CROSS FIRE

by Fonda Lee

  True Sapience had already denounced the agreement as a betrayal of their principles and had made public promises to continue to wage war on all zhree and exos. According to them, the Rii were a fabrication, and the bombing of the cities and supposed attacks on the Towers were a conspiracy designed and executed by the Mur colonists and the puppet human government.

  “How about you?” Anya stopped and crouched at the water’s edge. She picked up a stick, idly cracking it into pieces. “What will you be doing?”

  “Training. Preparing. We don’t know if, or when, the Rii will be back.” Or if Kreet might change its mind and choose to send warships against the rebellious colonists after all. At that very moment, thousands of Nurses were still at work, removing the exocel inhibition reflex in exo soldiers-in-erze all over the world. Werth was building an army of Hardened humans or, more accurately, repurposing the one he already had. SecPac officers who’d been trained to patrol cities and combat human terrorists would now also be taught how to fight alongside Soldiers.

  Meanwhile, Soldier Werth’s ambitous plan to accelerate the rates of human Hardening would proceed. If Earth survived as an independent planet, it would need more exos than ever to form a planetary defense force, to work in space, to travel and trade with other planets. However, there were restrictions: Conscripted Hardening could not occur without an amendment to the Second Accord, and future exos would never again be Hardened with the neural fail-safe. Human scientists and doctors would be allowed to observe and participate in the process and gradually trained in how to perform it. In the long run, humans would gain access to exocel technology, light-plus travel, and fission energy.

  There was even more to the agreement than that—Donovan had only paid close attention to the parts that most affected him and his fellow stripes. The shift in Earth’s future felt too big to wrap one’s head around, even for someone who’d grown up as the son of a state leader.

  Anya tossed the remnants of the stick into the water and stood up. She tilted her chin up to look Donovan in the face. “You did change my mind, you know.” A storm seemed to swirl behind the greenish flecks in her eyes. “On the rooftop, you said you took me through the Round hoping I’d see more of who you are and still like you. But I think you showed me who you are from the start. Even when I was trying not to like you, I still saw it.” Her subdued voice carried something that it took Donovan a moment to place: respect. “Everything you’ve done—sneaking information out to the world, saving the doctor, fighting the Rii—was because of who and what you are. Armor and markings included.” Anya stepped close and wrapped her arms around his waist, laying her head against his chest. “I never thought I’d say this,” she whispered, “but I’m glad you’re an exo.”

  Donovan closed his eyes and kissed her brow. “I couldn’t have done it without you. You’re the most out-of-erze thing that ever happened to me, and I … I’m glad for it.” He held her in his arms for a long minute, savoring the shape and warmth of her against his body, trying to draw some of her fearlessness and strength into himself, to hold in reserve for all that might be to come. He did not want to ruin the moment with more words, by asking her for anything, or by promising anything himself. As much as he felt that surely by now he must be numbed to the pain of loss, he knew that wasn’t true.

  Hand in hand, they walked back toward the convention center. The historic gathering was over; people were spilling out of the building as journalists crowded up the steps to meet them. Human and zhree figures were lingering in conversation or being escorted toward waiting skimmercars.

  A familiar bulky figure approached. “We’re out of here,” Saul said to Anya gruffly. “After I have a smoke.” His weighty gaze traveled from Anya to Donovan. “I’d like a word with you, stripe.” The Sapience commander turned and walked down the street, jamming a cigarette between his lips.

  Donovan slipped his hand from Anya’s and took long strides to catch up. Saul reached into the inside breast pocket of his brown jacket and drew out a badly wrinkled notebook.

  Donovan recognized it at once. It had belonged to his mother, and he had given it to Saul a year ago. Saul held it out to him. “Take it back. After today, I don’t want to be reminded of what she’d think of me if she were still alive.”

  “And what would that be?”

  Saul made a gravelly noise in his throat, his thick lips twisting. “I betrayed the cause. I laid down arms and made peace with the government that killed her and the shrooms that took her son from her.” Saul’s rough face shifted like rock in a slow landslide. “I did what had to be done. And she would’ve hated me for it.”

  Donovan looked at the notebook Saul was offering him. It was the only remaining memento of his mother and it had been hard for him to give it up. His hand twitched at his side. Then he shook his head. “I’m an exo and a soldier-in-erze and still she never hated me,” Donovan said. “You didn’t betray the cause. The cause changed. For all of us.”

