30SKULKING JUST OUTSIDE THE ENVIRO Center, I check the time on my chit for about the hundredth time and try not to look suspicious.

That’s not the easiest of assignments. Located at the edge of the Upper Habitat Ring on the topmost tier of farms, the area around the Enviro Center is not exactly a usual haunt for most of the station’s teens, especially now. It’s almost twenty hundred hours, and Teal has been inside the center for forty-five minutes already. I check the time again and frown. The center will be closing soon; where is Teal? Surely she should be done by now.

Of course, maybe it’s just taking longer than we supposed. After all, it’s not like either of us has much experience sabotaging the station ventilation system.

Pacing the small square of decking between the beds of crops on either side of the center, I look out over the ring. It’s a unique perspective—the long tiers of farms in the foreground curving down to the city below, its buildings tiny and square in the distance. Up here, at least, there’s no smell of Spectres in the air, though I did catch scents of them in the lower section of the ring on my way here. Not nearly as prevalent as in the hub, but still enough to make me shudder now that I know what the odor means. I just hope Teal and I aren’t wrong in our theory.

We managed to wangle the mister logs from Taylor under the guise of needing the information for Teal’s school project. The logs showed the output from the misters for the past three months. It wasn’t easy to recall all the times I did or didn’t smell Spectres in the rings, but I could remember a few for sure, if only because I had the smell linked to a specific event in my head. When compared to the mister logs, my memories did seem to corroborate our theory. While Spectres were present during normal mist flow or complete shut-offs, they seemed to clear out whenever the misters ran full blast. With our theory confirmed inasmuch as we were able, we set about putting Teal’s plan into motion. Now if only she would hurry up and finish.

I’m making my twentieth pass across the tier when my chit vibrates. I answer the link, grateful for the distraction. “Hey, Michael.”

“Good news, Lia. I’ve tested it, and we’re a go.”

“Then it worked?”

“Yup, the screen turned on the moment I scanned it.”

“You actually scanned it?” I ask, alarmed that he might have accidentally given away our plan.

“Well, how else could I determine if it would work? Don’t worry—you have to punch in the code before it will go off. I doubt anyone noticed the scan.”

I nod and sign off. Assuming Teal’s work goes as planned, we’re nearly set for tomorrow. I just wish my own mission had gone as well. It’s something I’d remembered earlier, but then forgot in the stir of realizing I’d missed blowing the transport: “You’ll have roughly one hour to get to a console and transmit the contents of the data chip—you know where it will be hidden—to the station before you go Nova.”

A data chip, with all of the information we’d managed to glean about the Spectres. I can remember it now. Everything except where it’s hidden, that is. I’d gone through my stuff earlier looking for it. Locker, blanket, clothes—everything I’d had on the transport. I even ripped apart the seams of my jumpsuits looking for it, but to no avail. Either I lost the data chip on the transport, or it’s really well hidden.

“Can you locate the information if we link minds again?” I asked Shar after my fruitless search. “Dig in my mind until you find what happened to the data chip?”

Shar gave me a dark look and flopped back down on her cot. “Not unless you want to risk dying again. Remember what happened the last time I tried to force memories from you?”

Seizing, heart stopping . . . yeah, it’s pretty hard to forget that. Plus, what if the poking around harmed my biochip or clock? They were already damaged from my electric shock on the transport, and they’d been running much longer than planned. What if Shar’s digging caused them to malfunction again? Or worse—go off?

“You’re right,” I told Shar with a nod of my head. “We’ll just have to hope it turns up before tomorrow. So you’re in, right?”

Shar hesitated. “Yeah, whatever.”

The answer wasn’t as rousing as I’d hoped for. “We need you, Shar. You know we can’t pull this off without you,” I added, a note of warning in my voice.

“Look, I said I was in, okay?” Shar said in a cranky voice. Sitting up, she swung her legs off the cot and stood. “I’m going to the cafeteria. You want anything?”

Mutely shaking my head, I watched her go. While her answers weren’t exactly encouraging, she had been in my head and seen what I’d seen. She knew how important the plan was; she wouldn’t let us down.

I stop my pacing and glance over at the door to the Enviro Center. Still closed, still no sign of Teal. As I deliberate whether I should go inside after her, a group of workers from one of the farms passes by. I duck my head, but they don’t pay me much attention. That’s right, I exhort them in my head, just walk right on by. Nothing going on here. You know, except station sabotage, an alien invasion, and potentially the end of the human race.

I smile to myself, wondering how I can be so upbeat at a time like this. Maybe it’s because after those horrible months hiding out on Tiersten, with my parents dying and the resistance failing, I can finally feel some hope. Maybe I’ve lost my parents, but I have other family now—Michael’s family. I have a plan that will allow me not to go Nova and a chance at a new life, just like Michael talked about.

