“We can’t stay up here.” Sofia sounds exhausted, and when I wrap my arm around her, she simply leans in against me, head on my shoulder. “We have to use the—the confusion to land.”
The confusion. The hundreds of thousands of lives that were just snuffed out, right below us. The millions of people who just lost a child, or a parent, or a partner. There’s nothing we could call it that would do it justice, and the crack in her voice tells me how close she is to breaking. I’m no better, myself.
Jubilee looks across at Flynn, then meets Sofia’s eyes—she doesn’t try for Merendsen, who’s leaning forward now, his head in his hands. Then, slowly, she nods. “Give me the coordinates.”
We land on the roof of Kumiko’s complex, and as the shuttle settles on the painted X of the landing pad, half a dozen guns appear in the windows of the stairwell, trained on us.
“Are we going to get a chance to introduce ourselves before we’re shot?” Flynn asks, eyeing them through a window. The view is only dimly visible in the glow of the shuttle’s emergency lighting.
“We’ll get a chance,” I say. “They’d have fired on our underside while we were landing, if that’s what Kumiko intended.”
“Comforting,” Flynn mutters.
“Good thing she didn’t,” Merendsen says, joining him at the window. “This is a maintenance shuttle, no armor.”
We’ve only got Jubilee’s weapon between us, and Sofia’s plas-pistol is long gone. I’ve shoved my hacking kit into my pockets and strapped it against my body under my clothes. If I’ve completely misjudged this, and I’m going to be locked up somewhere, I’ll have my weapons of choice. Assuming Kumiko’s people don’t just shoot me.
I raise my hands into clear view and make my way down the shuttle steps, Jubilee covering me from the doorway with her pistol.
A stocky figure appears in the doorway leading up from below, carrying an emergency lantern, lifting it high in one hand to illuminate the landing pad. She’s clad in black with a kerchief tied over her face, and if we’re short on weapons, Kumiko certainly isn’t. She’s carrying a gun as thick as her forearm, and she jerks the barrel to signal that I should halt a few steps from the shuttle. “You can stay right there, thanks.”
I suck in a slow breath, let it out. “Kumiko, it’s me—”
“You got a name, me?” she snaps, hefting her gun. She does something that makes a clicking sound, and I’m pretty sure it’s the safety coming off.
Oh, hell. “The Knave,” I say, arms twitching with the urge to drop them, protect myself. “The Knave of Hearts.”
Her mouth falls open. “Password,” she snaps, recovering, and for a moment I’m lost. Password? My mind scrambles, flailing for some memory to attach that word to, and just as I’m starting to panic, there it is. When I set up the forum I host for her troop, we chose a password together that would allow either of us to crash it, in the event they were about to be discovered. I mostly thought I was catering to her paranoia, back then. “Trodaire,” I stammer.
Slowly, she lowers her weapon. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“That’s an incredibly long story,” I start. “I’m here with…” I pause, not sure what to say. Friends? That’s a stretch.
But she’s not listening. In fact, she’s staring past me at the doorway of the shuttle. “Captain?” Kumiko’s voice has dropped, uncertain, softer now. “Captain Chase?” She reaches up to pull her kerchief down, revealing the lower half of her face.
Jubilee Chase walks slowly down the steps to stand by my side, her gun lowering. I hold still, silently willing Kumiko not to freak out and start firing.
But it turns out I don’t need to worry, because Kumiko’s just staring at Jubilee like she’s seen a ghost, shaking her head slowly.
And Jubilee just stares right back. “Corporal Mori? What the hell are you doing here?”
We watch them grow. The three of us are alone, and we do not know if the others can see what we see, but we press on with our mission, seek the answer to our question.
The girl whose dreams so fascinated us is a soldier now, and though she is younger than the others and smaller, she trains harder than any of them. Already she’s showing the steel that will draw her so to the poet. A change of a few symbols on a military document flying through our universe sends her to serve with him.
They will become friends. She will learn what she needs from him, but his path is not with her. She will stay here, with us, on the gray world.
And we will protect her.
I WAKE FROM DREAMS OF fire and pain, lurching upright with a strangled noise, heart pounding. Someone’s there immediately, a warm hand on my shoulder, a voice in my ear, quiet, urging me to lie back down.
“Gideon?” I croak, trying to blink away dreams and sleep.