Rebellion

Time seems to slow down to an infinite moment.

Sandy, not Skylar, stumbles. Her eyes widen in shock.

She lifts the hand covering her stomach, and blood seeps through her fingers.

“No!” Beechy yells.

His wife’s legs give out, but he catches hold of her. He cradles her in his arms.

“No, no, no,” he says over and over, his voice breaking more with every word.

Skylar pulls her gun out and moves around the two of them to get a clear shot at Buck’s head. Her hand doesn’t falter this time. Buck’s body twitches and falls still.

My ears ring as if Beechy is still screaming, but I’m pretty sure it’s all in my head. Rage fills my body, streaming through my veins.

Skylar should’ve been hit, not Sandy. She’s the one who betrayed us. I should’ve shot her back in the Core, when I had the chance. Then Buck wouldn’t have tried to hurt her, and Sandy wouldn’t be lying in Beechy’s arms bleeding out her stomach.

Too many of my friends have been hurt right in front of me, whether by my hands or someone else’s.

Enough.

“She needs a doctor!” Beechy says, his voice husky with worry.

“I can help,” Uma says, hurrying forward. But a guard grabs her arm to stop her.

“Get Sandy on a ship,” Sam says, not even looking at Uma. “There’s a medic back at the hovercraft. He can stabilize her until we get her to the Core.”

“She’s not going to the Core,” Beechy says. “We have a medical bay here.”

Sam marches over to him, lifting his gun. “I said put her on a ship. That’s an order.”

I’m still gripping my own gun. I can still use it.

Sam’s back is to me, protected by armor. But there’s a weak place where his helmet attaches to the neckpiece of his uniform. I have the perfect shot.

“I’m not obeying your orders anymore,” Beechy says.

Now—now—do it now.

“You will obey or I will shoot you,” Sam says, venom in his voice.

Fear makes my palms sweaty. The fear that has weakened me every time I’ve been about to shoot someone, making me pull the trigger when I didn’t want to hurt anyone, or holding me back when I needed to protect myself.

I shove the fear aside and let my anger against Skylar and Sam and Charlie and everyone who has ever hurt me or made me hurt someone else consume me instead.

I won’t let anyone control me any longer. I am the only one who can decide what my hands will do.

“You won’t shoot me,” Beechy says. “Commander Charlie told you to return my wife and me safely to the Core, and you won’t disobey a direct order. You do everything your commander tells you without questioning, and that makes you a bad leader.”

Sam cocks his gun, letting out a growl of frustration. “You’re wrong.”

His back is to me, and he is distracted. I have to do it now.

My feet move toward Sam. I lift my gun. I squeeze the trigger.

Something hits my arm and knocks off my aim. A laser—one of the officials shot me.

The pain spreads like heat through my arm, but I ignore it as best I can. I will not let anything stop me from killing Sam.

I fix my aim and squeeze the trigger again.

The yell that comes from Sam tells me I hit him. I don’t know where.

Another laser flies at me, forcing me to duck. I shield my head, wincing as I remember my arm was shot.

Sam staggers across the way. My laser seared the spot above his right boot, on the back of his leg. Not a killing shot, but better than nothing.

Relief floods through me, bubbling up into laughter. I controlled my hands. I shot him.

Beechy lets go of Sandy. He grabs Sam’s arm and twists the gun out of his grip.

He is free of the serum, at last.

And so am I.

The nearest official comes at me, to secure me and take my weapon. I put myself back in the training room with Colonel Parker and remember what he taught me during our sparring lesson: Set high, strike low.

I switch my gun to my uninjured left hand and aim at the official’s neck, as if I’m going to strike him there. He reaches for my arm, but I cut low at the last second and aim the copper at his abdomen, squeezing the trigger.

The laser doesn’t penetrate his armor, but it hits him hard enough to knock the breath out of him, giving me the moment I need to fire another shot at the weaker spot between his helmet and uniform. That one draws blood. He staggers into me.

A laser skims past my left ear. The other officials are shooting at me.

I grab the first official’s body and push him in front of me, using him as a shield. But I’m surrounded. I can’t possibly shoot all Sam’s men, or avoid their gunfire.

This is it. I’m done for.

BOOM!

A chunk of the wall to my right explodes. The door to the locker room turns to shards that fly everywhere, coating the air with dust and debris.

I duck and let go of the official. This can’t be happening. The explosives should not be going off yet. Someone was supposed to set their timers so Sam and his crew would’ve already cleared the hangar.

