by Karen Bao
My temples pound. Until I have more facts, all this cognitive effort is a waste. I need to find whatever Dovetail members I can and bombard them with questions.
I’m not sweating anymore—in fact, it’s gotten terribly cold—but too much blood is still rushing to my head. Dizzy and exhausted, I doze off, using nothing but air as a mattress.
* * *
With a whoosh, the lid to the crate opens into an unlit part of the Defense hangar. Thank the sun and stars, I once again know which way is up.
“Welcome home,” Eri whispers, leaning over the crate. The skin around her eyes is pink and puffy; she’s been crying. Get it together, I wish I could say. There are times for feeding a broken heart, but the middle of a smuggling operation isn’t one of them.
I attempt to stand. My limbs feel so heavy, I end up sitting where I was, with a sorer tailbone.
“Let me help. We have to be quick.” Eri grabs my wrists, tugs me up, and flips my visor down. She’s behaving like a mother or an older sister, despite what happened between Wes and me on the Pacifian runway. Did she see us? Regardless, her goodness makes me regret my impatience with her. I lost Mom, and I don’t know if I’ve lost Murray, but somehow I’ve found another person who will care for me.
And Anka’s waiting.
Eri slides her visor down and leads me away from the ship. Together, we jog toward the hangar’s exit, her left hand in her pocket to cover her handscreen’s audio receptors. Out of habit, I mirror her gesture, even though disconnecting the handscreen from my blood flow has rendered its every function useless.
“Sorry you were in there for so long,” Eri says as we duck behind another ship. “I had to wait until they moved us away from the unloading slot. More ships came in, and they ended up putting this one further back, into storage.”
Through her visor, I can see her eyes. They look at everything but me. “I’m sorry, Eri,” I say.
Her smile turns to a grimace. “For what? Let’s not start fighting over nothing.” She strides away from me and ducks behind another ship without looking back.
I follow, concerned about the passive-aggressiveness in her body language.
“Okay, you did kiss the guy I’ve liked for years just a minute after he rejected me.” With her flat tone, Eri might as well be talking about what she had for lunch. But that doesn’t mean she’s not angry. “And I never saw it coming, since you pretended you didn’t care about him. For all I knew, you thought of him as your personal trainer, but you were really too scared and emotionally constipated to admit how you felt. Both you and Wes lied to me, Stripes.”
Hearing my old nickname stings. “I should’ve been honest back in training.”
Eri finally raises her voice. “Didn’t I just say that?” she snaps.
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone.”
Awkward silence stretches between us. Then Eri’s expression softens, and her eyes meet mine. “What am I talking about? This is ridiculous.”
Again, I wait for the silence to grow uncomfortable—and she elaborates, as I’d hoped.
“I used to think that just because I wanted him so much, he’d want me too.”
I think of the time in training when she bought two-hundred-Sputnik boots on the spur of the moment. “Are you used to getting what you want?”
Eri chews her bottom lip. “Maybe. Nothing really got in my way when I was a kid.” I don’t reply, and again she keeps talking. “I mean, I had a supercomfortable life. Whenever I met people through my family, they wanted to be my friends.”
“Why do you think that was?”
“My father’s the Primary Education Superintendent. Makes it hard to tell whether people really like me or not.”
I gape at her. Her dad runs the Base IV school system for everyone under age eighteen; as an administrator, he has direct contact with the Committee and a hefty salary to match.
“But you know, Wes didn’t give a nuke’s fart who my dad was. Or what people thought of him. He did his own thing. It’s why he’s special to me. Now I know that he was too busy trying to save the world—literally—to think about all that.”
I underestimated her, thinking she was shallowly infatuated with Wes’s looks and fighting ability. Suddenly, I regret that I didn’t try to get to know her better during Militia training.
“I see why he picked you, Stripes. You’re the one girl who can keep up with him. I’ll stop being mad at you, eventually. I think. I can’t hate someone Wes cares about.”
I feel as if I’ve ducked a punch that was never thrown. Could I have forgiven her if Wes had rejected me? “I—thanks.”
