by Tess Sharpe
“Yes, except for exercise time, we’re always on the top floor,” Rhi nodded.
“So we’ve got to get through the other two floors and whoever’s guarding them,” Carol said. “I could fly up there, but I’d have to take the girls out the windows one by one. It’s not fast enough.”
“There aren’t any windows, anyway,” Rhi said. “None anyone could fit through.”
“Push comes to shove, I could crash through the walls,” Carol said. “But let’s make that a last-resort option. What about the tech? Were you locked in rooms? Are there heat sensors or actual keys?”
“There are sensors, but there are also keys, for safety, because of Miss Egrit. She has the keys,” Rhi said.
“Who’s that?” Carol asked.
“She’s the mistress of the Maiden House,” Rhi said. “Each one has a mistress running it, to teach us proper Damarian manners.”
“That sounds like a terrible job,” Carol scowled.
Rhi nodded. “But it’s the only job you can hold as an unmarried woman in Damaria.”
“So the only way to get yourself some power is by tormenting a bunch of young women.” Carol shook her head, her lip curling in disgust. “Traitors.”
“Does she keep the keys on her?” Mantis asked.
“Always,” Rhi said. “Just in case there’s an emergency and she can’t get to her gloves in time.”
“We’ll have to get them,” Mantis said, flipping to a second page of her notebook and continuing her list.
“Miss Egrit won’t let the girls go without a fight,” Rhi said. “None of them will.”
“If they want a fight, we’ll give them one,” Carol said briskly, looking at Rhi with a smile. “And we’ll win.” The girl stared back, awed by her confidence.
“Rhi, can I ask you something?” Mantis propped her chin on her palm, staring down at her notebook. “Why do they fear women with powers? Their resource problem would be solved if they enslaved the Inhuman men and boys like they do the girls. Why do the men get to stay on the islands in relative freedom?”
“There’s a myth,” Rhi explained. “They call it history, but I don’t think it actually is. It tells of a powered woman who fell from space hundreds of years ago and began bestowing powers on the Damarian women, so that they would know power like the men. But those powers, they destroyed the women. Distracted them to the point of madness and starvation. When this woman was finally defeated, the women remaining—the afflicted, they called them—were rounded up and killed to cleanse Damaria, for the betterment of all.”
“All but the ones they killed,” Carol muttered, shaking her head in disgust.
“Hey, Carol! I could use your help down here!” Amadeus called out from deep inside the ship’s central command module. “I can’t get this metal to melt with my torch, but I’m thinking you might be able to.”
“Coming,” Carol called.
Instead of taking the stairs, she just pushed off the deck and floated down to the ground, landing with such grace that it took Rhi’s breath away. To fly like that… it sent a stab of envy through her. She’d spent so much time in the Maiden House, peering out her sliver of a window up at the stars, dreaming about being out there again. And Carol could apparently spin off into space whenever she wished.
Mantis continued making notes in her book while Rhi watched Carol stride off toward central command.
“Umbra is the girl who is being kept by President Ansel?” Mantis asked. Rhi was beginning to realize that she liked to double-check everything.
“Yes. She’s been gone for seven months.” Seven months, ten days, and a handful of hours, if you were counting—and Rhi was. “And Jella is being kept by Security Secretary Marson. She’s been gone for almost two years now. But I know where she is.” She withdrew the chain from underneath her shirt, revealing the ID discs strung along it. “I have each girl’s old ID disc that they made us wear the first year. If I hold them, I can find them.”
“That’s useful,” Mantis said, making another note. Even as she continued to write, her eyes on the page, she said, “You know, it’s all right, Rhi.”
“What?” Rhi asked, confused.
“Umbra,” Mantis continued. “And how you two feel about each other. Love is a beautiful thing. I’m glad that you found it in a place of such pain.”
