11We reach the bunker an hour before half-light, Avelaine already sinking toward the horizon while Evelaine continues her eternal chase just a few hours behind. The place is exactly as I remember, with its leafy detritus, broken shield generators, and overhanging trees edging the circular platform in a constant reminder that, just like everything else on Iolanthe, this place survives only by the Rainforest’s sufferance. I glance at the middle of the platform, at the entrance hatch I know is there, and quickly look away again. I don’t care how hard it rains; I’m not going down there again.
Now that we’re out of the forest, getting a satellite signal is not an issue. I fire up my sat-link, scanning through the various radio frequencies for any signal that might indicate a ship is in orbit, while around me the others marvel at the degenerated majesty of the platform.
“Holy slag, this thing is huge.”
“I thought this was supposed to be a bunker.”
“Don’t you know anything about terraforming? The bunker is under the ground.”
“No way! Hey, you think there are skeletons and stuff down there?”
“A few more days of this, and we’ll all be skeletons.”
Skeletons? For vac’s sake! With a roll of my eyes, I get up and begin walking away along the edge of the platform, searching for a bit of peace from the ensuing inanities. Only when the voices have faded do I plunk down on the edge of the pad in the shade of a cocobolo tree and begin scanning again. A few minutes later, footsteps clank against the metal, followed by a voice.
“Find anything?”
I glance up as Zane crouches down beside me and shake my head. “Nothing so far. I don’t think they’re here—yet,” I amend at his concerned frown.
“What if they don’t come?”
“Practically every force fence on Iolanthe tripped,” I counter. “They’ll come.”
Zane doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. We both know if the Navy doesn’t show up, we’re all dead.
Our gazes lock, and for an instant, we share a moment of perfect communion. Not for the first time, I find myself wondering about him: who he is, where he came from, why he’s here. I search his face, looking for the answers, but I find nothing. It’s as though his eyes aren’t windows but mirrors, hiding him away while reflecting me back to myself in all my imperfections.
I jerk my gaze away, not certain I want to see myself through someone else’s eyes, especially Zane’s. The others? I know exactly what they think of me. I can handle Vida’s scorn and Jovan’s smug superiority, but Zane? He’s impossible to read. I have no more idea what he thinks of me than I have of Zane himself. I could ask him, I suppose, but what would be the point? Within hours, the Navy will arrive, and we’ll be off this rock forever, shipped away to opposite ends of the Expanse—me to Gran on New Sol and Zane to . . . wherever. There’s hardly any point mouthing the social niceties now.
“They’ll come,” I repeat, for lack of anything better to say, and this time Zane nods.
Now that we’ve made it to the bunker, our flight into the Rainforest feels almost anticlimactic. We’ve reached our destination and evaded pursuit, and all we have left to do now is wait. We eat some rations, then settle down at the edge of the platform to amuse ourselves as best we can, one eye on the sky as Ava and Eva sink lower and lower with each passing minute.
I sit on the fringes of the group and rotate through several tasks: scanning the frequencies for orbital traffic, updating my model of the Spectre Invasion, and planning my strategy for convincing Gran to let me enlist once I get back to New Sol. Though I try to keep myself as busy as possible, I can’t seem to concentrate on anything. Anxiety sizzles through my nerves, and my gaze is continually on the move, flipping between the sky, the platform, and Vida, who sits several meters away with Xylla, Jovan, and Djen. She catches me looking at her once and scowls—not her usual expression of scorn, but something more hesitant, wary even. I know things about her, things she doesn’t want anyone else to know, and as a result, the balance of power has shifted ever so slightly.
Of course, it’s not exactly a one-way arrangement. I think of what I said to her earlier in the jungle, and I grimace. I’m not sure why I told her all that. Maybe for no other reason than because I’d never been able to tell anyone else. At least, no one who could understand. Now, like criminals in the night, we’ve traded secrets. Told our worst enemy the very things we could never tell our closest friends, and in doing so put some small piece of ourselves in the other’s hands. A secret for a secret, with only honor among thieves to keep them.
After our little talk, we walked back to camp in silence. What else was there to say? It was only when the voices of the others wafted distantly through the trees that I stopped her. Vida’s eyes widened when I pulled the case of Spec 1280 from my backpack.
“Wait, is that what I think it is?”
I nodded, ignoring her gasp of shock as I scanned the instructions printed on the inside of the lid. Withdrawing the first vial, I fit it into the tailor-made injector, taking care not to dislodge the lid—exposure to the air can cause a false positive. Vida’s mouth dropped open as she realized what I intended to do.
“You’ve got to be kidding me! I told you, I’m not infected.”
“You told me, or your Spectre told me?”
Her mouth flapped silently, any denial abruptly cut off at the knees by my inarguable logic. A huff of annoyance spewed from her mouth, a reaction to the perceived insult in my suspicion, followed by a blatant roll of the eyes. Still, despite the dramatic response, when I held out the injector a moment later, she reluctantly offered her arm.
The needle punctured her skin in a flash of silver. Crimson blood filled the vial, cutting through the liquid inside in wispy streamers of pallid red. Per the instructions, I popped out the vial and shook it hard, watching as the clear drug became awash with blood.
“What are you going to do if it turns out I’m infected?” Vida asked archly as we waited for it to either go clear again or turn purple.
To be honest, I had absolutely no idea, a fact Vida had clearly surmised, judging by the smirk hovering over her lips. Luckily, the liquid chose that moment to finish processing, the blood-red fluid turning back to its previously-colorless state.
Uninfected.
I returned Vida’s smirk. “I guess we’ll never know, will we?”
Though my test cleared Vida, I’ve kept my eye on her ever since. She may not be a squatter, but that doesn’t mean she won’t break down and decide to go home after all. If she wants to stay here while the rest of leave, that’s fine with me. Just so long as she waits until after we’re safely off this rock to do it.
Half-light soon fades into full night. I watch Evelaine disappear into the trees before scanning the sky for life again, but if there’s anything up there besides the stars, I have yet to find it. Zane’s words resound in my head—what if they don’t come?—and I know from the soft murmurs around me that I’m not the only one who’s wondering.
I force the doubts away, setting my chit to automatically scan the skies every hour, and then turn my thoughts toward bedding down for the night. Not that “bedding down” constitutes much more than picking a spot on the ground and lying in it. I settle down with a group of girls on a narrow strip of dirt between the trees and the pad, a compromise between the eerie emptiness of the platform and the frightening fullness of the Rainforest. Not that I have any real expectation of sleeping. Between the noises of the night and my preoccupation with the coming fleet, it’s impossible to relax.
However, as Evelaine follows her banished sister down over the horizon, taking with her the final remnants of light, I find my eyelids becoming curiously heavy. The last thing I see before Morpheus takes me is the bright pinpoints of stars, winking like distant promises against the ebony sky.
The first rays of dawn have just begun streaking across the sky when they arrive, jumping down into the atmosphere to skim across the cloud line in a blaze of silver. I sit bolt upright, consciousness returning in a rush as three more lines of silver arc across the sky. Vibrations are emanating through my hand, brought about by the pooling light across my palm and the smattering of distant voices.
I raise my chit hand, my tired brain slow to catch on. Then the words coming through my chit begin to clear, the garbled talk morphing into actual words and sentences, and illumination comes in a blinding flash.
The Navy has arrived!