No way in hell,” Dorian said.

They were outside in the cold because Saskia had insisted on talking to him privately. He figured it would be about that damn suicide mission to get into the Forerunner structure, but he had gone along anyway because Saskia had gotten this pleading look in her eyes and because Dorian honestly didn’t have anything better to do. He and Yellow Squad had swept the entire transport station twice already. If they were going to scavenge, it would mean going out into the city. And Dorian wasn’t ready to do that again.

He wasn’t ready to do anything that would be a risk. Not for Owen. Not for ONI. He was tired of risking his life for people who didn’t give a damn about him.

Saskia, at least, did care. He knew that much. Same with Victor and Evie, but they were holed up with Owen and the team leaders, planning their approach for gaining access to the building. Better than storming the place, at least, although Dorian wouldn’t be surprised if that was what they wound up doing.

“Why not?” Saskia said a second time. Dorian was trying to ignore her. But she put her hand on his shoulder. “Well?”

“You know why.” Dorian swept her hand aside. “We aren’t supposed to be here. There’s no reason for us to risk our lives on a mission that was never intended for us.”

Saskia tilted her head, frowning, the wind blowing her lank hair into her eyes. Dorian’s own hair was limp and greasy as well. What he wouldn’t give for a bar of dry cleanser, much less a steam shower.

“What we did on Brume-sur-Mer,” Saskia said. “That wasn’t a mission intended for us.”

“Oh, come on!” Dorian whirled away from her, his face hot with anger. “We were saving our families.”

Silence save for the constant howl of the wind.

“Your families,” Saskia said softly.

Dorian closed his eyes. “This is not the same. You had people you cared about in that town. This is just … errand running for ONI.”

He heard her footsteps on the broken concrete as she walked around in front of him. “Our home is more than a town,” she said. “This place”—she swept her hands out wide—“it’s part of Meridian. If we can find out what’s in that structure, and how it relates to the cylinder, we can keep the Covenant from getting to it. We can keep them from glassing our home.” She shook her head, eyes damp. “Don’t you want this to be our home again?”

Dorian stared at her, anger surging inside him. “This isn’t going to be our home again,” he snapped. “Every single survivor is settled in at the refugee colony. Why the hell would they come back here?” And he gestured out at Annecy too, at the rubble and debris, the shattered buildings, the hollow, echoing emptiness. “And besides, if we remove the artifact, the Covenant will have no reason to not glass this place. They’ve already won.”

“Why are you being like this?” Saskia asked. “Is it just because of Owen?”

And there it was, the truth, hard and stinging like the wind. Her question hung in the air between them, ringing in his ears.

“You can’t keep holding that against him,” Saskia said. “I know you’re angry. I was angry too. But he had good reasons—”

Dorian rolled his eyes. “They always have reasons.” He paused, looked out over the rubble. “I don’t know why you trust him. Why any of us did. We should have listened to those damn stories our grandparents told us about the Insurrection. Owen was created to do whatever the hell the UNSC says.”

“He wasn’t created,” Saskia said. “He was a kid once. A war orphan.”

Dorian didn’t look at her. The information left him faintly stunned. “How do you know that?”

“He told me.” Saskia walked over to Dorian’s side, put her hand on his arm. He didn’t shrug her away; her palm was warm, a comfort in the biting wind. “He didn’t tell me much, but he told me that. He told me ONI trained him. Did things to him.”

Dorian laughed, although it tasted sour on his tongue. “So you’re telling me I should trust the UNSC because they snatched up an orphan, broke him down, and created a war machine from the parts?” He found himself thinking of Remy, ten years old. Orphaned, broken down, re-created. He shivered. Not, this time, from the cold.

“Look, I’m not defending what the UNSC did,” Saskia said. “But they made him what he is. They made him a hero. Think of how many lives he’s saved—how many people didn’t become orphans because he was there to fight for them.” She took a breath, her cheeks flushed. “Think about what would have happened to the people of Brume-sur-Mer if he had never shown up! We wouldn’t even be here to have this conversation because no one would have made it off Meridian alive. Including Remy and your uncle.”

Dorian was silent.

“Owen told me that, when it happened, when they—trained him, they gave him a new family. And I think something like that has happened with us.” Saskia smiled, although she looked exhausted. “We can’t do this without you.”

Dorian sighed, pushed a hand through his greasy hair. This was such a Saskia thing, her obsession with family. All because her parents abandoned her.

But the thing was, he understood it. His parents had abandoned him too. All for the UNSC, all for their stupid senseless protocols that said it was okay to lie to a bunch of scared, grieving teenagers. Sure, Dorian had Uncle Max and Remy, but there was still a space in his heart that his parents had gouged out when they boarded that UNSC recruit ship.

Owen had made him think, stupidly, that maybe they’d done it to protect him. But Owen had also lied.

“I’m not asking you to do this for Owen,” Saskia said. “I’m asking you to do this for Evie and Victor. They’re going down there regardless of whether you come with us or stay here. But we’ve been through so much together. You really think we should split up now?”

“When they’re about to do something incredibly stupid?” Dorian glanced at her.

She smiled like she thought he was joking.

“I mean,” he said, “they’re about to head down into some alien structure without any kind of protection. It’s pretty stupid.”

Saskia shrugged. “I guess. That’s why they need us there to help them. Maybe that’s the trick. Maybe we can do all the stupid stuff we want as long as it’s the four of us. We’ve survived this long as a team.”

Dorian stared at her. With her unwashed hair, the dark circles under her eyes, the filthy scavenged clothes, she looked so different than she had back before the invasion. He’d never even really talked to her before the attack. Now she was treating him like he was family.

