43The loss of our camp is a blow that hits everyone hard, and the loss of Mario, one that hits even harder. Out of everyone on this misbegotten rock, she’s the one who least deserved to die—an innocent in the truest sense of the word, pure of spirit and seemingly immune to the moral debasement that worms its way through this universe like a plague. If she ever said an unkind word about anyone in her life, I never heard it, and if she ever met an unkind word aimed at her with anything but a smile, I never saw that either.

At least, that’s what I told the others as the river took us away from the truest friend I’ve ever had on this planet. To a group as terrified and heartsick as we are, it’s not much—a meager handful of words that do nothing to ease the emptiness inside—but Mario would’ve been the last person in the world to disapprove, and as epitaphs go, I guess that’s enough.

Eyes closed, I slump against the side of the boat, too exhausted to do anything but lie there as we drift haphazardly down the river toward whatever destination, I don’t know. We’ve been traveling for hours now, only one goal in mind, and that’s to put as much distance between ourselves and the enemy as possible. Three times now we’ve made landfall, hiked to another branch of the Shoqua, and put in somewhere completely new—anything to throw potential pursuers off our track. It seems to have worked, at least so far; we’ve seen neither hide nor hair of our attackers since we left the camp.

Of course, just because we haven’t seen them doesn’t mean they haven’t seen us. They jacked our drones—nabbed one right out of the sky, followed the signal straight to us, and attacked. If not for the ones guarding our camp, they would’ve been on us before we even knew what was happening. Even now, our former drones might be circling above us, tracking us as we once tracked the enemy. Not that I tell the others that. No use worrying them with potentialities they can’t do anything about anyway.

The boat thunks against something solid, momentarily arresting our progress down the riverway. I lurch up, blinking heavy eyelids as I scan for the hang-up, but Zane is already there, pushing us off the offending log and setting us back on course. I give him a short nod, grateful for the assistance, and ignore the worried look he shoots in my direction.

Since I’m up anyway, I lean over the side of the boat and splash a few handfuls of water onto my burning face. My fever is back, but the water is so warm it barely takes the edge off. I splash a couple more handfuls on anyway, too wretchedly hot to care if some Iolanthian creature of the deep tries to bite off my hand in the process. In the fast-flowing current, my reflection ripples unnaturally in the waning light, my face misshapen and eyes dark with unspoken words. Coward. Liar.

Murderer.

I briefly close my eyes. Mario’s face awaits me there, in the dark recesses between what I know to be true and what I would give anything to deny. Maybe it wasn’t really set to kill, maybe my aim wasn’t as precise as I thought, maybe the squatters managed to save her. Every excuse, rationalization, and lie I could possibly use to save her is there in my mind, and yet for all the denials, it only takes one truth to demolish them all.

Mario is dead, and I’m the one who pulled the trigger.

First Lia, now Mario. How many are destined to die on my watch? Lia, at least, chose for herself, but not Mario. More than anything, she just wanted to stay in the jungle, where it was safe. It was my actions, my choices that initiated the chain of events that eventually led to her death. To me killing her. But isn’t that the way it always goes? The guilty make choices and the innocent suffer for them. It never happens any other way, because the moment you sacrifice someone else for your own purposes, you lose any claim to innocence.

My reflection stares back at me, her eyes hooded and full of accusation—You know. You know what you’ve done—and suddenly I can’t take it anymore.

I slap the water to make her face disappear and sink back into the boat. I’m not sure how much time passes, but I must doze off at some point, because the next thing I know a hand is gently shaking my shoulder. I sit up, eyes widening in alarm as I take in the unfamiliar jungle around me. Half-light has fallen, and in the deepening shadows, the forest looks alien, menacing even. I silently curse myself for falling asleep. Without anyone to navigate, we could have ended up anywhere!

“Where are we? How long was I out?” I ask as soon as I’ve regained my presence of mind enough to speak. Groggy and out of sorts, I attempt to calculate how much time has passed and how far we might have gone, but it’s difficult. Heat presses down on me, making it impossible to think, though whether it’s the temperature—a whopping ninety-five degrees—or just a new bout of fever coming on, I don’t know.

“Easy.” Zane touches my shoulder once more, briefly, and then takes his hand away. “We’ve sailed past the settlements and are approximately two klicks south of Settlement 5. Vida’s been checking our position with her sat-link, so we have a pretty good idea of where we are.”

I glance over at Vida, and she nods.

“Night is coming soon,” Zane continues. “We thought it better to be out of the water before it gets dark.”

“There’s a small glade not too far from here,” Vida adds. “It’s not glamorous, but it should do to spend the night.”

I glance from one to the other, and then, with no better option to offer, finally nod. “Okay. Let’s check out the glade.”

Vida links the others while Zane grabs a pole and begins steering us toward shore. Alighting on the bank, I waver as a momentary bout of dizziness surges through my head. Zane steps toward me, concern written in the frown line between his brows, but I wave him off.

“I’m fine. The footing in this spot is unsteady, is all.”

Zane raises one eyebrow in disbelief, but thankfully he doesn’t push the issue. Once everyone has made landfall, we grab our boats and hike inland, headed for the spot Vida marked out on the map. She’s right; it’s not glamorous, especially compared to what we’re used to, but for a weary, demoralized, ailing group, it’s good enough. Packs drop and bodies soon follow. Vida hands out rations, tossing them into waiting hands without even checking to see what flavor they are. It’s a credit to how exhausted everyone is that no one complains about what kind they got.

Despite the long day, eating is the last thing I feel like doing. Instead, I sit a little ways apart from the others and settle for fanning myself with my shirt and gnawing on a few sticks of Iletha bark. A few minutes later, Zane drops down beside me.

He frowns at my unopened ration pak. “Aren’t you eating?”

