The Hive Engineers

by Emilia Zeeland

  Yalena shuddered at the thought of being left on this frozen hell overnight. Despite the short duration of a night in this solar system, she’d bet they’d freeze solid before morning.

  “Why don’t we leave him out?” Natalia said. “He’d turn into a blue icicle by morning.”

  Yalena hesitated. “He might call for back-up.”

  Natalia muted the comms again. Yalena had the feeling she’d done it so she could mutter protests and insults undisturbed.

  After another twenty minutes of walking, the rocks grew few and far between, but the improved visibility didn’t help their search.

  The feeling of urgency made Yalena’s blood course through her veins faster. “He didn’t have that much of a head start, did he?”

  “I don’t know,” Natalia said, back on the line. “You wasted a lot of time at the crash site.” Then she let out a very uncharacteristic yelp.

  Yalena turned back so fast that her neck cracked. “Shh.”

  Natalia had slipped on the ice. Despite the helmet covering her face, Yalena could imagine the scowl hiding behind it.

  “Don’t shush me.” Natalia fought to stand.

  Yalena’s attention was shifted to the surface of the ice. Tiny, translucent droplets sparkled on it like pearls. “It’s water.”

  Natalia peered up into the blue skies instead of down at her feet. “The day is over eighteen hours on this moon. The ice must start to melt during the day.”

  Yalena whirled around in a circle, her eyes searching the ground around her. “That’s how he’s hiding the vibe. The water breaks it.”

  Natalia grunted. “Another reason to turn back. We’ll never find him.”

  Yalena didn’t listen to her. She walked further, not bothering to check if Natalia would follow. The surface grew more slippery until she reached a small clearing. The droplets of water had merged, forming a thin film of crystal water above the ice.

  “He knew the terrain,” Yalena said, mostly to herself, although her line was still open to Natalia. “He came here on purpose, which means he suspects someone who can feel the vibe is after him.”

  She became aware of Natalia’s careful steps behind her. “So they know you’re here?”

  Yalena’s body felt tingly all over. All of Felix’s Fian enemies were imprisoned. That left just her.

  She took a few more steps, splashing in the narrow river. “We need to find him before he signals back to them.”

  To Yalena’s surprise, when she crossed the surface river and stepped into shaded-from-the-sun dry ice on the other side, she felt a tremor. It was a stabbing pain, masked by a hectic train of thought. Panic.

  “He’s here,” she whispered.

  Arms stretched out for balance, Natalia followed Yalena through the water with measured steps. “Which way?”

  Yalena closed her eyes for a few heartbeats. She didn’t know how far she could probe before he’d sense her. He probably already had. When her eyes snapped open, she glared at the helmet hiding Natalia’s face. “He’d sense me coming.”

  “So?” Natalia bickered back. “He’s hurt. We’ll catch up to him.”

  Yalena hesitated only for a second, before scrambling into the direction of the vibe. Her feet struggled against the slippery surface, but she gained speed, not caring if she fell. The vibe drove her, consumed her. She wasn’t sure what she would do upon finding the Fian anymore. All she was aware of was his pain—his soul, fighting for life.

  She spotted his body sprawled across the ice, as if he’d collapsed from utter exhaustion. He was wearing regular clothes with nothing but a thin mask over his nose and mouth. Natalia must have been right—they only needed support to breathe here.

  Yalena ran to the Fian, knees hitting the ice hard upon descent. Her heart felt caged—small and terrified. She was supposed to hate this person—a Felix supporter—but the anguish that traveled through the vibe rendered all logic useless.

  Yalena reached out and cradled his head in her arms. A thick line of blood oozed from his nose and mouth. He choked on it, making it splatter under his mask, before he fought to speak.

  “Troian.” Plum-colored saliva drooled from the corner of his mouth. “Figures.”

  The vibe, slick with the terror of impending demise, strangled Yalena. “I-I’m going to help you.” Her mind was already frantically at work. She had to get him back to the ship. To check for internal bleeding and broken bones.

  “Are you insane?” Natalia’s voice cut the air. “He’s the enemy.”

