by Maura Milan
“It’s funny how stories come about, latching on to some speck of truth. You know who that monster really was?” White Hearts tilted his head to the side, the horns on his helmet spearing the air as he moved. “It was the man who created this thing.”
At that moment, White Hearts tapped at the button on his collarbone, and his helm slid off. Knives’s eyes scoured every detail of his face. He was young, the same age as he was, perhaps a year older. His skin was a light bronze, his eyes a marbled gray, and he looked so, so familiar.
“You’re staring,” White Hearts observed. “You look like you want to say something.”
“Yeah. You talk too much.”
White Hearts smirked and patted his shoulder, much like a friend would do. “You know, I think I can make good use of you.”
Knives met his gaze, squinting as sweat dripped into his eyes.
White Hearts stood, motioning to a darkened corner. A red light flared from the black. Metal footsteps clanged toward him, and the red light came closer, closer, until Knives could make out the figure in the darkness.
It was a borg. And he was a goliath. It wore no skin or clothing, only the metal armor that encased its construction. All raw metal and circuitry. Its limbs and joints were basic, with only two strong articulated fingers on its left hand, enough to crush skull after skull if it had to. On its right side, there was no hand at all, but a plasma gun attached at the end of its forearm. This borg was a machine built for combat.
“Put him in the circle with the rest.”
The borg grabbed Knives by the neck and lifted him up. His hands were still bound, so he kicked at the thing’s body, but it was no use. It was too strong, and he was too weak.
He was going to die.
Knives groaned as he stared at the red light embedded in Goliath’s head. Then suddenly, the light blinked like a closing eye, and its two metal fingers went slack. Knives fell to the floor, coughing as his airway opened. Looking up, he saw his father clutching a fistful of severed circuitry and kicking Goliath to the ground.
“Dad?” Knives coughed. “What are you doing here?”
“I knew something was up when your signal was cut. I docked here as soon as I could.”
Knives caught the look in his father’s eyes, and it felt like time had stopped. He recognized that expression, though he had seen it only once before, when he was four years old. Like most kids, he’d loved adventuring up trees. But one day, he fell off a weak branch and tumbled to the ground. He was banged up and bruised, a deep cut slicing across his chin. His father came running out of the housing pod with that same look on his face.
Knives’s breath caught deep in his throat. To see his father worry…he didn’t know whether to cherish or fear it.
Before he could decide, time caved in again.
A plasma blast split the air in half, hitting its mark. The general staggered back, clutching the arm where the blast had hit, the plasma searing through his armor.
Fingers gripped onto Knives’s hair, jerking his head back, so he could see the devil’s smile on White Hearts’s face as he stood above him. The tip of the plasma cannon dug into the nape of his neck, ready to blast his head clean off.
“Stop!” the general pleaded, lowering his weapon to the ground. His father’s voice was hushed, almost human. “Let him go.”
White Hearts paused. “And why would I ever do that?”
“I can give you information. You want to know how this place works. There’s someone on my ship who can tell you.”
“What’s his name?”
“Bastian Weathers.”
“Bastian…” White Hearts repeated. There was something strange about the way he said Bastian’s name, tonguing the word like it was candy in his mouth.
White Hearts threw Knives down. He rolled to the side in time to see his foe cup his hands together. In between his fingers was a ripple. Knives blinked, uncertain of what he saw. The space around him wrinkled, like a thin skin over an unknown universe.
White Hearts leaned in so Knives could hear. “Rips and tears.”
And like a piece of paper, White Hearts’s body crumpled upon itself, warping and shifting, until all that he was disappeared like water down the drain.
He was gone.
“What on Ancient Earth…” His father ran to the spot where White Hearts once stood. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
Knives shook his head at what he had witnessed. A person couldn’t just disappear.
The general located the blocking device that was garbling communication with the cruiser and turned it off. Almost instantly, a beep sounded on the general’s holowatch, and a screen popped up, lighting up the dismal space. Bastian, red faced, perked at the sight of them. “Thank Deus, you’re all right.”
