I RAISED MY HANDS IN the universal gesture of surrender. “Let’s talk about this.”
“Let’s not.” Priya gestured for the others to follow my lead. They did: Rune, Reed, and Imani immediately, Mia, Jasper, and Alexei more slowly. “We figured you’d be here for your friends. How many more of you are there?”
One of the men smirked, revealing a cracked front tooth. “Now that we’ve got this crew, I say we sit back and wait. We’re not gonna run down the speedster. Let him come to us, and any others with him.”
That was . . . exactly what would happen. My heart stuttered. If we let them take us prisoner now, we were finished, all of us. But what options did we have? Alexei couldn’t set fire to an airlock. That was a colossally bad idea, even if we hadn’t been standing in it. Mia might slip away, but the rest of us were pretty much screwed.
“We are not on different sides, you and I,” said Alexei conversationally. I glanced at him. Where was he going with this? He took a few steps, placing himself between us and the hunters. At the same moment, Mia shifted ever so slightly toward us.
Oh no. What did these two have in mind? It was super charming that they knew each other so well, but I wasn’t following the plan.
The man with the cracked tooth chuckled. “Really, boy? This is your strategy? Tell the big bad bounty hunters we have more in common than we think?”
“We have plenty in common.” Alexei spread his hands, as nonthreatening as someone well over six feet and composed of pure muscle could make himself. “For instance, money. You like it. I have it. My uncle . . .”
Priya snorted and mimicked his tone. “We have a contract. We fulfill the contract. It’s how this works.”
The rest of us were within Mia’s reach. She glanced at me. “Portal,” she mouthed.
My heart sank. That was their plan? I didn’t even know how I’d opened the door the first time! I shook my head frantically, and Mia nodded, equally urgent, her brows drawn together.
Oh my God. I bit my tongue. What choice did I have?
And then everything happened at once.
Alexei seemed to flash and a steady stream of flame, more concentrated and powerful than I’d realized he could produce, emitted from his cupped hands like a laser beam directed straight at Priya. She shrieked and dove aside. The other hunters opened fire on Alexei with their stun guns, but he’d already thrown himself straight backward, landing on top of Reed and toppling him to the floor. In the same moment, Mia’s eyes narrowed, and everyone vanished—or at least it looked that way. We were still there, and completely vulnerable.
Fortunately, the hunters didn’t seem to catch on. “Find them!” Priya shrieked, and they fanned across the hall, blocking our access.
Mia gasped beside me, and something shifted in my vision: my own arm, rematerializing. No no no, I screamed inwardly. Not now. I willed us invisible, intangible, urging Mia’s power to work.
My arm vanished again, almost too quickly to be coincidence, and Mia’s breathing steadied beside me. I blinked. I hadn’t really helped her, had I?
The hunters advanced steadily. They had the sense not to start shooting blindly, but they also weren’t about to let us slip by. At this rate, they’d be on us in seconds.
Unless I saved us. I didn’t know how the portal I’d created worked. I’d only made one once, more or less by accident, and it had only moved me through a thin barrier. But then, that was all I had to do now. I had access to an exterior wall, one I knew led to Obsidian’s docking ring and not into space. Just do what you did before, Kenzie. Somehow. With a whole bunch more people. And try to make sure no one gets stuck halfway between the ship and the station.
I drew my shoulders down my back, laying my hands on the wall and ignoring the voice screaming at me to stop trying the impossible. The first time I’d done this, there was an actual door. What if my portals only worked when I had an opening available? Maybe I couldn’t open space between walls. Or maybe I couldn’t yet, maybe the power was still developing, maybe . . .
But we were out of options. My mind raced, exploring other ideas even as I pressed against the wall and screwed my eyes shut. What if we tripped one of them, got our hands on their stun gun, took them hostage? Except I had the sense that these bounty hunters would cheerfully shoot one of their own along with us. Not a fatal blow, just enough to put us all down temporarily. We’d obviously underestimated both their competence and their dedication.
