The Gauntlet

by Megan Shepherd

  Kindred were closing in. Ten feet. Five.

  There wasn’t time for both Willa and Dane to board.

  A panicked look crossed Dane’s face. He suddenly hurled himself against Willa. She stumbled and fell off the truck bed.

  “No!” Cora yelled.

  She gripped the edge of the hatch with white knuckles. She never should have trusted him. “Dane, you bastard!”

  “Help me up!” he yelled, reaching a hand.

  Cora stared at him, disgusted and confused. How could she save him after he had just betrayed Willa?

  A streak of fast-moving brown fur leaped into the back of the truck. Just as the Kindred reached for them, the chimp leaped from the truck bed to Dane’s shoulders, then to the ship’s hatch, using Dane as a springboard. He cried out as her fingers clamped on to the hatch.

  Anya and Cora each grabbed one of Willa’s hands and pulled her the rest of the way up.

  “Cora!” Dane called. “Don’t leave me!”

  But a laser pulse hit the truck, and he crashed to his knees.

  He looked up as Kindred guards surrounded him.

  Cora slammed the hatch closed, leaving him behind.

  11

  Cora

  SPACE WAS UNSETTLINGLY QUIET.

  Bonebreak’s ship rumbled amid the stars with a low hum. If it wasn’t for that slightest vibration, Cora might not even know they were in motion. Bonebreak sat in the pilot’s seat facing the controls, staring at the view screen and the stars beyond. His musk filled the cabin with a stench she tried to ignore, a hand pressed against her nose as she paced uneasily.

  She wasn’t sure how long they’d been flying. Hours? A full day? As soon as it had been safe, she’d collapsed in a ball in the corner of the cabin, exhausted. She’d been too wired to rest, her mind jumping between what they’d left behind and what lay ahead. Thinking of Dane’s betrayal made her curl her toes with anger. The only way to calm her mind was to practice her training: Meditation to calm her mind. Push-ups until her arms shook.

  Now, sweat slick on her temples, she hugged her knees tightly and tried to calculate how much time they had left before the Gauntlet was due to begin. Twenty-one days. Five feet in front of her, covered in a white tarp, lay Lucky’s body. It had been weeks since he’d died, but the dry, purified air on the ship had kept his body from breaking down. If she pulled back the tarp, she knew, he’d look as though he were simply asleep.

  She hugged her knees harder.

  “Travel time to Drogane is three more days, if I use the hyperengine,” Bonebreak said. “But that will take extra fuel. There’s an Axion-run fuel station not far away. It will be a slight detour.” He turned to face her. “It is a sandy outpost. A meteor, but there is artificial oxygen and gravity, and soil.” When she looked at him questioningly, he motioned to Lucky’s body. “A place where you can bury the boy.”

  His voice held a trace of sympathy that surprised her. The last time Bonebreak had mentioned Lucky’s body, he’d wanted to dissect it and sell parts on the black market to pay for their voyage. But maybe Bonebreak had changed. Maybe he wasn’t as heartless as he’d first seemed. Still, it would be a long time before she trusted him.

  “I’d like that,” she said, wiping her face.

  Bonebreak returned to the controls, and the ship continued to rumble in silence. Cora eyed Lucky’s body beneath the tarp, chewing on a fingernail.

  This is our place. This is our cause.

  Those were among his last words.

  And yet a tiny voice nagged in the back of her mind. After months trapped in the cage, and in the menagerie with Makayla and the other Hunt kids, she was finally free of the Kindred. Free of Ellis and Armstrong too. Bonebreak could be manipulated or bargained with or, as a last resort, mind controlled by Anya. There was nothing stopping them from having Bonebreak steer them in the opposite direction from Drogane—straight to Earth.

  We could go home.

  The possibility was there, hovering so close that she only needed to reach out and take it. She doubted Willa would object. Anya might, but Cora could reason with her. Right now, they could be on a course back to her solar system. She could find out in days, weeks at most, if Earth was still there. She could put her feet in the cool waters of a lake. Smell grass and wildflower fields. Hear the sounds of traffic, of bees, of cafeteria chatter, of music on the radio. And most of all, she could go home. Bury her face in Sadie’s fur, hug her mother and father, tackle Charlie like they used to when they were kids.

