CHAPTER FOUR
Lem
Lem Benzaran crept through the foliage of her home planet, her chest tucked low to the earth, her fingers clawing her way forward through leaf litter as sweat dribbled down her lower back. She was a day late for her meet-up with Jei. Not her fault: blitzer troops had accountability rules that made it hard to slip away.
How long had it been—four months, now?
With one more furtive glance over her shoulder Lem drew back the sleeve of her armor to reveal the Frelsi wristband she still wore. It was gutted, and no longer told the Frelsi Command her location, but it could still get in touch with her battle-buddy. She dimmed the light as much as she could, and then scribbled with her dirty fingernail on its smooth surface:
“You enjoying your company?”
He responded almost instantly. She stifled a giggle under a satisfied smirk as Jei exploded at her with a string of funny curses: he knew she’d chosen a meeting point near Lt. Seria on purpose.
A pang of pain, and guilt, shot through Lem’s chest as she joked with Jei, teasing him about his would-be lover and dreaming with him about Njande. Man, she loved this—the inside of the shell he kept everyone else out of. She savored each scolding retort … because once she let this go, she’d never get it back.
Maybe she wouldn’t get caught. Maybe she’d die a good guy. Hope, like bird-puppies, was cute or whatever, and worth looking at. But it was a whole lot more likely that this was their last conversation before he hated her.
She almost needed him to.
Well. She couldn’t bury her head in her elbow and cry into the soil about it. The musty scent of underbrush wafted around her as she dug her fingers into the earth to pull herself forward, knees pressing into the ground commando-style. She had a universe to save.
But she couldn’t kid herself into thinking Mr. Too-Military-For-A-Name would forgive her for what she did next.
Jei
My wristband lit up with text—I almost fell off the tank tread in my rush to answer. It was her! Lem Benzaran, still alive enough to light up the night.
“You enjoying your company?” she asked.
“You know damn well I’m not,” I texted back. “I’ve tried everything to get Seria off my back. Even told her I talk to invisible people.”
“Funny that didn’t work. She stopped hanging out with me over it.” I could almost hear Lem laughing. “Guess you get a free pass for insanity if you got washboard abs.”
“Ha. Ha. Seriously, don’t set me up near her again. She’s so distracted she almost shot herself earlier.”
“Oh, I see it now! Fumbling with her gun as she bats her eyelashes as you … accidentally fires the tank into the wall ’cuz you roll up your sleeve to flash some bicep … the entire base goes up in flames and the Growen weaponize pictures of your pecs to conquer the universe …”
“Such a morbid sense of humor.” I smiled.
“Eh, can you blame me?”
“I blame Diebol.” My tone darkened. I wasn’t really joking. My fingers ached to crunch around his throat and crack his—
She snapped me out of it with one of her characteristic paragraphs, the wildness almost palpable in the lettering: “Oh really? You blame my crazy on the guy who electrocuted me every day for a month? The reason our friends call us mutants? The guy in charge of the army that’s statistically likely to kill us before age twenty-three? Naw, can’t possibly be his fault.”
Harty har. “Hold up, now, I only said I blame Diebol for your terrible sense of humor. I’m pretty sure you came with the crazy pre-packaged.”
“Psh, you know me, evil incarnate with a gorgeous smile. S’why your boy’s wild about me.”
Ech, no, Diebol was not “my boy,” and she didn’t know, like I did, the truth to her statement. I waved the bugs out of my eyes and spat another moonflower seed into the distance, blinking to keep … no, the memory came anyway. Jared Diebol’s agonized clenched jaw, his shaking hand as he showed me the video of what his father ordered him to do to her, the near-terror in his eyes as he almost begged me to save her … even in the heat of the jungle I shivered with the chill of the interrogation center.
Enough of this.
“Why did you take leave?” I texted. “Is everything okay?”
“I can’t tell you now. What about you? You still good with Njande?”
My skin warmed again with a sudden flush. I glanced around at the shadows gathering under the dark green leaves. “Well, he’s still invisible. I’m still not. People are still trying to kill me for talking to him. Not much change there.”
“But you’re talking to him?”