A nagging thought pulled his attention, and Knives remembered what White Hearts said about the story of Fugue, that there was no monster who destroyed this place. Only a man. Knives felt the blood rush from his face. He knew where White Hearts was heading. He grappled toward the screen. “Bastian, listen to me. You have to hide. Take your journal and hide.”
A voice floated in, interrupting them. “But I just got here…”
The next moments were a blur. A series of images that took only milliseconds.
White Hearts grabbed Bastian from behind, his hand coming up to stifle the sounds of his struggle. A sliver of silver glinted in his other hand.
He drew it like a brushstroke across Bastian’s throat.
Red spilled to his chest, and Bastian’s body dropped.
With a lazy kick, White Hearts nudged Bastian’s dead body to the side and plucked the notebook from the bloody floor.
He snatched Bastian’s holoscreen, still hovering, still transmitting, and he looked straight into it, knowing very well who was watching.
“Thank you for your cooperation. May your eyes be open…” White Hearts’s hand swiped along the screen. The general’s display blinked to black.
CHAPTER 42
BRINN
“I DON’T THINK I’m good at this game,” Liam said from his floatbed.
He swiped the Goma board back to Brinn, who was sitting in a nearby chair. Brinn looked at the pieces. They had barely started the game, and yet she had already predicted the next moves he would make. He could try, but he was going to lose. She closed out of the display while Liam watched her.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Brinn shrugged. It had been two days since Ia’s escape. At first, Brinn had been ecstatic, her reaction still stemming from the anger of their fight. But after a few hours, she had started to feel Ia’s absence.
“It’s quieter with her gone,” Brinn said.
“She didn’t belong here, Brinn,” Liam replied.
Brinn studied the monitor hooked onto Liam’s arm, watching the rise and fall of his heartbeat like waves of an ocean. He was still recovering from the events of that day, his bruises now fading into gray.
“I guess you’re right,” she said.
But then a strange liquid pooled into her eyes, overpouring onto her cheeks. What was this?
She was crying.
Her mind rushed as she tried to control herself, to rein everything back in, but her body fought against her commands. No matter how hard she tried, the tears continued to fall. And that noise. She was sniffling!
She felt Liam’s gaze, even through her wet eyelashes. It was as good a time as ever to retreat, but before she could turn, his fingers grazed her cheeks. They trailed delicately underneath her eyes, tracing each tear like they were words of a sacred spell. His hands guided her head to his shoulder, and she heard the air inside him hum.
“I thought she was my friend. Is that weird?”
“I’m going to be honest with you. Ia is the scariest person I’ve ever met.” His fingers lightly touched the bruises around his jaw and neck, and then his eyes rose to Brinn’s. “But she was always different when it came to you. Nice, even.”
He reached for her hand. “Yes, you do.”
She leaned back, catching a glimpse of his eyes, the specks of green and gold sparkling like gemstones in the remaining light.
Those eyes. She felt herself getting lost in him, and strangely, her hand came up to cup his jaw. Normally, her mind would have fought her on this, screaming for her to stop what she was doing at once. But right now, all was quiet inside, and she allowed herself to feel his skin underneath her fingertips. That was when she realized she had stopped crying. And how awfully close they were, his head angled to the side, and hers angled to the other.
Her holowatch dinged. Just in time for her brain to take over and steer her back to safety.
She laid his hand back on the bed and stood up. “It’s late. You should rest.”
He leaned toward her as if he was going to say something. But she turned and walked away before she could even give him the chance.
She shuffled back to her dorm room, now quiet with Ia gone. The room felt so different. The first night Brinn was on her own, she had cleaned up Ia’s things, picking up Ia’s messy pile of clothes and placing them in a container in the closet. She had wiped up the blood that had dried on the wall but left the small dent where Ia had obviously punched at it.
