by Caryn Lix
A vent caught the corner of my eye, and I stopped short. Cage grabbed my arms to steady himself as he crashed into me. “What’s up?”
“Liam,” I said, staring at the vents. “This is his worst nightmare, the thing he tried to avoid at all costs. Where do you think he is?” And what is he doing? Liam’s fear of the aliens was very real, but his motivation . . . that was something else. Was he huddled in a bunker with Grigori Danshov? Searching for weapons like us? Or something else, something more sinister? Preparing to vent the entire station and save his own life? I wouldn’t put it past him, not for a heartbeat. After all, he’d abandoned his own family to escape the creatures before.
“Hey!” Mia snapped from ahead. “What the hell’s going on back there?”
“Good question,” muttered Jasper from behind me, and I realized I was blocking the staircase.
I shook my head and got my feet moving. My suspicions about Liam had to wait. I had no evidence of any kind, and no idea where he was or what he might be doing. I couldn’t divert us from our mission to go on a wild-goose chase. “Sorry!” I called, keeping my voice light. I would regain their trust, I vowed to myself. Because I suddenly knew that if I was in the same situation again, I wouldn’t lie to them. I trusted these people, even Mia, as unpredictable and violent as she could be. And I wanted them to trust me. I glanced up to where she and Alexei leaned over the railing, looking at me, and opened my mouth to tell them so. At some point, you had to take a risk. I’d never been good at talking about my feelings or being vulnerable, but what the hell. I’d fired the shot. I’d lied about it. I couldn’t change it, but I could own it.
But before I could say anything, Matt appeared behind them, his face caked in blood and glowering in fury.
I screamed a warning, but a bolt of electricity struck Mia. She jerked ramrod straight, her body spasming, and slumped to the floor against the railing.
At almost the same instant, Alexei spun and dove into Matt. They collided and crashed, rolling out of sight. I raced ahead to help Alexei, although I don’t know what I thought I was going to do. But Cage grabbed my elbow and yanked me backward. I stumbled, smashing my ankle on the stairs as he jerked me to the previous level faster than a human eye could follow. A blast of electricity erupted where I’d just stood. “Bian,” he shouted. “Everybody run!”
We spun and bolted down the stairs, but Jasper, now in the lead, threw out his arms, smacking me in the face. “They’re ahead of us too!”
With no other options, we ran into the nearest prison sector. Stun guns crackled behind me—the other hunters, presumably, targeting us from below. I shot forward with a burst of speed I didn’t intend, stumbling around the corner into a commons area and plastering myself to the wall. Cage, Rune, and Imani followed. There was a server room here, but it was bolted shut. I didn’t see anywhere else to hide, anywhere to run.
I’d used the portals a few times now, but they still scared me. I’d only managed to move us to something right on the other side of a wall, and being in space made that dangerous if I didn’t know our exact location. But there had to be something I could do. My mind raced, searching our list of powers. Alexei’s fire? Jasper’s telekinesis?
“Where are Jasper and Reed?” Cage demanded.
Rune shook her head, gasping for air. “Hit. They went down.” She closed her eyes, sweat beading on her forehead, and the hall door rumbled shut. We all froze. Had she closed it in time? Why hadn’t I even tried to do that? Keeping track of all these powers was a nuisance.
Priya’s voice echoed from the hallway. “They’re in the commons room. Keep moving!”
“Stop!” I shouted in response, as Imani clutched her stun gun and crouched behind a box, her eyes wide and panicked. “Priya, listen to me!”
She laughed, the sound sharp and humorless and much too close. “The only thing I’m interested in hearing is your surrender.”
“Are you that single-minded?” I screamed, hysteria finally gaining the upper hand. “Goddamn it! Didn’t you notice there aren’t any other people on this whole station? What is here is much, much worse than anything you can imagine, and it’s coming for us!”
Her voice turned dark and dangerous. “The only thing I’m concerned about right now is my contract.”
Something shimmered, and Hallam appeared in a flash of light, crouched in our midst. The son of a bitch was a teleporter, too. How many powers did these guys have? Were they like me? Or was something else going on here?
