“If the Fractionist threat recedes, there may be hope that we’ll be landing on that planet within my lifetime. But if they continue to insist on splitting the Fleet, continue to take measures like the Aeschylus vent, the General Body cannot allow information about the planet to leak.” Vel’s eyes soften, and she takes a step back. The humming of the gauntlet’s presence eases. “This is for the protection of everyone under my care,” she says. “Under your care—not just the people you love, but the people you serve as Scela. I don’t like making threats like this, and I’m deeply sorry that’s what it’s come to, but as the leader of the Fleet, it’s my duty to keep it safe at any cost.”
“I understand,” I concede, head limp against my chest. In the exosystem, I feel the others—Wooj especially—pressing me to reject everything she’s saying, to rebel against her control. But I do understand. And I’m halfway to agreeing with everything the Chancellor has said. Yasmin threw me into this blind. I didn’t have a chance to think things through before I started doing her Fractionist dirty work, and I let my fear govern me before my reason could.
Now I’m starting to see reason.
“Unlike the Fractionists who put you in this mess, we value Scela,” the Chancellor says. “Too few survive the integration process to put any to waste—we need you to help combat this growing threat, and we can’t have you out of commission. So we’ll be equipping your exos with blockers that will keep you from joining any exosystems outside your own. With the blockers in place, your thoughts won’t leak the information anywhere you can’t control, allowing you to continue your duties. And you, of course, will not choose to leak this information under any circumstances.”
At my left, Key lets out a derisive snort, and the rest of us tense in unison.
The edge of the Chancellor’s smile disappears, and she pulls her gauntlet up, forcing Key’s spine to straighten. “Key Tanaka,” she says, low and level. “You aren’t like your fellows. But that’s no surprise to you, is it?”
The Chancellor steps right up to Key’s side, leaning close to her face. In the exosystem, we feel Key’s urge to flinch, to take a step back, but Vel’s gauntlet has her pinned in her metal. Pain burns through the system, radiating from the back of her neck.
Through her ears, we hear every word the Chancellor says. “It would be a more intensive process to block the planet from all your memories, but unfortunately, that won’t work with you in the mix. We can’t risk it on a brain that’s already had memory blockers installed, you see?”
Key’s lip curls. A faint whimper leaks from her throat.
“It was a mercy that we chose to suppress those missing pieces. Being Scela with them still there would be a tormented existence—you likely wouldn’t be able to stand it. But mark my words, if you tell anyone outside your squad about the planet in our grasp, we’ll put those memories right back in and let you live with it.”
Key’s always been hollow. An empty thing, a girl with holes. But nothing has shaken her before this. Nothing made her so uncertain—or if it did, she never let us feel it until today. Now we feel the Chancellor’s words blasting her thin. We feel everything she knows about herself wavering. She’s always desperately wanted to know who she was before she took the metal.
Suddenly that information’s no longer a reward—it’s a threat.
Her exo’s the only thing that keeps her upright, and she can’t meet the Chancellor’s steely gaze.
“I’m here to serve the General Body,” she mumbles, but predictably enough, there’s no certainty behind anything she’s saying. “I’m here to be the perfect soldier, to hold this Fleet together with my bare hands if necessary. Take my word or take my body—whichever serves you best.”
“Smart girl,” Chancellor Vel says, baring her teeth almost Scela-wide. “The technicians should be ready any minute. And once they’re done, we can put this whole fiasco behind us.”
This time, none of us make the mistake of laughing. This fiasco is far from over. And whatever comes next, I know one thing deep in my bones—it’s only going to get worse.
The holes are on purpose.
I’m not damaged goods like Woojin. I’m being protected from that thing that came crawling out of me when the exo shut down. I should be relieved. Grateful, even.
Instead I’m burning. I’m out of alignment with the others as we make our way to a nearby medical ward, my exo putting up walls again to protect them from the scorching confusion cycling through my brain. What could be locked down in my head? What’s so horrible that unlocking it could destroy me? My exo screams in my ear not to pursue it.
