by K. Gorman
In the middle of the room, Ethan remained quiet. His jaw looked tense, body rigid, hands balled into fists at his side. He was shaking again.
“Ethan,” Marc said. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”
He swallowed hard, but stayed still, nose flaring as he took quick, shallow breaths.
“There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things,” Marc continued. “Why didn’t you come to me?”
“Because you wouldn’t have done anything, and Hopper had something to lose,” Karin said, shifting where she stood.
A raw kind of emotion slipped up from her stomach, touching the bottom of her throat. She took a breath and glanced around. Quiet filled the bridge again. Everyone was looking between her and Ethan, their faces set in their thoughts.
Soo-jin tapped her finger against her bicep and chewed the inside of her cheek. “I think, perhaps, he should move to my room for a bit. Come on, kid.”
His head jerked at her voice. Then he moved, gaze still on the floor, and shuffled over to her.
But, as he turned to leave, he looked back.
The hurt and anger in his eyes dug straight into her heart. In fact, as he walked away, the entirety of what had just happened smashed into her.
Marc had just gotten them blacklisted from the station. By force. For her.
Ten hells, he’d pulled a Fallon cannon on an Alliance station!
And she was a lying piece of shit who’d just gaslit a kid’s story. All because she was afraid that some corporate lab would come and pick her up, lock her away, and resume where her childhood had left off.
The station would have been the perfect opportunity to test the kid’s theory—and her growing suspicion. If her light could hurt the Shadows, what happened when she directed it to their possessed? They had them all there, in isolation, controlled, and with only a small crew to witness what she could do. Hell, if she’d played her cards right, she could have sworn Hopper to secrecy in exchange for his wife’s cure.
If she was able to cure them at all.
And the worst part of it all? If she wasn’t able to help?
Then, at the very least, she would have tried.
She swayed, breath catching, and put a hand out to the wall for support.
“Karin?” Marc asked. “You all right?”
“Yeah, just give me a second.”
Get a grip. It’s over.
Except it wasn’t, was it? It had only just gotten harder. They still had a long way to go to Enlil, and she still had a sister to find.
If she was going to survive this, she would have to lie low, keep to herself and, when she found Nomiki…
She’d have to leave.
Chapter Eighteen
Her netlink beeped as they hit another relay, and Karin hurried to turn the sound down as the notifications began to roll in.
She sat in the corner of Soo-jin’s room. Soo-jin and Ethan were asleep in front of her, though she suspected Ethan wasn’t really asleep—she’d seen his eyes open earlier. Apart from the addition of him, and a string of colorful festival lights that Soo-jin had taped across the wall, the room remained the same as when she’d first kept watch just over a week ago.
The chair beside her stood empty, but the telltale beep of Marc’s netlink came from the Mess.
A couple of minutes later, his shadow blocked the door as he rejoined her.
“Anything?” he asked.
She shook her head. She’d now received mail from the day after the Shadows had come—even later, depending on its origin and the transmission delays. But, despite a few newsletters she knew came from Enlil, or were auto-generated reports from the relays, there’d been nothing.
Nomiki hadn’t messaged her.
Which either meant that her sister wasn’t on Enlil, that she was one of the possessed, or that she was otherwise incapacitated.
There was a good chance for each option—the former being more likely than the latter, considering what she had seen Nomiki do—but she couldn’t help but feel the pang of fear that rippled inside her chest.
“Did you see the headlines?” she asked, keeping her voice low. “Azcorp?”
Azcorp Teleview was the main news site on the Alliance planets, and its headlines app came as part of the standard installation on every netlink. Their notifications had been some of the first to come in, and none of them had filled her with joy.
He nodded. “Yeah. Looks like they were definitely hit. I’m going to download as much of the media streams as I can get. Maybe we can get a better picture.”
“Hopefully, anyway. You hear from Cookie?”
He let out a breath. “No.”
Now that was worrying. Unlike Nomiki, Cookie never left Enlil. He was too settled, had too many friends and contacts, his small apartment set up precisely how he wanted it.
And he was a techhead.
If his message hadn’t come through, it was because he hadn’t sent one.
Her gaze traveled across the room, lingering on the pictures by Soo-jin’s bedside, and then stopped on the small nest of blankets that housed Ethan. His eyes were closed this time.
“Shit,” she said.
“Yeah. I’m hoping maybe he went underground, or got caught up in a blackout. One of the articles mentioned blackouts in its headline.”
Possible, but unlikely. Even she knew that Cookie maintained a generator and a solar array—and by way Marc’s jaw worked in the silence, she suspected pessimism was catching up to him.
A low tone sounded twice through the hall.
Proximity alert.
They exchanged a look. Then, as one, they both headed for the bridge.
It wasn’t a normal alert—they weren’t actually close to anything. She had set the scanners wide, wanting info on anything human-driven that even sniffed into their relative space.
She tagged the object on the computer and brought it up wide.
Then she sucked in a quick breath.
“Warship. A-class.” Marc gave a low whistle, leaning over the back of the co-pilot’s chair. “What’s it doing out here?”