Imani opened fire, catching him with a stun gun blast. He froze, shock registering in his expression before he dropped to his hands and knees, still struggling to get up. Imani hit him again and he collapsed. Our eyes met, wild and frightened. Even on the stun gun’s lowest setting, it shouldn’t have taken two shots to drop someone like that.
“We have to find an escape,” Rune gasped.
Cage was already moving, wrenching a grate loose. I shook my head at him wildly. “What if the creatures are in there?”
“We don’t have much choice,” he pointed out. “You three go. I’ll follow.”
“I have the gun!” Imani replied.
“And I can run faster!”
She leaned around the box and fired a shot at someone advancing. “There’s nowhere to run, Cage. Go!”
Cage hesitated a second longer, swore, and dove into the vent. “Come on!” he urged Rune, taking her hand and dragging her after him.
I followed, squeezing my shoulders through the narrow opening. This was a much smaller shaft than the one we’d used before. As soon as my feet cleared the grate, I twisted to shout to Imani, “Okay, we’re in. Hurry!”
She scrambled along the floor, firing over her shoulder. At the same moment, the bald man with the British accent—Finn, I remembered—burst onto the scene, rolling beneath her stun gun blast. He stretched his hand in her direction, brushing her ankle, and she froze.
Our eyes met, and I read her fear, her confusion, her desperation. But she clearly couldn’t move a muscle. Somehow, Finn had manifested yet another power. He could freeze people in place.
Priya appeared in a burst of wind, much like Cage (and now, I guessed, me) when we moved at top speed. “Imani!” I shouted, shoving myself backward. I could reach her, I knew I could. My fingers caught in the metal and then Cage’s hand closed over my wrist.
“We can’t help her!” He dragged me forward. In the same instant, Finn lunged at the vent. His fingers grazed my shoe, but Cage yanked me out of his grip just in time.
Finn and I faced each other, me staring over my shoulder, him half hunched in the grate, his lips twisted in a sneer. His brow lowered as he calculated, no doubt debating whether he’d fit into the vent.
Cage’s grip on my wrist became painful as he wrenched me along. “Imani,” I repeated, almost in a whisper, but I was scrambling after him already. I didn’t have more time to think before Cage dragged us forward with phenomenal speed, bashing our elbows and shins as he accelerated in bursts, putting distance between us and the hunters.
At last, after what felt like an hour of twisting and turning, we stopped, collapsing against a dead end. Our breath echoed in the tiny space. I couldn’t see anything in the shadows. My joints ached where Cage had slammed me against the walls in our hurried flight, and his body trembled with the effort of carrying us.
In a matter of seconds, Matt and his new friends had reduced our group of frightened but capable anomalies to three terrified teenagers huddling in a vent on an alien-infested space station. And just like we’d abandoned Matt, even without meaning to, we’d left our friends behind at the hunters’ mercy. Imani, Alexei, Jasper, Mia, Reed. All of them gone in less than five minutes. How long before the hunters caught up with us, too? I dropped my head to my folded arms and faced the truth. One way or another, we were going to die on Obsidian.
THIRTY-THREE
“KENZIE,” CAGE SAID GENTLY, AND I became aware that he’d been calling my name for a while. I’d heard it without reall
y registering what the word meant.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice sounded listless and dull, almost unrecognizable to my own ears.
“Kenzie. We need you to get us out of this vent.”
I laughed. I meant it to be a quick snort of derision, but it got out of control, gaining a life of its own and becoming a hysterical giggle.
“Kenzie!” Cage and Rune chorused.
I choked back my agitation, still fighting the odd hiccup of mirth. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll get right on that. What do you want me to do?”
Cage’s voice remained somehow calm and steady. “Open a portal.”
I glared in the direction I thought he was. “I. Don’t. Know. How.” I made every word a snarl, knowing he didn’t deserve it, but channeling all of my hatred and energy in his direction. “I’ve done it twice. Both times, magic portal through a wall. Fantastic. I barely know what I’m doing. I couldn’t use Matt’s power before, and I didn’t do anything to help us when the hunters attacked. I’m not your secret weapon!”
