41CRYSTALLINE LIGHT SHINES DOWN around me, refracting across the empty halls like a scattering of diamonds. I run through the outer corridor of the Central Habitat, launcher in hand as I search frantically for the others. Outside the mists drift and swirl as ever, but inside all is silent. All is still. My voice echoes off the walls as I call for them once, twice, three times. Where are they? I have to find them, I have to warn them!

A noise behind me makes me stop. Chen is there, inky hair caught up in a neat bun as usual. I spin in a circle, and suddenly everyone is back. Ty, Archer, RC. Zephyr, Asriel, and Evangeline. Songbird and Kagawa; Raisman and Herrera. Inoue with his trembling courage, and Angelou. Always Angelou, standing there amidst the others, his frost-blue eyes glittering strangely in the pale light. He holds up his chit hand.

“No!”

Then everyone drops to the floor at once. I fall to my knees by the nearest victim. It’s Zel, her bright ponytail spreading in red-gold strands across the floor. I grab her, shake her, scream her name, but nothing I do makes any difference. She’s gone. Staggering to my feet, I stumble through the maze of bodies, unable to escape the sea of faces, when something catches my foot and I go sprawling. I lift myself up only to see Angelou again—lying on the floor, staring up at me with sightless blue eyes, condemned forever to look and look but never see. I reach my hand out to close them, and suddenly they snap to life, icy gaze fastening over my own, merciless and all-knowing.

“Win this war for us, Sorenson,” he whispers.

I lurch back with a cry. Turn around to flee, but the bodies are everywhere now, hemming me in, trapping me here with their blank faces and dead eyes. In desperation, I turn to the observation ports.

The pastel mists are gone, and in their place are ghouls. Millions upon millions of ghouls, pushing at the crystalline walls of the station, trying to get in, their forms so tightly packed all I can see are black rainbows roiling against the glass. I whip my launcher up, frantically pointing it this way and that as they lunge against the walls again and again. The whole station shudders, and a crack appears, snaking like a fault line through the delicate crystal. I hold my breath, eyes fixed on that single fissure—

Then suddenly the walls around me shatter, and we’re falling. Falling and falling, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop . . .

•   •   •

I come awake with a gasp. Pain knifes through my back as I jerk into a sitting position, but I ignore it, gaze already sweeping the dimly lit room for my launcher and pistol as I struggle out of bed.

Bunk, storage closet, desk. Plain metallic walls gleaming softly under the yellow emergency lights. I have to take it all in twice, eyes coming back around for another pass, before it sinks in: I’m not on the station anymore. It was just a dream.

Except that it wasn’t.

Slumping down onto the bed, I rub my eyes and check the time. 0350. That’s almost four hours before the nightmares woke me this time. I suppose I should be grateful to get even that much sleep, but all I feel is exhausted. The sort of all-consuming exhaustion that bores deep down into your very soul and can’t be extinguished no matter how much you sleep. Assuming you can sleep at all.

Padding into the adjoining hygiene unit, I go through the usual motions, drifting from toilet to sink to shower in a half-aware haze. The water is hot, but everything inside me is numb, has been ever since I bugged out on Angelou’s ship I-don’t-even-know-how-many days ago, leaving the remains of my entire world literally shattered across the ground. The failure of the Archangel, the station’s fall, those final moments when Angelou released the coma capsules; it’s all locked away inside, knotted deep within my gut like a festering sore that’s painless now but will be agony once it bursts. Unlike my physical body, which is agony now.

The rinse cycle finishes and the disinfectant spray comes on, razing my back like a hundred tiny lasers. I brace myself against the wall, gritting my teeth through the pain as the spray does its work, sighing with relief when it finally ends. A small sliver of crystal drops from my shoulder as I step out of the shower, just one of a couple hundred still lodged in my back, buttocks, and legs. Thank God for my armor, or the crystalline shrapnel that nailed me when H8 blew would probably have killed me outright. I pulled what pieces I could reach, but the rest will have to wait until I reach the MI base and can receive proper medical care. Until then, all I can do is run the disinfectant spray to keep the infection at bay and endure the pain. According to the ship’s computer, I’ve still got nine days to go. At least Angelou’s ship has a good supply of painkillers laid by in its infirmary.

I get dressed and take a few, chugging them down with a glass of water as I check my heading in the tiny cockpit. So far, so good. Everything about this ship is sleek and state-of-the-art, including a fly/nav system that basically pilots itself. All I had to do was feed in the base coordinates and let the ship do the rest. Which means I don’t have to worry about crashing the thing but also means I have nothing to do.

