This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Copyright © 2023 by Megan E. O’Keefe

Excerpt from The Fractured Dark copyright © 2023 by Megan E. O’Keefe

Excerpt from August Kitko and the Mechas from Space copyright © 2022 by Alex White

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Cover illustration by Jamie Jones

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: O’Keefe, Megan E., 1985– author.

Title: The Blighted stars / Megan E. O’Keefe.

Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2023. | Series: The devoured world ; book 1

Identifiers: LCCN 2021061174 | ISBN 9780316290791 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780316290807 (ebook)

Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3615.K437 B55 2023 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061174

ISBNs: 9780316290791 (trade paperback), 9780316290807 (ebook)

E3-20230415-JV-NF-ORI

For Tina Gower

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ONE

Tarquin

The Amaranth

Tarquin Mercator stood on the command bridge of the finest spaceship his father had ever built and hoped he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself. Serious people crewed the console podiums all around him, wrist-deep in holos that managed systems Tarquin was reasonably certain he could name, but there ended the extent of his knowledge. The intricate inner workings of a state-of-the-art spaceship were hardly topics covered during his geology studies.

Despite Tarquin’s lack of expertise, being Acaelus Mercator’s son placed him as second-in-command. Below Acaelus, and above the remarkably more qualified mission captain, a stern woman named Paison.

That captain was looking at him now—expectant, deferential. Thin, golden pathways resembling circuitry glittered on her skin, printed into her current body to aid her as a pilot. Sweat beaded between Tarquin’s shoulder blades.

“My liege,” Captain Paison said, all practiced obeisance, and while he desperately wished that she was addressing his father, her light grey eyes didn’t move from Tarquin. “We are approximately an hour’s flight from the prearranged landing site. Would you like to release the orbital survey drone network?”

Tarquin hoped his relief didn’t show. Scouting the planet for deposits of relkatite was the one job for which he felt firmly footed.

“Yes, Captain. Do we have visual on the planet?”

“Not yet, my liege.” She expanded a vast holographic display from her console, revealing the cloud-draped world below. “The weather is against us, but the drone network should be able to punch through it in the next few hours.”

“Hold off on landing until I can confirm our preliminary survey data. We wouldn’t want to put the ship down too far from a viable mining site.”

Polite chuckles all around. Tarquin forced a smile at their faux camaraderie and pulled up a holo from his own console, reviewing the data the survey drones had retrieved before the mining ships Amaranth and Einkorn had taken flight for the tedious eight-month voyage to Sixth Cradle.

Not that he’d been awake for that journey. His mind and the minds of the entire crew had been safely stored away in the ship’s databases, automated systems in place to print key personnel when they drew within range of low-planet orbit. When food was so expensive, there was no point in feeding people who weren’t needed to work during the trip.

Tarquin’s father put a hand on his shoulder and gave him a friendly shake. “Excited to see a cradle world?”

“I can’t wait,” he said honestly. When he’d been a child, Tarquin’s mother had taken him to Second Cradle shortly before its collapse. Those memories of that rare, Earthlike world were vague. Tarquin smiled up into eyes a slightly darker shade of hazel than his own.

At nearly 160 years old, Acaelus chose to strike an imposing figure with his prints—tall, solidly built, a shock of pure white hair that hinted at his advanced age. It was difficult to look into that face and see anything but the father he’d known as a child—stern but kind. A man who’d fought to have Tarquin’s mind mapped as early as possible so that he could be printed into a body that better suited him after the one he’d been born into hadn’t quite fit.

Hard to see through that, to the man whose iron will and vast fortune leashed thousands to his command.

“My liege,” Captain Paison said, a wary edge to her voice, “I apologize, but it appears there was an error in the system. The survey drones have been released already, or perhaps were never loaded into place.”

“What?” Tarquin accessed those systems via his own console. Sure enough, the drone bays were empty. “How could that have happened?”

“I—I can’t say, my liege,” Paison said.

The fear in her voice soured Tarquin’s stomach. Before he could assure her that it wasn’t her fault, Acaelus took over.

“This is unacceptable,” his father said. The crew turned as one to duck their heads to him. Acaelus’s scowl cut through them all, and he pointed to an engineer. “You. Go, scour the ship for the drones and load them properly. I expect completion within the hour, and an accounting of whose failure led to this.”