  A deep sense of longing made her close her eyes and smile.

  But then her toe grazed Lucky’s body, and she jolted upright.

  No.

  If she went home, that wonderful reconciliation wouldn’t last long. Soon she’d see for herself all the devastation humans were wreaking on the planet. She’d be reminded that all that traffic and wildflowers and her dog and her brother were living on borrowed time, on a planet that wouldn’t last forever. If she didn’t run the Gauntlet and free humanity to live among the stars, her race’s days were numbered.

  The facilities door slid open and Anya came out, rubbing her temples. She had dark circles under her big eyes, and her hands were shaking worse than Cora had ever seen. It had cost her almost all her strength to take control of Fian and the deputies. As soon as they’d boarded the ship, she’d collapsed and slept for hours.

  Now Anya sat cross-legged beside Willa, resting a hand on the wiry hair of the chimp’s shoulder. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever see you again,” she said.

  Cora sat up in surprise. “You two know each other?”

  Anya touched her heart in a greeting that Willa returned. Anya gave another small flicker with her hand, some kind of sign language.

  “It’s been a long time,” Anya explained. “Before the Kindred locked me in the Temple menagerie, I was in a cell for several days. Willa was in the cell next to me.”

  Willa took paper out of her pocket and wrote:

  Anya snored. Kept everyone awake.

  But there was kindness in her dark brown eyes. Anya read the note and rolled her eyes. “Funny, as I remember it, you kept everyone awake swinging from the ceiling bars all night.”

  Willa wrote something down again.

  Not my fault humans need eight hours of sleep. Lazy bums.

  “Listen, Willa, we really need you,” Cora said gently. “I’ve lost my coach. The Kindred Warden, Cassian. He taught me the basics of telekinesis and telepathy, and set up puzzles to simulate the ones in the Gauntlet. Bonebreak has agreed to be my Mosca sponsor, but no one knows what really goes on in those twelve puzzle chambers.” She paused. “No one but you.”

  Willa grunted as if to say that she was well aware of that fact.

  “Please,” Cora said.

  Anya rested a hand on Willa’s shoulder until she looked up, and then they exchanged a few hand signals. Willa’s face looked deeply troubled. She wrote:

  The Gauntlet . . .

  She paused. Anya patted her shoulder, and Willa took a deep breath.

  The Gauntlet can be won only at a heavy cost.

  “What cost?” Cora asked, reading the paper.

  Willa didn’t answer right away, and a sinking feeling filled Cora’s stomach. After exchanging a long look with Anya, Willa hesitantly started writing again.

  Are you certain this is what you want? Are you certain it’s worth any price?

  A thousand thoughts filled Cora’s head, along with a pang of guilt. Cassian was possibly being tortured even now. There was no way of knowing if Mali and Leon would be successful in their attempts to free him. And Lucky . . .

  Her eyes fell on the tarp.

  “We’ve already paid a heavy price,” Cora said quietly. “Not just me, but all of us. Lucky died for this cause. Cassian let himself be arrested to protect me. Mali and Leon are risking their lives, along with hundreds of sympathetic Kindred members of the Fifth of Five. Whether it’s worth it or not, it’s a price we’re already paying.”


  Anya’s face went very serious, and she nodded in silent agreement. Willa clutched the pencil.

  You already know that the Gauntlet requires you to push yourself to dangerous extremes. Few Gauntleteers survive, and those who do are the ones who drop out in early rounds; they are left damaged for life. For some, the physical challenges leave them maimed. For others, the paradoxes in the mental challenges render them insane: one Gauntleteer I knew was locked in a chamber with a starving lion and instructed to feed it, but the only thing to feed it was the Gauntleteer himself.

  She glanced at Anya before writing again.

  But most dangerous of all are the perceptive puzzles. If you strain your brain too far, it will rupture. You could permanently lose control of some function. The effects are different for each person. Maybe your sanity will go. Maybe your ability to speak. Maybe . . .

  Her eyes went to Anya’s shaking hands. Anya held them up, watching the tremor that was beyond her control.

