Jessica’s bloody, dusty hands scrabbled at shattered rock and plaster. The muffled cries that she’d heard coming from below the rubble became clearer with every stone she freed from that pile.

She managed to roll a large stone away, and pity and sorrow spun up inside her as she saw the faces of two small children and what must’ve been their mother staring up at her. “Come on! I don’t know how long whatever’s holding it up off you is going to stay in place! You have to come out of there now.”

The mother said, weakly, “Please, take my children. Here” Her hands thrust the infant out through the hole and Jessica grabbed it. The child was dusty and coughing but seemed otherwise unharmed. The second child, a small boy with large brown eyes that held a stamp of shock and absolute fear, clambered out quickly.

Jessica handed the infant off to his brother. “Give me your hand!”

The woman coughed again. “My legs are trapped! I can’t get out! Just save my children!”

Jessica said, “Which leg? Tell me which leg so I can move the…”

The pile let out a loud groan. Instinct kicked in. Jessica snatched both children up and ran backward just as the pile suddenly crumpled and the woman’s face disappeared in a fast slide of crushing stone.

“Mama! Mama, come back!” the young boy screamed onward and onward while the infant merely stared, his eyes wide and uncomprehending.

Jessica said, “I can’t help her now. Nobody can. Come on! We have to go!”

She wound up running through the streets, carrying both children. Everywhere she looked, there was chaos and death. Houses had fallen, killing their occupants. Once upon a time she had envied and hated those who lived above, but now, as she saw nothing but death and destruction all around her, she pitied them.

A large tracker craft pulled up beside her. The hatch opened, and a woman shouted, “Get in! Come on!”

Jessica shouted back, “Take the children! Their mother was just killed in a rubble slide, and I don’t know their names. I have to go help!”

The woman inside the tracker craft yanked to the children in and then slammed the hatch shut. Jessica stopped running for a moment, bending over to place her hands on her knees once more in an effort to get her breath and to recover from the unrelenting nightmare unfolding all around her.

Yori!

His father’s residence still stood, and it was dead ahead. Jessica’s feet kicked up a choking dust from the broken street’s surface as she aimed toward that still-magnificent abode.

The doors, a heavily carved set made of ancient wood and iron, opened easily. That alone was enough to give her pause. Had everyone within deserted the place?

She stepped into the great hall, her eyes going to the grand staircase that arched upward before splitting into and running in a perfectly symmetrical curve to the upper floor. An eerie silence hung over everything.

Jessica swallowed hard as she listened, trying to hear a single sound. There was nothing, not so much as a stirring inside the house.

A shiver worked its way up her spine. There were at least two dozen servants working at any given hour. There were always visitors; Federation business was of paramount importance and always needed to be tended to.

There should have been doors opening and closing. There should have been voices raised in greeting or goodbye; there should have been servants dashing about, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible.

There should have been something.

Yet there was nothing. Her hand trembled as she shut the door firmly behind her and surveyed that empty staircase and the silent hallway. Had they all fled as soon as they had news of the attack?

Her feet carried her forward. As a friend of Yori’s, and as a Capo, she had made many visits to that house, and she knew its layout very well. To her right lay the passageway that led to the kitchens and the dining hall. Beyond that door was a small parlor where Yori’s mother entertained the spouses of visiting Federation members and dignitaries.

Jessica paused, as she took in the slightly ajar door of that parlor and the rug, slightly askew, on the floor before it. That rug said to her that something was amiss. A servant should’ve already straightened it, and her nerves tingled as she jutted one finger out and pressed the door open just a little bit more so that she could see into the parlor.

Yori’s mother sat in her favorite chair. Her hands folded in her lap and her face turned toward the windows. Jessica’s heart leaped high in her chest as she abandoned caution and dashed into the parlor.

“Why are you all alone in here? Where are the servants? Come on; we have to get you to…” Jessica’s words died in her throat.

Yori’s mother was dead. A single blast wound covered the side of her face that had been turned toward the windows and not visible to Jessica from the door. Jessica scrambled backward, one hand to her mouth.

Her eyes went around the parlor. A bottle of expensive and pure water sat unopened on a tray next to a small plate of fruit, now buzzing with insects. Jessica’s eyes went back to that head wound. It was obvious the woman had been killed at least ten to twelve hours earlier.

But by who?

