The other guard’s nose is streaming, her face red from where the tray hit her diaphragm. I pick up the fallen platter.
She says, “You sonuva—”
I smash the tray over her head, and she crumples down on top of Jij.
My thoughts are strangely clear in the midst of all this violence. Like it’s been choreographed, I grab Jij’s limp hand and slap it onto the hand scanner. The doorsswooshapart down the center.
I step into the simulation room.
In the movies, when there’s a big revelation, the producers always take time to build up to the moment. They add in dramatic music and do a slow pan of the camera, closing in on the protagonist’s face, letting you see their emotion. Meanwhile, the viewer is held in suspense, anticipating that great and final unveiling.
It’s not like that now. There’s no buildup, no gap between me and the revelation. I know immediately this isn’t a supercomputer room—it’s a laboratory. I see Trey Morton standing in its center, speaking to a young woman in a lab coat. He turns at the sound of my entrance, his eyes widening, but not before I get a look at what’s around me.
Models of Mount Kilmon. Test tubes, gas masks, maps detailing rings of vapor. And there, stacked along the wall, is what looks like a dozen gray heat collectors—the same devices used by the people of Venthros to harness energy from Mount Kilmon’s eruption and power our planet. Only, these collectors have been altered. Their interior grids are gone, replaced with capsules of smoky white mist. Connected to the capsules are wires leading to countdown timers, which read in big red letters: three hundred and twelve hours. Thirteen days. The same amount of time until Mount Kilmon’s eruption.
My heart is in my throat. My ears roar as everything clicks into place.
There is no simulation. No advanced computer technology. Ran Doc Min didn’t predict the poisonous gas that will erupt out of Mount Kilmon and kill millions of people.
Heplantedit.
“Keller,” says a voice from behind me, “you’re off course, aren’t you?”
29
Ran doc min standsin the doorway. He looks different in person. Less cartoon villain and more real-life villain, with his long face and black cape and pointy goatee. His eyes are blue. Not teal blue like a summer ocean, not sky blue like a sunny day—dark blue, bruise blue, the color of your fingers when you’re being held underwater.
He whistles, and a swarm of guards descends.
It’s not my finest fight. I’m not too proud to admit that.
My first mistake is trying to battle more than one combatant at once, losing sight of individual targets in lieu of the greater mass. And hell, it’s amass. I don’t know where all these uniformed soldiers were hiding, but they appear in a swarm of gray coats and yellow gloves, some holding ray guns, some wielding stunners, some simply with their hands clenched to fists. I realize—instantly, with an intuition honed over years at the Academy—that I don’t stand a chance against so many, not like this, trapped and outnumbered in the depths of an enemy starship. I get off a whopping total of one ray gun shot before I’m disarmed, my weapon wrestled violently from my hand.
That reality—losing my gun—has my head spinning. I throw a punch at random, but this turns out to be another mistake, because my fist connects poorly with a guard’s ballistic chest armor, the impact reverberatingup my arm. Pain shears through me. My hand goes numb. I barely manage to thinkhope it’s not brokenbefore that same guard grabs my wrist, twists my elbow, and forces me to my knees.
I give a cry and try to fight back to my feet, but it’s no use. Working as a unit, the guards cuff my hands behind my back, then yank my hair, forcing me to look up at Ran Doc Min.
“I had hoped,” Doc Min says in that deep, distinctive rumble, “when I invited you onto my ship, it would not come to this.” A sigh. “Nina will be so disappointed.”
“Yeah, well.” My voice sounds like a wet balloon. “That makes two of us.”
“I take some responsibility, of course,” he continues, pacing toward me. He’s wearing black loafers that are polished to such a shine, I can see my reflection in the toes. “I told Nina we should have reestablished contact with you years ago. That’s our usual protocol with Legion placements. It was risky to hope you would give us your loyalty simply because of familial ties, but Nina was adamant you finish your studies at the Academy. The entire point of the exercise, she said, was for you to realize your potential.
“I do not disparage Nina for her hope,” Ran Doc Min goes on with infuriating calmness. “You showed such promise as a cadet. You’d established yourself as a top Academy recruit by the end of your first year, and had we interfered, we might have waylaid your concentration. Nina was determined to see how far you could go, and she was so pleased—”
“She has no right to be pleased by anything I do,” I snarl, in part because it’s true, and in part just to stop him from finishing this agonizing monologue. He’s speaking like I’m some sort of study experiment. Like my life is atest.
“She is a mother,” Doc Min replies. “That is reason enough.”
“She stopped being a mother the moment she walked away from me.”
“But shedidn’twalk away. Haven’t you been paying attention? Nina may not have been visibly in your life, but she made the ultimate sacrifice by putting your future beyond her own desires. She has been watching you grow all along.”
“No.” My brain hurts. My lungs are wadded cotton. “She doesn’t get to do what she did and then try for sacrifice points. It doesn’t work like that.”
“And yet, she has missed you.”
“Fuck you.”
