I scramble out of my sleeping bag and get to my feet. A slice of pain shoots through my injured ribs and I regret standing up so fast. My hand fumbles for my pulse gun.
Skylar, Cormac, and Dean are already up, their eyes on the sky through the trees overhead. The sky is growing lighter as the day moves closer to dawn. There are three dark forms flying above the mountain pass. Three raiders.
“What do we do?” Darren asks. His eyes are wide with fear.
“Stay out of sight,” Dean says, moving away from the opening in the branches. “The trees should hide us unless they get a lot closer.”
Skylar crouches beside a tree trunk with her gun in her hand. “As soon as they’re gone, we hightail it for the transmission station so we can get the hell off the Surface.”
I move beneath the branches of another tree and drop onto my knees, not taking my eyes off the raiders. They’re circling lower and lower like they’re searching for something.
How did they find us again? They can’t have known we survived, or they would’ve captured us back on the hillside. Surely these ships don’t know we’re here. It’s just a coincidence they’re flying overhead.
“We shouldn’t have stopped in the first place,” Cormac says through gritted teeth.
“We needed to rest,” Skylar snaps back. “If we hadn’t and the Mardenites ran into us before we reached the station, we’d have been in no state to fight them.”
I don’t think we’re in any state to fight them now. There are six of us, and Sam is completely useless. Which is why I’m hoping with all my might we remain unseen.
“I’ll start packing up everything so we can leave,” Dean says, slinging his rifle over his shoulder and moving around the camp to stuff the sleeping bags into our sacks.
“Do we need the bedrolls?” Cormac asks. “We should just leave them here and go.”
“No,” Skylar says swiftly. “We should keep them with us in case something goes wrong at the station and we end up stuck on the Surface longer than we intended.”
“We’re getting off the Surface tonight. We’ll die if we stay out here much longer.”
While Cormac and Skylar continue to argue, I keep my eyes glued on the sky. The closer the Mardenite ships get, the more details I’m able to make out. They don’t have curved, V-shaped wings or rugged bodies like the last raiders we ran into. Two of the ships are round like flight pods; the third is a small hovercraft.
“Wait!” I say, interrupting Skylar mid-sentence. “Look at the ships. Those aren’t raiders.”
The others immediately stop talking and look at where I’m pointing. One of the flight pods is so low I can make out a symbol on its hull, the bronze shape of the moon.
“She’s right,” Darren says. “They’re Core ships.”
Maybe it’s a rescue mission. Maybe they finally heard our transmission.
“We need to make contact with them,” Dean says.
Skylar quickly pulls out the hand-comm and twists the signal dial to the correct channel. “This is Cadet Skylar. I am with Lieutenants Dean and Sam, and we are stranded in Surface Sector H-9, close to the Pipeline transmission station. Does anyone copy?”
There’s a long stretch of nothing but static. My heart pounds as I wait for an answer, if anyone’s going to answer at all.
Please, please, please.
A voice crackles through the comm speaker: “Cadet Skylar, this is Lieutenant Patrick. What are your coordinates?”
Skylar lets out a whoop! of excitement. Relief, so much relief floods my bones.
She relays our exact coordinates to Lieutenant Patrick, and the Core ships lower into the clearing. The lieutenant disembarks with several soldiers and the ship medic. He takes one look at the disheveled state of our group and asks, “What happened?”
“We were attacked by Mardenites,” Dean says. “Didn’t you hear our transmission from earlier tonight?”
“We received a transmission, but there was a lot of interference,” Lieutenant Patrick says. “I don’t know exactly how much got through—I wasn’t the one who intercepted it. All I was told was you were in trouble and we needed to help you get back to the Core.”
Commander Charlie did send a rescue mission. Help just didn’t get here fast enough.
“What happened to the rest of your crew?”
“They were captured,” Skylar says.
“We’ll tell you everything once we’re on board,” Dean says. “We need to get to the Pipeline before any Mardenite ships come roaming the area again.”
“Right,” Patrick says, glancing fearfully at the sky. “Let’s hurry. Get the wounded onto stretchers.”
Sam is hauled onto a stretcher by the soldiers. So is Darren, because of his leg infection. My ribs still ache, but I can walk well enough, so I go up the boarding ramp into the hovercraft on my own.
