19

“Don’t worry about me,” Geum said to Hwa Young after what felt like an insufferable wait. “I know you have to get back to base. My dads said they could organize a ride back for me.” And zie smiled at her, radiant, from within the circle of zir older dad’s arms.

Hwa Young had smiled weakly and made her way back to the vehicle pool, alone and forlorn.

The lancers were her family now. All the same, she couldn’t imagine receiving such a warm welcome from, say, Eun or Bae. Especially not prickly Bae. And she didn’t really want Seong Su to hug her. With his strength, he might crush her.

The guards at the vehicle pool didn’t give her any trouble. Hwa Young checked the rover; even with her thoughts swirling, she hadn’t forgotten the earlier sensation that someone was following her. Still, she was running low on time; she needed to report back to the commander in an hour. She’d have to chance it.

Hwa Young entered the rover, keenly aware of Geum’s absence, and removed her pistol from its hiding place beneath her shirt, then holstered it at her waist so she could reach it more easily. Better to look stupid than be dead.

“Don’t hesitate to radio for help if you get waylaid by clanners,” one of the guards told her between sneezes. “ ’Scuse. Damn pollen sets off my allergies.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Hwa Young said.

She was grateful for her neural implant’s timekeeping function. Out in the Moonstorm, you couldn’t rely on the ebb and flow of light in the sky to tell time accurately. Several stars streaked past, brilliant and beautiful. Once upon a time she would have craned her head back to admire them, and thought of the folktales Eldest Paik had told her about aether-riders and far-travelers. But she couldn’t afford to get distracted by childhood stories anymore.

The sensation that someone was following her returned fifteen minutes into the journey, not coincidentally when the civilian base had dropped out of sight in the rearview mirror as she dipped into the far side of the hills. Hwa Young hadn’t lived this long without trusting her instincts, but it would be nice if said instincts gave her more details. She wanted so badly to turn off the road, to make her trail less predictable, but it would be no use. Whoever was tailing her knew her destination. Everything else was minutiae.

She grew tenser and tenser as the drive progressed, pain radiating from the base of her neck and throughout her shoulders, despite her best efforts to stay relaxed. If this had been one of Geum’s racing games, there would have been shitty jangling music to encourage her to accelerate. As it stood, only the jackhammer percussion of her heartbeat accompanied her, and the howling of the wind, which buffeted silvery starbloom petals across her windshield.

The attack came just as she had convinced herself that she was imagining things. She heard a tiny crack above the hum of the engine. Barely kept from losing control of the vehicle in a wild U-turn. Instead, she accelerated.

What the hell had that been? The rover was still handling fine, so it wasn’t the levitators or engine—

She punched the button on the radio. “Winter to Base Two—”

The radio didn’t turn on. Dead. Not even static. She bet if she stopped the rover and investigated, which she wasn’t about to do, she’d find that someone had shot out the radio unit.

Nobody accidentally disabled the radio first. She was being ambushed. Her attacker didn’t intend for her to call for help, which meant she was on her own.

Hwa Young didn’t know which direction the attack had come from. She had two choices. Disengage the safety protocols and run for base—of course, the attack had come at the midway point, leaving her with two equally bad options. Or stand her ground and fight an enemy she couldn’t see.

For the first time, Hwa Young resented Carnelian’s hills for the lack of visibility they offered. In the old days, the hills and ravines had been a side effect of the moon’s formation. Something to do with the fluctuations in gravity. Even Imperial planets weren’t immune to the effect, although her teachers had claimed the mountains and rivers were there by design, according to proper geomantic principles.

The road was clear, but not safe. She didn’t want to lose her transportation as well. She was going to have to take her chances off-road.

They better not disable the nav next, Hwa Young thought. Why did she have the worst luck with vehicles? First the school shuttle, then her lancer, and now this rover. Maybe she should have roller-skated.

She veered left, skimming just beneath the crests of the hills so as not to silhouette her vehicle. She had no idea what kinds of weapons her attackers had, but she didn’t like the idea of being nailed by a rocket launcher or laser because of her carelessness. Of course, if the clanners had aerial surveillance, they’d call down an artillery strike and she’d be a goner.

I have to return to base. I have to return to base. Empress protect me.

Was she being singled out because she was a lancer pilot? That was the only theory that made any sense. Perhaps, and her blood chilled, the clanners somehow knew she was the lancer with the sniper that had taken out the second capital ship. They might be out for revenge.

She drove farther into the hills, keeping an eye on the terrain in case she ever got an opportunity to return to the road. Out here, dead reckoning was a dead loss. She could already see the constellations flowing and shifting above her, a slow and lethal drift.

The military readiness class had only taught Hwa Young and her classmates the most elementary scouting and navigation skills, most of which assumed the presence of a fixed sun and a fixed north and fixed stars in the sky, a fixed landscape that didn’t warp according to the vagaries of local gravity. If she escaped the clanners now, it would be through the skills she’d picked up as a clanner child—memorizing angles and distances and landmarks while always realizing the latter were as treacherous as lake ice.

