He looked uncomfortably at his hands. “Kind of strong. Like I downed an energy drink.”
“Just wait,” Serassi said, and then her face broke into a smile. “It will grow. It will spread. First humans will feel stronger physically, as you two are already experiencing. Be capable of running faster, greater strength. Then greater intelligence will come. A more sophisticated moral sensibility. Then, in time, perceptive powers will develop. Don’t you see?”
She looked among them all. “It worked. The Gauntlet. I don’t know how Cora did it, but it worked.” She glanced at the symbols scrolling across the screen, lips moving silently as she tried to piece it together. “If she had failed, the stock algorithm would have stopped broadcasting those scrolling symbols, but they’re still going. Ah! I see my mistake now. I thought the symbol meant fall, but it didn’t. It meant jump. Cora jumped intentionally. She . . . she sacrificed herself symbolically. She won the moral puzzle. She won the Gauntlet.”
Mali gasped. Cora won.
Mali could barely process such a revolutionary concept, except that her mind seemed to be working faster than it ever had before. She scrolled quickly through what this meant—that the tingle in her fingers was the evolutionary jump. That she was one of the first humans it would happen to, and soon she’d be more perceptive, smarter, stronger.
But . . .
“But she’s still gone?” Mali asked.
Serassi must have heard the uncertain tone in her voice. “I’m afraid so. The screen is very clear about the death symbol.” She paused. “But she didn’t die for nothing.”
Mali felt dizzy again. Cora had won, but at such a heavy price. She glanced at the Axion guarding the door. His back was still turned. He hadn’t seen the information on the monitor, and neither had any other Axion, judging by the repetitive thunking in the central vestibule as his colleagues still tried to break into the portal door, not knowing that it was futile now. Not knowing the Gauntlet was already over.
“Serassi, if you’re experiencing the evolutionary jump too, if you’re stronger, do you think you can free us?” Mali whispered.
Serassi smiled in cold determination. She stood, stalking silently toward the Axion guard. She ran her fingers through her loose hair, twisting it back into a fresh knot, looking even more powerful and deadly than she always had.
The other captured Kindred along the opposite wall were all glancing at one another, and if Mali had to guess, they were exchanging psychic messages.
“I don’t get it,” Leon whispered. “What’s going on?”
“Watch,” Mali said. “And wait.”
Mali’s heart thumped hard as Serassi moved behind the guard. The guard heard her a second before she attacked and he turned, but Serassi moved impossibly fast, knitting her fingers in the air as Anya had done. The Axion went rigid. Serassi continued to move her fingers. The Axion started moving in a swaying way, no longer in control of his own body. He took a swaying step toward the rear of the room, toward the wall that had been torn off. Then another. The captives moved back, letting him pass. Serassi guided him all the way to the end of the room, where the floor abruptly ended in a twenty-foot drop into twisting, sharp wreckage.
The Axion stepped off and fell to his death.
Serassi turned, staring at her hands. “I’ve never been able to do that before. Take control of another’s mind and command their body. The evolutionary jump worked.” She looked at the other Kindred prisoners with a steady gaze that meant they were exchanging messages telepathically. Almost as one, the other Kindred stood.
“You must still be quiet,” Mali said. “The Axion will hear you.”
“Let them.” Serassi glanced over her shoulder as the Kindred prisoners strode purposefully toward the door. “We’re done being captives. They aren’t stronger than us anymore, and they’re about to feel justice.”
The Kindred started spilling out into the central vestibule. Redrage joined them, and even the Gatherer prisoner. Leon grabbed Mali, holding her back, but he needn’t have bothered. She was too stunned by all this information, and the sensation in her body, to be able to fight yet. Was this happening to all humans, everywhere? To Nok and Rolf on Armstrong? Even to the ones back on Earth? They stopped at the door, watching as the surprised Axion tried to defend themselves from the Kindred.
The battle happened fast.
The Kindred were not vindictive. They were not bloodthirsty or after revenge. They were simply cold and efficient as they and their Mosca and Gatherer compatriots dispatched every Axion traitor in the room.