  “Maybe you’ll lose motor function in your hands,” Anya said quietly. “Like me. I can’t even hold a pencil to write anymore. The only thing my hands are good for is playing puppet master—and most of that’s with my mind, anyway.”

  Cora stared at Anya’s useless hands with uneasy worry. She’d already pushed her brain too far—the nosebleeds, passing out. Cassian had warned her of the danger, but it hadn’t ever felt as real as it did now. What would she lose if she pushed her brain too far? The ability to walk? Her sense of sight? Her sympathy?

  She stood up, breathing hard.

  “Cora, are you okay?” Anya asked.

  Before she could answer, Bonebreak hit the controls and the ship hummed at a lower frequency.

  “We’re approaching Fuel Station Theta,” he announced. “Time to refuel and”—he glanced in the direction of Lucky’s body—“take care of the rest of our business.”

  CORA’S FIRST VIEW OF Fuel Station Theta was from the screen of Bonebreak’s ship. When Rolf had described the Axion cities, he’d mentioned enormous complexes on planet-sized space stations, but Theta was only a small fuel station, no bigger than an airport. It was circular but flat, a platform eerily hovering in space like a giant Frisbee suspended amid the stars, with a gleaming, smooth white station at one end and a fleet of glossy ships lined up behind it. But what surprised Cora most was what ringed the edge of the fuel station like the rim of a dinner plate: a forest.

  They stepped out of Bonebreak’s ship slowly. Cora took a deep breath, testing out the air, glad to see Bonebreak was right—there was artificial oxygen. She took a step toward the strange forest. It hugged the edge, a twenty-foot-wide buffer separating the flat Axion fuel station from outer space. There were trees, grass, flowers—everything beautiful and delicate and completely unexpected. Beyond the ring of forest, she could see the sudden drop-off of the fuel station’s platform, which gave her a dizzying feeling.

  “How is this possible?” she asked, taking another step, judging the gravity, which felt light and buoyant. “It’s flat—we should just float off.”

  “Axion technology,” Bonebreak grumbled dispassionately. “They’ve learned how to harness gravity fields however they wish, no matter the station’s size or shape. Show-offs.” He grunted. “They keep to themselves, mostly. Don’t like to socialize with the other intelligent races, except for trade and official Council business.” Bonebreak nodded toward the flowers. “The Axion just sit around trying to figure out how to keep those flimsy petal-y things alive in outer space. Waste of time, if you ask me.”

  Cora took another bouncy step toward the nearest tree. She closed her eyes, remembering being home, standing in her yard by the big oak trees, with Sadie panting happily in the sun, the clink of ice in her mother’s lemonade. It felt so real. And it was. In her gut, she knew it was all still there: Sadie. Her mother. The lemonade.

  She opened her eyes. The artificial atmospheric controls gave her a sense of lightness, almost of hope, after the heavy, oppressive gravity of Armstrong.

  She shaded her eyes to take in the fuel station more closely. Everything was sparklingly crisp and white, like a shining kingdom of ivory, as though straight out of the pages of Rolf’s picture book. Unlike the Kindred station, which was all sharp angles and straight lines, the Axion structure consisted entirely of smooth geometric curves. A few figures came and went from an arched doorway in the distance. She squinted to see better—she’d never seen an Axion before. They were smaller than she’d expected: a little over four feet tall. From this distance, their faces seemed unhealthily gaunt, some with dark brown hair, some with light brown, but each with a streak of white running through it.

  “Those are the Axion?”

  Bonebreak grunted the affirmative. “Yes. You childrens wait for me here. The Axion are unpredictable. Mercurial. Look at them—small creatures, thin and ugly. And they are not overly fond of humans, unless it is consuming your livers powdered in tea.” Cora shivered, and Bonebreak cackled. “Don’t worry. They only consume human parts if the human is already dead.”

  Unsurprisingly, Cora didn’t feel much better.

  “Are all those ships here because it’s a refueling station?”

  Bonebreak shook his head, turning toward the fleet of ships with an uneasy air. There must have been hundreds of ships, each the size of a small fighter plane, lined up in perfect order.

