CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

A chill trickled down Chase’s spine like ice water as comprehension settled in. This was Vo’s revenge. Angry about losing his ship, he’d lied about who attacked him, setting a trap that they’d all blindly believed. He had sent Maurus right into the hands of Rezer Bennin, a man who wanted him dead.

With this realization came the memory of where Chase had seen the tattooed man, Fersad: in the Shank port, where he’d been looking for Maurus. He, not Rezer Bennin, had attacked Vo’s ship, stealing the case when he couldn’t find Maurus.

Maurus was walking into a trap. Chase wished he could contact him somehow to stop him from going, but all he could do was stay silent and watch as Fersad tried to explain to Dornan why he still hadn’t caught the AWOL pilot.

“The Shartese smuggler had the case, but he told me that Lieutenant Maurus had already escaped, and by the time I tracked him down to a Zeta planet, there was no trace. It’s possible that he drowned on the planet.”

“Possible? Is that what we’re paying you for, Fersad? Possibly dead?” As she spoke, Dornan removed two identical disks from the silver case and laid them on her desk. She slid her fingers across the console. “At least you managed to get these back.” She turned and walked directly toward the closet that Chase was in.

Chase leaned back from the door, and with a gut-twisting wave of nausea, rolled sideways through the side and into the next cabinet. The burning, tingling sensation didn’t subside, and he realized with a start that his body was divided up into three pieces by the low shelves inside the cabinet. When he heard the door slide shut a moment later, he rolled back into the first cupboard and pressed his eye against the crack again.

Dornan was emptying a bottle into a plastic bucket.

“Don’t you think he’ll want to see them?” asked Fersad.

“I think he’ll take my word for it that the disks have been destroyed, don’t you?” snapped Dornan. “It was his foolish idea to make a hard copy in the first place.”

She dropped the two disks into the bucket and stepped back, covering her mouth as a thick column of vapor rose from the bucket. The acrid tang of disintegrating compounds reached Chase in the cupboard, and his heart sank even further. She was destroying the disks. Now Maurus had no way to prove his innocence. Not that he would need to, once Rezer Bennin got hold of him.

Dornan coughed and opened a compartment on her wall, setting the bucket inside and pressing a button that resealed the compartment door. She turned on her heel. “Now I suggest you go out, find Lieutenant Maurus, and end this catastrophe of an operation. Are we understood?”

Fersad grunted and turned to leave.

“Oh, and Fersad? Don’t ever come back in this building unless you want a gaping blaster hole in your chest in lieu of payment.”

The mercenary stomped out the door, and Dornan took a seat behind her desk.

Chase’s mind raced. Could he stop Maurus from falling into Vo’s trap? It was probably too late to stop him from contacting Rezer Bennin, although there might still be time to help him. But Chase’s sister was still out there too, possibly in just as much danger as Maurus. And only she could give Chase the answers he needed about who he was and what had happened to him.

He looked around the cupboard for a weapon and saw only papers. There was no motion from Parker or Mina in the supply closet. Chase looked back at Dornan. A black baton rested on her desktop.

Quickly counting to three, he jumped out of the cabinet and snatched the baton from her desk.

Dornan whirled around in her chair, her hand flying to the blaster at her waist. When she saw Chase, the color drained from her face, and her mouth fell ajar.

“What are you doing here?” she croaked.

Chase took a step toward her, noticing the slight movement she made away from him. “Where is my sister?” he asked in a trembling voice.

“This isn’t happening. You can’t be here,” said Dornan. The hand that wasn’t gripping the blaster gun crept across her console.

She recognized him. Chase stared at her in disbelief. Yet another person who said things that made no sense, who knew more about his past than he did. The truth was right there in the officer’s stunned blue eyes. All the frustration and fear Chase had felt in the last weeks boiled up in a rush, spilling over.

“Why can’t I be here?” he exploded. He swung the baton with all his strength at the console. She jerked her hand away with a cry and the baton slammed into the screen, shattering its glass top into a thousand crystals. He raised the baton to strike again. “What!” Crash! “Am!” Crash! “I!” Crash!

“You’re dead!” cried Dornan. “You were…” She trailed off, her mouth hanging open like the last word was stuck in her throat. Chase raised the baton threateningly. “Dispersed!”

Chase stopped, arm hanging over his head. “What?”

The words began to rush out of her. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. The soldiers went beyond my authority.”

“You were there?” A nasty feeling had started to snake its way up from the pit of Chase’s stomach, and he clenched the baton tighter. “You were there when they killed my parents?”

Dornan pinched her lips together. Her eyes were wide and terrified. “It was necessary for the defense of the Fleet.”

