On the island, the sunrise was gold. We sat on the sand, leaned against each other, and watched the night melt slowly into morning.

My friends and Nephrite had each swallowed a drop of the Sunset Vial too, just in case. No one had shown any symptoms. Orbit and Nephrite had also run a decontamination cycle through the jet’s air-conditioning system, to ensure all traces of the virus were erased.

As my vision gradually returned to normal, I stared at the horizon. The sun painted swirls of amber on the sea, as if the dawn had spilled a box of watercolours.

After a while, Nephrite joined us on the beach. She had been working in the Chameleon cockpit, sending out a distress beacon to any nearby HELIX jets. Dragon must have noticed our credit card trail by now, and a rescue squad was likely on its way to the Bay of Islands. Thanks to the distress beacon, it shouldn’t take them long to find us.

‘Are you kids all right?’ Nephrite asked.

We all nodded.

‘And you?’ I said, eying her bedraggled form. She had been a prisoner for days, and she didn’t look as though she’d eaten much.

Nephrite stared out to sea for a long moment. I remembered what Dippy had told us – that he had stolen a wisp of her quintessence weeks ago, and mimicked her appearance to kill her grandfather.

Had Mariner died thinking that Nephrite was his murderer? I could only imagine the grief of betrayal, like a virus in his blood, as he lay dying on his cottage floor. In his final moments, perhaps his gaze had fixed upon the painting on his shelf. A broken ship on a storm-tossed sea …

‘We’ll see,’ Nephrite said quietly.

It wasn’t the most optimistic statement in history – but in the circumstances, it was about the best we could hope for.

Steel sat alone, twenty metres down the beach. Phoenix still looked ready to gouge his eyes out, but I’d asked her to leave him alone. He was going to beat himself up enough without anyone else to help him do it. His career was over. Dragon would never allow him to keep his place in HELIX. He had bartered my life to save his own, and put our mission in jeopardy.

Steel had built his entire life around his reputation. Going into this mission, he had been so sure that he would be brave, that he would finally prove himself the hero everyone thought he was.

Instead, he had turned out to be a coward.

It had to be a horrific lesson to learn about yourself. But in the end, he had chosen to die rather than become an Inductor. Would that be enough to keep his head held high? Would it be enough to let him sleep at night?

I leaned on Phoenix’s shoulder, too tired to think anymore. My brain ached, my body throbbed, and the sunrise glinted sharply in my eyes. I couldn’t think about my mother, making the deal to buy the virus. Not yet.

It was still too raw, and I was still too weary.

So I simply stared into the sun, and the shine, and the sea. And when a second Chameleon jet finally flickered on the horizon, it glimmered like a seabird’s wings upon the morn.

Back at camp, we were instantly ushered into the medical centre. A stout little doctor had been flown in from Auckland HQ, and he checked us all over with a variety of tests, needles and sorcerous imaging technology. He tended carefully to Orbit’s wrist, finally strapping it up with a proper bandage.

‘All clear, cadet,’ he said, examining my blood test results. ‘Only problem now is exhaustion, and quintessic depletion. A day of rest should fix you up, but I’m putting you on medication just in case.’

Once our medical issues had been attended to, we trudged exhaustedly back towards the cabins, ready to collapse into bed. Outside, however, a muscular Kiwi agent held out a hand to stop us. ‘Nomad, Phoenix, Orbit and Riff. That’s you lot, right? Your boss wants a chat.’

We followed him, slightly bewildered. Our bewilderment only grew when he led us to the campfire pit at the edge of camp – and there, sitting in a buttoned shirt and an Akubra hat, was Dragon. She had mixed up a batch of damper dough, and appeared to be cooking the bread on a stick over the flames.

‘When did you get here?’ Riff blurted.

‘Soon as I heard what happened,’ Dragon said. ‘I knew I had to be here to debrief you. Honestly, can’t you lot go a single week without getting into trouble?’

‘Um … why are you cooking damper?’ I asked, not knowing what else to say.

Dragon shrugged. ‘This is a Wilderness Survival camp, ain’t it? Besides, I’m hungry.’

She patted the stones, inviting us to sit down. We quickly obeyed, trying to make ourselves comfortable. The doctor had applied salves and bandages to my cuts and grazes, but the rock was still uncomfortable and I hoped the conversation wouldn’t take too long.

‘Now,’ Dragon said, ‘which one of you nitwits is ready to tell me what happened?’

