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.”