Chase gaped at her, feeling like he was going insane. Here was someone who knew exactly what had happened to him—happened to Chase Garrety, at least. He pointed the baton at her neck. “You’re going to tell me everything that happened, or else I’m going to—”

“Whoa there, Chase,” said a voice behind him. Parker had stepped out of the supply closet, with Mina right behind him. His gray eyes were cautious as he reached for Chase’s shoulder. “We’re here about your sister, right?”

Mina took the baton from Chase’s hand in one smooth movement. She tucked it under Dornan’s chin, pressing it to her throat as she reached down and removed the blaster from her hand. She tossed it on the floor. “Chase won’t hurt you because he’s human, but I’m a machine. Tell us where to find Lilli Garrety.”

Dornan lifted one shaky hand and pointed toward the hallway.

“She’s here?” asked Chase incredulously. When his sister said, I’m being held by the one who led the end, had she meant Dornan?

“Why don’t you take us to her?” suggested Mina, pressing the baton harder against Dornan’s throat. She hid the weapon as they moved out into the hall and held the woman’s hand as if they were old friends. Dornan led them down the antiseptic corridor to a small, inconspicuous door guarded with a three-part locking system.

What Chase saw on the other side of the door knocked the breath out of him like a punch to the gut. The room was filled with various blinking machines, with a long table in the center, and laid out on the table like a tiny corpse was the girl from the café.

Thin cables from a few of the machines ran to her body, connected to her with tape and bandages. Her blond hair stuck out in all directions, and the deep circles under her eyes stood out like purple crescents in her pale skin. She wore the same light blue pajamas that he’d seen her wearing before. How had she ended up like this, when he’d seen her so alert and aggressive in the café?

“Wake up,” Chase whispered, laying his hand on her arm. He half expected her eyes to open when he touched her cool skin, but they remained closed. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breathing. He pinched her arm lightly. “Hey? I’m here. I’m sorry it took me so long to come get you.” He wanted to pick her up and carry her out, but didn’t know where to begin with all the cables that ran from her body.

Behind Chase, he heard Mina ask Dornan, “What did you do to her?”

“She’s under heavy sedation,” said Dornan slowly. “She’s an extremely dangerous child.”

“She’s just a little girl,” said Chase.

Dornan made a harsh noise. “You, of all people, should know exactly what she is.”

Mina stepped forward and began systematically detaching the lines by removing the bandages and tape strips that held down the flat metal disks on the end of each cable.

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” asked Dornan. “You’ll kill her, is that what you want?”

Chase’s heart pounded in panic. “Mina?”

“Check the medications,” said Dornan. “It’s ganglaphin, the strongest sedative available. You can’t just take a patient off without a step-down protocol, especially at this dosage.”

Mina frowned and looked at the IV machine, and Dornan quickly reached for the communicator at her belt. Parker leapt forward to tear it from her hand. They struggled over the device for a moment, and then Dornan wrested it free, smacking Parker across the face with it. With a grunt, he fell backward, but before he even hit the floor, Mina had seized Dornan by the wrist. She wrenched the woman’s arm behind her with such force that she dropped the communicator with a shriek.

Parker climbed back to his feet, holding the side of his face. “Take that,” he mumbled.

“Chase, take your sister off the table,” said Mina.

He went to the girl’s side and hesitated. There were still three lines attached to her. “I don’t know which one to take off first.”

“Just take them all off, it doesn’t matter,” said Mina. “You can do it. You’re not going to kill her.” Warily, Chase pulled at the edge of a tape strip on the girl’s skinny arm and lifted off the metal disk.

“You may not kill her, but she’ll never wake up again,” said Dornan.

“Shut up,” said Mina. She wrenched Dornan’s arms higher up her back, and the officer squawked and buckled to her knees.

Chase paused, looking at the frail girl. Mina wouldn’t lie to him about this, would she? He wasn’t even sure if she could lie. With trembling hands, he pulled off the three pieces of tape and lifted the metal disks from the girl’s skin. Her eyes remained closed.

“Shouldn’t she wake up now?” he asked.

“No, not right away,” said Mina. “You’ll have to pick her up.”

Gently Chase slid his arms behind her shoulders and under her knees and lifted her from the table. She felt as light and fragile in his arms as a little bird. He stared at her in wonder. Behind those closed eyes was all the information he craved so badly.

Mina forced Dornan to take a few steps, so that they were standing alongside the table.

“Parker, come over here and tape these lines on her arm.”

“With pleasure,” said Parker. Dornan began to struggle as he reached for her arm.

Mina tightened her grip. “Colonel, I can break your arm in ten places before you even feel the first snap—but believe me, you will feel it.”

Dornan ceased fighting, and Parker taped one of the disks to her arm. For a moment, nothing happened, and then her head began to droop forward and she folded toward the floor. Mina caught her and hoisted her limp body up onto the table.

“Put everything you see on her—every line we took off the girl,” said Mina. “We’ll try to knock her out deeply enough so that she can’t send anyone after us right away.”

