by Tess Sharpe
“The wound on her wrist, the shape of it, it looks like she might have dug something out of her skin.”
“Maybe a tracking device?” Mantis suggested. “She could be on the run.”
“Oh, she’s definitely on the run. That ship of hers wasn’t some dinky one-person shuttle; it wasn’t designed to be flown solo. I guarantee you she stole it.”
“So, a fugitive.” Mantis lightly drummed her fingers against the windowsill. “But from where?”
“I don’t know,” Carol said. “Did you recognize the ship when you were up there? Because I went inside and I don’t know the tech. There were hand-shaped sensors all over the control panel—the setup must be bio-profile touch-activated. Same thing on the doors.”
“I’m not familiar with the ship. I scanned it and couldn’t find it in any database I have access to, either.”
“The mystery grows.”
“Well, we’re about to get some answers,” Mantis said, looking through the window. The girl was starting to stir. “She’s waking up.”
* * *
BY THE time the doctors had finished checking the girl another twenty minutes had passed, and Carol was trying not to feel impatient. But that went out the window when Medusa showed up, her locks writhing.
“Please tell me the security guards still have all their limbs intact,” Carol said.
“They’re fine. I can’t believe you told them to detain me.”
She took a step forward, but Carol planted herself firmly at the end of the hall in a wide stance, arms crossed, with Mantis right behind her.
“We had agreed you were going to stay upstairs.”
The queen’s eyebrows snapped together in annoyance. “She is one of my people. I have a right to be here.”
“If the story you told me is correct, her people renounced yours, and you kicked them out. So technically, she’s a refugee. And she came here. So you’re going to follow my rules, or I’m gonna get cranky and cause a galaxy-wide incident.”
“All I want is to be in the room when you speak with her,” Medusa said between gritted teeth. Her hair swayed back and forth, the tendrils twitching like they yearned to reach out and strangle Carol. “You should want that as well, since I have insights that she may not—she must have been a child when her family left Attilan.”
“Fine,” Carol said. “Stay in the background. Let me lead. And, Medusa? I will kick you out if you upset her.”
“And I will help,” Mantis piped up. “We must proceed cautiously.”
“Mantis is right,” Carol said. “She says the kid’s been through it, and she’s the one who would know, being an empath and all. We want answers, but we don’t want to traumatize her any further.”
“I am not a monster, Captain. I do not hate those who left Attilan,” Medusa said. “There were people I knew who left on that ship. People I loved. It was not an easy time in our history.”
“Then let me lead this and make it easier now.” Carol let her voice go gentle, just a little, but the hint of steel remained.
Finally, Medusa’s hair calmed down, and she relaxed visibly. “You have my word: I will listen more than I will speak.”
Behind her, Carol felt Mantis let out a little breath of relief as the tension in the hallway finally dispersed.
“Then let’s do this.”
The girl watched them warily as they entered the room. Medusa, to her credit, went to sit in the chair tucked in the far corner, while Mantis took the one directly next to the girl’s bed on the right. Which left Carol to approach from the foot.
“Hi.” She settled herself on the mattress, which squeaked as she sat. “You remember me?”
The girl nodded.
“I’m Carol. This is Mantis. What’s your name?”
“Rhi.” She glanced warily at Medusa, her fingers tightening on the blankets. “I know who you are.”
Medusa’s chin tilted up. “And I know you. You’re the Adella girl—Aya and Rhine’s daughter. Why aren’t your parents with you?”
“They were murdered,” Rhi said, her voice flat.
“By whom?” Medusa was up out of her seat at the news.
“Medusa, stop,” Carol ordered. “Consider this the only warning you’re gonna get.” She turned back to Rhi, whose eyes were round, taking in the two of them. “Rhi, the queen here tells me that you sent out a distress signal. Is that right?”
The girl nodded.
“And you’re part of this group of Inhumans who left Attilan years ago?”
“Yes, my parents wanted a different life for me and my brother. Especially since the Genetic Council planned to send my brother to the mines after undergoing the Terrigenesis because they deemed him unworthy.” The look she shot Medusa was pure disgust. Seemed like Rhi’s parents had raised a rebel. Good for them, Carol thought. “We left about ten years ago.”
“And where did you go?” Mantis asked.
“We were on track to a new world suited to our needs when something went wrong with our ship. We suffered severe damage in an asteroid belt and veered off course; vital supplies were auto-vented out into space to reduce energy consumption, and the ship couldn’t sustain all of us for long. We would have starved to death out there, in the nothingness.”
That was the kind of thing to drive a person to the brink. Carol wanted to ask her what happened next, but Mantis quelled her with a look that made her shut her mouth and wait.
“In desperation, our parents exposed the children who hadn’t yet gone through the Terrigenesis to the mists, hoping that one of us would develop a power that could save us all. And someone did.” Rhi gave a shaky shrug. “I did. Or we thought so, at first.”
“That tear in the sky your ship came out of,” Carol said. “Is that what you can do?”
“It’s not that simple,” Rhi said. “I—” Her brown eyes slid to Medusa again, and then to the door, where the security guards stood on the other side. “Can I ask you something?” she asked, her voice lowering to a whisper.
