by Karen Bao
Shockwaves of anxiety pulse through my chest. Please, please let this be a false alarm. Checking the tracker map, I see that Lazarus’s blinking dot has vanished. He must have destroyed the tracker or moved out of range.
Wes stirs, and in a voice heavy with sleep mumbles, “G’morning, Phaet.”
Cursing our luck, I shake my head. No, it’s a bad morning, as mornings go, because it cut short one of the best nights.
His eyes snap open, taking in our surroundings and the empty tracker map. Every muscle in his torso tightens. We stagger to our feet and dash through the garden, toward the Odan camp. As we run, more hovercraft zoom over our heads: CITY NOW EVACUATING TO THE KOREA STRAIT.
The move makes sense. Battery Bay has land-based allies scattered throughout the former territories of Japan and South Korea; this move will put us right between the two. It’s risky, though. Pacifia was a land-based city in China before it floated away, so the Pacifian alliance in the southwest is strong. If they plan to attack, they’ll have an advantage. The plan seems too perfect, too perfectly timed. Did someone alert Pacifia that Battery Bay planned to break for friendlier territory today?
The auburn-haired Parliament aide . . . Lazarus. He knows all of Battery Bay’s plans to defend itself—and that means the Committee knows too. They probably gave him a ship to pilot to Earth, and he must’ve conned his way into the city.
Yellow lights all over the city shut off, and red ones turn on, the light bloody against the shiny metal façades. A sparse rainfall begins, the droplets combining with our sweat, leaving our cotton clothes heavy and stuck to our backs.
In the campsite, Odans are shouting one another’s names and hustling loved ones into tents for shelter. Before long, Batterer officials force them out again.
“Red alert,” says a young man in a blue uniform with gold buttons—a policeman. Instead of a right eyebrow, he has a tattoo of a dragonfly’s wing. “The Bay’s on lockdown. We need to escort you indoors.”
Emberley, Wes’s younger sister, squares her shoulders, facing off with him. “We are indoors.”
“By ‘indoors,’ we mean a bulletproof shelter,” the policeman replies.
Mrs. Carlyle glares at him; she’s angry that he’s using the cold language of war around her innocent daughter. I respect her devotion to the pacifist Odan tradition, though it seems inevitable that her endeavors will fail in these troubled times.
The policemen march us into the rain, toward the international hostel. The Odans’ moccasins slosh through ankle-deep puddles; heads turn back to the abandoned tents. As we scramble out of the park, several adults hold their children closer to shield them from the unnatural, violent things surrounding us: law enforcement hovercraft painted gold, metal guns holstered in belts, low-flying military aircraft overhead. Other parents look right through the spectacle, as if weary of such sights. In the smog, the red emergency lights are like evil eyes following us through the narrow streets.
When we reach the hostel, Wes, Alex, and I split off from the Odans and head for Dovetail’s new quarters. After Yinha warned her about Lazarus, Andromeda took shelter three floors above the rooms we were initially assigned. Public safety officers in teal and gold rush about the lobby, a chapel-like space lit by a dozen silver chandeliers shaped like jellyfish. They usher diplomats into vehicles, switch on emergency lights, pull workers from the front desk and kitchens and direct them toward safer locations. I was worried that security would block me from entering the hostel, but when I see the chaos, I relax: they’ll never catch me in this mess.
The elevators are shut down, so we take the stairs, scurrying up flight after flight. I gulp down air to mitigate the lactic acid burn in my quadriceps, determined to treat the endless climb like an exercise in Militia training—I can’t let the others beat me.
At last, we burst into a hallway, its ceiling molded into shapes that resemble upside-down waves. Yinha pounds on the frosted glass door to Dovetail’s new suite; Andromeda opens it, and we rush inside.
The suite has thick teal shag carpeting and a high dining table that extends out of the pale blue wall. An aquarium installed in the ceiling houses red, orange, black, and white goldfish. We gather our weapons, strip off our street clothes, and don our Militia gear. Despite how crowded it is, I give only a passing thought to modesty.