Jessica grabbed the bottle of water. Morals didn’t matter at the moment, and she was incredibly thirsty and in need of hydration in order to keep going. She spun the cap off and drank the richly oxygenated water down in several gulps.

The rush of liquid and air into her system buoyed up her ability to handle what she was looking at. She stepped out of the parlor, listened hard, and then retraced her steps back to the door that led to the kitchens.

In the kitchens, she found several servants, all of them dead. The kitchens had been looted, the water purifiers drained, and all of the massive pantries emptied as well.

Sick to her stomach now and saddened by the realization that those below must have indeed been engaged in fighting those who lived above, and with disastrous results, Jessica stepped back out of the kitchen and into the hallway.

Her feet took her up the staircase to the study of Yori’s father. He too was dead, and his death had not been easy or swift like his wife’s and the deaths of the servants.

Disgusted and horrified by the loss of human life, she turned away. It was past time to get out of there and get back out on the streets. She had to help people, and there was nobody here for her to help.

She turned toward the door, and her mouth dropped open in surprise and relief as Yori suddenly appeared within the frame. His eyes met hers.

Her lips trembled. “My God. I am so sorry. We can’t stay here. We have to move.”

He didn’t answer her for long moments. His fingers plucked at the weapons in his belt. His eyes moved past her face to the body of his father, but no emotion showed upon his features.

He was in shock. She moved forward, making sure to keep her hands at her side so as not to startle him. “Yori, we have to go. Come on, come on.”

His eyes shifted from his father’s body to her face. There was not a flicker of anything in there. He could have been a cyborg for all the emotion written upon his face. “They just wouldn’t understand.”

Jessica didn’t know exactly who he was referring to. She wasn’t sure she cared either. All she cared about was getting him to leave there. She wanted out of there, out of that house of death. “Come with me. Come on.”

He ignored that entreaty. “Do you know how many times I told them that they had to change? Do you know how many times I told them that if we did not end our insistence on slavery and mistreatment of those who live below that they would rise up against us? I had to show them. I need you to understand that.”

An uneasy feeling set in. “I have always understood that. We need to leave here now.”

“Have you understood it?”

He paced closer, and that uneasy feeling grew deeper, clawing its way along her nervous system and telling her that there was danger here. He was obviously unhinged, and why wouldn’t he be? He had just witnessed the death of his parents. He had railed against their way of life, but he had never wanted them dead.

He’d clearly snapped. Yori was always above it all: the violence and the dirty work of the resistance. He had not even been willing to break into the warehouses to steal the nutro-loaves and the foodstuffs that had kept those belowground in the most need from being starved to death. He was…he was an observer, not a participant in things.

She had seen too much bloodshed, but the senseless death in that house had rattled her as well, and she was not even family.

She kept her voice low and soothing, talking to him as if he were an invalid. “Yes, I have. We have to leave here. The people are in the streets, and they are dying. There’s so much death out there. We have to help. They’re firing at us from above, and it’s not safe here.”

It wasn’t safe anywhere, but now was not the time to say so.

He came closer still. “Do you remember the first time we met?”

Her lips formed an unwilling smile. “How could I ever forget that moment? It changed both our lives forever. If it had not been for you standing up for me that day, making it known what had happened down there in the tunnels, I would’ve been put to death for the crime of coming above.”

His eyes, still expressionless and unreadable, locked onto hers. “I lied that day.”

Another niggle of disquiet nudged into her consciousness. What was wrong with him? Obviously Yori, who had no taste for bloodshed and never had, had been pushed completely over the edge by the bloodshed within his home. “It doesn’t matter.”

His voice lifted into a shout. “It does matter! It matters a great deal! Don’t you dare stand there and tell me that it does not matter when everything hinged on that one lie!”

Her entire body felt as if it had been encased in a cryo-chamber. Her mouth went dry as Talon’s words came back to her. Could Yori have betrayed them? “I don’t know what the lie was. I never knew you had lied.”

The expression on his face now was one of pure rage, and it held her transfixed. He had always been so remote that was one of the reasons why their brief love affair had not lasted. He had always cultivated within himself a great distance from others. He kept everyone at arms -length and his emotions buried beneath a calm demeanor. “I said that it was all Heren’s idea.”

Jessica gawked at him. What did it matter now? So what if it hadn’t been Heren’s idea? Heren was dead, and had been for a great many years. He had died several weeks after that tunnel incident. He had fallen from a roof turret while working as a house guard as part of his punishment from his parents for going down into the tunnels.

