Cade hung his head. “I tried, Dad. But everything went bad. And I know you’re going to try, but look at me,” Cade said, gesturing to his restraints. “You can’t tell me I wasn’t wrong.”
“Yes, I can,” Benji said, his face filled with so much pity. “Forget about all this stuff with the Rokura and what the Paragon is and isn’t supposed to be and remember the one true thing that you’ve known all your life: You are never wrong when you stand up for what’s right.”
Cade shook his head. “Yeah, Dad. A lot of good that maxim did you. And Mom. And me.”
“I’m an idealist, Cade, and so is your mother. The last thought I had before I died was of you and Tristan; the knowledge that I’d never see you again was worse than any pain I could ever endure. I regret, more than you can possibly know, missing your life.” Benji cut himself off by pressing his fist against his mouth. He winced, the sorrow he’d experienced all those years earlier still fresh, and it took him a moment to collect himself. “Cade, you can’t run. You can’t hide. The only thing you can do is what you’ve done your entire life; you need to do whatever you can to push evil out of this world.”
Deep down, Cade didn’t want to die, especially not like this. Not when he still had a chance to correct everything that’d happened. He was the only one who could stop Ga Halle, and if he was going to die, he was going to die fighting. The problem, given his captivity, was how he’d manage to do much of anything. He felt the ship jostle like it was going through the atmosphere of whatever planet they were heading toward; his opportunity to do something wasn’t going to last forever.
“You’re right,” Cade said, feeling galvanized. “You’re right. But … it’s going to be a little tough for me to put up much of a fight if I can’t get out of these bonds.”
“You’re sitting on everything you need,” Benji said.
Cade rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. The power comes from within, I got it. You, Percival, and Wu-Xia can all be satisfied that you delivered that message loud and clear. And it’s great, but it’s not going to get me out of this mess.”
“No, Cade,” Benji said with a smile. “You’re sitting on everything you need.”
Cade looked down at the footlocker, and his eyes went wide when he realized what he was resting on: the grav suits.
“Oh,” Cade said, getting it. But then his spirits sank when he realized what this meant. “Aw, man, I have to use a grav suit again.”
Benji’s gesture said it all: Cade could either use the grav suit or stay on the Rubicon and accept everything that came with being Ga Halle’s prisoner. All things considered, the grav suit didn’t seem so bad.
Cade flipped open the locker and grabbed a suit. The problem, though, was that he couldn’t get a full suit on, not with his hands bonded together in front of him. Granted, he didn’t need the protection of the entire suit since he wouldn’t be dropping out of the Rubicon in outer space. At least he thought he wouldn’t be. Cade started to wonder just how certain he was that the ship was on a landing vector, but he knew it didn’t matter. This was what he was doing, so screw it.
In that spirit, he jammed his feet into a pair of the grav suit’s boots; he did the same with the gloves, getting them as snug as possible despite his hands’ limited mobility. The propulsion control was located in his right palm, so he’d at least be able to sorta maneuver his fall to the ground. It’d be hard with his hands bound, and he could have sworn he remembered Mig saying something about the suit itself being built to help distribute the propulsion thrust. But Mig spouted a lot of scientific junk; Cade didn’t have the brainpower to remember it all. And it wasn’t like the potential for the propulsion to send him careening out of control was going to deter him anyway.
Cade slapped a helmet on, just in case, and was ready to go. But he couldn’t leave, not yet. The vision of his father standing directly over his shoulder was just that: a vision. Cade pegged it as a manifestation of his subconscious mind working overtime to compensate for his addled conscious mind and give him the information he needed in order to survive. Cade heard of people lifting dasher bikes off themselves to save their own lives, so his own brain saying, “Here’s a way you don’t have to die,” wasn’t all that ridiculous. Still, figment of his imagination or not, it was the closest Cade had come to his father since he was a kid, and his heart couldn’t take that for granted. He turned around, and Benji was there, watching him with what looked to be pride.
