31

“Do you remember me?” Vincent Anais asked.

Earth’s strong pull weighed on me as I sat, handcuffed to a table in a large room near the very top of an Accordance administrative building. Through the floor-to-ceiling oval window, I could look down at Manhattan’s silver skyscrapers spread out around the central cluster of Accordance structures.

“I do,” I said solemnly. “Where’s my drink?”

Anais rubbed puffy eyes. “I would laugh, but I was woken up and dragged out of bed. Then I was told we were all under attack, and that it might only be a matter of weeks before Earth would be overrun. I’m tired, recruit. And everything has changed.”

“Twelve hours ago I was on the moon,” I told him. “They put us on an Arvani-only ship. It was called a Manta. I think I saw one on a show once. They mainly go planet to planet, right? The way the other passengers acted, you’d think we had cooties, but armed Arvani officers shut them up. And I have yet to see a doctor.” I raised my cuffed hands, trying to ignore the pain that came in waves.

Anais winced. “I’m sorry. It’ll be soon.”

“This isn’t how you treat us. Not after what we did.”

“What you did is up for interpretation.” Anais looked away as he said that. His heart wasn’t in it.

“Bullshit. You should be able to pull info out of the wreckage. The black boxes in our armor. The launcher. We told our stories on the way here, with weapons aimed at us.”

“All the evidence will be carefully examined. Now, Mister Hart, moving on, where is Amira Singh?”

“I’m sorry, did you misplace her?” I stared right at Anais.

He sighed. “She seems to have, uh, escaped.”

“Goodness gracious,” I said. “In a secure facility like this she’s gone missing? I don’t know where she is, but seeing that Ken’s still holding emergency medical sealant foam on his wound and my broken wrists are shackled to a table, I can’t imagine why she’d turn down your hospitality.”

“Has she said anything about her intentions as far as revealing sensitive military information found while at the Icarus base?”

I leaned in. “We caught a ghost. That’s what this is about. You don’t want her revealing what it is.”

Anais bit his lip. “Devlin, let’s be open here. Don’t think you’re the first to find out what the ghosts are. The Arvani administrators were all just given updates thirty minutes ago. In those files: updated information about ghosts. Information they didn’t know about until now. They are . . . upset that this has been held from them. But Arvani top command has been dealing with this for a lot longer than you can imagine.”

“And they’re terrified that Amira will release this into the wild.”

Anais nodded. “Things have gotten tense here since you left. Something like this would be explosive. Do you understand?”

Always trying to manipulate us, I thought. Even now, with the threat of invasion imminent. “I don’t know where Amira is,” I said. “But the last thing she told me was that, with the Conglomeration about to attack, she wasn’t going to spend her last days in an Accordance cell; she was going to go enjoy them. I think the secret is safe with her.”

Good luck, I’d told her when we’d gotten off the Arvani ship. Don’t let them drag you down, she’d said, and squeezed my forearm.

“And what about you?” Anais asked. “Is the secret safe with you?”

Ken, I realized, they already considered loyal. But I was the other wild card. “It all depends on what’s happening next,” I said.

Anais waved his hand over the table. The white color faded. I looked at a cloud of rubble and rock, so far on the edge of the solar system that the sun was just a tiny pinprick. A suggestion of light, another star.

In the cold dark, shadows moved. Shapes with purpose.

The perspective whirled back. It was a feed from a fast-­moving Accordance drone ghosting past the edge of a massive fleet of organic, irregular shapes. Some of them similar to the one in pieces near Icarus base.

“The Conglomerate forces are massing in the outer Oort cloud, on the far edges of your solar system and past our defenses. You repelled their beachhead, so they are planning a siege now. Accordance ships can’t get in or out. They are trapped here with us. They need more recruits. Because the fight is coming to us.”

A blast of energy wrenched through the dark and vaporized the drone. The image faded, leaving just the white table.

“The Arvani will move your family out of the political camp they are currently in and to home custody in upstate New York,” the Arvani on the left said. An Arvani tank had crept into the room silently while I was watching the video. I tried not to jump back slightly, thinking of Commander Zeus’s slashing, armored tentacles. “If you agree to our condi­tions.”

“I can’t go home?” I asked.

“You are needed now more than you were before,” said Anais. “Let us promote you to the youngest lieutenant, at twenty, in the CPF.”

“I thought I was an octave,” I said. “Aren’t native ranks not allowed?”

Anais smiled. “We’re getting concessions. A fully human officer corps. The chance to use native rank insignia across the force; we’re configuring this all on the fly, but taking full advantage of Arvani fear. Let us train you more. Deploy you. Help the CPF fight the Conglomeration. Because they are coming for Earth, Devlin. They’re coming for us.”

“Get the cuffs off me, and get me a goddamned doctor,” I told Anais.

+  +  +  +

I walked down toward the old financial district, enjoying the freedom to choose any direction, any path I wanted. I had no particular aim in mind, I just wanted to feel the sun on my skin, the breeze on my face. I wanted a hot dog with mustard, or a gyro, or a gelato, just something that wasn’t optimally designed to fuel my metabolism.

The city was different now. Smaller, maybe. I’d had a change in perspective. The streets looked grubbier. Earth First tags spray painted on brick corners warned me that walking here in my grays might not be too smart.

There’d been bombings. The repacification hadn’t worked. Human ingenuity prevailed as minds bent themselves to making life miserable for collaborators, civil servants, aliens. New York looked like a city under occupation: human enforcers in yellow riot gear in clusters everywhere, looking determined and tired. Armored struthiforms rumbling by on personnel carriers. Broken windows, destroyed buildings. The pockmarks of bullets on facades.

Concentration camps in New Jersey and Long Island. Livestreamed executions. Bombings. The occupation’s iron grip was slipping, because the Accordance was pulling its forces into orbit to ready itself for the oncoming invasion.

And who knew how many Conglomerate double agents were already here?

Rumors said the Darkside base attack had opened negotiations between Earth First and the Colonial Administration for a cease-fire. Earth First was trying to decide which enemy to fear more: the one that occupied our world and its moon, or the one that might breed us into hungry heat shields.

I stopped walking around aimlessly and headed toward my appointment at the Empire State Building.

The whole side of the ancient structure had been repainted in Colonial Protection Forces gray with white swirls. And to my surprise, recruits in civilian clothes stood in a line waiting to get into the lobby. A line that wrapped around the block. Once processed, they’d be housed here before going to the Hamptons for selection.

People pointed at me as I walked by. The Accordance had used my image already this morning, broadcasting the story of our fight. Ken and I had become symbols of resistance. They’d left Amira out, as they didn’t know what she was going to do next.

Even I wasn’t sure I wanted that profile.

But I could use it.

As I stood in front of an auditorium full of wide-eyed recruits, I smiled. If we could fight and survive the Conglomeration, the threat that made Arvani shit their tanks, then we’d be a dangerous force.

The graffiti-spreading Earth First activists outside could cause trouble. But these recruits in front of me? They could turn on the Accordance and gain Earth its independence.

In time.

If we survived.

If I could help build them into the weapons we all needed to be.

I cleared my throat, and heard the sound amplified to three hundred pairs of intent eyes.

“Listen closely,” I shouted. “There are many aliens out there. They come in all shapes and sizes. But if you want to survive your first encounter with the enemy, there are five aliens that you will need to spot on sight. Pay attention to me now, and you might live.”