  But Yalena’s mind was muddled with the vibe and she no longer believed that. The only sensation crashing into her in waves was panic. Rising panic. “We need to help him. He’s dying.”

  The Fian let out a choked, mirthless laughter. “It’s not so easy fighting your own kind, is it, Troian? Even harder for you with a weaker vibe.”

  He coughed violently, dropping a ripped-out radio he must have carried with him since the crash. Yalena only glanced at it enough to see the Fian had been trying to fix the device. Then she gasped, feeling the Fian’s pain splitting him from the inside out. His face grew a deeper, blotted shade of purple.

  “Hold on,” Yalena whispered, but her heart clenched with a realization that came through the vibe. This was his end.

  “Remember this, Troian,” Robin croaked. “You can’t kill us. Remember the pain.”

  More blood sputtered from the corner of his mouth. His heart twisted and struggled for the last few beats that seemed to echo inside Yalena’s skull.

  And then there was silence as his vibe dissolved into the arctic air.

  Yalena’s lungs tore apart with the scream that followed. It was piercing, pained, pitiful. Her scream fed on the broken link, which represented the death of Robin’s vibe. At that moment, it felt like it would go on forever.

  “Stop it!” Natalia shouted over her. “Quiet.”

  Yalena’s body didn’t listen. She was still screaming. She thought she’d scream until her lungs gave out. Natalia shook her violently, but achieved nothing. Yalena’s screams echoed through the vast icy wasteland. Then Natalia hit the side of Yalena’s helmet, so Yalena’s head bumped into the glass.

  She pushed Natalia off. “Don’t hit me!”

  “Well, you wouldn’t stop screaming,” Natalia yelled.

  Yalena sniffed her tears away. In her mind, the memory of that intense instinct replayed, leaving her under its spell. It was a pain Natalia could never understand.

  “What in the name of the Moon was that?”

  “I couldn’t...” Yalena stuttered.

  Natalia probably would have spat in her face, if it weren’t for the helmets. “Stop acting like death has wounded you so, like you’re the only good one. He had to die, and you know it.”

  Yalena tried to swallow the lump that felt stuck in her throat. “No, you don’t understand. The vibe made me want to help him and I couldn’t.” She whimpered. “I failed the vibe.”

  Natalia groaned like she was tired of hearing excuses.

  Gasping, Yalena took in a few ragged gulps of air from the suit. Her forehead wrinkled as her mind spun, lost in all the possible implications of this. She swooped into the memory of Veronica, Stanley and Felix in Lexa’s recording. They’d said a multitude of things Yalena had never been confident she fully understood.

  And she hadn’t. She’d never really grasped the meaning behind Stanley’s screams “You can’t kill me.”

  Now it finally clicked into place.

  “Nat, listen...” Yalena stared into the visor of Natalia’s helmet for pure impact, hoping to make her friend see through to the gravity of her discovery. “The Fians can’t kill each other.”

  Chapter 11. Three Names, One Face

  Paralyzed, Yalena stayed on the cold ice a while longer. Her mind was stuck in an endless loop of rearranging the clues in support of her conclusion. Stanley screaming “You know you can’t kill me,” in Felix’s face. Felix debating whether or not he would be able to kill Veronica. An
d Veronica—a sitting duck without the vibe. Then, the sound of the gunshot in that memory.

  She jolted upright.

  “Finally, you’ve snapped out of it,” Natalia remarked with relief.

  Yalena’s vocal cords seemed to have forgotten how to produce sound, or they needed a break after the tearing screams. She moved her mouth silently.

  “Don’t you get it?” there was a catch in Yalena’s throat when she finally spoke. “This means my father’s alive. For sure. Felix couldn’t have killed him. Sibel too. We can save them.”

  Natalia made a low hiss. “You want to go chasing butterflies again, don’t you?”

  Yalena folded her knees in to her chest. “They’re out there and we’re so close. If we’re careful we can pass for clones and find out where they are.”

  “Oh, hell no.” Natalia kicked the nearest rock repeatedly. She wasn’t even looking at Yalena. “Our mission is finally done. We found the army we can’t fight. Now we have to go back. You promised we’d go back.” Her voice went weak for the last sentence and her foot relaxed—she must have given up on taking her frustrations out on the rock.

