Is your transponder malfunctioning?
Now I’m in trouble. Only the higher ranks, the First through Sixths, receive revised directives this far from a hub. When I hesitate to answer, the Third shoves me against the metal wall of the cargo bay, rattling my armor.
Rank! he signs violently, his fingers slicing inches from my face.
I press into the wall. Eighth, I sign. Eighth.
Offside? he signs, holding his left hand out at shoulder height. I close my eyes behind my visor.
Dead.
I feel him kick me hard in the shin, but by the time I open my eyes he’s in the cockpit, signing to the First. She turns back to me for an instant, the briefness of her glance expressing as much disdain as any signs or words or facial expression could. I’m irrelevant, and a burden, farther down in the ranks from them than I was from Sixth, even pretending to be a Sixth myself. And worst of all, I let my Offside die somehow. They would be justified in pushing me out the hatch. Even I couldn’t survive a fall that far. We’re not supposed to kill each other, but I know it happens. Sixth threatened it enough times.
I busy myself by reloading my rifle from the ammunition stock. Only a few darts are missing anyway. Out of habit I check the six backup darts concealed in my armor, but of course they’re all still there.
The transport banks suddenly and begins to shake. First and Third reach up and grab handholds in the cockpit. I have nothing specific to grab here in the hold, so I wedge myself in between the ammo stockpile and the curved metal wall. Out of sight of the others I press my left hand onto the top of a weapons locker, curling my fingers around it, imagining . . .
I have to stop thinking of her.
A word pops into my head. It’s familiar and unfamiliar. “Friend.” It squeezed under the door somehow, with all the rest of the emotional stuff that is not supposed to bother me. We don’t have friends; we don’t have feelings, apart from anger and efficiency. I think of the way the human girl defended her friend. Humans are like this, bound not by rules and order but something else, something chaotic and unpredictable. It’s familiar to me, too, and not, like so many things. But I’m defective. I tried to make Sixth my friend and she ridiculed me for it, laughed at me for being so pathetic.
Once when we were disconnected, I pointed out that laughter wasn’t permitted either, even if it was mean spirited. She hit me in the face so hard my jaw ached for days.
I suck down the shame of this, swallow it into the thick slime below, hoping that it will turn into the strength of hate toward the vermin on this world. But the person I hate right now is myself. I wish the First and Third would push me out the hatch. We’re quite high up. I could pretend I’m flying on the way down.
I sometimes dream I can fly.
RAVEN
The next day breaks brightly, but unexpectedly cold. The temperature drops further as we ascend to the resort on the mountain, and then, as though to mock us, just after midday, it clouds over and begins to snow. We hunch and shiver, tramping upward. The first thing we see is the trailer park outside the more affluent village. Rows of shabby trailers perch on terraces in the steep hillside. They seem pretty quiet, deserted.
“This doesn’t look good,” Xander says.
Instinctively, we all draw our weapons. All I have left are knives, which seem pathetically small against Topher’s crossbow and the rifles, but speed is what matters with the Nahx. So the videos tell us anyway.
Sawyer takes charge. “Pair up and search. Take note of any food or weapons. We’ll come back after we scope the village. Emily and I will stand watch.”
Felix and I pair up. Topher and Lochie form another team, while Xander pairs with Mandy.
We work our way down to the end of one of the rows of trailers. Felix holds his rifle loosely at his side. My knives are holstered again, but I’m unnaturally aware of where they are. We check behind every trailer and in between every car. There are no signs of recent habitation. Everything is quiet, neat almost, like it was left tidy for visitors or something. There is a noise behind us. Felix spins, rifle raised, dropping to one knee before I even manage to get my knife pointing in the right direction. But it’s only blobs of snow falling from a trailer roof. The day is warming up and snow is melting in the sun.
Finally, we reach the end of the row.
“We’ll start with this one and work our way backward,” Felix says. He tries the door of the last trailer. With a low click, it opens.
Inside looks as though someone might have been living here yesterday. Dishes litter the table, a magazine lies open on a bench. Behind a narrow open door near the small kitchen I can see a toilet.
The trailer appears to have two rooms. While Felix opens cupboards, finding a few cans and some dried food that look promising, I check out the door to the back room. It’s closed but not locked. Perversely, I feel like knocking. But instead I turn the handle and it clicks open.
A man and a woman lie dead in the wide bed. Each of them has a black dart embedded in their forehead. Steel-colored veins spread out from the hole, covering their faces with the weblike lines. The man’s dead fingers are still curled around a baseball bat.
I feel sick to my stomach. Felix comes up behind me.
“Oh,” he says.
“They killed them in their sleep.” I’m struck by how discreet that seems—I mean, for a species that blows up cities.
“Yes.” Felix bends to look closely at the woman’s gray face. “Recently? They haven’t decayed.”
“I don’t know. That’s weird, isn’t it?” I swallow something sour in the back of my mouth. In the corner of the small room is a cradle. A tiny cradle. In it is a tiny desiccated baby. Definitely not recent. The baby’s mouth is open, fixed in a permanent scream. I pull back the pink blanket and see that the diaper is soiled, the excrement as dried out as the rest of the body.
“These newer trailers are well sealed,” Felix says. “And hotter than hell with the sun shining on them.” He’s calm, as though we’re not talking about a baby being baked.
“There’s no dart,” I say. I take my gloves off and gently move the corpse, but find no sign of any wound or injury.
Felix pulls the blanket over the tiny mummified face. “The Nahx killed her parents in their sleep and left the baby to starve, I guess.”
Somehow it is this injustice, this small act of disdain that finally steels me, welding me to Topher’s mission. I close my eyes, a silly girl with a broken heart, and open them as a soldier who will never surrender. I know what kind of hope remains when the likelihood of getting out of this alive is gone. I hope I can take down a hundred Nahx with me, a thousand.
“Did you find much food?” I ask, turning from the dead. I feel as though I might never eat again.