5

WITHIN FORTY-FOUR HOURS—TWO GENESIS DAYS—THE entire planet is in chaos.

Not every single person is sick. No disease is that contagious, not even Cobweb. However, more than one in five individuals have come down with the illness, and surely the virus is incubating within others. Noemi, having survived the illness, is immune. That makes her literally the only safe person on her world.

Everyone else is terrified, and that terror is ripping them apart.

On the first day, everything goes very still. The markets—and all other public places on Genesis—are closed by decree. It’s a desperate attempt to cut down on infections, but probably it was too late as soon as the first star hit the ground. Noemi spends the whole day looking after Mr. and Mrs. Gatson, who grow more feverish and weak with every passing hour; she feels as if she can do nothing but watch the white spiderweb rash spread across their bodies. That night’s a hungry one, because the emergency ration drop-offs won’t be ready until tomorrow. Noemi eats a solitary dinner of leftover vegetable stew and two cups of coffee, willing herself to stay awake.

The Gatsons need her. They’ve never welcomed her as a daughter, but they took care of her when she was sick, and she pays her debts. And deep on a level she doesn’t like to admit, she’s glad they finally have to rely on her for a change.

But on the second day, she’s past any feeling that petty. Nothing is left but sheer terror.

“Please!” Noemi pleads as she tries to walk Mrs. Gatson through a gathering crowd outside the hospital. “Please, let us through, she needs help—”

“Why do you think the rest of us are here?” snaps an old man. “Wait your turn!”

But there’s no such thing as turns, or a line, or any kind of order. The crowd’s panic is so thick in the air Noemi imagines she can feel it, like a vibration in her very nerves. Mrs. Gatson is heavy against her shoulder, barely upright, shivering despite the blanket Noemi wrapped around her shoulders. People bump into them, pushing them roughly from side to side. The hospital’s white walls seem to gleam against the storm-cloud-dark sky, promising hope, but there’s no reaching it through the desperate scrum. Sick people who can’t stand throng the sidewalk, laid out on blankets or just on the grass. The pale rectangles of cloth in their long rows remind her uncomfortably of tombstones in a graveyard. Some of the patients groan or cry; most of them lie quietly. A few are so still that Noemi suspects they’re already dead.

She remembers how Cobweb feels. Remembers the bone-wrenching ache of it, the chills that swept through her, the hot scratchy dryness behind her eyes. She’d tried to get to sick bay from her cabin and had instead collapsed in the ship’s corridor, unable to walk another step.

It was Abel who found her, lifted her up, took such gentle care of her—

Don’t think about him, she tells herself. Abel can’t help you. You’re on your own.

“Hang on,” she whispers to Mrs. Gatson, but she doesn’t think the woman can hear her any longer. Eventually, as the first drops of rain start to fall, vehicles pull up to collect the sick. They’re less like ambulances, more like… cargo trucks. The nurses inside look harried and worn; they’re doing their best, but their best isn’t good enough. Noemi has no choice but to let them take Mrs. Gatson away.

Returning home means hurrying along streets empty of people or vehicles. People have begun hanging red scarves at windows to signal that someone in the house is infected; nearly every home has one. She’s not the only one who keeps looking up at the stormy sky, searching not for signs of thunder or lightning but for Earth’s Damocles ships penetrating Genesis’s atmosphere at last—for fighting mechs descending like fallen angels to claim their world.

When she gets back to the house, she’s able to bring in some emergency rations. She checks and sees that her messages to Captain Baz have gone unanswered. Official information is all about the plague, with no word on who—if anyone—is patrolling the Genesis Gate. Noemi doesn’t know if the government is refusing to tell them anything, or whether it doesn’t have enough resources left over to even gather the information. None of the possible answers are good.

In the great room, the faint light from the cloudy sky illuminates the surroundings—almost unchanged from yesterday morning, when Mr. Gatson took ill. The teacups still sit on the edge of the sink. Noemi hasn’t washed them because she badly wants some reminder of normality. Some evidence of regular life.

Although Mr. Gatson got sick first, he’s not as bad off as his wife. He sits on the low couch near the largest window, staring at the dark sky, a knitted blanket around his shoulders even though fever flushes his face. Either he doesn’t hear Noemi come in or he doesn’t care.

She has to assume it’s the first one, just in case. “Mr. Gatson?” One long step brings Noemi into his field of vision. “Is there anything you need?”

“Yes.” His voice quavers. “Tell me about the star.”

Noemi knows he means Esther’s star. After her death, her body couldn’t be kept aboard Abel’s ship; if they’d been boarded and searched, they no doubt would’ve been arrested for murder. When Noemi rejected the horrifying idea of ejecting Esther’s body into the cold of space, it was Abel who came up with the idea of burying her within the heart of a star—the star of the Kismet system, one that gives heat and light to an entire living world. She still thinks it’s the most beautiful tribute to Esther that could possibly exist.