I ground my teeth, Mia’s hand tense on my ankle. I didn’t dare open my eyes to see how close the hunters were. Instead I pictured the docking bay, focused on the sensation I got when another language became clear to me, trying to imagine the bay in that same vivid detail and draw it toward me, rather than myself toward it.
The wall gave way beneath my hands. My eyes flew open in surprise and the metal shimmered in front of me, but my broken concentration quickly solidified it. Footsteps pounded nearby. I ground my teeth together, shut my eyes, and forced myself to concentrate. I knew I could do it now. All I had to do was reach.
The hunters shouted in surprise. Someone shoved me, and I flew through the blinding portal, landing on my knees and elbows on the docking bay floor. More shouts of surprise greeted us. Apparently even on Obsidian, it wasn’t normal to see people dive through bright circles of light in walls.
I twisted to see the rest of the crew stumble through seconds before the portal resealed itself, much like the entrances on the alien ship. They stared at me in amazement. “I didn’t know you did that,” Rune gasped.
“Talk later,” ordered Mia, scrambling to her feet. She looked sallow, and she staggered on her bad leg, as if the escape had exhausted her. “They’ll be right behind us. Get moving!”
As if on cue, the airlock door hissed. Alexei hauled Reed and Rune to their feet. Mia and I caught Imani between us and took off with Jasper on our tails, not sure of where we were heading, only knowing we needed to escape the hunters. “Make for a crowd!” Mia shouted. “They won’t risk shooting into it!”
“You sure about that?” I demanded. We rounded a corner, shouts behind us.
We couldn’t outrun trained bounty hunters. Alexei, Mia, Jasper, and I might have managed it, even with Mia’s limp, but we couldn’t abandon the other three. Still, I didn’t have a better plan. If we escaped the docking ring and reached the station proper, it might buy us time to come up with something.
A blur of motion in front of us and the man with the cracked tooth landed in a crouch, dropping straight out of the air, his stun gun aimed in my direction. I skidded to a halt before I crashed into him, my eyebrows shooting up my forehead. “How . . . ?” I whispered.
He grinned. “Did you think you were Earth’s only anomalies?” He targeted me. “Let’s make this easy. Stop where you are.”
Another blur of motion and Priya landed beside him, pivoting with the grace of a dancer. Her legs barely buckled under the impact as she vaulted over us. “Show-off,” she said.
The man laughed. “We were going to catch them anyway. I simply expedited it a bit.”
“What part of inconspicuous do you fail to grasp, Hallam?”
He flipped the gun in his hand, leveling it in our direction. “Oh, relax. We’re legal.”
None of this made a damn bit of sense to me, and I really didn’t care at the moment. I glanced at Mia and saw frustrated defeat in her expression. We had powers, sure, but they were useless against bounty hunters who could leap ten feet straight into the air. Alexei might have fried them, but the mere fact of being on a space station kneecapped his abilities. “You’re anomalies?” I asked.
Hallam shook his head. “We’re so much more. I’ll tell you all about it on the ship. Come on, little girl. It’s time to go home. Your daddy’s worried about you.”
The mention of my father tensed every muscle in my body, my jaw locking too tightly to even reply to the taunt. My own frustrated defeat was mirrored in my friends’ expressions—and I glimpsed something like panic in Mia’s. I glanced at Alexei, hoping if she charged, he would catch her. Mia more than anyone hated confinement. I wasn’t at all sure she wouldn’t choose death over imprisonment, and if that meant taking the rest of us with her, well . . .
But before anyone could do anything, Hallam jerked as if someone had shoved an electric rod down his spine. He shot straight as a bar of steel, his body spasming, and then collapsed to the ground.
Priya spun. “Reinforcement!” she yelled. “We need—” Her voice cut off as she, too, went numb from an electrical burst and tumbled on top of Hallam.
Cage stood behind her, a powerful Omnistellar-grade stun baton in his hand. “This way!” he snapped. “Hurry, before they catch up!”