“Anything.”
“You’re not Inhuman.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You have powers, though.”
“I do.”
“But you’re a woman. They… they still don’t lock women up here?”
The way she asked it, with almost childlike wonder, was spooky. Carol frowned, glancing at Mantis, who looked equally confused.
“Do they lock up women with powers where you’ve been?” Mantis asked.
Rhi bit her lip, which was already reddened from the habit.
“You’re safe here, Rhi,” Carol said gently. “No one’s going to lock you up for having powers. Look.” Light sprouted along her fingers, a gentle crackle rather than the full-on blast. The heat buzzed beneath her skin, a familiar tingling she had never quite gotten used to. Captivated, Rhi’s eyes followed the energy dancing between Carol’s fingers.
“See? No one’s coming to get me. And if they did? Well, trust me—they’d be sorry.”
Mantis let out a huff of breath at Carol’s audacity, trying not to smile.
“So where did you land?” It was Medusa who asked the question everyone was wondering, and she asked it softly, with the sympathy it deserved. She’d returned to her seat in the corner.
“I found us a planet,” Rhi said, looking across the room warily at Medusa. “One we could live on. They call it Damaria. That’s what I do… I find things. Anything that’s lost or hidden, I can find it. Mostly, I create little rips, tears through time and space. A kind of channel that I can reach through to grab what I’m looking for. But I have to be specific, and when I was small, just starting out, I could barely create a rip bigger than my hand for more than twenty seconds. For sure not one large enough to send a ship through, like I did to escape. And opening a rip with just the thought of I need to find a habitable planet is, well, not very specific. When I reached inside the rip, I pulled out a set of coordinates, scribbled on a piece of paper by someone who lost it who knows how l
ong ago.”
“And you went to those coordinates.”
“We ran out of options. We used the last of our fuel to make it out that far in space, but what we found…” Tears welled in her eyes for the first time. She pressed a shaky hand to her forehead, and then flinched when her fingers grazed the bump on her head. “We thought it was our salvation. Our scanners didn’t pick up any settlements, so it seemed like an empty planet, just waiting for us.”
“But it wasn’t empty,” Mantis said.
Rhi shook her head. “As soon as we hit the atmosphere, the Damarians attacked us. Hundreds of ships like the one I arrived in brought our ship down in minutes. Our parents tried to fight back on the ground, but that’s when we discovered they had more than just invisitech to mask their presence to anyone passing by. They have a weapon that sends out some sort of energy that suppresses certain powers—and enhances others out of control. It doesn’t affect any of the Damarians, but it affected us. We weren’t able to fight back properly, and they…”
The tears finally fell, silently, streaming down the girl’s cheeks. “They took us over within a week. And that’s when we discovered what kind of place I’d brought us to.”
“Why don’t we take a break?” Mantis said, reaching out and grabbing the pitcher of water set on the table next to the bed. She poured a glass of water and handed it to Rhi, who gulped it down. “Do you still have the coordinates to Damaria?”
Rhi nodded, rattling the numbers off from memory, and Mantis wrote them down. She got up. “Medusa, will you come with me? We’re going to go hunt down the maps of this star system. See what Alpha Flight and our ally’s collective knowledge says about it.”
“I—” Medusa protested.
“This is for the best,” Mantis said firmly. “Please trust me.”
For a moment, the two women just stared at each other, Medusa’s face pinched with frustration, Mantis’s calm and determined.
“It’s rude to invade people’s minds,” Medusa finally ground out, turning on her heel and following her out. As the door closed behind them, one of the tendrils of Medusa’s hair poked Mantis in the shoulder, and the empath swatted it away, shaking her head disapprovingly.
Carol turned back to Rhi, smiling. “That’s better,” she said. “Sorry about her. She’s just…”
“She didn’t expect any of us who left to ever return,” Rhi finished. She’d taken advantage of the distraction of Medusa and Mantis’s bickering to wipe her face free of tears and push her hair back behind her ears. Her ears were a little big for her head, like she hadn’t quite finished growing into them, and for some reason, it was this that made Carol’s do-gooder heart thump like she’d just seen a sad puppy in the rain.
God, she was turning into a softie.
“Do you want to talk about what happened after you were captured on the planet?” she asked. “Or do you want to take a breather?”
“If I stop now, I might not be able to start again,” Rhi confessed. “And telling it… it’s not as bad as living it.”
“Okay,” Carol leaned forward. “Then I’m here to listen.”
6
Ten Years Ago, Damaria
“FASTER!”
Every time Rhi’s steps weren’t quick enough for the guard, he sent flames from his hands to lick at her heels, a grin spreading across his thin lips when she cried out. The metal chains shackling her ankles heated up, singeing her skin further, burn blisters bubbling up and popping.
“Careful,” whispered her brother Zeke behind her.
Dirty water squelching between her bare toes, she walked through a puddle on the concrete as the guards led the half-dozen families through the corridor.
“Where are they taking us, Momma?” she heard someone ask ahead. A small voice, a baby one.
