by Karen Bao
VIKING
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Karen Bao
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE
Ebook ISBN 9780698152793
Book design by Nancy Brennan
Version_1
FOR THE FRIENDS WHO BECAME FAMILY
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
I’VE BEEN ALIVE FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS, BUT I collected most of my identities in the past two. Stripes, Girl Sage, Fay, Moon’s Most Wanted.
Phaet. The one name I’ve carried all this time has fallen into disuse. I only hear it now from the people who knew me as the silent, unthreatening girl I used to be.
Most days, it’s hard to keep track of the people calling my various names during strategy meetings, political rallies, and slapdash training sessions for new rebel soldiers. Dovetail’s twenty-six thousand members know about me, but they don’t know me. Otherwise they’d understand how only a few of them can overwhelm my senses. Although they might imagine me idling on the job, perhaps dreaming about past or future days, I’m really figuring out which way to turn my head.
Today, though, chaos liberates me from my usual responsibilities. The Dovetail fighters in the ships around me are shouting over the intercom even as they steer their Pygmette speeders through a laser storm, driven by survival instincts and their mission to free the Moon—and, eventually, the Earth—from the Lunar Standing Committee’s grasp. From restricted expression, surveillance, rigged elections, and killings. Long before the revolt, we’d all gotten sick of the killings.
In their panic, my comrades don’t ask me for orders; they simply react. I’m just another pilot to them—and to our Committee-loyal enemies, who see a ragtag cluster of ships, more rebels they must reduce to a bloodstain on the lunar regolith. I’m one more pawn to flick off the chessboard.
That’s all the Moon has become. A vast, tricked-out chessboard.
A blast of purple light stings my eyes, and I slam on the rightward thrusters. Our ship—a two-person Pygmette—jerks to evade the laser. A loyalist Omnibus ship, which can hold up to two hundred people, zips off to the left. Alex, my copilot, sends a missile chasing after it and curses colorfully when he misses.
“That laser could’ve shaved off our hull, Dove Girl,” he quips in his odd Earthbound accent. “Don’t get us shot down when we’re almost there.”
Alex’s speech differs from his, but the similarities dredge up old memories and make me ache for someone who’s half a million kilometers away. I like Alex, but at the least convenient times, his mannerisms and even his sense of humor cut to my heart, highlighting the hollowness left by Wes Carlyle’s absence.
“Base VI is in the next crater over . . .” Alex glances backward. “And someone’s behind us. Someone who’s not a friend.”
Checking the rearview screen, I see a five-person Destroyer ship tailing us, one without a red stripe across the nose to indicate Dovetail affiliation. From that angle, the loyalist crew could use us for target practice.
Get it together, I tell myself, and don’t let anyone get that close again.
Jamming my thumb down, on a button, I pull the Pygmette into a 180-degree turn; Alex sends another missile careening into the enemy Destroyer.
The craft tumbles onto the dull gray regolith and comes to rest belly up, like a fruit fly’s carcass. I start to sigh in relief but stop mid-exhale when a pulsing pain rattles my cranium. I shouldn’t have stayed up half the night planning and expected to fight at dawn without an on-and-off killer headache.
Alex doesn’t notice my grimace; he seems preoccupied with events in his own head. Our recent victory forgotten, he shifts around in his seat as if it’s burning.
“The closer we get, the more I want to turn back,” he says, helping me steer the Pygmette into the shelter of a small crater overlooking Base VI. “Hasn’t been long enough since I booked it out of the Singularity with my tongue all tangled up. Didn’t even warn my lab friends that I had to go.”
Three months ago, Alex Huxley, Earthbound spy, steered a limping Pygmette—or “Pig,” as he angrily called it—onto Base IV, the sole settlement under Operation Dovetail’s governance. After we revolted against the Committee, our home base was nicknamed the Free Radical.
Alex bolted as soon as his employers in the renowned Base VI Astrophysics Department scheduled a speech analysis test for him, and I understood why as soon he opened his mouth. He leaves h’s off the beginnings of some words and r’s off the ends of others; he usually forgets to pronounce his t’s and overemphasizes them when he remembers. Although Alex says his accent betrays both his Caribbean childhood and his Odan adolescence, all I hear is strangeness. When Alex is calm, he imitates Lunar speech well enough, but he would’ve lasted about five minutes under pressure from the authorities.
Returning to Base VI—commonly known as the Singularity, because it’s a “black hole” of physics and astronomy research—has put Alex on edge, and in such close quarters, his mood affects mine. With my heartbeat in my throat, I adjust the camera above the Pygmette’s windshield so it peers over the edge of the crater in which we’ve hunkered down, and the Singularity’s majesty comes into focus on the dashboard’s video feed.