  “The Axion are in the process of repurposing this fuel station into a ship distribution center—they construct the ships for all of the intelligent species. They have dramatically increased production in an effort to improve mobility between the species. They’re storing the ships here until they can be distributed.”

  Cora looked at the fleet hesitantly. “It looks more like a military base than a distribution center.”

  Bonebreak didn’t speak for a moment, as though similar worries had occurred to him. But then he shrugged. “Ah, well. The Mosca are in charge of business. Which means we’ll get a commission from each ship once distribution begins.” He rubbed his hands together greedily. “Now. On to more timely things.” He dug around in a bag slung over his shoulder, muttering to himself, and then raised his fist proudly.

  Cora’s stomach turned. Her ponytail dangled from his fist.

  She reached up to feel the short, uneven hair that just brushed the back of her neck. It was only hair, yes, but she couldn’t help feeling that she’d lost something more of herself, clutched there in Bonebreak’s grasp. As though by being asked to make this small sacrifice, she was opening the door to much bigger ones.

  Bonebreak hummed to himself as he headed toward the glistening Axion spire.

  Cora walked in the opposite direction, toward the ring of forest, and crouched down to pick a wildflower, trying to clear her head of worries. She sniffed it and then handed it to Anya. “Do you remember? This is what Earth smells like.”

  Anya looked at the flower with uncertainty. “Not really. It was too long ago.”

  Cora had seen the same troubled look on Mali’s face. Taken from Earth as a toddler, Mali retained only distant and dreamlike memories.

  “I wish I could remember,” Anya continued. “My family, my town, all of it. I’ve been trying so hard to free a species I barely know. . . .” Her hands started that violent trembling again, and the flower tumbled to the ground. She let out a frustrated sigh. “And now I can’t do anything.”

  “That’s not true,” Cora said softly. She rested a comforting hand on Anya’s shoulder. “You’ve laid the groundwork for humanity to be free. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be able to even dream of running the Gauntlet. And once all this is over, you and Mali both will go home and find your families. You’ll make new memories.” She took Anya’s shaking hand and squeezed it. “The wolves are strong. But the rabbits are clever. Mali told me you used to say that.”

  The tightness in Anya’s face eased. She mustered a half smile. “I’m going to go inside and ask around for news of station 10-91.”

  Cora hesitantly e
yed the short, eerily gaunt Axion people who came and went from the structure. “Bonebreak said to wait here.”

  Anya rolled her eyes. “I’m not afraid of the Axion. Even I’m bigger than they are. And besides . . .” She wiggled her fingers in the air, reminding Cora of her mind-control ability. Cora watched her go, thinking it wasn’t fair that someone so young had felt such pain.

  A soft hand touched her shoulder. Willa. The chimp motioned to beneath the ship, where she had gently laid the wrapped white tarp containing Lucky’s body on the ground. Willa motioned toward a patch of grass tucked away behind a small willowlike tree.

  Cora took a deep breath.

  “Thank you. For helping.”

  Willa nodded, and they carefully moved Lucky’s body to the patch of grass.

  “We don’t have a shovel,” Cora said. “But the ground feels soft enough to dig with our hands, I think.” She rested her hand on the edge of the tarp, fighting to keep her emotions from spilling over. At her silence, Willa gave her a concerned look that seemed to ask if she was all right.

  “I was just thinking,” Cora said, “about the enclosure we were in on the Kindred station.” She brushed her fingers against the smooth tarp. “We were all so frightened the first day we woke up there. Lucky made each of us feel better, in his way. It was a knack he had.” She touched the journal tucked in her waistband for reassurance. “He never gave up on home. I wish we could bury him there, on his granddad’s farm. But I guess this is the closest we can come.”

  She started digging in the dirt with her fingers. Willa joined in. The soil was much less dense here than it had been in the root mines, and it felt good to dig for a real purpose. Once they had a shallow pit, Willa helped Cora lay Lucky’s body there. Together, they smoothed the dirt back over him.

  Cora rested a hand on the grave, overwhelmed with memories.

  Even if they had escaped Armstrong . . .

  Even if they went to Drogane and trained for the Gauntlet . . .

  Even if they managed to free Cassian . . .