24A STRAY BOOT catches the slim metal relay scanner and sends it flying off the catwalk. It pitches through the air, tumbling end over end as gravity drags it down until it’s out of sight.

“Oops.” Ty stares down at the city far below, soon to be one relay scanner richer. “Hey, Sorenson. Go on down and grab that for me, huh?”

“Hey, it’s your scanner.”

“But I’ve got rank and seniority.”

I consider that. She’s got a point. “In that case, I resign.”

“Damn.”

It’s been months since I first set foot on Prism, and now I’m back again. Only this time I’m not installing a replacement shunt from the safety of an enclosed room but clinging to a narrow maintenance walkway halfway up a massive antenna affixed to the roof of a skyscraper.

Reaching into my vest, I rummage around until I find my own relay scanner. Ty accepts it with a nod and finishes scanning the sensor feed we just installed. Everything checks out, and in a minute she’s linking Archer to let him know we’re done with this round of modifications.

We’ve been making adjustments to the sensor hardware since before the start of Prism’s abnormally long sunrise. The old equipment wasn’t giving specialized enough data, so the researchers on base designed some hardware modifications that would collect better readings. We’ve been installing and adjusting equipment for over three hours, per the continually changing instructions linked to us from R&D. In between modifications, they’ve been performing WMGD tests to determine which modifications work the best. Besides Ty and me, there are twenty other two-person teams spread out on spires across the city. Talk about one hell of a mission.

I wrap one hand around the straps of my harness and the other around the flimsy guardrail. The view is dizzying. Except for a few other building spires rising up in the distance, we’re completely alone up here—above stone and steel, flesh and blood, in a place few birds dare fly. It’s breathtaking.

Maybe a little too breathtaking.

I force my lungs to inhale, casually sidling back from the edge and tilting my chin as though I’m simply trying to catch the sights from a slightly different angle. Ty notices anyway, the side of her mouth quirking ruefully. “You have a thing about heights, Sorenson?”

Fairly certain there’s nothing I can say that won’t be used against me somehow, I only shrug and grunt, “Never been on the antenna of a skyscraper before. What about you? They have buildings like this on your home world?”

“These metal death traps? Hell, no! The quakes would tear them down around our ears in a week. Our buildings are mostly low-lying structures of heavy cloth and flexible plastics—tethered to the ground for added support, but with enough give to allow them to roll with the ground shifts. Nothing like this place,” she says, shaking her head in awe. She shoves my scanner into her utility belt before adding, “Not that I haven’t been in plenty of cities like this before, as a guardian.”

“Same here.”

The smile fades from her voice. “Usually to evacuate them.”

Yes.

The word is unnecessary, my agreement echoing clearly enough in my silence. Just as Ty’s response to that unspoken agreement echoes clearly back in hers:

At least we don’t have to evacuate this one.

No. Because it’s already too late for this city.

As one, we look down at the gleaming city below. Prism at sunrise is truly a sight to behold. Only the earliest risers up, the streets quiet and the air crisp. The rising suns intensify the sky’s pastels into deep hues, painting the silver skyscrapers in swathes of fuchsia and indigo, turquoise and gold. Captured within the stillness of the morning, there’s a serenity so deep and abiding even I can’t help but be touched by it, the fidgety feet and impatient hands nowhere to be found though we’ve been sitting at least an hour. Only the distant odor of ghouls meters and meters below mars the perfection of the day.

“Zel always loved this view,” Ty comments suddenly. “She told me once that she was born in the mountains, that no matter where she went, the heights always called to her.”

I glance over at Ty in surprise. By tacit agreement, no one really talks about fallen team members once they’ve been consigned to the net. However, like most of the testers who came from the Celestial Guard, Ty still slashes when a teammate is lost. It’s a warm day, and she’s got her sleeves rolled up to the elbow, revealing the myriad slashes down her forearms. My eyes fall on the thickest one—a centimeter-wide band of red wrapping her right arm just below the elbow—and I know it’s for Zel.

Ty catches me looking and, with a glance at my own bare arms, asks, “You came from the Guard, right?” At my nod, she adds, “Why didn’t you ever slash? Or wasn’t that something the guardians in your unit did?”

I blink, startled by the question, though I got it often enough in the Guard. The answer automatically fills my mind.

Because if I had, I would be one giant red band from head to toe. Lia would’ve taken every centimeter of me and left no room for anyone else.

Not that I ever told anyone that. Anyone in the Guard who made the mistake of asking me either got a Frag off! or a punch in the face. The question never failed to arouse the constant anger lurking just a hairsbreadth beneath my skin.

I meet Ty’s questioning gaze. Strangely enough, I don’t feel compelled to curse or hit her. It’s as though the anger that’s been rustling beneath my skin for so long has vanished. No, not vanished, but faded, its toxins leached away leaving it a pale remnant of its former self. Maybe I used it all up on Angelou that awful day I melted down in his office, or maybe I’m just too confused to be angry right now. All I know is that the lump in my throat that usually comes whenever someone asks me about her is gone today.

“It’s because of Lia,” I finally answer, eyes fixed to the Prism sunrise as it glimmers and glows across the horizon.

“Who’s Lia?”

I let out a soft sigh at the question. Ever since my breakdown a few weeks ago, I haven’t known what to think or feel about her. Who’s Lia? There are so many ways I could answer that question, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. My childhood best friend; my first love. A Tellurian prisoner and a Celestian patriot. A girl eighteen months dead, and a ghost still very much alive. A traitor I trusted, and the human bomb who killed herself so that the rest of us might live. Too many names, too many labels. I can’t even sort her out in my own mind, let alone explain her to anyone else.

