63Time seems to stop as I stare at that vial, glinting up at me with purple accusation from the palm of my hand. My mouth opens and then closes, pure shock preventing me from speaking for a full minute, until finally—

“This . . . can’t be . . . I mean, it’s . . . it’s lunar! This can’t be right.”

Gao raises a single eyebrow. “No?”

Just one word, and yet still it’s enough to stop me in my tracks. A tendril of fear winds through my chest. Oh stars. Can it be?

Common sense reasserts itself with a vengeance. My jaw tightens, and I toss the vial at the soldiers’ feet. “You can’t actually believe this is real.”

My statement hangs in the air unanswered, and I can feel the blood start to drain from my face. Wordlessly, Riegert retrieves the vial and walks over to his med-kit at the edge of the platform. I ignore him and concentrate on Gao. “You realize those tests can be faked, right? I’ve done it myself. All you have to do is expose the solution to air before you administer the test, and you’ll get a false positive.”

“Are you saying my corpsman faked the test?”

Realizing how ridiculous that must sound, I phrase my response carefully. “Not exactly. Maybe there was some sort of accident with the testing solu—”

A thick arm suddenly loops around me from behind. I cry out, struggling wildly as I’m yanked back against a hard chest. Something sharp pierces my arm.

Before I can even start to process what happened, the arm suddenly releases. I spring away with a curse, backing up until I can keep both men in sight. “What was that?” I demand. “What did you do?”

“Easy there.” The corpsman holds up an injector. “I just injected you with a dose of Psi-Lac. It’s a psionic suppressor that temporarily suspends a squatter’s ability to cause delusions, hallucinations, or otherwise influence its host’s perceptions, allowing the human to see reality as it truly is and not as the Spectre wants them to see it—”

“I know what Psi-Lac is, and I don’t need it.” As evidence, I spin around in a slow circle, letting my eyes glance off the burned remains of the Rainforest before finally turning back to face the men. “See? You gave me the Psi-Lac, but everything is still exactly the same. I’m obviously not hallucinating.”

Putting my hands on my hips, I wait for the soldiers to concede the point. When they continue to stare dumbly at me, I throw up my hands in frustration. “This is ridiculous! Think about it. How could I possibly be a squatter when I’ve been fighting the enemy on Iolanthe since day one?”

Gao’s eyes narrow. “What do you mean, fighting the enemy? You mean the squatters in town?”

“No, they were pretty much harmless. We checked in on them every once in a while, but it became clear early on that the squatters we really needed to watch were the ones in the old terraforming bunker under the spaceport.”

Gao looks at me sharply. “You know about the bunker?”

“Of course.” I fold my arms across my chest. “We discovered the bioweapons operation months ago and have been carrying out a full-scale offensive against it ever since. My team wasn’t large—less than forty of us escaped the initial invasion—but we did what we could.” A lump forms in my throat as I think about the others, lost in the final battle, and I softly add, “I led the others in the final attack on the spaceport myself.”

All the color drains from Gao’s face. “The spaceport. You mean you’re the one who’s been leading the attacks on the TruCon facility?”

“Well, not the facility itself,” I amend. “The underground bunker was too well fortified for a head-on assault, so we had to attack it indirectly.”

“Indirectly,” Gao says faintly.

“Exactly. Since we couldn’t get into the bunker, we had to go for the aboveground structures that supported it instead—air, water, power. We destroyed solar fields and power stations, blocked off the air vents and poisoned their water supply, raided food sources—anything that could put stress on the bunker’s life-support systems. It was obvious that the TruCon operation had grown way too large to be supported by the terraforming bunker’s original systems alone. Hence, the aboveground support facilities. I knew that if we could just take out enough of those auxiliary systems, we could force them to close down part or even all of their operation . . .”

My voice trails off as I take in the soldiers’ slack-jawed expressions. Riegert is shaking his head, eyes wide, as though unable to comprehend a single word I’ve just said, and as for Gao . . .

Gao looks completely aghast.

At the sight of his appalled expression, something inside me goes cold. Fear trickles down my spine, and for the first time since I saw that purple vial, a seed of doubt begins to creep into my mind.