“Just to clarify, you won’t use those weapons except in self-defense, correct?” Andromeda sounds like a parent trying to keep her children under control. She paces as she speaks. “We’ve presented Dovetail as a movement founded on nonviolence, and I can’t have Battery Bay vloggers film you actively killing Pacifians when we haven’t even declared war on them.”
“Can’t guarantee we’ll sit this out.” Wes pulls on tattered black gloves and flexes his fingers. “Alex and I still have our Odan Sanctuarist duties.”
“I’m officially a Dovetailer,” Alex says, “but he’s got no good reason to listen to you.”
“True,” Wes says.
Andromeda paces back and forth, talking more to herself than to us. “To think you’ve risked your lives since you were practically children . . .”
She stops and slumps onto an ornate couch. An open suitcase lies by her feet. With pensive eyes, she looks out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the sea. I see faint yellow lights in a neat grid and the outlines of wings—a wall of aircraft heading our way.
Behind the menacing array of planes, the gargantuan city of Pacifia, with its familiar jagged outline, approaches Battery Bay. Cubic concrete buildings squat on either side of the wide boulevards, and the monorail winds around the city’s perimeter like a lasso.
“Look at that eyesore, Phaet,” Andromeda’s eyes never leave the window. “I can’t help but wish we had brought more people. It’s easier to face with a crowd behind you.”
Somehow I know she isn’t talking about just any Dovetail members. “Callisto?”
Andromeda’s mouth presses into a line, and she nods almost imperceptibly. “If it weren’t for her reputation, I’d have asked Asterion to allow her to accompany us.”
Her confession doesn’t shock me—she’s a mother, after all—but it makes me queasy. “Do you trust her?” I ask, remembering our strange conversation in the training dome.
Andromeda presses her knuckles against her heart. “In here, I do. In here, she’s a little girl with a toy sword who said she’d protect me no matter what. But I fear that she’s a Committee child through and through, that she wouldn’t have joined the revolution if I hadn’t. Bringing her here was too risky. I have to show Dovetail that principles run deeper than blood.”
I don’t have the heart, or the nerve, to point out that Callisto didn’t join Dovetail for Andromeda. She joined to save her own skin after the Committee linked her mother to the rebels. Dovetail would let her live. The loyalist side would have shown no mercy.
“Enough talk.” Andromeda looks out at Pacifia, the ever-approaching goliath. Her fingers toy with the handle of her suitcase. “Everyone, gather your things. We’re heading to Battery Bay’s lowest levels, beneath the water line. It’s our best hope of survival.”
Her calmness under pressure unnerves me. She’s hiding her anxiety, I realize. She spent four years as a Dovetail mole on the Committee; of course there’s a wall between her feelings and her face. After all this time, Lady A is too cold, too politically proficient—it’s why Dovetail chose the transparent, earnest Asterion to lead us instead.
I move to Wes’s side. “Should we go belowdecks?” I whisper to him.
“We won’t be any safer down there. Pacifia’s attacking from underwater, from the air, and on the sea’s surface, all at once,” Wes says. “And they’re just a few minutes out; we’ll never make it underground in time. But we can try to find an empty suite in the hostel. The Odans and Andromeda can stay there. The rest of us will fight.”
He and I share a long look. As a Sanc
tuarist, his duty is to repel invading troops and keep the Odan refugees safe. As a naturalized Odan citizen who’s partly responsible for their current homeless state, I feel obligated to join him. My allegiance to Dovetail shouldn’t stop me; my mother’s revolutionaries wouldn’t have me at all if the Odans hadn’t saved my life.
What would you do if you had all the time in the world? The memory’s a sucker punch to the gut. Neither of us anticipated that our time could end today.
Looking out at our foes, I see shiny, aerodynamic carbon-fiber ships with pliable midsections hovering over Pacifia like schooling skipjacks.
“Lunars,” I say, and sheathe an extra dagger in my boot. Shoving aside my distaste for laser weaponry, I walk to the room’s desk, where we’ve laid out a Militia weapons stash, and grab a Lazy. “Laser for laser. Reciprocal self-defense.”
“Phaet, we cannot let you out there,” Andromeda says. “You will take shelter with us underground. Please. The Moon needs you.”
