“Yeah,” I said, my voice coming out in a deep, throaty growl. Shailene flinched. I turned, looking myself in the mirror, and immediately realized what Shailene meant when she said sentries don’t see the way we do. Everything looked weird; it was all in black and white except for the red of Shailene’s T-shirt. That was so vibrant it glowed. It was hard to make out the details of her face. She looked almost like a blurred silhouette. My own form, on the other hand, was clear to me, and it was pretty disgusting. But it was also flawless—there was no part of me remaining to give away that I was anything but this sentry. And that was the most important part of this plan. We needed to hide in plain sight. Shailene was the last Striker. They’d be coming for her. If we were going to turn the tides, we had to act now.
We had to find Janice and the others before the Anesidorans found Shailene. And what better way than letting them think they already had her?
“Remember the plan?” I said, trying not to wince at the sound of my own voice.
“Of course. We get on the train with the other sentries and go with them to wherever they’re going. After all, I’m on Nibiru’s side now, right?” She smiled, only looking ever-so-slightly like a Stepford Wife.
“Good. There should be another train coming along any time now, considering how many sentries there are prowling around out there.” I watched as she pulled the stall door closed, shutting the unconscious sentry inside. “Let’s just hope that the Anesidoran communication network is as disorganized as the I.G.A. seems to be. As long as they don’t realize you’re the one they’re supposed to be looking for, we’ll have a chance.”
Shailene nodded. “It’s a long shot, but it’s the best we’ve got.”
As we left the bathroom, I paused, looking around to make sure no one was watching us. Everything looked so bizarre through these alien eyes, and I felt weird just waltzing out into the station in this form. The Sentries usually disguised themselves when regular people were around. “You’re sure no one can see me?” I asked.
“I’m sure,” Shailene replied. “You’re fine.”
“Okay.” I nodded. “Let’s do this.” We headed for the platform the ghost train had left from earlier. In our surveillance of the station after we’d come up with this plan, we’d noticed that there were at least a dozen sentries milling around the station. Another ghost train must be coming in soon—we’d just have to catch it.
As we started up the stairs, Shailene said in a quiet voice, “You know… you’re pretty brave for an ordinary girl.”
I stared at her. “Thanks, I guess?”
“I mean… Sorry, that came out wrong. What I meant is… It takes us Strikers years to get to the level where we’re comfortable facing the Anesidorans head-on. Most people, when they find out what you have—it freaks them out for years. But you just took it in stride, and jumped right in to help us. I… I appreciate it, Laura. I’m sorry I was such a jerk when we first met.”
Her words made me feel warm inside. I tried to grin, but found the mandibles my lips had shifted into didn’t really work that way. I settled for a nod and a shrug.
When we reached the top of the stairs, another sentry was waiting for us. He was disguised as a human, a security guard like the first sentries I’d encountered on Thursday. But through my new eyes, I could see his true form superimposed over the top of the featureless human figure.
“Striker,” he said, a note of suspicion in his voice. “What are you doing here?”
“Andronicus ordered me to meet up with the others,” she replied coolly. “Is this the right floor?”
He glanced from her to me, then relaxed. My presence alongside her without any sign of distress, a sentry paired with a Striker just as Erikka had been earlier, seemed to ease his suspicion. “Yes, Platform C. Train should be coming in about five minutes.”
She nodded, a self-assured arch to her eyebrow. Dismissing him. He moved away, reassuming his security guard façade of patrolling the deck. We moved over to Platform C, waiting for the train to pull in.
I looked around, still trying to get my bearings with these strange new eyes. A group of people was congregated across from us at Platform F, their features an indistinguishable blur to my eyes, as nondescript as bugs were (ordinarily) to me. Gray smears dotted here and there with unnaturally bright hues of neon red.
Under my breath, I murmured, “I was wondering… The sentries are able to disguise themselves as humans, like the security guards and that guy back there. So does that mean they’re all bug things in disguise?” I kept thinking about Andronicus and the guy in the hood. The sentries were undisguised when they attacked us on the train, but those two—I’d only ever seen them in human form.
“No,” Shailene replied, her voice barely audible. “Some of them are actually human.” She paused. “Well, human-ish. There are different species on Nibiru. I didn’t see them all when they… had me.” I tried to focus on her face, but her expression was as blurry to me as if I were looking at her without my contacts on. “But of the ones I did see, some were humanoid, some weren’t. Some were a hybrid.” She shuddered. “But they were all monsters.”
I turned, pacing a few steps away from her, trying to look casual. I almost didn’t hear what she said next.
“The sentries were our precursors.”
I turned back and stared at her, aghast. “You mean they used to be human?”
“No, no. They were grown in a lab. Cobbled together from a mix of Anesidoran DNA and creatures from Nibiru. Genetically-engineered monsters, with barely a brain to comprehend anything more than what they’re programmed to do: serve the Anesidorans.” She sighed, looking away. “That’s what they want us to be. They honed every modification on them, but even with their ability to cloak themselves, it wasn’t enough. They don’t just want to rule humans. They want to change us.”
