“Spartan!” shouted a man with MediGel drying over the left half of his face. It was Valois, the one who was always hassling Victor. “They did it. Probably poisoning themselves, the way she’s holding that thing, but they did it.”
Owen stepped out of the largest tent. His visor was up, and he looked exhausted—the first time Evie had ever seen him look that way. She’d seen him injured—horrifically so—but never so … defeated. He strode across the camp, his pace picking up.
“Set that down immediately,” he barked.
Evie did as she was asked, sliding the artifact onto the ground. “We couldn’t wait for the extraction team,” she said. “The tunnels were going to collapse, and—”
“I understand,” he said. “You disobeyed orders, but I can understand. Still, we have to minimize contact.”
“We swapped who held it,” Victor said. “Since it didn’t seem like it was doing anything—”
“That was probably unwise, but there’s nothing we can do about it now.” Owen lifted the artifact up to his line of sight. It looked so small in his huge grip.
“It was sticking out of the side of the tunnel,” Dorian said. “Thanks to Saskia, we were able to pry it out pretty easily, once we dealt with the debris.”
Owen nodded. “Come with me,” he said, whirling around, marching back toward his tent. Evie glanced at the others—did he mean all of them? Just Dorian?
“Let’s go,” Saskia whispered.
They cut across the camp. Evie could feel the stares of the surviving members of the militia sticking to them like spiderwebs. She couldn’t look any of them in the eye.
Owen held the tent flap open for them as they ducked inside, one by one. Then he set the artifact on a big metal cube that she realized was the box the emergency drop must have come in. The five of them just stood around it, staring at it as it glowed steadily in the dim light.
“We lost seventy percent of the militia,” Owen said.
A pang of sorrow shot through Evie’s chest. Someone—maybe Victor—let out a sharp gasp. The others were silent.
“The Covenant were stronger than we suspected,” Owen continued. “They had more support than our reports suggested. And the excavation site was too heavily reinforced for us to even attempt an extraction.” Owen took a deep breath, his expression weary but focused. “We’re lucky you came up with an alternate plan. Even if you had to disobey my order to carry it out.”
Evie glanced at Dorian, who was looking down at his feet, his hair falling into his eyes, hiding his face.
“Why’d you do it in the first place?” Saskia said. “Go in fighting like that?” There was a quaver in her voice.
“Those were our orders based on the available intel,” Owen said. “Sometimes intel is on point, and sometimes it’s off—either way, we can’t afford to make decisions based on anything else. There are millions of lives at stake. It’s our job to keep Meridian from falling, and we have to do that based on more than a best guess.”
Evie’s pang of sorrow turned to a dull throb of unease. She understood the urgency, the importance, of their mission. And the last thing she wanted was for Meridian to fall to the Covenant. But something in Owen’s tone still suggested that Command was looking to squeeze every last useful drop out of a militia that had—against all odds—outlived a one-way trip.
“Fortunately, in the end, we were successful.” Owen sighed and turned his gaze on the artifact. “You proved yourselves capable soldiers.”
Evie shifted her weight, crossed her arms over her body. Glanced over at Dorian. He looked up at the right moment and their eyes caught, and she wondered if he was thinking the same thing as she was: That, while the attack might not have been Owen’s idea, it had been his to let them go into the tunnel after all, despite the danger.
“Do you know what the artifact is?” Victor said.
Owen shook his head. “I don’t have a clue.” He paused. “ONI has experts, of course, but it’s looking like it might be difficult to make contact.”
“Are you serious?” Dorian blurted out. “I thought this whole thing was their idea!”
“Yes,” Owen said. “But as I just said, it’s clear now that the Covenant forces here in Brume-sur-Mer, and likely on Meridian in general, are much stronger than we anticipated. Our fight here is one very small part in a very large theater of operations on this side of the moon. A lot of people need extraction right now, not just us. So we may be stuck here for the time being.”
“What the hell?” shouted Dorian. “Getting this thing was supposed to be our ticket home!”
