by Maura Milan
“Show me,” Brinn said. If Ia was telling the truth, then Faren would be all right. His body would heal. “How did they do it?”
Ia shrugged. “I think you just have to will yourself to do it.”
“That’s not going to work. Look…” She pointed two fingers at her head. “Get rid of this fever, body,” she commanded.
Ia’s eyes met hers. “Give me your hand.”
Brinn placed her palm on the tabletop. Ia scooped her fingers gently. “Do you trust me?” she asked.
“What are you going to—”
But before Brinn could finish, Ia gripped Brinn’s forefinger and twisted it back. Her skin tore, and her bones snapped. Brinn screamed. The pain was so fierce that she almost tumbled out of her chair.
Brinn stared at her broken finger, trembling at the sight of bone poking through her flesh. Rivulets of crimson blood spilled out of the wound, dribbling down her forearm.
“You broke my finger.” Brinn’s voice shook.
Across the table, Ia stood with her arms crossed, offering her no assistance. “You needed more motivation. Now, do it. Heal.”
The pain. It was all Brinn could think about. Her hands trembled, making it sting worse. She gripped her wounded hand trying to stop it from shaking, to stop the awful sensation from ripping up and down the nerves of her arm.
The Monitor interrupted. “Cadet Tarver, are you in need of assistance?”
Brinn opened her mouth to answer, but Ia beat her to it. “She’s fine, Monitor.” Ia turned her attention back to Brinn. “Stop screaming. Just do it.”
She felt like she was going to faint. “I can’t.”
“Do I have to break another finger?”
Brinn shook her head. Ia stood back and nodded for her to get on with it.
Brinn drew in a shaky breath. How on Ancient Earth was she going to do this? Maybe if she treated it like something she had a better grasp on. Like numbers. And patterns. And codes.
And hacking.
She could hack into anything. Any network of any size. And the body was like a network. She closed her eyes, and her mind waded through the dark. There was a sound. Her heartbeat. Her mind grew closer to it until the beat grew crisp, and she saw everything.
Her blood pulsed inside her, rushing, always rushing.
And because of her thoughts, it pumped faster through her veins.
Too fast. Her body would go into shock.
Normalize, she thought. And it did. Her blood flow steadied, and with her next breath, her mind flashed through her neural system until she located the exact source of her pain.
With her mind’s eye, she saw the damaged fibers of her muscles gaping open and the severed break in her bone.
It was like reading code. Binary. Concept-based. KovX code. Her brain was better than any supercomputer in existence, and she could read all of it. Now, that included the code inside her, from her DNA to her cells to the atoms that built her.
With all her energy, she focused, rearranging her internal programming to repair her bone and musculature. She opened her eyes in time to watch her finger fold back into place until all that was left was an open gash. Again, she concentrated, her mind rewriting the state of her skin cells, reconstructing it. The wound sealed itself.
“Nicely done, Tarver,” Ia commended with pride, and then felt Brinn’s forehead. “Looks like your fever’s gone too.” She draped a blanket around Brinn’s shoulders and patted her on the back.
After seeing her body repair itself at will, Brinn felt calmed, knowing that her mother would show Faren his unique ability as well. She wanted to hear his voice, to talk to him about this skill that made them so unique, that connected them to each other. But her brain was too tired. Ia did say that healing herself would take a toll on her. All Brinn wanted was sleep. She felt hands around her shoulders, guiding her to her bed.
The mattress shifted as Ia sat down with her legs crossed at the corner of Brinn’s bed.
Brinn’s thoughts were a messy jumble, piling up inside her. An unmovable mountain. It was on the verge of crashing down and burying her. She needed help.
Her eyes rested on Ia. “My brother’s in the hospital,” she said.
Ia’s face twisted, her tone now severe. “What?”
“They found out he’s Tawny.”
Instead of lecturing her, Ia placed her hand gently on Brinn’s knee. “I’m so sorry, Brinn.”
“I feel like I’m losing myself,” she whispered. “Was I wrong to come here?”
“I know I’ve done bad things. Regretful things,” Ia admitted. “The only way you can live with your past is to recognize that every decision you make in your life will make you stronger. There’s no such thing as right or wrong, Brinn. Not in this universe.”
Ia reached over and gripped Brinn’s hand like she had done just moments prior. Unlike before, her touch was gentle now, but still strong.
Brinn’s eyes fluttered closed. That night, she dreamed she stood in the middle of a path, staring in one direction and then the other. Her foot came up, preparing to take a step. She woke before she could see where her foot had decided to land.
CHAPTER 29
IA
HER FIRST CLASS wasn’t until after lunch period, so Ia spent the morning on her bed watching Brinn talk to Faren about discovering one of their Tawny traits. She envied Brinn at that moment, being able to talk to her brother whenever she felt like it. It was an everyday act, something people thought nothing of until it was no longer possible.
It had been a while since she’d contacted Einn, and she was starting to feel his absence, as though her connection to the outside world was fading away. She could demand to use Brinn’s holowatch again, even threaten to tell her secret if she wanted to. But the more she got to know Tarver, the guiltier Ia felt about getting Brinn tangled in her own plans.