I didn’t wait to be told twice. He opened a nearby grate in the wall and the others dove through it. Panic drove me forward and I lunged. Everything vanished in a flash, a blur of motion and wind just like when Cage had carried me. I slammed hard against the grate’s opening, stilling my motion, and launched myself forward without thought, blind panic driving me. I scurried along so fast I jammed my elbows into the walls, drawing blood with every movement, leaving the others behind. The scent of the aliens filled my nostrils as every memory of pursuit swallowed me, blinding me and making me rush for any sort of freedom. Ghost claws tore at my flesh as I lurched farther into the darkness, bile teasing the back of my tongue and the sick, clattering hiss of their breath echoing in my ears . . .
“Kenzie!” called Cage. “Wait up!”
The panic dulled at the sound of his voice, although it didn’t abate. Obsidian. You’re on Obsidian. Running from bounty hunters, not aliens. I dug my fingers into the grating, forcing my heartbeat to return to normal. Bounty hunters. Dangerous, yes. But not aliens. Would these glimmers of terror haunt the rest of my life?
It was that stupid silver mask, I realized in irritation. It had unsettled me. Primed me to panic. “Up here,” I called, my voice echoing in the darkness but seeming quiet over the sound of my racing heart. I clenched my hands into fists, letting the pain of my nails biting my palms return me to the moment.
The last few minutes came back to me in a rush, and my mouth went dry. The blur of motion reaching the shaft . . . Had Cage picked me up? No. He’d been by the opening. Somehow, I’d propelled myself forward.
Just like I’d opened the portal.
And . . . maybe . . . helped Mia keep us invisible?
My heart stuttered. No. Not now. I couldn’t deal with this now. We had to escape. All the weirdness could come after.
I activated the light on my wrist monitor, and half the terror left me. I forced myself to be calm, to take command of the other half. “Alexei,” I called, “any idea which direction I should go?”
“None. But if there’s a way in, there’s a way out. I suggest we find it before the hunters find us.”
I swore softly. I did not want to think of the hunters on our tails in this tiny place. I got myself moving again, scrambling forward on my elbows and knees. No one seemed to be pursuing us through the vents so far. Maybe they wouldn’t fit. I pictured Priya next to Alexei and scratched that idea. They’d fit if they wanted to. If they weren’t in here, it meant they didn’t follow. And that was a worry of its own. Did they have some other way of tracking us? Or were they so confident in their ability to find us that they didn’t even bother giving chase?
I came to a branch in the vents and crawled left at random. About fifty feet farther along the tunnel, I opened a service hatch to find an emergency ladder. It stretched above us into darkness, dim lights embedded into the walls, presumably heading all the way up.
It was a relief to straighten, even if it meant a long climb ahead. I deliberately angled my light downward, providing illumination for the others as I climbed. I hauled myself hand over hand to what I thought was probably the third floor of the station, then clambered off the ladder and aimed my light down the shaft. My friends had staggered themselves with Cage and Alexei at the bottom, presumably ready to catch anyone who fell. Cage had some sort of light, maybe from the stun baton. Mia was almost by my side already, Rune surprisingly close behind her, and Jasper a few feet below. Imani and Reed made slower progress near the bottom.
Mia appeared on my tail. “Go on,” she said. “Cage has a light. He’ll bring up the rear.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, I suppose you could hang out in the shaft and block anyone else from climbing the ladder,” she replied dryly. I scowled at her, flipped over, and resumed crawling.
I found an exit vent in short order. Like the others, it was magnetically attached on three corners and came away easily in my hands. Was that a station quirk, or had Liam casually fixed all the vents to his own specifications? I dropped into a surprisingly comfortable area, resembling my own quarters on Sanctuary, a small but well-furnished living room done in shades of gray, with a leather couch facing a holoscreen on the far wall. I had no idea where we were, but it beat the ventilation system. It almost felt nice enough to be the upper levels. No way we’d climbed that far, though.
I moved away to let the others drop behind me. As soon as Cage hit the floor, I grabbed his arm. Guilt over leaving him behind gnawed at my chest, and now here he was rescuing us. “Are you okay?” I demanded. “What happened?”