Throats sliced.
Skulls crushed through telekinesis.
“You know what this means,” Leon said. “This means the same thing is happening throughout the galaxy. To all the planets and stations with humans and Kindred on them. The Axion won’t last long.” He wrapped an arm around Mali’s waist. “It means we’re free now. We can go to Theta and get Anya back!”
She thought of Anya—the real Anya. She’d finally be able to repay her friend for all the times Anya had saved her life. And even better, she’d be with Leon. Together they’d rescue Anya, just as they’d freed Cassian. She smiled, thinking of being trapped in the shuttle’s lining with him, pressed so close. How she’d been so hesitant to trust him—to trust anyone.
Not anymore.
He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Wherever we go, we’ll go there together. I promise.”
And she believed him. “We could go back to our solar system. Learn if Earth is still there,” she said.
Leon looked down at her. The storm was making the structure shake violently, but Mali felt as though they were tucked away in some other place: the calm eye of the storm. She and Leon. And now there was a real future for them, where she might be able to find her family and return to the desert where she’d been born.
She laughed.
“What?” he asked.
“Despite your best efforts,” she said, “you couldn’t avoid being a hero.”
He rolled his eyes, but the corners of his mouth curled upward. “Keep that to yourself.”
They watched from the recess room as the Kindred soldiers dispatched the last of the Axion with deadly precision. Mali flexed her fingers. She had transformed into something new: a new type of human, one more capable and, she hoped, wiser.
“Everything is working out,” she said, but felt that pang of darkness. “Except Cora isn’t here.”
Leon hugged her close, rubbing a hand down her back. He didn’t need to offer reassuring words; they could feel each other’s sadness and gratitude for Cora’s sacrifice. No matter how much Mali knew Cora had done something world changing, she couldn’t shake her sadness.
“I can’t believe she’s gone.” She let out a sob. And then more. She’d cried so rarely. Was this what it meant to be human? To feel such sorrow?
Leon kept rubbing her back as she rested her forehead against his chest. Then his hand stopped, and she felt his breathing go still as footsteps approached.
Mali jerked upright, wiping away the tears.
Cassian stood in the ruins of the central vestibule.
Blood streaked down one of his arms. His fingers were shredded as though he’d climbed out of the jagged wreckage of the puzzle chambers with his bare hands. The lines of his face were heavy with exhaustion, but there was determination written there too, along with a sheen in his eyes—the evolutionary jump.
“Cassian, you’re alive!” she said.
He gave a single nod. “Come with me. This isn’t over yet.”
Mali frowned as she and Leon pushed to their feet. “You mean the battle?”
“The battle will continue until the Axion are defeated—but in the meantime, we have something just as important to do.”
Cassian motioned for them to follow him as he stepped over the uneven floor. His movements were quick, anxious. Mali scrambled behind him as he led them through the devastation of the central vestibule, toward the place where the portal door had onc
e been. Now it was broken, crumpled in on itself, the opening crunched to only a foot high. Cassian dropped down to his stomach to crawl through.
“We’re going into the puzzle chambers?” Mali asked in alarm.
“Yes, and we must hurry,” Cassian said, “before the storm does any more damage.” He was already crawling through the narrow space. His head disappeared into the chamber, then his torso, then his feet. Mali glanced at Leon.
He shrugged and dropped to his stomach.
They followed Cassian through the damaged portal door. Mali’s heartbeat thumped as she spilled out into a room with gridlike panels on the walls, the ceiling halfway torn off, lights flickering. Her breath stilled. She knew the puzzles were over. Yet for years she’d heard rumors about the Gauntlet, and she still expected some shocking illusion to appear at any moment.
“We’re going after Cora, aren’t we?” she asked.
Cassian nodded. “This way.”
“But she’s dead. Serassi saw it on the monitors. It was real. It had to be or else the evolutionary jump wouldn’t have happened.”