Swallowing hard, I force it aside, deliberately misunderstanding the men’s reactions as I scornfully demand, “What? You don’t think a bunch of prissy academy brats could pull all that off?”

Silence falls, broken only by the soft rush of the wind skimming over the ash. For a long time, all Gao does is stare at me, a strange mixture of indecision and pity and fear in his eyes, and I can’t tell if he wants to arrest me, stun me, or hug me. At last, he expels a quiet breath and says, “Those weren’t bioweapons they were making in that bunker, and those people down there weren’t infected.”

“What do you mean, they weren’t infected? They fought us at every turn!”

“Because they thought the enemy was attacking them!” Riegert interjects.

I let out a disbelieving laugh. “Wait. They were making bioweapons, but they thought we were the squatters?”

“They were producing pharmaceuticals down there, but they weren’t bioweapons,” Gao says. “Far from it.”

I narrow my eyes. “Of course they were, and I can prove it.”

Activating my chit, I pull up my gallery of stills and start thumbing through them until I reach the digitals of the underground bunker. I scroll past the pics of the production floor and the scientists with their microscopes, searching the images until at last I find the digitals of the massive storeroom at the end of the facility with its racks upon racks of bioweapons, all lined up and ready to go. With a few quick motions, I zoom in on one of the racks.

“See!” I hold up the digital hovering over my palm for the two men to see. “It’s right there on the canister: Sinesens—”

My words abruptly fall away as I register what I’m seeing. What the . . .

My mouth falls open. I stare at the digital, unable to believe my eyes. The canisters are still there, lined up in the storeroom just like I remember, but the labels . . . The word on them isn’t Sinesensu but—

Spec 1280.

I shake my head, unwilling to believe what I’m seeing. No, this can’t be right! I looked at these pictures a million times! They were always labeled Sinesensu. Is it possible I was zoomed in on another row?

On impulse, I zoom back out, scroll across the image, then zoom in on another canister. My lips part in disbelief as I read the word.

Spectranol. Another Spectre drug. When administered regularly to squatters, it prevents the Spectres from breeding new ghouls, allowing squatters to be safely relocated and quarantined without infecting their captors.

Hands trembling, I pick another canister at the other end of the storeroom. My eyes widen as I read the label. Again, not Sinesensu but—

Psi-Lac. The exact same drug the soldiers just gave me.

My heart sinks. Oh stars! Can it really be true? These aren’t bioweapons. They’re all Spectre drugs!

Quickly, I flick through the rest of the digitals from the underground facility, thumbing through image after image of scientists in white coats standing at microscopes and working on the manufacturing floor. As far as I can tell, they’re exactly as I remember. Not that that says much. As if I could tell the difference between a pharmaceutical operation that manufactures Sinesensu and one that makes Spectre drugs! It was only the labels on the canisters that told me what they were making, and now those labels have changed.

A chill runs through me, and I can’t help wondering what other things might have changed. Heart lurching, I start scanning through my entire war database, flipping through digitals and holos and research notes, everything I used to plan my offensive. With every document I look at, my fear only deepens. Everything is exactly the same . . .

 . . . and yet just the smallest bit different.

Surveillance footage I used to plan my attacks doesn’t quite match up with the notes I wrote about it anymore; a reference paper on Sinesensu now reports a completely different planet of origin, one half a universe away from Iolanthe; and the diagram I found underground, detailing the plan for dispersing the Sinesensu, now displays the weekly cafeteria menu. I pull up the force fence network for the underground bunkers, and my heart stops.

Not a single sensor is tripped.

A disbelieving laugh chuffs from my mouth. These lights were all red! I saw them, not once but several times! And yet according to these records, they were never tripped at all. I shake my head in disbelief. It’s impossible! I saw it, I did! And yet, buried so far beneath the ground . . .

Could it be that the Specs never found these people at all?

Everyone knows the Specs can’t sense hosts through a vacuum. Is it possible the kilometer of dirt between them and the enemy provided these scientists with the same protection? The theory is reasonable—too reasonable. In fact, now that I’ve let my mind open up to the mere possibility, a host of other oddities suddenly come crowding into my head.