  Yalena let go of her knees and pushed herself up, with the broken radio in hand. Her legs still felt shaky. “How?”

  Natalia tilted her head left and right, as if to focus. “We’ll take the Fian ship and patch it up. I bet you could order a few of the Veronicas to take care of it.”

  Yalena remained unconvinced. “Our mission wasn’t just to find out about the army. We have to stop it if we can.”

  Natalia stomped her foot. “You keep pushing the finish line.”

  Yalena had to admit she was guilty of that. Like a parent who always pushed their child toward the next achievement, she was requesting more and more from this mission and from the only one left on her team.

  “I’m sorry,” Yalena said. “What difference does it make that we know who the soldiers are? We can’t fight them, as Sibel said. So, now we have to figure out a way to stop the attack.”

  “They’re brainwashed.” Natalia’s arms flew up to the sides of her head in exasperation. “You can’t stop them because they act without thinking. They haven’t been taught to think for themselves.”

  “Well, they’ll get no better opportunity to start.”

  In the terse pause, the harsh wind was the only sound between them. One of the suns had already disappeared behind the horizon, which half-hid its twin. Soon, they’d be left in darkness and in frost.

  “We need to hurry back to the clones,” Yalena said, anticipating Natalia’s retaliation.

  “You can’t be serious,” Natalia insisted. “Getting caught would be far too easy. It would only take one of them blindly following the protocol to get us busted.” Her voice built up to a dramatic squeal. “Trying to save these clones will kill us.” Natalia panted in the silence that followed. “You want to save them, don’t you?”

  Yalena’s voice was a whisper. “And my father. And Sibel. But I can’t do it alone.”

  Natalia spun around, palms at the sides of her helmet, like the idea was giving her a headache. “I’m so not going with you. Given everything that’s befallen the others, I’m a statistical outlier. And I won’t be beating the odds forever. We need to leave before we run out of luck.”

  “Three days,” Yalena begged. “Give me three days. We’ll get the ship fixed. We’ll try to find out where Felix is hiding my father and Sibel and I’m going to do what I do best—plant the seed of disruption in these soldiers’ minds. Three days.”

  Natalia expelled a noisy breath. “I suppose we could multi-task while we get the ship ready.”

  “Once we do, you can go, if you want to.” Even as she said it, Yalena could hear the hollow fear behind the words. She needed Natalia more than she cared to admit.

  “And what? Leave you here to reign justice like a suicidal one-woman army?” Natalia huffed, but her voice had softened.

  Yalena felt that contagious optimism blossom inside her—that stubborn relentlessness she carried in her very core. “Unless you’re afraid I’ll hoard all the glory. Then, you could stay, and Felix would have two one-woman armies on his hands.”

  Yalena imagined Natalia scowling behind the black visor, but the acknowledgment of her being as powerful as an army on her own must have stroked Natalia’s ego. “Enough baiting, boss. Let’s go brainwash the clones with our agenda.”

  THE LONE SUN HAD ALMOST entirely disappeared behind the jagged, rocky landscape by the time Yalena and Natalia stumbled back to the crash site. Yalena threw the ripped-out radio onto the icy ground in front of the corpus.

  “We need to get rid of the bodies, if we’re going to send soldiers here to fix the ship.”

  Natalia started the hoverbike, its lights pointing ahead to give them visibility. “The temperature is falling fast. Hurry.”

  Yalena’s jaw stiffened. “Here we go.”

  She pushed the half-open gate to the side and sneaked inside the corpus. The three dead Fians looked exactly like before, their foreheads covered in sticky, plum-colored blood and their chins tilted to the side. One of them still had his eyes open.

  Yalena’s knees shook and her stomach contracted. All she could imagine was their panic, the horror of those last seconds, the sensation of knowing it was over. She thought she’d been able to imagine it before, but she’d been wrong. No matter how compassionate, a human could never understand. Not even Jen would have been able to relate enough. Only a Fian could truly feel that pain, understand the horror and the empty sorrow of those last seconds of life.

