“How to present us?” I sit up. “He kicked me out of a publicity meeting? Seriously?”
“Well, it’s tricky.” Col switches to his tour guide voice. “Your father’s team spent a lot of effort creating us as a couple. They did a good job of it too—on the feeds, at that party, and not just in Shreve. They bribed kickers all over the world to talk about us. We’re a big deal now.”
“Yeah, I know, Col—it was my idea! People had to think we were real, or my father wouldn’t keep you alive.”
“But that’s the problem—we aren’t real. The whole world thinks you’re Rafi.”
“Right …” My brain spins for a moment. “So we have to figure out how to explain to everyone that I’ve been Frey all along.”
“Which means admitting that the rebel Frey on the feeds is really Rafi.” Col leans back against the wall of the cabin. “The world just found out there’s two of you, and we’ve mixed up who’s who. Worse—our side’s been lying.”
“Lying? Rafi had to act like me so our father wouldn’t figure out who I was.”
“Sure. But your father wants people to think that your speech with Rafi was fake. If we admit we’ve been lying, people might start to believe him. And now that Rafi’s not around to prove there’s two of you, we only look shadier. It confuses our narrative.”
“Our what?” I ask.
“The story of you and me. Dr. Leyva tested the real us with a friendly focus group in Paz, and we didn’t go over very well.”
I shake my head. “He focus-tested … us?”
“Yeah, and it turns out most people love Col and Rafia—two heirs thrown together by war. Romeo and Juliet. But they see you and me differently.”
“Sure,” I say. “You might be Romeo, but I’m not Juliet. I’m more like … that guy who starts the fight and ruins everything.”
“Mercutio.”
“People had missing names back then.”
“Frey,” Col says. “What if you kept being her?”
I stare at him. “What did you just …”
“Keep being Rafia. We take everything your father built and use it against him.”
The words blur as my heart breaks a little. Col’s talking like he expects this to be easy for me.
Like he didn’t know we had to put me back together.
This is why Dr. Leyva kicked me out of the room—if I’d been sitting there hearing it, Col would have realized.
I have to make him see.
“It makes our story much simpler,” he says.
“Not for me.” I take both of his hands in mine. “For a month, I’ve been afraid to talk in my own voice, to stand like myself, to breathe like me. How am I supposed to find myself again?”
“By being yourself, Frey. We’ll be hidden in the Amazon. It won’t be like Shreve, pretending every minute. It’s just making announcements on the feeds.”
“And interviews,” I say. “And photo ops, and when we visit other cities to drum up help. I know how it works, Col. I’ve done this job my whole life!”
“I know. But it’s not forever.”
“It is forever. It’s in my bones.” I guide his hand to my right wrist. “Like here, where Naya broke me in training. And these ribs here and here. And here above my eye, where Dr. Orteg cut Rafi so she’d have a scar just like mine. It’s all forever, Col.”
When he doesn’t say anything, I hear Dona’s voice in my head.
You threw it all away for your sad little first love.
No. He’ll understand what this means to me.
“I can’t be my sister anymore, Col.”
He looks away. “In the focus group, people got confused. Some of them thought I’d switched my affections back and forth between you and Rafi. So it was like a trashy soap-op feed. For people to support us, we have to be more like a prince and princess in a fairy tale.”
Something heavy falls on me. “And I’m not a fairy princess.”
I’m a killer right down to my marrow.
“Frey,” he says, my name sour and deliberate in his mouth. “My city’s occupied. My people are breathing your father’s dust.”
“How does my being Rafi help Victoria?”
“By weakening him. You supported your father as Rafi. She has to denounce him.”
Right. And the real Rafi has run away.
I need her more than ever now. This is her world—diplomacy and politics. Charming the world.
“How did freedom get so complicated so fast?” I ask.
“It gets worse,” Col says. “The global feeds love our little fairy tale … but Victoria is a different matter. Seeing me join your family has hurt morale there. They all knew that a marriage would give your father a legal excuse to keep the city. That’s why Leyva didn’t risk delaying our rescue. It had to happen before our wedding, or the last spark of resistance in Victoria would’ve been crushed.”
Something deflates inside me. “I was going to kill my father that day.”
“My people didn’t know that,” Col says. “But this isn’t your fault, Frey. I said yes to you. I betrayed them to save myself.”
Another silence descends on us.
All those hours of planning the wedding, those photo ops beside Col, both of us meticulously dressed. I wasn’t just helping my father maintain control of Shreve. I was helping him subjugate Col’s city too.
“You’ve defied your father by escaping,” he says softly. “My being with you isn’t as bad. We need you to denounce him as Rafi of Shreve—his own heir turned against him.”
I lean back against the cabin wall, letting the rhythm of the train find the old fractures in my bones.
Col’s in a Victorian uniform, but no one’s given me anything to wear. Now I know why—they want me in my sister’s red dress forever.
Unless …
“What if we found the real Rafi?” I ask.
Col shrugs. “Then you wouldn’t have to pretend to be her. But her note said she didn’t want to be found.”
“She didn’t mean me!” I cry. “I’m her protector. She left a clue in her last feed before she disappeared, that she was in Paz. What if she wants me to find her?”