  Saul studied Donovan for a long moment, his unlit cigarette hanging from the corner of a mouth that trembled slightly before firming with resignation and grudging respect. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the Sapience commander stowed the notebook back in his pocket. “All my life I’ve fought your kind and everything you stand for,” he said.

  “And now you need us. And we need you.”

  “Today is a truce,” Saul said. “Not a solution. Not an end.”

  “I don’t suppose so,” Donovan agreed.

  Saul grunted. He walked away, and Anya joined him and walked alongside. Donovan watched them go. Only when they were lost from sight in the crowd did he realize that neither of them had spoken the name of Kevin Warde, and he let a grim bit of satisfaction settle on his face.

  “Reyes? Donovan Reyes, is that you?”

  Donovan turned to see a young woman in a SecPac uniform. Her black hair was pulled back in a clasp, and telltale patches of healing panotin burns marred her otherwise pretty face. “Maddison?”

  “As the only member of 198 Alpha from Round One, I’ve been telling you blokes to come visit for years, and this is finally what it takes?” She poked him in the chest, then gave him a fierce hug. “It’s good to see you, mate. You got time to grab a bevvy and call up the rest of the cadre?”

  “Yeah,” Donovan said, breaking out in a true smile. “That sounds great.”

  When he returned to Round Three, Donovan searched for his partner and found Jet at the erze cemetery. The memorial site on the SecPac campus lay tucked away on a low, sparsely treed hill that was normally quiet save for the groups of trainees that jogged past on the running trail at regular drill times. These days, there was no shortage of visitors leaving flowers and cards that brightened the beige of the frost-burned yellow grass and the slate gray of the new plaques honoring all the SecPac officers slain in the Rii invasion and the retaking of the Towers.

  Jet was sitting on the cold ground in front of Vic’s name, his arms resting on his knees, his unmoving gaze a million miles away. He didn’t turn when Donovan walked up and sat down beside him, but slowly his focus seemed to draw in and his shoulders relaxed a little. At last he asked, “So how was it?”

  “It was the most significant political event in a hundred years,” Donovan said. “Historians like your dad will discuss it for ages.”

  “In other words, boring.”

  “You didn’t miss a thing.” After a minute, “It was good to see Madds, though.”

  Jet nodded. More quietly, “Did you see her too? Anya?” It was the first time he’d ever used her name.

  “Yeah. Only for a few minutes. Neither of us could stay long.” Donovan closed his eyes. A few brief, warm moments—even that was something Jet would never be able to share with Vic again.

  His erze mate let out a long breath. “After the hard time I gave you, it’s tough for me to admit that you were right to trust her. You saw past things like armor and markings.” Jet’s hands fisted in the grass and his voice fell. “I can’t help thinking tha
t I never really understood Vic the way I should’ve. That I didn’t try hard enough … and now I’ll never get the chance.”

  Donovan put a hand on the back of his friend’s neck. “She loved you,” he said. “I think you know that.”

  “Here we are.” Cass came up on Donovan’s other side and crouched down next to him, a little gingerly, as her right arm was back in a sling. She’d told them that she had metal pins and rods stabilizing the bones now, making her, in her own words, “the first woman to be both an exo and a cyborg.”

  A dark-haired boy of about fourteen came up next to Cass and stood looking at the memorial plaques with them. He held a folded piece of sketch-pad paper, slightly bent around the edges from being carried in his back pocket. The boy unfolded the paper and looked at it with sudden trepidation, as if discovering that it was more meager than he’d feared. Then, seeming to resolve himself, he bent and carefully placed the paper on the plaque below the name of Leonides Hsu and held it in place with two rocks. He stepped back, straightened, and dropped his armor sharply, the way SecPac trainees were taught.

  “Jet, D, this is Aristides,” Cass said.

  The teen nodded a little shyly at the older exos. “It’s not very good,” he said, looking apologetically at the offering he’d left on his brother’s grave marker: a passable sketch of a warrior angel with eagle wings unfurled and an E201 pulse rifle in his hands.

  Cass put her good arm around Ari’s shoulders. “He would’ve loved it.”

  The four erze mates remained for some time in consoling, comfortable silence. The handfuls of dry yellow grass that Donovan and Jet had pulled from in front of their feet were lifted and scattered by the stiff autumn wind that rose and snapped the cemetery’s flags. The flag of West America and the seal of the Global Security and Pacification Forces flew at half mast. The third and central flagpole was empty; the icons of the Mur Erzen Commonwealth had been taken down. They would be replaced by something new, some as-yet-unknown symbol of an independent Earth, threatened, friendless, and alone in the galaxy. When Donovan looked past the flagpoles, down the hill toward the road, he realized that while he’d been away, wreathes and doves had gone up in windows and on street posts throughout the Round. It was, inconceivably, almost Peace Day again.