I slip a half-eaten meal bar from a few days ago out of my pocket and flash it at him. He nods, relieved at this apparent evidence of my appetite. We lapse back into silence then, him eating and me pretending to eat as we watch the suns set through the trees. Avelaine has disappeared completely, and Evelaine is fast following, painting the sky in glimpses of mauve and gold as she goes on her way.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

The words are so quiet I almost don’t hear them. I freeze, completely unprepared for the emotional ambush so summarily sprung on me. I will him to stop, to drop this conversation before it can go any further, but he’s deaf to my silent plea.

“Nobody blames you. You know that, right? It was just . . . bad luck. Everything was chaos—people shouting and running and shooting. Between the pitching of the boat and the target’s movements, anyone could’ve missed that shot.”

I jerk back as if slapped, yanked from my stupor by the sheer arrogance of the remark. Anyone? It wasn’t anyone who made that shot; it was me. I’m the one who put a decimator bolt through Mario’s heart, and yet he would presume to pass judgment for it? As though he has the right to absolve me any more than he has the right to blame me!

I jump to my feet, rising so rapidly he nearly falls off the log in his attempt to follow me. My fatigue is gone, driven away by the Iletha bark, or maybe just by my own anger, and even my fever seems a distant concern.

Leaning in, I fix him with a cold stare. “I know exactly what happened, and I don’t need you or anyone else to explain it to me.”

Zane shakes his head, a mixture of hurt and confusion in his eyes. “I don’t . . . I didn’t mean . . . I just didn’t want you to . . . feel bad . . . about the way things ended—”

“Ended?” My incredulous laugh rings through the glade. “Things haven’t ended; they’ve only just begun! The enemy is sitting on a bunker full of bioweapons, and we’re the only ones who stand between them and the rest of the universe! We can’t quit now.”

Zane doesn’t answer. He just stands there, staring at me like I’m some alien from outer space. He’s not the only one. Everyone is watching us, eyes wide and faces creased in concern, and only now do I realize I’ve been yelling.

I’m scaring them.

The realization is enough to cut through my anger, at least in part. I take a slow breath and, with an effort, force myself to take it down a notch.

“We can’t,” I repeat more softly, to the group this time and not just Zane, “because if we do, then Mario died for nothing.”

Silence falls over the group, or perhaps it was already there, a quiet desperation buried too deeply to give voice to. I search my mind for something to say—something soothing, something reassuring, something to salve the raw pain emanating from those around me—but the words aren’t there. My mind is as empty as my heart, and though I want nothing more than to offer them the comfort they need, for the first time since the Spectres invaded, I have nothing to give.

It’s Divya who finally speaks, eyes wide and face tilted up to the waning light as she asks, “So what do we do now?”

I don’t know.

The words sit on my tongue, an admission of failure I can’t quite seem to utter. For all my talk about continuing on for Mario’s sake, I haven’t the faintest idea what to do next. We’ve lost our camp, our position, and most of our supplies. The enemy attack has shaken us to the core, sent us fleeing downriver to this random shore, and now sheer exhaustion threatens to finish us off. Even now, the enemy might yet be watching us, and without any intel on their current movements, anything we do could send us straight into a trap. Anything we don’t do could send us straight into a trap. It’s an impossible situation, and one that my pounding head just can’t seem to reconcile, no matter how hard I try.

A wave of dizziness passes through me, and I briefly squeeze my eyes shut until it passes. “Div, I—”

A brilliant light flashes in the sky above us. Everyone jumps as a bolt of blue lightning forks through the deepening night, crackling and sizzling in a gridwork of sharp lines. Electricity sweeps through the camp, sparking along my skin and making all the little hairs on my arms stand up, and through the gaps in the canopy, neon-blue lines begin flickering crazily in a familiar latticework pattern.

The planetary net.

Not as it usually is, but frantic and thrashing out of all control. With every passing second, whole sections of the net brighten and dim, lighting up in a brilliant web one moment only to fade into near nothingness the next. My eyes flick to and fro, trying to track the flashing lines, but if there’s any pattern to the madness, I can’t perceive it. It’s almost as though the net has been taken over by an opposing force—an invisible foe determined to take it down at any cost.

A wash of cold floods over me. Heart in my throat, I watch, transfixed by the fireworks in the sky as I wait to see who will emerge the victor in this desperate contest. The flickering suddenly stops, and the entire net begins fading, growing ever dimmer in its inexorable fade to black. I hold my breath, certain that at any moment it’s going to go out . . .

Life comes back in a flurry of blue, every line and latticework suddenly beaming across the sky in pure, unbroken glory. I peer closely at the net, looking for any signs of degradation, but there’s nothing. No flickering, no fluctuations—nothing to indicate it was ever anything but an unbroken web across the sky. The others babble in wonder, trying to make sense of what happened, and only now that immediate disaster has been averted do I listen to their cries.

“What’s happening?”

“Is the quarantine being lifted?”

“They can’t lift the quarantine! Not with Spectres everywhere!”

“Maybe it was a malfunction.”

All eyes turn to me, as though knowing that whatever the scenario, I’ll have some sort of answer for them. Gravely, I lower my face to the others.

“The enemy just went after the net. They tried to take it down, but they didn’t succeed.”

Silence falls as everyone tries to digest that. Then in a quiet voice, someone asks, “What happens if they do succeed?”

An image of the storage room with its racks of Sinesensu flits through my mind. I think of the underground bunker, with its scads of bioweapons and personnel, all buried just meters below the spaceport. They have the bioweapons, they have the hosts, and they have the ships. All the enemy needs now is a way to elude the quarantine, and there’ll be nothing to stop them from implementing their plan.

I give the others a grim smile and shake my head. If the enemy takes down that net, there’s only one outcome.

“Game over.”