The way there never seemed to be any ghouls around the terraforming bunkers, though it’s a well-documented fact that ghouls have a tendency to hang around their squatter kin.

Squatters who, in all our run-ins, never once used lethal weapons of any kind. I assumed they wanted to save us as possible hosts. Could it be that they were afraid we would infect them?

I suddenly remember that squatter I shot in my escape from our camp. I burned a hole straight through his chest with my decimator. There’s no way he could’ve survived, and yet no ghoul ever emerged.

And then there was that ghoul who found us during those early days on the run. While the others slept, it drifted into our midst, hovering over me for a full minute before suddenly infecting Ysha instead. Why switch hosts at the last minute? It makes no sense unless—

It’s first choice was already taken.

My heart seizes. Stars above! Too much of this is making sense, filling in pieces of a puzzle I didn’t even know was incomplete. It can’t be, it can’t! And yet . . .

Could the soldiers possibly be right?

NO! No, no, no!

A sudden thought occurs to me, and I immediately seize on it like a drifting woman grabbing for a space line. Reaching up into my nostrils, I yank out my sniffer.

“Impossible! See this?” I wave the sniffer at the two triumphantly. “I’ve had this in since the moment the invasion hit! Even just a whiff of ghoul was enough to wake me from a sound sleep. There’s no way I could have been infected without sensing it!”

The soldiers exchange a sidelong look. The ensign hesitates, as if trying to decide whether or not to reply, and then quietly says, “We have gotten reports that the ghouls have been in place on certain planets and colonies since long before we were aware of the threat, biding their time, waiting for the right opportunity—or the right host—to come along. They’re called Biders.”

That pulls me up short. My hand falters, and I pause, trying to think through the ramifications of that little revelation. Finally, I shake my head. “Even if that were true, even if there were ghouls hidden on Iolanthe before the invasion hit, I still couldn’t have been infected. I was trapped at school behind a dozen force fences! There’s no way one could’ve gotten to me without setting the fences off. And until the invasion, I never went outside the fences . . .”

A vision of a long-ago game of laser-disc flashes into my mind, and my voice trails off as I suddenly realize:

I did go outside the force fence.

Just once, a few weeks before the invasion. I climbed through a hole in the enviro-shield, chasing after a laser-disc that went astray in a game I wasn’t even playing, and it was there in the jungle, just a couple of meters past the force fence, that I found it. Mere moments before I saw—

Shar.

Cold washes over me, tendrils of fear winding deep into the pit of my stomach as I recall my old nemesis. Shar was always the one piece of the puzzle that just never made any sense no matter how much information I obtained. Her purpose was an enigma and her presence a mystery, a fleeting shadow I could never catch no matter how fast I ran or how far I traveled. She always came to me, not the other way around, and though I could never explain her presence here on Iolanthe, three times she showed up out of the blue.

The first time, she led me to the path that took me directly to the terraforming bunker. If not for her, I never would have led the others into the jungle the night of the invasion but simply taken my chances with the spaceport.

The second time she came, I ended up at an aboveground terraforming shed in the middle of a field of dead solar-flits. It was there that I used the smart film to infiltrate the underground and discover the enemy’s plans, a discovery that catapulted me out of my complacency and into the war.

The final time was the night of the fire.

Oh God. I see it now, the missing piece I could never spot amidst the larger picture.

Activating my chit, I pull up my gallery of digitals. My fingers slide through the images, whipping through the air faster and faster as I search for the pics I snapped of Shar that first day I chased her through the woods. Images fly before my eyes, a collage pasted together through six months of war, and then there it is! I punch the little icon with my finger, and the digital flies up over my palm. I scan the forest, vibrantly green within the afternoon light from Ava and Eva, searching for the sullen figure just starting to run away.

She’s not there.

I pull up the other digitals I snapped that day, but all I find is empty forest. Shar is gone.

