They barely spoke as they walked, side by side when the rocky path allowed it. One foot in front of the other. That was all he’d let himself think when everything started to get too real in his head. Apart from Kara, there was all kinds of other stuff to worry about. Like the fact that he may or may not have seen the end result of a Ravaging—hollowed-out people who’d lost their souls, just like they’d described in the sermons. Their existence had a beginning and an end, and what was once a seed had grown and thrived and now withered on the vine, the roots rotted in the soil. Such was life. But he never imagined it would start with ladies babbling on about their sons and their favorite type of tea. And it sure as hell didn’t say anything about the end of them all happening in a lab.
Kara said members of the G-1K summit were being taken—and Ravaged. Did someone want them to forget whatever they’d been working on? Or was someone trying to use their memories for another purpose? And who had that kind of power, to abduct these men and women from their homes, to Ravage them with impunity, to keep all of it secret?
Was it the Regent? Had he disappeared to engineer some master plan, or was he already dead?
As if that didn’t already take up enough head space, there was the fact that when you came right down to it, Aly had traveled to Rhesto because maybe Kara’s mom would be there, and maybe he’d be able to broadcast his cube playback to the universe so maybe he could avoid getting executed for a crime he didn’t commit.
And then what? Even if the plan worked, it wasn’t gonna be this happy-ending-roll-credits. Best-case scenario: He got the public on his side, proved his innocence to anyone with eyes and ears and a heart—then there’d still be the Regent’s council to deal with. Those choirtois. They’d framed him, all because it dove-tailed with their screwed-up plan to launch the galaxies into war again. For what? Money? Wraetan minerals? Power, territory, silver? He didn’t know.
What Aly did know, for sure: He’d been moved around like a little action figure, like a worthless piece of plastic you could lose and burn and replace.
Think you’re a man? he’d heard his dad say. Think you’re a big man, don’t you?
Aly could see him now, sweating moonshine, a crazy look in his eyes. Aly had packed up his stuff, but his dad swatted it out of his hand. I own this, he’d said. I own you.
So he’d left that day to join the UniForce with nothing but the clothes he’d worn, as light as a feather, grin from here to there thinking nobody owned him after all. Look at him now. It boiled Aly’s blood, picturing a bunch of old men sitting around a big wooden table deciding his fate. They’d already decided Vin’s.
The path was steep now, dirt and shale slipping under their feet as they went single file.
“It’s a forty-two percent grade,” Pavel piped in behind them, like they needed to be reminded why they were out of breath. They were practically leaning into the mountain, scrambling up with their hands when it got tough, grabbing dead roots on either side of them for purchase. He could hear Pavel’s motor struggling as his wheels spun out in the trickier pockets.
It had taken two days to reach Rhesto once the Gency ambulance pod zoomed out of the zeppelin bay, and another half-day hike to reach the spikes of the refinery towers in the distance.
“Finally,” Kara said as they reached the top of the slope. From here he could see it, a thing of beauty: the broadcasting tower. In front of that, smokestacks, huddled together and backlit by the dawn, looming over a squat mineral refinery building.
“Wraeta had thousands of refineries just like it,” Aly said. “My dad used to work in one before the evacuation.” He missed his cube for exactly this reason, because it was easy to make unwanted organic memories like this go away—just drown them out with some DroneVision channel, or set a memory of him and Vin and Jeth on constant loop.
But now, there wasn’t one memory of that old rock that didn’t lead back to his dad, to Wraeta, to his broken and crusted past. When he was younger, the refineries used to scare him. They’d looked like giant metal monsters turned inside out.
“We learned about your mineral refineries in second form,” Kara said, and for some reason he flinched when she said your. Wraeta didn’t feel like home anymore. How long had it been since he’d known what home was? “None of us would have cubes if it weren’t for Wraeta. Imagine that.”
“Imagine that,” he repeated. All the first-generation cubes were Wraetan-made—all the materials mined there, all the cubes produced there. Give the universe its greatest piece of tech, and then get yourself blown up.
She looked back at the distant steel city. He imagined her in an art gallery, or whatever they did in the Kalusian capital, that same look on her face, trying to find some higher meaning out of nothing. It was funny. Sometimes she seemed just like a street kid; at other times, like some visiting ambassador from a rich planet. He wondered which one was the real Kara.
She started down the hill. They were halfway down the slope when Aly saw movement in the distance. Sun catching on metal. Hydraulic joints, perfectly calibrated to move as if it were a living, breathing soldier. Aly grabbed her arm and yanked her down behind a rubble pile of broken cinder block and stone. He got on his stomach and motioned for Kara to do the same. Pavel felt the urgency and compacted down so that his dome was low to the ground.
“What is it?”
“Shhhhh,” he whispered.