Brinn was in the middle of saying goodbye when Ia called across the room. “Tell him I hope he gets better.”
Brinn swiped the screen into the center of the room. “You can tell him yourself.”
Ia had heard a lot about him from Brinn, even overheard them on the streams with each other in the past, but this was the very first time Ia has ever seen him. Faren waved at her on the screen. His eyes were bloodshot, but his face now bore no bruises, only the faint mark of a cut across his nose. Ia sat up, a smile somehow painted across her face. “Hi, Faren. You look well. Strong.”
“I still feel awful,” Faren said, drawing out a slow laugh. He didn’t have enough strength, but his eyes focused on hers. The next words he said slowly but surely. “Thank you, Ia, for looking after my sister.”
Brinn motioned for the screen, and it returned to her side of the room. “Bye, Faren. Miss you.”
With Faren gone, the two of them were left. After a few minutes, Brinn swiveled around and stared at her expectantly. “Why haven’t you made fun of me yet?”
Ia shifted in her bed. Brinn was right. She loved poking fun at Tarver, mainly because getting under her skin was so easy. But seeing her joke around with Faren, Ia remembered there was another person she liked to tease, and she immediately grew somber.
“You miss him, don’t you?” Brinn asked. “Your brother.”
“So you can read minds now?” Ia bristled.
“No, I can just tell,” Brinn said, her eyes studying her roommate.
“I do,” Ia admitted. Einn was her anchor. She felt lost, as though she had been washed away without him.
Brinn opened her mouth as if she was going to say something.
“What?” Ia asked.
Brinn played at the hem of her sleeve. “Well, do you want to talk to him again?”
Her question caught Ia off guard. She’d never thought Brinn would offer. The answer was stuck inside her throat, so she nodded, speechless.
“I’m failing all my classes,” Ia said as she stared into the infinite white. Einn sat behind her. They were in the White Room, leaned up against each other, sitting back-to-back.
Ia didn’t realize seeing the letter F multiple times on her report card would make her feel like she was totally and completely worthless. It was just a letter, for Deus’s sake.
The midterm exam questions were all about facts and dates. Memorizing wasn’t her thing. She was certain she would have aced it if the questions were about surviving life-or-death situations. Why couldn’t they have tested her on that?
“Well, I don’t think any less of you,” Einn said.
Ia was relieved to see him again, after more than a month of no contact. Fifteen minutes was all she had back then. Now Brinn trusted her enough to leave Ia with her holowatch while she went to the canteen to grab a quick dinner with Angie, which meant Ia had some time.
Ia turned and looked at her brother, finding comfort in his expressions, from his subtle grins to the crinkly laugh lines that gathered around his eyes. Since her arrival at Aphelion, she’d felt like her sails had been pointed in the wrong direction, and only her brother could direct her to her original path.
“I hate that this is my life now, where I have to worry about a pointless test score,” she told him. “If any Dead Spacers found out, they would laugh.”
“No,” Einn answered, “they would think you’re running a very elaborate con that only someone as clever as Ia Cōcha could think of. Did you find out anything we could use against them?”
She paused, realizing the weight of his question. Something about this felt wrong to her.
“Ia?” he said, interrupting her thoughts. She shook her head, trying to alleviate the feeling of guilt sinking into her. If she did this, she would be dragging Brinn deeper into her own plans.
Einn wanted her to find something that they could use against the Commonwealth. Weapons, intel, starship technology. It was easy at first, imagining how she could turn their own tech against them. But now there were other people orbiting her. Like Knives, and more brightly, there was Brinn.
Ia had to keep telling herself Aphelion wasn’t her home. She didn’t belong here. She needed to be with Einn, so she could be happy again. So she could smile like Brinn had with Faren just moments ago.
Swiveling around to sit beside Einn, Ia plucked out a strand of her hair and tossed it up. It shattered, breaking off into images, streams of data, basically everything she had collected while she snooped around academy grounds. Photos of blueprints, prototypes, even the pieces of paper filled with random numbers that Brinn had left on the table in their room.
The most notable finds were the goodies from the Armaments department. That place was a playground, filled with gadgets and advanced tech. AI-partnered missile launchers. Roaming area scatter nukes. One corner of the room was completely caged off, surely where they kept all the fancy stuff. Through the bars, Ia had snapped photos of boxes with different names. Project Mech. Project Icarus. Project Perpetus. All wrapped up in chains like Solstice presents.
“I managed to get photos during a mandatory tour of the department. There’s war-grade weapons tech here,” she revealed, “and did I mention the uranium core? It’s massive.”
Ia’s eyes darted to Einn, trying to gauge his reaction. “Yes, you mentioned it last time,” Einn said, looking everything over and pursing his lips. She knew that expression on his face. “Is this really all you’ve found?” he started.
She leaned in. “What’s better than a uranium core?”
“There’s something more dangerous than any weapon,” Einn answered. “It’s information.”
“Information? Well, I’m pretty sure my guard, Aaron, is in love with one of my professors, if that’s the type of stuff you’re after,” she joked.
Einn gave her an amused look. “I don’t even know how to respond to that.”