“Yes, my liege.” The engineer tucked into a deep bow and then turned on their heel, whole body taut with nervous energy. Tarquin suspected that as soon as they were on the other side of the door, they’d break into a sprint.

“It was just a mistake,” Tarquin said.

“Mercator employees do not make mistakes of this magnitude,” Acaelus said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Whoever is responsible will lose their cuffs, and if I catch anyone covering for the responsible party, they will lose theirs, too.”

“That’s unnecessary,” Tarquin said, and immediately regretted it as his father turned his icy stare upon him. Acaelus clutched his shoulder, this time without the friendly intent, fingers digging into Tarquin’s muscle.

“Leave the running of Mercator to me, my boy,” he said, softly enough not to be overheard but with the same firm inflection.

Tarquin nodded, ashamed to be cowed so quickly but unable to help it. His father was a colossus, an institution unto himself, a force of nature. Tarquin was just a scholar. The running of the family wasn’t his burden to carry. Acaelus released his shoulder and set to barking further orders with the brisk efficiency of long years of rule.

He gripped the edges of his console podium, staring at the bands printed around his wrists in Mercator green. Relkatite green. The cuffs meant you worked for Mercator’s interests, and Mercator’s alone. And while the work was grueling, it guaranteed regular meals. Medical care. Housing. Your phoenix fees paid, if your print was destroyed. The other ruling corporate families—who collectively called themselves MERIT—had their own colored cuffs. A rainbow of fealty.

Working for the families of MERIT kept people safe, in all the ways that mattered. While his father could be brusque, and at times even cruel, Acaelus did these things only out of a desire to ensure that safety.

The cuffs around Tarquin’s wrists came with more than the promise of safety. Mercator’s crest flowed up from those bands to wrap over the backs of his hands and twist between his fingers. The family gloves marked him as a blooded Mercator. Not a mere employee, but in the direct line of succession. Someone to be obeyed. Feared. His knuckles paled.

“Straighten up,” Acaelus said.

Tarquin peeled his hands away from the console and regained his composure, slipping the aristocratic mask of indifference back on, then set to work reviewing the data the ship had collected since entering Sixth Cradle’s orbit.

Alarms blared on the bridge. Tarquin jerked his head up, startled by the flashing red lights and the sharp squeal of a siren. On the largest display, the one that’d previously shown a dreamy landscape of fluffy clouds under the brush of golden morning light, the words TARGET LOCKED glared in crimson text.

That wasn’t possible. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone here except the Amaranth and its twin, the Einkorn. Of the five ruling corporate families, none but Mercator could even build ships capable of beating them here.

“Evade and report,” Acaelus ordered.

Captain Paison flung her arms out, tossing holo screens to the copilots flanking her, and the peaceful clouds were replaced with shield reports, weapons systems, and evasion programs. There was no enemy ship that he could see. A firestorm of activity kicked off, and while Tarquin knew, logically, that they’d rolled, the ship suppressed any sensation of motion.

“It’s the Einkorn, my liege.” The captain’s voice was strained from her effort.

“Who’s awake over there?” Acaelus demanded.

“No one should be, my liege,” the Amaranth’s medical officer said. Their freckled face was pale.

“Someone over there doesn’t like us,” the woman to Paison’s right said between gritted teeth. “Conservators?”

“It’s not their MO,” said a broad-chested man in the grey uniform of the Human Collective Army. “But it’s possible. Should I check on the security around the warpcore?”

“I iced Ex. Sharp,” Acaelus said. “Without her to guide them, the Conservators are nothing but flies to be swatted. Captain, continue evasion and hail the Einkorn.”

Tarquin cast a sideways glance at Ex. Kearns, Acaelus’s current bodyguard and constant shadow. The exemplar had the face of a shovel, as broad and intimidating as the rest of him, and he didn’t react to the mention of his ex-partner, Ex. Sharp. It had to sting, having the woman he’d worked side by side with turn against them all and start bombing Mercator’s ships and warehouses.

The fact that Naira Sharp had been captured and her neural map locked away didn’t erase the specter of the threat she posed. Her conspirators, the Conservators, were still out there, and Tarquin found Acaelus’s quick dismissal of the possibility of their involvement odd.