  Yalena became aware that her body was shaking, convulsing almost, when Natalia squeezed her shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

  But Yalena couldn’t turn her back on this. “I did this. It’s mine to deal with.”

  She motioned for Natalia to help her up. This must be what working at a Fian hospital would feel like, Yalena thought as she fought to keep control of herself. She unbuckled the nearest Fian from his seat. Natalia tactfully positioned herself opposite her, ready to grab his feet. They carried the bodies out one by one and left them lined up behind the nearest rocks.

  Yalena was silent throughout the trip back to the barracks. Natalia, on the other hand, was muttering to herself, probably still in shock. Yalena would have offered to drive if her body hadn’t felt so paralyzed. Her mind, though, was sifting through it all. She’d have to take charge of the clones now, even if that would require her to act Fian. All that mattered was that she got through to them. And she had an idea of where to start.

  As soon as they’d landed in the hangar, she approached the nearest clone.

  “I need to see the two of you that were there when I woke up,” Yalena said. “And the one that was guarding my assistant’s cell.” She tilted her head in Natalia’s direction.

  The guard took them to the canteen, where they chewed on the dry protein steak and washed it down with water. Yalena had to force herself into each movement, no matter how insignificant or easy it appeared.

  Three identical Veronicas lined up in front of the table after only a few minutes.

  “You asked for us,” one of them said.

  “I have a special assignment for you,” Yalena said. “Take us someplace we can talk in private.”

  She stood, leaving her half-eaten ration on the table. Natalia was in the middle of cutting another piece of the protein steak off. Her eyes darted up to Yalena’s and she popped the last bite into her mouth before joining them.

  They took a corridor to the left of the route to the control tower. Yalena didn’t even try to keep track of where they were going, though. She was in a linguistic loop, trying to find the words to express what she needed to say.

  When they entered a small, windowless room she went rogue anyway, before anyone had so much as taken a seat. “Everything you’ve ever known has been a lie.”

  The three identical girls looked back at her with blank expressions.

  “What do you mean, mis
tress?” the closest one to Yalena asked.

  Yalena swallowed the dryness in her throat. “I mean, I’m not a mistress. And in the real world, there are no masters and mistresses and no products. You aren’t products. You’re copies...of a real person. Creating you was illegal and that’s why you’re hidden down here.” Despite them balking at her, she said it all in one breath. “And I won’t stand for it anymore. If Felix and the Fians—the ones you call masters—don’t care to treat you as human beings, then screw them. I care. We, humans, care. And we’re here to help.”

  The girl at the center moved a step closer to her after careful consideration. “Is this why your genetic markup wasn’t exactly the same as theirs?”

  The fact she hadn’t called the Fians ‘masters’ meant more than anything to Yalena at that moment.

  “Yes. I’m half Fian, half human.” She wanted to turn to the girl by her name, but the only name that popped into Yalena’s mind was not enough for the number of Veronica’s around. Unless... “Can I call you Vero?”

  The girl blinked a few times fast. “All right.”

  Yalena glanced at the Veronica double to the right. “Could you be Ronnie?” Then, she turned to the third girl. “And you—Nicky?”

  They both nodded to agree.

  “And can you say your names when I approach you, so I know who I’m speaking to?

  Another round of nods followed.

  Perhaps it was cheesy, giving them Veronica-related nicknames, but it made Yalena feel closer to them. The real Veronica, the stubborn gutsy girl, was somehow still alive under their skin. Together, they’d make Felix sorry he’d dared to create this army.

  Chapter 12. The Tests

  Fixing the Fian ship took the better part of the next day, but Vero, Ronnie and Nicky followed Yalena’s orders with the utmost precision and worked round the clock. Even Natalia had to admit the plan seemed more doable with every passing day.

  The main problem was that all other clones looked to Yalena for guidance at every step. With her only allies focused on ship repairs, she often had to guess what her role as a Fian would have been and do as was expected of her. This made her increasingly angrier at Felix—especially when she had to refer to Veronica’s doubles as products or watch them combat train, showing no mercy to each other. So far, she hadn’t seen the slightest sign that any of the others might be as receptive to her propaganda as Vero, Nicky and Ronnie.