“I—” Rhi licked her lips. “Really?” her voice cracked on the one word, unable to truly believe it, and Mantis looked up, slowly reaching out and grasping Rhi’s hand once she turned her palm up in permission.
“Really,” she squeezed Rhi’s fingers and smiled with such reassurance it made her want to cry. “That’s not to say there isn’t a minority of people here on Earth who feel differently. I want you to be prepared for that, if you and your friends return here to live, but those people are lost in hate. Pay them no mind. But among us, and most decent folk?” She swept her arm down to encompass the rest of the team. “Nothing to fear.”
“It’s… it’s not allowed in Damaria.”
“I figured,” Mantis said. “I didn’t want you to worry that you had to hide here. I know it must be terrifying, to have the woman you love in such danger.”
This time, Rhi squeezed Mantis’s hand, a thankful little movement that kept the tears from trickling down her cheeks. She didn’t have words that were big enough.
“Hey, are you two paying attention up there?” Scott called, peeking his head out of the module door. “We’re up and running!”
“Well done,” Mantis clapped her hands together lightly as Amadeus grinned, wiping a streak of soot off his forehead.
Her stomach tight, Rhi got to her feet, staring down at the module—which, sure enough, was rumbling, its outer rings glowing as it began to power up.
“It’s going to be okay,” Mantis said.
“I know.”
There was no other option. She had to be strong, and she had to be smart. For Umbra and their love. For Alestra and Zeke and their baby. For Mazz, who couldn’t even remember freedom, and Jella, who had endured a Keeper’s control for too long. For Tynise and Tarin, who knew there was a special hell waiting for girls like them, girls who could be used as real weapons.
“I’m ready,” Rhi said.
She had to be. She had found Captain Marvel, a hero who held even more power than the star woman the Keepers had feared for centuries, and they had a team and a plan. Now it was time to save her people.
12
OPEN SPACE: vast, mysterious, tantalizing—unlike anything else.
Carol stared out the window of the Damarian ship, her view obscured every few seconds by the dual solar rings constantly spinning to power it. But even interrupted, the view filled her with the kind of peace and surety she’d never experienced anywhere else.
Perhaps it was strange to feel so welcome in the darkness, but Carol knew that space was much more than emptiness. There was good to be cultivated and evil to be vanquished, and in that pursuit she had found her driving purpose in life.
After the smooth takeoff, once she’d gotten used to the ship and the constant heat of the gloves Scott and Amadeus had fashioned for them, her mind turned to the mission at hand.
She could hear Rhi and Amadeus out in the mess, making what would be dinner. Laughter floated through the ship’s curved halls, and that fuzzy feeling rose in her chest again. As the laughter increased, she knew that asking Amadeus to join them was a good idea. When Mantis had suggested that they find someone close to Rhi’s age Carol had been wary, but now she was glad she’d listened to the empath. Amadeus seemed to have won a friend for life when he’d given Rhi the tablet full of books.
With some time before dinner, Carol headed back to her bunk, where she’d spread out all the maps and notes and bits of Damarian information Rhi had found and hidden through the years. There were even a few digital recordings of speeches by President Ansel, which Carol had watched twice.
The Damarian bunks were small, and the slanting walls might feel claustropho
bic to someone unused to a cockpit, but to Carol the close quarters were comforting.
As she settled down to read through the booklet titled Your Keeper Duties, she heard a light knock on her door.
“Come in.”
Mantis peeked her head in. “Getting through it all?” she asked.
Carol nodded. “There’s a lot of it.”
“How did she hide so much of it from them?” Mantis asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed.
“She shoved it all in one of those rips she can make. So this stuff was just floating in the in-between until she needed it.”
“Clever.”
“She is.”
Carol tossed the pamphlet—a load of hateful propaganda— on the bed. “You check out President Patriarchy’s speeches yet? They’re doozies.”
Mantis smirked at the nickname. “For the betterment of all,” she said, quoting the Damarian motto.
