The Gauntlet

by Megan Shepherd

  “You mean that without the enhanced strength of the paragon burst, I don’t stand a chance.”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  Memories of the first four puzzles washed through Cora’s head, along with a wave of pain. She hissed in a sharp breath and closed her eyes, feeling dizzy. Cassian’s hand on her shoulder tightened to steady her. When she opened them again, everyone in the room was staring at her.

  Cora glanced at the clock on the wall: only a sliver remained green. “Why do the Axion even care if I win or not? I’m a human—I’m no threat to them.”

  “They care because once a species wins the Gauntlet,” Serassi explained, “it triggers a change in the entire species. We call it an ‘evolutionary jump.’ Evolution is more complicated than you have learned on Earth. It is not only a biological change that occurs over millennia, but also a spiritual one. Once one member of a species attains intelligent status, it opens the door for the others. For some who are already highly gifted, like Anya, they will see an immediate change. Others will take more time, but the result will be the same. If you win the Gauntlet, your entire species will become more powerful.”

  Cora blinked through the incredible things Serassi had just said. “Even so, humanity would still be in its infancy. We’d still be no threat.”

  “That is correct,” Serassi said evenly. “You would not be a threat. But the Kindred are not in our infancy. We are the peacekeepers, the police, the army of the universe. We have the best chance of defeating the Axion.”

  “But how would elevating humans elevate the Kindred, too?” Cora asked.

  Serassi cocked her head. Her eyes slowly went to Cassian, and Cora got a creeping feeling that she was missing something very important.

  “You never told her?” Serassi asked.

  Cora whipped her head around to Cassian. “Didn’t tell me what?”

  He swallowed.

  A crazy premonition entered her mind. Her eyes traced over the curve of his throat, his lips, his jaw. She’d noticed from the first day the startling similarities between their species, but the differences—their black eyes, their large size—had been impossible to ignore. Surely, Serassi couldn’t be suggesting what Cora imagined. . . .

  “Humans and Kindred,” Cassian said slowly, “are the same species.”

  30

  Cora

  CASSIAN’S WORDS HIT CORA like a slap in the face. She sat heavily on the bench. The others seemed equally stunned. Leon flexed his hands, seeming to compare them with Serassi’s larger ones. Bonebreak and the other Mosca whispered to one another in words Cora couldn’t understand.

  “Same species?” Cora repeated.

  “Not exactly identical, of course,” Cassian clarified, keeping his gaze just slightly away from hers. “We derive from the same ancestral species: Homo erectus. Our DNA is similar enough that if a human wins the Gauntlet, both our species will experience the evolutionary jump.”

  “That can’t be.” Cora shook her head. “You told me that you were an astral species, not a terrestrial one.”

  He glanced at Serassi. “That has been true of us for the last twenty thousand years, but we originated on Earth. I told you that we owe our intelligence to the Gatherers, who long ago elevated us to live among the stars. It was Earth where they found us. Our two species had already branched apart. You Homo sapiens were smaller and faster—you spread more quickly across the continents. Our ancestors were Neanderthals, larger and smarter, but in danger of annihilation. That was when the Gatherers took us. That is why we among the Fifth of Five care so strongly about your species. Because Earth is our planet, too, or at least it was once. You are kin to us.”

  She stared at him as though he were speaking a foreign language.

  “Only a few know,” Cassian added, still not meeting her gaze. “I learned myself when I became the leader of the Fifth of Five—it is a closely guarded secret. The Intelligence Council does not wish to reveal that Kindred are related to a lesser species. I intended to tell you, but you hated me so viciously after you thought I betrayed you that you wouldn’t have believed me.” He paused and then spoke more softly. “I always knew that your plan to cheat the Gauntlet wouldn’t work—cheating wouldn’t have triggered the evolutionary jump. But you didn’t want to hear it. If the Council hadn’t stopped your plan, I would have had to find a way to do so myself.”

  “What about the paragon burst? Isn’t that cheating?”

  “Not as long as it is composed only of human DNA,” Serassi said.