She cuts me off with a nonchalant wave of her hand. “Whatever. Neither of us can be with him now, so let’s look out for him and his people together. That sound all right?”
I nod. “Even from a few hundred thousand kilometers away.”
Eri gives me a quick hug, and once again, I’m filled with admiration for her.
“What happened to the Odans after you hid me?” I ask.
Eri looks around the corner, checking to make sure the corridor is empty. Then we break cover and move toward the exit. “The battle wrapped up quickly. The Militia and the Pacifians couldn’t figure out how to break into the Odan hideout without getting zapped; there was some kind of electrical cannon hidden up on the mountain.”
I smile, a wave of relief passing over me. The Sanctuarists must have weaponized the electrochemical battery in the Carlyles’ basement. “The Odans in the hideout . . .”
“Their caves and farms got wrecked, but most people should be okay. They ran for Battery Bay when the enemy started pulling back. But I think a lot of people made it.”
Longing burns in me like a sore muscle. Wes and his family escaped, surely.
“All the people?”
Eri sighs. “Check your hopes, Phaet. We set Saint Oda on fire.”
23
AFTER ERI LEAVES ME, I SET off for Shelter, Anka, and Umbriel. But I must take a new route, because wandering about the base’s closely monitored hallways, even with the lights off, is sheer idiocy. I’d be asking for capture and torture—the Cygnus treatment.
After some careful searching, I find a Sanitation manhole in a remote corner of the hangar, slip my thumb into Wes’s fake fingerprint sleeve, and press the digit to a tiny groove in the floor. The manhole cover slides back, revealing the tunnel beneath, and I jump in feetfirst. Even as the stench of bleach mixed with sweat and feces hits my nose, I feel immensely powerful. Almost free. Not a soul knows my blood pressure, body temperature, heart rate, or hormone levels. They can’t hear what I’m saying or follow where I’m going. In the dark sewers, I’m invisible. To the eavesdroppers, the Medics, the Militia, and every other person on Base IV who would care, Phaet Theta is in limbo, neither alive nor dead.
It’s an eerie freedom, though, and a limited one. The rare security pods in the tunnels could still record my movements. And a stray nighttime worker might think it awfully strange to find a Beetle wandering the tunnels. With these thoughts in mind, I tiptoe carefully—when all I want to do is run. Scum sticks to the bottoms of my boots, and they squelch with every step.
I keep the Sanctuarists’ maps in my mind as I approach Shelter. A few dozen meters from my destination under the dome, the Sanitation lane ends at a sealed door. I tap my knuckles on the impenetrable block of metal, unwilling to believe it’s real.
The Committee probably sealed Shelter off, to keep Dovetail sympathizers from sneaking in and out.
I push the metal door, throwing all my weight behind my hands. Then I ram my shoulder against it—once, twice, three times. Tears spring to my eyes, not because of the pain, but because I’m so close to Anka and Umbriel. To feeling my sister’s wispy black hair against my cheek; to the old security of my best friend’s arms.
I hold back shouts of frustration. At such a hi
gh-security juncture, anyone or anything could be listening. I tiptoe back the way I came and find a meter-high door in the tunnel wall. It opens into a closet used to store cleaning supplies. There’s just enough room for me to curl into a ball on the floor, shut the door against surveillance, shut my heart against sorrow, and plan my next move.
* * *
“High knees!” someone’s shouting on the floor above me. “They should reach your chest with every step!”
After a brief rest in the maintenance closet, I set off for the Defense complex to look for other members of Dovetail. From my conversation with Lazarus, I’ve guessed that Shelter serves as the organization’s home base, but Defense houses several of their moles, one of whom I’m sure is on my side.
On Saint Oda, I studied the Sanctuarists’ maps of Base IV until my mind could reproduce my home city dome by dome. I know more now than I did when I lived here, and it’s paying off. I find my point of exit from the tunnels by listening for Yinha’s Militia-instructor roar. A smile creeps across my face as I remember how much she once intimidated me.