“What happened ?” he repeated, his eyes so wide I could see the red rimming them. “Kenzie, how the hell did you move so fast back there?”
I sagged against the back of the couch as my last doubts vanished. “I don’t know,” I whispered, acutely conscious of the others listening. “I opened a portal, and . . . and I think I might have helped Mia keep us invisible on the hunter ship.”
“You did.” There was no hostility in Mia’s voice, only frank curiosity as she draped herself across an armchair, examining me with interest. “Or someone did. I was losing my grip, and then it got much easier. I didn’t know what had happened at the time. You say it was you?”
“But how?” The words exploded from me in a panic, and I finally understood why Mia had been so upset on Mars. Having something inside you that you didn’t understand, no matter how useful, was terrifying. Goose bumps prickled over my skin and my stomach flip-flopped. “What else can I do? Where are these powers coming from?”
“I don’t even dare guess,” said Cage, exhaustion seeping through his voice.
Jasper and Reed flanked Imani, who had dropped into another chair. All three seemed deep in thought. “Invisibility, speed, portals,” said Jasper slowly. “Mia has invisibility and Cage speed. Your original power is picking up other people’s languages. Maybe now you’re somehow picking up other people’s abilities?”
“What about the portals?” Reed demanded. “We don’t know anyone who can do that.”
“Yes, we do,” Rune interrupted so quickly she almost tripped over the tail end of his sentence. “Liam. Remember? He said he opened a portal to Obsidian.”
She was right. I exchanged glances with Cage and shook my head. “I can’t deal with this right now,” I whispered. “I just can’t. I know it’s important and we need to figure it out, but please, please, can we talk about something else? Just for a minute?” I needed time and space to process this, to come to terms with what was happening to me, whatever it was.
Alexei nodded, and I gave him a grateful look as he shifted his attention to Cage. “What happened with your contact?”
Cage stared at me a moment longer, worry and fear creasing his brow, but then he allowed his calm, carefree mask to surface. “Short version, Géxià was willing to help. She gave me the baton and told me where to find you.”
“She didn’t want anything in return?”
Cage shook his head, clearly frustrated. “She wasn’t willing to help us off the station, and she was short on details. It sounds like Omnistellar is putting Obsidian in danger. This is her home. She doesn’t want it destroyed. She also implied that if we save Obsidian, she’d be willing to talk again. I guess our goals happened to align, which is very fortunate for us.”
“Well, only kind of,” I replied, and quickly explained Liam’s theory: Omnistellar was working on summoning the damn aliens to steal their tech.
He took it about as well as could be expected, shaking his head, his eyes wide in disbelief. “No offense, but your company is short a few brain cells.”
I scowled. “It’s not my company, not anymore. And we’d better get out of here. This is someone’s home, and from the looks of it, someone important.”
“Can we stop for just one minute?” Imani sounded on the verge of hysterics. I blinked. I’d never heard her speak with anything but perfect calm. Even when she’d been on the edge of tears, her control remained in place. Now she trembled, her hands clenched into fists. The encounter with the bounty hunters had shaken her. “We haven’t rested in hours. We’re exhausted. We’re going to start making stupid decisions very soon. In fact, we already are.”
Jasper laid a gentle hand on her arm, and she peered at him through a veil of unshed tears. He said, “We do need to rest. But this is not the place to do it. We might still have hunters on our tails, and Kenzie’s right: whoever lives here isn’t going to be happy to see us. Okay? Let’s keep moving. We’ll find someplace safe soon.”
“Will we? Where on this station is safe?” Imani shook him off and stomped her foot. “Where in this solar system is safe for us now? I wish I’d stayed on Mars with the others.”
Mia scowled. “If that’s what you want, we’ll find a way to get you back there. And if you want to stay here while the rest of us move on, that’s fine too.”
“Take it easy, Mia,” said Jasper quietly. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t tear into him. “Imani. We’re all scared. It’s going to be okay. Keep moving a bit longer, all right?” I wasn’t sure anyone but me caught his next words, spoken so softly I barely heard him. “I know you’re thinking about Aliya. About who’s going to tell your parents what happened. I’m thinking about my family too. It’ll be okay. I promise.”