  Cora spun to face her. “You aren’t part of the Fifth of Five. Why do you care about helping humans?”

  “I do not,” she answered flatly. And then she cocked her head. “Let me rephrase that: I have been a friend to Anya and Mali, in my own way. I have always been fair in my dealings with humans, I have served diligently as Chief Genetics Officer overseeing human health, I have even tended to your own wounds on multiple occasions. It is my duty as a Kindred to protect lesser species, and I take that responsibility seriously. But care? No, I do not personally care about helping humans evolve. You are merely a necessary piece of the puzzle. This is the only way to make us evolve, too.”

  Cora narrowed her eyes. Technically the Kindred didn’t lie, but she could still selectively twist the facts. Something still sat uneasy with Cora. She paced back and forth.

  “So if your plan works, and the Kindred become powerful enough to stop the Axion, what’s to stop the Kindred from attempting to become the most powerful race yourselves?” Her question was directed toward Serassi, but her gaze went to Cassian.

  A quiet spread through the room.

  “We have no interest in domination,” Cassian stated.

  “That isn’t what Fian and Arrowal seem to think,” Cora countered.

  “Fian and Arrowal are Axion in disguise,” Cassian said. “The real Fian is, at this very moment, risking his life in battle on the aggregate station.”

  “It’s true,” Leon added. “We saw it ourselves.”

  Cora made the mistake of meeting Cassian’s eyes—so clear, so blue, so obvious in that moment that he wasn’t entirely alien. “You have to trust me, Cora,” he said. “I am not lying about this. My cards are all on the table. The Kindred do not wish for domination. Not I, not Serassi, not any of us.”

  He held out his hands palms up. She thought about their training sessions in the Hunt, when she had taught him how to lie. Right now, he wasn’t bluffing.

  Above the doorway, the timekeeper clock gave an audible click. Time was almost out. Any moment, the impostor Fian would come to collect Cora.

  Serassi uncapped the syringe, eyes on the clock. “We can wait no longer. The effects of this paragon burst will not be immediate; it might take one or two puzzles before the effects settle. Until then, you may feel disoriented.”

  Cora glanced at the needle, then at the clock. Did she trust what Serassi and Cassian were saying? Did she have a choice?

  “Wait.” All eyes turned to Mali, who had been silent but now stepped forward. “I assume you have Nok and Rolf’s DNA samples in that vial.”

  Serassi nodded.

  Mali glanced over her shoulder at Leon. “But you do not have mine or Leon’s.” She began to roll up her sleeve. “The stock algorithm chose us because of our unique traits. Leon’s strength and his artistic aptitude. My adaptability and keen senses.” She held her bare arm out. “I want to contribute.”

  “Mali,” Cora said, “we don’t even know if this will work.”

  Mali shot her a stiff look. “I do not mean to offend you, but”—her eyes traveled from the bloodstains around Cora’s nose to the bruises covering her body—“you need all the help you can get.”

  Leon snorted. He came over and shoved back his sleeve too. “Mali has a good point. That vial can’t hold all of humanity’s strengths if it doesn’t have any of my DNA.”

  Cora rolled her eyes.

  “Hang on,” Bonebreak said. He rooted around in his pocket
, then produced a tangled lock of dark hair. “Here’s more. From, you know, the other one.”

  Cora stared at him. “From Lucky? You stole hair off his dead body?”

  Bonebreak looked toward the ground sheepishly. “In case we needed money in a pinch. What do you call it? For a rainy day.”

  Cora made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat, but then she threw her hands up. “Fine.” From beyond the door, she could hear footsteps approaching. She nodded to Serassi.

  Serassi replaced the syringe tips with different, larger ones from the tool belt at her uniform’s waist. Moving quickly, she sterilized Mali’s and Leon’s arms, then drew their blood and took a sample from Lucky’s hair.

  The footsteps outside the door stopped.

  “Lift up your hair and turn around,” Serassi told Cora. “Quickly.”