The HCA soldier was right. They really should send someone down to check on the warpcore. Overloading the cores was the Conservators’ primary method of destruction. Tarquin rallied himself to say as much, but Paison spoke first.

“My liege,” she said, “the Einkorn’s assault may be a malfunction. The Amaranth’s controls aren’t responding properly. I can’t—”

Metal shrieked. The floor quaked. Ex. Kearns surged in front of them and shoved Tarquin dead center in the chest. The world tipped and Tarquin’s feet flew out from under him. He struck the ground on his side. Something slammed into him from above, stealing his half-voiced shout.

Tarquin blinked, head buzzing, a painful throb radiating from his hips where a piece of the console podium he’d been working at seconds before had landed. Red and yellow lights strobed, warning of the damage done, but no breach alarms sounded.

Groaning, he shook his head to clear it. The impact had pitched people up against the walls. Seats and bits of console podiums scattered the ground. Across the room, Paison and another woman helped each other back to their feet.

“Son!” Acaelus dropped to his knees beside him. Tarquin was astonished to see a cut mar his father’s forehead, dripping blood. “Are you all right?”

Tarquin moved experimentally, and though his side throbbed, his health pathways were already healing the damage and supplying him with painkillers. “Just bruised. What happened?”

“A direct hit.” Acaelus took Tarquin’s face in his hands, examining him, then looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Kearns!”

Kearns removed the piece of podium from Tarquin’s side and helped him to his feet. Tarquin brushed dust off his clothes and tried to get ahold of himself while, all around him, chaos brewed. Kearns limped, his left leg dragging, and Tarquin grimaced. Exemplars were loaded with pathways keyed to combat. For one of them to show pain, the wound had to be bad.

Tarquin nudged a broken chunk of the console podium with the toe of his boot. A piece of the ceiling had come down, crushing the podiums, and it would have crushed Acaelus and Tarquin both if Kearns hadn’t intervened, taking the brunt of the hit on his own legs.

A knot formed in his throat as he recognized the damage Kearns had taken on their behalf. Tarquin had never been in anything like real danger before, and he desperately missed his primary exemplar, Caldweller, but that man’s neural map was still in storage. Acaelus had deemed Kearns enough to cover both of them until they reached the planet.

None of them could have accounted for this.

“My liege,” Kearns said in tones that didn’t invite argument, “I suggest we move to a more secure location immediately.”

“Agreed,” Acaelus said. “Captain, what’s the damage?”

“Uhhh…” Paison squinted at one of the few consoles that’d survived the impact. “The Einkorn’s rail guns tore through the stabilization column. This ship won’t hold together much longer.”

Brittle silence followed that announcement, the roughed-up crew exchanging looks or otherwise staring at the damaged bridge like they could wind back time. Tarquin studied his father, trying to read anything in the mask Acaelus wore in crisis, and saw nothing but grim resolve wash over him. Acaelus grabbed Tarquin’s arm and turned him around.

“Very well. With me, all of you, we’re evacuating this ship.”

Tarquin stumbled along beside his father, half in a daze. Kearns assumed smooth control of the situation, sliding into his place at the top of security’s chain of command. Merc-Sec and the HCA soldiers organized under Kearns’s barked orders, forming a defensive column around the rest. Paison threw a brief, longing glance at her command post before falling in with the others. Tarquin found himself in the center of a crush of people, not entirely certain how he’d gotten there.

How had they gone from looking at fluffy clouds to fleeing for their lives in less than ten minutes?

The HCA soldier next to him, the one who’d said this wasn’t the Conservators’ MO, caught his eye and gave him a quick, reassuring smile. Tarquin mustered up the ability to smile back and read the man’s name badge—DAWD, REGAR. That meager kindness reminded him that there was more at stake than his worries. These people had put their lives in the hands of Mercator.

If they died here, they could be reprinted later, but every death increased one’s chance of one’s neural map cracking the next time it was printed. Neural maps were never perfect; they degraded over time. Traumatic deaths sped the process exponentially, as even the best-shielded backups were never entirely disentangled from the active map.

As if there were fine threads of connection between all backups and the living mind, and sufficient trauma could reverberate out to them all.

Some people came up screaming, and never stopped. Some got caught in time loops, unsure which moment of their lives they were really living through. Neither state was survivable.

