The long jump used a hefty portion of the Endeavor’s power and left my stomach in even tighter knots than before. I nearly dry heaved when we finally slowed and only managed to control my unruly insides by putting all my focus into steering us through the busy spheres over the capital city. The crowded sky distracted me from the bile rising in my throat.
We eventually landed on the rooftop corresponding to Sanaa’s coordinates. It was empty, a private platform.
I opened the ship and exited, shading my eyes and willing my stomach to settle. It looked like high noon on Galligar Prime, her sun blazing down. Sanaa followed me onto the platform.
“Ready for a showdown?” I asked.
Sanaa’s blade-sharp gaze cut to mine. “Daraja, the general’s not here. I guarantee it.”
Good. I wasn’t ready to face my uncle. Except… I swallowed. I wanted the confrontation. Thoughts and questions flamed inside me, igniting more. I had no outlet for them, and they were starting to burn me up inside.
Shade stood grimly in the doorway with his arms crossed, his steady brown eyes watching me. The rest of the crew came up behind him. I took a few steps away from the Endeavor, bouncing on gravity that was less than the universal standard. My steps lighter than the weight in my mind, I followed Sanaa to the rooftop elevator. She used the key card Uncle Nate had printed out and then punched in a code. I trailed her into the lift and turned. Shade’s eyes met mine as the doors closed.
We hardly moved before the elevator stopped again. Top floor? The doors opened to a security wall that looked as thick as the outside of a spaceship. Sanaa typed in another code, and a machine that wanted a retinal scan emerged. This wasn’t your typical home security. What was this place? Double agent central?
“Even if my uncle had given me the key card and the codes, how would I have passed the retinal scan?” I asked.
“You’re programmed in.”
“What? Why?” And how?
As if that wasn’t weird enough already, Sanaa looked at me hard before offering up her eye to the security machine. “He’s not who you think he is.”
Meaning what? That my uncle wasn’t the asshole I kept shooting my mouth off at? I already knew that. Two-hundred-and-sixty-seven people were better off, free, because he’d messed with our heist and put himself and his own ship in the middle of our escape. Now, assuming he’d placed some information on Galligar Prime, he was helping us rescue Shiori. Because of Sanaa’s involvement, he obviously also knew about Reena Ahern. I wasn’t sure how they communicated, but they did. Nathaniel Bridgebane was there at every turn.
Knowing those lives meant something to him made emotion grow inside me in a way I couldn’t seem to contain anymore. It just pushed and pulled and shoved at everything until I felt insane.
And a little jealous of Sanaa Mwende, who knew my uncle like I never would.
“He really trusts you with everything, doesn’t he?” Yes, there was that small prick of envy, but I was mainly glad that Uncle Nate had someone. Everyone needed a friend.
Sanaa shrugged. “With everything except for what I wanted for a long time.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Himself.”
I stood there, my jaw slack as she completed the retinal scan.
“But I’m over that. Have been for a long time.” Sanaa glanced at me as the security system started to unlock. “I’m ready to stop being lonely just because he is. There’s a small chance he might be ready to stop being lonely, too.”
“With who?” I asked. “You?” I’d seen Sanaa’s interest in Merrick. I hadn’t imagined it.
“Oh no, not with me, Daraja. With you.”
“Me?” Uncle Nate and I were family, but we hardly knew each other. I’d barely seen him in eighteen years. It seemed a little farfetched to think we might suddenly become best buds. “Why do you call me that? Daraja?”
Just then, the double doors parted, revealing a beautiful and comfortable home. Sanaa swept inside, and I followed, looking around. Curiosity and an odd sharp pinch crunched together in my chest. My throat suddenly thickened, a lump expanding in it fast. Mom would have loved this place.
Most of it was a large living space sprinkled with colorful furniture that had been placed at angles around a low glass table that looked perfect for kicking up your feet at the end of the day with a warm drink and a book. Huge windows let in natural light and offered a spectacular view over the capital city. Rooftop gardens. Spires. Some high traffic. Bookshelves, only half-full, lined the whole wall on my right. There was an open kitchen off to the left. It looked pristine, never used. In fact, everything in here looked brand new.
