by K. Gorman
He took a step forward, and his gun lifted.
“Shit!” Soo-jin sucked in a breath. “Shit, shit, shit, they’re going to shoot him!” She smacked her. “Do something!”
Beside her, Karin was having a hard time breathing. “Working on it.”
Her light flared under her palms—both of them. One of the soldiers’ heads turned her way, but she didn’t care, too focused on the bead of light that she collected on the roof of the sanctuary’s extended walkway.
Marc saw it, too. His head shifted.
The light dropped onto the lead soldier’s head and fastened into place like a full-head mask.
The blaster cracked. Light streaked.
But Marc was already diving. He hit the ground and rolled, dust rising as he scrabbled back to his feet.
He sprinted for the ship.
Frantic, Karin pulled on more light to cover the other two soldiers—one was definitely looking her way—and then rose. “Come on, this is our chance.”
Soo-jin took one look at her glowing hands, then grabbed her elbow and pulled her through the undergrowth. A blaster bolt hit a tree twenty feet to their left—a wayward shot, but close enough for sparks to crackle into their sight. They jumped ahead, branches cracking and snapping as they pushed through. Sharp pain spiked up from her bad knee again, and she sucked in a gasp as her ankle twisted on the uneven ground.
When they hit gravel, Soo-jin half-hauled, half-dragged a limping Karin to the ship.
Marc skidded in ahead of them. A hydraulic hiss sounded as the bottom hatch opened. He didn’t even bother to wait for the stairs—he made the jump, caught the lip, and pulled himself inside.
His wide-eyed gaze saw them coming, and he twisted around, ready to help. His hand caught Karin’s wrist as Soo-jin pushed her up. Then she wriggled in beside her. Their palms smacked the metal floor as they pulled themselves in.
He lunged for the door panel. As the hydraulics hissed again, several more blaster strikes flew through the air, going wide.
He gave a half-second’s glance at Karin’s glowing hands, then jumped to run down the hall. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. I’ll see about the engines.”
She didn’t have time to give him a nod. He wouldn’t have seen it. Instead, she curled her legs up to keep them inside the closing outer ramp. Soo-jin, Marc’s blaster in her hand, crept to the other side, then peeked around the side.
A blaster strike hit the top edge of the door. A spark of pain burned her skin as one of the offshoots landed on her arm.
Soo-jin ducked her head back in with a yelp. “Those three guys are coming back. Think you could light them up?”
“Not without seeing them.” She went to pull herself toward the door, but another blast struck its frame.
Soo-jin kicked the wall. “This stupid thing needs to close faster.”
It was half-up now, having had to reverse the partial-lowering of the stairs after Marc had initially opened it.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit,” Karin said. Movement caught her eye, though the soldier that appeared quickly hid behind the frame. Light fluctuated from her hands, some of it rising like little wisps that rippled into the air. Cool air pricked her skin from the half-closed doorway, reminding her of just how open it was. Outside, voices shouted. The faint glimmer of stars pricked the sky. “Hang on.”
She curled herself together, then pulled hard on her power.
The response was immediate.
Light flooded the scene, unfolding across the lot like a wave of plasma. It felt like a whumph of air hit her as it crashed in on her and the Nemina as its epicenter. Marc gave an alarmed shout in the bridge. Soldiers also shouted outside. More blasts struck the door, one hitting the ceiling. Sparks offshot from it, flaring heat as they fell in front of her face. Light warped around her in waves, undulating, recessing, coiling. Energy tingled through her body.
The door clicked shut.
Soo-jin’s hand found her wrist. “You okay?”
Karin couldn’t respond. All she could do was focus on her power, focus on keeping it pouring through her. It felt like she was holding her breath. If she let her focus go, the whole thing would collapse. She had to keep it lit.
The engines thrummed to life.
Soo-jin hesitated. Then her hand left Karin’s wrist. “I’ll be right back.”