“Then what?” Rune cut in, her voice sharper than I’d ever heard it. “We die in this vent because you’re too scared to try?”
I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the wall, letting her anger wash over me. I deserved it. I deserved every drop of it. Rune had been so upset that Cage had betrayed her, and I’d listened and talked and commiserated and the whole time I’d been guilty of something worse. “Rune.” What could I say? What could I possibly say that would make things better? That Matt was still alive after all? Small comfort when he was trying to capture us. That I’d lied to her because we’d been lying to everyone else and, well, she’d gotten caught in the crossfire? “I know how you felt about Matt. And I know I betrayed your trust. I’m sorry, I’m just so sorry . . .”
Irritation edged Cage’s voice. “Why doesn’t anyone see that we didn’t have a choice? You’re all acting like everyone embraced Kenzie with open arms when they first met her.”
“Oh my God, báichī ! Both of you, just . . . is that really what you think I am?” Rune slammed her fist into the wall hard enough to rattle the vent, and Cage and I both jerked upright. My heart pounded as I waited for the telltale skittering that meant the aliens had heard us, but Rune pressed on as if she’d completely forgotten the danger. “I’m not mad at you for shooting Matt, Kenzie. I know what an accident is. You were trying to protect him. I get it. And I even sort of understand why you didn’t tell the others about it, at least right away. But me? After three weeks on that ship from hell, you didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth! And you, Cage. After everything we’ve been through, you still think I’m a bloody child!” Her voice caught on the edge of tears. “If I can’t trust the two of you, who am I supposed to trust, huh? If my twin brother and my best friend are lying to me, where does that leave me?” She took a moment to gather herself, lowering her voice, as her words washed over me. Best friend. Was that really how she saw me? “Lying about it on Sanctuary, sure, I get that. But we had almost a month on that ship. Weeks of working side by side. Of talking and trading stories and jokes. And in all that time that I thought we were becoming friends, you were hiding something from me. Something that tore you up inside. You didn’t trust me with it, no matter how much I trusted you.”
I pressed my palm to my face to hide the sting of tears as her words washed over me. I’d spent all those nights terrified. What would Rune do, what would she say when she found out? And here she brushed it off with nothing but understanding.
Silence echoed, more deafening than her yells, and her words echoed in my mind. Best. Friend. I realized suddenly that, like me, she hadn’t exactly had a lot of opportunities to form friendships. She’d grown up on the streets of Taipei, committing corporate espionage to stay alive, no one but Cage to rely on.
Before I could think too hard about what I was doing, I fumbled in the darkness until I found her hand. She recoiled, but I squeezed hard and didn’t let go. “You’re my best friend too,” I said quietly. It sounded stupid once the words left my lips, but I pressed on. “And, Rune, I’m so sorry. If I could go back, I would tell you the truth. If there were any way to undo the lies, I would take it. Please believe me.”
Cage sighed heavily. “You’re right, meimei. You’re always right,” he added with the air of making a huge concession, and Rune snorted. “Even if we didn’t trust anyone else, we should have trusted you. I just . . . I get carried away sometimes. I start plotting and planning and I’m so worried about keeping everyone safe and alive that I forget we’re still human. It scares me.”
His words sent a chill down my spine. “Cage,” I said softly. What he said made sense. Had my parents thought the same way? When they’d chipped me, had they only been thinking of my survival? And when they hadn’t told me, well . . . I had my own experiences with lies now. Once they started, they snowballed. It was hard to escape an avalanche.
I closed my eyes against the bitter press of tears, and Rune’s hand tightened around mine. Mom was gone, but maybe Dad and I could still work things out. I finally understood. Dad was trying to protect me. Cage and I had been trying to do the same thing. We’d all gone about it the wrong way, but everyone deserved forgiveness. We all needed second chances.
Rune tugged me forward to lean against her shoulder. Her arm slid around me, and I heard her pulling Cage close on her other side. “All right,” she said, her voice muffled. Cage’s hand brushed my face as he cupped the back of her head, leaving tremors in its wake. Would I ever fully know or understand Cage? The things he’d done to survive?