I don’t know whether to believe it.
Wrapped up in the war inside me and shuttered by my headpiece, I don’t realize we’ve stopped until I run right into the marshal’s back with a clack of colliding metal. A burst of her consternation hits me, followed by a brief squeeze of her will on the back of my neck that forces me to straighten up and step back. After the unrelenting violence of the Chancellor’s gauntlet, her mind’s touch is shockingly tender.
My cameras whirl, taking in the sterile white room we’ve entered. I’m surprised to see Isaac limping back and forth among the team of humans setting up the blocker installation. An unsteady fury rises in me—he knew. Or at least, he must have known something. There must have been more he could have told me before the Chancellor turned the past I’ve been seeking into a nightmare I have to escape.
I watch him shout orders, clutching his datapad to his chest as the technicians unpack a massive set of ugly, thick wires and plugs. They look familiar.
I reach for the memory and instead feel the edges of my holes twisting and aching. So they’re another thing I’ve lost. Another thing I’m being protected from, the exo wills me to understand. It’s pushing out calm, but I’m not buying it.
What if the Chancellor wasn’t telling the whole truth?
My breath goes shallow, and for a moment I feel as if the air in the room has vanished, as if I’m back in the silent hell of the Aeschylus vent.
Isaac turns and faces us. “We’ll be rewriting the permissions on your interexo protocols, making sure you can’t jack into the greater Scela system. Jesuit, yours is a little more complicated, since we need you in communication with the rest. You’ll be the nexus point for access to these four. You’ll be taken care of last.”
“Then I’m going first,” I say, stepping toward the technicians. Anything to get away from the vile, twisting thoughts, from the doubts and insecurities, from everything that might make me unworthy of the metal I wear. One of them hoists up a plug, and my body already knows what to do. I bend forward, crouching to expose my neck as I flick a panel open at my nape.
The tech hesitates, and that prickling familiarity intensifies. I’ve done this before. Somehow I’ve done this before, and somehow I know that’s part of my missing pieces. The exo’s stress triples—over and over, it warns me to be careful with what I’m chasing.
Isaac stares at me from across the ward, a wary spark in his eyes. He glances at the tech and nods.
The plugs jack into my port with a harsh snap, and Marshal Jesuit dissolves the exosystem. As I adjust to my solitary headspace, my exo recoils from the thought of what’s about to happen. It hates even the notion of being forced to change. A moment passes as the technicians swipe furiously at their datapads, and then my cameras cut out, leaving me in total darkness.
The pain ignites inside me like a star gone supernova. My body rocks and shudders, my hands clench into fists, and then I lose myself entirely in the cold, white light. I feel the exo’s muted attempts to shield me, but there’s nothing it can do to stop the horrid sensation of someone brute-forcing my brain to comply. The new protocols slice through me like a sharp knife through flesh. They’re twisting, pulling, rearranging.
I feel the familiarity here too.
Finally it fades.
Finally my cameras click back on, my muscles relax, and my exo grabs hold of my body again. I rip the plugs out of my neck before the technician can get to them, my exo flashing warnings about improperly ejected hardware. The port flips closed. I toss the limp cords to the ground.
“Wasn’t so bad,” I say.
Even without the system between us, I know the others can tell I’m lying. And even worse, the install’s done nothing to combat the sinking, empty feeling of my holes and what they might be for. I stagger back toward the door as Aisha steps up for her turn.
Everything’s rising inside me. Who I am. What I was. What I saw on the Aeschylus. The exo swats it down, but I swat it back. I want it to consume me. I want to understand what’s going on in the Fleet. Why the General Body would vent a ship and blame it on the Fractionists. It’s even easier now to believe that they were the ones who vented the Aeschylus, knowing that they’ve covered up an entire livable world to maintain their power. I want to carve through all the lies that surround me, but there’s one lie at the heart of it all. One thing I need to know.
