7Sirens split the air, wailing through the dorm in a blaze of sound. I lurch to my feet, driven from sleep by a primal reaction kindled deep in my gut. Off-balance, I grab for the desk, steadying myself as I try to shake off the fog of sleep enough to identify the threat.
Depressurization? Fire? Core breach? My brain scrambles for an explanation from all of the myriad drills I’ve been forced to undergo over my life even as it quickly rejects them all.
“What’s going on?!”
Divya’s panicked voice cuts through the darkness, barely audible over the pounding of the alarms. I’m just about to tell her I have no idea when my palm vibrates. A holo surges up from my chit, shining brightly within the darkened room, and my heart stops.
Ghouls.
I stare at the force fence grid above my hand in disbelief. The fences in the northernmost settlement are lit up like an asteroid field, red dots glowing menacingly around the blue-white structures of the spaceport.
My jaw drops. Impossible! Eight hundred and fifty thousand to one, and they choose the one? I frown, refusing to accept the evidence in front of my eyes. Maybe it’s just a few stray ghouls that somehow managed to stow away on a cargo freighter . . .
But even as I think it, three more fences turn scarlet, and I know: This is not a few along for a ride. This is a full-scale invasion.
Any vestige of sleepiness evaporates, driven from my system by a jolt of adrenaline straight to the heart. Steel hardens in my veins, and in an instant I’m up and moving, yelling at Divya to get up—we’ve got ghouls!—even as I lace my boots and reach for the backpack in my closet. The sirens are so loud I feel like my ears might bleed, but I resist the urge to cover them so that I can grab the sniffer from my pack and pop it into my nose. My nostrils flare, revolting against the alien feel of cold metal, but I ignore it, pushing it in tighter, making sure it’s secure. I glance at the clock. Three twenty-seven a.m. The ghouls couldn’t have picked a better time to invade if they’d tried.
I pull up the town’s force fence grid again and study it, checking the tripped fences for time stamps, calculating the shiver’s speed and trajectory. Everything on the northern edge of the spaceport glows red. As I watch, fences all through Settlements 1 and 2 begin lighting up. So they’re spreading out through the northern half of town first. Good. Since the school is situated at the southwestern edge, that gives me time. Not a lot of time, but enough.
I hope.
I minimize the grid but don’t turn it off, letting it pool in a small circle of light across my palm. Pulling on my jacket and hat, I spare a quick glance at my roommate. She’s huddled in the corner of her bed, clutching the sheet and whimpering like a malfunctioning clone-bot. I roll my eyes and dismiss her, already marking her as infected, dead, or both.
“Teal?” she chokes out as I reach the door, and I reluctantly pause.
“Ghouls, Divya!” I yell at her whimpering figure. “Move fast or die slow!”
“What do—” she starts to say, and then the door shuts behind me, and I’m gone.
Out in the halls, it’s pandemonium: doors opening and closing; students stumbling out of their rooms half asleep, a few dressed but most not; scared voices mingling with the blaring alarms and panicked footsteps. A couple of staff members try to instill some order into the rabble, calling for students to quiet down, to dress and line up in two rows—as if this is some sort of slaggin’ fire drill!
My lip curls at the sight of them. Ghoul bait, all of them. By the time they’re ready to move, it will be too late.
I shoulder my bag and push through the mob. A teacher yells at me to stop and line up, but I ignore her. There’s a stairwell through the door at the end of the hallway that will give me a straight shot out of the building. From there it’s a short jog to the southwest academy gate, and from there the auxiliary spaceport. I don’t know how many crafts they have available, but when the first ships take off, I intend to be on one. Run or die. With ghouls, there is no other option.
Two meters from the end of the hall, a door flies open and someone tumbles out in front of me. I jump back to avoid being hit, surprise stinging me as I realize it’s the Queen Bitch herself.
“Move it, Djen!” Vida is yelling back into the room. “If you’re not ready in ten seconds, I’m leaving you!”
