Victor slouched down in a pile of ash and dirt, the softest place in the entire city. He took a deep breath, but the cold air just stabbed at his lungs. He never thought he’d say this, but he missed Brume-sur-Mer and its sweltering humidity.

“Do we know where we are?” Saskia asked, sitting a few paces away on a chunk of broken stone. She squinted up at the sky. “Better yet, does Owen know where we are?”

Does it matter? Victor thought, although he stopped himself from saying it out loud. He wasn’t Dorian, for god’s sake. He was still trying to toe ONI’s military line, but he didn’t like not knowing about the true start date of the invasion any more than the others. He understood that there were things Owen couldn’t tell them—hell, there were things his own sisters couldn’t tell him. He never expected Owen to sit them down and spill all of the UNSC’s secrets. What bothered Victor was the idea that Owen had kept information from them that the other members of the militia already knew. If they could fight alongside people like Caird or even Valois, they could know that Meridian had been under attack for the last six months instead of the last three. At this point, Victor knew that their work on Meridian merited more respect than that, and Owen knew they could take care of themselves.

“I think the most important question,” Evie said, “is whether or not the Covenant know where we are.”

That elicited a murmur of agreement from Victor and Saskia both. Victor pressed himself back into the dirt and stared up at the brilliant blue sky. They’d been running for at least half an hour, weaving around half-demolished buildings, ducking behind felled trees and piles of broken bricks and glass and stone, trying to confuse the Brutes’ scent tracking. They’d lost them pretty quickly but had kept running to be sure they were in the clear, weaving around on top of their own steps. Now, Victor knew, they were lost, and without any real equipment to help them survive or get them back to camp.

He hated to admit it, but this wouldn’t have happened in Brume-sur-Mer.

“So now what?” he said.

Evie and Saskia looked at him. “We’re going to have to find our way back,” Saskia said. “If we can get up high, I bet we can see where the transport center is. It’s on a hill.”

Victor grinned at her. “Good point.”

She smiled back. It still made him feel all fluttery in his chest.

“I wish we had the artifact,” Evie said, gazing off into the distance. “It was so weird, wasn’t it, the way it pulled at the excavation site like that? Like it wanted to be there.”

Victor nodded. “Yeah, I thought the same thing.” He looked over at Saskia. “What about you? Do you know of any technology that can do that?”

Saskia laughed a little. “Does it matter? We’re dealing with Forerunner tech with that thing. It’s not something we’re ever going to understand.”

Victor’s cheeks warmed. “I know that,” he said. “I just thought—”

“I think the artifact is more than a map,” Evie said. “I mean, I don’t know what, not without getting to the dig site. But if it was just supposed to get us here, I don’t know why it would be freaking out like that.”

“Maybe it wanted to make sure we definitely went inside,” Victor said.

“Right,” said Evie. “So what’s inside?”

They went quiet. The wind stirred the dust around, and it glinted in the bright sun. Victor still couldn’t get over how much light there was here, despite the constant chill. It was like the sun couldn’t do anything to warm the air.

“We ought to try to find some warmer clothes,” he muttered.

“I don’t think we’re going to be finding anything here.” Saskia gestured at their surroundings. “I mean, look.”

She was right; they might as well have been resting in some ancient alley, worn down by time. Buildings lay in heaps of rubble, twisted metal frames clawed jaggedly toward the sky. Nothing even looked remotely like a city, let alone a store.

“Well, I hope Dorian found something, then,” Victor snapped. “Might as well do some good if he’s not going to help out.”

“If there were something there,” Evie said. “I’m sure Dorian would find it.” But Victor knew her well enough to hear the shiver of doubt in her voice. And why not? Dorian had been livid about Owen lying to them. For good reason, Victor had to admit, even if he didn’t like the way Dorian expressed it. He had lost the most out of all of them during the invasion.

“Oh,” Evie said after a moment. “Oh my god, I just had a thought.”

“About clothes?” Victor said.

“No.” Evie stood up and paced around the debris, her fingers tapping along her thighs. Victor recognized this particular maneuver; it was what she did when she was on the verge of a breakthrough. “Look, it’s clear the Covenant found the Forerunner building—the structure, whatever it is—before us. The space has been cleared out; it’s protected behind an energy shield.”

“They were guarding it,” Saskia added.