“Dad,” Cade began, and all at once, the memories of his misjudgments and mistakes came back to him. But looking at his father, Cade didn’t see disappointment. He didn’t see a shred of regret or the desire for Cade to be anyone else but himself. And in that instant, for the first time since the Rokura came into his possession, he felt okay. “I know I’ve made some, well … mistakes as I’ve tried to figure a lot of stuff out. And I’m probably harder on myself than anyone else could ever be, but still…” Cade paused, drew a deep breath, and stood a little taller. “I always did my best. I always did what I thought was right.”
Benji beamed. “I told you you’d find your way.”
Cade smiled in return, a bittersweet grin as he watched the image of his father fade away. Wu-Xia’s two simple words came at him through the ether—“Just be”—and Cade growled.
“All right already,” he said as he walked to the switch that controlled the cargo door’s hydraulic release. “I’ve got it.”
The moment he hit the door’s release, Cade knew that an alert would route directly to the control panel informing the pilot that—oh, crap—the ship was opening up. It wouldn’t take Ga Halle much to figure out what was happening, and Cade knew she’d be none too happy about him trying to escape. The thought made Cade smile. She could stomp and huff all she wanted; he was leaving.
Cade punched the little orange button that got the hydraulic system going. As if in tiny increments, the door started to open. Bit by bit by bit. Cade didn’t remember it being so slow.
“Comeoncomeoncomeon,” he murmured, expecting Ga Halle to storm into the bay and use the Rokura to tear his flesh from his skeleton.
Cade stepped onto the door as it was lowering, slid off one of his grav suit boots, and started to hop on one foot, hoping it would help the door open faster. The hopping wasn’t proving to be all that effective, though Cade was just finding his groove when the door connecting the cargo bay to the Rubicon’s cockpit slid open. Ga Halle stood in the open space, Rokura in hand and an incredulous look on her face.
“What are you doing?” she shouted.
Cade stopped his bouncing and thought to answer, but all he did was suck in a lot of air. When he actually thought about it, he wasn’t sure what he was doing. He was down to one grav suit boot, his hopping wasn’t at all effective, and he was suddenly aware of how painfully ridiculous he looked.
“What are you doing?!” Ga Halle repeated. This time, she asked the question with the Rokura. It was pointed straight at Cade, and he saw the familiar lights of its power sparkling at its tip.
Cade looked over his shoulder; it seemed like the door was open just enough for him to slide out of it. And what was even better was that they weren’t in space anymore, so at least death wasn’t a certainty once he plunged out of the ship. The odds were still pretty good that he wouldn’t land in one piece, but at least his demise wasn’t a guarantee.
When Cade turned back to face Ga Halle, he did so with an expression of defiance. He didn’t feel bold. In fact, he was terrified of the Rokura and its growing energy, but he refused to give Ga Halle the satisfaction of seeing him scared.
“I’m leaving!” Cade yelled. “I’d rather kill myself than be your pawn.”
“You’ll die,” Ga Halle snarled, “when I tell you to die.”
“I don’t think so,” Cade said, then he dropped against the hard surface, rolled to the narrow space the still-opening door had provided, and slipped out of the ship.
For a moment, Cade smiled. He would’ve paid to see the
look on Ga Halle’s face as he slipped right between her fingers. She must have thought he was so stupid.
But then Cade realized something: He was stupid. This was a horrible idea. Because now, he was free-falling to the ground, which wasn’t all that far, and he couldn’t even kick on his grav suit. Not yet, at least. His fall had to be convincing; Ga Halle couldn’t know that he survived. Cade needed all the time he could get to escape, and being dead was the best way to keep Ga Halle and her forces off his back.
So, he had to just fall.
The planet below him raced into view, and Cade was surprised by how pleasant it seemed. Fields of lush, vivid green pastures rolled as far as he could see, interrupted only by the lakes and waterfalls dotted across the landscape. And, save for a towering stone edifice in the south that blighted the idyllic forest surrounding it, that planet was abandoned. There was no sign of human life anywhere, and that perplexed Cade, not only because he wondered why such a beautiful place was uninhabited but because he had no clue where he was.