Either the packages are more unstable than he expected, or someone disobeyed his orders and set the timers early. Someone who either wanted to give us rebels a chance to escape, or make sure all of us went down with the hangar.

“Abort the mission!” Sam yells.

Through the dust and the dizziness from the pain in my arm, I see him limping away from Beechy.

“Get to your ships!”

He’s afraid the hangar will blow to smithereens, killing him and all his men.

No one challenges his orders. All the officials race for the X-wings. Skylar throws a worried glance at me over her shoulder as she runs. But if she cared about my safety, she wouldn’t be abandoning me. She wouldn’t have pledged her loyalty to Charlie.

I look around the hangar. The dust makes my vision hazy—or maybe that’s the pain in my arm—and I can’t tell where the other rebels are. There might still be one more undamaged Davara jet we could fly, if it has fuel, but I’m not sure if it does. Beechy said the supply was almost nothing.

“Clementine!” a voice yells.

I turn toward the voice, toward the X-wing I flew in earlier. Lieutenant Dean is calling for me. He’s helping Beechy and Uma lift Sandy into the ship. It’s the only X-wing left unclaimed; the other officials must’ve found room in the others.

I hurry over to them, securing my grip on my gun with my left hand, while my right arm screams in pain. I don’t understand. Why is Dean helping us?

Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Sam climbing into his ship. He’s having trouble because of the wound I gave his leg, but another official helps him up. His X-wing’s engine is already running. He will make it out of here before the bombs destroy the hangar, if anyone does.

I reach the X-wing where Dean and the others are. Beechy is already in the pilot seat, and he’s helping Uma hoist a barely conscious Sandy into the seat behind him.

“Careful, careful…,” he says. I’ve never seen him look so scared.

“Get on board,” Dean says to me.

BOOM!

Another chunk of wall explodes, this one at the back of the hangar, behind the hovercraft Beechy and I flew to the moon. The spaceship will be buried beneath the mountain soon.

“What about the other rebels?” I ask. I don’t know what happened to Fiona and the others.

“They’re getting on one of the pods,” Uma says as she presses something against Sandy’s wound—a strip of cloth she tore off her safety uniform. “We transferred most of the fuel to one of them in case of an emergency. They’ll have enough to make it outside, at least.”

I suppose that’s the best I can hope for. Tucking my gun into its holster, I climb up into the third seat of the X-wing. But every movement of my bleeding arm makes my head dizzy, and I nearly fall. Dean catches me from behind and boosts me up.

“Thanks,” I mutter.

“Don’t mention it,” Dean says, climbing into the seat behind me.

“Why are you helping us?” I ask.

“Commander Charlie told me not to abandon his daughter, no matter what,” he says stiffly. “I need to make sure she gets back to him safely. And get you all back to him, as well.”

My hope falls away. He’s just following orders.

But the way he refuses to meet my eyes makes me wonder if that’s really the whole reason.

To my right, the other X-wings lift into the air, making for the entrance tunnel. Beechy buckles into his seat and starts our engine.

As the jet cover lowers overhead, I look at Sandy again. Abdominal gunshot wounds are hard to treat at the best of times, and she has another human being inside her whose life has also been affected. She’s going to bleed to death and lose her baby if we can’t get her to a doctor.

“Hold tight,” Beechy says as he lifts our ship into the air. We speed toward the hangar exit, and the rebel flight pod follows.

I cradle my injured arm against my chest so it won’t bump into anything, trying to focus on anything but the pain.

Another explosive goes off to our right, and then another.

BOOM!

The walls blow to pieces behind us, burying the entrance to the room where Logan trained every morning, and the bed where I dreamed of Oliver’s death, and the mess where we ate age-old food out of cans. The booming noises fade as we speed through the tunnel, flying farther and farther away. Leaving a once safe place in smoky ruins.

The X-wings with Sam and Skylar and the others are too far ahead for me to see them. Part of me wants to catch up to them and attempt to shoot them down, but that would likely be a death sentence; we’re still outnumbered. And killing Sam can’t be our priority anymore, not until Sandy is no longer in danger of dying.

“What’s our destination?” Uma asks, voicing my next thought aloud. “Sandy needs a surgeon, as soon as possible.”

“There’s a medical attendant on board the hovercraft,” Dean says. “We should rendezvous with the other X-wings and return to the Core.”

