The Gauntlet

by Megan Shepherd

  Fian paused, as though further explanation were on the tip of his tongue, but then he thought better of it. He glanced at Cassian.

  “In a way . . . we were fortunate our plans failed,” Cassian said between unsteady breaths. “They would have . . . killed Cora to keep her from running the Gauntlet.”

  Leon’s eyes went wide. “Uh, shit.”

  Both Fian and Cassian looked at him curiously.

  Leon exchanged an uneasy glance with Mali. “That’s why we’re here. To get you. Cora’s going to run the Gauntlet on Drogane.”

  Cassian coughed his surprise. Uncloaked and wounded, he couldn’t hide how much this information affected him. “The Gauntlet?”

  “She’s on Drogane right now with Anya and Bonebreak,” Mali explained. “The Gauntlet module is probably already there. It starts in around twelve days. She still intends to run it. Bonebreak has agreed to be her sponsor, but we do not trust him. We need you. An intelligent species member we can trust.”

  Cassian tried to straighten, wincing as he put his weight on his scarred limbs. “We have to get to Drogane,” he said. “Now. There’s . . . a flight room . . . on this level.”

  Leon eyed Cassian doubtfully. He barely looked strong enough to cross the room, let alone cross the galaxy. But with Fian’s help, they were able to move through the hallways, while Mali covered them with kill-dart guns drawn. The halls were empty; all of Arrowal’s troops were battling on the lower level.

  At last, they reached the flight room.

  “I won’t forget this, Fian,” Cassian said, resting a hand on the Kindred’s shoulders. “Whatever happens, your loyalty is acknowledged.”

  Leon flinched. It still felt wrong to see Cassian thanking the enemy—even if he knew that this Fian wasn’t the same one who’d betrayed him.

  “Here,” Leon said, handing Fian the sack of kill-dart guns. “These are for Tessela. She needs them.”

  They helped Cassian climb into the ship, and then Leon climbed up the ladder behind Mali. It was tight inside, the size of a fighter jet, just one seat in front and room for supplies in the back, where he and Mali crawled. Cassian eased into the pilot’s seat, wincing.

  “Stay low,” he breathed. “Try . . . to keep your balance centered. These ships are meant to be solo units. They’re . . . sensitive to movement. Fast, but they require frequent stops to recharge. We’ll just make it in time.”

  He closed the roof and hit some controls. From somewhere deep in the station came more gunfire. Mali sat in front of Leon, and he wanted to draw her close, wrap his arms around her, and breathe in the smell of her hair, but he knew she’d never tolerate it. He slid the sack around to his front. The sharp edges of the provision pack inside pressed against his fingers. What the hell was in it?

  Cassian handed them some pills—oxygen adjusters that would let them breathe on Drogane. Then he hit a few more controls, and the ship rumbled and lifted off. It rocked violently—Cassian hadn’t been joking about balance. Leon and Mali both gripped on to either side of the narrow cockpit, steadying themselves. Cassian steered them to the port.

  The flight room disappeared behind them.

  Leon dared a glance back, the slightest turn of his head, not wanting to risk unbalancing the ship more. From the exterior, the aggregate station looked as perfect as it always did. If he hadn’t known better, he’d never imagine a battle was waging within.

  He reached forward and squeezed Mali’s shoulders.

  Then Cassian hit another control, and the vessel shot forward so fast that everything went black.

  19

  Cora

  THE STORM ON DROGANE’S surface raged ceaselessly. But in the sheltered belly of the mountain, the only change Cora could sense was a dampness seeping through the stone. Her eyes drifted constantly to the clock the Mosca children had made for her: seven human days left until the Gauntlet began. Then five. Then three. Reports filtered in that the modules had finished constructing themselves. The various delegations’ ships were entering the outer edges of Drogane’s solar system.

  The Gauntlet was nearly here.

