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CHAPTER FIVE

Jei

I ripped the infrared goggles off my head. The world seemed to spin as my training partner scrambled to her feet, removing her damaged helmet to tangle her long fingers through singed hair.

Lem spoke first, and fast. “Man, it’s good to see you. I’m really really sorry about all this, really sorry—my whole platoon, back there, they saw you, and I had to do something about it. I’ll let you go now, though, now that they can’t see us.” She twirled her helmet in her hands, then looked from it up to me. “Look at you being a rebel out here, riding your air-rider with no helmet on,” she said. “Here, take this one. You gotta keep everyone safe—yourself, too.”

What? She dropped her helmet in my hands with a sad smile, and then whirled to run.

“Wait!” My hand shot out on its own to grab her by the arm, and when she struggled against me, my confusion flared into odd anger. Without thinking my emotions powered an em-pull—my negative charges, the chlorine in my nerve cells, flipped to the rear to polarize me like a magnet.

I froze her in place.

“Hey, what the hell, Jei?” she snapped. As if I were the one cavorting around in a Growen uniform.

“You can’t just run in and then run off and—” I breathed. “Look, I didn’t know it was you! You could’ve gotten seriously hurt! You have to give me some kind of signal, or—bloodseas, I cut you on the edge of your helmet, Lem.”

I relaxed the em-pull, letting her go, and reached to check her forehead—

She batted my hand away, twisting her eyeballs upward as if she could see the blood trickling down her brow. She blew at it and shrugged with a goofy grin. “Eh, I’ve seen worse.” Weird pause. “Hey, uh … you should go now. You got a base to defend.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Come on, Lem, you lose duels all the time. No need to be awkward.”

“Haha, no. No, that’s not why it’s awkward. Step back before I turn my boots back on and fry your pasty ass.”

“You should have told me you were going undercover. I could help.”

Her eyes softened, and for a long second she stared at me with such deep sadness I thought she might cry. She drew a long breath … “I’m not undercover, Jei.”

The world became hell.

The warships—the warships broke through the EMP shield right after I texted her. Here she was, scouting ahead for a mess of Growen soldiers, and here I could not believe the conviction in her voice. No. No, she valued her freedom too much, she’d been through too much. Quit playing. Punch her playfully in the arm, make the joke go away …

“No more games, Lem,” I growled softly.

“You’re running out of time,” she said. “Go take care of my family before Diebol does.”

And with that, flames whooshed around her boots.

I leapt back to shield myself from the licking heat as she hurtled off into the sky, and I scrambled for my air-rider to follow—

“Tank Watch 3, this is Grey Fox, where the strangledip are you?” yelled Sergeant Strong.

Where the … that … indeed. I glanced after Lem’s disappearing light in the night sky—no, screw it, screw her—I glared at the broken headgear she had left in my hands, its visor fractured like the eye holes of a human skull.

Wait.

The scout's transmitter was still intact inside the helmet.

I shook myself off, reawakening with gritted teeth as I ran back for my air-rider. "About twenty seconds away from the tank line, Sergeant," I answered into my wristband:

"I have a way to neutralize the ground forces."

I counted distance on the windshield of my air-rider as I zoomed back to the tanks. With the airships now through the EMP bubble, our anti-air lasers and skypilots might hold them off the base directly, but as soon as they bombed our tanks their overwhelming ground forces would swarm in and wipe us out. I already heard their air-riders whining in the distance behind me …

I gripped the transmitter from Lem’s helmet with my teeth gritted. A quick glance over my shoulder for the incoming ground troops—no, nothing yet.

Seria already knew what to do when I got back.

“Toss it here!” she yelled, popping out of the tank with arms outstretched. I threw Lem’s helmet up to her and whirled back into the jungle toward the blitzer line. My eyes darted from earth to sky and back. The buzzing had become a thunderous rumbling: soon the warships would be directly above the incoming blitzers. With the thick jungle canopy below them, the pilots couldn’t see the soldiers below, and our shields still blocked their locator signals. They needed their scouts for radio communication.

Or, in our case, for miscommunication. Fight fire with fire, Growen with Growen.

“Seria, you get through?” I shouted to my wristband as the hot jungle “wind” picked up around my air-rider.

“Affirmative! They bought it.” Sweet, with that garbled helmet-piece she sounded just like Le—like the scout I’d robbed. “They’re ready to fire when I give them the location.”

“The blitzers are about six hundred meters from where I am,” I answered.

“Be more specific. Hurry before they get a visual!”

More specific? She better not get me shot. I leaned in, ducking toward the blitzer line, cursing the loud hum of my air-rider over the singing of the creatures of the night. There—a blitzer’s reflective mirror-like helmet. Coordinates?

