I don’t hear any of the explosions, but a ripple of energy permeates through the walls, making the whole room tremble like there’s been an earthquake. The battle stations are far, far away, but I can picture their hulls being ripped apart, the child workers inside screaming as the Strykers buried in their digestive tracts split their chests open and silence them forever.
Four of the battle stations had prisoners in their holds. It’s likely everyone aboard—Sandy, her baby, Hashima, Nellie … they’re all dead.
My heart thuds in my chest like a sledgehammer. There’s a loud beeping sound on the wall behind me. Turning my head, I see warnings flashing on several of the screens. Dots on a cross-sectional map of the Core show there’s been serious damage to the five uppermost levels. Who knows how many citizens and soldiers—both vul and human—were up there when it happened.
Logan could be dead.
Commander Charlie speaks a command into his ear-comm: “I need a disaster squad sent to the upper decks immediately.”
I can’t believe he did it. He really killed them.
Charlie smiles as he slips the detonator back into his pocket. “Now that that’s done,” he says calmly, “we’d best get back to everyone. Colonel Fred’s contraption is on its way to the detonation site as we speak. The Core will soon be a fully functional battle station, free from the restrictions of the rest of Kiel. You wouldn’t want to miss such an important event in history.”
My whole body is trembling with fury. I can’t comprehend how he could care so little about human lives. How does he live with himself?
“It might interest you to know your daughter didn’t come here with us,” I say. “She stayed aboard one of the battle stations. But you just killed her. Her and her baby, Grace.”
The slightest flicker of emotion crosses Charlie’s face. It’s hardly a crease in his forehead, really. But enough for me to know he almost, almost cares. “That is unfortunate,” he says. “But a necessary casualty. Guards, take her to the bridge.”
The guards haul me forward, shoving me past Sam toward where Charlie is standing beside the doorway. As I pass him, I want to reach out and blind him with my fingernails. But my arms are being held behind my back by one of the guards. So instead, I turn my head and spit full on in Charlie’s face. “You disgust me,” I say.
Charlie carefully wipes my saliva from his cheeks. “It’s nice to know you feel that way.”
* * *
The guards take me to the Core bridge, the room at the heart of Restricted Division where a pilot could control the flight functions of the Core, if it were useable as a battle station. Soon it will be, if the Developers get what they want.
There’s a massive blockade of soldiers outside the entrance to the bridge, ready to defend it if the vul make it this far down.
They’re coming, I want to tell the soldiers. Be ready.
Beechy and the others should’ve made it here by now, but they haven’t. They must’ve been held up on the way. After seeing how much damage was done upstairs, I’m worried the vul’s numbers have diminished considerably. There might not be enough of them left to take on all these soldiers waiting for them, if they get here in time at all.
I’m worried all the power is back in the Developers’ hands, and we won’t be able to seize it from them.
Every important Core official is inside the bridge, beyond the blockade. The army generals. The governors who were transferred here to safety from the outer sectors, so they’d survive the destruction of Kiel. Commander Regina and the other four Developers stand on the far side of the room, beyond the monitors lining the walls and a short set of stairs, before a screen of a night sky speckled with stars. The screen Charlie used to show me Marden’s fleet was on its way to our planet, days ago.
The Tessar is bound and gagged in the corner of the room. I’m surprised the Developers haven’t executed him yet, to anger the vul army, but maybe some part of them is still afraid to kill him. Or maybe they’re just waiting for the perfect moment.
Out of his cage, the Tessar looks unbelievably thin and weak. He seems like he’s barely clinging to life on his own, and his eyes are devoid of hope. I wonder if he felt the trauma of his people when the battle stations were destroyed. If I could get close enough to him to touch him, perhaps he could find the strength to form a mayraan with me again, and we could figure out a way to stop the Developers.
But my guards don’t take me anywhere close to the Tessar. They shove me up the steps toward the wide, rectangular table with a spinning hologram of Kiel. They turn me around to face the room. Almost everyone is watching me.
“Well, well, well,” Regina says, stepping around the table. Amusement stabs the coldness in her eyes. “Subject 7 found her way back to us and brought an army of savages with her.”
I don’t say anything to her in reply; I don’t need to give her any satisfaction. I look at all the people around the room, trying to see who else is here. Hoping beyond all hope Logan is somewhere nearby, not upstairs amid the wreckage of the Stryker destruction.
“How close is Colonel Fred’s machine to the detonation site?” Charlie asks, his boots clunking up the short set of steps. Sam follows close behind him.
“Twenty minutes away, sir,” Cadet Waller says, standing with her tablet in hand to the right of Regina.
“Wonderful.” Charlie claps his hands together. “In the meantime, we have some business to attend to. Bring forth the prisoner.”
My gaze automatically goes to the Tessar, the only other prisoner in the room. I can’t let Charlie kill him.
I open my mouth to protest, but stop when I realize no one’s making any move to bring the Tessar closer to Charlie. Charlie’s eyes are focused on the door on the right side of the room.