“He’s just kind of here. I don’t hear him talking that much when you’re not around.”
“You just have to listen differently. It’s hard when your inner voice is too loud. And anyway, ‘sometimes it’s okay to just be together in quiet,’ right?”
Mm. I hadn’t forgotten that mission, either. But waiting with the bloodsuckers had tired me, and not every memory of Lem made me happy. “Did you text me just to talk about our respective stalkers all night, or are you actually going to give me an ETA?” I asked.
“Yeah, just need that password to get through the EMP shield.”
I glanced at Lem’s name over the top of her texts, shining in soft emerald to reassure me: yes, her wristband was reading her biometrics, and this was my friend, not a trick from our Growen enemies. The EMP shield was the one thing keeping their enormous gun ships from flying over and decimating our tanks—and without our tanks, those gray foot soldiers might actually have a shot at infiltrating the outer wall that domed over our base like a translucent pearl. Even without the wall, the gunships couldn’t just carpet-bomb the jungle without getting in range of our anti-air defenses—but no wall, no tanks.
And no tanks, well. Kids under fighting age would go to the gas chambers. The Growen would divide the soldiers above thirteen: those of us who talked to invisibles could look forward to a swifter, mulchier end, and non-talkers like Seria could expect concentration camps, starvation, and, if they didn’t convert, ultimately a needle in the brain.
It’s what you get for opposing intergalactic peace, the Growen would say. They’d gotten more aggressive about killing kids now that Bricandor, the Growen leader, thought Njande could use our minds as portals to enter this dimension.
But not today. My wristband vibrated again with Lem’s question: “The shield’s Password Challenge asks: ‘Out of the eater came something to eat; out of the strong came something sweet.’ What’s the answer?”
“‘What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a lion?’” I said.
“Ooh, nice. You set that one, didn’t you?” I could almost see her flush with happiness—I’d gotten the snippet of prose for this password from one of the aged manuscripts she and I had unearthed on our personal mission to uncover more about our ethereally ancient invisible friend.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Man, I can’t wait until he breaks in,” Lem gushed. “I wish we knew how to open brain portals.”
I flinched. I’d grown friendlier with the being, and studying his ancient scripts lit up my brain with questions, statistics, curiosities I found almost as enjoyable as a good tech readout. Still, though, an unease gripped my chest when I imagined anything traveling through my head. “I think I’m good for now. And you don’t know for sure that’s how Njande works.”
“It’s gotta be true, though! How else is he gonna save the universe from heat death?”
“We don’t know that’s it at all. The manuscripts aren’t so scientific that way.”
“Psh. I know.”
I smiled. “Like how you knew how to rewire your air-rider last summer?”
“Pbhtl$ !!@#” I chuckled at the stream of random characters: she’d whacked the watch. “Well if you woulda helped me!” she said. “You’re the tech guy, Bereens, not me. I’m the people person.”
“You’re the people person?” Wow. “Lem, if you’re our people person we’re a PR nightmare.”
“Duh. Why you think everyone always wants to kill us?”
I laughed out loud, not because she was particularly funny but because her silly spirit made me … joyful? I paused, biting my lip, and glanced up at the open tank hatch where Lt. Seria’s head poked out at the sound of my rare happiness. Yeah, I never laughed.
But screw it, I didn’t need to be stiff with Lem. “PR person or not, I’ve really missed you, cadet.”
“Yeah, I wish things were different.” Then, with uncharacteristic abruptness: “Over and out.”
Well that sounded ominous.
I dimmed my watch and slumped back against the tank. A breeze tickled my sweating nose; something tightened in the base of my chest. I guess I sighed.
“She’s never going to put out, you know,” Seria sneered from above.
Watching my texts over my shoulder, now? I let my silence shame her unprofessionalism as I hopped off the tank tread to pace again, hoping Njande’s voice could still my growing unease.
Whatever my reservations about our invisible friend, I kept one place in my mind only for him and me. This seat of my will, this throne room full of cinnamon pie and colorful blown-glass figures—it haunted my happier dreams. There I was really me and he was really him. I had first accessed it years ago during my captivity as an eight-year-old, when Njande led me there by the hand in my unconscious stupor to protect my psyche from what adults can do. Now, in moments of meditation, I could stare up at the stars, wrap the color green around my shoulders, and sink into the feeling of that inner room: a strong hold, a hug, maybe, from the older brother I never had.