Tarquin summoned the scraps of his courage and stood straighter. He had no business in a crisis, but the employees looked to him for assurance. His terror no doubt added to their anxiety, and that was selfish of him.

Something metal groaned in the walls, taunting his ability to hold it together. Tarquin cast an irritated glance at the complaining ship. If only ships would fall in line as easily as people.

Acaelus pulled up a holo from his forearm, but whatever he saw there was blurred by his privacy filters. The information carved a scowl into his face. He slowed and swiped his ID pathway over the door to a lab, unlocking it.

“Everyone, in here,” he said.

They hesitated. Paison said, “My liege, the shuttle isn’t far from here.”

“I’m aware of the layout of my own ship, Captain. Get in, all of you, and wait. I’ve just received notice that Ex. Lockhart’s print order went through. I won’t allow my exemplar to awaken to a dying ship. You will go into this lab, and you will wait for my return.”

That wasn’t right. The secondary printing round wasn’t automated; it needed to be initiated. Tarquin frowned, watching the crew shift uncomfortably. Every one of them knew Acaelus was telling a half-truth at best, but none of them were willing to say it.

There was a slim possibility that whatever was causing the other errors had triggered this, but making all these people wait while Acaelus collected one person was a waste of time.

“My liege.” Paison stepped forward, squaring off her shoulders. “I can’t guarantee this ship will last that long, and we require your command keys to open the hangar airlock.”

“I am aware, and you are delaying. Get in the lab.”

They shuffled inside without another word, though they were all watching Acaelus warily. The terror of offending their boss was greater than the fear of being left behind to die. You could come back from death. You could never re-cuff for Mercator after being fired. The door shut, leaving Tarquin and his father alone with Kearns. Tarquin’s head pounded.

“What are you doing?” he demanded in a soft hiss. “Ex. Lockhart can handle herself. We have to get these people out.”

Acaelus shoved him down the hallway. “We need to get out. I printed Lockhart to help Kearns handle the crew, but you and I are going to cast our maps back and exit this situation, because I don’t know what’s happened here, and I’m not risking your map.”

Tarquin dug his heels in, drawing his father to a halt. “We can’t just leave. I’m not going to allow the Conservators to run us off before I have proof the mining process is safe.”

“If this was the Conservators, then we’d already be dead. All the nonfamily printing bays just went active, and I do not know who is coming out of those bays. We have to leave. Kearns and Lockhart will handle the rest.”

Tarquin rubbed his eyes in frustration. “We can’t abandon the mission.”

“We can, and we are. Come. This is hardly the place for an argument.”

Acaelus jerked on his arm. Tarquin stumbled after him, mind reeling. Sixth Cradle was supposed to be his mission. Supposed to be the moment Tarquin stood up for his family and finally squashed all those squalid rumors Ex. Sharp had started when she’d claimed the relkatite mining process was killing worlds.

While a great deal of what his family had to do to ensure their survival was distasteful, Tarquin was absolutely certain the mining process was safe. He’d refined it himself. Mining Sixth Cradle and leaving it green and thriving was meant to be the final nail in the coffin of those accusations. The one thing he could do for his family that was useful.

He wouldn’t run. Not this time. Not like he had when his mother had died and he’d fled to university to bury himself in his studies, instead of facing the suffering that weighed on his father’s and sister’s hearts.

“I’m sorry, Dad, I won’t—”

“Kearns, carry him,” Acaelus said.

Tarquin was thirty-five years old, second in line to the most powerful position in the universe, and Ex. Kearns scooped him up like he was little more than luggage and tossed him over his shoulder without a flash of hesitation, because Acaelus Mercator had demanded it. Kearns’s shoulder dug into Tarquin’s ribs, pressing a startled grunt out of him. His cheeks burned with indignity.

“I’m not a child,” Tarquin snapped, surprised at the edge in his tone. He never raised his voice to his father.

“You are my child, and you will do as I say.”

Acaelus didn’t bother to look at him. Tarquin closed his eyes, letting out a slow sigh of defeat. There was no arguing with his father when he’d made up his mind. He opened his eyes, and temporarily forgot how to breathe. The door to one of the staff printing bays yawned open, and it wasn’t people who emerged from that space. Not exactly.

Their faces were close to human, but something had gone off in the printing. A mouth set too far right. An ear sprouting from the side of a neck. An arm that bent the wrong way around. Half a chest cavity missing.