“The Pacifians are sending submarines,” I say. “It’s more dangerous belowdecks. Stay in the hostel.”
She blinks. “We’ll stay, but I can’t let you fight.”
“You let her go to the Singularity,” Alex says. “You made her go.”
“That was different,” Andromeda counters. “That was a controlled environment; she had hundreds of troops to protect her. I doubt that your Militia training provided adequate information about foul-weather oceanic combat, Phaet.”
“I will choose when and how I risk my life.”
Andromeda opens her mouth in surprise but rapidly recovers. “I never said you couldn’t.”
A thrill zips up my spine. “Then I choose to protect the Odan refugees. They lost their home because they took me in when I had nowhere else to go. Lady A, the way you try so hard to keep me safe? That’s how I feel about them.”
“I owe them one too,” Yinha says softly. “I don’t want to commit insubordination, but—”
The entire building tips a degree or two, causing everyone to stumble.
“Did the enemy just send a tidal wave at us?” I say, on my hands and knees.
Wes shrugs and extends a hand to help me up. He’s remained steady, leaning against the wooden desk. “Consider it your introduction to floating city warfare.”
THE PACIFIAN AIRCRAFTS’ HIGH BEAM HEADLIGHTS pierce the vapor-saturated air. Even the weather is on their side: the rain has thinned to a drizzle that’ll sharpen the enemy’s aim.
Small water scooters straddled by gray-suited Pacifian foot soldiers snake across the ocean. Although we can’t see beneath the gray-green waves, we know submarines are approaching, deep underwater.
Clipped to ropes and pulleys, I perch on the outside wall of the hostel’s seventieth floor, about two-thirds of the way up the building. To avoid revealing that there are Lunars fighting among the Batterer troops, I’m wearing a Batterer soldier’s dark teal uniform over my mirrored suit and carrying an unwieldy Earthbound handgun as long as my forearm. The hostel’s ocean-view balconies have retracted, leaving a smooth surface that’s difficult to climb and easy to slip off. Like the rock-climbing wall in Militia training, however, it has ridges that can serve as handholds.
Our mission: protect the Odans who have taken shelter on this floor, deep in the building’s interior. The Sanctuarists have rigged the place with booby traps, but it’s hardly secure. At this moment, nowhere in the city is safe. Enemy aircraft could strike high floors, while submarines attack belowdecks. And the foot soldiers on water scooters are headed straight for “ground” level.
Hating myself for what I’m about to do, I raise my borrowed Earthbound handgun. Bang! The shot sends a Pacifian soldier tumbling into the ocean. The weapon’s kicking recoil—and my own guilt—crushes the air from my lungs.
I hate this, I hate this, I hate this.
But he would’ve killed the Odans and me.
I did it because I had to.
Along with the Sanctuarists and about a hundred Batterer soldiers, I must prevent enemy foot soldiers from infiltrating the hostel. Dozens of Pacifians have hopped off their water scooters and are climbing the exterior wall. I send three more bullets downward and score one hit. The unfamiliar gun handles like a twitching rodent, throwing off my aim.
To make matters worse, the two-hundred-meter drop between my feet and the black waves strikes terror in me every time I look down. Never mind that my rope’s automated belaying mechanism will catch me if I fall too fast, or that the magnets strapped around my ankles glue me to the metal wall. The water is there, and I can’t swim.
“Heads up!” shouts a Batterer soldier.
“They put a fizzing plane on the roof!” Yinha cries.
A flash of lightning rattles me to the bone; it illuminates dozens of foot soldiers sliding down on ropes just like ours. From hundreds of meters away, they look like innocuous bugs. Up close, they’ll be lethal. I try shooting at them with my Earthbound gun, but due to rain and gravity, the metal bullets slow their upward climb and fall back down before they reach their targets.
“Phaet! On your right!” Alex shouts.
I scoot to my left as something whizzes by my ear. The grenade that was meant for me hits a Batterer soldier two floors below, blowing a hole in the hostel wall and tossing the soldier’s mangled body into the air. I watch the corpse fall into the ocean with an insignificant splash, unable to tear my eyes away.