She chose her words carefully because she was terribly afraid they might be her last. The suspicion that Talon had planted in her head made her very aware of just how close to his weapons Yori’s fingers really were.

Those weapons, they were like him. He preferred to be the mastermind behind the bloodshed. He had created that chamber above the tunnels but below ground in order to have a command center from which to run the resistance. He did not even know how to use a weapon as far she knew. But he wore the ones strapped around his waist with real authority.

He said, “Nobody could ever see it. I was always just the catalyst for the rest of you. You were the devices by which every part of the plan was played out. None of you could see how necessary my role was.”

She back-pedaled a step, and he came forward. Her heart hammered in her chest as she realized that she had walked right into something both deadly and dangerous. “We all knew how necessary you were. You are our leader. We would’ve been nothing without you. We would have failed early on. You brought me into the resistance, remember? I had no idea it even existed until you took me into the tunnels and into the command center.”

His eyes flashed. A smile, so evil and vicious that it took her breath away, lifted his mouth. He looked like a complete stranger now, and she took yet another step back, knowing that he would pursue her if she tried to run. His hands were so much closer to his weapons than hers were to the ones she wore. She might have a chance to get off a shot, but not before he got off one of his own.

He said, “You were the easiest one to convince. I already had your loyalty. All it took to buy you was to elevate you from the tunnels to the training grounds for the Capo. It cost me nothing but a few words to own you.”

She had to buy some time. He was going to kill her. She knew it. She heard faint noises from downstairs and hope lifted her spirits, but not for long. That might be his reinforcements, come to aid and assist him in murdering her, and whoever else might be left in the house.

She had time to reassess the situation however when he paused for a second, a slight frown marring his face as he too heard those voices and footsteps below. That he was obviously not expecting someone made her feel better about whoever was down there not being an ally of his, but then again, they may not be allies of hers either. They could be Federation officers ready to kill anyone who moved.

Her gaze flicked back to his face to see that he had come forward yet again. She had missed her window of opportunity to draw fire upon him. His attention was focused back on her again.

Jessica knew, deep down in her heart, that part of what kept her weapons sheathed was a vast sense of loyalty to this man. He had indeed taken her from a life that had been far beyond awful and placed her in the hallowed above-ground life. She knew, with every fiber of her being that the life she had had up there, in the sunlight and air, would have been completely beyond her otherwise.

She owed him her life, but was she willing to let him take it from her?

Hell no.

She had to placate him. She held her hands up, her empty palms showing. “So you own me. I don’t mind that. I have never minded that. I have always known it.”

She had known it. Deep down in her soul and heart where it counted the most, she had known that he had played upon the loyalty that she felt for him and used it to take her into the resistance. It had not taken much convincing though. Every single day of her life she had seen the injustices that he had sworn had to end, and she had wanted them to end as well.

He said, “You I am going to regret having to kill.”

She managed to get out the words, “Then don’t kill me.”

His face contorted. “I don’t want to. I always loved you. Even after you no longer loved me, I still loved you. I did everything I could to get you off this planet, and what did you do? You opened your mind just enough to get yourself wiped and put on a slaver ship.”

Her breath hitched in and out of her throat. “What are you talking about? I was betrayed, and I was captured. You know that. They were trying to mine my brain and memories for any hint of who the resistance leader was, but they couldn’t find it. They couldn’t find any of the information that you gave me. That’s why they put me on that slaver ship.”

He shouted, “I had planned for you to be betrayed! You were supposed to hold out from interrogation long enough to be shipped off to one of the penal planets, where you could have been rescued. But no. You had to come back here and start a war between those who live above and those who live below and wreck my plans.”

He drew his weapon. He kept it steady and aimed right at her heart. Jessica gathered up every bit of her dignity and courage as she spotted a movement near the door of the study. “It is you, isn’t it? You are the Federation traitor who wishes to take over the entire universe.”

Yori said, “I have a plan. It can be done. There must be one ruler, not all of these delegations and planets with other rulers and all of this constant back and forth and checks and balances that only make certain that some are privileged while most starve. There must be one ruler and one way of doing things.”

“And why must you kill me?” That question burst from her lips before she could stop it.

He said, “Because you are my one weakness.”

Talon said, “Mine too. Put the weapon down, or I will blow your head right off your shoulders.”

Yori’s face didn’t change. His smile turned bitter. “I always knew you’d be the one to betray me, Jessica.”

