THE JOLT OF FEAR WHEN the guards haul the door of our cell open is nothing compared to the icy fingers that wrap around my throat when they single me out to go with them, alone. I want to glance at Javier, to get a nod or a wink or some last bit of reassurance, but I can’t do anything that might arouse suspicions, so I trudge out the door like my spirit’s broken.
My two guards are both bigger than me—one’s a woman, about a head taller, and the other’s a lanky guy with quick, darting eyes. My heart’s sinking, because there’s no way I can take out two on my own—but part of me tingles with relief, too. Because there’s no way I could be expected to deal with them both. I won’t have to risk getting shot. I won’t have to risk shooting someone.
I’ve seen no sign of Jules. I have to assume he’s okay, though, and that he’s still insisting I be kept alive in exchange for his cooperation. Otherwise the manpower they’re wasting keeping an eye on a bunch of useless prisoners makes no sense.
They bring me back outside, down a long, enclosed ramp they’ve erected to make accessing the airlock door easier. The IA camp is still being erected around us, but I guess the soldiers are at least human enough that they’re worried about lunch, because the kitchens are up and working. We walk to the tent serving as a mess hall, where a skinny military chef called Benson gives me a bowl of tasteless protein mush.
I’m about halfway through the meal when an electronic crackle sounds from the guards’ earpieces. The guy rolls his eyes over toward his partner. “No way—I’m calling in that favor. I heard it’s twenty-five flights of stairs, maybe thirty.”
She lifts her eyebrows. “Yeah? You want to take this one to the ladies’ room, then?”
The male guard’s eyes flick back toward me, and he groans. “Cheater,” he accuses.
The woman shrugs. “Up to you. If you’ve got a handle on her feminine needs, then I’m happy to go up there instead.”
The guy mutters something uncomplimentary under his breath and gets up, presumably to answer the summons from his earpiece. The female guard grins at his retreating shoulders, then leans back, watching me finish my breakfast.
“Feminine stuff,” she comments. “Gets ’em every time. Guys are such idiots.”
I’m inclined to agree with her, but the tasteless mush of a meal is suddenly sticking in my throat. I’m down to one guard.
“Done?” she asks, after a few long moments of me staring into my bowl.
I probably should finish the meal, but I’m not hungry anymore. I nod wordlessly.
“Then it’s to the latrines, then back to the cell. C’mon, on your feet.” She approaches, grasping at my arm to help me up from the bench. Her other hand’s gripping her gun—she might sound casual, but she’s on the alert. These soldiers aren’t stupid, that’s for sure.
I tell myself I’m going to wait until after the bathroom visit because she might have relaxed by then; that there might be fewer guards patrolling that section of the base; that it’s nearer the ship, so easier to get back to the cell undetected. But in my heart of hearts I’m stalling for time.
The bathrooms, also still being set up, are little more than tents with holes dug down into the ice, are small and stark and smell overpoweringly of disinfectant. But we find one that’s ready to use, and there’s even lukewarm running water hooked up to a washbasin, so I spend some time splashing my face.
You can do this, I tell myself as firmly as I can.
Yeah, comes the answering thought before I can stop it. Sure you can, in bizarre upside-down world where you’re a freaking superhero and not some high school dropout who specializes in running the frak away when things get dangerous.
My hands are shaking as I dry them on the damp rag hanging as a towel next to the basin. My legs feel rubbery as I step toward the door. My guard’s waiting for me, and she falls into step behind me. She’s not close enough, though. She needs to be right on my heels for me to execute Javier’s plan.
I slow my steps. “I don’t want to go back,” I hear myself saying as we reach the umbilical-like tunnel leading up into the Undying ship.
“Orders,” replies my guard. “Sorry.”
“What is all this, anyway?” I’m talking just as much to distract myself from what I have to do as anything else. My steps echo on the ramp as we ascend into the dark, icy ship once more.
“Confidential.”
“Come on,” I reply over my shoulder. “No games. We’re all dead anyway, me and the guys—once you’ve got what you need from Jules, you’re gonna kill us, right? What harm is there in telling a dead girl?”
My guard hesitates—or, at the very least, doesn’t answer right away. “I don’t even really know,” she says finally. “I’m not high on the list of need-to-know personnel. But this mission—we’re saving the human race. This tech, this is how the International Alliance fulfills its promise to the world. It was created for projects bigger than all of us, like Alpha Centauri. And this is even bigger than that. Not just a new colony. A cure for our whole world. We’re doing the right thing.”