Inside, someone wraps a blanket around me and thrusts a canteen into my hands. The sweet, frothy drink warms my belly. Hopefully my teeth will stop chattering soon.
We buckle in for takeoff. I watch through one of the cabin windows as the pilot takes us over the mountain pass. The sun comes into view, casting sweeping rays of red across the snow-topped mountains ahead of us. I grip my armrests, bracing for any sign of raiders. But there are no ships on the horizon. No enemy contacts appear on our radar screen.
We descend into the valley below us, where the Pipeline entrance lies well hidden between the forested hills. The trees grow bigger and bigger, and finally I see the dark hole of the tunnel entrance. I don’t let out my breath until we’re well into the tunnel. The Mardenites don’t know this tunnel or the lower sectors exists, so we’re out of their reach. For now.
But the raiders are still out there with my friends aboard their ships. They’re still attacking the Surface. Soon we’ll know exactly how much damage they’ve done.
Soon I’ll have to face Commander Charlie. I’m going to have to explain why I disobeyed his orders and broke free of his serum’s control. I’ll have to convince him not to go through with his threat to kill Logan.
But for now, I push aside those worries and focus on the fact I’ve escaped one of my enemies alive.
* * *
Lieutenant Patrick sends a transmission ahead to the Core, to let them know he has injured passengers on the way. In the meantime, the ship medic does what she can to treat our wounds.
First she checks my vital signs. Blood pressure is a bit high, but not a real cause for concern. Temperature is normal. Unlike the other survivors, I don’t have a high fever or symptoms of nausea. My biggest medical problems are obvious: my ruptured eardrum, broken ribs, and the bullet wound that reopened thanks to Sam’s attack. The medic stuffs a small bit of gauze into my ear to help it stay dry and heal on its own, though at this point I’m afraid I’ll never recover my hearing completely—not without surgery or an implant. My ribs will also have to heal on their own, but the medic gives me a pain pill to take so it won’t hurt as much when I breathe and cough. After all the times medicine has been used to control me, I’m wary of taking any pills. But my chest pain is becoming too much to bear, and I can’t afford to let it slow me down. It’s only a mild pill, anyway. The medic says I’ll probably need stronger medicine, but I’ll have to wait until we’re back in the Core.
While she cleans and re-bandages my gun wound, I wonder about why the poison gas didn’t affect me. It can’t be because I ran faster than the others to escape it, or because I didn’t inhale as much as them. I was right next to the bomb when it fell. Somehow, I was able to resist the poison the same way I’ve resisted the control serums better than everyone else. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
After the medic is finished with me, I’m given a fresh pair of clothes to change into. I won’t need my safety suit in the Core, as the moon’s acid can’t reach us there.
I go into a supply closet, so I won’t have to change in front of everyone. But the closet isn’t empty, as I’d hoped it would be. Skylar’s changing in here too. She pauses when I walk in.
“Hey,” she says, clearly uncomfortable to be in such close quarters with me.
I don’t say anything in response. Just because she’s agreed, for the time being, not to get me in trouble for the Sam situation doesn’t mean anything has changed between us.
I turn my back on her.
Changing proves to be a difficult task. I remove my helmet easily enough, but I have a harder time getting out of the suit. The pain medicine hasn’t sunk in yet, and even reaching my hand behind my back to unzip the suit sends slashes of pain through my chest.
“Here, let me help you,” Skylar says, behind me.
I hesitate. But clearly this is going to take forever if I try to do it on my own. “Fine.”
She finishes unzipping the suit for me and helps me ease it off my arms. After I’ve stepped out of it, she helps me remove the outfit underneath and pull on a new shirt and set of trousers. The process is painful enough with her help. I can’t imagine how much worse it would’ve been without her.
When it’s finally over I say, “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Skylar says.
There’s a long, awkward stretch of silence. She shifts from one foot to the other, looking like she wants to speak.
She starts to open her mouth, but I blurt out: “Why aren’t you going to turn me in for what I did to Sam? You know Commander Charlie was waiting for me to do something like this on the mission. And I’m sure he’d praise you for your loyalty if you ratted me out. That’s how you get your fix these days, right? By betraying people you once pretended to be friends with.”
