44The first attack comes five hours later. It’s Xylla who raises the alarm, screaming a warning to the sleeping camp moments before the first grenade drops. Within seconds, the next missile follows, and soon gas is flooding across the ground in every direction.

I stagger to my feet with the others, head bobbing wildly as I search for the source of the attack. Military drones sweep through the canopy above my head, dropping objects left and right. A high-pitched whistling rings out, and a split second later I spot something dropping toward me through the trees. It hits the ground a couple of meters away. I jump back, tilting my face away as thick smoke begins pouring from the grenade, but a few particles of gas fly into my windpipe anyway. Violent coughs tear out of my throat as my lungs reflexively try to repel the poison, and a wave of dizziness rolls through me.

Knockout gas!

A few blinks, and the thermal vision in my lenses engages. Taking a deep breath, I yank the collar of my shirt up over my nose and mouth and charge directly through the billowing smoke for the nearest grenade.

Clank! The canister makes a loud metallic sound as I kick it into the forest as hard as I can. Another ping rings out as someone else picks up on my strategy, followed moments later by the phthooom of an aero-launcher. The nearest cloud immediately thins, dispersed by the high-powered burst, and soon more bursts are echoing through the clearing.

I drop my collar just long enough to yell, “Make for the boats!”

Launchers blazing, we grab what stuff we can and run for the river. Several people stagger, clearly feeling the effects of the drug, only to be pulled along by the others. Megumi is completely unconscious. I start to call out, but Kieran is already there, tossing her over his shoulder before charging toward the boats.

We splash into the shallows and push off, fleeing down the river not twenty-seven hours after our last escape. I hold my breath, terrified the drones will follow with more grenades, but soon enough we see that the attack is over. I will it to be the last . . . but I know it won’t be.

For seven days, the attacks continue, each heralded by a telltale whistling just moments before the first grenade hits. Day, night, half-light—anytime is fair game, and it doesn’t take me long to realize that whenever we stop our exodus down the river, attack is soon to follow. They’re driving us out of town, harrying us with drones until we have no choice but to flee past the settlements completely and deep into the southern jungle. By the time the attacks stop, we’re twenty klicks away from civilization, and the message is clear.

Stay out of our way.

So that’s exactly what we do. Demoralized, exhausted, and unable to fight, we hole up in a niche in the forest and wait for the nightmare to end. The attacks stop; the nightmare doesn’t. Though the drones are no longer assaulting us, two of them remain, hovering overhead in plain sight like rabid watchdogs waiting for us to make the wrong move. We can still move south or west without harm—deeper into the jungle and away from their installation—but any attempt to stray more than a hundred meters north or east has the drones immediately mobilizing for attack. They’ve clearly been left here to make sure we stay put, and it’s working. Now we’re trapped out in the deep jungle, our weapons are mostly exhausted, and our food supply is running perilously low. The third drone—the one hidden from view in stealth mode—is tracking me.

I glimpse it one day when I leave camp to wash up at a nearby stream. Maybe it accidentally clips a branch or rustles some leaves, but some force of the subconscious cues me to look up at just the right moment, and there it is, shimmering almost invisibly through the trees. At first, I assume it’s one of the two that have been watching us, until a quick link confirms they’re both still hovering menacingly over our camp in plain sight. Is this third drone just another watcher tasked with keeping us away, or does it have some other purpose?

Curious, I quietly set Merc the task of finding a way to track it. Now that he knows it’s there, he finds its signal with surprising ease. For three days, he follows its every move, and the resulting data is irrefutable. Everywhere I go, no matter how far or in what direction, the drone follows me, which can only mean—

They’ve made me.

I don’t know how—through their drone surveillance, perhaps—but somehow the enemy has identified me as the head of this particular snake. What they intend to do with this information, I don’t know. Perhaps they simply want to keep an extra eye on me, or perhaps they have something more insidious in mind. All I know is that the longer the drone remains, the more I sense it hovering in the trees above me, a silent ghost that never sleeps.

As if that isn’t bad enough, the battle for the planetary net continues. We see it flicker on two more occasions, each one longer than the last, and though we don’t speak of it, its constant threat of failure is a sword hanging above all our heads. Though I try to keep morale from plunging too far, everyone is quiet and subdued, and it’s not hard to see they’ve lost their heart. Worse than that—

They’ve lost their faith.