She turns and almost runs into me, stopping short and backpedaling at the last second. For a moment, we eye each other, both of us not only dressed, but dressed to go outside. A messenger bag is slung over her shoulder, and a pair of well-worn hiking boots is laced up her ankles. I give her a grudging nod, my respect for her going up the smallest notch at the evidence of her preparedness. After a heartbeat, Vida returns the gesture, apparently seeing in me the same thing she sees in herself.
A survivor.
“You have a plan?” she asks curtly, all past animosity temporarily shelved in the face of a greater threat.
“Main spaceport’s overrun. Auxiliary port’s our only hope.”
“Jovan’s got a line on a vehicle if we can get to the garages. The others will meet us there.”
I check the grid. “We should have enough time if we go now.”
Vida nods. She takes a breath, ready to scream for her roommate once more, just as Djen comes stumbling out the door, shirt inside out and schoolbag overflowing. Vida grabs her arm, and together the three of us race for the door.
The stairwell is a maze of chaos. Students rush up while others run down, no one seeming to know quite where to go or what to do. We bull our way through the press, Vida and I shoving through the mob with Djen on our coattails, finally bursting out of the building and into the rainy night. Our boots eat up the ground, clomping over dirt and tile as we hightail it for the garage, where we find Jovan, Trey, and Zane, a couple of roamers powered up and ready to go at their sides. Mercury is with them, as well as a dozen other students who apparently had the same idea.
“It’s about time!” Jovan exclaims as we duck into the carport. “Where’re Xylla and Mario?”
“Coming,” Vida barks tersely, and as if on cue, the two girls appear, out of breath and dragging a pajama-clad Divya and another few girls with them. “What about Kieran and Ri?”
“Should be here any minute. I told them—two minutes, or we leave for the spaceport without them.”
“Auxiliary ’port,” I put in. “Main one’s overrun.”
“How do you know?” Jovan asks suspiciously, as if I’m just making this up for some oxygen-deprived reason.
In answer, I maximize the grid, letting it spring up over my palm. Almost a third of the town is red now, ghouls eating up the distance faster even than I’d anticipated.
“Slag,” someone murmurs. “They’re everywhere.”
“I linked my chit into the town’s force fence grid when I first arrived on Iolanthe,” I explain. “I set it so that the grid would automatically send me an alert if any fences ever tripped. As you can see from the red lights, the main port is already overrun—that’s where the invasion began—but if we can get south, to the auxiliary ’port—”
I stop, blood running cold as a line of fences suddenly lights up in a perfect diagonal down the grid. A perfect diagonal between us . . . and the auxiliary ’port.
“No,” I whisper, frantically nudging the holo this way and that as I search for the clear path that no longer exists. No, no, no.
Silence. Then everyone erupts at once.
“Oh, stars! What do we do now?”
“I say we try for the spaceport anyway.”
“But there’s no way through!”
“Well, what else are we going to do? Stay here and rot?”
“I don’t know, but I’d prefer not to commit suicide, thank you very much!”
More voices join the chorus, everyone seeming to want a say though no one actually has a clue what to do. I stay silent, not bothering to add my two creds to a debate that was pointless before it even began. We waited too long, and now the ghouls have snaked their way across every road between here and the ’port. Even if we could find a more circuitous route that isn’t blocked yet, it wouldn’t do us any good. At the rate they’re moving, they’ll get to the auxiliary ’port long before we could. My heart pounds in my ears, fear coursing down my spine as I imagine the inevitable outcome. Go to them or wait for them to come; it makes no difference.
We’re dead either way.
A hand reaches out, ghosting lightly along the side of the holo to give it a three-quarter spin. My head pops up, startled. It’s Zane. He’s staring at the grid, a strange expression on his face as he shakes his head and silently mouths two words. He suddenly looks up, and I catch my breath as his gaze collides with mine. I would have expected fear, but what I see instead is anguish. A deep anguish so pure and abiding, it’s as if he’s seen the future and already knows how this all comes out. Knows, and is powerless to stop it.