“You mean, they want everyone on Earth to be like… us?” It still felt weird, lumping myself in with the Strikers. Even as I stood here in this insectoid body, clearly as far from being a normal human as it was possible to be.
“Yes. But no matter how much they experiment, removing our free will is too difficult. Or at least… it used to be.”
The air began to vibrate with the sound of the approaching train. I could almost taste the sound in the air. Around us, other sentries in disguise stood up from benches where they’d been sitting, corners they’d been standing in. As they walked toward the platform, their disguises fell away, rippling off their bodies like a silky robe.
Moments later, the ghost train pulled into the station. I felt my skin tingle with anticipation as it slowed to a stop, and I closed my eyes, willing my heart rate to settle, forbidding myself to lose control of this transformation. After a couple deep breaths, the tingling sensation stilled. I opened my eyes and Shailene and I boarded the train.
I watched the other sentries for cues on how to behave. I supposed they weren’t expecting me to guard Shailene, since as far as they were concerned, she was one of them. When Erikka had been standing alongside the sentries earlier today, I’d gotten the impression that they were less her guards and more her muscle. When they boarded the car, they spread themselves out, some sitting, others standing near windows, watching as the train swiftly began to pull out of the station. They didn’t sit together, didn’t make conversation amongst themselves. I thought about what Shailene had just said, about the sentries being grown in a lab. Did they really have so little personality that they didn’t even talk off-the-clock?
I settled into an empty seat in the middle of the car. Shailene drifted toward the back, perching on a side-facing bench and looking out the window across from her. The train sped down the track in silence. I glanced at the stone-faced sentries around me. At least they were making this part of the plan easy on me. If they didn’t want to talk, that made one less way for me to put my foot in my mouth and blow our cover.
I hadn’t sensed Andronicus or the guy in the hood at all since we’d lost Janice, but as t
he train pulled into the familiar valley where Erikka had confronted us, I felt a twinge behind my eye sockets. My breath caught in my throat. No, dammit, I thought.
But there was no mistaking it. Andronicus was close—getting closer every second. I turned casually, glancing out the window to my left, and saw a train approaching us on the opposing track. The ghost train. The same one Erikka and Janice had disappeared with earlier.
Maybe he’s just heading back into the City, I thought, trying to steady my nerves. As long as that train passed us and kept on going, we’d be fine. He wouldn’t catch us. By the time he figured out where we were, we might have already freed the other Strikers. It would be lucky, really.
Just pass us. Just pass us.
Suddenly my senses felt flooded. He was close—too close. The train jolted for a moment, and I realized with absolute certainty that he was here. He’d been on that other train, and he’d jumped to this one.
Andronicus was on our train.
I wanted to run over to Shailene, but I didn’t dare make a scene. Slowly, my motions as controlled as I could make them, I stood, making my way down the aisle toward Shailene. She looked up at me, her expression blank but her eyes wide. I knew she couldn’t sense him, but she must have guessed from that jolt and my reaction what I was trying to tell her.
We had to get away. We couldn’t let him find her.
But before either of us could react, the door at the front of our car slid open and he stepped through, his trenchcoat whipping around him from the force of the air moving between the cars.
“That’s her,” he said in a loud voice, pointing at Shailene. “That’s the one we’re looking for. You idiots—”
Shailene caught my gaze for half a second. “Stay here. Don’t get caught,” she whispered. Before I could react, she’d broken away from me, racing to the back of the car and shoving the doors open. All around me, pandemonium erupted. There was an enormous bang as someone fired a weapon after her; it missed, ricocheting off the wall.
“Stop her!” Andronicus shouted, and without another moment’s hesitation I raced after her. She’d told me to stay there, but there was no way I could.
She’d scrambled up onto the roof, two sentries hot on her heels. By the time I made it out there, she was fighting them off, brandishing her nightstick like a sword. I launched forward, intending to tackle the sentry closest to me, but then the sound of Andronicus’ voice riveted me in place.
“Everybody freeze.”
My feet obeyed against my will. I watched in horror as he pushed past me, striding casually toward Shailene.
“This ends now,” he said. “Come here.”
Shailene’s eyes were wide, but she didn’t fight him—she couldn’t. Slowly, she closed the distance between them. I wanted to scream, cry, hurl myself at them like I had before, but this time I really couldn’t move. His power was stronger than Erikka’s had been. It was like a tractor beam. There was no escaping him.
He lifted his hand, fingers brushing against Shailene’s face.
This can’t be happening.
He pressed his thumbs to her temple.
No, I tried to scream, but the word wouldn’t come. I couldn’t even close my eyes. They were glued to the horror scene before me. He was going to erase Shailene, and this time there was nothing I could do. I braced myself for the flash of red lightning that would split the air in two.
But it didn’t come.
“What is this?” Andronicus said, bewilderment clouding his features. He moved his hands across her face. Nothing happened. He stiffened, looking down at his hands, then back to Shailene. “This girl has already been altered. We’ll have to take her back to the base to overwrite the existing protocol.” He turned to me, and I felt his power on me loosen. “Sentry E-495,” he said, in words I knew weren’t English but I still understood. “Her inhibitor.”