One thing that feels like it might tear me apart if I find out.
The door is right there. The exo doesn’t stop me from walking through it. I square my shoulders, brace myself for the order that will yank me right back into the room, and wait for the marshal’s reaction.
“Tanaka,” Marshal Jesuit warns, but when I don’t stop, she mutters, “All right, you need to cool off—I get it.”
I round the corner unhindered, my heart racing faster than a shuttle at light speed.
I’m free of the exosystem. Free from the chatter of my squadmates and how incomplete I feel in their presence. Free from the marshal’s will and Isaac’s warnings and the Chancellor’s vague threat. Without all of them breathing down my neck, I take stock of myself. Of the mystery inside me, this thing that was done to me.
I won’t let myself be controlled by it.
And there might be answers on this very ship.
My exo digs in its heels, but without the exosystem, there’s no willpower for it to enforce apart from my own. I snap back my headpiece. It takes me a moment to adjust to seeing with eyes instead of cameras, to only have 180 degrees of visibility from side to side and even fewer up and down. I run one hand over the place where my exo ridge meets my skull, my fingers brushing over the stubble of my hair growing back. In the nearest plastic wall, I catch a warped, faint image of my reflection.
I remember what I looked like before my conversion. I was built lean and willowy before they carved me apart and stacked me with the buildings of a mechanical god. I used to have hair that swept down to my shoulders, cut severely at a dramatic angle. Now there’s metal squaring my jaw. The ridge of my exo carves my skull in half. I’m an animal. A monster.
But I still remember that look on Aisha’s aunt’s face on the Reliant. She’d mumbled something—some word I didn’t quite catch, but somehow it was meant for me. She’s a backender, and yet she seemed to recognize me.
Keep away, the exo warns, but that warning only spurs me forward. I stalk through the halls of the prison ship, the doors parting as easily for me as they did for Praava on the Aeschylus. The ship’s management software knows better than to get in the way of a Scela on a mission. I move down the rows of cells as their residents peer curiously through the glass. The location I need to get to is seared into my memory, into a space the holes can’t touch.
It might destroy me. Or it could fill the holes at last. All depends on whether I trust the Chancellor.
So I run toward it.
Keep away. Keep away. Keep away, the exo chants in my head. The uncomfortable hum on my neck is back, enforcing orders I don’t remember being given. I fight it. Throw my own will against its insistent buzz. My legs go unsteady beneath me, and I sway like a drunk as I round a corner to another row of cells. This is the hall. Three blocks down. My footsteps thud at uneven intervals.
Just a little farther. Just to the plastic of the cellfront.
I lift my eyes and find a familiar face staring back at me.
No, it’s not, the exo screeches in my ear.
But it is. It’s the boy from my dreams, this boy standing in the cell—
It’s rising in me again. The metal around me, the metal inside me—it’s not my body, it’s not a body I chose, it’s not supposed to be like this. The boy jumps back from the cell wall as I sag against it, warping the plastic with my weight. My fingers dig into my skull, pressing along the line between my exo’s ridge and the flesh and bone of something that should be mine and mine alone.
“Hey,” a voice says, muffled slightly by the cellfront between us. I squeeze my eyes shut, my audio inputs ringing with confused signals. I know that voice.
You don’t, the thing on my back shrieks.
I’m stronger than this—that’s the worst of it. They built me with all this strength, and what use is it if I can’t keep myself together? What’s the point of jamming my head with blockers and patching me up and throwing me into a fight I can’t quite justify? Why did I do this to myself?
And maybe it’s finally remembered that we share this body, because the exo actually gives me a clear and truthful answer to that last question.
You didn’t, it whispers.
My eyes snap open again. They find the golden-haired boy approaching the plastic, his expression halfway between horror and holy reverence. I lock up my muscles, holding myself perfectly still as he comes closer and closer. Keep away, the exo whispers one last time, just in case I haven’t gotten the message already.
