25A strange sort of hysteria bubbles up in my chest. Here I am, exiled by my parents to this tiny planetoid at the edge of the Expanse for the sole purpose of keeping me safe, and this whole time, I’ve been living on top of a gigantic pile of bioweapons?!

The irony of the situation is almost too much to bear, especially in light of the fact that said pile has ultimately attracted the very enemy my parents meant to protect me from. Because regardless of the Spectres’ enigmatic goals for Iolanthe, there can be no doubt about it—this is the reason they came. Not for the planet’s population, which is negligible, or its location, which is completely insignificant, but this—a bioweapons lab so secret, even the natives don’t know of its existence.

A cold sweat breaks out over me as I continue to stare at that forbidding door at the far end of the hall. My eyes catch on a single word—experimental—and if anything, my fear only deepens. I may be a teenager with little experience of the universe, but even I know that experimental is merely code for weaponized. This is no facility for studying and preserving the universe’s scariest diseases. This is the place where they find a way to turn those diseases into agents of war.

My stomach lurches. Though I’d instinctively known that whatever I’d find down here wouldn’t be good, this is far worse than anything I imagined. It’s bad enough that TruCon has access to a cache of weapons of this magnitude, but the Spectres? I don’t know what they intend to do with them, but the possibilities are unthinkable! And yet, now that I am thinking about it . . .

What the hell could the Spectres possibly want with a cache of bioweapons?

My gut clenches, the sheer inexplicability of such a move making my anxiety worse not better. The Spectres need hosts, not corpses; otherwise they would be hitting cemeteries, not cities. To go after a bunker full of bioweapons just doesn’t make any sense. There’s no point in killing off the very species you’re trying to enslave! No, there must be something else in this facility they want. Something nonlethal but devastating all the same.

Several possibilities spring to mind, each one worse than the last, and I fight back a shudder. In our quest to spread across the universe, we’ve encountered hundreds of alien agents—spores, bacteria, atmospheric compounds more toxic than the deadliest human poisons. Many were destroyed during the terraforming of their home worlds, but some survived, and still others were created due to our unrelenting meddling. Any number of terrifying possibilities could lurk on the other side of that door.

I suck in a shaky breath. Every instinct is telling me that entering this stronghold will change everything. The eye of the storm, in which we’ve sheltered so peaceably these last few weeks, will shift in dangerous ways, and we’ll be spat into the tempest once more. Only with ignorance will we retain bliss, and yet . . .

And yet.

Screw bliss.

Navigating down the corridor, I take a deep breath, then cross the threshold into the chamber beyond.

The world beyond the door is like a collage of scenes from my worst fears. From relatively benign air locks and decontamination rooms, I quickly move into labs full of DNA synthesizers and genomic analyzers, microscopes and test tubes, and high-powered refrigeration units that span entire rooms. Massive chambers full of production equipment follow, their searing lights revealing a host of blazing, pumping, pistoning machines, and everywhere I go, white-clad scientists in protective clothing scurry about in a whirl of activity, their helper bots underfoot. Everything is overwhelmingly big, overwhelmingly complex, overwhelmingly bright.

I’ve never found a place so terrifying in my entire life.

I press my eyes closed, that I might block out the sight for at least a moment, but with the combat lenses situated directly in my eyes, all the action does is zoom in the feed. Unable to escape the view, I take a steadying breath. Revulsion churns in my gut, a clenching knot of nerves and nausea, but I force myself to focus on my task. All of this production equipment is creating something—but what? I need to find an office, a supply room, anything that might shed light on just what they’re working so hard to produce and what they intend to do with it.

I find the administration area at the far end of the compound, set off from the main production facility by a narrow corridor. I ghost through several offices, looking for anything that might be useful, but compared to the rest of the bunker, these rooms full of desks, chairs, and knickknacks are disappointingly ordinary. With an internal sigh, I slide into the final office—and stop.

The entire back wall is digitized from floor to ceiling with design schematics.

Space station plans, colony layouts, orbital platforms designs, shelter diagrams, even hab-ship models. All of the most common habitats in the Expanse are digitized across the wall in a glowing array. Though none of the schematics is marked with a particular location, I recognize many of the basic designs from my time moving around as a kid, following my military parents. I stop in front of one design that looks almost deck for deck like New Sol Space Station, and my heart lurches.

Bloody stars, is there anywhere they’re not targeting?

From the looks of it, the answer is no. I even find a section in the far corner detailing weather equalizer patterns for several types of planets, both terraformed and nonterraformed. Weather equalizers. That means the agent they’re developing must be airborne, or at least one version of it is. The strategic highlighting of water mains and ventilation systems on several plans not only confirms that theory but tells me that some sort of hydro-dispersal method is not out of the question either. But whether they’re targeting air or water, that still doesn’t tell me the most important thing.

Just what are they planning to disperse?

I have to find it. I have to find the finished agent. It’s the only way to know what horror the Specs hope to unleash on us.