“She’s late, you know,” I muttered to him, trying to access that feeling now. I never knew if he could hear me, but like a blind man playing darts I’d learned to guess and throw. “Even the day lizards finally shut up.”
Njande didn’t answer.
I sighed. Maybe his species of interdimensional time-traveling energy being didn’t mind awkward silences. Maybe he enjoyed them. He left me in that answerless pause, and with the singing reptiles gone to sleep, the whole planet seemed to hold its breath.
Like Lem, the planet couldn’t hold its breath for long. Its glowing lilac twin rose in the sky behind me, brighter than a full moon, and the night lit up with growls, primate-shrieks, and orchestral frogs. This gaudy place never allowed a man any peace.
Seria whispered through my wristband. “Hey Bereens … do you hear that?”
A faint, mechanical buzz began to drown out the bloodsuckers humming around us.
Shyte.
My sweat iced. Even Seria feared that sound enough to stay inside the tank. It sounded like a warship fleet. Floating gray rectangles, sky-cities with cannons and blocky underbellies for carrying slaves, cages, and the newest technology in genocide while their bombers covered the sky like monsoon clouds—
“Call it in,” I spat into my wristband. “I’m going to get a visual.”
My air-rider shuddered as I leapt behind the tank line to mount it. My legs slipped past its metallic, egg-like exterior to seat me on the bike inside; my body rumbled with my ride as the egg coughed to life, and I leaned forward, hands against the windshield to tell it to go. Like a bull escaping its stall the air-rider bucked forward. I squeezed my legs tighter around that internal bike, urging it faster, faster …
Lem always said our air-riders looked like sparrows in a dive.
I pushed mine now above the treetops for a better look as the leaves slapped me, first giant oblong leaves the size of my vehicle, then bushy clusters of small round ones, all different blackish greens in the darkness. Spiderwebs flickered across my face and broke. That threatening buzz intensified—and as I shot out of the hot, tangled canopy, into the moonlight, I saw them.
Thirty warships blocked out the stars.
My heartrate broke into a thumping sprint. I lifted my hand—the warships were about the size of my palm now.
Shyte again. I raised my wristband to my lips.
“Grey Fox, this is Tank Watch 3. We’ve got 30 L-42s en route, about twenty minutes away by visual estimate, well within the shield.”
“Warblepiss!” The Hoernig-species NCO swore with a lippy gurgle—his made-up word would’ve made me laugh if I’d never seen him impale a man with his face. “I’ll call out the sky runners. Scout for foot soldiers, report, and return to your tank line. Understood?”
“Roger, Sergeant. Over.”
“Get.” He didn’t bother to follow protocol with an over and out: Sergeant Commander Strong was as gruff and hard as the horn sprouting from his long snout, and as slippery with decorum as his shiny skin.
I never disappointed him.
I snatched a pair of infrared goggles from under my seat and dove back down into the jungle. Bugs splashed against my goggles with nasty thwicks, stinging my cheeks; leaves slapped me harder now like a halfhearted scolding as the steam thickened over my wet skin. My air-rider covered ground with patriotic hunger, weaving in and out of the tight tree trunks now as I neared the ground.
If my radar didn’t pick anything up, my eyes soon would. Silver mirrored orb helmet, gray body in camouflage, anything out of place—I didn’t have any kind of spiritual oneness with this blasted jungle, but I knew how to look for the shapes of my enemies. How’d the airships get in? Maybe a hidden electrical station, buried under the roots of a sprawling Bangla tree, opened a gap in the shield? Or I’d find a Frelsi border patrol soldier, my comrade, bleeding against a tree trunk, hanging mutilated from a limb after torture …
Had someone overheard my transmission with Lem?
Filking shyte. A bloodsucker slammed into my snarling teeth. I spat it out. Tasted like rust. Like everything tasted right after electrocution.