  Cora swept her hair to the side and felt the press of the cold needle at the base of her skull. There was a pinch as the needle punctured and then a painful warmth as the paragon burst spread through the blood vessels at the back of her head. She massaged the throbbing sensation, but it only seemed to latch harder onto her brain, searing her neurons with fire.

  “It feels weird,” Cora said. “It hurts.”

  Serassi had already taken apart the vial and syringe and was replacing it in her tool belt, as though nothing had happened, when the knock came at the door.

  Cora’s vision was starting to fade in and out of focus. A dull roar seemed to surround her, as if a stadiumful of people were cheering between her ears. She took a step and stumbled.

  “Serassi, something’s wrong.”

  “It is a new drug,” Serassi explained. “This technique has never been tested. I do not know the exact effects. Your body needs time to adapt to the compound.”

  “She doesn’t have time,” Cassian growled.

  Cora felt hands shaking her. Everything moved suddenly too fast and then too slow. The roar increased. Whispers. How were there so many voices? Where were they coming from?

  Someone knocked harder at the door.

  The roar grew, and Cora clamped her hands over her ears. She realized the voices were coming from inside her head. From hundreds—thousands—of strains of human DNA in the injection Serassi had given her. It was as if her body weren’t her own anymore. As if thousands of other legs were inside her feet. Thousands of other voices in her head.

  Mali opened the door.

  Fian waited on the other side, hand raised to knock again. No—not Fian. Now that Cora knew he was an Axion, the little glimpses of emotion he let slip seemed so obvious, like the trace of contempt he now wore when he tilted his chin to the lights. How had she ever believed this creature was a Kindred?

  He smiled darkly when he saw her ashen complexion. “Time for round two, Gauntleteer.”

  31

  Leon

  LEON WATCHED CORA ENTER the Gauntlet with a sick feeling in his stomach. He hated the Gauntlet’s claustrophobic rooms, and the central vestibule was the worst. All those monitors giving off a sickly light, that low hum that worked its way into his head until he thought he’d go crazy. Even worse was the way the four Chief Assessors stared so passively at the monitors’ scrolling lines of coding, as though they were watching a weather report, not Cora’s life-or-death progress. Now she was in there again, the portal door sealed shut, enduring God knew what. Puzzle five could be killing her. The injection Serassi had given her might have fried her brain. She could be writhing in pain, and those damn judges would just stare.

  Mali rested a hand on his shoulder, as though sensing his worry. “There’s nothing we can do for her. Cora is on her own until the next break.” She dropped her voice. “Besides, we have our own puzzles to solve. Willa thinks she may have discovered something.”

  Leon glanced over his shoulder toward the Mosca recess room, where Cassian was standing in the doorway, staring coldly at Fian as though he were fantasizing about shaking the Axion until his disguise melted off. A sentiment Leon shared.

  “Come on,” Mali pressed.

  Leon reluctantly returned to the recess room. Anya had left to see if she could overhear anything useful from the other delegations, but the Mosca and everyone else were congregated around the back wall, where Willa was scrawling on paper.

  Leon looked over their shoulders at the note.

  I learned much about the Axion while they were experimenting on me. They are sensitive to high-pitched frequencies—which is why the Intelligence Council ordered that their genetic implants be set to emit certain tones. But frequencies can do more than just announce when one is disguised. A high-enough frequency would disrupt Axion brain waves to the extent that they would no longer be able to shape-shift at all. It would force them into their true appearance.

  Murmurs spread through the room as the various Mosca and humans read Willa’s note.

  “So we’d know immediately which ones are impostors,” Leon said. “And then we arrest the bastards.”

  Serassi gave him an exasperated look. “It is naive of you to think it would be so simple.” She went to one of the monitors, reached behind it, and extracted some equipment. She set it down on the desk in front of Willa. “Though it is still a good idea. Can you build a frequency emitter from this?”

  Willa examined the wires, then started attaching them to the monitor’s speaker.

  The speaker suddenly let out a high-pitched squeal, and Leon made a face. “Try not to shatter all our eardrums in the process, okay, Queen Kong?”

