Mouth touches my arm. I almost forgot she and Alyssa were here. “If Bianca was telling the truth and nobody else knows what we’re doing, then we have a narrow window to get you out of town before everything explodes. She’ll be missed long before we will.”
I pull away from Bianca. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”
Mouth looks at Alyssa.
“Well, of course I’m going to help you, you fuckhead,” Alyssa groans. “It’s not like I was getting used to my life not being a giant nest of fetid swamp dogs or anything.”
I’m turning to leave and searching for a way to thank Alyssa and Mouth for the risk they’re taking on my behalf, when Bianca speaks.
“Please don’t leave me. Please, I can’t lose you again.” Bianca’s voice sounds almost the same as when the police were dragging me away from the Zone House. “Please. I know that I’m selfish, but you make me better, and after everything we’ve been through we share a bond, you and me, and it goes way beyond any simple college friendship. Sophie, please. I get it, you’re scared to go home, but it’ll be okay, I won’t let anything hurt you ever again. You’ll be a hero. Sophie! Don’t walk away from me.”
I almost walk into a wall of placards, but Alyssa steers me.
Mouth is already muttering to Alyssa about the best routes out of town, the easiest way to vanish. I concentrate on trudging.
And then, from somewhere behind me, Bianca says, “I love you.”
All of the strength leaves me and I fall, and Alyssa barely catches my limp body as my eyes wash out. My face feels hot and Alyssa’s shoulder smells like soaked-in sweat. Alyssa lays a hand beneath my nape, gingerly, and lets me rest on her as I tremble and spasm. The hurt I’ve crammed inside every joint and sinew for too long rushes to the surface, and my anger falls away, and I can’t hold any of this inside anymore. Nobody speaks, as my jag goes on and on, and I can’t think past the words I just heard Bianca speak, I can’t stand this hope.
Alyssa’s stiff denim shirt is soaked and she supports me, both arms now, without offering any false reassurance.
At last I pull myself upright. “I can’t leave her. I just can’t.”
“Oh.” Mouth bites her lip, then shrugs with her head slung forward.
Paint runs down Bianca’s cheeks in uneven lines, but she’s giving me the smile that used to make me want to dance on my bunk at the Gymnasium. “Thank you,” she says. “I’ll be by your side the whole time, I promise.” She pulls me close, and soon I’m crying in her arms instead of Alyssa’s.
My tears mingle with Bianca’s, and I realize the two of us have never cried at the same time before. I’m convulsing and clutching at Bianca, trying to pull her closer and also push her away, and my heart is a dented bell, and the junkyard shrinks in on us, and I hold on tight to her declaration of love, as if it could save me from all of the horrors that lie ahead.
PART
FIVE
SOPHIE
The viewports inside the Command Vehicle darken, then grow opaque as a dense layer of ice covers them. Even with warm air streaming into the passenger section through tiny vents, the walls turn frigid to the touch, and my fingers get numb. All around me, seasoned killers in dark padded uniforms whimper, Let me out I’m so cold I want to go home we’re all going to die out here we’re going to die. Every time our gravity-assist treads stumble over another sharp downgrade, we lurch, and the entire capsule screams. “Everybody shut up,” snaps Nai, an elegant older woman who’s the leader of the Perfectionists. “You all sound like children.” I can’t see anyone’s face behind their protective faceplate, which makes their wailing seem disembodied—as though delirium has settled upon us like a mist. My armpits chafe and my chest constricts, and I’m caught in my worst terror: strapped down in a tiny enclosed space, surrounded by a whole platoon wearing dark combat gear and helmets, being dragged into the night. Except that this time, I could have escaped. I had a choice, I could have said no. The moans grow louder as the Command Vehicle struggles to stay upright and move forward.
I’m the only one in the passenger section who’s not making a sound, and that’s only because I’m screaming inside my own head.
“We’re fine,” says Sasha, a large fussy man who’s the second-in-command among the Perfectionists. “Everything’s fine. Nothing to worry about. Everything’s totally fine. Why should we worry? We’re doing great.” He keeps saying these things until Nai hisses at him to shut up. A sour odor hangs in the stale air around me. I think of Reynold saying, Some primitive fear from before our ancestors discovered fire.