Blinking quickly, I take several stills of the wall in quick succession and send the data to my chit for later examination, then slide out of the administration area and back into the main bunker. I’ve investigated almost this entire facility, which means there’s only one direction left to go.

The storage facility is located at the northernmost end of the bunker. I glide to the entrance, briefly eyeing the door for any clues before slipping into the chamber beyond. My mouth falls open.

Rows of storage racks fill my vision from end to end, each lined with identical canisters from top to bottom. I stop dead at the sight, eyes widening as I take in the sheer immensity of the space before me. The feed zooms out, cued automatically by my optical reaction, and more racks come into view—at least a dozen more on each side—but still I see no walls. It takes two more zooms out before the edges of the chamber sidle into view and a third before the high ceiling finally makes an appearance.

Coasting along the wall, I eye the nearest rack and swear softly. Stars above! There must be hundreds, even thousands of canisters in here, all filled to the brim with the same smoky gray liquid. I’ve found what the Specs came looking for, but what is it? I don’t know enough about bioweapons for the color alone to tell me anything, but maybe the canisters are labeled.

I narrow my eyes until they’re nearly closed, and several racks at the edge of my vision disappear as the feed obediently zooms in. I narrow them again, and then again, and then again after that, watching as the room slowly falls away around me and the canisters come ever nearer. It’s not long before the muscles around my eyes begin to ache, and I can feel a headache coming on from the constant squinting, but I ignore it, all attention focused solely on bringing the words on those distant labels into view. At last, I’m close enough that I can just make out the single-word label on the middle canister.

sinesensu.

I frown, trying to figure out where I’ve seen that name before, and suddenly it hits me. My birthday! Was it only a day before the Specs invaded? I was sitting in the lounge with the others, doing homework, when the news report came in. More than three hundred war tech facilities had been hit by the enemy: by fire, by decompression . . . and by Sinesensu. I recall the footage of Carella Station. A few pumps of Sinesensu, and within five minutes, the officers went from furiously fighting for their home to welcoming the enemy in. At the time, I wondered where they’d managed to get such a rare and banned substance. Now I know. They must have intercepted a shipment of it somewhere, realized what they had, and tracked it back to its source.

My mouth sets in a grim line as I zoom out the feed once again. No wonder TruCon hid this lab away on a tiny planetoid at the ass end of the Expanse! To create even a single vial of Sinesensu constitutes a serious war crime! I can only assume they originally intended to use the bioweapon against the Tellurians back when we were at war with them, and then later, after the Spectres came, continued production for use against the squatters.

The same squatters who now have possession of it.

A rush of fear trickles down my spine as I recall how effective it was on Carella. Just a single rack of this stuff could allow them to take down ten stations, and they have a whole bunker full of it! All the Specs have to do is disperse this stuff—through water mains, ventilation systems, weather equalizers—and whole stations, cities, even colonies could go down without so much as an alarm raised or single person evacuated. The resulting casualties would be immeasurable. More than that.

Catastrophic.

Gobsmacked beyond words, I reel back on my heels, breaking the connection and sending myself crashing back into the real world. Panic hits me like a bolt from the black. I gasp, and gasp again, lungs seizing up in a paroxysm of shock and horror. Throwing open the door to the hub, I stumble out into the jungle. Solar-flits crackle and crunch beneath my boots, cunning harbingers of the death that lurks all those meters below, and my heart clenches. Nothing on my mind but escape, I flee into the jungle, desperate to be anywhere but here, but in my haste to run, I trip over a terraforming sprinkler and down I go.

Panting, I clutch at the ground for support, and it’s only now that I see the missed links blinking on my hand. Zane, probably, wondering what the hell happened to me.

A desperate laugh bubbles up from my throat. What am I doing? There’s a war on! Not for territory or resources or some politician’s shady ambitions, but for the very survival of our species, and here I am doing, what? Basking in the sun and making swim dates? What the hell is wrong with me?! Lia died for us! She sacrificed everything she had—her family, her love, her life—so that we might have a fighting chance against this enemy that’s already decimated an entire empire, and how have I repaid her?

Lia’s face suddenly flashes before me, clear as the day she died, and my heart skips a beat. So young—just sixteen, the age I am now. With Telluria overrun and her parents dying, she accepted a suicide mission because she thought she had no one left to live for. Then she came to New Sol and found Michael, found me, and in the end, she completed her mission, not because she had no one left to live for, but because she’d found someone worth dying for.

No wonder Michael loved her so much.

My heart catches at the thought, that one sentiment more acute somehow than every other feeling I’ve ever had about her put together. I press my hand to my chest as if the contact could somehow temper the sensation. How long has it been since I thought of Lia before today? Really thought of her, and not just as a name in passing? Weeks? Months? Not for a long time. Maybe not even since the second anniversary of her death. But then, I’ve been too busy trying to survive.