“What a crock. More like for the betterment of the few privileged dudes,” Carol snorted. Ever since Rhi described witnessing her parents’ murders, a ball of anger had been growing in her gut. And as she sifted through all the Damarian propaganda, her fury had only grown. President Ansel had his people snowed, that was for sure. But she knew there was an in—there was always an in when it came to these restrictive societies; a weakness she could put pressure on until everything shattered.
“He is a charismatic leader,” Mantis said.
“But look at this,” Carol said excitedly, pulling out a scrap of paper stamped with twin suns above the words “Quench the Flame” in big block letters. “I think there’s a resistance movement.”
“That makes sense,” Mantis said. “There must be people who object to the Inhumans’ imprisonment.”
“And Rhi said that only forty percent of the men had the flame,” Carol said, tapping the paper thoughtfully. “So how does the other sixty percent feel about a society that restricts rights to only the guys who can shoot fire out of their hands?”
“I thought this was a rescue mission, not a revolution,” Mantis warned.
“It is,” Carol said. “It is!” she insisted, when Mantis shot her a thoroughly unconvinced look.
“You forget who I am,” Mantis said. “And you forget I know who you are—without even having to read your feelings.”
Carol sighed. “My priority is to get Rhi’s friends out,” she said. “But their Maiden House isn’t the only one on Damaria, Mantis. There must be, what, forty of them across the planet? Fifty? Plus all the Inhumans held on those islands. And that’s not even factoring in all the Damarian women. If they treat the powered girls like this, how the hell do they treat their own?”
“That question has been gnawing at me as well,” Mantis admitted, staring down at the papers spread across the duvet.
“We know at least some of the women buy into the sick system,” Carol said, “if they’re running the Maiden Houses for the Keepers in exchange for a bit of power.” God, every time she thought of another woman betraying those girls like that, she wanted to launch into a sun just so the heat would match the burn inside her. “If Rhi’s fears come to pass, they’ll probably have more mistress positions available. And if that’s the only way to get any independence and power as a Damarian woman… that means the ones who are craven enough will support the president’s plans to create more Inhumans.”
“He’s smart,” Mantis said, staring down at the tablet that had the president’s speech paused on it. “He covers all his bases, doesn’t he?”
“He didn’t bargain on Rhi,” Carol said, feeling proud. “She got the better of him.”
“He’s going to be very angry about that. We need to be careful.”
She was right. Rhi’s escape, if the government had revealed it to the public, would make the president look weak, especially since she stole his own ship from him. It might cause hysteria—if one of the girls could escape, could all of them?
Satisfaction curled inside her. She hoped he was scared. She hoped he was terrified that Rhi would be bringing the wrath of the galaxies upon him. Because that’s exactly what she was about to do. Because the more Carol learned about this planet, the more pissed off she got. By the end of their four-day journey, she might be so amped up she’d go full Binary on the enslaving dirtbag. She smiled at the thought, feeling cheerful for the first time in a few days.
There was a tap on the door. “What are you grinning about in here?” Scott asked.
“We’re just going through the Damarian documents Rhi’s pilfered through the years,” Mantis said.
“I read that Keeper booklet—it’s disturbing,” Scott said. “The instructions on what to do when your Inhuman starts crying— apparently you’re supposed to ignore them. Or shock them so they learn not to do it. What happened to them that made these people like this? What the hell is wrong with them?”
“What was wrong with us when it took us hundreds of years to give women the vote? And even longer to give women of color the vote?” Mantis asked. “We also didn’t allow women to have their own credit cards until the mid-1970s.”
“You zoom out, and our history isn’t all too different,” Carol gestured at the spread of papers and pamphlets across her bed.
“Our present isn’t necessarily all that different,” Mantis said.