“It’s you,” he breathes, his lips barely moving. “Spirits alive, Key—”
Only I don’t hear how he finishes that sentence, because suddenly I’m lost in an onslaught of memories. This isn’t a controlled leak, one of the exo’s rewards for a job well done. This is white water in a flooded Earth cast. My head goes under, and there’s no coming back up for air. His voice is all around me—Key, Key, Key—soft, harsh, fond, frustrated. I’ve heard him say my name so many times, and every single one of them is trying to claw its way out of the dark spaces in my brain.
Some of them sharpen, images flickering in my head. An outstretched hand, a wild party pulsing around us, an easy smile. Nice to meet you, Key. Breath on my cheek, my name said like a warning, just before I kiss him. A camera lens, studio lighting, hands on my shoulders. Key, you can do this.
“Key!” he’s shouting now, pounding a fist against the plastic barrier. I’ve sunk to the ground, propped up crookedly against the cellfront, and I can feel my exo at work in my head, trying to keep my muscles from seizing up. They spasm against my will, clenching and unclenching ferociously. My mismatched teeth grind together.
I don’t know which way to run. I’ve come so far for my memories—if this is my only chance to recover what I’m missing, to make my head make sense again, I have to see this through. But it’s ripping me apart to be this close to what used to fill those holes, and I don’t know how much longer I can last.
The Chancellor may be a liar on some fronts, but I never should have believed she’d make an empty threat.
My eyes roll, meeting the piercing blue of my dream boy’s. His mouth drops open, making a shape I’ve seen before—as a Scela, in an orphanage cafeteria, on a ship I never want to go back to. Only this time I hear the sound that was missing when Yasmin spoke.
“Archangel,” the boy says.
Oh fuck.
I’m gone, I’m gone, I—
“—really don’t see the need for the new costume,” I tell Kellan as he circles around behind me.
“It’s about effect,” he says, straightening the banner that serves as a background for our makeshift set. I flinch as one of the other crewmembers adjusts a light, accidentally pointing it directly into my eyes. “Besides.” He crouches low next to me, close enough that his b
reath teases along my neck. “Looks good on you.”
I crack a savage smile, nudging his chin away with my knuckles as the tips of my ears go hot. “Save it for later,” I hiss, then go back to fidgeting with my skirts. A small red light glows to life in the darkness.
It’s over the top, but the costume works. Today I’ve been decked out in shimmering white, the bodice cut with sharp angles and a neckline that takes no prisoners. With my lips painted crimson and the camera settings adjusted to make the contrast pop, I’m unrecognizable and ethereal. I look ready to hold my own on the floor of the General Body Seat.
The General Body Seat would never host the likes of this, though, and that thought puts a slight smile on the edge of my mouth as one of the crewmembers holds up the first cue card. Kellan ducks behind the camera, his golden hair briefly backlit by the studio lights. “Scramblers are live. Standing by to jack the cast channel,” one of the tech guys announces. “Ready when you are.”
Kellan settles the crew, fidgets with a few settings on the camera, then holds up three fingers.
On two, I breathe out.
On one, I breathe deep.
The green light glows. “Citizens of the Fleet,” I announce, my voice calm and clear. “This is the Archangel, once more coming to you live from the heart of the stranglehold.”
It’s a hell of a speech. I got giddy just rehearsing it, and it’s an effort not to let the words get to my head as I plow through the cue cards. My chin tilts at an angle Kellan would call “downright cocky,” and I know he’s going to tease me for it the second we lose our hold on the channel. I can’t let myself think that far ahead in the future—I sink into the immediacy of my performance.
I’ll use everything I’ve been given. Every little piece of the privilege I was born into. My charisma, the schooling that shaped my voice, my disarming looks. Even my parents’ money—they think I’m blowing it on fancy First District parties, not propaganda cast production. Kellan does the same.
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