Yet the Gatsons never asked about the star before. Noemi doesn’t know whether that’s their rejection of the mode of Esther’s burial, or their reluctance to talk about Esther’s death any more than necessary.

She goes to the couch and sits beside Mr. Gatson, though she leaves half a meter of distance between them. Habit. “You know the constellation Atar?” That formation of stars is one of the most famous in Genesis’s southern hemisphere. “The brightest star in the base of the cauldron? That’s Kismet’s star. That’s where Esther is.”

Mr. Gatson leans his head back on the edge of the sofa, gazing up at a sky too cloudy to show them any stars. The faint spiderweb rash on his face is almost invisible in the dimness. “That’s—‘Atar’ is holy fire for the Zoroastrians, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Noemi isn’t particularly familiar with that faith, more common on the northern continents. But she looked up a few things after Esther was buried there. “It purifies. It knows guilt or innocence. It’s the divine glory of God.”

After a long silence, Mr. Gatson says, “Then it’s a good place for her.”

That’s as close to forgiveness as Noemi’s ever likely to get. She knows better than to respond out loud.

A rap at the door startles her. Mr. Gatson doesn’t even seem to hear. Noemi hurries to answer it; when she sees a nurse standing there, medkit in hand, the sight is so welcome she almost wonders if she’s imagining it. “Thank God you’re here. But Mrs. Gatson—I shouldn’t have taken her away, I wouldn’t have if I’d known—”

“I’m sent to help out here while you answer the summons.” The nurse hands her a small dataread—a confidential summons to meet with the Elder Council, immediately.

Noemi doesn’t travel to the Hall of Elders. Instead, she’s been called to meet with them in an emergency ward.

“Everything we know about Cobweb,” rasps Darius Akide, from his place in a hospital bed, “we know from you. To whatever extent we’ve been able to respond to this crisis, it’s because your intel prepared us.”

“That’s not much,” Noemi says. Though she knows in her mind that there’s nothing more she could’ve done, she still feels as though she failed somehow. “Ephraim Dunaway told me the Stronghold doctors figured out I was from Genesis because I was too healthy. Because I responded to Cobweb treatment so quickly. But this disease—it’s destroying us.”

“You responded to antiviral drugs we don’t have,” Akide says. “Ours are older and, it seems, much less effective against Cobweb.”

Another elder says, “Earth appears to have made Cobweb more contagious before they sent it to Genesis—and perhaps they’ve made it deadlier, too. Something our drugs can’t treat.”

“Then we need to—” Noemi stops mid-sentence. The idea is so tantalizing, so liberating, that she can’t give it voice. If she admits it’s even possible, she’ll be admitting how much she wants it. Admitting she wants something means she won’t actually get it. She pushes her mind down another route. “Is it—does my body carry Cobweb antibodies, or something like that? Could they use my blood to synthesize a cure?”

The silver-haired elder shakes her head. “Our doctors doubt it, and the research would take time Genesis doesn’t have. Earth sent this disease to paralyze us. They could send Damocles ships through at any moment, and we could put up little resistance. Within another few days, we’ll have no ability to resist at all.”

“We need the better antivirals,” Noemi says. It’s really happening. “You’ll have to send me through the Gate. That’s why you called me here, isn’t it? I’m immune and I’ve got contacts in Remedy who could help us. I’m ready.”

One thought overwhelms her beyond any others: I’m free!

Then Noemi wonders what the hell is wrong with her. Genesis is in terrible danger, maybe the worst it has ever faced. The mission she’s going on will be dangerous; surely Earth will be guarding the Genesis Gate closely, which means her chance of capture is high. If she fails, it’s the death of her world, and she’ll actually deserve the hate she’s received.

She knows all that. She believes it. She’s going to get the antivirals back to Genesis or die trying.

But then Darius Akide slowly shakes his head. “That would take time we almost certainly don’t have. We must face the inevitable.”

Nausea twists Noemi’s gut. No.

“You’re not my first choice of diplomat,” he says with as much humor as he can muster, which isn’t much. The gravity of his words is unmistakable. “But you’re the only individual we know will remain healthy and uninfected.”

Please, no.

Akide concludes: “That’s why you must be the one to offer Earth our surrender.”

The war is over. Noemi’s world is lost.

The next few hours pass in a blur: Fueling and provisioning her starfighter, and charting her course to the Genesis Gate while scanning all sectors at maximum intensity for any potential mech patrols. Tears periodically blur her eyes, but she keeps going, driving herself on because the first time she stops to think about this, it’s going to kill her.

On the journey to the Gate, though, there’s nothing to do but think.