Diebol …
I clenched my fists against the windshield, breathed in green, and released. The memory disappeared. I could handle these flashbacks like a pro now. I forced a hateful grin and slipped my head back into the game with the honed focus of a targeting missile.
Yup, there. Enemy scout: gray, mottled uniform with a bullet-shaped matte helmet like a seal’s head. Far into the distance behind him I caught a glimmer, a glint, as light from the planet in the sky glanced off the silvery orb helmet of a much more heavily armored blitzer.
Two Growen soldiers. I wheeled to return to base to spread the news. There are two hundred where you see two. My mother used to say that about cockroaches.
I raised my wristband to my lips—
The invisibility screamed at me to duck.
Something whizzed over my head—the scout had fired. Not ideal, but I could manage. I leaned in, embracing my metal ride as the landscape blurred by me in infrared streaks and I urged faster, faster, glanced over my shoulder, and drew my pistol behind me. With a deep, slow breath I sensed the electric field of my enemy’s body with my fist, and drew the barrel of the gun toward his center of mass … even moving like this, without a good sight picture, I could aim dead on. I squeezed the smooth grip and tightened my finger on the ice-cold trigger with another perfect breath—
What the bloodseas? The guy had a neodymium mace!
The glowing length of the mace’s staff lit up the forest. Spikes on the mace’s laser-ball leapt in and out like sine waves, casting shifting red shades across the scout’s armor like water as he spun the weapon into a magnetic forcefield in front of him. He rose into the air like a demon from the inferno, strange fire lighting under his boots, and then, like a falling morning star, dove at me to give chase.
Not your run-of-the-mill blitzer scum.
A rush ran through my shoulders, my chest, my lungs; my teeth gritted in a nasty smile. There were maybe six living people who could handle a mace’s forcefield like that. I was always hungry to take on the five who weren’t me.
“Grey Fox, this is Tank Watch 3, we’ve got blitzers coming in under the warships from the north, about six kilometers out—they’ve got a mace warrior with them, over.”
My mouth did its job, but my eyes scanned the scene, analyzing terrain for the impending duel. Not much space to swing a mace. The scout could fly with those jet-boots, so I should keep him in the tangled canopy below the tree line to limit his movement. I wanted this mace-man to be Diebol, oh man I did, but I didn’t sense Diebol’s em-field, so probably not, but you never knew—
“What do you mean, mace warrior?” Strong snapped back. “Electromagnetic, Stygge, what?”
“Sergeant, all I know is I got a flying guy chasing me with a glowing stick, and for some reason we haven’t had the chance to break out the teacups for a nice get-to-know-you. I’ll be right back after the icebreaker.” Chit chat was over. I could barely hear the call anyway over the rushing wind, the bugs, the leaves slapping my arms, and the flying demon gaining on me.
And—now.
I dropped my hand back to the windshield and slid both palms violently to the left. My air-rider whirled to face the scout head on. I drew my mace like a jousting spear. My hand warmed; the short bamboo handle shot out into a full-length staff and light, lasers, and heat washed over the weapon. I leaned in, reached forward, and breathed. Ohhh yeah.
Collision imminent; get skewered, scum.
The mace-demon stopped short, hard—if air screeched, his rocket boots would have—and dashed up out of my way. He struck down at me, flipping over me—
One hand blocked over my head with my mace. The other stopped my ride midair; I jumped, stood on the seat, and leapt off of it, outstretched like a lemur to tangle with my enemy in the air—
We plummeted, him first, our maces clashing and flashing around us in the darkness like giant fireflies. He gripped his mace wrong, like a club instead of a staff, and swung at me too hard, and I wanted to correct him like I always corrected Lem—
“You’re going too hard out of the gate,” I would tell her, “Skill over strength!”
But when we landed on the soft soil and I tripped him and he stumbled and I slammed my mace down onto his helmet—well, that was the end of that. He tried to block; he only softened the blow as he crumbled.
A chunk of the enemy scout’s helmet split off.
I almost choked.
“Hey.”
Lying below me, her braid pinned in the earth by the end of my staff, chestnut skin gleaming with sweat in the starlight and eyes laughing, was Lem Benzaran.