One of the army generals opens the door. I glimpse computers and technicians sitting in front of monitors—it must be one of the security control rooms—but as soon as the prisoner steps through the door, everything else falls away.
Logan has a gag between his teeth, a rag that makes it impossible for him to speak. But I can see the panic in his eyes. There are streaks of blood on his shirt, and there’s a fresh bruise around his eye. He’s stumbling with every step, barely able to walk without his crutches.
The guard leading him onto the bridge is Lieutenant Dean. His expression is stony, impossible to read. He doesn’t meet my eyes.
He couldn’t convince the Developers to leave Logan out of this. I wonder if he even tried. Is this all part of his plan to keep his cover until the last possible second, or did he lie to me about everything? Was he ever really on my side?
He hauls Logan to the foot of the stairs. Commander Charlie moves down one of the steps to stand in front of him, almost blocking him from my view. I struggle against my guard, trying to get closer to Logan, but the soldier’s grip on my arms is too strong.
The bridge door abruptly opens, and soldiers bring five more prisoners into the room. Beechy, Skylar, Jehara, Mal, and the vul warrior who was injured earlier. They’re all in rough shape, bruised and bloodied from another gunfight, one they clearly didn’t win. There’s a big gash in Skylar’s shoulder. Mal is almost on the ground from a wound in his knee. Beechy is the only person who seems relatively unscathed.
“We intercepted these rebels out in the hallway,” the lead guard says.
“Thank you for bringing them,” Charlie says. “Put the savages in the other room.”
Jehara and the other vul are hauled through the door into the security control room. Beechy, Skylar, and Mal are kept where they are. Their hands aren’t bound, but they’re held in place by five burly soldiers and they have no weapons.
“You’re just in time for the fun,” Charlie says.
“The vul army is on their way,” Beechy says in a hoarse voice. “You’re going to lose.” But the fear in his eyes tells me he doesn’t entirely believe what he’s saying.
All Charlie says is, “We’ll see,” and smiles. He focuses on Logan again. “Citizen Z13729, you are charged with treason against the Core, for collaborating with the Alliance rebels and helping the Mardenite army break into this sector. You are hereby sentenced to death.”
Panic. Anger. Both of them rush through me at once.
Logan makes a noise through his gag, a wordless response. He can’t even defend himself against the allegations.
“Lieutenant Dean, if you’ll do the honors,” Charlie says.
Dean pushes Logan onto his knees, hard. He shoves his head forward with one hand, and with his other he removes the gun from his holster. There’s still no emotion in his eyes; the hazel is filled with a haziness I couldn’t see when he was farther away.
Charlie subdued him—he must’ve caught a whiff of Dean’s involvement in my escape.
“You can’t shoot him!” I yell, struggling against the grip of my guard. “Logan had nothing to do with the army breaking in—I didn’t even tell him I was going to them for help. He’s innocent.”
“Perhaps he didn’t know you’d gone to the Mardenites,” Charlie says, turning to me. “But we know he was collaborating with you against us. Earlier this morning, we caught him breaking into the health ward attempting to steal a supply of energy injections. It seems he was trying to break the citizens free of their submission. You can thank your friend, Ariadne, for reporting his crime.”
This is insanity. Charlie would never kill a person for a crime like this before; he’d subdue them, or throw them in Karum if that didn’t work. But this isn’t the real reason he’s killing Logan, anyway. He’s killing him because he knows it will ruin me. Ever since Charlie discovered how important Logan was to me, he’s been trying to use him to break me. And it’s working.
“What do you want me to do?” I ask through clenched teeth. My eyes are watering. “How can I make you change your mind?”
“My dear, you won’t change my mind,” Charlie says, almost sadly. “But that reminds me, there is something you can do for me.”
Charlie snaps his fingers in Sam’s direction, and Sam walks toward me, smirking. He pulls something out of his pocket. It’s a long, rectangular metal box. Opening the lid, he removes an enormous syringe filled with orange liquid. Orange like control serum.
“Thanks to your cooperation with our most recent Mod tests,” Charlie explains, “Dr. Jeb was able to examine your blood and DNA in a more thorough manner than before. After he developed the serum that would make our people more resistant to the Mardenite poisons, I put him to work attempting to create a stronger control serum for you, one you and others who share the same level of resistance wouldn’t be able to escape. Dr. Jeb believes he found the missing element he needed. A way to make our serums long-lasting, so they only need to be administered once and the subject will be controlled for life.”
“What was the missing element?” I ask. My heart’s pounding so fast, it feels like the beats are tripping over one another. The pain in my ribs is unreal.
“A resistance gene in Logan’s blood, in fact.”
“Logan?” I startle. “When did you test his blood?”
“We took samples while he was in the hospital, the night you shot him. Logan was never one of our most promising mods, due to his physical condition. But it seems we were wrong to overlook him entirely.”
“So then why are you executing him? You might need him for something else.”
Charlie waves my question away with a hand. “We took what we needed from him for the serum. That’s the most important thing. We’ve already tested it in simulations, but I believe it’s fitting that you’ll be the first human test subject.”