Did it matter? Couldn’t we all be forgiven?
I caught Rune’s hand in mine and squeezed it again. “Okay,” I whispered, my heart thrumming into my throat, panic fluttering in my belly. “We have to get out of this vent. I can do it. I can open a portal.”
“I know you can.” Rune gave me a final hug and let me go. “Come on, Kenz. Get us out of here.”
Cage stayed strangely silent, just when I most wanted his voice. I nodded, running my fingers over the metal wall. “I don’t suppose you two have noticed we’re on a space station? If I open a door, it might lead outside.”
Now Cage spoke, calmer and more controlled than I’d expected. “It might, but I don’t think so, not if you open it against the side of the vent. The last two portals you opened led straight through the surface you touched. The side of the vent isn’t an exterior wall. And going back isn’t really an option. Even if we managed it, we don’t know how close behind us the hunters are.”
“I hate it when you’re reasonable,” I grumbled, but his calmness restored some of my own. “All right. Here goes nothing.” Unbidden, my mind sought Liam’s little nook in the ventilation system. Somewhere like that. Somewhere safe and protected to plan what the hell we did next, somewhere not in the vacuum of space. A place like that on the other side of this wall. That was all I needed.
I closed my eyes, prayed very hard we weren’t about to die, and reached.
The door opened so close beside me I tumbled out of it, Cage and Rune landing heavily on top of me. A flash of light illuminated over my head, and I got a quick glimpse of the portal I had opened before it faded back to metal. There was a lot of cursing and apologizing as we untangled ourselves and scrambled to our feet to find ourselves exactly where I’d envisioned: right in the middle of Liam’s den, complete with Liam himself, gaping at us.
My insides surged with conflicting emotion: relief that I hadn’t blasted us into space, fury at the sight of Liam, confusion about where we’d landed. Had we coincidentally been right beside his nook? Maybe I’d subconsciously led us here. . . . In any case, I was coming to terms with the idea of my new status as a chameleon. The thought of regaining some agency, of serving a purpose, revitalized my very core. But I needed time: time to think, to practice, to see what I could do. And that was a luxury we couldn’t afford.
“Um,” said Liam, “you came out of the wall.”
“Yeah, appa
rently we do that now.” I sank onto a nearby crate, too exhausted to argue. “I see you managed to get to safety.”
To his credit, he didn’t play dumb. He only nodded and gestured toward his computer setup. “I saw what’s going on,” he said, all the blood draining from his face. He played with the hilt of his stupid sword and shuffled his feet. “They’re back, aren’t they?”
“It sure looks that way.”
Liam laughed shortly. “Fantastic.”
Cage and Rune sank down beside me and we all stared at one another bleakly. “The rest of our friends were captured by Legion bounty hunters,” I told him. “It’s just the three of us now.”
“And me, I guess.”
My head shot up, my eyes narrowing in suspicion. “I mean, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer. But you never did tell me what you were doing with my comm unit.” Fury surged in my chest, and I knew all of it wasn’t directed at him. It was all the stress and fear and hurt and anger of the last few hours clawing inside me, desperate to escape. If I let it now, I’d punch Liam in the face before he could explain, so I forced my voice to be calmer, closing my eyes to avoid his strange gaze. “Until you explain that, you aren’t going anywhere.”
“You aren’t in a position to refuse the help, sweetheart.”
“Oh, I think we are,” said Cage calmly. “Especially if you plan to stab us in the back.”
Liam groaned theatrically. “Why the hell would I do that? What would it gain me? Look, I took your comm unit because I was looking for records of the zemdyut. Okay? That’s all there was to it. I didn’t want to say anything earlier because frankly, I don’t really like talking about them.”
He was still lying. I knew it. Cage and Rune knew it too, judging by the way they glared at him. Did we have time to fight this particular battle? And could we afford to turn down allies right now, no matter how suspect?
Something clattered in the vents, and all four of us froze, sparks of terror reflecting in our eyes. But no one reacted more strongly than Liam. He jerked upright, still as a statue, his jaw gaping in unabashed horror.