“Well, sort of.” Evie stopped pacing and looked up at her. “The Jiralhanae must have been patrolling, but they weren’t nearby. That light flash would have drawn them instantly, and it took them a while to get there. So there’s a presence, but they’re only watching the perimeter. That means the Covenant aren’t too worried about someone swooping in there and taking off with something.”

Victor nodded, the pieces starting to fall into place for him too. It was just like when they were designing robotics for class last year. “So we’re not looking at an artifact here, not like the one from Brume-sur-Mer.”

“Right,” Evie said. “Saskia, is this making sense?”

“It is,” she said. “But what do you think is down there? Some kind of building?”

“Yes,” Evie said. “But there’s got to be more to it than that, right? It can’t just be a building—I mean, why would the Covenant be protecting it, then? It must have some other purpose, something they can’t get to work—”

“And you’re thinking the Brume-sur-Mer artifact is the key,” Victor said.

Evie shrugged. “That thing wanted to be in the structure, that’s for sure. I mean, it flew out of my hands.”

“Yeah, and it went straight for the shield too,” Saskia said. “Owen caught it before it hit, but—”

“It wanted in the building,” Evie said. “There’s got to be a connection between the two things. I just—we have to figure out what.”

“We’ll need to get past that shield,” Victor said. “Take it in there.”

“Yes,” Saskia said. “That doesn’t sound dangerous at all.”

Victor blushed. “We just escaped a pack of Brutes. I think we can go into a building.” But then he sighed. “It is a weird alien building, though, so you may have a point.”

“May have a point?” teased Saskia.

Victor’s blush deepened. He wondered if she was flirting. Probably not.

“Once we get back to camp, we can take a look at the artifact,” Evie said. “Victor, you can help me—you didn’t look at it much before, and you were always the hardware guy.”

Victor smiled. “I guess you could say that.”

“Then it’s settled.” Evie paused, looking up at their surroundings. “Now we just have to figure out how to get back.”

An hour later, at the point when the wreckage had all started to look the same and even Victor was about to give up hope of ever getting back to the camp, voices echoed through the buildings. Human voices.

A very familiar human voice, in fact: Dorian’s. He was out scavenging for Green Squad, and he came around the corner of a fallen building with his gun hoisted and a supply pack strapped to his back.

“So you didn’t die,” Dorian said, lowering his weapon. “We weren’t sure.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Victor asked.

Dorian laughed bitterly. “Owen came back here an hour ago. Said he lost you. I figured he was just lying again, and ONI had fed you to the Covenant as part of their grand master scheme where everyone dies painful, horrific deaths but they win the war.”

“Seriously?” muttered Saskia. “You need to let this go.” She didn’t say it loud enough for Dorian to hear her, though.

As it turned out, they had been closer to the camp than they realized. Dorian led them through a narrow gap in a nearby wall, and the landing pad gleamed dead ahead, the transport station glittering in the sunlight.

From there, they made it back to camp in fifteen minutes, straggling one by one into the main atrium. The place had been transformed in their absence; a heating unit hummed steadily in the corner, warming the room to a halfway decent temperature. Jackets were laid out on the floor, ripped and dirty but still warm—Victor grabbed one and threw it around his shoulders as soon as he spotted them. The camp itself was empty, though.

“I heard you found something.” Dorian stretched out on top of one of the blankets. “Some kind of structure? A building?”

“Yeah,” Evie said. “Underground. Where is Owen? We need to talk to him.”

Dorian scoffed. “A lot of good that does.”

“Dorian,” Saskia said. “He didn’t lie to hurt us. We’re going to need your help.”

Dorian jerked up to sitting, his hair falling into his eyes. He looked exhausted. They probably all did.

“Those lies cost my friends their lives,” Dorian snapped. “They cost how many lives in this city? In case you haven’t looked around, it doesn’t look like the UNSC really knows what it’s doing on Meridian. Or if they do, they’re doing a terrible job of it. If they’d been open to my plan in Brume-sur-Mer, sixty lives could have been saved. And I made that plan not even knowing half of what’s going on in this world. And yet you all are willing to keep parroting this lie that it’s okay because the adults know better? They don’t. And, Evie, I know you know it too.”

Evie crossed her arms, glancing up at Victor.

Saskia sighed. “It’s not about the adults knowing better,” she said. “It’s about looking at the bigger picture. It’s about understanding that even more people could have died if they’d tried to evacuate into the middle of a Covenant blockade—”

Dorian rolled onto his back, twisting away from them.