Boots thumped heavily on the walkway as Soo-jin ran to the bridge.
Karin was alone.
Or, well, almost alone.
Even before he spoke, she felt his presence. Ethan stood in her light as if it were the most normal thing in the world. The entire corridor was white, the brightness of it reflecting off the metal and fixtures like bare definitions in a camera whose light meter had malfunctioned. The light wasn’t colored—it was pure, white, all colors. As such, all colors became a muted, warm presence within it.
She found she could see him. Soft green eyes stared from above her, appearing upside down like the rest of the hallway from her vantage point. Cool metal pressed to her cheek. She realized she was lying on the floor.
“Ethan?” she asked. “How—what?”
He shook his head. Then he moved his attention from her to the light around them, considering it. “That’s outside, too, isn’t it?”
She nodded. She could still feel it.
He glanced back up the other hallway, his eyes assessing. “You won’t need it much longer. They’re almost up, I think. I—”
The ship jerked. Without the vacuum of space to muffle them, the engines gave a hard whine, roaring into action with a ship-shuddering clunk like a motor suddenly propelled into high gear.
The next jolt slid her across the floor. She slammed hands-first into the opposite wall.
Her light blinked out in a flash.
When she looked back up, Ethan had vanished. He reappeared a few seconds later, fingers clutching the corner like a rock climber on a mountain’s edge. A thick frown cleaved his face, and his hair looked even more mussed than it usually did—Suns, had he hit something? The look in his eyes had turned from awe-struck wondering to deep alarm.
The ship careened drunkenly to the side. She slid back, hissing as the motion pressed in on her injuries. Something—were those trees?—smacked and scraped hard into the hull beneath her. She clung to the floor as it evened out, eyes widening. Another series of thwacks and cracks reverberated through the floor, this time accompanied by the sound of whining machinery.
Sol. They’re going to catch the landing gear in something.
Her brief flash of panic settled into a slow, resigned anger. Her muscles quivered. With a tentative wobble and a heavy hand on the now-sealed door, she pushed herself to her feet and staggered up the tilting hallway.
“Go find a place with a seatbelt,” she told Ethan, then thumped hard against the wall as the ship rocked. “I’m going to show these people how to fly.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Karin staggered to the bridge, clutching hard against the walls. Then, as the ship steadied out, she lunged for the closest fixed chair.
“I thought you people knew how to fly,” she grumbled, buckling herself in and snapping up a flight display onto the screen in front of her.
“Never said I flew well.” Marc, hands gripping the manual sticks like pipe wrenches, risked a glance her way as she pulled the co-pilot’s manual drive out from the dashboard. “On three?”
“Yeah. Three,” she said, then kicked the emergency switch at her feet.
An alarm sounded, and he gave a yelp as the ship dipped, the controls going limp in his hands. But Karin steadied it out a second later, easing them into a less-hectic path. Trees flew fast beneath them, giving her a dizzying sense of speed when she glanced through the viewscreen. She took a moment to study their course history.
“Any reason we’re going around the mountain?” she asked.
“I preferred not to go through it,” he said.
He looked a lot more relaxed now, watching their course
on the monitor. Soo-jin, too, seemed a little less worried.
“You guys seriously can’t fly?” she asked. “What the hell did you do before I came along?”
“We can fly in straight lines. Docking, take-offs, with the help of the computer. We know how to get her up in the air and fly it around. The computer usually takes care of most of it.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Guessing there’s no computer model for ‘get us the fuck out of here’?”
“Alas, no.”
She shook her head—of all the skills she’d thought she’d use in this ship, her elective in defensive flying had not been one of them—then returned her gaze to the screens. They were approaching a lake. The trees had dropped away from them now. With the darkening sky casting the area in a deep, dark blue, the scene put an almost-immediate sense of peace over her. She sat back in the chair and adjusted her grip.
For a moment, the cabin was quiet.
