Aly couldn’t write off any of it as conspiracy theories anymore.
He scratched the spot on his arm where the warden had injected him with . . . what? He wasn’t sure. He noticed then that his knuckles were bloody from all the times he’d punched at the walls. It turned out these plasma screens were self-repairing. Every time he thought he’d shattered one, it would smooth out again—like a ripple in the water. When he closed his eyes, invisible soldiers cranked the volume to blasting.
He’d seen the segment on loop, counting 277 until the screens went dark and the outline of a door appeared in the static of the feed. When it opened, Kara walked through.
He knew it was a hallucination, or maybe a hologram. She was too calm, too clean, too graceful. That smile. That’s always how they mentioned the Fontisian saints. Isn’t this when they appeared too? At your darkest hours? Ready to take you to your eternal home?
Aly scrambled toward the corner, pressing himself hard against the plasma. He tried to flip that switch inside himself, when he’d crawl into the corner of his mind and block it all out. Every time his dad had called him all those names, every time those Fontisian preachers had told him he’d burn in hell, every time someone had said he was smart for a Wraetan—he flipped the switch, and an invisible armor went up over his dark skin. Leave me alone. I’m innocent, he repeated to himself. I did nothing wrong.
But the switch was choirtoing broken.
“It’s me, Aly. Stop! Shhhhh. It’s me, Kara.” She grabbed his wrists. He tried pushing her away but he felt sluggish, like all his limbs belonged to someone else. “What’s wrong with him?” Her hands felt cold. They felt real. But he knew they couldn’t be real. He didn’t even know if he was real anymore.
A woman had entered behind her, so skinny she seemed to be made entirely of muscle. She had light skin and hair, tiny wrinkles at the edges of her green eyes. “He’s been drugged,” she said.
“Help me,” Kara said to her. Desperate. Begging. He’d never expected to hear her speak in that kind of tone.
The woman leaned down and pushed Aly’s head against the wall, gripping him by his hair. With her free hand she pulled out a syringe and uncapped it with her mouth.
“No.” He tried to free himself, but his body felt like it was filled with lead. Then the woman stuck the syringe into his neck and he felt a sudden release, like pressure let out of a balloon.
“That should reduce the effects. Now get up, Aly,” she said. “We’re saving your life.”
I’m the guy who’s going to save your sorry ass, Vincent had said. Everyone had seen him say it now in Aly’s playback. But not a single person in the galaxy believed Aly.
He tried to shake himself out of this gods-awful nightmare. Bits of darkness still clung to his mind, but he felt them cracking, peeling, falling away like old paint.
“We’re going home, Aly,” Kara urged. Easy for you to say, Aly thought. He had the Wray Town, but it was only ever a place he’d lived once—and he was never going back. He didn’t have a home.
“What’s going on? Where are we?” he asked. He turned to the older woman. “Who are you?”
It was Kara who answered. “We’re on Houl. This is my mom, Lydia. Can you believe it? She’s been here all this time—she came and found me and broke me out.”
Aly felt his eyebrows raise halfway up his forehead. Would’ve gone back all the way if it were anatomically possible. He was an expert at being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and here was Kara’s mom, in the right place at the right time. A little too right.
Kara told him he’d been there only a few hours—but that was impossible. He was sure it had been weeks.
“It’s the drugs,” Kara’s mom said. “They manipulate the temporal experience. You’ll be dizzy too.”
“‘Temporal experience’?” Aly still didn’t understand, and when Kara helped him up, he doubted his own legs.
“Lean on me,” Kara said.
We’re on Houl.
What did he know about Houl? It was a planet on the Outer Belt. The atmosphere was unforgiving, and discarded parts had developed AI. The surface itself was covered with eel-like creatures that produced electromagnetic fields. Terrifying. Basically the perfect place to put a prison if you didn’t want anyone to escape. And he had a feeling it was Kalu’s.
It was starting to come back now. Jeth had told him about a secret prison; Kara had told him about a place for experiments . . . He looked over her shoulder, at the door behind them, at the dead screens that had for hours been playing the same news. All those experts had said he was guilty. Was he guilty? The only thing that anchored him to any version of reality was Kara. But was she even real? Her eyes kept changing color. But she couldn’t be a hologram—she was supporting his weight.
“Your eyes . . .” he said. But he was too afraid to say the rest. What was happening to him?
“Come on, Aly,” Kara said. “We gotta move.”