“It was real,” Cassian confirmed as they climbed through a maze of identical chambers, each one more devastated than the last. The wreckage sliced Mali’s hands, bruising her knees as they dropped down from trapdoors and crawled through broken wall seams. Sparks snapped and popped as the storm continued to rage outside. “Cora did sacrifice herself,” he continued, moving quickly to try to beat the storm. “She fully believed that she would die when she jumped, which is what the morality puzzle required.”
He shuffled through a torn wall seam, then dropped to his knees, leaning over something on the floor. Mali and Leon pushed their way through the seam behind him, spilling out into another wrecked puzzle chamber. Mali froze.
“Cora,” she breathed.
Cassian was leaning over Cora’s body. She lay in a puddle of dark liquid that was slowly draining from the cracks in the chamber’s floor. Her blond hair, soaked, clung to her pale skin. Her Gauntleteer uniform was tangled around her lifeless limbs. She wasn’t breathing.
Mali looked away with a quick inhale.
“It’s okay,” Leon said, rubbing her shoulder. “She knew what she was doing. It was her choice.”
Hesitantly, Mali glanced back at Cora’s body. Cassian was lifting each of her eyelids, then feeling along her skull as though to check for broken bones. His movements were quick, anxious.
Mali frowned. “She’s dead, Cassian. She isn’t breathing.”
Cassian parted Cora’s teeth to look inside her mouth, then quickly picked her up in his arms, carrying her back to the broken wall seam. “You are correct,” he said. “She is not breathing.” He squeezed through the wall seam with Cora’s body and then hurried back through the course they had taken through the Gauntlet wreckage. “But it doesn’t mean she’s dead.”
Mali drew in a sharp breath as she ducked under a fallen beam. “She’s alive? How?”
But the storm had made another beam fall, blocking their path. Cassian changed course and plunged into another chamber, then stepped carefully over a shattered wall panel and bent down to open a trapdoor in the floor.
It revealed a dark pit.
This was not part of the official module.
He grabbed a few sets of goggles hanging from a hook. “Put these on so you can see.” He pulled one pair over his own eyes and then climbed into the pit. Mali and Leon hurried to do the same. The temperature was cool. Storm water made the stone walls slick, but the floor was well trodden.
A cave.
When she came around the corner, unused to the red tint that the Mosca goggles gave everything, she stopped.
A small cavern had been converted into a makeshift medical room, with a bed and beeping equipment. Cassian laid out Cora’s body on the bed and began hooking up the equipment, affixing sensors to Cora’s arms, pressing a tube into her throat. Thick blue liquid started to flow out of the tube.
Slowly—impossibly—Cora’s chest rose and fell.
Mali ran to the bed.
“What is this? How is this possible?”
The anxious set to Cassian’s expression eased. He leaned over the bed, blood still trickling down his arm, and rested a gentle hand on Cora’s forehead. Her chest rose in another breath.
He looked at Mali and gave a weary smile.
“Cora taught me how to cheat,” he explained. “And I paid very close attention.”
45
Cora
HER LUNGS WERE THICK with water. An icy blackness coated her skin. Her memories were hazy, but she remembered sinking deep into the swollen river. A sense of peace had surrounded her as she’d melted into the dark muck of the riverbed. But now she didn’t feel peaceful at all. Now her lungs burned as though someone had clawed them with jagged fingernails. Her head throbbed, and her entire body felt violently, painfully alert.
Was this dying? This awful, terrifying, electrifying pain?
She awoke with a gasp. Air flooded into her nose, rushed down her irritated throat, and coated her screaming lungs. She sucked in another breath, and another, greedily, as though she weren’t sure she’d ever have enough air. The pain was so acute she nearly blacked out. She tried to sit up, only to have a wave of dizziness knock her back against the pillow.
She cracked her eyes open, but a golden sort of light stung them, and she recoiled. She tried again gradually, blinking hard. There was a soft humming in the room, maybe a radio or a jukebox, she couldn’t be sure. Her vision was swimming as she tried to take in the blurry shapes in the room. She blinked harder. The walls were brown. Wood. A dirty window let in mottled sunlight.
A baby suddenly wailed.
She jerked her head around as the humming stopped. The movement drew the attention of someone sitting in a rocking chair by the window, cradling a baby.