“Fine,” she muttered. Then, louder: “So where is Owen? We do need to talk to him, like Evie said.”

Dorian gestured loosely. “Out back with the others. They’re running drills.”

“And you’re not training with them?” Victor frowned.

“Clearly not.”

“Come on,” Evie said. “Let’s go. Let him have some space.”

“He shouldn’t be talking like that,” Victor said once they were in the corridor and out of earshot. “I mean, yeah, Owen shouldn’t have lied, but what does Dorian propose we do? Without the UNSC we’d all be—”

“I can see where he’s coming from,” Evie said, which didn’t surprise Victor at all. These days she was always taking Dorian’s side. “I mean, his friends died, Victor. None of us went through anything like that. And he was right. If we had known about the attack, we could have been better prepared.”

“But that wasn’t Owen’s fault,” Saskia said. “It was the government keeping the attack from us for our own good. By the time Owen came along, Dorian’s friends had already—” Her voice faltered. “He’s being unfair.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Evie said. “But the point is that Owen is the government. He has to keep their secrets and carry out their orders. If Dorian disagrees with the UNSC, with ONI, he also disagrees with Owen. And I don’t blame him. Seeing Annecy in this state … I have questions too.”

Victor listened to their conversation, trying to work out his own feelings. He knew in the military you couldn’t know everything. Security issues. But three months ago, they’d been in an active war zone, with a slim chance of surviving—what if something in their rescue and escape plan hinged on them knowing something that ONI didn’t want them to know?

Honestly, thinking about it just made him exhausted. Victor—and it seemed like Saskia agreed with him—wanted to bypass processing this entire situation and skip straight to the only logical conclusion: They would have helped the UNSC anyway, because the UNSC represented humanity’s best chance of survival. It was like Owen had said. Their lives weren’t the only ones in the galaxy. There were millions of others to factor in too.

They stepped through the jagged gap in the wall, out onto the landing pad. The militia was divided up into their squads, all of them sparse and painful to look at. Owen barked orders, offered tips of improvement.

The case, with the artifact, was still clamped to his thigh.

“We should be out here running drills with them,” Victor said. “Going over Owen’s plan.”

“We should be looking at that artifact,” Evie responded. “If we can take it back to that structure, we might be able to study it, get some answers.”

Saskia nodded. “But Owen will never agree to that—it could compromise the whole mission if we get caught by the Covenant.”

“Well, that’s why we’re not going to get caught.” Immediately, she cut through the landing pad toward Owen. Saskia and Victor hung back while she and Owen spoke, Evie gesturing wildly, pointing at the artifact, then at the city, then at the sky. Owen kept shaking his head, but Evie stayed on him, her gestures growing more and more emphatic. Typical Evie—not even a Spartan could stand in her way when there was a problem to be solved.

“What do you think ONI’s gonna want us to do?” Saskia asked.

“Huh?” Victor went still. “ONI?”

“With the last artifact, they wanted us to literally take it. But we can’t take a building. There’s got to be something more to all this.”

Across the landing pad, Owen handed Evie the case. Then he barked out Farhi’s name.

“Huh,” Victor said. “Looks like we’re about to do some investigating.”

Evie jogged up to them, breathless. “Okay,” she said. “It took some convincing, and Farhi’s going to come along in case we run into the Covenant—”

“So a babysitter,” Victor said.

Evie shot him an annoyed look. “We’re lucky he’s letting us go at all—this is a huge risk we’re taking. Farhi stepped in and mentioned we could scout out if the Covenant presence has been beefed up at the site since our last run-in with them. That and telling him we’d be in and out as quickly and quietly as possible was the only way he’d let us go. He did like our theory, though. He’s already working with the rest of the team to figure out how to get access to the structure. Saskia, you want to help us, or do you want to run through the plan with the militia?”

Victor resisted the urge to offer to let her take his place; he’d prefer to be here, helping Owen come up with a strategy. But Victor had always been good with hardware. Probably better for him to take a look at the artifact.

Saskia tilted her head, looked out at the landing pad. “I think I’ll stay here,” she said. “It’s important one of us knows the whole plan of attack, and I doubt Dorian’s going to show up any time soon. Plus it’s probably best you go in with a smaller group to avoid being seen. I’ll be more help to you this way.” She nodded at them. “Good luck.”