Not that I can blame them, I reflect as I look out over our makeshift camp. In the early morning light, our little encampment looks even sadder than usual—no tents, no bedrolls, nothing but a few sheets of canvas strung up to make some rough shelters. With our medicine severely rationed, malaria symptoms have returned, and everyone is weak and tired from half rations. Even in sleep, they look weary and fatigued. As I watch them under the dawning light, a single thought occurs to me.

We’re going to die here.

Starvation, jungle rot, sickness, attack—though the method is uncertain, the outcome is not. With every day that passes, our strength continues to wane, our will drained by powerlessness and our drive sapped by melancholy and despair. And without the will to go on, we won’t survive the jungle. Food poisoning, contaminated water, predator attack—it doesn’t matter which. If we don’t act, and soon, we will die.

I don’t want to die out here.

The words echo in my mind, but the voice isn’t mine. It’s Mario’s. Though the memory is unbidden, I suddenly see her, clear as day, sitting next to me on a log by the river just hours after the invasion. She admitted to me that she didn’t want to die, and in return I promised her—

You won’t. We won’t. Not if I can help it.

I broke that promise. I made it only to turn around and smash it to pieces as though it didn’t mean anything. I betrayed one of the people I cared about most, and now that she’s gone, there’s no way to put that promise back together. Not for her. But though I can’t do anything for Mario, I can do something for everyone else.

Something snaps inside of me, shaking me out of the helpless despondency I’ve felt ever since our exile into the deep jungle. I’ve let Mario’s death shake me, and the enemy’s attacks paralyze me, but not anymore. I will complete this mission; I will take the enemy down. I will see this through to the bitter end. No matter what.

Wading into the group of sleepers, I reach down and grab the first limb I see. “Get up!” I shout with a hard yank on Divya’s arm. “Wake up!”

Div moans, and her eyes flutter open. Dropping her arm, I grab Kieran’s leg. “Come on! Let’s go! The time for lying around in the jungle is over.”

I shake Vida’s shoulder. “Nobody’s giving up! Not if I have anything to say about it.”

Groans and grumbles break out all over the camp as people are forcefully awakened by my voice and hands, but I don’t let the complaints stop me. Through the crowd I go, rousing everyone I encounter until they’re all stirring in some stage of wakefulness. Between their fatigue and their hunger, no one is in a good mood, as evidenced by the barrage of insults they send my way. “Frag off!” someone yells, followed by another’s cranky “Are you completely lunar?”

I take the question at face value. “No, but we all will be if we stay here another day!” Another batch of insults rings out, but I shout them all down. “Listen to me! I know you’re tired and hungry and scared—I am too!—but if we stay here much longer, we’re going to die here. We have to go, now, while we still can.”

“Where will we go? We’re klicks away from anywhere!”

“And what about food? I’m so hungry!”

“There’s no way we’re getting out of here. Not with those drones watching us.”

More voices ring out, but I refuse to listen. There’s too much to accomplish to waste time on endless objections and complaints. Reasonably certain that everyone is more or less up by now, I stop the wake-up call and start barking orders.

“Kieran, Trey—start gathering up the supplies. I want everything divided and packed within thirty minutes. Vida, distribute breakfast rations to everyone, then link me a complete inventory of what we have left. Get a few of the others to help you if you need it. Merc, Hegit—I need you to determine the status of our drones in town and at the bunkers, see if there’s a way we can access them without the enemy detecting it. Everyone else, find a hygiene unit and grab breakfast. I want everyone ready to move within the hour.”

Without breaking stride, I activate my chit and peruse my maps, already planning our escape. I’m so engrossed in my calculations that I get several steps away before I realize nobody is moving.

I glance out at the sea of confused faces and motionless bodies and frown. “What’s everyone standing around for? You’ve got your instructions. Get moving.”

More silence. Still no one moves.

“What’s wrong with you all?” I demand. “You’re acting like it’s all over—”

“Isn’t it?” a voice yells from the back of the crowd.

I stop, eyes narrowing as I watch Jovan shove his way through the others until he’s practically in my face. “Jovan, what th—”

“Well, isn’t it?” he repeats, a nasty sneer twisting his face.

I put my hands on my hips. “It’s not over until I say it’s over.”