“You’re awake!” Nok pushed out of the rocking chair, clutching the baby to her chest as she came to the side of the bed.
Cora stared at Nok as though she were a ghost: there were dark circles under her eyes and a listlessness to her skin, as though she’d been ill too.
“Nok?” Cora’s voice was creaky with disuse. “What . . . what happened?”
“We’re on Armstrong. You’re safe.” Nok clutched the baby tighter. “You’ve been unconscious for almost two weeks. Cassian says that’s a normal recovery period when it comes to ingested stasis fluid.”
Ingested stasis fluid? Recovery period?
Cora tried to sit up. “Where’s Cassian? Where’s Mali?” Her eyes fell on the baby as she realized with relief that Nok must have given birth safely. “And Rolf?”
Nok’s eyes, heavy and dark, started to rim in red. She blinked a few times, struggling against tears. Cora leaned forward, worried. “Nok?”
“Rolf . . . he . . .” Nok swallowed, stumbling over her words. “Rolf protected all of us. He left plans to rebuild this whole town. We owe him so much. . . .”
Cora’s breath stalled. “Why are you talking about him like that?”
“He’s gone,” Nok choked out. “He crawled into the transport hub’s reactor core to shut off power so the Axion couldn’t blow up the town. He . . . he died. Once the power was off long enough and the radiation levels lowered, Keena sent some guards in there to get his body—she’s been sick too, but she’s getting better. We buried him yesterday. In the valley by the river.”
Cora drew in a sharp breath. Oh, no. Now the dark circles under Nok’s eyes made sense. Nok had been ill. Her heart had broken irreparably.
Cora swallowed back her own grief. “Oh, Nok. I’m so . . . I’m so sorry.” She reached out, catching Nok’s wrist, pulling both Nok and her baby into a hug. Nok didn’t try to hold back tears. She shook with sobs as Cora squeezed her shoulders, fighting an urge to sob herself.
The baby started wailing.
Nok pulled back, patting the baby’s back gently, wiping away her tears. “I gave birth to Sparrow a few days ago. She came early, but she’s a
fighter. Like her father. Anyway, I’d better get Cassian. He asked me to tell him the minute you woke.” She paused at the door. “I’m glad you’re okay, Cora. Rolf would have been, too.”
Cora nodded her thanks.
Alone, Cora stared at the ceiling, groggy, trying to process it all. Rolf was gone. The pain in her head was gradually dulling, but it still throbbed hard enough that she felt she might pass out again. Her lips were dry, and she looked around for water, dimly taking in a wooden table next to the bed; but when she felt for water or a bottle, her hand only grazed paper. A journal. Lucky’s journal. Someone must have found it and saved it for her.
She forced herself to sit up, rearranging the pillows to form a backrest. She touched her sleeve. She was wearing a soft cotton shirt that went down to her knees and was draped in a cozy felt blanket. The wooden walls looked like they belonged in a cabin or hut, but everything was clean, and there was a fresh smell of new paint.
She heard faint voices outside. The sunlight was too bright to look directly through the window, but she thought she saw dusty red ground, maybe the hazy shapes of other cabins or huts, and some people moving.
The door opened again.
Cassian took one look at Cora and sank onto the edge of her bed, reaching out to run a hand through her hair.
“You’re awake.”
“Cassian.” She squeezed her eyes closed again but reached out to hold on to him, needing to feel him. “I heard about Rolf.”
“Yes. He died a hero.”
She took a deep breath. “And . . . and I don’t understand. I died, too. I remember.”
He shook his head. “You only thought you did. You had to believe you were truly sacrificing yourself in order for the Gauntlet to register it. But you’re crazy if you thought I would let you die.”
She squinted at him in incomprehension.
“The river,” he said. “It wasn’t water. It was a stasis fluid that is breathable to humans, like amniotic fluid. Though it usually results in a partial shutdown of secondary biological systems, which is why you lost consciousness for so long. Your body had to purge all the stasis fluid and learn to breathe air again.”
The Gauntlet Page 29