I recall the words he mouthed. Not again.
Or perhaps it’s not the future he’s seen, but the past.
I break the stare, too discomfited to hold it any longer, and turn my attention back to the grid, now angled so that the western edge sits squarely in front of me. The fences along the western perimeter are still untouched, but it hardly matters. There’s nothing there. Well, nothing except—
“The Rainforest.”
We say the words simultaneously, both Zane and I reaching the same conclusion at once. A plan starts forming in my mind, pieces slotting into place one after another.
Like every other planet in the Expanse, Iolanthe’s force fence grid is monitored by the Navy. The moment the first fence tripped, they’ll have dispatched ships to evacuate any survivors and quarantine the planet. If we can hold out long enough for them to get here, we’ll have a free pass off Iolanthe. But with no way to fight, all we can do is retreat. Retreat far enough and fast enough that the ghouls won’t find us.
Retreat to the only place we can.
A jolt of electricity shoots through me at the thought of going back into the forest. My hand shakes as I check the grid again, adrenaline spiking my blood at the enormity of what I’m about to do. Because make no mistake—in its way, the Rainforest is almost as dangerous as the Spectres. I just hope it’s more forgiving.
Racing to the nearest roamer, I tear through the emergency supplies in the back. Zane follows, asking in a terse voice, “What are you looking for?”
“This!” I pull out a small case of sat-links, grabbing the first disc I find and slapping it down over my palm. It clicks into place around my chit, and biometal filaments spring out of the ’link, threading themselves into the chit filaments already embedded in my nerves. “If we want to call for help, we need to make sure the Navy will hear us.”
He nods, understanding dawning in his eyes.
“Now if we can—slag!” The curse bursts from my mouth as I realize the giant flaw in my plan. “The enviro-shield! The hole by the field was patched up two weeks ago. There’s no way we can get through!”
Zane grins suddenly. “Passkey,” he says, waving a small metal card. “Works for the roamers, maintenance buildings, and the shield. They keep them on hand for the techs. Jov and I stole a couple from Mr. Sylvan’s room during the chaos. How do you think we got the roamers started?”
I laugh, half in surprise at this startling bit of ingenuity and half in relief. Checking the grid again, I ask, “Can you run?”
Zane nods.
I point to the closest enviro-shield generator on the map. “Run ahead. Get the shield down. I’ll tell the others.”
He shakes his head, clearly reluctant. “I don’t want to leave everyone.”
“You have to! If we don’t get that shield down, we’re dead! Every moment counts!”
Still he hesitates, and again I see that anguish in his eyes. He’s terrified, I realize. Not for himself, but for us.
I lean in close. “We’ll be right behind you. I promise.”
He stares at me for a long moment and finally nods. Shouldering his pack, he takes off in a rangy lope through the garage and out of sight.
Zane gone, I snap my attention back to the crowd. Students have continued to trickle in, one group following the next in hopes that the first might actually know what they’re doing, and now there are a few dozen voices swirling around me, bleeding into the air with a terror that only sharpens the more they continue.
“—should go back to the dorms—”
“—we can’t, we just can’t—”
“—the spaceport gone, what else—”
I raise my voice, finally adding my two creds to the din, but no one hears me. The argument is too far gone, the absence of any true leadership forcing them to fend for themselves, to scrabble in the dark for a lifeline no one can seem to provide.
“—never should have trusted—”
“—look at me! You’re the one—”
“I don’t want to die here!”
For vac’s sake! They’d stand here arguing until every last one of us is infected if I let them! My temper explodes. Leaping up onto the back of a roamer, I scream, “SEAL IT, EVERYONE!”
At once, the argument ceases. A dozen heads turn, shocked into silence by my unexpected roar. I grab my opportunity while I can.
