54My heart falls out of my chest. There must be thousands of girls in the universe who bear her name, but from the tone of his voice, I know there’s only one he could be speaking of. What was it he said only a minute ago?
They invaded Tiersten.
Oh stars! I was so focused on the argument at hand that I didn’t even note the name. Tiersten, as in, Tiersten Internment Colony. This was the final home of the Tellurian Resistance. It was they who fought the Spectres when we were still blissfully ignorant of their existence. They who risked everything to tell us of the alien threat. And it was they who wired Lia into a human bomb and sent her off to New Sol. If Zane was on Tiersten when the Spectres invaded, it can only mean he fought in the resistance.
With Lia.
My anger evaporates, doused like a fire under a sudden downpour, and a tiny seed of fear creeps into my chest. I take a breath, then another. Swallowing past the lump in my throat, I confirm, “Yes. I knew Lia.”
“How?”
“Lia . . . grew up next door to us—my brother and me—on Aurora. We moved away when we were still kids, but then later, she found us again on New Sol. I . . . It was me. I was the last person she spoke to before she died. She hugged me goodbye, and then she got off. She got off the SlipStream train and went Nova for all the universe to see.”
Zane stares off into space, a faraway look in his eyes as he processes the information. “I never knew,” he murmurs, almost more to himself than me. “I never knew what happened to her after she left Tiersten, before she . . . For weeks, we were left wondering, checking the feeds for any sign that she’d completed her mission. Every day that passed with no word, we wondered what happened to her. Did she get captured, imprisoned, killed?”
“Her countdown malfunctioned. With her memory wiped, she was stranded on New Sol with no idea where to go or what to do.”
“But she found you?”
“My brother, actually, is the one who found her.” I smile slightly as I recall how excited Michael was the day he wandered down to the cargo bay to see the incoming refugees, only to find his childhood best friend among them. He’d talked nonstop about her for hours; I’d wanted to brain him with my tip-pad! “She used to come over to our apartment a lot in the weeks before . . . you know.”
“Were her last days happy?”
I think back to those final days on New Sol. “At first, I think it was hard for her, but in the end, she found a new family, she fell in love, and her final days were spent with people she cared about. So yes, they may have been short, but I think her last days were happy.”
He nods, accepting the explanation, and we lapse into silence. That faraway look remains, and I get the feeling he’s still stuck back there, lost somewhere in the past.
“What happened?” I ask. “What happened on Tiersten after she left?”
Zane simply shakes his head. “What always happens. They all went away, and they never came back.”
A chill goes through me at his answer. He couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen at the time. What must it have been like to be the last one standing? To watch everyone you know and love go off to war and never return?
I get it now. I understand why he wants so much for us to just give up the war and save ourselves. Anything rather than watch us go off on a perilous mission from which we might never return. The last thing I want to do is hurt him, but I can’t sacrifice the human species for one person, no matter how much I might care about him. Maybe I can’t scratch the mission, but . . .
“I’ll come back,” I promise. “When the mission’s over, I’ll come back and let you out. You have my word on it.”
Zane smiles sadly, and even without words, I know what he’s thinking.
The dead keep no promises.
“This isn’t your responsibility, you know,” Zane says after a minute. “Would it be so terrible if you let someone else deal with the bioweapons?”
“What if Lia had never gone Nova?” I return. “What if I’d grabbed her at the last second and kept her from getting off the SlipStream and going back into the hub?”
It was meant to be a rhetorical question to illustrate my point, but Zane answers anyway. “What if you had? What would have happened if you’d refused to let Lia go?”
My heart crumples. This is the question I’ve been afraid to ask myself for over two years. At the time, I was so sure that letting Lia go was the right thing to do, but with every day that’s passed, the doubts have only continued to creep in. Maybe the authorities would have discovered the Specs without Lia’s help. Maybe they would have believed us without seeing the proof. Maybe things would have turned out all right anyway. More than anything, I want to tell Zane that without her sacrifice, humanity would have fallen long ago, but I can’t. I can’t tell him that, because the truth is—
I don’t know.