“I’m sorry?” I said. My brain thought the words in English, but they came out in something else entirely. What the hell? How was this happening?
Irritation spread across Andronicus’ face. “I said, her inhibitor.”
I may have been able to speak his language, but I didn’t know what any of that meant, or how to respond. Shailene still stood frozen in place, but her eyes locked with mine, panic flickering through them. “Run,” I could feel her silently urging me, but my feet wouldn’t obey—not because of a spell this time, but because fear had rendered them completely useless.
“Sentry E-495—Wait a moment.” His eyes narrowed. “You…”
“Run!” Shailene shouted out loud, and this time my feet obeyed me.
I turned, starting to dart across the roof of the train, but then Andronicus yelled, “Her inhibitor! Now!”
My brain barely registered the words when white-hot pain seared through my skull. I screamed, feeling my skin ripple with the shift back to my own body just as my knees gave out and I collapsed.
I couldn’t move.
It wasn’t that I was restrained (at least, I didn’t think I was), but every part of me felt heavy. Like an invisible person was sitting on my chest and had tied lead weights to my wrists and ankles. Or like one of those dreams you have where you’re half-awake and can see your room around you, but you can’t move your body, can’t get your lips to move in order to speak.
Finally I managed to open my eyes, staring up at a plain white ceiling and trying to figure out where I was and what I was doing there. There was a bad taste in my mouth, and my tongue felt fuzzy. How long had I been asleep?
As I lay there motionless, I could hear the muffled sound of someone talking, possibly in another room based on how quiet it was. I couldn’t make out any words, though. Just the soft drone of a voice.
Eventually, enough feeling returned to my limbs that I was able to roll over onto my side. The crinkle of paper accompanied my movement, and I realized I was on an exam table. A doctor’s office? I struggled to remember what I might have been doing that would have required a trip to the doctor, but my mind was a blur. I stared blankly at the wall across from me, which was covered with the sorts of posters you’d see in any physician’s office. But as my eyes focused on them, I realized these weren’t quite the pamphlets I was accustomed to. Instead of the typical fliers for cervical cancer screenings and BMI measurements, there were anatomy charts.
Non-human anatomy charts.
I stared in bewilderment at a cutaway of what looked like the musculature and organs of a minotaur. No joke. I blinked a couple times, trying to read what the text on the poster said before I realized it wasn’t in English—or any alphabet I recognized, even. Next to it was another diagram that showed a blue-skinned cyclops with a horn protruding from its forehead.
When my eyes rolled confusedly to the next diagram, I suddenly realized with a jolt where I was—and why. The giant, insectoid figure was an Anesidoran sentry.
This wasn’t a human doctor’s office. It was an Anesidoran one.
I sat up quickly, squeezing my eyes shut as a wave of dizziness washed over me. When it passed, I slid off the exam table and moved closer to the posters on the wall. The small room was covered with them, anatomy charts for half a dozen different alien species. Were these all Anesidorans?
I ran my fingers over the glossy paper. Some of these creatures were unfamiliar, creatures I’d never seen before; but many of them looked like monsters from Greek mythology.
Pandora’s Box…
I shuddered and turned to the door. The last thing I remembered was the encounter on the train roof. If I was here, then where was Shailene? In another exam room? My stomach dropped through my feet as I remembered that she was the last of the cheerleaders who hadn’t been captured. Had they brainwashed her yet? The way Erikka’s personality had completely changed after the red lightning had struck flashed through my mind, and hysteria burbled up in my chest. They couldn’t have erased Shailene. They just couldn’t.
I had to find her. I had to save her. There must be a way to fix this.
What the hell? This couldn’t be right. There must be something holding me here. They wouldn’t just leave me alone and unsupervised, right? I hesitantly raised my hand, expecting to hit an invisible forcefield when I started through the door, or some kind of electrical current—something. But to my shock, there was nothing.
I stepped out of the room into a narrow hallway, looking around myself in confusion. What was going on here?
The soft drone of someone talking was louder in the hall. I followed the sound of it, walking as quietly as I could, every nerve in me on edge. Any second now, someone would round the corner and bust me, I was certain of it. I looked anxiously over my shoulder before peering around a bend in the hallway.
There were two doors in the next corridor, both unguarded. The one directly ahead of me was closed, but to my right, the other door was slightly ajar. The voice I’d heard was coming from there. After a moment, I recognized it as Andronicus’. My blood ran cold.
“I’m just at my wit’s end. This is completely unacceptable,” he was saying to someone I couldn’t see.
As softly as I could, I moved forward. If I was lucky, I might be able to creep past him to the door at the end of the hall, which I prayed was the exit.
“I’ve been making excuse after excuse to the council, but this is just too much. I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to them. She acted in complete violation of the treaty. Your line agreed to stay out of the war, but she keeps interfering.”
I was just tiptoeing past the door when the reply came. “I’m going to have to talk to her.” It was a woman’s voice.
A voice I recognized.
I froze in my place. It couldn’t be. Goddammit, it just couldn’t.
Shrinking back into the shadows, I peered around the door into the room. Andronicus had his back to me and was looking intently at some kind of webcam that was broadcasting onto a big TV screen.
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