“The ’ports are blocked, and the town will be overrun soon, including the school. The way I see it, we have only one option left. The Rainforest.”
Silence, then Jovan—“Are you out of your fraggin’ mind?”
“The Navy is already on its way! If we can just put some distance between ourselves and the enemy, hold out for two, three days tops, we’ll be rescued.”
Objections immediately start breaking out. I answer them as fast as they’re launched at me.
“What about the shield?”
“Zane has a passkey. He’ll have it down by the time we get there.”
“If we’re out in the middle of the forest, where’s the Navy going to land?”
“I know a place. A landing pad left over from the early days of terraforming. It’s not big, but it’s big enough.”
“Okay, but how will they even know where to go?”
I raise my palm, showing the sat-link. “Because we’ll tell them.”
The crowd falls silent, objections temporarily assuaged, but still they hesitate. I’m not surprised. If there’s one lesson we’ve all learned since coming to Iolanthe, it’s that you stay out of the Rainforest. Which is worse: the invisible enemy coming for them, or the visible one waiting just a klick away? Murmurs break out as they contemplate the idea.
“Maybe we should just go back to the school.”
“The teachers would know what to do, right?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we should go . . .”
“Yeah, but it’s the Rainforest.”
One person. That’s all it will take to sway the group. I hold my breath, waiting to see which way the tide will turn . . .
“This is bullslag!” Vida’s voice echoes shrilly through the garage. “The Rainforest is dangerous beyond anything you can possibly imagine. Going there is absolute lunacy! People die out there!”
“We’ll die if we stay here!” I counter, jumping down from the roamer and facing her. “I don’t care how dangerous the Rainforest is; the Specs are worse. They’ll infect us, they’ll enslave us, and they’ll kill us slowly, if we let them!”
“Yeah? And how would you know?”
The question hits me like a shot to heart. I stumble back, instinctively retreating from an attack I never saw coming but should’ve. Lia’s names ghosts across my lips, an elegy for innocence lost too soon, and yet her moniker is still an invocation I can’t seem to speak aloud. “I . . . She . . . You know what? Frag you! You all want to stay here and die? Fine, stay! I’m going!”
Grabbing my pack, I start shoving through the crowd. The others instinctively move back, pushing to one side or the other to make way for me, then—
“Yeah,” comes Vida’s scornful retort. “I thought so.”
I stop. Turn around then and face her, shards of glass in my heart and ice in my eyes. “I know because I was there,” I intone, my frigid voice barely above a whisper. “I was there the day New Sol blew. I was there the day Lia died.”
Lia.
Her name whispers through the crowd like a soft wind. There’s no one alive in the universe who doesn’t know the name Lia Johansen. Who she is. What she did.
How she died.
Even the fear in Vida’s eyes has changed, shifted somehow, as if it’s no longer the Rainforest that scares her so much, but . . .
Me.
“What’s it going to be, Vida?” I challenge in a low purr only she can hear. “Move fast or die slow?”
A spark kindles in her eyes, nostrils flaring as her competitive spirit rises to my challenge exactly the way I hoped it would. She gives me a look of pure loathing. “Let’s go.”
Darkness. Rain. It’s a new moon, and even with the night vision in my lenses, the run through campus is a nightmare as we charge blindly through the long grass, the wind howling around our ears as we run. My heart is beating out of control, terror and exertion combining to set it pounding against my breastbone like a prisoner trying desperately to escape. My breath rasps raggedly in my throat, but still I exhort the others—Go, go, the ghouls are coming!—my voice chiming out in tandem with Vida’s shrill scream and Jovan’s lower rumble.
We break out of the main quad, threading our way between a couple of administration buildings, and my eyes dart to the pool of light on my hand. Red seeps across my palm like blood, but the disc of light is too small to see any detail. Clenching my hands into fists, I pump my arms and run harder, dodging between the roots of a fig tree even as the tricky tendrils send others sprawling. I pause just long enough to haul up one of the fallen, and then I’m moving again, through the corridor of buildings and out onto the grassy lea behind the garages.