The blitzer’s head swiveled toward me. I pressed my wristband with my mouth to send Seria my location. I didn’t have time to check if she got it: with a familiar zip, radiating colored shots lit up the jungle around me like I was tonight’s victory fireworks. The closest blitzer was shooting flayer cartridges at me.

I didn’t return fire. I heard a whine, a distant unlocking click of giant doors creaking open far, far away, as the misinformed Growen warships prepared to bomb their own soldiers instead of our tank line.

“Get clear, Bereens!” Seria’s voice crackled as she yelled.

Yes, thank you, contrary to appearance I didn’t enjoy showering in explosives.

The first bomb hit in the distance. My snark evaporated like shower steam. The forest shuddered as ancient trees splintered behind me in the shock wave and Lem’s planet groaned under our crossfire.

Lem.

I changed the channel on my wristband with my lips as another bomb hit, this time closer. The wind of its impact pushed me forward. “I don’t know if you heard that, Benzaran, but you better get out of the woods if you don’t want to die in Growen uniform.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll make it to twenty-three,” she replied. “Standard life expectancy.”

She always said that, always reminded me we might not even live past our teens. She usually said that to excuse her need to pack in as much wildness into every day as she could.

I always felt, though, that if tomorrow is uncertain then today should focus on working to make it sure, and as another shock wave threw me forward, this time—shyte! Almost into a tree—I swerved, swerved again—bomb, bomb, another bomb, like the first rain-drops, and then the full storm fell, obliterating everything behind me as heat seared the back of my neck and I shot out of the jungle and tumbled off my air-rider, thrown, rolling in the dirt to duck behind the tank line as our fighter ships took off above me like a swarm of bees toward the warships and blinding light blew past me—

Seria texted me, “high five.” Yeah, she was right.

We’d earned ourselves one more day toward twenty-three.

Starlight streamed through the small oval window over my bunk as the entrance to my barracks splooshed shut behind me. The sharp, clean creases on my still-made bed warned me dawn was still hours away.

We’d lost a number of tanks to the air raid after the shield opened. You couldn’t just pull tanks back away from the line, back into the base under the anti-air guns, not with blitzers on the way: no one wanted the friendly fire hell of a ground fight in the middle of our refugee barracks. But once Seria and I tricked the Growen into demolishing their own ground forces, and we knew no blitzers were coming, the tank battalion had been able to move into cover. And the Growen were forced to retreat with colossal losses. It still wasn’t safe to, say, fly in to Retrack city to watch air acrobats, but supplies could get in again.

We’d ended the siege.

A black hole settled into my chest, crushing my lungs. She was a blitzer now?

I avoided my bed, closed the porthole cover over my window, and saw the grime on my hands. I couldn’t go to bed like this. Just cleaned these sheets …

That wasn’t why.

It was too dark. No explosions, no screams, no more orders or debriefs … I would choke on my own thoughts in here.

I went back outside to walk the base’s shadowed streets. Clarity didn’t come. I leaned against the white wall around the base, fists clenched—needed to do something, to beat something. Ran to the garages to fix my crashed air-rider. As I twisted and re-set its body I plotted.

We did well, taking out most of the Growen foot soldiers using their own warships. Of course, we still would have lost the fort if not for our crack swarm of fighter pilots and fantastic anti-aircraft lasers. But that wasn’t my part to play. We each did our part. We all survived.

But Lem gave up passcodes that could have killed us all? Lem, who couldn’t keep her mouth shut when anyone needed telling off, wanted to join the Unification Cause to control all speech? She ranted for hours about the right to be different. She had trouble toeing the line in our army; I couldn’t imagine her choosing one that wanted to remake the universe into one homogeneous, watered-down culture.

My fingers slipped in the grime around my engine. “Stupid new coating,” I spat. The scent of ground metal and oils met me as I wiped my nose …

If the Growen had entered our fort, they would’ve taken all the refugees we guarded, sorted them by species, and gassed them. That included Lem’s little siblings—babies, almost, kids we trained to become deadly weapons because otherwise the Growen would slaughter them like a rat infestation. What did she say? “Take care of my family before Diebol does?”

She had to have lied about being undercover. Maybe someone was listening.

Dangit, of course. Of course she’d lied, the crazy girl believed connecting to Njandejara’s energy would save the universe from impending thermonuclear collapse. Diebol would never let her join up with that kind of crazy. There wasn’t room for fanatics and weirdos in Diebol’s vision of the universe—there wasn’t room for anyone but weirdos in Lem’s.

I yanked another bent metal panel off the air-rider’s back end. “Is he monitoring you?” I asked into my wristband.