Because he was family. They all were. As much as he hated to admit it, maybe Owen was right about this one thing. They’d survived something together, and that forged bonds that nothing else could. They were his family, and he wasn’t about to be like his parents and abandon them.

“Fine,” he said. “Let’s go be stupid together.”

The entire militia—what remained of it, anyway—set out at sunset, bundled up in jackets and armed with every weapon and piece of equipment they’d managed to put together. It wasn’t much. The three remaining Blue Squad members manned the Warthog, the only piece of good luck on this entire trip as far as Dorian was concerned. Although even that made a peculiar sputtering noise anytime they drove over some particularly sizable debris, so Dorian spent the whole march waiting for it to cut out.

At first, things were quiet, just Meridian’s ragtag militia and the emptiness of the city. But then something big and loud whined through the sky, leaving bright trails in its wake. Energy arced between two parallel cylinders. Everyone hit the ground, guns ready. Fortunately, the ship didn’t loop back around to them, just kept barreling toward wherever it was going.

“That’s not good,” Evie said softly.

“It never is.”

“No, I mean, they didn’t have ships before.” She frowned. “The site wasn’t being watched from above. There were only ground patrols.”

“Agreed.” Owen, eavesdropping with that supersonic hearing of his. “But we knew this was likely to be the case, after we first encountered them at the site and then you”—he cleared his throat—“breached the shield.”

“I didn’t mean to,” she said.

“We need to proceed with caution,” Owen said, pushing forward through the group. They set out again, moving through narrow side streets, keeping their eyes on the sky and the shadows. A pair of Banshees swooped overhead, moving in the opposite direction from the dropship. Whatever they were doing, it wasn’t surveillance. They would have seen the group heading into the city.

Dorian took a deep breath, resisted the urge to turn around.

Eventually, they came to a stop in a particularly demolished area situated on the top of a hill. The metal frame of a ruined building jutted out of the ground, its walls replaced by shredded white material that clumped together, plastering the frame like a faded old skin. Zabinski parked the Warthog behind the wall and began distributing equipment.

“We’ve got a clear view of the Forerunner structure site from here,” Evie said. “And that building gives us a little cover.”

Dorian felt a surge of curiosity despite himself. By that point, the sun had set completely behind the distant hills, but the night wasn’t nearly as dark as it was down at the transport center. He drifted closer, creeping to the wall’s edge. No one tried to stop him—not that he would have listened anyway. He peered around the corner.

“Holy sh—” he sputtered, slamming back around to cover. That caught some attention: Both Owen and Farhi jerked their heads up at him.

“What are you doing?” Farhi said.

“What did you see?” asked Owen, and even Dorian had to admit that was the better question.

“Nothing good,” he said.

He peeked around the edge of the wall again, his heart hammering. Even without the HUD of his old helmet, he could clearly make out the scene below.

The bombed-out space between the hills was crawling with Covenant soldiers.

There were ground troops marching in formation, heading off into the city. A pair of Locusts, like the one used in their excavation three months ago back on Brume-sur-Mer, crawled over the ground. A Banshee floated in the air, casting bright lights down over the entire scene. Fully armed Elites stood in a ring at the center of the space. A strange berobed figure sat near them, hovering in what appeared to be some sort of chair. It looked vaguely human compared to the rest of the Covenant species. But then it turned its head, and Dorian saw that its neck was longer, more serpentine. He gasped and jerked back behind the wall. In all his time fighting since the invasion, he’d never seen one of the San’Shyuum—the Prophets, as they were called. They didn’t fight. Just led the Covenant in their endless holy war.

“Looks like our activities here have drawn more attention,” Owen said to Evie, who stepped away from the wall, her face pale.

“We expected this,” Farhi said.

“Not to this degree.” Owen gestured and the militia gathered around him. The wall rose up against the night, their only cover. Dorian kept staring at it, waiting for it to topple.

“We giving up on this?” Valois said.

Owen shook his head. “We can’t. We’ve just got to learn from our past mistakes.”

Dorian smothered a laugh. “Too bad we don’t know the tunnel system around here.”

“The shield’s down,” Victor said. The activation light on his helmet was blinking. Must have zoomed in on the view. “It’s a straight shot into the hole if we can make it.”

“They’ve got a Prophet down there, for god’s sake,” said Valois. “With about a million bodyguards. I’m not the only one who sees that, right?”

“I say we stick with the original plan,” said Farhi. “Snipe at them from the surrounding hills, like we talked about, while the kids sneak in. The shield being down actually makes it easier.”

A low rumble of suggestions started up from the group. Dorian glanced over at Evie and Victor. The two scouts. He thought about what Saskia had told him, about them being a family. Whatever crazy idea Dorian came up with, he wasn’t about to let them go down there alone. All of them, or none of them.

Somehow, seeing all those Covenant troops down below had just cemented that fact for him. Weird how that worked out.

Owen stepped up. “If we do go forward with it, I’m going down there with them. Farhi, you’ll lead the strike here.”

Farhi nodded, gave a quick salute.

“I’m going down there too,” Dorian announced suddenly. “The four of us, we work as a team, and Evie and Victor are going to need more reinforcements. You know a few gunshots from up here isn’t going to pull away that entire setup down there.”

Owen looked over at him. “Fine.”

“I’m going too,” Saskia said, stepping up beside Dorian. She glanced at him. “Like he said. We’re a team.”

“All right, then.” Farhi clapped her hands together. “It’s been decided. Blue, Red, Green, Yellow: You know what to do. Local Team.” She looked at them. Somehow Dorian, Saskia, Evie, and Victor had managed to clump up together. “Happy hunting.”