“Don’t talk to him like that,” Victor snapped.
The blood rushed through Evie’s ears. She didn’t want to think about this—the possibility that after all they had gone through they weren’t even going to be able to get the artifact to ONI. She glided forward, knelt down in front of the metal tube. The artifact glowed steadily. Behind her, Dorian and Victor were bickering. She tuned them out, focused just on the artifact. Something had been inside of it. But it was impossible to actually see because of that bright light.
“Can I borrow the exo-gloves?” she asked.
“Leave it to the experts at ONI,” Owen said.
Evie looked up at him. “They may not be able to look at it. I promise I won’t do anything dangerous.”
Owen frowned, but he handed her a bulky, gray pair of gloves. She put them on, the exo-material heavy and hot against her skin. Then she reached out and picked up the artifact. Tilted it to hear the clink. Tilted the other way. Another clink.
She thought of the gifts her father used to give her when she was a little girl. Clever puzzles she had to solve before she could access her real gift. It had been his way of encouraging her interest in problem-solving and computer science, but she’d always had a fondness for those physical puzzles.
And this artifact reminded her of one.
She tilted again, listened to the clink.
“What are you doing?” Saskia asked.
“Quiet,” Evie said. “I’m thinking.” She held the artifact between her two palms. No sign of movement inside. The surface was smooth. No seams. No cracks.
She tilted it. Clink.
She glanced up at Owen. “There’s something inside. I’m trying to figure out how to get at it.”
“I’m afraid this counts as doing something dangerous,” Owen said.
“I have the gloves on.” Evie gripped the artifact and twisted. Nothing happened. She moved her hands over the side of the cylinder, testing it.
The cylinder moved. The light inside flickered.
A shout came up from the others. Evie almost dropped the artifact in surprise.
“That’s enough,” Owen said. “Please put the artifact down. We don’t have the protections in place that ONI has in their labs.”
She looked up at him, her breath held tight in her chest. “Please,” she said. “We can send whatever observations I make to ONI through the comms. They might be able to use it.”
Owen frowned.
“I think it’s a puzzle,” she said. “Just a few more seconds.”
Owen crouched down beside her. “Be careful.”
She twisted again, in the same spot, but nothing happened. She hoped she was right, that this was a puzzle, and not a trap … or that activating whatever was inside wouldn’t do any harm.
She took a deep breath. So she couldn’t see seams, but something in the artifact could move. She twisted again, back the other way. Another flicker.
The others were crowding in close; she could feel their breath on the back of her neck. She pushed the sensation away, however, focusing just on the puzzle.
She ran her hands up the length of the cylinder. Nothing.
She gave it a shake. Nothing.
She twisted again, in the same spot, and this time the light blinked out.
“Oh my god!” she shouted, dropping the artifact onto the table. It rolled sideways, clinking the entire time. Owen grabb
ed it before it rolled off the surface.
“We are obviously not getting the kind of data that would be useful for ONI,” he said. “Even if there’s nothing dangerous about the artifact itself, the Covenant could very well be attempting to track it right now. That’s the last thing we need.”
“Do they even know we have the artifact?” Saskia said.
Owen shot her a dark look. “If they don’t know, they will soon enough.”
“I was getting somewhere with it,” Evie said.
Owen set the artifact down on the table. Even with the light out, Evie couldn’t see the object inside. The glass was just dark, like the cylinder had filled with smoke.
“Let me try one more thing,” she said. “Please. The Covenant could track the artifact to us regardless of what I do now. And maybe I can—deactivate it somehow.”
Owen’s frowned deepened. “I’m not sure that’s how it works.”
“It’s worth a shot,” she said. “If we have to hold on to it until we can deliver it to ONI.”
A long pause. And then Owen nodded once. Immediately, Evie picked up the artifact and tried twisting again.