“Sixty more seconds until your lunch break! Is that motivation enough for you? Those knees better touch the ceiling!”
After a minute, a timer buzzes in the training dome, and the trainees dash out to get food. Hoping I’m making the right move, I press the fake fingerprint sleeve to a groove in the wall, and the circle of floor beneath my feet rises like an elevator, lifting me up to the training dome. I surface in the shadow of the rock climbing wall. With my helmet’s visor down, I peek out and see that thin frame, those severe features, the hair slicked back in a bun.
Yinha’s berating two abashed trainees. “I’ve seen vines creep faster than those feet of yours!” she shouts.
It’s her, it’s really her! Yinha Rho, my teacher and friend. She egged me on and kept me strong when all I wanted to do was wallow in pain and frustration. But she also kept her involvement with Dovetail a secret from me—I’m not sure she even knows I’m aware of it. I can needle her about it later. Right now, I need to slip back under her wing. I break cover and approach.
“Pop some caffeine pills before the afternoon session, cool?” Yinha trails off as she notices me. The two trainees slink toward the exit, shoulders slumped and heads hung low.
“Looking for something, Private?”
“I just landed, Captain.” I adjust my throat muscles to create a deep-sounding tone. Everyone on the base has heard Phaet Theta’s high warble; ambient sensors will be primed to detect it. “Passed the ISS on the way. It’s all torn up now, but someone told me that it used to shine.”
Yinha’s face passes through shock and wonder before settling on barely suppressed happiness. “You . . . I . . . Yes, it did.”
The night after I had a terrible fight with Umbriel, Yinha dragged me out of my Militia captain apartment, fixed me up with a Pygmette, and raced me to the International Space Station. Someone had ripped away its solar cells and metal plates, leaving it a decrepit skeleton, but Yinha told me she’d visited the ISS with her brother when it was whole and beautiful. The experience was something she never forgot, and she passed her wonder on to me.
“This way, Private,” Yinha says, walking us both out of the training dome. “I have urgent new orders for you.”
24
“I HAD NO IDEA YOU’D LANDED!” Yinha whispers. “None of my bosses saw anything on the LPS monitors.”
We lean against the sloping white wall of Defense’s main hallway, which bustles with foot traffic. Yinha’s left hand is in her pocket to hide her handscreen, but mine dangles by my side, freeing us from suspicion. No base resident attempting to keep secrets would have her handscreen receptors uncovered, and no one knows mine’s useless.
“Wes disconnected my handscreen and took out the LPS chip,” I say. “Technically, I don’t exist.”
Yinha laughs. “Smart kid, that Kappa. Is he . . . is he all right?”
She’s asking if he’s alive. I shrug. If Wes went back to Koré Island during the Batterer bombardment, who knows what happened? He could’ve been burned or captured or shot through with a laser beam like Finley. At the thought of his glorious heart stopping, my insides turn to ice.
Please let him be alive, and safe, and free.
“Huh.” Yinha rocks back and forth on her toes, looking at her feet every time she pitches forward. She seems to understand that I don’t want to talk about Wes.
All around us, overeager soldiers are returning from their lunch break. We have a few minutes at most.
“Yinha, I need your help. I tried to visit Shelter via the maintenance tunnels, but—”
“To see Anka and Umbriel?” Sympathy flits across her face, but the expression is quickly replaced by blankness. “That’s sweet. But stupid. They’ve sealed the underground entrances to that sinkhole. Everyone in Dovetail got their LPS chips removed—”
“That many people?” I say. “How?” Wes told me that he’d studied handscreen diagrams for weeks before figuring out how to do the procedure without injuring my hand—or worse.
“Our Medics accidentally paralyzed a few people before getting the job done correctly.” Yinha grimaces, and I feel my fists clench. “Some people got mad; a whole lot ditched Dovetail. We wanted to knock out people’s audio receptors too, but that involved rerouting blood vessels.” It’s miraculous that Wes managed to do that for me without causing adverse side effects—but then, he always was a skilled Medic. “Too risky to try en masse. After the LPS removal, we thought things were going well. Then the Committee found out.” The memory of whatever punishments they doled out briefly silences Yinha. “They couldn’t have hundreds of people going around untracked, so they fenced Dovetail in with Militia soldiers and bars in the underground tunnels. Dovetail’s been completely cut off.”