So, he’d been listening to us back on the ship. Imani didn’t seem to catch that detail. She laughed shakily and wiped her eyes. “Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. I’m tired. I’m . . .”
Cage was already on the move, checking other rooms. “No one’s here,” he reported. “We can stop for a few moments, Imani. Okay?”
She nodded gratefully and sank onto the leather couch, Jasper beside her, keeping his hand on her arm and speaking softly. Our eyes met, and he nodded. A wave of some unrecognizable emotion surged over me, concern and love and gratitude and fear and sadness somehow all bundled into the pit of my stomach. Jasper understood family. He, more than anyone except me, knew what Imani was going through.
Cage and Rune drew to the side a bit, Rune recounting their capture in hushed tones, and Mia and Alexei sat on either side of the door, their hands joined across it. That left Reed and me as an awkward duo near the holoscreen. Was he going to ask about my powers? What was happening to me? Was my ability to understand languages somehow becoming an ability to translate powers? I squeezed my fists to hide my shaking hands and pushed it to the back of my mind. Practical concerns. Something, anything to distract me.
I glanced at the stun baton in Cage’s hands. It was the only weapon we had. If someone came through that door, we might need it. But I didn’t want to interrupt him to say anything. Besides, Alexei and Mia wouldn’t let anyone in. They hadn’t chosen their position by coincidence.
Reed had vanished while I considered this, but now he reappeared with his arms full of bottled water and a bag of dried fruit dangling from his hand. “I raided the kitchen,” he said around a mouthful of apples, passing the bag to me.
I only hesitated a second before helping myself. We were so far beyond breaking the law that a handful of rations probably didn’t matter. I passed the bag to Jasper on the couch and bit back a moan as the sweet tang of dried peaches burst over my tongue.
Reed and I leaned against the wall, sipping from water bottles. He gulped down his food and said, “Hey, Kenzie. I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said about Liam earlier. Doesn’t he seem like he knows a little too much?”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure, exactly.” Reed shook his head and drained half his water in a gulp, crumpling the bottle in what seemed entirely too noisy a fashion. “I just . . . watch out for that guy, all right? I mean, he can decode transmissions, he monitors alien frequencies, he has powers but he can’t use them, he works for the Danshovs but also against them . . . Whose side is he on?”
“I really don’t know. His own, I think.” I considered Liam for a minute, the terror in his eyes when he mentioned the . . . what did he call them? The zemdyut. “I believe this much: he is genuinely afraid of the aliens. He’d do anything to keep from facing them again. Other than that, you don’t have to worry. I don’t trust him at all.” And I still didn’t know what he’d wanted with my comm device. I ran my fingers over the sleek metal. Part of me really wanted to run into the guy again and get some answers. Part of me hoped he just stayed in his hole so we didn’t have to deal with him.
On the couch, Imani raised her head, apparently calmer now. “I’m with him on that. Whatever it takes to keep those things from coming back here, I’ll do it. Whatever it costs. We have to stop Omnistellar, Kenz. You know that, right?”
“I do,” I told her, and a sudden burst of warmth surged in my chest. For a moment, just a moment, I felt like I had at Omnistellar training camps. Part of something. Like I belonged, knew my place, knew my heart. I risked a smile and Imani returned it—determined and grim but a smile nonetheless.
Cage scraped the last of the raisins out of the bag of fruit, then set the empty container and his water bottle on a nearby shelf. “Everyone okay? I really think we should get out of here. We don’t know how far the hunters are behind us.”
The question was really for Imani, who sighed but nodded. Jasper squeezed her arm once more as they got off the couch and we reassembled at the door, Cage and me in the lead. Having him by my side reassured me. Somehow, no matter what happened, the two of us kept winding up together. We had problems to work out, but in terms of survival, we were at our best side by side, and I knew everything would be all right as long as we stayed together.
At least until we opened the door to find the Silver Oni lurking in the corridor.