Misprints. Empties. An error in the printer slapping together a hodgepodge of human parts. The Amaranth wouldn’t have tried putting a neural map into any of those bodies, but whatever had caused the malfunction had also made the ship release the prints instead of disintegrating them into their constituent parts, as was protocol for a misprint.

What was left of those faces twisted, drew into vicious snarls.

“Kearns,” Tarquin hissed in a sharp whisper. His voice was alarmed enough that the exemplar turned.

Kearns pulled his sidearm and fired. The earsplitting roar of the shot in such a small space slammed into Tarquin’s ears, but his pathways adjusted, keeping him from going temporarily deaf. The misprints shrieked with what throats and lungs they had, and rushed them. Kearns rolled Tarquin off his shoulder and shoved him back.

Tarquin stumbled, but his father caught him and then spun, pushing him ahead. “Run!”

Fear stripped away all his reservations and Tarquin ran, pounding down the hallways for the family’s private printing bay, praying that he wouldn’t find the same thing there.

Kearns’s weapon roared again and again, a staccato rhythm drowning out the screams of the misprints. He looked over his shoulder to find Acaelus right behind him, Kearns farther back, his injured leg slowing him down. Tarquin faced forward and sprinted—the door to the printing bay was just ahead.

Kearns’s gun fell silent. His father screamed.

Tarquin whirled around. Acaelus was chest-down on the ground, misprints swarming over him, their teeth and nails digging into his skin, ripping free bloody chunks. He took a step toward them, not knowing what he could possibly do, and Acaelus looked up, face set with determination as he flung out a hand.

“Go home!” he ordered.

He met his father’s eyes. Acaelus pushed his tongue against the inside of his cheek, making it bulge out in warning. New terror struck Tarquin. High-ranking members of the corporate families often wore small, personal explosive devices on the interior side of a molar to use in case someone intending to crack their neural maps attacked them. Acaelus had one.

Tarquin fled. He burst through the printing bay door and slammed it shut behind him, leaning his back against it, breathing harder than he ever had in his life. The explosion was designed to be small. It whumped against the door, tickling his senses.

A gruesome way to die, but it was swift. Gentler suicide pathways had been tried, but they had a nasty habit of malfunctioning. Pathways remained frustratingly unpredictable at times.

He swallowed. The staff back on Mercator Station would reprint Acaelus the second they received notice that his tracker pathway had been destroyed and his visual feed had cut. His father would be fine. Tarquin forced himself away from the door, shaking.

One of the printing cubicles was lit red to indicate it was in use. He crossed to the map backup station and picked up the crown of electronics, running it between his hands.

Tarquin knew he wasn’t what his father had wanted. He lacked the clear-eyed ruthlessness of his elder sister, Leka. He couldn’t stand to watch people cower beneath the threat of his ire as Acaelus so often had to do to keep their employees in line. His singular concession to being a Mercator was that his love of geology and subsequent studies had aided the family in their hunt for relkatite.

His father never complained about Tarquin’s lack of participation in family politics. Acaelus had given Tarquin everything he’d ever asked for and had only ever asked for one thing in return.

When Naira Sharp had been captured and put to trial, Tarquin had taken the stand to prove her accusations false. As a Mercator, as the foremost expert in his field of study, he had disproved all her allegations that Mercator’s mining processes destroyed worlds.

It hadn’t stopped the rumors. Hadn’t stopped the other families of MERIT from looking askance at Mercator and asking themselves if, maybe, they wouldn’t be better off without them.

They needed to mine a cradle world and leave it thriving in their wake to put the rumors to bed once and for all.

Tarquin could still give his father that proof, but he couldn’t do it alone. Not with misprints infesting the halls and the potential of a saboteur on the loose. He needed an exemplar.

He set the backup crown down and crossed to the printing bay control console, checking the progress on Lockhart’s print. Ninety seconds left. Enough time to compose himself. Enough time, he hoped, to get to the planet after she’d finished printing.

Tarquin had never disobeyed a direct order from his father before, and he hoped he wasn’t making a colossal mistake.