Feeling like he’d reached a safe-enough distance from the Rubicon—Cade had looked back a few times to check if Ga Halle had decided to change course and crash the ship directly through him; she hadn’t—Cade kicked the grav suit to life. Energy pulsed through his hands and on his one foot, and before Cade knew it, he was uncontrollably spinning and twirling. The distribution of thrust was completely out of whack, far too powerful for Cade’s body to balance. Every time he gave power to the grav suit, he was sent careening.
The trick, Cade learned, was in short bursts. He’d stopped the thrust altogether in order to straighten out, and once he had his head above his feet once again, Cade fed the grav suit the smallest bit of juice. Then a little more, then a little more. In each increment, he felt the grav suit’s power pushing against his fall, which meant he was slowing down, but the power wasn’t strong enough to pinball him around the sky.
Of course, he wasn’t slowing down enough, and Cade didn’t need Mig’s brainpower to know that the rate in which he was approaching the ground and the rate of his deceleration weren’t going to make for a nice, smooth landing.
Cade was going to crash. Again.
The ground was fast approaching; Cade could see the finer details of the swaying grass and the poppies it bore. Collision was imminent, and just before Cade nailed the ground, he pushed maximum burn into the pieces of the grav suit. While it did send him tumbling, it also created the most resistance possible and softened the blow of his landing.
Still, Cade smashed into the ground. He tore through grass and poppies; he sent dirt erupting with his impact. His body rolled and bounced for a good fifteen yards until, finally, he came to a stop, facedown.
That’s where he stayed for a good five minutes, afraid to move any of his limbs out of fear that they’d fall off if he tried. But once he realized he was fine, that he was in no worse shape than he’d been before he’d jumped out of the Rubicon, he got to his knees and spit a clump of dirt out of his mouth. He opened his eyes, and the first thing he saw were blasters. A bunch of them, and they were all trained on him.
“Oh,” he said. “Hey…”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Hey, guys.”
Kira couldn’t believe her eyes. She froze, sidewinder limp in her hand, and she felt her heart skip a beat. The galaxy had taken a lot from her—the father she once knew, her mother, and it’d almost taken an essential piece of who she was when she’d nearly surrendered her will to fight. As devastating as those losses were, and as much as Kira cursed the unfair hand she’d been dealt, she knew there was more to the galaxy than the pain it inflicted. The stars, the planets, and all the spaces between contained more mysteries than anyone could ever hope to fathom. In her boundless love and generosity, Akima bestowed many gifts upon her daughter, but the greatest gift she ever shared was her sense of awe for the unknowable galaxy; Kira knew wonder, and no matter how dark her life’s journey became at times, she always found solace in looking out to the stars, just as she’d done so many times with her mother, and imagining what could possibly be out there. Akima maintained that the galaxy was far richer and more complex than even the best scientists gave it credit for. There were unique, special places that defied fundamental laws of nature; there were occurrences that should not have been possible but transpired nonetheless.
And now, ostensibly when Kira needed it the most, one such unlikely occurrence happened right before her eyes:
Cade had fallen out of the sky and back into her life.
Kira didn’t hesitate. She shrugged off how dumbfounded she felt—Mig, Kobe, 4-Qel, and even Kay shared her agape expression—and as Cade rose to his feet, Kira ran to him; she threw her arms around his shoulders and pressed herself close to him, needing to feel as much of him as possible. Kira could tell by the way he was grunting that she was hurting him, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t let go.
“I’m sorry,” Kira whispered into Cade’s ear. “I’m sorry for how I was before you left. If those had been the last words I said to you, I … I…”
“It’s okay,” Cade said, and he tried to clasp his arms around her but remembered they were still restrained. 4-Qel, though, fixed that problem by breaking his hands free.
“I shouldn’t have left like that,” Cade continued. “I should have found a way to keep us together, to keep us all together.”
They stood like that for a few moments more, wrapped in each other’s embrace. Cade broke the silence.