Ia’s bed was still there, sheets left unturned and crumpled. The past few nights, Brinn had fallen asleep listening to the drone of the lights instead of the tune Ia sang out in her sleep. Brinn had it memorized by now. So tonight, she hummed it lightly. It eased her sadness, just by a little bit.
It was 0448 when the ground shook. Brinn rocketed up in her bed.
The lights inside the room pulsed red.
“Monitor, what’s going on?”
But there was no response.
She hooked her hair behind her ear and listened. Footsteps. Voices.
Maybe some sort of prank? Someone must have pulled the emergency alarm.
Brinn jumped out of bed and pulled on her boots. She was still in her sweats, but there was no time to change. She ran to her door, placing her hand to the metal. Hissing, she jumped backward. It was burning hot.
With fluttering fingers, Brinn pressed her palm to the sensor. The door slid open but then stopped halfway. Through the small opening, she caught glimpses of smoke and fire. And of cadets running.
Worse than that, she heard their screams. Like they had seen death.
She caught sight of Reid running past her door.
“They’re coming!” she cried.
She was almost out of sight when her feet came up from underneath her, and she fell forward. Brinn angled her head out of the opening, trying to see if Reid was okay. Something coiled around Reid’s ankles, a thick plastic, so tight it tore into her skin.
Pulling her sleeves over her hands, Brinn gripped the edge of the metal door, still hot through the fabric of her sweatshirt, and pulled. It wiggled open a few more inches. That was all she needed.
Brinn slid through the narrow opening and knelt before Reid, her red hair plastered to her face from both sweat and tears. Brinn’s hands darted to Reid’s ankles, trying to pry off the cable.
“You need to go,” Reid cried.
“Let me help you.”
Reid pushed her away. “They’re slavers! Save yourself!”
The coils grew taut, ripping Reid away from Brinn’s grasp and dragging her back to the far end of the smoke-filled hallway.
Brinn skittered backwards in shock, not stopping until her back hit the wall behind her. She heard voices from across the smoke.
“This way,” one of them ordered. “Her room should be in this hallway.”
Brinn stood frozen as heavy footsteps thudded toward her. She saw the sheen of eyes, vicious as they savored the fear they created.
She turned on her heels and ran. She didn’t dare look back; she’d be stupid to think they weren’t following.
She found a group of cadets and joined them. They were a small group at first, but then grew by a few people at each turn. That’s when Brinn realized how experienced these slavers really were. They knew what they were doing. They were herding them, flushing them toward the flight deck.
So when the crowd veered right, Brinn darted left into a separate hallway. The corner came up fast, and she turned.
Right into arms clad with armored steel.
Her heart banged hard in her chest as her eyes met her opponent. He towered over her, dirt and grease clinging to every angle of his face. He was one of them.
She pushed away, but his hands shot forward, gripping tight around her shoulders. He leaned in, examining her. The stench of his decaying teeth soured the smile that flashed across his face.
“We’re looking for a girl,” he said. “You look like a girl.”
His hand smothered her mouth, and she gasped in the stench of his oil-stained skin. Brinn heard a loud crack, and the slaver’s body slumped. Behind him, Liam stood, a metal pipe gripped in his hands.
Seeing his face, her heart leapt, and without even deciding it, her arms wrapped around him, as Brinn tried to steady the rhythm of her breathing.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
More voices traveled toward them. “We need to hide,” he said.
“The comms lab. It’s close.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him down the hallway, her footsteps quick and certain. The doors slid open at their presence, revealing a room thrown into chaos. Each comms station had been torn from the floorboards and gutted. Water poured down from overhead sprinklers, trying to quench a fire brewing in the corner.
Her hand came up, drawing her soaked locks to the side, and that’s when she heard it. A cough.
Someone else was inside.
Brinn turned to Liam and placed a finger against her lips. He readjusted his grip on the metal pipe.
Brinn pointed over at a large pile of ruined components. Liam led the way, his pipe raised high. As they made their way around the cluttered heap, Brinn caught a glimpse of someone digging through metal. The nails on her hand were painted a distinguishable shade of pink.