And this time, the top half of the cylinder twisted all the way around. The light blinked back on, even brighter than before: a shimmering, opalescent glare that stung at Evie’s eyes. She twisted it to darkness. Twisted again, only halfway.
The light gathered into a point. Evie froze. The point of light brightened, streaming between her fingers. She glanced up at Owen.
“You’ve started some kind of reaction,” he said urgently. “Stop it. Immediately.”
Evie twisted, slowing her movements down. The light flickered, faster and faster the slower she twisted, until when she stopped it was flickering on its own, the light shimmering like static across her face. Panic rose up in her throat. “I can’t get it to stop,” she whispered.
“I don’t think you need to,” Victor said. “Evie, look.”
She lifted her gaze off the cylinder and gasped. Geometric shapes floated in the air above them, dancing as if they were sparks of light caught on a sheet of metal. Circles and half circles floated into a triangle; dots spun around like stars.
“Keep going,” Owen said. “I recognize this. It’s a map.”
“What?” Saskia said. “How do you know?”
“I’ve seen this Forerunner script, in this configuration, before. And it was a map then.”
“Really?” Evie’s heart pounded. “Can you read it?”
“No. But keep going. It should show us something soon.”
Evie twisted, trying different patterns of movement. The cylinder spun more easily now, and the glyphs flickered and changed, orbiting one another like planets. Eventually they moved closer and closer, their edges bleeding together. Evie kept twisting. Slow, then fast, then slow again. The shapes merged into an enormous corona of light.
A clink rang out from inside the cylinder.
Immediately, the corona exploded into a million points of light that hung suspended, filling the tent. Evie jumped in surprise. But it wasn’t an explosion at all.
“What the—” Dorian said.
“It is a map,” Saskia breathed. “Of the galaxy,”
The dots of light drew together, forming a bright sphere that slowly carved into itself swirling gases of yellow and green. A planet. An extremely familiar planet.
“It’s Hestia V!” shrieked Victor.
The phantom Meridian spun lazily around the gas giant, the features dimming into a smoky murk.
“What’s happening?” Saskia said.
“Look,” Evie said, because there was a single bright spot left on the Forerunners’ concept of Meridian, a fiery beacon glowing in the northernmost part of Caernaruan, far on the top of the world.
Meridian stopped spinning. The light pulsed.
And then the image shifted, flattening out. Caernaruan spread out in front of them, the point of light still blinking, blinking, blinking.
Suddenly, a green holo-map snapped into existence. Evie turned around; it was Dorian, holding up his map projector.
“Let’s find out where this stupid light is,” he said, and zoomed out from Brume-sur-Mer’s tunnel systems to the entire moon, then zipping over to Caernaruan. The green lines overlaid the image of Caernaruan, lining up perfectly. Dorian zoomed in on that blinking light. It shimmered over a net of lines on the map. A city.
“Annecy,” Dorian said, reading the map’s label. “It’s pointing to Annecy.”
And then, abruptly, the glowing image of Caernaruan vanished in a flash of white light, leaving only Dorian’s map. The artifact itself went dark and lifeless. Evie stared at it for a long moment, then set it down carefully on the table.
“Now what?” Dorian asked, breaking the silence.
Owen looked up at them. “I’m contacting ONI,” he said. “You were right. They’re going to want to know about this.”
There wasn’t much to do at that point but go back out to the camp and find a place to wait for Commander Marechal’s orders. It was raining again, a faint drizzle that only hinted at the storms that swept through the area during the height of the rainy season. Still, it’s just enough rain to be miserable, Evie thought as she burrowed beneath a pile of wide palm trees someone had brought in for shelter. The drizzle turned the dirt from the cave-in into a sticky, dark mud, and Evie wiped at it disconsolately, succeeding not in cleaning it off but just in smearing it worse. She wanted to complain, but if she looked up, she saw soldiers resting out their injuries and their grief, and she felt sheepish in her discomfort.
“I can’t believe Command sent them out there like that,” Dorian said softly beside her. He sat with his arms thrown over his knees, his expression dark. “I thought it was weird that the commander and Owen were being so adamant about the attack.”