Talon’s weapon settled right on Yori’s temple. He said, “You had to have heard us downstairs. What betrayed you, you idiot, is talking too much. Let that be a lesson to you: if you’re going to hold somebody and kill them, do it. Don’t try to talk them to death.”

Jessica’s eyes flickered downward. Yori’s smile got even wider and far more evil. That was when she understood.

She screamed, “It isn’t him! He’s not the Federation traitor! And he’s wearing a kill pack! Run! For God’s sake, run!”

Yori’s hands dropped to his waist. He had been buying time; this whole time he had been holding her there because he was buying time, but for whom and what and why?

Those questions were blown away by the force of the blast.

Memories ran through her mind. Her life flashed and pulsed. Her mother, stooped and tired. The dim and swaying illuminator bulb that had been all they could afford in their one-room tenement. The dark corners that always held shadows where she went to cry quietly on nights there was no food.

Her father, coming home, his injury severe. The shouting between him and her mother. Her mother’s voice, “She’s going to starve to death anyway. The shortages are driving the cost of a loaf to heights we can’t afford if you don’t work.”

“We have to pawn her…”

The memories collided and spun. The pawnshop dealer saying she could be sold for pleasure training, if her father wanted a larger pawn.

Her father, looking at her upturned face. His lips twisting away in disgust and fear as the shopkeeper said, “She’d eat well, anyway.”

Had he said no to her going to a pleasure training camp just because he was angry that she would eat and they likely wouldn’t?

Everything spun again, and she was running form the rats in the tunnels, dragging Yori along with her. Then she was on the training field for her tryout, her whole body rigid with fear. Not fear of the large and vicious opponent that the Capo who had caught her above had set upon her out of a need for revenge for having his power thwarted either, but a fear of failing that tryout and being sent back below to die of starvation and exhaustion and without ever knowing what it felt like to live above.

She was sneaking through the below, her hands filled with stolen nutro-loafs, the nutrient-rich and dense loafs sold to the below because real food—fruit and bread and cheese and meat and potatoes—were only allowed to those above. The stolen loaves had been atop a crate of potatoes and onions and carrots.

The faces of the hungry peering at her as she slipped by, tucking potatoes into hands eagerly outstretched and loaves into shaking ones. Making love to Yori, his building memory boxes within her mind to help hold all of their secrets.

Talon.

Talon and everything she had ever known with him.

Her eyes fluttered open.

She was covered in gore and blood. Her fingers slid on the floor, and she had to crawl, she could not stand. There was a long ringing in her ears, and her head ached furiously. Her stomach rolled as she crawled past what was left of Yori.

Talon?

Where was he?

She did not know, and she could not see him either. Her knees finally took her upward but not upright. She swayed, her eyes blinking as she tried to focus. Her feet found the floor, and she leveled herself up, her eyes blinking.

Caleb and Harlon rushed in. They were shouting at her, but she could not understand what they were saying. Her lips moved. They formed Talon’s name. Harlon ran to one side of the room. She staggered behind him, her arms outstretched. Her mouth hung open, and her feet took shambling steps that landed her near his limp and unmoving body.

Tears washed down her face, and she found herself on her knees again. Her hands rolled his body toward her. His eyes were closed, and blood was spilling from his scalp. She gathered his body into her arms and wept her tears down upon his face.

She shouted, “Oh, don’t you die on me now!”

Her words choked off as his eyes opened. He said, “I told you I’d come back.”

A sharp laugh burst from her mouth even as tears ran down her face. “You did. I love you.”

“I love you.” His fingers rose. “Good thing I got behind that blast just far enough not to die, I guess. Since you’d probably kill me yourself if I hadn’t.”

Harlon spoke, “We have to get moving.”

Jessica looked up at them. Tears kept running down her face. “Why did he do it? Why?”

“I think he did it so they couldn’t interrogate him,” Talon said as he sat up. “The Federation, I mean. The ones who are not traitors have to know what is happening here now. The plot’s been uncovered. Whoever he was loyal to, he was loyal to a fault.”

Jessica stood. She said, “We have to go help these people here.”

Talon managed to stand. He said, in a weary voice. “I need a vaca-cycle.”

Jessica hugged him. His body rested against hers, and she gulped out, “When we are done here, we are taking the longest vaca-cycle ever known.”

He whispered, “I am going to hold you to that one.”

Then they drew their weapons and headed out of the house.