  Right up until the final day, she trained long and hard, running up and down Tern’s spiraling ramps twenty times, then thirty. She practiced telekinetically lifting heavier and heavier objects, as Bonebreak had suggested. First an empty clay pot the size of her fist, then a stone statue the size of her head, then a chair that weighed about thirty pounds. She tried to lift a potted fern that must have weighed one hundred pounds—nearly her own weight—but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t so much as make it wobble without pain throbbing in the back of her head, forcing her to ease off.

  Now, from the edge of Ironmage’s balcony, she noticed through her goggles that Tern seemed more active than usual. More Mosca were out on the streets. They moved faster than normal, not exchanging greetings with one another, hurrying to their destinations.

  Ironmage came out, looking over the activity. “Tensions are high because of the impending Gauntlet,” he explained. “We Mosca don’t like it, as a rule. No one wants the Intelligence Council on our doorstep. At least five smuggling units have had to suspend operations until they leave.” He adjusted a setting on his mask. “Lucky for you, the storm has bought you a little extra time. The Kindred and Axion and Gatherer delegates cannot land until it lessens. Their ships are in a holding pattern in the outer atmosphere, waiting.” He looked up at the stone ceiling as though he could judge what was happening beyond. “Half a day, maybe.”

  She let out a tight breath.

  He pinched her arm, feeling the muscle that had grown there, and let out a grunt of approval. “You have trained well. My brother and I, we believe you might actually win this thing. Your chances are low, of course, but not impossible.”

  “Thanks,” she muttered.

  He patted her arm and left.

  She chewed on her lip, anxious. Half a day. Not much time. She turned to the potted palm, taking a deep breath. If she didn’t figure out how to lift it, she might fail the Gauntlet as soon as she’d started it.

  She walked over to the fern and tried to lift it physically, judging its weight again. Her arms strained. She stepped back and rubbed her sore palms.

  Cassian hadn’t prepared her to lift anything this heavy. The thought of him triggered a torrent of worry, and she sucked in a breath. Why wasn’t he here yet? Had something gone wrong with Mali and Leon’s rescue mission? Her imagination filled with gruesome images of his torture. A flood of guilt rushed in behind it, and then longing. She’d give anything to have him here with her, his arms circling her waist, his whispered reassurances in her ear.

  She closed her eyes.

  Focus on the fern, she told herself. Focus on what you can do now.

  She opened her eyes slowly, held her palms flat, and tried as best she could to turn her thoughts from Cassian to the potted fern. A few white fronds ruffled. She gritted her teeth together and focused hard on the heavy pot, willing it to rise. A spark of pain tickled the back of her mind and she released her hold.

  “You’re not doing it right.”

  Anya stood in the balcony door, pointing at the potted fern.

  “What do you mean?” Cora said. “I’m doing it exactly how we practiced.”

  “Yeah, but we’ve been practicing with little things. Pebbles and coins. Things Cassian trained you to move, because that’s the way that the Kindred train their young.” Anya eyed the potted fern closely. “But this takes other techniques.”

  “I thought there was only one technique. Concentrate and lift.”

  “Only one Kindred technique, yeah,” Anya said. She came onto the balcony. “But our minds don’t work the same as theirs. When it comes to little things it doesn’t much matter what technique you use, but with bigger things, it matters a lot.” She walked around the fern, flicking its fronds playfully. “Cassian told you not to push your mind too hard, didn’t he?”

  Cora nodded.

  “See, that’s what th
e Kindred don’t understand. Because humans don’t cloak our emotions, we can’t ever concentrate as hard as they can. Our emotions are always clouding everything, which means we actually have to push our minds even harder to match their level of perceptive ability.”

  Cora folded her arms, chewing on a lip. “Cassian said if I pushed my mind too hard, it could tear permanently.” She paused before adding, “He said that’s what happened to you.”

  Anya’s expression went flat. Her small hand curled tightly around the fern. “He was wrong.”

  “But your hands,” Cora said, motioning to the way Anya’s hands shook. “And in the Temple, you were practically delirious.”

  “Delirious because of the Kindred drugs,” Anya insisted. “Not because I pushed my mind too far. Pushing my mind to the brink was the only thing that kept me alive in there.” She chewed on her lip, as though reliving bad memories.