I waited several minutes for a response. When I’d almost given up, she texted instead of speaking. “No. This is real.”

I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the wall. My throat hurt. Probably from all the smoke earlier. That, not a complete loss of control, was why the question, as I squeezed my fist over my wristband, rumbled in a low growl: “Why?”

Another long pause. Knowing Lem, it meant she was typing a colossally long answer.

No. It wasn’t long.

“You don’t actually care why.”

“Try me.”

“There’s no answer you’ll take to justify joining people you call kid-killers.”

“I call them that because they kill kids!” I hissed. It was good she wasn’t there in person. I wanted to fight, and I wanted to fight hard.

She … didn’t. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry you caught me. I didn’t want this. I wanted to just keep talking.”

I laughed, and it wasn’t a happy laugh. “What do you mean just keep talking, Lem? You were going to keep sending me messages, pretending to be away somewhere, until how long?”

I could almost feel the shame radiating off the text. “Until 23.”

“Until I’m twenty-three, you mean, because you just tripled your life expectancy by switching sides.”

The next text returned like lightning. “I get it. I’m stupid. I just thought, you know, because you kept talking to Diebol for years.”

I couldn’t even answer that. The forced, sick, painful connection I used to surveil the guy I hated most? That she would even pretend to be jealous of that, to want something like that with me, when she knew me and knew I hated it—

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, that was messed up to say. I’m so sorry. Here, you want a why, here’s a why.” The block of text appeared so fast I wondered if she’d copied and pasted it. “Maybe I just got tired of the hypocrisy back home. We talked about freedom, but the Frelsi Command controls your every move. I know it’s for ‘safety,’ but with the Growen, we promote safety all the way. Throughout history the most dangerous cities have always been the ones with the most divided, different populations. No more different, no more hate speech, no more war.”

They were Diebol’s words. “Okay, is he listening in on you?”

“Jei, come on, you know he’d never let me join, not with Njande and stuff. I stole one of our prisoners’ identities to get in.”

Smart. Skip basic, show up with a little intel as a hero. Now her statement four months ago about getting to know the prisoners as people meant something.

I took a violent wrench to the back of the air-rider’s engine. “Njande and stuff?” My teeth clenched. “You really think Njande’s okay with an organization that kills kids?”

“I think I can reform the Growen, Jei. Just gotta get high enough. End killing, and instead capture and educate everyone in the way of peace, you know?” Beep. Before I could answer, another text, again as if copied and pasted. “Remember when we first talked about becoming so powerful we didn’t have to kill to stop anyone from hurting us? I got it figured out, man. It’s all in our heads! Once I get into everyone’s heads, no one will want to hurt anyone else. And the Growen’s got the best machinery in place to make that happen.”

I laughed again—again, not a happy laugh, just a sound to let out the steam and scorn building in my chest. Sure, this, this explanation sounded insane enough. This sounded more like her. But like her in a terrible way, where it was no longer haha Lem you’re so crazy and more like oh shyte, Lem, you’re actually crazy. “So you’re gonna take over the Growen single-handedly,” I said.

“Nah. I’m gonna use the Growen to take over the Frelsi. Then I’ll use both to save the universe from heat death. That was my job, right?”

Oh my freaking—“Lem!” I yelled into my wristband. “Drop the pretty language, you’re talking about murdering your family!”

“Njande will protect them.”

“You almost got our entire base killed! We lost tankers today, Lem, bloodseas, I thought you were joking about blowing Seria up, and here you almost made it happen!”

“Eh, you don’t like her anyway.”

“Holy shyte Lem,” I breathed. It disgusted me, deep in my core, to read that name, to see Njande, and in the next text watch her joke about the death of one of our own. I couldn’t couple this disgust with her, with my friend; I couldn’t fathom, I just—this was—

No one said anything for a long time.

Finally, she turned on voice. “Jei?” Her voice wavered. I couldn’t do anything but listen; I was too angry to talk. “I’m really sorry,” Lem whispered. “I never wanted to be on opposite sides. I missed you and thought I could see you today, make sure when everything went down you didn’t get—get—please, you gotta trust I just don’t want you to die. I had to give them those codes. But I knew you’d find a way to out-strategize me tonight. That’s what you do, man. Now they’ll move me somewhere else and we’ll never fight each other again.”

“You’re telling me you’re betraying us for our good.” I wanted to say that she’d used me, but I couldn’t. That sounded so weak.

“I’m so sorry. Jei …”

“What?”

“Njandejaratanderovasaa.” She had the gall to say a blessing from Njande to me. Like a code, to tell me she was still on his side. As if he could side with anyone who aided our enemies.

She ended the transmission, and the engine dropped out of my air-rider onto the ground with a clang.


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