She shook her head, her mouth hanging open. It was huge, bigger than the Ozark by at least fifty times—a behemoth of system combat. Even a fraction of one of its back thrusters would be enough to swallow the Nemina whole.
“Whose is it? Enlil’s?”
“Either them or Belenar Rep. Fallon wouldn’t come in this far.” He squinted at the screen. “It looks Alliance, by my guess.”
“You think they’re going to take umbrage with us? With the ship? You think they’ve scanned us?”
“Oh, they’ve scanned us, all right. They probably scanned us from around the back of that asteroid.” He jabbed a finger at the screen, indicating the route their computer had backtracked the military ship to. “Don’t think they’ll care, though. This pot-shooter couldn’t even scratch their shielding.”
The computer registered an available link through the comms system, the alert popping up in the corner of the screen—registered as EN-052, the Enmerkar. Karin waited to see if it would activate.
Nothing came.
It kept moving, its route almost parallel to theirs, except in the opposite direction.
Ten minutes later, it was gone.
Nomiki was in her next dream, but the standing stone ruins were not. Instead, this dream had a different set of ruins, bigger and newer and much more recognizable. There was even a plaque embedded in the front of one of the old buildings, though its copper had turned into both light and dark shades of teal from age.
It had been a factory, she’d read. People had made lightbulbs here, once.
Now, only she, Nomiki, and a few of the other children came. It was set much farther from the compound, several hours’ walk in the opposite direction of the road. They’d only discovered in the later years, when their numbers had thinned, and the guards and scientists hadn’t been paying as much attention to them.
“Do you remember what it was like?” her sis
ter asked. “Before, I mean. Do you remember?”
She wore a simple dress—dark blue, with a high, tight collar and a hem that flapped below her knees—her black hair pulled into a low ponytail that the wind blew across her back.
Karin shook her head. She had remembered once, a time before, but not now. Like so many others, the memory had leaked out of her head last year, when she’d grown tall enough to climb over the fence and leave the compound behind. “Do you?”
“No. I think they took it. I think they’re taking them all.”
The sky was overcast, dull and gray. The cold brushed around her bare legs. She, too, wore a dress, much like Nomiki’s, except hers was white. Their caretakers were always doing that, setting the colors and changing their lessons. Putting them out as if they were opposites, like Gemini in the old legends.
They were like that, in some ways.
But, mostly, they were not. Even with the differences in their programming.
“Something’s coming,” Nomiki said. She bent down and picked a stick from the ground, holding it like a weapon. “Are you ready?”
Karin frowned. Anxiety trickled through her as she eyed the stick. Some distant part of her remembered a different time and a different ruin. A knife.
Her frown deepened as the memory slipped through her mind. That part of her didn’t seem so far away now. In fact, it seemed to be coming closer.
“What’s coming?” she asked. Her voice seemed to spit. An image came to her—her, in her bunk on the Nemina, speaking as her head lay on the pillow. “Miki, what should I—”
But Nomiki was gone—vanished in the split second she’d been thinking of something else—and she’d taken the stick, and all of the warmth, with her.
Karin shivered as the breeze blew again. It cut colder this time, ran right through the thin fabric of her dress and chilled her skin as if she were naked.
Above her, the sky darkened.
In the distance, someone was yelling.
She snapped awake in a panic. Noise tumbled around her. In those first few moments between dream and reality, it sounded random, as if someone were spinning through channels on the radio.
She jerked around just in time to see Marc tackle a Shadow to the floor.
Her heart leapt. She scrambled back on her bed—then her brain kicked in.
She grabbed the crowbar from her bedside and jumped into the fight.
There were people yelling around her. As she stumbled onto the floor, fighting bleariness for balance, Soo-jin appeared at the door. Ethan had backed into the corner, screaming.
Marc and the Shadow wrestled on the floor, flailing wildly, trying to grapple each other. She didn’t understand how exactly the Shadows worked, but it looked as though it was trying to shift—trying to lengthen its half-pinned arms to get them behind Marc, to get its long, slender fingers around the back of his head.
She swung hard at a flailing limb. The crowbar passed through its translucent hand like smoke.
Shocked, she redoubled her grip on the bar and swung again, aiming for higher up on the Shadow’s arm.
This time, it hit—and was jerked out of her hands. It rang against the metal floor and vanished under her bed.
Her eyes went wide, and her suddenly empty hands flexed for something—anything—to grip.
“Karin! Here!”
A rush of movement caught her eye. Ethan threw something at her. Its chrome body caught the light as it flipped through the space. She snatched it out of the air, nearly fumbling it, then frowned in confusion.
A flashlight.
She stared at it, confusion clouding her mind.
Then she met his eyes.
“Fucking use it!” he shouted.
Her eyes widened. She turned it lens down, holding its metal body like a knife—or a stake. Shivers of light energy pulled from her skin as she pushed all of her power into its bulb.
It blazed to life.
“Marc—move!” she bellowed.
It took him a moment and several grunts of effort—or pain—but his head jerked clear.
She slammed it down with her entire body. Light streaked through the air.
A second later, the flashlight’s rim smashed into the metal floor with a loud crack.
The rest of the Shadow dissolved.