  Cora hesitated. She still couldn’t shake the feeling that Anya wasn’t all there—that her mind was slightly off somehow. She glanced toward the house. Inside, Willa was playing with the Mosca children, oblivious to what was happening on the balcony.

  I’m being paranoid, Cora told herself. Anya’s just trying to help.

  Anya pointed to the fern. “Go ahead. Try it.”

  Cora focused on the heavy fern. Before, she had used caution when reaching out toward objects with her mind. But she was out of time. Now she pushed aside that caution and projected her thoughts as hard as she could. Not reaching delicately for the plant, but snatching for it. Instant pain ricocheted through her head, and she hissed but ignored it and pushed harder. The potted fern trembled. It rose an inch.

  Cora was so surprised that she dropped her focus, and the fern crashed to the floor, cracking the pot.

  “See?” Anya grinned. “Don’t think like a Kindred. Feel like a human.”

  Cora pulled off her goggles and shook out her hair, raking her fingers against her aching temples. Her head was throbbing. But still, she’d done it. Which meant maybe she could do it again in the Gauntlet. In the sudden darkness, she noticed that the dripping sound of storm water filtering through the mountain’s crust had lessened. She leaned over the railing, listening.

  “The storm must have broken,” Anya observed.

  Cora let out a long breath. “That means the delegates will start to land. I’ll have to go up to the surface.” She turned to Anya in the dark. “Cassian still isn’t here. I’m worried about him. And about you and Willa, too. Once I go into that Gauntlet, Bonebreak and Ironmage will have no need of you anymore. What’s to stop them from selling you while everyone is distracted? And . . .” She suppressed a shiver. “I can’t shake the feeling that Fian and Arrowal have something else planned. Something bad.”

  Anya rested a hand reassuringly on Cora’s arm. “Your job is to worry about the puzzles,” she said. “Let us worry about what the other species might be planning. You’ll be in there, but we’ll be outside. Technically, I’m a ward of Bonebreak’s now”—she tapped her hard thumb badge against the railing—“which means I can join him and Ironmage as part of the Mosca delegation. We’ll observe your progress from the recess rooms. Assuming you make it to the break after each round, we’ll be able to talk, and let you know about anything we discover.”

  Cora smiled. “Thanks. That makes me feel better.”

  She slid the goggles back over her head as Ironmage and Bonebreak emerged from the house, dressed not in their rust-red jumpsuits, but in crimson-red ceremonial shielding.

  She sniffed the air. They looked nice but still smelled rotten.

  “It is time,” Bonebreak said. “We must go now, in the storm’s eye. The official Mosca delegation has already made its way to the surface. They are awaiting us.”

  Ironmage held out a simple set of black clothes. “Put these on. They are embedded with nanocircuitry that the stock algorithm will use to track your progress.”

  Cora hesitated before taking the clothes.

  No more time to train. No more time for Cassian to land and reassure her that everything would be okay.

  She was going to have to do this alone.

  She felt a heavy hand on her shoulder and turned to find Willa behind her. The chimp gave her a long nod, her dark brown eyes wordlessly reassuring her. She handed Cora a scrap of paper.

  I have not wanted to tell you about what happened to me in the Gauntlet because I feared the same might happen to you. The truth is, I lost the one thing that mattered most to me: my identity. The moral puzzle in module eight forced me to face the fact that I was no longer a chimpanzee, but neither was I a human. It shattered any hope I had of ever belonging. And I fear that you might lose what matters most to you too. But I do not fear that anymore. I believe you can do this.

  Cora smiled.

  No, she wasn’t completely alone.

  She went inside to change behind the curtain that divided the bedroom area and cooking area. Ironmage’s children were on the other side, making strange beeping noises. She pulled back the curtain to watch them playing some kind of laser tag game. The youngest one tackled the others, and they all erupted in giggles.

  She let the curtain fall.