To my surprise, he bursts out laughing. “What world are you living in? You realize the Specs just totally nuked us, right? Strolled right into our camp and bombed the slag out of us and sent us crying down the river like a bunch of glitches So now what? You think we’re just going to waltz out of here and start hitting the enemy again as though nothing happened? With what? If you haven’t noticed, we’re starving, we’re stranded, and we’ve got a trio of drones overhead waiting to make mincemeat out of us! Face it, Teal. We tried to take on the enemy, and we lost.”

Voices break out, mostly in agreement, and what little dissent I hear is pallid and weak. I stare out over the crowd, searching for my usual supporters—Trey, Kieran, Divya, Zane—but none of them speak, their eyes sliding guiltily away, unable to meet mine. Even Vida remains silent, staring out into the forest with the same look I saw on her face that day I found her at her family’s homestead, trying to decide whether to live with us or die with them.

My heart sinks. This isn’t a group that’s merely demoralized; it’s a group that’s defeated. They had it all—a life, a home, a winning hand—until the enemy swept in and took it all away in a single night. Now they’ve lost it all, and just as when we were winning, they could only envision more winning, now that we’ve been defeated, they can only see more defeat. It’s a defeat that will ultimately kill them unless someone—unless I—can show them another way.

I step forward, pushing into Jovan’s space until he’s forced to back up.

“You’re right,” I admit once the murmurs have finally died away. “We took on the enemy, and we lost. Once. We lost one battle, but we haven’t lost the war! Not so long as those bioweapons are still on this planet. Not so long as we’re living and breathing and standing here together. Not so long as we don’t give up!”

I spin in a slow circle, no longer talking to Jovan but to everyone. “So we lost our camp—so what? The entire Rainforest is our camp! We’ve slept on the ground and sweated in the heat and run through the rain so many times that this place might as well be one big dormitory! Hell, some of us have lived in the forest for longer than we attended the academy! Stars know the AC at the school wasn’t much better than being out here.”

A smattering of laughter breaks out at my weak joke. Heads lift and eyes glance up, sparks of hope kindling where none existed before. Encouraged, I continue.

“So we’re low on weapons? Big deal! We’ll just steal some more. We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again. Same with ammo, same with anything else we need. There’s no place on Iolanthe we can’t break into. If it’s there for the taking, we’ll take it. And food? We’ve got caches; we just have to get to them.”

“Say that by some miracle we do manage to do all that,” Jovan challenges. “Then what?”

“Then we finish what we started! The enemy invaded our home, separated us from our families, destroyed our planet, and now it’s our turn! We are going to take down that bunker, and when we do, it will be so big, so significant that it will echo to the ends of the Expanse and back! Even the Navy won’t be able to ignore us this time, and when they finally come back, we’ll be waiting for them. And when they lift off once again, it won’t be with a hold full of frightened students. It will be with a hold full of heroes.”

I pause, giving them a moment for that to sink in, then add, “Or we could just sit here in the jungle and wait to die. It’s your choice. You’ve followed me this far. Now the time has come to decide: Are you with me, or are you against me?”

Eyes flick and heads turn, everyone glancing around at their neighbors as they attempt to figure out what they think by deducing what everyone else thinks. I covertly scan the crowd, trying to decide who will be my biggest challenger now that Jovan seems to have backed off. The answer reveals herself quickly enough.

“You talk a good game, and maybe you’re even right,” Vida declares, a touch of her old belligerence ringing through her voice as she addresses me. “Maybe we could rearm ourselves and fight again—except for one thing.” She points skyward. “Those drones up there. As long as they’re watching, we can’t make a single move without them following us.”

Heads nod and voices rise, the fear of being stunned or gassed into oblivion clearly at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Not that I blame them. Having gotten more than a few whiffs of the stuff myself during our flight downriver, I’m no more eager to repeat the experience than they are.

I tilt my head and let my eyes sidle up to our three watchers hanging high up in the canopy. With their high-tech sensors and stealth equipment, they could track us anywhere on the planet, and all without ever getting within visual range. Losing them will be nearly impossible . . . unless we don’t try to lose them.

The beginnings of an idea glimmer in my head. I look out over the others, and a faint smile touches my lips. “You’re right. The moment we step foot out of this camp, those drones will follow. So I guess we better make sure we lead them where we want them to go.”