“Daraja means bridge in my language,” Sanaa answered while I stood there in shock. I loved this place. It was welcoming and warm, like the Uncle Nate I used to know. “I call you that because you are what kept him walking between two worlds. Without you, he might have stepped to one side or the other. It would have been easy to embrace the Dark Watch general, to be him. It would have been even easier to strip off that uniform and go back to the Fold.”
My eyes widened. “The Fold?”
“We’ll all die with secrets, Daraja. Even when he didn’t know where you were, without proof that you were dead, you lived in his mind. The thought of you kept him walking the line he’d chosen, when there were days, weeks, years when it was so tempting to simply step off the bridge.”
“Why pretend all this time? Why not just…kill the Overseer?”
“And make that man a martyr? Murdered by his own kin?” Anger boiled in Sanaa’s midnight-sky eyes, darkening them further. “The man you knew as your father has many admirers. Mostly people with much in the way of currency and weapons and little in the way of conscience.”
Isn’t that the truth. “So my uncle’s goal was just to”—I shook my head in question—“limit damage?”
“You make that sound easy. On a galactic scale, I assure you, it’s not.”
“Someone else could kill him.” Every now and then, we heard about attacks on the Overseer’s life. I was always hoping one of those attempts would succeed and we’d finally be rid of him.
Sanaa cocked her head at me. “You?”
I was thinking of her, but yeah, maybe. “If I have the opportunity, I might.” Simon Novalight was probably the only person I could kill in cold blood. “And I’d bet Merrick would be willing.” A memory sprang to mind—Big Guy charging toward the Overseer’s cruiser on Starway 8. “Just seeing Merrick scared the shit out of him the last time they met. Why is that?”
“Merrick got away before the final injection,” she said.
“What do you mean?” How many injections were there? I’d only passed over one kind to the rebel leaders. Were they missing something?
“The one that makes you forget,” Sanaa answered. “Wiped clean, only knowing what the Overseer says.”
I stared at her in horror. “He’s rebooting people?” The living room blurred around me. “Oh no! What’s in that serum I passed off?”
“Don’t worry, Daraja. The final injection is a separate thing. They’ll end up like Merrick. It’s okay.”
“You’re sure?” I choked out.
“Yes. He’s still him, just enhanced. He was undoubtably sexy and quiet before, but now he can rip a metal spaceship apart with his bare hands and use it for a shield.” Her smile turned almost dreamy. “I wish I’d seen that.”
A little breath burst from me. I had two super soldiers aboard the Endeavor. If they had wild sex, would it…throw us off course or something?
I coughed and glanced around the apartment. “So, where’s this info my uncle might’ve left us?” There had to be a safe somewhere. And it looked as if there were some rooms off a hallway. Bedrooms, no doubt.
It struck me again how the place seemed stocked with everything a family could need to live here; it just d
idn’t look like anyone did.
“What’s that?” I asked, a small metallic square snagging my eye before Sanaa could answer my previous question. Curious, I moved toward the picture frame on the kitchen island. It was facing away from the living room, so that someone at the sink might see it.
I turned it, and everything in me stopped. It was a picture of Mom, me, and Uncle Nate. I was…six maybe? I was on his shoulders, and Mom looked up at me, smiling. He looked at her, smiling also, his hands up to hold mine just above his head.
The sudden rush of blood in my veins threw me off-balance. My heart pounding, I set down the picture, suddenly on a vital mission to inspect every single inch of this place. I couldn’t articulate why, exactly, but I knew I had to—and that what I found might change everything.
Breathing harder than usual, I entered the first room along the hallway.
A large bed, definitely for two people. Nice colors. Good light. A closet. A dresser with a framed photo on it. A rather feminine writing desk and chair. On the desk, still in the store packaging, sat a sketchpad and set of drawing pencils. Everything about the room screamed A couple belongs here, not a bachelor general.