  If it hadn’t been for their curved backs and odd way of walking, she could almost have imagined they were human children. Memories of home flooded her mind. Once, she and Charlie had dressed up their dog, Sadie, in fairy wings. They’d played fetch all morning in the big yard beneath the oak trees, laughing, telling each other that every time Sadie brought back the ball it was a wish granted. What do you wish for? she’d asked Charlie. He’d smiled and thrown out his arms. To fly! And she had laughed too, picking up Sadie and giving her a kiss between her floppy ears. I wish to be famous. A famous singer with my songs on the radio!

  Now, as she dressed, she shook her head at how carefree she’d been. In a way, she’d gotten her wish. She was important—an entire species’s survival depended on her. But famous? No one even knew she was alive. And, she realized, maybe it was better that way.

  “Home means loved ones . . . ,” she sang quietly, “and good times and shelter from gloom.”

  She pictured Fian as she’d seen him on Armstrong, so cold in his cloaked emotions, and yet she had been able to feel his simmering anger just beneath the surface. She represented a threat to Fian’s superior way of life. To the menageries, to the enclosures, to the system that kept Kindred like him powerful and dominant.

  She pressed a hand to her throat, fighting against the phantom feeling of suffocation.

  She had survived the bridge accident.

  She had survived eighteen months in Bay Pines.

  She had survived being imprisoned by an alien species.

  And she would survive this.

  She pushed back the curtain and met the others on the balcony. “I’m ready.”

  20

  Cora

  FIERCE WIND HOWLED AS they neared the transit hub that led to Drogane’s surface. Cora shielded her face from the sleeting rain that blew in from the hub’s enormous gates. “I thought you said the storm had lessened!” she called to Bonebreak.

  “This is lessened!” he answered.

  The storm was a wall of angry gray rain that made Cora, Anya, and Willa shield their faces. Before, when Cora had gone to the surface to tour the Gauntlet’s module with Bonebreak, the planet had so reminded her of a summer day on Earth that it had made her heart ache. But now, the mountains weren’t visible. The whipping wind howled at an almost deafening level.

  “Wait over there, away from the gates!” Bonebreak called, waving them away from the exposed entrance. “Your weak human bodies will be bruised!”

  Ironmage strode into the exposed section, rain bouncing off his thick rubber shielding and mask. He flicked at a sharp shard of ice that struck a bare patch of skin like he was shooing away a mosquito. Cora watched him disappear into the storm. Every once in a while, she caught sight of a few flashing cerulean-blue lights in the distance.

&n
bsp; She drew in a sharp breath.

  It had to be the Kindred delegates’ ship docking with the Gauntlet.

  In another moment, a circular orb appeared out of the haze: one of the rover spheres. Ironmage steered the rolling vehicle to the sheltered side of the transit hub. A dozen of the complex Mosca gears unlocked themselves, and the rover sphere cracked open like an egg.

  “Climb in,” he called.

  They clambered into the orb, which had a circular bench around the perimeter. Anya sat by herself on one side, knees drawn in to her chest, her fingers once again still. Ironmage leaned forward to press some controls in the center of the orb, steering it so that they rolled smoothly out of the transit hub gates. They passed the other rover sphere stalls, but only one remained. The Mosca delegates must have taken the others.

  Ironmage steered the rover sphere up a ramp that led to the planet’s surface. The wind tried to bat around the vehicle, but Ironmage steered it carefully down the valley track, its ridges locking with the gaps in the track for stability, until a tall structure loomed before them. Cora wiped away condensation from the rover’s windows and stared up at a wall of metal.

  “That’s it,” Cora told Anya and Willa. “That’s the Gauntlet.”

  They all peered through the windows. In the raging storm, the Gauntlet looked imposing and monolithic. There were no more shifting parts, no deconstructed cubes. It was whole.

  Near the Gauntlet’s base, a port opened just wide enough for them to roll inside. Through the rover sphere’s window, Cora made out a small garage where the other rovers were parked, as well as vehicles that must belong to the other species. One was a small transport with glowing blue lights and sandstone-colored panels.

  She pulled off her goggles. “The Kindred are here.”

  “Yes,” Ironmage said. The heavy garage door closed, sealing out the storm. Ironmage hit the controls, and the egg-vehicle cracked open again. “All the delegates are here. We are last to arrive.”