Beechy doesn’t say anything, but he tightens his grip on the flight controls. I’m sure he’s thinking the same thing I am: Returning to the hovercraft means surrendering.

Surrender and we can return to the Core, where Charlie will put Sandy into the care of his best surgeons. Surrender and we might be able to save her.

But the rest of us? We will be prisoners in the Core. When Sam gives his mission report, Charlie isn’t going to be happy with me. I shot Sam. I screwed up this mission, even if I didn’t do it all on my own. Charlie promised me he would kill Logan if I didn’t follow orders, and he will keep his word unless I find a way to stop him.

I will find a way. Charlie did everything in his power to control me, but he couldn’t. He tried to turn me into a weapon for him, a mindless person who shoots without thinking, but he failed.

He made a soldier out of me, but I will no longer obey his orders.

* * *

As we approach the end of the northern entrance tunnel, there’s a crackle in the comm inside my helmet.

Skylar’s voice comes through the speaker, faint and full of static: “Beechy, do you copy?”

Anger flares inside me. I wish she’d been trapped back in the facility. It’s her fault Sandy was hurt; she should’ve been the one hit by Buck’s blaster.

“Yes, I copy,” Beechy says tersely. “You can tell Sam we’re prepared to surrender. Make sure he’s ready to receive Sandy at the medical bay.”

I reach to shut off my comm, not caring to hear Skylar’s answer. Or anything she has to say ever again.

But she speaks before I can find the Off switch: “We—have—a—problem.”

Her voice sounds higher pitched than usual, almost panicked, which makes me pause. Her words continue, but they’re completely garbled by static and impossible to decipher.

Why is the comm signal cutting out? It was plenty strong when we flew through the tunnel before.

“Skylar, can you repeat that?” Dean asks.

White noise splinters through my ear-comm. Skylar can’t hear us, or if she can, we can’t hear her answer.

The tunnel exit isn’t far ahead of us. I can’t see any of the other X-wings. All I can see are the dark figures of swaying trees at the edge of the moonlit valley.

“What’s going on?” Uma asks. She doesn’t have a helmet and earpiece like the rest of us.

“We’re having communication problems with the other X-wings,” Beechy says, fiddling with the signal dial on the ship’s control panel. “This is bird four. Does anyone copy?”

The crackle of static continues. There’s no response from Skylar or Sam or any of the officials aboard the other X-wings.

I run my teeth along my lower lip, gripping my armrest with a sweaty hand. Years ago, I learned in school about flight communication and electromagnetic interference. Wireless comm transmitters usually face problems only if there’s a power failure on a ship—if the backup as well as the main generator stops working—or if the comm transmitter is disrupted by a major electronic device in the vicinity. Usually a transmitter from another ship, running on a different radio frequency.

But the KIMO facility’s radio transmitter went up in flames. There shouldn’t be any other transmitters nearby.

An odd feeling trickles over the nape of my neck, like a croacher skittering across my skin. The tunnel walls have turned to mountain stone instead of steel, and the stream of water below us flows out into the night, where the stars are bright and twinkling.

Something isn’t right.

As we soar through the tunnel exit, the sky expands through the window. My eyes slowly adjust to the light of the full moon rising over the mountains. There’s nothing strange about the mountains, so I look higher, toward the acid shield and the stars.

Every muscle in my body goes rigid. There are dark figures beyond the acid shield, floating in Kiel’s orbit. No bigger than meteorites, but there’s more than one and they’re hardly moving. They can’t be falling space rock.

They must be battle stations. Enemy ships speckling the canvas of stars and darkness like they’ve made our sky their home. I count seventeen, but there could be more. It’s hard to tell when they’re so far away.

But they’re closer than they seem if they’re close enough to interfere with our comm system.

“It’s the fleet,” I say, but my voice cracks so much, it sounds like someone else’s. We were supposed to have two more days to prepare, two more days to stop Charlie from going through with his plan and killing thousands of innocents.

Two more days. But we have none.

Someone’s shouting inside the X-wing. Dean’s telling Beechy to put us down near the hovercraft before we’re seen.

I’m afraid it may be too late for that. As I stare out the window, dots of dark objects stream from the underbellies of the battle stations that crossed a billion miles of the universe to reach our home. Hundreds and hundreds of smaller ships come pouring out like a legion of predators and descend into Kiel’s atmosphere through the acid shield.

We thought Commander Charlie was our biggest problem. Looking out the window at the fleet invading our sky, all that is forgotten.

The Mardenites are here for war.