Focus. Swallowing bile, I reorient myself and assess the situation. With the advantage of gravity, the Pacifians have an easier time hitting us than vice versa. I have to rectify that. Taking a deep breath, I begin climbing and signal for Wes and Alex to do the same. Despite the risks, we need to take the higher ground.
“They’re descending too quickly!” Wes shouts. “And they’re killing every soldier in their way.”
The enemy is but forty meters above us. I can’t let them reach this level. Even if it means giving away our identities. Clipping my Earthbound handgun to my belt, I take out my Lazy and point it upward, knowing its ammunition is immune to rain and gravity. A continuous violet beam leaves its muzzle. I swing my arm in a wide arc, shooting the entire line of soldiers.
I shut my eyes, too, knowing that if I open them I’ll take my finger off the trigger. When I do, I see a row of burnt bodies thrown about by the wind, like dead spiders dangling from their webs.
“WONDERFUL,” ALEX SHOUTS FROM BELOW ME. Not even the wind can dissipate the bite in his tone. “Blastedly, phenomenally great!”
“Phaet saved us,” Wes points out. “For at least the next thirty seconds.”
“Anyone who saw that beam knows there are Loonies on board, Loonies fighting against Pacifia,” Alex says. “Loonies who can only be Dovetailers.”
There’s no room in my head to care about what’s coming next. I swore I’d never use lasers to kill. Not after watching one end my mother’s life. I want to hurl my blaster outward, to be swallowed by the ocean, but that would be suicide. Instead, I slide the cursed thing into a belt loop and vow not to use it again. My grip on the wall slackens, and I slide downward a meter and a half. I’d plunge into the sea if not for the magnets on my ankles and the rope around my waist.
Alex is still raging. “And now we’ve got a plane headed straight for—”
There’s a colossal clang as a midsize Batterer hovercraft magnetically latches on to the wall, right on the seventieth floor. It’s an older steel model with a bubble-like shape and rectangular wings that point diagonally upward.
Smaller, newer, more aerodynamic Batterer military hovercraft, painted in a blue-and-gray camouflage pattern, instantly surround the rogue vehicle to investigate. It takes off again, ripping out a chunk of wall, spraying metal and glass into the air. Fragments ping against my helmet, settle into the fabric of my Batterer uniform.
“Hang on, that’s not really a Batterer vehicle,”
Wes mutters.
I’ve got grudging admiration for whoever’s inside, Pacifians or Lunars. Without their deception—without our stupidity—they never would have gotten this close. And now they’ve left a gaping hole in the hostel wall. I scuttle toward the opening and breathe a sigh of relief when I see half a dozen Batterer soldiers already inside, fending off the enemy. Alex pulls himself up over the ledge and joins the troops. Wes swoops in too, using his rope as a pendulum.
Hovering in the air just out of range of the Batterer guns, the stolen craft’s hull opens like stiff flower petals unfolding, curved metal segments lifting back to reveal a hovering platform that holds perhaps thirty black-clad Lunar soldiers, Lazies at the ready.
The tall, slim flight leader stands. Pinned to his jacket is a SPECIAL AGENT badge instead of a Militia rank insignia. As a flash of lightning bleaches everything bone white, he leaps across from the platform into the hostel.
Blinded by the flash, I shoot at him and miss. No one else fares any better. But his followers choose less opportune times to make their exits. I nail one in the groin before seeing that the leader has taken off into the hostel—straight toward the Odans’ hiding place on the other side. He doesn’t spare a glance for the Lunar soldiers fighting and falling behind him.
This one clearly operates on his own, and I’m 80 percent sure of his identity. The other 20 percent is trying to deny that I’m right.
“Hold down the turf!” I shout to the Batterer soldiers. “Wes, Alex, we’ve got to stop the leader.”
My friends and I tail the tall Lunar soldier into the hallway. He runs in an unpredictable zigzagging pattern, so our shots miss and hit fine wallpaper or expensive-looking lava lamps instead. Footsteps echo behind us, and I curse internally as I realize that at least five Lunar soldiers made it past our Batterer allies. Now we’re the ones dodging bullets.
