Chapter Two

BY THE TWENTY-THIRD minute since he’d left Mir in their pod—stranded them, lorded over them his skill with programming, with hacking systems designed to keep them in line as they cried out Peter’s name—Peter had chewed his fingernails to stubs.

Guilt roiled in his gut for leaving Mir like that, storming away when he knew full well Mir would be desperate to follow and wouldn’t be able to.

But if they were so desperate to go join the army, they’d have been saying goodbye soon—too soon—anyway. What difference did the manner of their last parting matter?

What if they die? They can’t die. When ships are shot out of the sky, do the pilots die right away? Do they burn? Do they explode? Do they feel pain? Will they have time to think of me? Will they remember us, the good us, or only the way I was stiff and cruel and left them before they even had the chance to really explain? Before I had the chance to touch them again, to tell them to be safe? Are ten rotations of history cancelled out by a bad parting in the moment of death?

They won’t die.

They can’t die.

Send me instead. Anyone. Anyone but Mir.

Please. Please. Please.

But he knew no one was listening.

He also knew he had to shift, and soon. It was still early enough the Commons wasn’t full, that the passersby who were out were probably just returning from something shifty, something they’d rather not be seen coming home from. Or, the passersby were rushing, telling themselves they were rushing to work, to, to, to, even though, probably, they were really rushing from, from, from. Away.

Without sparing much more than a scandalized glance or disapproving murmur for him.

But that would change soon. The growing day would bring a growing number of time-takers, of people passing through the Commons just because they could, at their own pace, in their own time. Registering their speedbikes and their speeders and ambling through the square, pretending it was something like it used to be, relishing the depth, the cleanness, the crispness of air they don’t have to pay for.

More to the point, his keeper would be out and about soon, making sure all his charges were waking and tending to their morning responsibilities.

He’d be found out. Again.

Peter rose unsteadily and wiped his face roughly on the backs of his hands. With a few trembling breaths and a wayward glance from the alley into the Commons proper, his hand disappeared under his hastily grabbed jacket. As he started backing into the alley, still sniffling, swallowing hard—all that yelling and crying had done his throat in—his fourth finger tapped on the fleshy part of his palm, just under his thumb. A small series of tones shot up from his hand into his arm, his shoulder, his neck, his inner ear. His eyes narrowed in focus, his head tilted inadvertently to his right side.

His right hand had a small chip implanted in his palm, so he tapped, tapped, tapped until the frequency of the tones being sent to his ear told him what he needed to know. All the way up in his and the others’ rooms—where Mir was no doubt waiting, probably crying, still—he knew his pod was transmitting information it had been authorized to open early because Peter had gotten called away on a job. His keeper wouldn’t mind that: Peter was brought in to repair the systems of the keeper’s business contacts more often than he would be comfortable writing up on his rotation forms.

Peter flexed out his palm to deactivate the chip—for now—and slipped deeper into the alleyway, the growing noise of morning activity from the Commons fading, becoming more muffled, more distant. More irrelevant. Everything was irrelevant.

Mir was going to die.

He knew if he saw them again—saw them before they left, in that god-forsaken uniform, with the scent of fighter fluid on their breath, their long black hair hacked off to accommodate the VR helmets they locked their pilots into—he would break.

And Peter couldn’t afford to break.

So with his nimble fingers, he found the crease in the alleyway’s wall that would open wider and wider, until it became a miniature door. It was so narrow Peter had to step through sideways and suck in his stomach on the way through, but it was enough. Enough to disappear.

In his refuge—their refuge, the refuge he had built for himself and Mir, where they were supposed to hide in if ever they were chosen—he could scream until his throat bled, and no one would hear, no one would threaten to call his keeper, to have him sent away, to have him chosen so he could learn some discipline through the Hub. There, he could program his own VR—Mir’s old system, long since antiquated, long since broken, and long since repaired and enhanced by Peter—to take them—him, just him now, him alone—anywhere and anywhen he wanted.

In his refuge, he could send signals to his pod, updates to his keeper, to glean the longest amount of away time, alone time, Mir time—grieving time—he could without being seen, touched by anyone.

In his refuge, he could do the only thing he was burning, desperate, to do right then. Other than convince Mir to stay, but he knew that was impossible: they’d been chosen, first, and the Hub would kill them if they didn’t go, but even if that weren’t the case, he knew that look in Mir’s eyes. It was the look they’d had when they clocked those boys who jumped them and Peter last rotation. It was the same steely look they’d had the first time they’d kissed, behind the Artificial Aquifer in the simulated snow.

“Kiss me,” they’d said. “It’s snowing.”

No, no, no, no, it wouldn’t do to think about that, to think about the logic that only made sense in Mir’s head, the kind of logic that automatically translated artificial snowflakes into romance, into a first kiss, into diving headlong toward something they’d give up for the ability to fly outside of VR, outside of the inside of Peter’s mouth.

No, no, no, no.

Because the one thing Peter wanted to do other than take Mir into his arms and never, ever let them go, never never let them go fight and die for the Hub, was, very simply, to sleep.

So much crying had exhausted him, and the shock of seeing Mir’s beautiful arm with that horrid mark gutted him. And anyway, he did his best programming in the early morning, the barely waking moments, the in-between moments fumbling through waking and sleeping.

And he was going to need to do his best programming that day. Because he couldn’t let Mir go. He couldn’t. Not so they could just die for their people. Not so they could just die. Period.

He was going to need to do his best programming, because he was going to do what no one had ever done before: he was going to save Mir from the choosing.

Whether they wanted to be saved or not.