The shield looms up before me, glittering in a giant wall of gold raindrops against the dark, dark forest. Zane is there, a narrow door in the shield grinning blackly against the gold beside him. I watch as Jovan and a few of the faster ones disappear through the doorway. Putting on a burst of speed, I dash past the rest to meet Zane at the opening, pausing just outside even as the others continue to stream past me into the forest.
“What took you all so long? I’ve had the shield down for fifteen minutes!”
Temporarily ignoring him, I maximize the grid. My mouth falls open as I see how close the enemy has gotten while we’ve hied it out here. The majority of the town is red—blindingly, piercingly, screamingly red—and I know we’ve only got a matter of minutes at most. I take a breath, and a faint tang of sweet-and-sour hits my nose. I jerk my head up as I realize what that odor is.
Minutes? Not even. Seconds!
I run out to meet the next batch of arrivals. “They’re here! Go! Go, go go!”
The red over my hand screams out into the night, sending the message as much as my voice, and the students sprint for the gap, no longer arguing or questioning but simply running.
One, two, three. The first few students make it through the gap as two more fences fall.
Four, five, six, seven. A rush of students puts on a burst of speed, leaping through the doorway and into the jungle.
Another dozen follow right on their heels, and now it’s a fight to the finish, students pushing and shoving for their chance to make it through the gap. Sparks fly as someone gets jostled into the barrier, and for a brief instant, the entire section of shield flares up in a blaze of gold. Quick as a whip, Zane catches the unlucky victim as he bounces off the shield, setting him back on his feet and sending him through the doorway with the last of the pack.
It’s just the stragglers now, lagging behind, clearly winded and barely on their feet as they struggle to reach the gap in time. Mario is with them, along with Divya and four or five others—and Vida, who has looped back around to yell, harangue, and harass the stragglers, anything to keep them moving. Surprise suffuses me as I realize she purposely stayed behind to keep the slower ones going. The unexpected selflessness puts me to shame, and when a girl drops to the ground, I dart out from cover, grabbing one of her arms while Vida grabs the other. Together we haul the last straggler through the gap and into the forest. Zane follows, swiping the shield closed with the passkey and jumping through just before it closes.
We push our way into the jungle, forcing our way between trees and shrubs, over roots and around vines, until the shield disappears behind us and all trace of the school is out of sight. Only then, when the sour-and-sweet odor has faded and the mouth of the forest has closed around us, do I stop and pull up the grid once again.
The fence at Sheridan’s front gate is the first to fall, one small blink of red within a sea of blinks. Then the student center, Ngongo, the dorms, the science building. I want to look away, to pretend it’s not happening, but I can’t.
Sharlton, the gym, the garages where we almost argued ourselves to death.
I imagine them sweeping through the school, these invisible foes, stealing people away one by one while the fences wail out around them, too scared and confused and helpless to escape what they cannot see.
I squeeze my eyes shut, but it’s too little too late. My entire world is crashing down around me. Brick by brick, it’s crumbling to the ground, and there’s not a thing in the universe that can stop it. Pain squeezes me like a vise, wringing the life out of me, and it’s only now, as I watch this place fall—this place I hate to the very marrow of my bones yet still call home—that I remember:
My father died yesterday.
Something inside me goes cold; so cold it burns, like a lump of dry ice searing through everything it touches.
Fine, fine, always fine.
The last building lights up, and the destruction is complete. Quiet sobs rise around me, stifled sniffles and low whimpers whispering through the dark as everyone watches their reality die. They cling to each other, grasping each others’ hands and pressing their heads together for any small bit of comfort they can glean, but not me. I stand alone, eyes only for that red-lit city upon my hand. Because I don’t want comfort.
I want revenge.