As Parker applied the lines to the unconscious woman, he looked over at Chase, who held the delicate girl as if she were made of glass.

“This lady knew what happened to you,” Parker said.

Chase looked at Dornan’s slack face. There would be no getting answers from her now. “Once my sister wakes up, she’ll be able to tell me.”

“It might take a few hours for these sedatives to wear off,” said Mina. “Dornan was right about one thing—they had her on an extremely high dosage of a very powerful sedative.” Seeing Chase’s nervous expression, she added, “But she’ll be fine.”

Parker slapped the last line on Dornan. “Have a good sleep, you old bat.” He looked at Mina and Chase. “Now, how are we going to get out of here?”

Mina cocked an eyebrow. “I’d say we just take the stairs. Quickly, before someone finds Colonel Dornan and raises an alarm.”

The hallways of the twentieth floor were mostly empty, but as they walked toward the stairs, an older man in a lab coat stepped out of one of the offices. Chase’s pulse sped up. He glanced up long enough to see the man giving them a funny look, but he didn’t try to stop them. When they reached the stairwell, Mina stopped and lifted the girl out of Chase’s arms. He opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off, saying simply, “Run.”

Chase rushed down the stairs two at a time with Parker at his side, Mina right behind them. At about the tenth floor, a door crashed open somewhere above them, followed by a man’s shout: “We’ll head down, you go to the roof!” The sound of their footsteps gave Chase a surge of adrenaline, and he started taking the stairs three at a time. Beside him, Parker was clutching the railing, and at the next landing he missed a step and skidded down onto one knee. Chase whipped around to help him up, and gasped at Parker’s glassy eyes and the sweat coating his pallid face. “What’s wrong?”

Parker shook his head, pulling himself quickly to his feet. “I’ll be fine,” he wheezed, pushing Chase’s hand away.

Chase ignored him and looped his arm under Parker’s shoulders. “Two at a time. Come on, we can do this.” They ran in sync down each flight, pausing for a moment on the landings. The men’s steps grew louder as they closed the distance. Their angry shouts echoed down the stairwell. Chase focused on the flights remaining. Three to go. Two to go.

Finally they reached the ground floor, bursting through an outside door onto the street. Chase glanced backward and caught a glimpse of two soldiers directly behind them, almost within grabbing distance as the door began to swing shut. His view was cut off as Mina grabbed the handle with one hand and pulled with all her strength, buckling the metal door and wedging it securely in its own frame.

Parker was already staggering out toward the street, where he quickly hailed a jettaxi. The driver, a small creature completely covered in dark, glossy fur, barely looked at them as they tumbled into the vehicle and ferried them away from the military building and up into the streams of traffic.

“We need to get to a communication hub so I can contact Asa,” said Mina. Parker nodded and leaned back against the seat, breathing slowly.

“Are you okay?” Chase asked.

“I’ll be fine.” Parker closed his eyes. “Just give me a sec.”

Chase leaned over his sister and brushed the chunks of blond hair from her face, willing her to open her eyes, but her long lashes lay closed against her cheek. There was nothing he wanted more in the world than for her to wake up and tell him everything he needed to know about himself. He smiled, imagining how happy she would be once she realized he had come for her.

Another thought gnawed at the back of his mind: Maurus. His thoughts produced a horrible image of the doomed Lyolian, strung up and tortured in Rezer Bennin’s lair. He pushed the image away. Maurus was probably already dead—there was nothing that anyone could do for him. And it had been his decision not to flee to his homeworld. Chase leaned in toward his sister and whispered in her ear, “Wake up.”

They had the jettaxi drop them off in an abandoned alley, and Mina broke into a closed warehouse. Chase carried his sister, keeping an eye out for somewhere to set her down, and followed Mina and Parker while they located an office with a communication console.

“How do you even contact him?” Parker asked, sinking into a chair and watching her fingers fly across the console.

“I ping him first with a series of code fragments inserted at specific intervals into a shifting order of public bandwidths based on forty-three algorithms.” She glanced at Parker’s baffled face. “It’s complex.”

Chase laid his sister on a cot in a corner of the office and crouched beside her. The connection he felt to her was so strong, he made a decision at that moment: He was Chase Garrety, not a clone, nothing man-made. He had to be. And he had saved his sister, and soon Asa would come, and she would wake up, and everything would be right.

Only it wouldn’t. Because Maurus was still out there, and maybe he was alive, and Chase would never know if he could have saved him too. Now that all the answers were right at his fingertips, walking away would be the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. But he couldn’t leave Maurus to his fate without knowing that he’d tried to help. Maybe Chase didn’t completely understand the rules of the galaxy—which species he could count as allies, who not to trust—but he knew in his gut that Maurus was one of the good guys. He couldn’t just leave him to his fate.