  He caught sight of Bonebreak coming in from the facilities room, looking over the coded monitor with its scrolling data. Anya hadn’t yet returned, and the others were distracted with Willa’s project. For a second, he was alone with Bonebreak.

  “Listen,” he said in a low voice. He quietly reached for the provision pack that he had stashed in his inside jacket pocket. “I know we’ve got bigger problems right now, but I got the delivery for you.”

  Bonebreak barely glanced at him. “Eh? What are you going on about, boy?”

  “The special delivery,” Leon whispered more urgently. “From the station. The provision pack you asked me to pick up.” He opened his jacket, revealing the package.

  Bonebreak tilted his head in a bewildered way. He scratched at his chin beneath the mask as his gaze went between Leon’s face and the package.

  “Come on, mate,” Leon urged. Sweat was starting to break out on his forehead. Any minute Willa might look up from her work, or Mali might turn around, and the last thing he wanted was to be caught smuggling when he was supposed to be a goddamn hero. “If you don’t want it anymore, too bad. We had a deal. I risked a lot for this.”

  Bonebreak grabbed the lapels of Leon’s jacket and pulled him into the corner, to the side of the monitors where they’d have some privacy. “Listen closely, boy. I have no idea what you speak of. I requested no pickup. I made no deal with you.”

  “Yes, you did! An easy job, you said. On Armstrong, right after Nok killed the sheriff and all hell broke loose.”

  “On Armstrong?” Bonebreak sputtered. “As soon as that sheriff was killed, I ducked behind the dais to to save my own skin, like any sane creature. I most certainly didn’t search you out for a chat.”

  “Then who did I make a deal with?” As soon as he’d spoken the words, it struck him. How, at the time, Bonebreak had seemed to disappear and reappear on opposite sides of the tent almost instantaneously. “Oh, shit.” He swallowed. “An Axion.”

  An angry rumble came from behind Bonebreak’s mask. “One of those bastards had the gall to pose as me, and you were too dumb to tell the difference?”

  “Hey!” Leon snapped. “It was chaos and he sounded just like you. Smelled just like you, too!” But as soon as he said those words, he realized it wasn’t true. The Bonebreak he had spoken to in the tent had lacked the Mosca’s trademark odor.

  Bonebreak shook him again. “What did you tell him? Did you say anything that will get us killed?”

  Leon’
s mind turned back to the deal he’d made with the trader. “I, uh, might have told him about the plan to rescue Cassian from the station.”

  Bonebreak hissed his displeasure.

  “But listen, what harm did it do? The plan worked. He couldn’t have been impersonating you for more than a few minutes, tops. We got Cassian and the Axion didn’t stop us. So no harm, no foul, right?”

  For a second, Bonebreak was silent. Then, very slowly, his eyes dropped to Leon’s jacket. “That depends, boy, on what is in that package you so obediently stole for our enemies.”

  Leon swallowed. He pressed a hand to the provision pack, feeling the hard edges. How had the Axion impersonator even gotten the package into the crate? It must have been one of the Axion already on the station, the one the fake Bonebreak had been communicating with. He slowly pulled the package out, holding it by the corner as though it were contagious. Bonebreak recoiled as well. On the opposite side of the room, Willa’s emitter released an even higher frequency.

  “Open it,” Bonebreak whispered.

  “You open it.”

  Bonebreak hissed a string of curses as he snatched the package out of Leon’s hand and tried to tear at the edge, but he was unable to get it open. With a frustrated growl he pulled a knife out of his pocket and sawed at the corner.

  Leon caught a flash of movement as the recess room door opened. Anya slipped in quietly. “I’m back.” Her face looked grim. “I didn’t find out anything useful. The Axion didn’t say much about their . . .”

  Willa adjusted the emitter’s dial again, and a high squeal burst through the room. Leon clamped his hands over his ears, wincing. He was about to call to Willa to shut the damn thing off when he caught sight of Serassi’s face.

  She was staring at Anya. Or, rather, the place where Anya had been standing.