Finally I just shrug and say, “Lia was my friend, and now she’s gone.”

Ty nods once, expression grave, then turns back to the sunrise. Relief fills me at her easy acceptance. Six months ago, she wouldn’t have let it go so easily. She would’ve badgered me with questions, made wild guesses and teasing remarks. But Zel’s death changed her, spread a layer of gravitas across her flip demeanor. She’s still Ty, overly mouthy and quick with a line, but somehow it’s a strength now, as though she found some way to absorb Zel’s death into herself, to reshape its unfairness and transmute its ugliness, and come out the stronger for it on the other side. I wish I knew how she did it.

Her humanity, her heart; the way she worked so hard to reclaim everything she’d lost, only so that she might give it all away again.

I wish I knew how both of them did it.

A soft hiss from my com has me grabbing my discarded helmet. It’s Archer, linking us through the group channel to let us know another WMGD test is about to begin. I put on my helmet while Ty does the same. Though technically the WMGD energy is supposed to be harmless to humans, we’re still under orders to wear full uniform, including helmet, during all tests. Nor have I forgotten Preston’s sharp comment all those weeks ago about giving half the humans on the planet seizures.

Seizures. I think of Zel, and something pops in my chest, hollow and hard.

I check the timekeeper on my gauntlet. Twenty seconds until the next test begins. Following Ty’s lead, I scoot away from the edge until my back hits the spire. I slide down the wall into a crouch, arms resting on my knees. Though we’ve already sat through a dozen tests today, still I hold my breath as I wait for the light to come. After what happened with NE-2, every test is enough to put a flutter in my belly, no matter how much I tell myself everything will be okay.

It starts slowly, only the most distant spark of silver tingeing the pastel sky, then comes faster, like a spreading stain, as the deep arc of energy drops ever nearer. Energy crackles along my skin, static electricity shocking me in a dozen little pinches as it falls around us in a shimmering mercury shadow. Bathed in a pool of deep, deep silver, I watch as it plunges away into the depths of the city, rippling out in a great wave before dissipating as quickly as it came.

Test complete, I rub my arms to get rid of the tingling sensation running along my skin. Ty shakes her own arms out a couple of times, presumably for the same reason, then turns to the control array.

“Do you have the next set of freqs, Soren—” She stops suddenly, eyes widening as she takes a big sniff. Then in a faint voice, she asks, “Do you smell something, Sorenson?”

Frowning, I shake my head. “No, I—”

My mouth drops open as I suddenly take her meaning. Flaring my nostrils, I take a huge sniff, sucking air deep into my lungs—but I don’t smell anything. Not a single thing at all. The distant but ever-present odor of ghouls is gone.

My heart drops out of my chest. “You don’t think . . . ?”

“I don’t know.”

For a minute, we just stand there staring at each other, this small shred of hope more terrifying than any enemy we’ve ever faced. It’s the chime of Ty’s com that breaks the spell. Turning, she takes a few steps away and answers the call. I watch her profile as she listens to the voice on the other end, but with the rising sun gilding her face, it’s hard to make out her expression let alone read her lips as she subvocalizes into her com. At last she signs off with a louder, “Understood, sir. Ty out.”

My foot is dancing in my boot now, my earlier serenity gone as I wait with bated breath for her to brief me on the call. She meets my gaze and suddenly grins, eyebrow raised and eyes glinting with life, the old Ty temporarily resurrected. “Feel like taking a walk?”

Since the com station building is completely sealed up except for the roof, we take the shuttle down to a landing bay in the southern half of the city. I wonder about the security of leaving our ride off-planet in a strange place, but as Ty points out, the shuttle looks like any other Prism ship used for intraplanetary transport. Nothing to raise eyebrows over, especially with so many others already filling the pad.

Following Ty’s orders, I take off my armor and remove my insignia. Dump my helmet and rip off my uniform patches. Strip away my identity piece by piece until anything that can identify me as R&D is gone and I’m left with nothing more than a pair of boots and a fitted black jacket and pants.

I touch the plain fabric on my chest, not even plain so much as bare now that all identifying marks have been taken away. It’s a perfectly respectable outfit, the sort of casual suit any working-class civil servant might wear, but somehow I feel almost naked in it. As though my own identity were lost the day Lia died and only by putting on the uniform did I find some definition once again. And now that the uniform is gone, there’s no one left underneath.

Or perhaps I just don’t know the person underneath anymore.

The last two things to go are my weapons. I cradle them in my hands, the slim stunner in the right and the heavy launcher in the left.

“The launcher’s too big to hide, and both could identify us as R&D,” Ty says from the shuttle door.

I know she’s right, but still I hesitate. If we’re wrong, if the scientists floating a hundred klicks up in the air are wrong, it’ll be the end for us. We’ll simply be sitting ducks waiting for a couple of hungry ghouls looking for hosts.

Or maybe it’s just that these weapons have become as much of my identity as the R&D insignia and the false flag patch now absent from my arm.

“You don’t have to come. I won’t order it.”

Ty’s expression is steady, her bearing radiating a quiet strength, like the faint rays of a sun that seems too pale to provide any heat—until you stop long enough to realize its light has already warmed your face. With a shake of my head, I carefully stow my weapons under the seat. “You don’t have to.”

Then together we walk out of the shuttle and into the fresh air.