I picked up the photo, seeing Mom when she was younger. Probably a late teen and well before she married the Overseer. Her smile was radiant. I’d never seen her smile like that. It almost hurt to look at.
I put down the picture, a tremble in my fingers. The truth was starting to weave itself into my consciousness, but I wanted more proof before I let myself believe.
I ignored the bathroom off the master suite and opened the closet. It was huge, a walk-in, but not very full. I recognized some of Mom’s clothing and reached out to touch a red dress she’d kept from before her marriage but had never worn again, as far as I knew. I bent and sniffed the dress on impulse. The fabric didn’t hold her scent. It didn’t smell like anything. Or maybe I didn’t remember what she smelled like to begin with.
I closed the closet door and left the master bedroom, continuing down the hallway in a sort of trance. Sanaa walked behind me, keeping a slight distance. The next door I opened revealed a large playroom. Toys. A hopscotch rug. A rocking horse. Books and games. I shut the door with a clack.
I opened the final door along the hallway, shaking hard now. This was my room, wasn’t it?
I stepped inside and had no doubt. Color everywhere. Pale-pink walls, bright-raspberry bed, a mound of pillows in every shade of the rainbow piled high against the headboard. A stuffed-animal monkey sat perched on top of the pillows, and I almost lost it. At the last second, I trapped the sob in my throat.
Blinking a hot sheen of tears from my eyes, I went and looked at the picture on the bookshelf. Mom held an infant. Me—I was her only kid. I was fast asleep, a happy little blob in her arms, having no idea what life was really like. The white blanket wrapped around me in the photograph now lay carefully folded at the foot of the bed. I dragged down a hiccupping breath.
Sanaa ducked out of the doorway, saying, “I’ll go check the safe.”
And then I was alone in this little girl’s bedroom, with the life I might have had staring me in the face.
Oddly, the most pounding thought in my head was that I had to tell Shade and Jax. I wished they’d come with me after all. I wanted Shade’s warm hand on my back.
I swallowed hard as my gaze landed on the bedside table and the lamp with constellations printed across the shade. Lit up at night, it would throw stars across the bedroom. Another framed photograph sat next to it, angled toward the bed. Stiffly, I sat on the edge of the mattress and stared at the picture while I realigned my life.
Nathaniel Bridgebane held me on his lap as he pointed to illustrations of what looked like old Earth animals in a big glossy-paged book. I wasn’t paying attention at all and chewed on a finger while I played with my foot. I was a good judge of age after growing up in an orphanage and knew I was about five months old in that shot.
It was just a flat, 2-D image, but it told a story with almost more depth than I could handle. That was what a father looked like.
Tears welled up. I opened the bedside table drawer. A fake ID—what would have been my fake ID—stared up at me, the picture of myself at age eight hitting me like a Red Beam’s crimson shock. The small document had a Sector 10 citizen matriculation number on it, as if I’d been born here when I hadn’t. My hair color wasn’t right, which was the only effort at disguising me. It was a dark red that made my freckles stand out. My blue eyes still blazed like beacons in my head.
Margaret Suzanna Walker. The birth date wasn’t mine. It was about five months early.
A tarnished silver bracelet for a small wrist circled the Sector 10 ID card. The drawer was otherwise empty apart from a box of red hair dye.
Natural pigments. Two universal months without fading. Safe for children and adults.
I didn’t move for a long time. Everything just sort of stopped as an alternate life filled my glazed-over vision and my aching soul reached for it, even though it was far too late for any of the careful things that had been planned here. Eventually, I picked up the silver bracelet. The name Maggie scrawled across the top in an engraved script with pretty swirls and dips. My heart jerked sideways. I put the bracelet back and closed the drawer, my lips pressed flat. If I could keep the worst of the tears in, I might not shatter from the inside out.
Sanaa appeared again in the doorway. She carried a bag in her hand.