Movement caught the corner of her eye. Ethan, eyes wide and his face awash in the colors of the bridge’s screens, crept inside.
“I thought I told you to find a crash seat,” she said.
“This was the closest one,” he said, slinking carefully to where one folded out of the wall.
Right. She gave her head a shake and refocused on their course. “So, where are we going? Orbit? Back to Bau?”
“Ideally, somewhere we can set her down and hide out for a bit.” Marc turned. “Soo-jin, anyone on our tail?”
“Not as far as I can tell. We ran pretty quick.”
“Let’s hope any planet tracking systems are down.” She swung to the far side of the lake. They were still too close to the sanctuary to land—their heat signature alone would make them easily visible through the trees. “Soo-jin, can you find me a place? This planet got any big, deep, uninhabited caves?”
In the end, they settled on the rocky instep of a cliff about five hundred miles up the coast with some very thick forest between them and the nearest outpost. After piloting them down into the sand, Karin flung herself back into the seat, massaged her wrists, and let herself relax.
Around her, the bridge fell quiet. Neither Marc nor Soo-jin, nor Ethan by the wall, rose from their seats.
But she could feel their attention on her.
“Guess my secret’s out now, huh?” she said.
“Girl, you lit that whole place up,” Soo-jin said. “I give them maybe three hours before they have your picture plastered on every planetary and satellite feed.”
“Not to mention ours, plus the Nemina’s ID tags.” Marc leaned his head back, then glanced her way. “I disabled our broadcast, in case you were wondering.”
Soo-jin poked at her controls. “We’re gonna have to install an anonymizer on this thing.”
“She used to have one,” Marc commented. “It was stripped with the rest of the stuff.”
“Cookie could put one back on,” Soo-jin said. “I could too, probably. There’s some good guides around.”
“Could you fudge the ident tags, too?” he asked.
“No.”
He leaned back with a resigned sigh. “Then we have a problem.”
A small silence settled in the cabin while the three of them thought on that. Karin, who’d been mentally tallying her current injuries, opened her eyes as she realized they were both looking at her.
Fear struck her heart, instinctive. She immediately stiffened.
Oh, Gods, thought a small part of her brain. They’re going to turn me in.
But then, the rest of her brain caught up with the conversation.
“You’re still thinking of jail-breaking him?” she asked. “Even with the military on us?”
“By my estimate, if we go quick enough, loop back around—they might not expect that. Might take them time to get the alerts up. One hand talking to the other, you know? And maybe they’ll be too busy trying to figure out what you did back there. Some might explain it away as a weird flash bomb,” Marc mused aloud.
“Except for the part where I healed people.”
“Except for that.”
“Technically, they didn’t see that part,” Soo-jin pointed out. “Dude walked in on us after you’d done your thing.”
She arched a brow. “So they’ll be looking for the both of us?”
“To cover their bases? Yeah, probably.” Soo-jin sighed. Leaning forward in a hunch, she narrowed her eyes at the screen, though Karin didn’t think she was really looking at it.
Then she turned to cast her attention across the bridge. “Hey, Ethan—you did good back there.”
“Uh…” He squirmed under the sudden attention. “Thanks.”
“Forgot to mention that until now.” She stifled a yawn. “How’d you get back on the ship, by the way?”
“Left the Mess as soon as that guy came in.” He met her eyes. “He got pretty distracted when he saw the people waking up. And those other kids covered for me.”
“You just walked back to the ship?” she asked. “Right past their other ship?”
“Yeah. I figured something was going to happen, so I left. Why?”
There was a small silence in the bridge as they all got a mental picture of Ethan walking casually out into the sanctuary’s lot, perfectly visible in the lights.
“That’s actually kind of funny,” Marc said. “He got in right before the alert went up.”
“We didn’t even see him,” Karin said, then glanced to Soo-jin. “Must have been just after we went through the window, when we were on the side.”
“I walked by the room you’d been in, but you weren’t there,” Ethan said.
“Huh.”