Col stares at me, uncertain. “You think she’s still there?”
“My father does. He’s certain enough that he’s going to take the city.”
I explain everything my father told me—the mysterious weapon recovered from the ruins. The coming attack. His plan for me and Col to rule Paz together
For a while, there’s nothing but the sound of the train as Col absorbs it all.
“So conquering my city,” he finally says, “destroying my family—it was all to find some Rusty weapon?”
I nod. “My father didn’t really care about your ruins. All he wanted was an old research bunker hidden beneath them.”
Col’s voice almost drops away. “If we’d found it first, my mother might still be alive.”
“Maybe. But she also might’ve used it against the rebels. Or Shreve.”
Col looks at me like I’m talking nonsense, but Boss X’s words are stuck in my head. What if Aribella Palafox was just a more civilized version of my father?
“We have to warn Paz,” I say.
“They won’t believe us. It’ll sound like we’re trying to scare up allies.”
“But I heard it straight from …” My father, who no one trusts. And, like Col just said, our side has been lying.
Would I tell them as Rafi? Or as Frey? Neither of us is credible now.
“You don’t know how this weapon works,” Col says. “Or when the attack’s coming. We can’t help Paz defend itself.”
“So what do we do?”
“We tell the world who was behind the attack—after it happens. We make sure your father takes the blame!”
I stare at Col. “You mean let people die, if it helps your cause?”
He doesn’t answer. In the window behind him, the last shards of sun are turning the white weed red.
Part of
me understands—he has a city to save. He can’t afford to let anything else matter as much to him. Not Paz, not my sister, not me.
At the start of this, it was so easy for us to be allies. We were like overlapping waves, carried on each other’s crests, made twice as strong.
But waves also cancel each other out.
I try to make it simple. “My sister didn’t run away because of some tantrum about camping. Rafi always has a plan. Can’t you see that?”
“I never met her. How should I know?” Col shrugs, still looking out the window. “None of it makes sense. Rafi did everything my people asked to help our rescue—but then she just vanished. And that last feed from a few days ago, it almost blew everything.”
“Right, the Paz street in the background. Maybe that wasn’t an accident.”
Col looks at me. “She gave your father our location on purpose?”
“It wasn’t for him—I think it was for me. It always felt like that, watching her pretend she was Frey. Like she was talking to the whole world, but also just to me.”
“Saying what?” he asks.
That question freezes me. I’m still missing part of the puzzle. There’s something I don’t know about the person I’ve spent my life pretending to be.
That’s why I have to find her.
Col squeezes my hands. “Listen. With her gone, you being Rafi is the easiest way. It solves everything.”
I pull away. “But she doesn’t know what’s coming!”
“No one in Paz does. They’re all in danger. But at least if your father attacks another city, the world will finally have to deal with him!”
I close my eyes.
Col keeps talking. “I’m playing politics, I know. But for my people right now, politics means fighting for our right to exist.”
He lets me think about that for a moment. The noise of the train rushes into the space between us. I stare out the window, trying to imagine what it would be like to have a whole city stolen from me.
I’ve never had that much to lose. I grew up with no friends except my sister. No real possessions, just workout clothes and weapons. Even my name wasn’t real, because I was never a legal citizen of Shreve. Frey was just something they called me.
I know all about having to fight to exist.
Turning back to him, I say, “Col, what if you and I just—”
A shriek cuts me off, the train lurching beneath us. We both careen forward, everything in the cabin tumbling.
The overhead lights flicker, and the wail of skidding metal fills the cabin for long seconds. Col is pushed up against me, the train’s momentum pinning both of us against the forward wall.
We come to a slow, aching halt, till finally everything jolts back into place. Col stumbles, and I grab his hand.
It’s silent, except for a distant alarm.
Out the window, red streaks ignite the sky—the glowing heat shields of an orbital drone insertion.
“He’s found us,” I say.
My hand goes to where my pulse knife should be.
But I’m unarmed. Unmasked. Definitely underdressed.
Someone must have spotted the rebels in Vega and put it on the feeds, or wondered why that dish was being carted through the station. That’s all it took to bring my father down on us.
Col throws on his uniform tunic. “How’d they get here so fast?”
I start on the lacy sleeves. “My father has drones in orbit. All they had to do was drop from the sky.”
“He’d attack an intercity mag-lev, out here in the open?”
“He’ll just stop the train and arrest us. The feeds are saying the rebels tried to kill his daughter today.”
And if my father grabs me now, no one will ever find out that Col and I got away. They’ll never know that I was Frey.
This would all be better if we hadn’t been rescued. If everyone had waited for my wedding day, when I could—
The cabin door slides open.
It’s Zura, already in full camo and body armor.
“Come with me,” she says. “Get ready to fly.”
A minute later, we’re in a crowd of half-dressed rebels and Victorians, waiting to climb out the top hatch of the train.
“A fight in the wild,” says Boss X beside me, full of battle fever and bubbly. “No civilians in the way!”
I feel it too—the blood rush of combat kicking in. The ecstasy of all my training making contact with reality.