Bianca keeps smiling at me from the front of the Command Vehicle, where she sits with Nai, Dash, Sasha, and an older Alva loyalist named Marcus, all of them still dressed in normal clothes. She kisses Dash, holding his face in one hand, across an instrument panel full of muddy topographic readings and warnings about the dangerous thickness of ice coating our outer shell. Our conversation in the junkyard repeats in my mind, and I can’t believe how stupid I was.
Bianca went with me when I said goodbye to Ahmad and Katrina, and she kept nudging me so I wouldn’t say anything about where we were going, but also to hurry me along. She said, It’s exciting, we’re going on an adventure, oblivious to how I flinched.
The people around me are still crying, thrashing against their harnesses, making invocations to various gods and devices. Dash is joking about Xiosphanti food again. The indicator lights on the front panel make rainbow trails along the scuffed aluminum walls.
Bianca said she loved me, long after I’d have sacrificed anything to hear her say those words. I would have worn a tower of ribbons and gone to a hundred terrible parties, just so I could pile every shining toy in the world at Bianca’s feet. I would have braved every gun and every gloved hand in Xiosphant to bring Bianca jewels from the Palace vault. But now I see her in the cockpit, whispering to Dash and twirling one slender hand for emphasis, and I feel empty.
The vehicle lurches, and someone’s gloved fingers grab at my arm for support, and I freeze. I can’t breathe. But just as I’m spiraling into panic, I feel a nudge on my right wrist. My bracelet has woken up, and it’s urging me deeper into midnight. I take a deep breath and I concentrate on the hum that I feel through my skin. The Gelet haven’t given up on me, even after all the times I failed them. They still want me to join them.
All that matters is that bracelet, and the knowledge that my friends are near, and everything else is nothing. Except I don’t know what the Gelet will think when they see a fleet of armored vehicles, spiked with weapons, and they realize I’ve led a whole army to their territory. Bianca’s friends designed these vehicles to look just like the ones the Gelet tore to pieces before.
I never loved anybody the way I have loved Bianca. But I know in my shattered core that I would have been a better friend to her if I had walked away in that scrapyard. I need to learn to belong to other people the way everyone else seems to, with one hand in the wind.
* * *
Something strikes our vehicle, and we rock sideways so hard we’re perched on one set of treads for a moment. Then we fall flat again with an impact that crushes me into my safety harness. “What was that?” Nai says, and nobody answers, except to groan. A second impact pushes us off one of our treads, and the vehicle sways harder.
The cockpit’s night-vision screen shows a glimpse of fuzzy segmented armor.
“Fucking bison!”
“It’s a lot bigger than I thought it would be.”
“It’s a lot bigger than we are.”
“Get it off us!”
“There’s more than one of them.”
At least three shapes move around us on the screen. We rock onto our side again.
“We can’t move forward,” Marcus says.
“Shoot them! Shoot them!” Sasha has sweat pooling on his forehead. “Where’s the bloody flamethrower?” A woman named Lucy puts on protective gloves and fumbles for a port in the side, letting in a stabbing draft for a moment until the port seals around her wrists. Sasha picks up a short-range radio and shouts, “We’re under attack. Roger, you’re in the rumbler. Can you get a clear shot?”
Nai starts to say, “No, wait—” Dash tries to slap the radio out of Sasha’s hand.
A heartbeat later, I feel an impact that makes my teeth snap together. My neck hurts, and my ears ring.
“You missed the bison, but you hit us,” Sasha says into the radio. “Try aiming.”
A second mortar blast rattles our vehicle.
“Sasha, you idiot,” Nai says. “Tell them to stop shooting at us.”
Lucy’s flamethrower goes off, turning the night vision a shimmering green, and Lucy shouts, “Got one of them!” The viewport shows an impression of a shrieking round mouth and stringy white fur on fire, then goes dark again.
We’re back on our treads, moving forward in fits and starts.
“Bad news,” says Marcus. “Those mortars cracked one of our engine casings. We’ll have to keep stopping every few kilometers, or the chamber will overheat and flood with toxic fumes.”