TWO

Naira

The Amaranth

It wasn’t the first time Naira Sharp had awoken in the wrong body, but it was the first time she had done so with the acrid reek of burning plastics in the air. People said that the first thing you saw in a new body set the tone for how that life would be lived, but Naira had been brought back often enough in the relkatite-green cubicles of her enemy that she’d abandoned visual superstition for olfactory. A decision she regretted right about now.

Naira lifted her arms and found them medium brown and well muscled, tapering to wrists banded in the green cuffs that marked this body as an employee of Mercator. The stranger’s skin glittered with pathways, golden implants reminiscent of circuitry. An experimental flexing of those pathways revealed they enhanced strength and agility.

An icy sensation built behind her eyes.

Breathe. She’d dropped into dozens of different bodies, and though this wasn’t the one she’d expected, its shape was surprisingly close to her preferred print. A little shorter, maybe. A little sturdier.

She’d been counting on waking up in the freshly printed body of Acaelus Mercator. Something had gone wrong, but this body wouldn’t stop her.

Because the fact she’d been printed at all meant that Kav had done it. He’d gotten her map off ice in time for the Sixth Cradle mission. She’d slipped Acaelus’s control at last.

Naira was free.

She planted pathway-enhanced legs against the hatch at the foot of her cubicle and shoved. Discarded biomatrix sloshed as the tray she’d been printed onto rocketed out, barely catching on the rails. Fresh air burned into her lungs, all at once refreshing and astringent.

“Whoa. Ex. Lockhart, are you all right?” a man asked.

Her pathways adjusted her vision, taking away the sting from the bright lights. She didn’t recognize the name, but she knew the title of exemplar. That solved the mystery of why she was crammed full of high-end combat pathways.

Naira rolled off the tray and dropped into a crouch, the cold floor shocking some of the haze from her mind. Slowly, she stood, flexing each muscle one by one. The circuit board lines mapping her skin glittered as she stretched.

“What’s happened?” she asked, to give herself time to think.

“I don’t know,” the man said. He stood by the printer control terminal and slid a panel closed before turning around to face her.

Dark brown hair fell to the edge of his jaw in wavy chunks, partially hiding an angular face with soft hazel eyes and thick eyebrows. The man’s demeanor lacked the arrogance common to his family, but there was no hiding the aristocratic lift to his chin, the aquiline nose.

Tarquin Mercator. Youngest child of Acaelus Mercator. Geologist, recluse. She’d never crossed paths with him when she’d been an exemplar.

But he’d crossed her, when he’d testified against her at the trial.

The basic facts of his dossier spun through Naira’s mind, something to hold on to so that she wouldn’t break him between her bare hands, punish him for taking the stand and explaining, with that faux-charm common to his family, that she’d been mistaken. That his family’s mining practices couldn’t be responsible for the contagion that collapsed ecosystems.

That killed worlds.

Naira wasn’t here for him. She was here to stop this ship. To keep Mercator lies from destroying yet another viable planet. He might have information and access that could help her accomplish those goals. It was a near thing, though, not indulging the urge to wring his neck.

“The Einkorn fired on us. We can’t raise them on comms,” Tarquin said.

“Situation on board?” She opened a bulkhead panel and pulled out a set of light body armor. The fibers went on baggy, then adjusted to conform to her body. The interior of her forearm lit up briefly, then turned clear, revealing the network system integrated with the skin of her arm. She flicked her gaze through the display, checking permissions. Ex. Lockhart had almost as much clearance as Acaelus. She could work with that.

Tarquin twisted his fingers together. “It’s a mess, E-X. There are living misprints roaming the halls, attacking people. I have a group of survivors that need an escort to an escape shuttle before the ship tears itself apart.”

Misprints assaulting people sounded highly unlikely. She needed someone who actually knew what was going on. “Where’s Liege Acaelus?”

“Dead.”

“His print failed?”

“He was printed. He lived. He and Ex. Kearns are both dead. We have to go.”

Her stomach swooped with the sway of the ship as the Amaranth lurched to one side. Red and yellow warning lights painted the printing bay in a sickly glow. The artificial gravity stuttered, filling the air with the harsh scent of ozone even as her weight vacillated between boulder heavy and feather light.

Destroying the relkatite containment of the ship’s warpcore had been the Conservators’ plan. The plan, however, had not included her being on the ship at the time. And it certainly wasn’t supposed to go in fits and starts like this.