We all stared at each other. No one seemed particularly willing to talk. Finally, to my surprise, it was Orbit who opened his mouth.

‘Pickles and Serendipity were traitors,’ he said. ‘They procured the Red Sky Virus on behalf of the Spider, who hoped to regain her position of power in the Inductors’ organisation.’

Dragon paused. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Now give me the details.’

For the next twenty minutes, we filled her in on the last few days’ misadventures. We left out nothing, from our trek to Mariner’s cottage to the chaos of the glow-worm caves, and finally our journey to the Bay of Islands.

When we had finished, Dragon stared into the fire. She reached for her damper stick and turned it over, spitting cinders into the air.

‘This whole mission was a joke,’ Riff said, suddenly. ‘We weren’t prepared, we didn’t know who to trust, and we almost all got killed. There should’ve been another way to call you, in case we couldn’t get in contact with Nephrite. And there should’ve been a –’

Dragon cut him off. ‘Blaming me, are you?’

Riff shook his head, looking stubborn. ‘Just saying we could’ve been better prepared, that’s all. If there had been a Plan B –’

‘There was a Plan B,’ Dragon said. ‘If I hadn’t heard from Nephrite by last night, I was going to send in a backup team. Nephrite knew that, and I’m sure she was banking on it after she got captured.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘I didn’t expect you lot to take matters into your own hands. If you’d followed my instructions, you never would’ve been in danger.’

‘Well, you could have told us that! We didn’t know there was help coming. We thought we were on our own. And you …’ Riff clenched his fists, and his voice grew tighter. ‘You weren’t there last night. You didn’t see it. You didn’t have to stand there and watch your friend dying on the floor.’

A long pause.

Dragon gave Riff a shrewd look. ‘You might be awful at humming, kid,’ she said, ‘but at least you’re honest, I’ll give you that.’

‘Hang on, I’m not –’

‘And in recognition of that honesty,’ Dragon went on, ‘I’m willing to dish out a few truths of my own.’ She ticked off a list on her fingers. ‘First, you kids broke about a dozen rules on this mission. You were under strict instructions to search the cottage for clues, and that was it. You were not authorised to go gallivanting off into an underground cave system.’

‘Yeah, but –’

‘Secondly,’ Dragon said, ‘you weren’t supposed to share the details of this mission with any other cadets, let alone drag an imbecile along with you. Cadet Steel should never have left the damn campsite in the first place.’

She raised her hand, cutting off our protests. ‘Third,’ she said sharply, ‘your decision to travel to the Bay of Islands was suicidally foolish. You had no backup, no weaponry, and no authorisation to risk your lives. That was a job for my backup squad, not a mob of reckless children. Your role in the mission was already over.’

‘But –’

‘It was your decision to disobey the rules,’ Dragon said. ‘You’re the ones who put yourselves in danger.’ She gave Riff a sharp look. ‘Hate to break it to you, kid, but you can’t blame HELIX for this one. You chose to be there.’

The campfire crackled. A quiet breeze filtered through the clearing, tossing a fistful of embers skywards.

‘Having said that,’ Dragon added, ‘I’m here to thank you.’

We stared at her.

‘I won’t condone you risking your lives,’ she said. ‘But you kids did something remarkable last night. You managed to stop a danger that could have threatened the existence of HELIX itself. I hate to say it, but there’s no way to know if my backup squad would’ve arrived in time. You showed initiative, and you put yourselves in harm’s way to protect the innocent.’ She exhaled. ‘There’s no higher praise I can give one of my agents.’

For a long moment, we all just stared at the campfire.

‘Pickles and Serendipity …’ Orbit looked down at his fingers, which knotted together awkwardly. ‘What will happen to them?’

After a long pause, Dragon held up her prosthetic arm. It glinted in the light of the campfire. ‘You know, I lost my arm fighting the Inductors during the Auckland job. Dippy built this replacement for me.’ She shook her head. ‘They were right, in a way. They sacrificed as much for HELIX as any field agent and deserved far more credit than what they got. But when they decided to kill for it …’

‘They were traitors,’ Orbit said, with a sudden fierceness. ‘They betrayed the highest principles of the gadgeteers.’

Dragon sighed. ‘Well, there ain’t a lot we can do about it now. They’re being sent overseas, to the highest security prison that HELIX has got. Their cousin, too.’ She shook her head. ‘What a waste of brilliant minds.’

The debriefing lasted another ten minutes or so, as Dragon wrapped up all the loose ends and jotted down notes on a few confusing parts in our story. She reassured us that the remaining virus and vials would be destroyed – and this time, it would be absolute.