Hwa Young glanced at her rearview mirror again. This time she spotted her pursuer, an armored vehicle that was steadily gaining on her. Hwa Young cursed her lack of comms, her lack of a rifle, her lack of ability to call in an orbital strike that could take out the hostile, and never mind that she’d be caught in the blast radius too. She’d willingly pay the price.

Her only hope, outrunning the enemy, looked increasingly unlikely. It was only a matter of time before—

She felt rather than heard the percussive bang of the shot a fraction of a second before it took out her rover’s levitators. The vehicle skidded wildly, then crashed to a halt, almost turning turtle in the process. Hwa Young had a freezing flashback to the shuttle accident back on Serpentine, Instructor Kim’s death. They’d never given her a proper funeral. She imagined she heard the woman’s accusing whisper: Not acceptable.

The airbag deployed, shoving her roughly back against her seat. Any illusions she had that it would be soft and cushioning were shattered. She lay stunned for an indeterminate period.

I’m not going to let myself be easy meat. It felt impossible to move, even a flicker of her eyelids or a turn of her head. She tested her fingers. They weren’t broken. She reached for the knife and dislodged it with an effort, punctured the airbag since it had served its purpose. Damn sure she wasn’t going to let it trap her like a lethal mushroom.

The air bag deflated with agonizing slowness. She sheathed the knife, then scrabbled frantically, head throbbing in time with the pounding of her heart, until she had retrieved the gun. Almost managed to stab herself in the thigh in the process.

How much time had elapsed? Seconds? Minutes? She hadn’t been paying attention to the implant’s clock function. The rover, formerly her hope of escape, had become a death trap. She had to get out of here.

At least Geum’s safe at the base, she thought, trying not to get distracted by the idea that she might have seen her friend for the last time.

The rover’s door had crumpled in the crash, so there was no way she could get out from the driver’s side. She scrambled to the other side and exited that way, agonizingly aware of her forefinger, which she held away from the trigger so she didn’t cause an accidental discharge—aware that she might have to react at a moment’s notice to fire at her attacker.

She emerged just in time to see the armored vehicle bearing down on her. She raised her arm and fired once, guessing at the driver’s location through the dark-tinted windshield. The flare bolt splashed sparks in all directions and had no other effect.

If the driver floors the accelerator, I’m a goner. There wouldn’t be anything left of her but a red blotch soaking into the earth, soon to be blanketed by starbloom petals. Her comrades might never find her body before local predators cleaned the bones.

The driver swerved to avoid hitting her. Hwa Young’s mood sank. They hoped to capture her alive. Did they intend to torture her? Ransom her? She wasn’t used to thinking of herself, a ward of the state, as particularly valuable, but as a lancer pilot…

Hwa Young ducked behind the rover’s wreckage. Prepared to fire again.

Can I disable their vehicle? If she’d known it would come down to this—herself on foot against someone in an armored car—she would have rammed them while she was still in her rover so they’d be on even terms.

To her astonishment, Hwa Young heard a window being lowered. She poked her head around the side of the rover and fired once, twice, barely missing the figure. It returned fire, narrowly missing her hand. That was a bullet that had whizzed by her, not an energy blast. A clanner for sure, then.

Nice try. Hwa Young exchanged fire twice more, then—then nothing. Her finger pulled the trigger fruitlessly. The sound of the click over the rising wind was the loudest thing she’d ever heard. To say nothing of the fizzy whine of the pistol’s battery dying.

Where was her backup battery pack? Suddenly Hwa Young remembered she’d shoved it, uncomfortably, into her boot. She withdrew, keeping the rover between herself and the idling car, as she dug into her shoe.

She reloaded. The pain of the crash made her stiff and spoiled her aim. Don’t think about the pain. Think about how much you want to kill the person who did this to you.

One more try. She heard a cry as she clipped her attacker—well, one of them anyway. There could be more in the vehicle. Then it occurred to her that she couldn’t feel her hand, or the weight of the pistol in it. Because the pistol had fallen from her hand.

I would never drop it, she thought at the exact moment she worked out that, whether by skill or chance, the attacker had shot her gun out of her hand. Pain reverberated all the way up to her shoulder, like the knelling of a terrible bell.

Hwa Young drew her knife with her left hand, lamenting her clumsiness and wishing the jangling pain in her right arm would quiet down. She’d done drills with her off hand, but only “to balance the body,” as Instructor Kim had liked to say, not with the serious intent of becoming an ambidextrous fighter. Still, if she could close the distance without taking a bullet to the head, she could mess up her attacker.

She gathered herself, then charged toward the armored car, screaming. Maybe her luck was turning, because the driver had opened the door and emerged, rifle raised.

Hwa Young’s right arm might be injured, but her legs were fine. Her spring took her to the driver in heartbeats. She jabbed forward only to find the point of her knife deflected by the driver’s body armor. Aimed upward for the face.

The face—

She’d seen that face before, six years ago, and all the years before that, and every day in the mirror besides.

Hwa Young froze, her knife one centimeter from the woman’s eye. “Mother Aera?”