The nine-thousand-meter-wide dish of a telescope, hollowed into the Crater Daedalus, stares out like a blank black spider’s eye. Researchers
use it to look immense distances into space, at places so remote I can’t wrap my mind around the numbers of kilometers. A thick metal ring containing living and working quarters surrounds the satellite dish, which is in turn surrounded by a thinner copper tube called the Pandora Particle Accelerator, or PaPA. Inside, scientists are studying matter’s fundamental components, seeking more and more specific answers to the question, “What really makes up everything we know?”
Unlike the other five bases, which started out as food and energy production stations, the Singularity was constructed primarily as a research post and isolated on the Moon’s Far Side. To threaten its scientists, as we’re doing now, is a crime.
I try to ignore the twisting feeling in my gut. “Hardly any loyalist ships above Singularity,” I say into my headset. “Only two, maybe three Destroyers near the satellite dish.”
As we’d predicted. We scheduled this attack the day after an enormous dispatch of Singularity Militia to Earth; the Committee’s fighting a two-front war now that its Earthbound ally, Pacifia, has engaged its longtime rival Battery Bay in the fight for the Earth and Moon. The loyalists’ multitasking is probably their only weakness, and we’ll continue to exploit it.
“Cool. Just a few ships? That means Alex got the date right.” The whine of active wing artillery blurs Yinha Rho’s words. Now the leader of Dovetail’s armed forces, my friend and one-time Militia instructor must command our entire military operation as well as fight in it. Her Pygmette cruises behind ours, releasing projectiles.
Hands steady on the controls, I steer us up and out of our hiding place, over a rocky rill, and into the enemy’s line of sight. A dozen more two-person Pygmettes, three Destroyers, and two much larger Omnibuses follow.
“Thank me again later, Yinha,” Alex drawls. “Once you make sure my head’s still in one piece. Shouldn’t be hard—Medical’s got tape and glue at the ready if something gets past my helmet.”
I give him a thumbs-up and an uncomfortable smile. Several weeks passed before I learned the difference between his amusement, which he covers up with sarcasm, and genuine annoyance. When he’s entertained, his long, curling eyelashes shiver, and his dark skin subtly flushes.
“Lovely. Now we’re all picturing Alex’s fractured skull,” Orion says into our headsets. His Pygmette pulls ahead. “Just what we needed before an invasion. Tell me, Alex, do all Earthbound get sidetracked this easily?”
Next to me, Alex stiffens, and we hear Yinha groan. Although Orion has never liked the Earthbound, I’d have thought my old Militia friend would avoid creating tension for the duration of the mission . . .
Flash. A white beam thinner than a strand of hair slices through my vision; it seemingly scalds my brain. A scream passes between my lips.
“We’re okay, Dove Girl, we’re okay . . .” Alex mumbles soothingly.
But I’m still rattled. Even after I shut my eyes and rub them hard, I see a reddish gash in the blackness.
“That one barely missed us!” shouts Nash, another Militia veteran in the Pygmette with Orion. “A hair to the left, and this Pig would be cinders by now.”
Whatever people’s opinion of Alex, his nickname for the smallest Lunar ship has stuck.
Another ray, silent like lightning unaccompanied by thunder, flashes in front of our Pygmette and cleaves through the Destroyer to our left. The shark-shaped ship tumbles downward and crashes, scattering bits and pieces over the lunar surface. Fleet members cry out, murmuring our fallen comrades’ names—Levy, Nijima, Mayuri, Rhea, Asgard. No one I knew well. But listening to our new recruits’ screams brings me to the edge of grief, and I ride it over. Names turn statistics into people, the people who are dying every day for Dovetail’s cause.
Even as a storm of sorrow gathers in my heart, I resist the urge to mute my headset. I need to be here for Dovetail’s recruits, who are experiencing the sensory overload of their first real battle, or are readjusting to combat after years on hiatus. Many began their service five months ago, when Dovetail instituted a comprehensive military recruitment and training program. First there were volunteers. Then there were draftees: able-bodied individuals age eighteen to forty, preferably ones who’d completed Militia training. Whether they remember how to fight is a different matter altogether.
Soon we forced seventeen-year-olds to join—and then sixteen-year-olds. If we continue to sustain losses, Dovetail might have to go even younger, to fifteen: Cygnus’s age. My brother. With the way he’s been since Umbriel and I pulled him from the Committee’s clutches, I can’t let that happen. Dovetail’s leaders might grant him an exemption for reasons of mental health, but I won’t count on their mercy.
Then turn this battle around, I tell myself.
White flashes are fracturing the sky at greater frequency now. They originate from a point on Base VI’s outskirts, where subatomic particles circle the settlement at near light speed. When I realize what’s happening, every instinct tells me to turn back and order everyone else to follow. Instead, I call out: “They’ve weaponized the particle accelerator!”