They pondered that for a few more moments. Then Soo-jin adjusted her hunched posture and turned her attention back to the screen in front of her, hands moving over its control panel. “So, where’s Cookie at?”
“Nuenbar, according to the poster.” Marc flipped it up on his netlink and transferred it to her screen. “It’s on the north side, I think.”
“Yeah. An ex-penitentiary. Heard some of my friends talking about it.” She tapped a few keys and frowned up at the changing display. “Apparently, they’re renovating one of the old high schools for the Lost. Putting bars on the windows and the like.”
“It’s a good idea. They don’t need the containment that crooks do,” Marc said. “Plus it looks better than stuffing them in prisons.”
Karin, however, grimaced. There were a few infamous torture prisons in Old Earth’s history that had been high schools before.
This, she assumed, was different.
“I’m not sure the Alliance cares about looks at this point…” Soo-jin trailed off, one finger tapping an empty space in the console. “Give it a sec,” she continued. “I’m routing it through my netlink to hide the signature.”
A few seconds later, the screen shifted. Soo-jin pushed the information onto the main screen, and Karin suddenly found herself squinting up at an aerial view of the prison, taken from what looked to be a satellite image.
“So,” Soo-jin said. “Anyone have a plan?”
The nano treatment flooded her skin and drove a numbness through her blood that slowly crept across the underside of her skull. The pain from her knee was gone, along with the bruising and stiffness that had risen since their flight from Songbird. The cut on her head tingled like beads in a rain stick.
Must have hit it harder than I thought.
She shivered and blinked hard, stamping her feet to ward off the dissociation that came with nanos. The penitentiary’s white lights cast a soft glow over the streets around her, mingling with the regular orange-yellow of the streetlights. Houses lined the street in a similar low, single-level fashion to the ones she’d seen facing Estbrook station, which was probably to be expected around here. With Nuenbar as a neighbor, the people who’d designed the fancy condos on the Hegir-Nuna waterfront were probably not eager for any redevelopment projects here. Property values were permanently crippled.
It was even
bigger than it had looked from the air. Hard-edged concrete rose up in twenty stories of smooth walls and tiny windows, capped on the corners by towers that had almost a classical sense to them by the way their tops curved round. With the white paint putting a lighter face on its brutalist vibe, it almost looked like one of the Skydorms.
Until one saw the fences, at least. Old-school chain-link surrounded it, topped with razor wire and littered with signs that had small, stylized lightning bolts on them. There were no flashing lights to warn that the fence was live, but that—the banality of it—seemed to make it even more notorious.
Idly, she wondered how many birds had been electrocuted for sitting on it.
Not many, probably. She glanced back up. It was probably a bit hard for them to get their feet, let alone their fluffy butts, between the razor wire.
Stifling a yawn, she resisted the urge to check her netlink. Marc and Soo-jin had gone in about ten minutes ago. They’d walked right in through the open gate, only stopping for a brief chat with the two guards positioned on either side before they’d gone through.
If all went well, she wouldn’t have to go in at all.
Hah. Like anything’s gone well tonight.
Her stomach churned. Tense with nerves, she shivered into her jacket again, keeping an impatient eye on the entrance. This was the only entrance and exit—unless they wanted to actually attempt a jailbreak and cut through the electrified fence.
Though maybe the military had turned off the electricity. After all, the Lost weren’t criminals. She could easily picture one of them wandering into the fence by accident, in that shuffling, idle way of theirs.
They didn’t want to kill citizens, did they?
Guess it depended on just how much the city needed its people back. The Lost were probably a pretty big burden to keep, and, although they seemed pretty mellow now, there was no telling just what they might do, should they become more… ambitious.
Her netlink buzzed in her hand. Still on the edge of the Nemina’s network, she turned away from the gate’s lights and took shelter behind the wall of the dark-windowed convenience store that neighbored the prison, making sure she was well out of sight before she rolled up the message.