“And yet you’re planning to kill us eventually.”
Her silence is answer enough, though she doesn’t exactly look happy about it. I keep my steps slow, hoping she’ll prod me along with the barrel of her gun, giving me my opening. But she doesn’t, hanging back and letting me dawdle. Despite my best efforts to stall, we’re turning the corner into the hall that houses our makeshift cell before I can come up with another plan.
There’s a crowbar leaning against the wall outside our door, the tool they use to pry our cell open. My guard gestures with her gun for me to pick it up and open the door myself. I heft the tool in my hands, toying for an insane moment with the idea of turning and swinging it at her head—but she’s far enough back, too canny to get within range. She’d shoot me before I got anywhere close.
So I fit the edge of the crowbar into the groove along the door and haul with all my weight. I wiggle it into the widening crack bit by bit, until the curved end is well inside the cell—then I let go with a gasp, grabbing at my wrist. The door goes slamming back on the crowbar, wedged in firmly now.
“I think I pulled something,” I groan.
My guard mutters something, shifting her weight. “No dramatics, please.” She sounds tired. I guess I would be too, having to be on the alert all day like her. “If you think you’re getting me close enough to take me out with a crowbar, take another look at this and think again.” She hefts her weapon, a rifle as long as my arm.
“The crowbar’s stuck,” I point out, lifting my arms and taking a step back. “See for yourself.”
The guard scowls at me, but after a few breaths steps closer, then closer still. After a brief inspection, she puts her attention back on me. “Well, try again.”
“Give me just a sec,” I mutter, panting. “Catch my breath.”
“No, now.” The woman’s on edge, suspicious. But the flare in temper is all I needed; she gestures with the barrel of her gun, just centimeters from my chest.
The move Javier taught me used contact between my back and the gun—had me spinning so the barrel went one way while I went the other.
But this is as close as I’m gonna get.
For the briefest instant, I look up to meet the guard’s eyes. And in a heartbeat I know it’s a mistake. She reads my intention there, in my face, and suddenly I’m committed. I’m moving, slamming my arm up against the barrel so that when she pulls the trigger it fires up into the ceiling with a deafening crack. My head’s spinning from the noise, but my body knows what to do next. I lower my shoulder and slam into her, my momentum combined with the recoil from the rifle knocking her flat onto her back. And just like in our practices, I’m wresting the butt of the gun from her lax hand and pulling it so the strap around her shoulder is taut, and my boot is pressing the barrel into the underside of her chin.
But then my finger touches the trigger and I freeze.
Sorry, she’d said. And guys are idiots. And she’d grinned when she got her way and sent the guard off to answer the summons, like she’d drawn the longer straw, like escorting me was the better assignment. She waited for me to finish my breakfast. She let me take my time walking back to the cell. We’re saving the world.
And now she’s looking up at me, still half-dazed. The impact with the floor knocked the wind out of her and her eyes are watering as her lungs try to reboot.
I can hear the guys on the other side of the door, the scrabbling of the crowbar against stone, someone shouting something through the crack. But it all fades to a dull buzzing as I stare down at the woman.
It’s not like we practiced.
Then a body barrels into mine, coming out of nowhere and knocking me aside. I slam into the wall opposite the cell door, and an instant later there’s a second gunshot. Shaking, I blink and blink again until I can see properly. Hansen’s propping the door open with the crowbar and Javier’s standing where I was a second before, the rifle in his hand. The guard isn’t staring at me anymore—she’s staring at the ceiling, still looking surprised. There’s blood on the floor beneath her, and as it spreads it finds a crack in the stone floor and slithers toward me like it’s a live thing.
I stumble away until a hand grasps at my shoulder.
“You okay?” Javier’s face is close to mine. I can smell the tiniest hint of something acrid in the air. Smoke. Gunfire. “Sorry I knocked you aside so hard.”
“I was gonna do it.” I swallow, unable to take my eyes from the dead guard. “I was.”
Javier’s hand squeezes. “I know. But you don’t need to become a murderer, kid. Not today.”
Then I’m retching, whirling around and ducking back inside the cell so I can puke in the corner, my mushy breakfast just as vile coming back up as it was going down. I end up with my head in between my knees, forehead resting on my balled fists.