She was right, of course. Carol knew that though she was privileged in many ways, her life had been a battle against inequality from the start. Rejected by her father in favor of her brother, she’d gone on to struggle for recognition as a woman pilot in the Air Force. At NASA, she’d hopped from boys’ club to boys’ club, having to fight her way in every time. Regardless of her talent and expertise, because she was a woman, the deck was still stacked against her—on her own planet as well as others.
And then she became more. More than just a human, but with the experiences of a woman who had clawed her way up. You never shook that: the power plays, the disrespect, the insinuations, and sometimes much worse. All of that fueled her: It kept her warm on cold nights, and lit her up on hard ones.
“Getting the girls out doesn’t seem like enough,” Scott said, his shoulders slumping.
“It has to be our focus,” Mantis stressed. “We can make a full report after we get them off the planet, with an appeal to Alpha Flight and some of our allied planets so we can go back to free the rest of the Inhumans and help the Damarian women. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll get the Guardians on board and start a revolution myself. But only after Alestra and the rest are free.”
“We’ll get them out,” Carol said firmly, just as Amadeus’s and Rhi’s voices called in unison from the mess, “Dinner’s ready!”
* * *
WITH THE ship on autopilot after the meal, the team broke up to bunk down for the night. Alone in her room, Carol found she couldn’t relax. Because the ship was so small, it didn’t have a track to run laps on like she did when she had insomnia at Alpha Flight Station. Instead, she found herself pacing the dark, hushed halls until she made a stop on the deck.
“You’re up late,” she said, venturing farther into the control room upon seeing Rhi standing at the window, looking out into the vast unknown.
“I never needed much sleep,” the girl replied. “And this…” She stared out the window, transfixed. “I didn’t think I’d ever see it again.”
Carol crossed the deck, veering around the vast panel that controlled the ship with its many hand sensors and switches, to stand next to Rhi. “It is a beautiful sight,” she said. “I used to wonder if I’d ever get up here to explore the universe like I dreamed.”
“They told us we’d never leave the planet,” the girl’s voice cracked. “Sometimes I believed them.”
“People told me that, too,” Carol smiled. “We both proved them very wrong, didn’t we?”
A ghost of a smile echoed back to her. They never stayed long. Carol wondered if Rhi had forgotten how to hold a smile with so little happiness about in her life… or if, in her enforced complia
nce, its brevity was a kind of rebellion.
“I was so scared, getting this thing in the air,” Rhi confessed, running her hands along the ship’s curved wall. “Zeke, my brother, he works on the old ships. Taking them apart on the Forgotten Islands for scrap. He’s the one who taught me how to fly, visit by visit, until I could recite the launch procedure in my sleep. But it was all theory—no practice. The real thing was so different, I still can’t believe it worked.”
Carol, for once, was speechless. Finally, she said, “That was incredibly brave.”
“It was incredibly desperate,” Rhi corrected. “In our original plan, Zeke was going to pilot it. I was just backup. And now…” Her mouth clenched, tears gathering in her eyes. “They must have taken him into custody,” she said. “Right after I stole the ship.”
“Rhi, how exactly did you steal the ship?”
Carol had wanted to ask that question from the minute she saw Rhi emerge, dazed, from the hatch, the ship bobbing in the Hudson… but as soon as it was out of her mouth she regretted it, because the girl went so white so quickly, Carol was afraid she was going to crumple.
“President Ansel wanted to see me,” she said. “He always wants to see me when he visits.”
Carol stayed silent, not wanting to ask why.
“He has Umbra,” Rhi continued. “He likes to rub that in my face.”
“You two are close,” Carol said, understanding filtering through her voice.
Rhi nodded. “Ansel was the only person on the ship. He likes to interrogate me in private. And there was this big metal paperweight on his desk, and he turned around for a moment so his back was to me, and I just… I looked down at it, and I knew: This was my chance. So I picked it up and brought it down on his head as hard as I could. And he went down like a sack of rocks.” That fleeting smile flickered across her face for a moment. “That thump was the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.”
“I bet.” Carol was fighting a grin thinking about it.