“I wish we could stay like this for so much longer,” Cade said, “but you’re hurting me.”
Kira pulled back and straightened out Cade’s shirt, which had gotten twisted around his body during his landing. “Sorry about that,” Kira said as she tried not to wince at all of Cade’s visible injuries.
“Your grip is really strong,” Cade said, “and my body is really sore.”
“So, this is pretty weird,” Mig said, stepping close to Cade and examining him as if to make sure it was really him. “You just happened to drop out of the sky, right where we are, without even knowing we were here?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Nice to see you, too, Mig,” Cade chirped in his most condescending tone.
Mig shrugged. “Hey, I’m just asking ques— Wait, are you wearing pieces of my customized grav equipment?” Mig asked, his tone shifting from cautiously inquisitive to accusatory. “Where’s the other boot? Don’t tell me you lost a boot, Cade.”
Cade brushed Mig off. “Relax, okay? It’s on the Rubicon.”
“And who’s flying the Rubicon?” Kira asked, adding to Mig’s cross-examination.
Cade nodded and sucked in his lips. He’d been so caught up in losing the Rokura that it didn’t occur to him that he’d also lost Kira’s prized starcruiser. “That … you know, it’s all a long story. Let’s just focus on the fact that I’m here and … we have this nice reunion. With that strange guy over there,” Cade said, gesturing to Kay.
“Name’s Kay,” Kay said, extending his hand to Cade. “Good to meet the actual Paragon. It’s an honor.”
“Yeah, about that,” Cade said as he shook Kay’s hand. “We’ve got a lot of gaps to fill in. A lot. But, first of all, where are we? And why are you all here?”
“Why are you here?” Mig asked, still sounding like an accusation.
“Mig, you’re one stupid question away from getting punched in the face,” Cade said as his response.
“Look, we don’t have time for this,” Kira said as she stepped in the center of the group, taking charge. “A lot happened since you went your way and we went ours. I’m going to tell you really quickly what you need to know, and then we have to move.”
And Kira did. She summarized the revolution on Praxis, the solar bombs embedded near the planet’s core, and how they had less than two hours to infiltrate the Crucible and stop Ebik from killing millions of people. She stopped short of relaying what’d transpired with her mother; that was a wound she’d share with Cade another time.
/> Cade, for his part, listened intently to Kira’s summary. There was something about him, though; something had changed. While Cade would always be Cade—he’d always act cavalierly to mask his insecurities; he’d always use humor as a shield against his own self-reproach—whatever had happened to him on his journey returned him with a little more depth. Kira would never say this to him aloud, but Cade seemed like he’d matured. He might even be able to fool people into thinking he’d cultivated a bit of wisdom within himself.
“So … this Crucible,” Cade began. “That doesn’t happen to be a giant stone tower about a mile away and over the ridge, does it? I saw it, well, on my way down. It looks … how do I say this nicely? It looks totally impenetrable. And I thought that before I knew it used to be a super-max prison.”
“But things just got all the easier,” Kay said, clapping Cade’s shoulder. “You’re the Paragon; you have the most powerful weapon in the galaxy, and you can use it to blast us wherever we need to go. Nobody and nothing will stand in our way now.”
Cade recoiled out of Kay’s grasp; he got especially squirmy at the mention of the Rokura, and Kira began to wonder, with no small amount of panic, where the weapon was. It definitely wasn’t in Cade’s hands. Or on his body.
“Cade,” Kira said, trying to sound patient, “is there something you want to tell us?”
Cade pursed his lips and gingerly shook his head. In short time, though, the rebuking that was waging within him subsided, and he began to answer Kira’s question. “You see, my journey, like yours, was also full of many surprises. In fact—”
“You lost the Rokura, didn’t you?” Kira asked, cutting to the chase. It was the merciful thing to do.
“Lose it? No. No, I know exactly where it is.”
“Where?” Kira asked, already dubious of where this was heading.
“Ga Halle has it. On the Rubicon. Which she also took from me.”
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