“Sam attacked you first,” Skylar says, ignoring the second part of what I said. Her cheeks are turning pink. “I’m not that cruel of a person.”
I snort. “Oh, really?”
“Yes. And I don’t think you should be punished for making a decision you had to make in order to protect yourself.” Her eyes meet mine, hard and challenging. “We do what we have to do.”
She’s trying to say the things we’ve done are the same. She betrayed the Alliance in order to save herself from harm, so she doesn’t deserve blame.
But what she did was unforgivable. Skylar handed other people—innocent people—over to Commander Charlie in order to earn her freedom. People who should never have died are dead because of her.
“Thank you for helping me,” I say in a flat tone, picking up my helmet from the floor. “But don’t think this means I’ve forgiven you for being a traitor.”
“You’re welcome,” Skylar snaps. “And that’s fine. I wasn’t asking for your forgiveness.”
She leaves the room before I can, slamming the door shut behind her.
* * *
I don’t remember falling asleep in my passenger seat, but I wake to someone shaking my shoulder. “What?” I mumble.
“We’re here,” a soldier says. “Time to go.”
Blinking, I lift my head and take in the scene around me. The hovercraft isn’t moving anymore. I must’ve slept the rest of the hour-long journey through the Pipeline.
Beyond the open doors at the back of the pod, I see transports of various shapes and sizes, and mechanics in orange uniforms pushing tool carts between the ships. We’ve landed in a flight hangar in the Core.
Most of the other passengers have already disembarked. The gurneys with Darren and Sam are gone.
I quickly unbuckle and get to my feet. My neck is stiff from the position I was sitting in, and the pain medicine is no longer doing anything for my ribs. I keep a hand on my chest as I follow the soldier out of the pod.
There’s a group of people waiting for us at the bottom of the ramp. I immediately search for Commander Charlie in the group, but he is missing. There are only soldiers and a few nurses, one of whom is wheeling Darren’s gurney toward the hangar exit.
Cadet Waller, the woman who oversaw my Extraction test and serves as one of Charlie’s aids, is standing near Sam’s gurney, next to Lieutenant Dean and Skylar. Waller’s dressed in her usual scarlet uniform, wearing her hair in a slick, high ponytail, clutching the tablet she always carries with her. She steps closer to Sam on his gurney. He’s babbling incoherent speech in his overdosed haze.
“Take the lieutenant to the health ward,” Cadet Waller says. She glances at me with no pity in her gaze. Then she looks over to Skylar and Dean. “Commander Charlie is waiting to speak with the three of you in the debrief room.”
My heartbeat picks up. I thought we’d all be taken to the health ward first. I thought I’d have more time to figure out what I’m going to say to Charlie.
“Clementine was hurt,” Dean says. “She has fractured ribs and a bullet wound. She needs rest.” He sounds wearied, exhausted; yet he isn’t even mentioning the fact he’s still feverish from poison.
Cadet Waller takes in my injuries—the blood-streaked bandage on my arm, the muddy spots on my safety suit covering up the bruises Sam gave me. All she says is, “She seems well enough to walk, so she’s coming.”
There’s annoyance in her expression, and distrust. She didn’t agree with Commander Charlie’s decision to send me on this mission.
I might’ve tried to kill Sam and help the Alliance rebels escape, but I failed. It’s not my fault we were attacked by Mardenites. I hope the Developers will believe that.
Dean’s eyes flicker to me, a question in them. I bet he’d continue arguing on my behalf if I needed him to, but this isn’t worth a fight. I can handle the pain a little while longer. As nervous as I am, it’s probably smart to get this meeting over with.
“I can wait,” I say, even as I wince from another flash of pain in my ribs. “I’ll be fine.”
“Good. Follow me,” Cadet Waller says, leading the way out of the flight port.
* * *
The hallways look exactly as they did the first time I arrived in the Core: crisp and clean. That day I was nervous for a different reason, because I didn’t know what to expect in this new life I’d won. Now I know the truth: I’m no safer in the Core than I was all those years I lived in the work camp on the Surface. I escaped the hard labor and the starvation, but I didn’t escape the ruthless dictator and the lies.