Even Rhi was old enough to know that wherever they were going, it was nowhere good.
She looked over her shoulder, where her own parents were shackled behind her. Her mother shot her a smile, but it didn’t crinkle her eyes like her smiles usually did. Her father was following her mother, a dirty, bloodstained rag tied awkwardly over his head to cover what remained of his right eye.
They had lost. And now they were here, being marched out of the prison that had been their home for the last… Rhi didn’t know how long. Week? Or longer? She couldn’t keep track. All she knew was that every few hours, their captors would take someone off for testing, sometimes returning them to their pit of a prison cell, sometimes not.
Something had changed this morning. The guards rounded them all up and chained each family together and began marching them out to the exercise yard, family by family. The yard was just a muddy pasture surrounded by a shimmering force field that lit anything it touched on fire. They’d found that out the first time they’d let them out in the yard, and one of the teenagers had dared brush her fingers along it.
The guards had laughed as the girl burned.
Today, the guards stopped them at the door that opened to the yard.
“Line up here,” the guard ordered, pointing to a spot along the wall.
They obeyed, Rhi’s shoulder flattening against the cool wall.
“First group, come forward.” He pointed to Rhi’s father.
Rhi looked up at her father, and he nodded, stepping toward the guard. Rhi, Zeke, and her mother followed suit, Zeke’s shoulders jostling against hers as the guard removed the chain linking the four of them together at the waist. The shackles on their arms and legs remained connected, but this allowed a little more freedom of movement.
“Outside,” the guard said, once he’d unchained them.
“It’s going to be all right, sweet ones,” her mother said on her other side as the guards hustled the four of them through the doors, leaving the rest of the families behind. For the first time in her life, Rhi doubted her mother.
The light from the dual suns circling in the sky made Rhi squint. She was unused to such brightness, especially after the days spent in the dark cell. Today, an elaborately carved chair had been set in the center of the field. It was forged from a reddish metal that Rhi didn’t recognize, with carvings of flames sprouting from the top. When the sunlight hit the carvings, they almost seemed to flicker like real fire.
And sitting in it was a man with silver-shot hair and deep-set eyes that sparkled like ink in his long, strong-boned face as he looked them over.
The guards hammered stakes through the ends of the chains running through their leg shackles, driving them deep into the wet soil until they were pinned, unable to move more than a foot in any direction.
There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. There was only facing their captor.
Zeke grabbed Rhi’s hand now that they were side by side. Their cuffs bumped and clinked together, the metallic tink making her think of raindrops.
The man was dressed in a dark, somber, high-necked suit, the jacket falling all the way down to his knees, and all Rhi could think was that this was how someone who thought you were an enemy looked at you. Cold. Assessing. Combative.
Her fingers itched, the power still newly discovered inside her swirling around, unable to burst free. She couldn’t use her abilities here. The buzz in her head, the ache in her body, it heightened to a fever pitch every time she tried. And the shock bracelets they’d snapped on everyone’s wrists sprang to life every time she fought through that buzz and pain for more than a minute.
Their captor stood up. His hair was parted razor-sharp, and his mouth was small and seeking, like he was hungry for something, like he wanted to gorge upon it.
“I am Keeper Ansel, undersecretary to President Lee, long may he burn. I have been tasked by the president and the esteemed Council to deliver the Damarian government’s complete assessment of your people.”
“We did not come here meaning harm,” her father said. “If we’d known this planet was inhabited, we would’ve sent down a distress call—a greeting to identify ourselves. But—”
The undersecr
etary waved her father’s explanations away. “The Council has concluded that while we believe you did not come here seeking war, your presence on our planet—especially the presence of your females—is dangerous at best, and a catastrophic biological threat to our continued well-being as a society at worst.”
“What does being a woman have to do with it?” her mother asked.
Without a word, he raised his hand, snapping his fingers.
The bracelet around her mother’s wrist lit up, shocking her so hard she went down in a heap of blonde hair and rusty chains.
Lesson One: Women speak only when spoken to.
But Rhi had never heard such a lesson before. All she knew was her mother’s screams of pain, the fear wrapping an iron hand around her own heart, and Zeke’s horrified sob. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her mother, her eyelids fluttering from the aftershocks, blood on her lips from her bitten tongue, and that was all it took. Her fingers curled into fists.
“Aya!” Her father jerked toward her mother just as Rhi lunged forward at the man who was watching them with a light in his eyes that woke an instinct she didn’t know she had until that second. His gaze settled on Rhi as the shock bracelet grated against her wrist, grinding into her skin as she strained to just get close enough…
He raised his fingers, ready to snap them again.
“No!” Her father leaned over and wrapped his arm around her waist, half yanking her off her feet even as Rhi wriggled, trying to work her way free, chains clinking and swinging.
“Your women don’t know when to stay down, do they?” Ansel murmured, his fingers just an inch apart, the threat still there.
“What do you want from us?” her father’s voice broke.
“As I was saying before I was interrupted,” Ansel continued, his tone growing bored, “your presence on our planet presents many complications. However, our gracious president has decided to grant you amnesty. There are, of course, conditions each family must agree to.”