  He hoped there would be more.

  In February of 2016, I attended the Rainforest Writers Retreat, where over the course of four days, I wrote the outline and first three chapters of the sequel to Exo. A year later, having written two full drafts of Cross Fire already, I returned to Rainforest in a state of near panic over my manuscript, and, in that magical writing place, I broke the back on a hefty round of revision and shaped this story into its largely final form. I’m consequently grateful to organizer Patrick Swenson and my fellow retreat attendees for the special creative space that helped me so immensely with this book.

  It turns out that writing a sequel is more difficult than one would initially suspect. Fortunately for readers, my editor, Jody Corbett, is not one to settle for anything less than the maximum extent of my abilities. Thank you, Jody, for so wholeheartedly partnering with me to continue Donovan’s story and for constantly pushing me to make this book as strong as it could be.

  I’m grateful to the entire team at Scholastic: Rachel Gluckstern for paying attention to every production detail; Bonnie Cutler for working her copyediting magic; Lizette Serrano and Emily Heddleson for championing my books with librarians; Rachel Feld, Mindy Stockfield, and Isa Caban in marketing; and Alan Smagler, Elizabeth Whiting, Alexis Lunsford, Sue Flynn, Jackie Rubin, Jody Stigliano, Chris Satterlund, Nikki Mutch, and the rest of the team for the fantastic sales energy. Thank you to Phil Falco for designing another stunning cover. My thanks to Scholastic Canada for enthusiastically supporting Exo north of the border.

  Jim McCarthy keeps selling my books and guiding my writing career, proving time and again that there’s simply no substitute for a kick-ass agent. Four books in four years together—and hopefully many more to come. Thanks, Jim.

  Thank you to S. J. Kincaid, Kass Morgan, and Sabaa Tahir for saying such nice things about Exo.

  Dr. Raymund Yong patiently answered all my questions about neurosurgery, and David Two Hawks deserves belated thanks for giving me Saul’s name. While I have yet to write a book that takes full advantage of the wealth of knowledge I gained at the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop, I was inspired while I was there to set part of this book in Laramie, Wyoming.

  I do not often enough express appreciation for the understanding and support of my family, especially my husband and first reader, Nathan, and our two children, who are proud to have an author mom even though it means she spends an awful lot of time in front of the computer.

  To the YA librarians and teachers who’ve emailed me; book-talked my novels to students; invited me to speak at schools, conferences, or festivals; nominated my books for awards; gotten me on state reading lists; and placed my books in the hands of teens: thank you endlessly for the vital work that you do in creating the next generation of curious and thoughtful readers.

  Finally and always, to my readers: thank you for being here.

  Fonda Lee is the author of Zeroboxer, which was an Andre Norton Award finalist, a Junior Library Guild selection, and a YALSA Top Ten Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers. After spending years as a corporate strategist for Fortune 500 companies, she is now a writer and black belt martial artist living in Portland, Oregon. You can visit her online at www.fondalee.com.

  Copyright © 2018 by Fonda Lee

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  Names: Lee, Fonda, author.

  Title: Cross fire / Fonda Lee.

  Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Scholastic Press, 2018. | Sequel to: Exo. | Summary: When the peaceful alien-run government decides to simply withdraw from Earth, it seems that the terrorist group Sapience is going to get the “free” Earth it wanted; but Donovan Reyes, member of the security forces, and once a prisoner of Sapience, realizes that freedom comes with a price—other alien races want to strip the planet of its resources, and if anyone is going to survive, what is left of the security forces and Sapience have to work together.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017055126 | ISBN 9781338139099

  Subjects: LCSH: Extraterrestrial beings—Juvenile fiction. | Human-alien encounters—Juvenile fiction. | Terrorism—Juvenile fiction. | Soldiers—Juvenile fiction. | Science fiction. | CYAC: Science fiction. | Extraterrestrial beings—Fiction. | Terrorism—Fiction. | Soldiers—Fiction. | LCGFT: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.L395 Cr 2018 | DDC 813.6 [Fic]—dc23

  First edition, June 2018

  Cover design by Phil Falco & Mary Claire Cruz

  Cover art & design © 2018 by Phil Falco

  e-ISBN 978-1-338-13910-5

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

 
  Fonda Lee, CROSS FIRE