Nothing to do but lick my wounds and think, that is. Nothing to do but remember.

I squeeze my eyes shut. If I let the memories in, they’ll never let me go. To distract myself, I start cleaning up the place. Pak wrappers, dirty dishes, soiled clothes. In the six days I’ve been onboard, I haven’t exactly been the most considerate houseguest. No doubt Angelou would be appalled if he could see what I’ve done to his precious ship.

If he were still alive to see it.

I start in the galley, throwing away wrappers and putting dishes in the sanitizer, then move on to the bedroom to make the bunk, tucking in the corners tight and smoothing the blankets until it would pass any Celestial Guard inspection. My last stop is the hygiene unit, where I start by turning on the self-cleaning jets in the shower, then throw the loose toiletries in the drawer. My R&D mission uniform is crumpled up on the floor where I left it the first day I came aboard. Crystalline shards still cling to the back, sharp and deadly. I carefully brush them into the recycler, fold up the uniform, and stop. Slowly I reopen it, heart thudding as I stare at the black fabric.

The suit is ruined beyond repair, the back completely torn open by flying shrapnel. I finger the pattern of holes across the back. The layer that held the ghoul-repellant gases has been slashed open in several places. By the time the station hit the ground, all of the air would have long since seeped away. Which means I had no more protection from the enemy when Chen walked in with a head full of ghouls than anyone else did.

They let me go.

My knees give out, and I sink to the floor, head shaking in denial. No, it can’t be! Maybe there weren’t enough ghouls for everyone, or maybe they just overlooked me for some reason. Only I remember that awful moment when Chen walked in, how Angelou and Ty—the two people closest to me—were the first to go. Everyone else in the vicinity was taken within moments after they went.

Everyone except me.

The question is: Why? What reason could the enemy possibly have for sparing me? Out of nowhere, my mind suddenly flashes to that final data chip I pulled out of my helmet. The custom-made helmet created specifically for me.

No, it can’t be!

I shake my head, refusing to believe there could be any connection, but even I can’t deny the similarities inherent in the two situations. The Spectres singled me out, spared me on not one, but two occasions—on top of the relay station with Chen, and then only minutes later in the fallen Atrium. The same way the saboteur singled me out personally on two occasions, first planting the laser cutter in my personal locker and then later the chip in my custom-made helmet.

The laser cutter. Everything goes back to that, I suddenly realize. It was the first clue in a trail of bread crumbs leading me straight down to the relay station where I found that transceiver and learned the truth about the Archangel. Only if Chen’s theory was right, there never was a saboteur on R&D. But how could a saboteur at one of our military depots have possibly managed to plant a laser cutter in my locker? I think back to the night I found the cutter. How I was fumbling in the dark for clean clothes only to have the laser cutter tumble out . . . from my Celestial Guard mission uniform.

My eyes widen in shock. All this time, I figured the cutter had been planted in my locker—that’s why I assumed someone in the Testing Division was to blame—but what if the cutter wasn’t planted in my locker at all, but in my Guard uniform? Slipped into one of my side pockets, perhaps, without me noticing? It would have been easy enough to plant in the midst of a crowd, and the cutter is certainly light enough that I might not have noticed, especially if it happened shortly before I retired my Guard uniform for good. It would even explain why Asriel found no evidence of tampering with my locker when I first brought him the cutter. I rack my brain, trying to remember the last time I wore my CG mission uniform. The answer comes like a bolt out of the black.

I last wore it during the evacuation of ScyLab 185g, less than twenty-four hours before I was recruited by Dr. Daedalus Angelou.

My mind flashes through everything that’s happened since that day, since the day the Specs invaded a seemingly insignificant ScyLab and in doing so threw me straight into the path of Daedalus Angelou. I recall my last conversation with Gran, only hours before I left for R&D, and those final words she spoke to me.

Don’t forget who the real enemy is.

The real enemy. Stars burst in my brain at those words, and it suddenly occurs to me—the common denominator? It isn’t a human. It’s the enemy.

Spectres on ScyLab 185g where the laser cutter could have been easily planted on me.

Spectres on Military Depot S6-4112 using chips to lead me to the truth of the Archangel.

Spectres on the Prism relay station using our own data to create a weapon of their design.

Spectres stealing the lost amplifier and using it to blow R&D from the sky.

Spectres ready to infect everyone the instant we hit the ground.