“What?” Yinha’s voice crackles in my headset. “The atom smasher?”
“It’s a big, circular tube lined with electromagnets,” Alex drawls. “They’re probably adjusting those to aim at us.”
Ingenious. But it makes me sick. Instead of producing knowledge, the Committee’s cronies are engineering death.
“Shave off altitude now, and fast.” Alex sounds annoyed, not panicked in the slightest. “Fly close to the telescope dish so they’ll quit lobbing protons at us.”
I fire exhaust upward, and our Pygmette drops below the Crater Daedalus’s lip with gut-wrenching speed. Sure enough, the PaPA ceases firing; even the Singularity’s loyalists still have the sense not to shoot at the most powerful radio telescope ever built with the most advanced accelerator in existence. That would only endanger civilians.
A headset feed fizzles out, and ship fragments fly into my line of sight. Another ship down, I think, chains wrapping around my heart. In retaliation, a Dovetail ship takes down a loyalist one, sending it crashing into the regolith, but those brave teammates meet with two missiles to the left wing.
As the second ship goes down, I have to reach inside my helmet to wipe my eyes.
Our breathing labored, our minds rattled, we push on. Because the soldiers’ sacrifices have cleared the way forward, it feels anticlimactic and wrong when Dovetail reaches the entrance at the telescope dish’s lowest point. Like we’ve discarded our comrades’ lives to get here.
The airlock gates open downward, feeding us into the Singularity’s center. That’s one success today: despite everything that went wrong on our journey, the undercover Dovetailers stationed here have managed to hold up their part of the plan.
Our nine Pygmettes, two Destroyers, and two Omnibuses descend inside, taking turns riding an elevator leading into the hangar. The Singularity’s Defense Department is smaller than that of the Free Radical, and since most of their Militia is on Earth, we’ll never have a better opportunity to invade.
At least that’s what we’ve been told.
I touch our Pygmette onto the elevator, and it begins to jerk us downward, away from the stars and into the unknown.
AS SOON AS I STEP OUT OF THE PYGMETTE, dense laser fire bars my way. It’s as if the whole base is clustered here, fighting us.
Overwhelmed, I duck behind the fuselage and nearly crush a small, ashen-faced Dovetailer who’s clutching a Lazy—a deadly weapon that can shoot violet lasers—for dear life. He must be a year or so younger than me and fresh from our “training” program.
“G-g-girl Sage, don’t make me.” He grabs my sleeve, his fingers stiff from terror. That paralysis could kill him in battle. “Don’t make me walk into that.”
But he can’t stay here either.
I take his trembling hand and stare into his unblinking brown eyes. “We’re
going to run into it. Stay with me, all right?”
Hand in hand, we dash into the laser storm, from which there’s sparse shelter. The hangar is nearly empty of ships, and the ones that I see are old models, hardly spaceworthy. Their wings are bent at strange angles and wires poke through gashes in their hulls.
The young soldier and I let go and roll under a Pygmette with a busted windshield. As we catch our breath, I take a hard look around, my hopes sinking with every damaged vessel I see. So much for adding to our fleet. Even if Dovetail takes this base, we can’t use its ships. I should’ve expected this. The Singularity garnered fame for its research, not its Militia; that’s the domain of Base I, the Moon’s capitol, and Base III, home of the Moon’s uranium mine.
This place has no shortage of hostile humans, though. They’re concealed at the moment, hiding in dark corners and under ships, but they’re blanketing the place in violet. We have to break through the hangar and into friendlier territory or this mission will fail, leaving us imprisoned or dead.
“Did the General call all the troops back from Earth, or what?” Nash shouts from above me and the scared new recruit. She’s crouched under the ship’s dashboard to avoid getting hit through the cracked windshield.
“Not all of them,” I say, surveying the black-suited loyalist soldiers spread throughout the hangar. If the gore disturbs them, their glassy opaque helmets don’t let them show it. “But someone’s commanded them to shoot everything they’ve got.”
“Hmph. Let’s hope this really is everything, and there isn’t more ammo around the corner.”
On every side, hundreds of Dovetail troops pour from the two Omnibuses and then scatter, shouting and flailing, their haphazard training forgotten. Ours isn’t an army; it’s a swarm. Some troops aren’t young anymore, and they lack the youthful Militia’s rapid-fire responses. Others, like the boy still trailing me, are so young they should’ve stayed home. Most fighters wear old Militia jackets and pants that we’ve sanded down to a dull gray color—it’s meant to be silver, but we didn’t have the resources to dye it. Other Dovetail troops fight in colorful civilian robes, which trumpet their presence and offer little protection from enemy weapons.