Victor zoomed in on the dig site on his helmet. The energy shield was a white mass in the center of his field of vision.

“I’m not seeing anything,” he said. “Looks clear.”

Farhi’s voice crackled in his ear. “Looks clear from where I am,” she said. She was perched up on the second floor of a nearby building with a sniper rifle, keeping an eye out for Covenant scouts. “You two be careful.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Okay.” Evie rustled beside him, behind the last source of cover for the next forty meters. “You ready?”

Victor pulled out his rifle, cocked it into place. “Go for it.”

Evie took a deep breath and slid open the case. A pale glow flooded between them, a sphere of light about a meter wide. She eased out the cylinder. The light flickered but didn’t flash like it had earlier that day, which was what Victor had been bracing himself for. He breathed a long sigh of relief.

“Yeah,” said Evie. “Let’s just hope this light isn’t enough to draw them.”

“Is it vibrating?” Victor asked.

“A little.” Evie held it up between them. The light was diffused, but that flicker made Victor feel like he was back in Mrs. Alvarez’s chemistry class. That damn light had never been fixed. Never would, now.

Evie grabbed the cylinder and twisted, the way she had when she discovered the map. The pieces slid together, and the light blinked out.

“Oh.” Evie frowned. “So it’s not going to show us the map again.”

“Well, we’re here,” Victor said. “I mean, that kind of proves your theory, right? That it’s not just a map. It served that purpose, so now it’s got something else to do.”

Evie nodded. Through the haze of night vision, Victor could see the movement of the artifact in her hands, a faint blur where its edges should be. He wished they’d had their full complement of equipment, instead of whatever people had been able to carry with them as they raced through the forest. A nanoscanner, or even just a computer—either could have given him some insight. Hell, if they’d had time to take the artifact to the Brume-sur-Mer high school, he bet he could have hooked it up to the JDI machine and gotten a read on its electromagnetic waves. Something.

“I think we should go closer,” Evie said. “I’m leaving it in this state, though. I’m curious to see what happens.”

“I’ll lead the way,” Victor said, tapping his helmet.

They picked their way across the field of trash and destruction. Even with Farhi keeping watch, Victor was aware of how exposed they were, how disadvantaged. He had to admit he found the idea of a babysitter less irritating now that they were out in the open.

Evie yelped, her voice echoing out into the darkness. Victor cringed, tightened the grip on his gun.

“Everything okay?” Farhi said, her voice staticky.

“It’s moving,” she hissed, more quietly. “Oh god, it’s pulling me toward the—”

She shoved past him, her arms jutted out in front of her, the artifact pressed between her palms. The light pulsed. He couldn’t look at it directly.

“Evie!” He followed after her, grasping out with one hand—but she was running too fast. Or being dragged, really. Somehow she managed to stay on her feet, but her legs kept splaying out from underneath her, and she twisted around and looked at him with a stricken expression. “I’m trying!” he cried.

“It’s pulling me!”

“What the hell’s going on?” Farhi said.

“It’s the artifact,” Victor panted, running after Evie. “Not the Covenant.”

They were almost to the energy shield. Evie smothered a scream. The artifact jerked in her hands, and then, to Victor’s horror, she went flying straight to the energy shield.

“Drop it!” he shouted.

Instantly, she hit the ground. The artifact streaked forward, slammed into the energy shield in a blast of heat and light. Victor flew backward, his ears ringing. He was too stunned to move, his gaze fixed on the brilliant night sky.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Farhi said over the comm. “I have no idea what just happened but that light is going to call the Covenant. We have to get out of here. Now.”

“Agreed.” Victor sat up, fumbled around in the debris for his gun. Evie shifted up ahead, dragging herself to her feet. She rubbed her forehead. Then she let out a cry and scrambled toward the shield.

“What is she doing?” Farhi said.

“I’ll get her!” Victor responded. He clambered to his feet and followed after her, heart pounding, afraid she was going to fling herself against the shield, but she slowed and knelt down at its edge.

Victor stumbled to a stop beside her.

“Look,” she breathed.

At first, he thought she was talking about the artifact, which had bounced off the shield and lay undamaged on the ground, its light pulsing violently. But then she pointed toward the shield, and Victor followed the line of her finger to see a dark spot clouding out along the shield. It consumed the dome for one terrifying moment, and then went dark.

“We’ve got to get in there,” Evie said.

Victor couldn’t disagree.