Ready to infect everyone except me, that is. They let me go and took everyone else, so that when Angelou needed someone to give the Archangel to, I was the only one left.

My gaze flicks to my hand, to the chit buried deep in my palm, now the only living key left to the magnificent Archangel, and a chill runs down my spine.

They designed a weapon, tricked us into implementing it across the Expanse, and then minutes before it was set to fire, they threw the station down from the sky in a blaze of sound. And when the dust cleared, everyone was dead, and it was me who walked away with the Archangel squarely in the palm of my hand.

My hands start to shake. The sheer magnitude of what I’m contemplating is staggering. More than staggering, it’s terrifying. For months now, I’ve felt like I was being personally manipulated, led by some unknown entity for purposes I couldn’t begin to guess. A feeling that was only confirmed when I found the serial number from the energy converter’s chip stamped on my helmet. I followed the trail, this intricately choreographed path weeks, even months in the making, from the planting of the cutter to my recruitment into R&D, my discovery about the Archangel to the destruction of R&D, and for what?

All so I could walk away with the Archangel in the palm of my hand.

Everything inside me goes cold. Objections immediately spring to mind—I’m just an ordinary soldier. I’m no one. Why give it to me when there were a thousand more qualified people available? For that matter, why not simply let Angelou fire the weapon and be done with it?

It’s all in the timing. They literally took R&D down minutes before the Archangel was set to fire. So they wanted us to create the Archangel and implement it, but not fire it? Or at least, not fire it yet. What they’re waiting for is a mystery I can’t answer. I only know that somehow, irrevocably, I’ve been made a part of it.

Fear trickles through me, cold and raw, and suddenly it’s all too much. I have so many questions begging to be answered, but there’s no one to answer them. How could the enemy manage to pull off such an incredible chain of events, and why? What purpose could this terrible strike possibly hold? And even more importantly: Is this the end of their plan . . . or only the beginning? All this time, we’ve presumed to know our enemy. To know how they think and where they’ll strike and what they want, and yet the truth is that we know nothing. If there’s anything I’ve learned from the Fall of R&D, it’s that the enemy clearly has abilities and motives beyond our knowledge, perhaps even beyond our capacity to understand. An old saying of Gran’s pops into my mind: You need all the pieces to put the puzzle together. Suddenly I feel like I’m trying to do a thousand-piece puzzle with only fifty pieces in hand.

My lungs seize and my brain freezes, smothered by all the pain of the past days and the weight of these new ideas. My mind is spinning in circles, struggling to find something, just one thing I can be sure of, but it’s like the ground is caving in beneath my feet, dropping away around me before I can find any footing. Then a single thought crystallizes in my brain.

I have to talk to Teal.

The urge to see my little sister is a sucker punch to the gut, hard and fast. That knot tied deep down inside of me is unraveling, the threads spooling out of control in every direction, and suddenly I need nothing more than to tell Teal everything. About the station’s fall, the failure of the Archangel, my terrible suspicion I’ve been played by the enemy. But most of all, I need to tell her about the end. About that awful moment when I let go of Angelou’s hand, knowing what he would do, knowing that everyone would die . . . and I let it go anyway.

The same way she knew Lia would die if she got off that train . . . and she let her go anyway.

“You knew what she was going to do! How could you’ve ever let her go?”

“I let her go because I knew what she was going to do.”

I close my eyes, heart sinking as I remember all those times Teal tried to explain it to me. But I’d never understood. Until today.

I activate my chit, fingers fumbling as I uplink with the ship’s com system and dial. I have to see Teal. If anyone can unravel this mess, Teal can. My brilliant little sister with her ability to put things together and see the far-reaching ramifications of events long before anyone else can. She’ll know what this all means. She’ll know what to do.

Endless minutes pass as I wait for the link to connect. I anxiously pace the room, impatience mounting with every step I take, until at last a message flashes up.

*Error: Unable to Establish a Connection*

Disappointment washes over me, the desperate urge to see my sister only intensified now that I’ve failed. I set my chit to keep linking until it connects, but it’s no use. I get the same message no matter what I do. After five hours, I collapse on the floor with a bitter laugh, the irony of the situation not lost on me. For months I’ve had chance after chance to talk to Teal and always refused, and now that I actually do want to see her, I can’t get through. Maybe there’s no justice in this twisted universe, but apparently it does have a sense of humor.

De-acking my chit, I slump against the wall with a sigh. “Where are you, Teal?”

But just like every other time I’ve asked, there’s no one here to answer my call.