By the time I can stand back up, Hansen and Javier have dragged the body into our cell and wiped up most of the blood in the hallway with the guard’s jacket. Hansen’s looking a bit white in the face, as I can only imagine I am too, but at least he’s not hurling his guts up.
“We should go,” he’s saying, reaching out to touch my elbow, hesitant.
I nod. “Yeah. Yeah. Okay.”
“Follow me,” Javier orders. “If anyone heard those shots, they’re already on their way to investigate. If we get separated, try to get outside to the shuttles.”
“Shuttles?” That word cuts through my fog like a welding torch through copper.
“Hansen’s a pilot, remember?” Javier waits until I’m out of the cell before yanking the crowbar free, then tossing it to Hansen as the door slams shut. “If we can get one of those shuttles working, we’ve got transportation.”
“Jules,” I manage. Single-word sentences. I swallow, tasting bile and fear, and try to pull myself together. “We can’t just bail yet, we need Jules.”
“Look, I know you want to help your friend.” Javier’s keeping his voice low, eyes scanning each end of the corridor. “And we will. But we don’t even know where he’s being held. We’ve got to get out of here ourselves first. He’s the valuable one—they’re not going to kill him because we escaped. We get out, we find more gear, we survey the place, we get intel…then we’ve got half a chance of rescuing him.”
My throat’s like sandpaper. “If we get to a shuttle, you’re telling me you’re going to come back for Jules?” I don’t believe it for a moment—I can barely even blame them—but it still feels like a punch when Javier looks away, won’t meet my eyes.
“He kept you alive,” I say, trying to force strength into my voice. “He made them keep you alive. So you could just leave him?”
Javier and Hansen exchange a glance, and Javier’s the one who speaks again. “Kid, if he were here, Jules would tell you to run,” he says quietly. “Save yourself, if you can.”
And perhaps he would. I’m sure he would. But that’s exactly why I can’t.
I stare at Javier and Hansen, thoughts spinning. They just want to get out of here alive, and I can’t blame them. Javier just spared me having to kill someone at point-blank range. He’s got no practical reason to bring me along on this escape attempt of theirs, a girl with no training, an extra mouth to feed with whatever supplies we can steal on our way out.
He’s not a bad man, but I can’t go with him. I can’t leave Jules. Slowly, I shake my head. “He’s in here somewhere,” I say quietly. “I have to find him.”
Javier’s shoulders drop, but he doesn’t look surprised. “We’ll head along this hallway,” he says. “It’s the best way out, and it’ll get you closer to their command post. If you can listen in on their plans, maybe you’ll get a handle on where they’ve got him. We’ll stay together as long as we can. And if we can wait for you at the shuttles, we will.”
I nod. Then, trying to forget the image of the guard’s body slumped in the dark next to her blood-soaked jacket, I fall into step behind Javier, with Hansen bringing up the rear. We don’t have a lot of time.
The IA’s only been in the ship a day, so most of the corridors are untouched by footprints or trekked-in snow or other signs of humanity. We try to stick to less marked-up hallways, but we have to follow the footsteps—the more there are, the more likely it is the hallway will lead to weapons, or an exit, or for me, some kind of command post I can eavesdrop on for hints on where to find Jules.
We dodge soldiers in the maze of corridors, navigating as best we can by the frequency of footprints in the dust, until my head starts to spin. Maybe it’s the concussion still, or dizziness from trying to mentally map this place, or just plain exhaustion. If we can wait for you at the shuttles, we will, Javier said.
A day ago these men were my enemies, and now the thought of leaving them to fight on my own again makes me want to crumble. But I can’t. We’re coming up on the exit to the ship, and the moment when we’ll part ways. And I’ll be left alone, without any kind of a plan, hiding on an alien ship, dodging soldiers and trying to save a boy I didn’t know a few weeks ago. I told Jules that the ability to make snap decisions is what keeps a scavver alive, but I’ve never been less sure what to do.
Suddenly a door a ways up the corridor creaks open and a handful of people pour out into the corridor. We’re too far from the last junction to hide. And there are only three of them. Javier’s already got the rifle to his shoulder, moving to stand between me and them.
“Wait!” My heart’s leaping and I’m darting forward to grab at Javier’s arm. Because not all the figures are wearing the black of these soldiers. One of them is wearing head-to-toe khaki, and though it’s as dirty now as if it’s been through an entire excavation season, I’d know it anywhere. “Don’t shoot—it’s Jules.”