How could they do it? How could they just give up? Yes, Genesis is stricken, but Earth hasn’t invaded yet. The delay can only be because they want the virus to wreak maximum havoc before the invasion, to make their takeover as easy as possible. That cruel arrogance could be turned to Genesis’s advantage if they’d only try to get the antivirals. I could’ve done it if they had let me. It would’ve been easy!

Well, maybe not easy. But it would’ve been possible. I’d have reached out to Ephraim, if I could find him—or maybe Riko, if I could figure out where she is—

—Kismet would be a place to start, if I could—

I could do it.

Noemi has been reprimanded for reacting instead of acting. She knows her temper and her impulses don’t always point in the right direction. And what she’s thinking of doing is even more serious than disobeying a military command. She would be making a judgment that will determine the destiny of her entire planet, overruling the Elder Council itself.

But if Remedy could help her get the antiviral drugs in time… she could save Genesis.

The Gate beckons. Noemi hasn’t made her decision yet—or at least she tells herself she hasn’t—but she feels like she’ll know what to do the minute she’s on the other side. Time to fly.

She urges her starfighter forward into the shimmer at the very center of the Gate. The ship hits the event horizon, and reality cracks.

In an instant straight lines seem to bend, and light varies its brightness from millimeter to millimeter. It’s as if the serene image of her cockpit a moment ago had been turned into a jigsaw puzzle and someone just dumped the pieces on the table all out of order. Noemi’s stomach drops, but she keeps her hands on the controls, full speed ahead.

For one moment she closes her eyes, just to steady herself. In that moment she recalls going through a Gate for the first time, Abel at her side, his hands sure on the controls. He’d been so arrogant about his skills, so pleased with her fear. And she’d hardly even wanted to look at the thing she would later destroy—

Reality restores itself instantaneously as the starfield before her shifts, showing an entirely new set of constellations. The planets shine brighter, and quickly she figures out which one is Earth. She stares at it and knows what she has to do.

I have to find Remedy. I have to at least try.

The decision feels like another moment of grace, one so beautiful she has to blink back tears.

Then her sensors begin to shriek, and Noemi swears.

Eight—no, ten fighter mechs, all lying in wait for her. They must’ve been here the whole time.

She has been betrayed by what she thought was grace, and her folly scalds her like boiling oil.

The Queens and Charlies swoop in, encased in the metal-framed suits that turn them into warrior and warship simultaneously. It’s as though she’s surrounded by birds of prey, their talons reaching for her from every side. Noemi fires immediately, picking off two of them before her sensors begin to go haywire. She jabs at the controls until she realizes she’s caught in a kind of electromagnetic net, one made up of mini–tractor beams emanating from mechs.

That’s not standard fighter mech procedure. Not their standard weaponry. Have they evolved a new way of fighting, one Genesis will be powerless against?

But that can’t be right, she thinks. If this was an Earth patrol, there would be even more mechs. A Damocles ship would be nearby. If they’re guarding the Gate this closely, where’s the Damocles? And why bother with just a few mechs when they’re going to invade any day now?

Her comms speak in the voice of a Queen, scratchy through the speaker: “You have been reclaimed and will be returned.”

“Returned?” Noemi talks to it more on instinct, out of pure bewilderment. “You mean to Genesis?”

“To your owner,” it says. “You are the property of Burton Mansfield.”

“Property? I’m no one’s property!”

But the mechs don’t listen to her. They are Mansfield’s property and incapable of knowing why humans should be any different. Instead, one of the Queens swoops close, her metal exosuit carving a stark, angular silhouette against the surrounding stars. Clamps lock on to Noemi’s starfighter, jolting her so hard she bites her tongue. To her horror, a thin tube extends from the exosuit, spinning like a drill, to pierce her cockpit.

“No—no no no—” She can’t imagine why mechs would want to kill her by robbing her of air instead of shooting her down, but why doesn’t matter, not with that thing coming closer by the second. Heart pounding, she scans her controls for something, anything that might help her, even though she knows there’s no way.

The tube pierces the cockpit. Shards of transparent aluminum sparkle like snowflakes as they float freely around her. But the drilling doesn’t stop. Instead the tube spins closer and closer, and her horror intensifies as she realizes it’s going to go right through her helmet. Maybe through her skull.

Noemi turns her head, even though it’s useless. She won’t save herself, but at least this way she won’t have to watch the thing drill right between her eyes.

Her helmet shudders with the first impact. Now she can hear the high-pitched sound of it, getting closer millimeter by millimeter. Closing her eyes, Noemi begins to pray. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee—

The tube breaks through the helmet, just shy of her left temple, then stops. She has no time to be relieved before greenish gas fills her helmet, her lungs, and dizziness sweeps everything away into the dark.