“They’re soldiers,” Victor said. “They knew what they signed up for.”
Dorian rolled his eyes. “Look around you, man. Every single squad lost someone.” He paused. “Except for us.”
“Just because we didn’t fight,” Evie said.
Victor looked down at the dirt. “Weren’t allowed to fight,” he muttered.
“And thank god for that,” Dorian said. “You think we would be here now if we’d gone into that battle? We’d be dead, or injured, and we wouldn’t have secured that thing.” He jerked his head back toward Owen’s tent, where they’d left the artifact.
Victor scowled and opened his mouth to protest. But Saskia interrupted him.
“Dorian’s right,” she said. “And now their deaths weren’t totally in vain.”
They went quiet at that and sat without speaking as the rain picked up. Finally, the mud on Evie’s skin started to streak away.
About an hour later, Owen came charging out of his tent. “Evie,” he said. “Commander Marechal and I need to speak with you.”
Evie straightened up, her heart pounding. She exchanged quick glances with the others, wondering if it was obvious how nervous she was.
Owen tilted his head toward the Command tent.
“Good luck,” Dorian whispered.
She shot him an angry look—was he trying to make her more nervous?—and then jogged over to Owen. Together they walked into the tent. Commander Marechal was sitting at the desk, a holo projection lighting up the murky interior. Evie put her hand to her forehead in a salute, and Commander Marechal nodded. “At ease.”
She dropped her hand, but her shoulders were still tense with anxiety. The air in the tent was muggy and thick from the rain. She could barely breathe.
“Thank you for joining us,” said a female voice. The holo flickered, and Captain Dellatorre materialized in the air above the desk. Evie felt a jolt of fear, a jolt of excitement.
“Yes,” Commander Marechal said. “Thank you. Please, have a seat.”
Evie glanced at Owen, but his face was impassive. She slid into the rickety chair set up beside the projection of Captain Dellatorre.
&nbs
p; “Spartan-B096 has informed me of the success of your mission.”
Evie said nothing, just squeezed her hands together in her lap. She would hardly call the loss of 70 percent of the militia a success.
“He also informed me that you managed to activate the artifact.” Captain Dellatorre pressed her lips into a wan smile. “That should have been done under the controlled conditions of a laboratory.”
A silence hung over the dark, humid tent. Evie realized she was expected to respond.
“I understand that,” she said softly. “But with the delay in getting the artifact to ONI, I thought—”
Captain Dellatorre waved one hand, the light of the holo trailing after her movement. “You disobeyed a direct order. Or rather, convinced Spartan-B096 to disobey a direct order.”
Evie forced herself not to look over at Owen.
“You were deeply lucky the artifact wasn’t a weapon—or something worse. There is a reason we have protocol for handling these objects.”
Evie took a deep breath. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Commander Marechal watching her, and she felt vaguely dizzy.
“I understand,” she whispered, her cheeks hot.
“Do not do it again.”
Evie sat as still as possible, her fingers prickling from being clenched so tight. “I won’t.”
“Good.” Captain Dellatorre lifted her chin imperiously. The light from the holo was burning Evie’s eyes. “Now. To the matter at hand. Rousseau, I invited you to this briefing because you did crack open the map inside the artifact. You showed an aptitude for interacting with Forerunner technology. And that may prove useful.”
Evie’s anxiety shifted. What did that mean?
Captain Dellatorre gazed out through the holo-projection. “I’m saddened to report that conditions above your position have worsened.”
Captain Marechal frowned. “In what way?”
“The fighting has grown even more intense. The Covenant is managing to penetrate Meridian’s orbital lines and funnel more and more forces groundside—just as you experienced today.”
Beside her, Owen shifted his weight.
“And unfortunately, extraction off Meridian is impossible at the moment. For everyone.” She paused, tilted her head toward Evie. “Including our youngest team members.”
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