“See! That’s how bored I am here. On top of that, the flight master won’t let me fly, and my roommate is very close to actually beating me at Goma.”
She wanted to slap herself for how silly she sounded. She remembered back when surviving a gunfight was her biggest worry of the day. Or finding out that half the NøN she’d stolen was counterfeit. Those were Dead Space problems. Real problems.
Einn gave her a moment to collect herself before asking, “Who’s your headmaster?”
“Bastian Weathers. He’s like a living statue. Do you know him?”
He scratched his jaw lazily. “I know of him.”
“Brinn says he’s really smart. She helps him with his impossible math problems sometimes. She’s smart too, because she’s Tawny. She never explained what they were working on. The numbers just look like gibberish to me.” Ia knew she was rambling at this point and decided to change the topic. “How are the Tawny refugees from the travel ship?”
She was relieved the Elder and some of the people on that ship were able to find their way to Einn. She knew it must have been hard for him to leave his comrades. She felt it too. The guilt tore her up inside, watching the captured Tawnies day after day on the media streams. They were there because of her.
But that’s what happened when you drifted. You lost people. Pirate scuffles, sickness, insufficient resources, radiation poisoning. There were too many things working against you. The only way to survive such a loss was to keep moving forward, to find another tribe and survive.
Was that was she was doing now? With the cadets she had come to know at Aphelion? She tried as hard as she could to push those questions away.
Einn nodded. “They’re safe. That Elder though…He’s a stubborn one. But intelligent. He helped me figure out a computer problem. Something was wrong with the processor.” Einn scratched at the stubble on his chin and angled his head toward her. “Now tell me about your life as a student.”
Her eyes widened. Oh, she had tons to tell. “Get this. Knives, he’s that stubborn flight master I was talking about. He told this absurd scary story during lecture to freak everyone out. It was all about a monster that ate some star system I’ve never heard of. Fugue? Ridiculous, right?”
“Very.” Einn smiled at her, then bumped her lightly on the shoulder. “It almost sounds like you’re having fun there.”
She waved her hands. “If I’m stuck here,” she hurried to explain. “I might as well amuse myself.”
“You should,” he agreed. “Just don’t forget where your priorities are. Once I get there, you’ll need to drop everything and leave.”
“That’s if I ever find out where Aphelion’s located.”
“Sometimes things fall into your lap when you don’t expect it. It’ll happen. Eventually.” He stood up, his long, limber frame like a stain in the expanse of white. He crossed his arms, thinking. Like the real conversation had only begun. “Escape routes…You have them planned?”
She had memorized all the hallways of Aphelion’s campus in her head. If she was cornered, she’d know how to wiggle away. She’d recorded the flight master’s voice and knew where all the Eyes were located and how to avoid them. A big perk of being an engineer was that she knew which engines were in the best condition, so she had already made a list of the best possible training jets to steal when it came down to it. The jets were print-locked. She may not have her Sponge Tips, but there were other, albeit more violent ways to get fingerprints. Aphelion was full of fingers, and she just had to break off one.
“I’ll be ready,” Ia said.
Einn looked at her, pleased. “Good. No loose ends?”
She thought of all the people she’d grown fond of while on Aphelion. There were her guards. Geoff was her number one fan. She didn’t even want to imagine the look on his face when he found out she’d left. And even Aaron, with all his stiff borgy mannerisms, had grown on her.
Ia thought of Brinn, and how their strange dynamic had turned into an actual friendship. She hated the fact that she was going to miss her roommate, and she would worry about her. But Tarver was smart, and Ia knew she would be okay.
She could leave these people. And she would have to if she wanted to resume her life as the Blood Wolf and fly those skies again.
Then there was Knives. He would be right behind her, chasing her throughout the onyx sky. She could outfly him, easily. But no matter how fast she flew, he would be tied to her, gripping her heart, the shape of a tiny silver egg, in the pit of his fist.
“There is one loose end,” she told Einn.
Ia had to get that heart tracker. Only then would she be able to fully break free.
CHAPTER 30
BRINN
BRINN WAS IN THE LIBRARY, studying the screens for the next history quiz, when a new dialog box popped up into her field. Her eyes widened as she read the words.
I know.
The hair on her arms bristled, and she stiffened in her seat. The username wasn’t tagged, so she wasn’t sure who sent it. Everyone’s holos had to be registered with Aphelion admin, so whoever messaged her was doing it from an unapproved device. With jittering fingers, she waved a hand across the screen, closing it before anyone could see.
“Hey, Brinn.”
Brinn glanced up as Liam sat next to her. She feigned a smile, but it was no use. The worry had already seeped into a crinkle of lines on her forehead.
He leaned in closer. “You okay?”
Brinn nodded. “Do you need something?”
Liam paused, probably from the tone in her voice. “Can I share screens with you? My holo is fritzing right now.”
Before she could answer, another message popped up in her field of view. Do you want to tell him? Or should I?
She stood up, surveying the room. The other cadets were either studying or chatting quietly among themselves. Who was sending her those messages?
“I’m sorry,” she told Liam, as she grabbed her things. “I have to go.”