“There has to be a way in. I need to see if my family’s all right—”
“They’re alive, but they’re being held under Penitentiary-level security, Stripes. You’ll only put them in more danger if you try to sneak in. Speaking of the Pen—they threw Sol in there. Locked her up a month after you left, which is why I’ve had to take over some of her to-do list—”
“Wait, wait,” I splutter. “Rewind to Sol Eta getting arrested.” I have little love for Sol, but her arrest still disturbs me. Sol was a witness for my mother during her trial, and claimed on the stand that Mom didn’t write the “Grievances and Propositions” that lambasted Committee rule. She took up the mantle of leading Operation Dovetail after Mom was executed.
How will Dovetail move forward if the Committee continues to decapitate its leadership, to cage it in? They’ll be like a tree confined to a tiny pot, trying to grow while choking on their own roots.
“Sol aired the footage of your mom’s trial on the other bases,” says Yinha. “Count ’em—I, II, III, V, VI. Everyone knows about you now—and about Dovetail. I’ve got to say, you looked pretty awesome telling off the Committee. ‘I don’t know better, but I may know more’—you come up with that on the spot?”
“Hold on,” I say. “How did this happen? I thought the Committee was trying to keep knowledge of Dovetail confined to Base IV.”
Yinha shrugs. “Even though the Committee generally tries to keep each base isolated from the others, the six Journalism Departments have always been allowed to collaborate. The Committee wanted to make sure they all told the same lies. My guess is that Sol sent everything to her contacts, people she knew would be sympathetic or intrigued, and they aired the segments: your mom’s trial, Belinda’s death, Shelter residents in the Atrium, you and Wes facing down the General.”
“And you stabbing him with your visor down?” I ask. When the General cornered me, a mystery soldier stuck a dagger into the junction where neck meets shoulder.
Yinha wears a naughty child’s grin.
“Of course,” she says. “Sol added a clip of herself sa
ying that you and Wes had crash-landed on Earth. She told everyone that he was an Earthbound agent all along, and used that info to put a nice spin on things. Lunar girl and Earthbound boy, united in the fight for freedom!”
Not quite. We were fighting for survival. At the time, we had zero concern for base politics. But Sol spun the threads of our story into a yarn that’s entirely hers.
“How’d Sol know Wes’s real identity?”
Yinha shifts uncomfortably, stepping away from the wall and walking toward the training dome. “Militia put me on his case, and I found out about his voice samples. I had to tell Sol. She thought it was great ammo, so she, uh, shared it with the entire Moon.” She huffs, frustrated. “I wish Mira and Sol had given us Dovetail underlings a warning before they started dropping news bombs all over the place. Led to their capture, and we’ve been a mess without them. There’s still no real plan—but we’re secretly backing one of our members in the elections next month. His name’s Asterion Epsilon.”
The name stirs something in my memory. “The medicinal chemist who earned the Committee Medal of Achievement?” It was three years ago, I think. He discovered ingestible chemical compounds that protect astronauts from the long-term effects of cosmic rays. At the time, I dreamed of becoming a titan among scientists, like him.
“Yeah, he’s still mixing potions in a Committee lab. But he’s a great guy—lots of influence in the Chemistry Department—and he doesn’t care that the Committee’s going to steamroll him in the official tallies, no matter how many people vote for him. Says it’s the standing up that matters.”
I hope he’s right. Because those six monsters might kill him, like they killed my mother. Panic for any family this man might have courses through me.
Yinha glances at the time on her handscreen, rolls her eyes, and begins walking toward the training dome. “Look, Stripes, I have to get back to those green-faced newbies.”
I follow her, murmuring over her shoulder. “But Shelter—”