Hand trembling, I reach into my pocket for the piece of fabric I picked up after snapping those digitals. A square of gray cloth, ragged and uneven, like something torn from a jumpsuit—a jumpsuit exactly like the one I saw Shar wearing that last day on New Sol. My fingers brush the edge of the cloth, just barely touching it, and for a long moment, all I can do is stand there, more terrified than I’ve ever been in my entire life. Taking a deep breath, I yank it out of my pocket.

It’s not a piece of cloth.

It’s a leaf.

My mouth falls open. In total shock, I turn the withered plant over and over in my hands. Now that I can finally see it for what it is, I recognize it. Poison ash. The slightest touch of it will cause an itchy rash, even after the plant is long dead. The strangest thought comes over me.

So that’s why my hands kept breaking out.

My heart drops out of my chest, and just like that, the final piece of the puzzle falls into place. It was all a lie. Everything—the square of cloth, the Sinesensu, the plot to drug the human race into submission. Even Shar was never really here! She was just a fake, a forgery, a hallucination dreamt up by the monster in my head with no purpose but to lead me where it wanted to me to go!

The leaf flutters to the ground as I lurch forward, hands outstretched to the burnt remains of the forest. I turn my head wildly back and forth, as though somehow all the desolation, all the destruction, all the devastation will melt away now that I’m seeing through new eyes, but it doesn’t.

It’s all ash and dust as far as I can see.

Horror suffuses me as I take in the fruits of my labor, now showcased by the smoking ruin around me. More than anything, I want to deny everything I’ve seen and heard, and yet with one dose of Psi-Lac, the scales that have hung across my eyes for more than six months have finally fallen, and no matter how hard I try, I can no longer deny the truth:

I went to war to fight the enemy, and all this time, the enemy was me.

A roaring sound fills my ears. From the corner of my eye, I can see the soldiers’ mouths moving, soundlessly opening and closing though no voices emerge. The whole world starts to spin, ash and smoke and dust spiraling around me in a violent haze—slowly at first, then faster and faster, filling my vision in every direction until all I can see is a grayish blur. A wave of dizziness hits me, and suddenly I’m on the ground, burned knees pressing painfully into the gritty mud.

Figures loom over me, dark shadows against the pale sun, but I hardly notice them. Deep inside me, a hard knot is forming, like a fist, expanding outwards through my chest in every direction. I press my palm against my breast, digging the heel of my hand hard into my sternum as though I can somehow halt the increasing pressure, but in vain. My breath is coming in pants, rasping loudly through my burned trachea with every inhalation, and my chest feels like it’s going to explode. Every secret, every sin, every second I’ve spent on this stars-forsaken planet is building up inside of me, a swirling maelstrom that only continues to grow. Words thrum through my head, an unremitting chorus that refuses to end—

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no, nononononononononono . . . !

—and then thoughts become voice, and suddenly I’m screaming like wildfire into the ash-strewn sky.

Once I start, I can’t stop. Barely has the first scream ended when the next one begins, welling up from some terrible place inside of me to echo, high-pitched and harrowing, across the ashen sky. Again and again they come, tearing through my throat one after another until my larynx burns and my windpipe is on fire. Violent tremors seize my body, hijacking my nerves in a flurry of shivering spasms, and still the screams continue, driven by an all-encompassing horror rising up from the very depths of me until it’s impossible to tell where I end and the screaming begins.

Helpless to stop, I raise my desperate gaze to the soldiers. They stand stock-still in the drizzling rain, eyes agonized and faces white. Neither moves, and in the pale reflection of the double suns, their frozen forms seem tragic and remote. The corpsman’s hand flutters toward me and then away, a gesture of helplessness so acute it pierces my heart, and Gao . . . Tears stream down the officer’s face, a river of regret so deep I could drown in it, and it’s as though he’s crying for me the tears I could never seem to summon for myself. I meet his gaze, brown eyes to black, imploring him with every ounce of my will across the ashen dirt.

Please.

Gao stares back at me, denial etched into every line of his face. Ever so slowly, he nods. When he raises his pistol, I don’t turn away.

Then his finger pulls back on the trigger, and everything goes black.