For a moment, I briefly wonder if Niven and Jao and the rest of the resistance would approve. After all, they gave their lives to take down the Tiersten spaceport. Would they be angry if I don’t do the same? I don’t think so, I decide after a minute. They gave their lives because they had to; they’d be happy to know I don’t need to.

I’m just getting ready to go into the Enviro Center after Teal when I see a figure coming up the steps from below. From the uniform, I can tell it’s an officer, and I immediately take a couple nervous steps back before reminding myself I’m not technically doing anything wrong.

No, that would be Teal.

The figure reaches my tier and stops a few feet away from me. “PsyLt. Rowan,” I blurt out, surprised to see him, of all people, on the agricultural level. “What are you doing here?”

“I need to speak with one of the farming managers about his report.” Rowan’s lips twist wryly. “What, you think I spend all my days on Level Eleven brain-draining people?”

Well, actually . . .

Rowan must see the answer on my face, for he laughs. “It may surprise you, but most of my duties on the station don’t have much to do with being a psychic at all. So what are you doing here, Lia?”

I start to babble out the story Teal and I concocted to get her into the center—that she’d lost an earring earlier this week while visiting with Taylor to work on her school project and had come back to look for it—when Rowan interrupts me to clarify. “I mean on the station. Didn’t your freighter shove off this morning? Comet’s Kiss, wasn’t it?”

Oh. The freighter. I’d forgotten about that. “I decided not to go, after all. The friend I told you about? Michael? He said it would be okay for me to stay with them. In fact, it’s his sister I’m waiting for.”

I feel a little guilty lying to Rowan after all the kindness he’s shown me, but I tell myself it’s not really a lie. Michael did once say his gran would let me stay with them, and I am waiting for Teal. For the first time, I wonder what I’ll do after this whole plan is over. Having originally assumed I would go Nova, housing had been the least of my concerns. Well, I’ll figure that out later.

“. . . if you could have Michael’s guardian come to the PsyCorp office sometime tomorrow,” Rowan is saying. “There’s some paperwork she’ll need to fill out to make everything official.”

“Of course. I’ll tell her tonight.”

Rowan just stares at me for a long moment, an unreadable look in his eyes. “I’m really glad this all worked out for you, Lia. Ever since I first saw you in the cargo bay—”

“What?” I ask when he stops abruptly.

“It’s nothing. You just look a lot like someone I know.”

“Who?”

He laughs. “My little sister, if you can believe it. You’re a dead ringer for her at that age. I know you’re not her, but I can’t help thinking of her every time I see you.”

His sister! I remember Rowan’s gentleness at our first meeting, the way he tried to warn me about the Aurorans’ fate, how he confided in me about Dayav and Mechanra. Now I understand why.

“Do you see her often?” I ask curiously.

“I’m afraid not. I come from a military family. My parents, my maternal grandparents, me, my sister. She’s on a posting far away. I haven’t seen her in three years.”

“Oh. Well, maybe you can visit her the next time you have leave.”

Rowan gets a strange look in his eyes, as though he would object to my suggestion and then suddenly realizes he doesn’t have to. He gives me a firm nod. “Maybe I will.”

The doors to the Enviro Center open and out comes Teal, followed by a few enviro workers who pause to lock the doors. She doesn’t even bat an eye when she sees Rowan, coming straight up to us as though there’s nothing more natural than finding me in conversation with an officer—and a PsyCorp officer, no less. I introduce her to Rowan, and the two make small talk for a minute while I marvel at her calm. Rowan mentions my staying with her family, and I tense.

“Oh yeah, I knew Lia back on Aurora. We’re like sisters. It’ll be much better than sharing a room with Michael,” she says, wrinkling her nose at the unfairness of a world where she has to share a room with her brother.

Rowan laughs, and a minute later we all part company. Teal and I take the steps leading down through the tiers. Feeling awkward about my lie, I try to explain.

“About what Rowan said, about living with you guys—”

“Well, where else would you stay?” Teal interrupts. “Unless you don’t want to live in that tin can we call an apartment. Tiny, cramped place. I can’t wait until I’m old enough to move away from this station and get my own place.”

Where else would I stay, indeed? Grinning, I savor the warm glow spreading through my chest at the idea of having a place to call my own. Soon enough, though, I refocus on the mission. According to Teal, everything went off without a hitch.

“They completely bought my story about the earring, and having seen me with Gran a couple times, they waved me right through. They didn’t even have anyone shadowing me while I looked. I guess they don’t consider the filtration system especially high security. Either that, or they couldn’t see past my innocent face to the evil genius inside.”

“Then what took you so long?”