Liam’s pipe swung down, hard enough to break through bone.
“Liam. Stop!”
Just in time, he readjusted his aim. The blunt end of the pipe landed off to the side, crashing down into a pile of metal.
Angie swiveled around, facing them. “What the mif do you think you’re doing?”
Brinn rushed forward, shushing her.
“We thought you were one of them.”
“Do I look like one of them?” She looked at the grime on her hands. “Oh mung. I do, don’t I?”
Angie sat back on her haunches, her eyes darting over the wire and circuitry before her. “I was trying to send out an SOS signal to HQ. But all of the comms orbs are destroyed. Even our holowatches are jammed. We’re totally scuzzed.”
“No, we’re not. Give me some cover from the sprinklers.” Brinn crouched next to Angie, who had found a small sheet of metal to hold over her as Brinn unlatched her holowatch and pried the backing loose like she had seen Ia do so many times before. She spotted a landline wire in a nearby pile and fished it out. With deft fingers, she twisted it onto the circuits of her holowatch.
A holoscreen popped up, a blinking dash waiting for her input. A number pad appeared on the lower right side, but all she needed to use were two buttons. 1 and 0. She was connected to the spire, one of many beacons that patched all of the ArcLite together. She typed in a series of rapid-fire commands, and in response, a scrolling screen of numbers cascaded down like a waterfall. Her eyes raced as she absorbed the information.
“What does it say?” Angie asked.
“It’s telling me the codes to all RSF spires.”
“Why would you want that?”
“We can’t send out a visual transmission. But I can get each spire to ping out an SOS code with our coordinates to the closest Commonwealth vessel.” Brinn typed in her last lin
e of code and pressed Enter.
“I didn’t know you were this smart,” Angie remarked.
Brinn snorted under her breath.
Liam brought a finger up to his lip and angled his head at the entranceway. “They’re close.”
They all held their breath as footsteps passed outside.
“I think they’re gone,” Brinn said after a moment of measured silence.
Liam turned toward them. “We should get out of here before they circle back.”
Brinn made her way to the entrance. The floor had become flooded as the sprinklers continued to spray overhead. She wiped her wet hair away from her face. Blinking through the drizzle of water, she looked over her shoulder to see Angie frozen in place. Brinn looked past Angie’s tousled appearance, her drenched hair and the rips on her flight suit. There was something off about her. Instead of her usual confident self, Angie stood hunched over, wringing her fingers. Brinn’s gaze fell to the speckles of red staining Angie’s suit. Blood. And it wasn’t her own.
“Angie…”
“I don’t want to go back out there.” Her voice was very small. “I was with Cammo. He was right next to me, and then he wasn’t. He was trying to save me.”
“What are you saying?” Liam’s voice was tense.
Angie’s eyes darted up for a second. And from the pained look on her face, Brinn knew…
“No,” Liam sputtered, his face pale. “Not him.”
Brinn felt the room spin. Cammo was gone. Easygoing, joke-cracking, endlessly enthusiastic Cammo. Her throat tightened, and she felt like throwing up.
Brinn swallowed her sadness and looked Angie straight in the eye. “We can’t let them win.” She extended her hand, offering Angie her strength.
Angie raised her chin at the sound of her words. Her fingers slipped into Brinn’s hand. They were cold and clammy, but Brinn held them tight anyway.
Metal screeched behind her, and she spun to see the entry doors wobble open, catching only a glimpse of a slaver adorned with metallic skull headpiece. He stood in the archway, a smile on his face and his pistol pointed.
The nozzle strobed red. Air cracked at her ears. Her head whipped back, and all she saw were the panels of the ceiling and the flat rows of lights. Her feet were no longer on the ground because she was flying backward. With a loud thud, her head cracked against the floor, but that wasn’t what hurt. Pain radiated from deep inside her rib cage, and she found herself gasping for air.