We aren’t all killers. But somewhere, deep down, I am.
“Frey.” Boss X ceremoniously hands me a pulse knife. “You might find this useful.”
It fills my hand, the weight perfect for me. “Is this yours?”
“A little thing like that? Never.” He points to the pulse lance on his belt. “I was going to give it to you earlier. But I hadn’t wrapped it yet.”
“You … wrap presents?”
“Exquisitely. I’m a wolf, not a barbarian.”
I squeeze the knife, sending it for a moment into full pulse. It turns fierce and buzzing in my hand, ready to tear the world apart.
“Thank you. I love it.”
“Use it well,” he says, touching the pendant around his neck.
It’s my turn on the ladder. I set the knife to follow me and climb.
The metal rungs grow cooler as I go up—the roof of the train is swept with a chill ocean wind. A small fleet of hoverboards waits on top, lit by the flashes in the sky. Col stands on one already, a large rifle over his shoulder, gesturing for me.
I leap aboard, wrap my hands around his waist.
“Where’s your armor?” he asks. Someone’s given him baffle camo and body armor, while all I’m wearing is my scarlet dress.
“Priorities,” I say. “You’re the heir. Just fly.”
He swears at his soldiers as we lift into the sky, but what I’m wearing doesn’t matter anymore.
In a way, I’ve missed this even more than freedom—fighting alongside him.
I call Boss X’s gift into my hand. Clutch it tight.
As Col wheels us around, I count lights in the sky. Three drones the size of aircars are still hurtling down at us, burning meteoric in their heat shields. Another four are slowing, their drogue chutes like black jellyfish against the sunset.
One drone has landed—it stands sentry at the front of the Cobra to keep the train from continuing on to Paz. Two more fly low at us, their lifting fans rippling the white weed.
I crouch behind Col, hoping his baffle camo will hide me.
He hoists the rifle. “Hold me steady. There’s a kick.”
I grip his waist harder, spread my feet on the board. The closest drone is halfway up the train—a klick away.
Col fires. The air splits into a burning streak between us and the drone, which shatters into fragments of hot metal.
The boom hits a tardy second later, kicking the air around us. Our weight shifts perilously—we’d fall, except for my grippy ballet shoes.
Dress to move.
Col extends his arms, and we steady ourselves again. He’s got crash bracelets. I don’t.
“Rail gun?” I ask.
“Yes.” He drops the rifle. “No reloads.”
A thunderclap from another hoverboard lights up the desert below, and a second explosion sets the air trembling again. But more drones are coming down. The roar of lifting fans fills the sky.
Zura’s voice is in my ear.
“Split up, everyone. Run your patterns. Radio silence … now.”
I shut my comms down.
“Do you know what we’re supposed to do?” I ask Col.
“Yeah, everyone’s scattering across the desert except us.” He brings us around again, aiming for the front of the motionless train. “We’re headed through the tunnel, straight into Paz!”
“We’ll be trapped in there. We aren’t even armed!” My knife might slow a heavy battle drone down, but not for long.
“Zura’s staying with us. She’s got a rail gun.”
<
br /> “Just one?”
Col doesn’t answer. He leans forward, driving us faster against the wind. Heading up the tracks like this, our magnetics give us extra speed. The other Victorians, spreading out over fields, have only lifting fans.
They’re making themselves slow targets, drawing fire away from us.
The drones take the bait—sprays of hot metal light up the landscape. The horizon, bloody with the sunset, dulls with smoke and churned-up dirt. The Victorians melt into vague, shifting shapes, heat signatures hidden by their baffle camo.
We fly low, just beside the Cobra, hoping the enemy won’t risk hitting the train. The drone guarding the tunnel entrance waits just ahead.
We accelerate, hitching a ride on the track’s mag-lev flow. Soon we’re almost kneeling on the board, the wind in my face diamond-sharp with sand.
I close my eyes and let Col steer, feeling our maneuvers in my body against his, in the shifts of our weight on the board. When we clear the front of the train, we swerve over onto the tracks.
My eyelids creep apart—the drone shoots by too quickly to open fire. But now we’re in the clear, the empty tracks like an aiming reticle below us.
And I’m not wearing camo.
Looking back, I see the drone coming around. I squeeze my knife and throw it down hard, set to return to me.
The knife skims the ground, and the drone behind us disappears behind a veil of dirt and swirling orchid petals.
I lean, and we swerve right, then left. When the drone opens fire, more plumes of sand fly up. The shots are falling short.
The drone’s AI must be confused—it’s shooting at the biggest heat signature, my pulse knife.
A moment later, the knife jumps back into my hand, gritty and scalding. The sandstorm behind us starts to dissipate.
“How far to the tunnel?” I yell.
“Five klicks!”
Three minutes, even at this speed. Long enough for the drone to get in a lucky shot. Maybe I should be in front, letting Col’s camo hide me.
Behind us, the drone bursts through the haze, picking up speed, raising its own tail of sand.
I throw my knife at the earth again.
“Where’s Zura?”
I feel Col shrug. Another flight of projectiles whistles past us. My knife returns.
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