She shrugs. “It took me awhile to get an unoccupied control station; I had to wait until someone went on a maintenance check. Don’t worry—it’s done. I set the system to lock open all valves in both the lower and upper rings at exactly 2230.”

“All of them?”

“Sure, no sense playing it safe, right? With the center closed for the night, it’ll be morning at the earliest before anyone realizes what happened. I changed the valve system password while I was at it, so it should take them awhile to get it shut off.”

I nod. “I just hope it’s enough time.”

Teal gives me a sidelong glance. “You and me both.”

I wake with butterflies in my belly the next morning. Today is the day. The convoy will be arriving late tonight so they can refuel and be ready to take on passengers tomorrow. If we’re going to make our move, it has to be sometime within the next several hours. My stomach clenches at the thought, though whether it is from fear or excitement, I’m not entirely sure. Probably both.

As soon as I finish my morning routine, I link Michael and ask him to meet me at the SlipStream station on the ring side. Time to see if my theory and Teal’s sabotage have panned out. The first thing I do when I step out of the station is take a deep breath.

“Well?” Michael asks me impatiently.

I grin. “So far so good.”

“What now?”

“Time to walk around and see if the rest of the place smells this good.”

We spend the morning together, just Michael and me, sometimes walking, sometimes biking to cover more ground. Technically, I don’t need him to come with me, since only I can smell them, but I want his company. After all that’s passed, I finally have the chance to tell him everything I never could before. About the resistance and my time on Tiersten. About Cavendish and Jao and Niven, and how they must have died taking out the spaceport. Even about how my parents were infected on our flight from the main camp. The words pour out, one after another, and through it all, Michael just listens, occasionally asking questions when my story doesn’t quite fit together.

“So if you were just another prisoner at the colony, how did you end up in the resistance?”

I hesitate, unsure how to answer without revealing that I wasn’t imprisoned on Tiersten, but created there. “Well, the resistance chose Tiersten to base their operations for a couple reasons. First, because it was about as far from New Earth as they could get.”

“And second?”

“Because with the only people coming in being war prisoners from the Celestial Expanse, they knew the population would be uninfected, and thus a good place to recruit from. Not like the rest of the alliance. They chose my parents because my dad is—was—a psychic.”

I tell him how I first learned about the Spectres, much the way he had, by linking with a Tellurian psychic and seeing all she knew.

Michael whistled. “They had to recruit everyone into the resistance individually, using only psychic links?”

“They had no other way—still don’t. The Spectres can’t be seen, heard, touched. We have no hard evidence of their existence to show anyone. Even my smell technology is a prototype. Only the psychics can sense them once they’ve bonded with a human, and only if they know what they’re looking for. It’s what made it so hard to fight them, and so difficult to organize a resistance.”

“I’ll bet. I mean, you couldn’t even com someone safely with the information, not without any way to verify they’re not infected.”

“Or if their superior or their coworker is infected. We think it’s why our previous attempts to warn the Celestians always failed. Even when we sent people in person, they had a way of disappearing.”

“Well, I’ll tell them,” Michael says. “When this whole thing is over, I’ll help you tell the entire galaxy.”

My heart lurches as the declaration. Oh, Michael! I struggle to keep a huge grin from bursting across my face. “Promise?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Stick a needle in your eye! I think wryly.

By early evening, we’ve finished our tour of the rings and have ended up on Michael’s roof. Though the rings are too big to go over every nook and cranny in a day, we’ve covered enough for me to know that Teal’s sabotage was a success. The Spectres have cleared out of the rings, at least as far as I can tell. I did have a false alarm down in the lower ring when I caught the scent of an infected officer. Luckily, he got on a SlipStream bound for the hub shortly after we started discreetly following him. I can only hope there aren’t other infected people I may have missed.

“Lia?” Michael asks as we lean on the roof ledge and watch the people below. The nutrient spray is drifting around us, thick enough to feel after more than twelve hours at maximum capacity. Teal did her work well.

“Hmm?”

“I just wanted you to know that what I said before is still true. In the park, when I said it didn’t matter what your name was? I still mean that. I know you’re not Lia—my Lia from Aurora, at least—but you’re still Lia from New Sol. I just wanted you to know that.”

I look up in surprise, my heart fluttering at the words, otherwise implied but never spoken until now. This time, I’m the one who kisses him. Wrapping my arms around his neck, I pull his face down to mine and let every thought fly out of my head, lost to everything but the tingles running down my spine and the shivers caressing my skin everywhere we touch. When we finally pull away, Michael closes one hand around my wrist. I glance down at it, then raise a questioning gaze to his.

He shrugs sheepishly. “Just in case you get the urge for some exercise.”

I laugh and kiss him again, enfolded within the cool of the mist and the warmth of his arms, and realize I’ve never felt more alive in my entire life.