Chase touched his sister’s cool temple as he whispered good-bye and promised to return, and then he stood and turned to the others at the console.

“I’m going to look for Maurus,” he announced.

Parker whipped around. “What? No.”

“Parker, I have to.”

“Then I’m coming with you.”

“You’re in no shape to go anywhere, and you know Mina won’t let you.” She didn’t even glance up from the console. “Besides, I need you to stay here and make sure my sister is safe.”

“You’ll get yourself killed.”

“Come on. It’s me.” A quiet confidence had been building in Chase ever since he’d broken out of the brig on the Kuyddestor. “I don’t know what I am, or what all I can do, but I don’t think there’s anything that can hurt me. I’ll be fine.”

Parker laughed and shook his head, but he looked angry. “Sure, you’re special. You can do things that make no sense. I’ve been trying to come up with a rational explanation for how you jump through doors, but I can’t. It’s insane. So you’re magical, whatever. But you’re not invincible. Remember when you first showed up at my home, how you were wounded? Bleeding? You don’t know what can hurt you, but obviously something can. And if that Rezer Bennin guy catches you, he’ll keep trying until he figures out what that is.”

Chase considered this. He’d survived being shot at, stabbed, and locked up, but his phasing ability hadn’t kept him from almost drowning in the mud sea—Maurus had. So he wasn’t immortal, but if he played it smart, he knew he had a chance. “I have to go. I can’t just leave him there. You know that. Promise me you’ll keep my sister safe.”

Parker gave him a long, troubled look before he nodded.

Mina said something in a low voice, and Chase turned around to see that she had pulled up a screen on the console. It was silver for a moment, and then Asa Kaplan’s face materialized.

“Thirty-second window, Mina,” he barked.

“I’ve got Parker. We’re on Qesaris in a district called Nano City. I’m sending you the coordinates right now.”

“Is the Garrety boy there?”

“Yes, and his sister,” said Mina.

Asa’s brow furrowed. “I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.”

“I won’t be here,” said Chase, stepping in front of the screen. “I have to go help a friend first. He’s being held by a man named Rezer Bennin.”

“No,” said Asa abruptly. “Stay put. Who is your friend?”

“He’s a Fleet soldier. Well, he was—”

“Don’t go anywhere,” Asa interrupted. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“I’ll be fine—I can do this. I’m different.”

“I know you are,” said Asa in a harsh tone. “Just stay with Mina.”

The words almost slipped past Chase. I know you are? If Asa Kaplan knew about Chase’s ability, maybe he actually knew more about Chase than anyone else. Maybe he’d just been pretending not to recognize him. “What do you mean? Do you know who I am?”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Do not leave.”

“No!” shouted Chase. “Tell me! Do you know who I am? Did you know my parents?”

Asa’s face had gone red. “I will not discuss this over a comm feed!”

“Then I’m going.” Chase crossed his arms. “You can find me in the Shank. I’ll probably need your help by then.”

“You can’t do this! Not for a Fleet soldier,” Asa yelled, grabbing the sides of his screen. “Don’t—” The transmission cut out and the screen went blank.

Chase looked at Mina with a questioning frown. Had she turned off the communication, or had something happened to Asa? “Thirty-second window,” she said with a shrug. “I can’t stop you from going.”

“Come on, just wait for Asa to get here,” said Parker. “Let him help.”

“I have to go now. If Rezer Bennin hasn’t killed Maurus, Lennard will find him soon anyway.” Chase didn’t speak his other thought—that after seeing Asa’s reaction, he doubted the man would let him go after Maurus once he’d arrived. “Mina, tell me how to get back to the Shank.”

Mina gave Chase a simple list of directions and money for a jettaxi, and wished him luck. Parker looked pained as he squeezed Chase’s arm. “Be careful. We’ll come help you as soon as we can.”

Chase nodded and looked over at his sister lying motionless on the cot. I’ll come back for you, he promised her in his thoughts. He headed for the door before he could stop himself.

Taking the jettaxi was easy, and the silent driver pointed Chase toward the shadowy alleyways of the Shank. Evening settled over the district as he wandered, lost in the maze of corridors, but it wasn’t intimidating to him this time. He wove his way through the crowds, catching glimpses of translucent aqua skin, golden limbs, silver eyes, and deep maroon hair. Outside an eatery he spotted one of the large, pale men with the wide-set eyes. An Ambessitari.

“Take me to Rezer Bennin,” he told the man, using the boldest voice he could muster.

The Ambessitari looked down at him and scoffed. “Why should I?”

Chase flashed a confident smile. “Tell him I already escaped from him once, and I’d be happy to do it again.” The man’s lip curled up in a sneer, and Chase raised his chin in challenge.

It was only a tiny flicker of the man’s eye, but Chase realized a moment too late that someone was coming up behind him. Then all he saw was darkness as a cloth bag came down over his head.