Finally she waved a hand, dismissing us. ‘Nomad, stay here,’ she added, as we rose. ‘I want a private word with you.’

I eyed the others, who shrugged uncertainly. They headed back towards the cabins, ready to collapse into bed. Every inch of me longed to join them, but I forced myself to look polite as I sat back down.

‘Your quintessence,’ Dragon said bluntly. ‘Has it changed at all? Behaving differently, swirling in a different pattern, anything like that?’

I frowned. ‘I don’t think so. I mean, it’s still replenishing itself after last night, but I don’t think –’

Dragon cut me off. ‘This is important, cadet. You’re a Witness, and your body just survived a terrible trauma. For all we know, that damn virus might’ve sparked a Catalytic Event.’

‘It doesn’t feel any different.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Dragon said. ‘Effects of a trauma like that might take days to appear. Weeks, even, or months.’ She gave me a serious look. ‘If your quintessence starts acting up, behaving oddly … you come straight to me, all right? I want to know. Even if it’s six months from now. Got it?’

Mouth dry, I nodded.

‘Good,’ Dragon said. ‘Now, we need to have a chat about Steel.’

I blinked. ‘Steel?’

‘You’re the one he almost got killed, twice. I’d say you’ve earned the right to have a say in his punishment.’

‘Punishment?’

Dragon nodded. ‘He’ll be kicked out of HELIX, of course. Personally, I’m tempted to put his powers into stasis. And if you want, I’d be willing to send him to trial at Global HQ. He’s committed enough offences to warrant a spell in prison, I’d say. What do you think?’

For a spiteful moment, I was tempted to agree. Steel had risked my life to save his own – in the watery chaos of the tunnels, and in the cockpit of the Chameleon jet. He had put our entire mission in danger. If things had turned out differently, my friends and I wouldn’t be breathing right now. Let him go to prison, I thought. He deserved to suffer for what he’d put us through.

But then I remembered the shame I’d seen in his eyes. The scared kid, lashing out on pure instinct, desperate to keep himself alive. I would never like Steel, or respect him, but I could imagine his terror in those final moments.

‘He’s not evil,’ I said, finally. ‘He was just scared. And I don’t think any punishment you come up with will be as bad as what he’s doing to himself right now.’

‘Oh?’ Dragon gave me a perceptive look. ‘What would you suggest, then?’

‘I know he has to leave HELIX,’ I said. ‘But after that, let him decide. Let him choose to put his powers into stasis, and live a normal life. Or if he wants, maybe he could go and live in a Clandestine Zone. That way, he can keep his quintessence, but he won’t put anyone else in danger.’

Dragon tilted her head, examining me closely. Then she gave a slow nod, her expression blank. ‘A very interesting response.’

A quiet breeze blew through the clearing. It sent the leaves aquiver, and I inhaled a hot whiff of smoke from the campfire. When I realised Dragon was still studying me, a sinking feeling filled my stomach.

‘That was a test, wasn’t it?’ I asked.

Dragon gave me an amused look. ‘Of course it was.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

I tried to hide my frustration. ‘Well, did I pass?’

‘Some say too much empathy is a weakness,’ Dragon said. ‘That you need to be stronger, and harder, to be an effective agent. Sometimes, a strong leader needs to make cruel decisions.’

She turned her cooking stick over, plunging the other side of the dough into the fire. The damper crackled and smouldered, smoking in the cinders.

I hesitated. ‘And what would you say?’

‘I’d say real strength comes from the people around us. And I’d say a lack of empathy is the whole damn reason why Steel is about to lose his place in HELIX.’ Dragon pointed at me. ‘You’ve got an imagination, kid, rattling around in that head of yours. You know how to put yourself in other people’s shoes, to consider what they might be feeling.’

Another breeze tumbled through the foliage. Dragon sniffed the air, fished her damper from the campfire and yanked it off the stick. She tore it down the middle and offered me half.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘Don’t mention it,’ she said. ‘You look half starved. What in the blazes have they been feeding you at this place?’

‘Celery, mostly.’

Dragon snorted. We ate in silence, watching the smoke rise like trails of quintessence through the air. There was nothing but the silence, and the warmth of half-charred damper in my mouth.

‘You’ve got a decent heart, kid,’ Dragon said. ‘If you want my advice, don’t let the world beat it out of you.’ She stared into the flames. ‘In a job like this one, it’s the only thing that keeps us human.’