Though I can’t bear to admit it aloud, the answer must show in my eyes, for a look of pure pity creases Zane’s face. He leans forward, lifting a hand as if to reach for me, then remembering I’m nothing more than an image on the wall, slowly drops it. Understanding sparks in his eyes, and with it comes a resigned calm, like that of a person who realizes their cause is lost. A moment passes, and then he speaks.
“Toward the end of the resistance, Spectres invaded our internment camp, and we were forced to flee. Lia’s parents were infected on our flight from camp, taken right in front of her before anyone could stop it. When she was assigned the Nova mission, she told me it was the first day she’d felt at peace since she’d lost her parents. I guess she thought she owed them some sort of penance for not saving them.”
He pauses, eyes creased with sadness, and finally says, “Lia’s penance eventually took her to heaven. I just hope yours doesn’t take you to hell.”
Slowly, he sinks back onto the bunk. A fleeting smile, so sad it nearly breaks my heart, tilts up the corners of his mouth.
“Goodbye, Teal.”
At his plaintive farewell, an answering sorrow echoes through my heart. I open my mouth to return the words, but even though they’re what I came here to say, now that the time for them has finally come, I can’t speak them. Not when I know that to tell him goodbye would be to admit that I won’t be coming back. Instead, I silently mouth the words I can’t bear to say, the words I always seem to end up owing no matter what I do.
I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.
Then, with a twist of my chit hand, I dissolve the link.
Darkness falls as the bunker fades from sight, and suddenly I’m back in the real world again. Exhaustion pours through every centimeter of my body, and I feel strangely like crying. Hugging my legs to my chest, I rest my chin on my knees and wonder if I’ve just spoken to Zane for the last time.
Everyone’s asleep by the time I make my way back to camp. Though I yearn to join them, I bypass my makeshift bed and head to our small cache of supplies instead.
There’s one more thing I need to do.
I find the emergency beacon in Hegit’s electronics stash. It takes me half the night to reach the bunker, and another hour after that to find the right access panel, but by the time the moon has risen, I’ve managed to wire the beacon into the bunker’s power supply. After careful thought, I set the timer for three days from now. That should be more than enough time to carry out our attack and then get back to let Zane out of the bunker . . . unless we all die, in which case the beacon will send out a signal, alerting anyone within range to his presence there. If Zane truly is immune to Spectres, as he believes he is, he should be safe enough regardless of who eventually comes. At any rate, it’s the best I can do to ensure I keep my promise.
It’ll have to be enough.
Dawn has just begun to filter through the trees when I arrive back at camp. Though I have an almost-intuitive sense of the countdown by now, I glance down at my chit anyway.
*33:05:26*
Thirty-three hours until the net falls and the enemy is free—not that I’ll give them the chance to escape. Our attack begins in six hours, giving us a full day to put our plan into action. By the time the net falls, the spaceport will be destroyed, and the enemy won’t be in a position to go anywhere.
Knowing I should get some shut-eye before the big offensive, I throw myself down on a patch of sickly moss and close my eyes—but I can’t sleep. Thoughts of tomorrow run amok in my head, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to shut them off. Feet twitching and hands shaking, I finally get up, picking my way carefully through the sleeping bodies until I reach a downed tree at the edge of the clearing. There I sit, perched on the edge of the rotting trunk, a dried-out piece of Iletha in my mouth as I watch the seconds tick down in glowing digits.
Time passes, slowly inching down one minute after the next, but I can’t seem to sit still any more than I could lie still. I stand up, then sit back down, then stand up again. Finally recognizing that my cause is lost, I rise to my feet and slowly pace the clearing. My legs are like lead, and my entire body trembles with exhaustion, but despite my fatigue, I can’t seem to stop myself. All I can do is pace back and forth, silently counting the seconds, while overhead the planetary net flickers and glows against the darkened sky. I look up at the wavering net, then glance down at my chit—
*27:38:31*
—and glance up at the sky again. My mouth falls open.
The net, which has been softly flickering all night, is gone.
A disbelieving laugh bubbles from my mouth. No, this can’t be. We still have more than a day! Unwilling to believe what I’m seeing, I stare intently at the sky, sure this must be just another blip and that the net will suddenly reappear . . . but it doesn’t. Seconds spin into minutes, and still the sky remains perilously clear. A rock settles into my stomach as I finally realize the truth.
The planetary net is down.
Time’s up.