A snort escapes me as I recognize the blatant falsehood for what it is. Maybe I was too busy trying to survive at first, but now? Survival has hardly been the first thing on my mind lately. No, if anything I’ve been far too busy swimming in the pond and snoozing in the sun and taking walks in the woods to think of Lia!

Utter disgust fills me at how easily I let myself be derailed from my purpose the moment I found some small measure of comfort. Sometime between the chaos and the peace, I let myself forget what really matters. I let my own selfish desires cloud the bigger picture, and for what? A few precious moments in the sun that I don’t deserve anyway?

Because I don’t. Lia’s dead, and I don’t get to just walk away from that as though it never happened. As though I didn’t stand silently at the door of the SlipStream and watch her go to her death even as Michael fought with every ounce of his strength to save her. I accepted the responsibility when I let her go. I did it, and I did it willingly, because to make Michael choose between the human race and the girl he loved would have been beyond cruel. Much as I might wish it, I don’t get to just lay that responsibility aside now that Lia’s no longer here to conveniently remind me of it. I have to live with it. More than that, I have to feel it. I have to feel every single drop of guilt and misery and pain and sorrow, because to do anything less would be to dishonor her sacrifice, even her memory itself.

My mind flashes back to this morning, when I lounged in a chair outside my tent and watched the others play in the river. How happy I felt then! It hardly seems possible that that was only a few hours ago. Now all I feel when I think of that moment is shame for trying to take something that wasn’t mine. Happiness isn’t for people like me! It’s for the innocent, the unknowing, the blissfully ignorant. It’s for people like Michael, who would unwittingly let the entire universe burn if it meant saving one precious life. It’s for the others at camp—the Diyvas and the Megumis and the Treys—but it’s not for me. My lot is to make the hard choices, the ugly choices, the choices no one else can bear to touch. Choices that can save lives or take lives, or take some lives in order to save others. Choices that bring unimaginable guilt but never happiness. It’s a fate I didn’t choose, but one I accepted all the same. Or at least, I did until—

The Rainforest.

Everything changed when I came here. Not simply because the Spectres invaded, but because of Iolanthe herself. It’s as though whatever plan the universe held for me, Iolanthe harbored a different one, and she would not be gainsaid for anyone. The last few weeks have been paradise, and yet I can’t deny that I’ve felt torn as well. Between peace and war, happiness and guilt, acceptance and rebellion. I came to the Rainforest, and somehow I managed to both find myself and lose myself at the same time. Now I’m split down the middle, cleaved into two, and finding myself caught between the Teal I was and the Teal I’ve become, I have to decide which one I’m going to be.

I lay my hand softly against the trunk of an Iona tree. The cool bark pulses with its own inner force, like a beating heart pumping life through everything around it. I lean my cheek against the bole just above my hand and look out into the trees. Though it’s drizzling, Ava still shines through, illuminating the rain as it trickles lightly through the canopy to the ground. The usual afternoon chorus—chirps and twitters and cheeps—rings out through the understory, and everything feels fresh and alive and new. It’s a strange juxtaposition, life continuing on in the trees though death lingers below on the ground, but then, that’s Iolanthe: an ever-flowing fountain from which life eternally pours. I would not forsake her for all the universe, except for—

Lia.

She was a martyr to her cause, whose sacrifice deserves to be repaid. And I will repay it, no matter what the cost.

Touching the bark one final time, I lift my face from the tree and drop my hand.

Steel hardens in my veins. This extended summer vacation is over. No more playing games, no more socializing or lazy days in the sun. The Spectres have taken away everything I’ve ever cared about—my home, destroyed; my father, dead; Michael, so saturated in anger that he’ll never forgive me. Even Iolanthe herself isn’t free from their pestilence. Well, I may not be able to kill them. I may not be able to capture them or expel them from the universe or even this planet, but I will make them pay for what they’ve done.

Iolanthe isn’t some random stepping stone on the Specs’ path to universal conquest; they came here for a reason. I have a camp full of supplies and an army of students at my disposal, and I’m going to use them both to stop them, no matter what it takes. We will not be passive bystanders in the fight for our future any longer. From this day forward—

We are at war!

Blood surges in my veins, the lackadaisical flow reinvigorated as my purpose is renewed. The world around me crystallizes into precise detail, every leaf, every shrub, every tree trunk now standing out in sharp relief, as though my eyes have been half closed all this time and only now are fully open. Thoughts begin churning in my mind, ideas born out of the countless hours I’ve spent going through drone feeds and reviewing maps, all coming together to form the first vestiges of a plan.

I stride back to camp, first walking, then jogging, and then finally sprinting. Bursting through the trees, I yell for the others, screaming one name after another until everyone is assembled before me.

“Everyone, listen up! For weeks now, we’ve been second-class citizens on our own planet, forced out into the jungle by an enemy that knows no mercy. We’ve scrabbled and scraped and run for our lives, but that time is over now. I know why the enemy’s here. I know what they want.

“Now the time has come to make them pay.”