I met her cautious gaze with watery eyes. “Nathaniel Bridgebane is my father.”
Sanaa didn’t deny it. I hadn’t thought she would. “He was working on getting you out. Both of you.” Her low, careful pitch made this place seem like a tomb all of a sudden. Things were buried here, things like love and hope.
Sanaa moved into the bedroom but only barely. “He was putting the finishing touches on this place when your mother passed away. He went back to get you and found her dead.”
My heart withered and died a little in my chest. So close? A matter of days, and we might have had all this?
My chin quivered. Why didn’t he take me anyway? Without Mom, I wasn’t enough?
I swiped a tear from my cheek. “Murdered, you mean.”
“Yes. Murdered.” Sanaa’s voice hardened. True rage stormed into her expression like a desert wind. Harsh. Dry. Ready to flay skin off in strips. “I know what happened. The deadly virus. How the Overseer held the cure over her head.”
“She wouldn’t tell him who my real father was, so he let her die, just like he said he would. Probably the only person he ever loved, and he killed her,” I spat out in disgust.
“There are small blessings, Daraja. At least you haven’t lived nearly two decades knowing you could have saved her with just a few drops of your blood.”
Sanaa’s dark eyes held mine, and my whole world tipped over. Bridgebane was the source of my A1 blood.
I reached out and picked up the picture of my father and me on the bedside table. My father and me. Mom’s stepbrother. The man who’d gone with her into hell. When had they fallen in love? As teenagers, after their parents’ marriage brought them together, these two people who might never have met? Or was it later, when my mother needed the touch of a man who didn’t make her skin crawl?
Nathaniel Bridgebane was a little older than Caitrin Bishop. She’d followed him into all sorts of rebel trouble when they were young, but he’d followed her into something much more destructive, hadn’t he? And then…I’d come along.
I stared at the picture. How had no one guessed, even me? Tall, dark hair, blue eyes. I looked just like him. Was the Overseer that blind? Caitrin and Nate—they were the two he just couldn’t see past, weren’t they? Because they meant something to him.
It was hard to understand the Overseer’s obsession with my mother. He’d seen her and put her on a weird sort of pedestal that I don’t think she’d understood, either,
but knew she could use. Their marriage stopped the attacks on the Outer Zones and ended the final Sambian War. She agreed to be his and got him to back off on the bombings and accept negotiations. Like a pawn, she sacrificed herself for the good of the game. The stability it brought consolidated Novalight’s power, yes, but it also brought an end to decades of fighting and murder on a mass scale. Caitrin did that. That was her legacy. It wasn’t the Overseer who brought peace to the galaxy; it was my mother.
Whatever the Overseer thought love was made no sense to me, but he desired in ways that warped his mind. He desired control, power, Caitrin Bishop. But Mom had wielded her own power, even though it was hard to see sometimes, especially from the outside. He only got her on her terms, and he’d never been able to control her, not even when death was the alternative.
My parents never gave in to him. They both walked that bridge. I closed my eyes and saw them together. They were a perfect fit.
I opened my eyes to the picture in the frame again. Me on my father’s lap. I set it down before I threw it across the room and ruined the herd of unicorns stenciled on the wall. “How dare he? How dare he let me be poked and prodded and drained when he had the same blood!”
“Listen to me carefully.” Sanaa took a step closer, her voice snapping with anger at me now. “First of all, your father couldn’t have done anything for anyone if the Overseer had locked him up the way he locked up you and your mother. Second, do you want to know why I’m a better super soldier than Merrick? Why I don’t have the bulk and can blend in? Why I can beat ten Merricks in a fight and not even break a sweat?”
“Yeah.” I popped off the bed and stood eye to eye with Sanaa, scowling at her tone and at everything else. “I do want to know that.”
“Because it was the general’s blood in my formula. Pure Mornavail. You’re a half breed, darling, and the Overseer’s enhanced army is based on you, not him.”
Holy shit. I choked on the acid burn in the back of my mouth. “Does the Overseer know about you?”
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