The room went dead quiet.
Karin sat back on her legs, breathing hard. Her hand had slipped, smacking hard against the floor. She rubbed it. It took a few seconds for her brain to catch up with reality.
Then she looked at Marc.
He was on all fours, his size dwarfing her by comparison, and breathing just as hard. He nearly blocked out the light with the way he had angled toward the door. Sweat gleamed on his forehead, and at least one trail of blood—thick and dark, smeared near its top—worked its way down the side of his face.
His eyes met hers.
“Sol’s child,” he said, breathless. “How hard did you hit it?”
“Hard enough, apparently.” A crack had formed at the edge of the lens—not very important, considering its function. She checked that it still worked, turned it off, and tossed it into the mess of sheets at the base of her bed. “You okay?”
“All right, I think.” He sat back on his knees. “Give me a minute to count all my pieces.”
“Is it just me, or are they getting more wily?” Soo-jin said. “That’s the second one that’s appeared after one of us has left the room.”
“It also came after me first, not her,” Marc said. “Knocked the blaster away before I had a chance to grab it.”
Looking around, Karin spotted the weapon on the floor under the other bed, its handle catching the light from the door.
“We should step up the buddy system. Three awake, at least two on guard. Kid can sleep with me. It really went after you?”
“I don’t think it even looked at Karin. Not until she started hitting it, anyway.”
“Then I think we should rearrange a couple sleep schedules, possibly some bunks. Let’s not split potential attacks.”
“Yeah, and let’s bring that alarm out of storage. You know the one I mean.”
“I’ll get it.” The light shifted as Soo-jin vanished from the door. They heard her shoes tapping down the hall.
Marc waited another beat, then leveraged himself to his feet. As he steadied himself on the closest wall—and Ethan pushed himself further into the corner to avoid him—he paused and turned his head toward Karin. “Guess you’re awake now, huh?”
“How long was it?”
“Four hours, give or take. How do you feel? Do you need to get more?”
The laugh that startled out of her sounded more hysterical than genuine. “After that? I don’t think I could sleep.”
He snorted. “I know what you mean. I’m all pumped up now. Better than caffeine.” He turned toward the door as another shadow smudged across its threshold. “Hello, Senton. You all right?”
“Oh, suns—I am so sorry. I was in the loo—” His face appeared panicked as he poked it around the threshold, attention snapping to her as he saw her on the floor. “Is everyone okay?”
“Yep, and don’t worry. Not your fault. Your turn next, right?”
“I—I think so?” He flashed up the screen of his netlink. “I thought it was a few hours yet?”
“Well, Karin woke up early. Might as well get to it.”
“All right—well, I won’t complain about that.” He glanced over, gaze lingering when he caught her eyes, as if assessing that it was, in fact, okay. Then he seemed to realize that he was looking into her room. His head vanished from the door. “I’ll get ready, then.”
Marc winced as he bowed his head, his long fingers feeling up from his cheekbones and to his temple. The cut looked shallow, but she had a feeling there was more to it than the blood. The Shadow hadn’t carried anything sharp—from what she’d seen of the fight, it had probably bounced Marc’s head off of something.
“Better go check for concussi
on,” she said.
He snorted. “Yeah, I need all the brain I can get.” He shook his head, dropping his hand. His eyes found hers. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Just keeping myself acquainted with the floor,” she said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
He nodded, then lifted his hand in a dismissive wave as he took the hint. “See you, then.”
The room darkened as he went through the door, then returned to normal.
A small movement made her look to the corner. Ethan was still there, crunched so far and so still into the corner that he was barely noticeable. As he extracted himself, stepping forward into the light of the door, he stopped.
His eyes met hers for a long time, unblinking, the glow from the corridor casting sidelong into the room and highlighting the thin, concentrated rings of his green-brown irises.
After several long seconds, he turned and left.
Chapter Nineteen
Enlil was a beautiful planet, and would have been so even if they hadn’t just come from the nothing of deep space. Set with seas that glittered deep and blue on the sun-side, the contrasting green land forms made the whole thing look like one giant jewel, hanging in space.
For someone like her who hadn’t grown up with knowledge of terraforming—the rudimentary attempts on Mars, and its early domes, were all the compound ever let slip to the students—it was a wonder.
But, as they pulled closer, the seas weren’t the only thing that glittered.
Its orbit was absolutely stuffed with ships.
They weren’t, all told, very big ships—most were mid-sized or smaller, with a couple full-sized carriers sticking out like chunks of driftwood in a sea of ants.
The space equivalent of trawlers, she thought, or rowboats. Like the legend of Dunkirk from Old Earth, people had jumped into anything space-worthy they could get and had gone, en masse, to either find or retrieve their people.
Comms traffic was nuts.
“Aiyeu,” Soo-jin said. “That’s a… well, a lot of people.”
Her hesitation made Karin think she’d intended another word for the description, but it seemed as though she’d returned to censoring herself whenever Ethan was close. He stood by the arm of Karin’s chair, nestled in front of Marc and Soo-jin as they leaned in to study the screen. Senton was on her other side, not quite as intrusive.