But this time, I’m facing Commander Charlie with more strength and more knowledge. He’s tried to control me with two serums now and failed. Giving me another injection won’t work; I’ll just break free of it again. He’s lost the biggest power he had over me. And with the arrival of Marden’s army, his mind is preoccupied with a bigger threat, so there’s no time for him to create another serum. He’s going to have to accept the fact I can no longer be controlled.
If Charlie truly ordered Lieutenant Dean to protect me and bring me back here safely, my life must be worth something to him—something more than what he told me before. I’m going to find out what he needs from me, and I’m going to use it to get what I want: a truce. Freedom for Logan and myself, at least until the Mardenite army has been defeated. That will buy us time to figure out a more permanent means of securing our freedom.
I hold my helmet under my arm as Cadet Waller leads Dean, Skylar, and me down a narrow corridor in Restricted Division, the area of the Core where only the Developers, their personnel, and citizens granted special access are allowed to go. I’ve walked down some of these corridors before, but the first time I was about to be sent to Karum prison and the second time I was a mindless soldier. Now, I pay closer attention to the path we’re taking, trying to memorize it so I can navigate these hallways on my own. We pass doors marked ENGINE ACCESS, CREW QUARTERS, and HALL OF COMMANDERS. Rooms that would allow the Core to function as a space station if the outer sectors of the planet were blasted away.
Ahead of me, Dean is talking to Cadet Waller about the Mardenite invasion. He asks whether she knows anything about the extent of damage to the Surface thus far.
“I don’t have the latest updates,” she says. “Everything’s been chaotic. I’ve been working with citizen control, so I haven’t been able to hear any damage reports. But I’m sure the commander will inform you.”
Cadet Waller stops in front of a door marked CONTROL ROOM A. She presses her hand to an access panel on the door, and it opens. We step into a massive room filled with voices and the loud beep of monitors. Giant screens cover the walls and form partitions throughout the room. Each screen has a different label: CORE, CRUST, MANTLE, LOWER, or SURFACE. Images on the screen directly in front of me, labeled CORE, show me Recreation Division, the area of the Core with war simulations, antigravity machines, and other games Core citizens can play in their pastime. This must be the room where the Developers keep an eye on all the happenings in Kiel’s five sectors, through the video footage from their security cameras and cam-bot patrols.
As Cadet Waller leads us farther into the room, my eyes jump to one of the partition screens playing a live feed from the Surface. There are more techs crowded around this screen than any other. They’re sifting through images at lightning speed, but sometimes they pause long enough for me to catch a flash of something familiar: the education building in the Surface city, or a street in the work camp. Enough for me to see that the skyscrapers in the city are still standing. If the Developers had detonated the Stryker bombs inside the child workers, the buildings would’ve been completely demolished. Which means the Strykers haven’t been detonated yet.
The child workers are still alive. I exhale in relief. Something must’ve made the Developers decide to abandon that strategy.
My relief splinters when another image pops up: the black shapes of four Mardenite raiders circling over the skyscrapers. The techs start talking faster into their ear-comms. Bits of what they’re saying reach my ears over the hubbub of noise in the room.
“We have another sighting—four raider planes—”
“Circling over blocks ten, eleven, and twelve.”
“No sign of poison bombs, but we’ll let you know.”
“This way, quickly now,” Cadet Waller says, ushering us past the screens.
I almost stop and wait to see what the raiders will do on the screens. But it’s not like I can do anything to stop an attack from this control room, anyway. I can only hope the techs are communicating with a military squadron on the Surface.
Cadet Waller leads us to a door on the far side of the room. She pauses in front of the door and presses a speaker button on the wall. “Commander Charlie, sir, this is Cadet Waller. I have the survivors of the Alliance mission, as you requested.”
A moment passes before an answer comes through the speaker. “Bring them in,” Charlie says.
Just hearing his cold, hoarse voice sends a shiver down my spine. The words he said to me before I left for the Surface mission replay in my mind, burning in my memory: The more you fight the serum, the more you will lose.
But it was nothing more than an empty threat, meant to scare me into thinking he still has power over me. I won’t let him control me anymore, or hurt Logan or anyone else I care about ever again.
Cadet Waller opens the door and leads us into the debrief room, her high, black ponytail swinging behind her. I follow Dean and Skylar inside, hardening my jaw. Trying to control my breathing so the pain in my ribs won’t distract me from what I have to do.
It’s not just Commander Charlie waiting for us.