The surge passed, leaving her panting with her hands on her knees. Tarquin slouched against the console podium he’d been working at, holding on for dear life. His complexion was wan and sweaty.

“That’s new,” he gritted out between his teeth and forced himself to stand.

“Warpcore’s damaged,” she said matter-of-factly, ripping open another bulkhead to find—ah yes, perfect—a wide selection of rifles and handguns. She selected a few weapons, strapped them on, then gave Tarquin a once-over.

“Can you run?”

“Yes.” He brushed a hand through his sweaty hair.

“Good. Follow me. Where are the other exemplars?”

“You’re the only one. There’s just a skeleton crew. We entered low-planet orbit five hours ago.”

“Then who the hell attacked the ship?”

“I really don’t know.”

Naira swiped up a map on her print’s built-in HUD. She put a pin in the location of the nearest shuttle, then switched her rifle to crowd-control mode. The last thing she wanted to do was accidentally kill any of her team. Naira stepped into the hallway.

Smoke hung thick in the air, stinging the back of her throat. Remnants of a small explosion painted the walls in greasy soot and gore. The Amaranth shuddered again, making her stumble, and she got a hand against the wall to steady herself as a group of people tore around the corner, rushing her.

Her blood ran cold. Blank faces stared at her even as they sped up, empty eyes tracking her every movement with less personality than a rock. Misprints. She really hadn’t believed Tarquin’s report, and found herself grudgingly impressed that the princeling hadn’t dissolved into sobbing panic.

Naira switched back to lethal and fired without a second thought.

“Let’s go,” she said to Tarquin once she’d dealt with the misprints. “Stay behind me.”

He edged into the hallway, throat bobbing as he followed. A little too tight on her heels, but she couldn’t blame him and didn’t have the time to tell him to back off. The HUD implanted in this print kept her updated on the Amaranth’s systems, and Naira didn’t like the amount of red in the display.

This ship was dying, and not in the tidy way the Conservators had planned. The Einkorn’s rail guns had torn through the ship’s stabilizers. She scanned the damage as she marched down the hall, checking her corners.

The hit was too clean, not a random misfire caused by the AI glitching. Whoever had fired from the Einkorn wanted the Amaranth not just destroyed, but crashed into Sixth Cradle. It’d kill everyone on board, but it’d also risk contaminating the planet with Mercator’s mining materials, priming it for the same collapse syndrome that infected the other cradles.

Naira clenched her jaw. She was a killer in a war few believed in, but this wanton destruction of both the human life on board and the planet wasn’t something she or the other Conservators would endorse.

If it wasn’t the Conservators, then who? Was she really free of Acaelus? Until she could rendezvous with her team and confirm the state of her neural map, she needed to stay alive. Otherwise, she might find herself back on ice.

And then the next time she woke it’d be in Acaelus’s labs, the subject of his experiments.

“E-X, wait.” Tarquin jogged up alongside her, and she bit back a remark about him staying behind as he swiped a hand over a door panel.

The door opened into a lab. A quick head count put the population inside at around fifty people. Mostly Mercator personnel, though five wore the gold-crested flak jacket and grey cuffs of the Human Collective Army.

Naira almost smirked at the HCA soldiers, but stopped herself. Acaelus must have hated being forced to bring the HCA on his mining missions to “oversee” the process after she’d outed him for killing worlds.

She extended two fingers and pressed them against the top of her thigh, the signal the Conservators currently used to identify one another when inhabiting prints not their own. No one reacted to the gesture, so she turned it into a stretch.

“Liege Tarquin,” said a wiry woman inside the lab. She slammed a hand down over a holo to close it, but not before Naira caught a glimpse of what she’d been working on.

She’d had the controls to the hangar airlock open, doors that could only be unlocked by Mercator command keys due to the shroud protection protocols. Naira glanced at the woman’s jacket—CAPTAIN PAISON. The mission commander had been trying to find a way around Acaelus’s lockout. Naira liked her immediately.

Paison covered her surprise with a deep bow, and the confident posture Naira had seen seconds before melted away into practiced obedience. The others followed suit. At least this print kept her off the hook when it came to bowing to Tarquin. Exemplars didn’t look away from their charges. She’d have to remember to refer to the little shit by his title, though.

“We stayed put, as your father ordered,” Paison said, deftly reminding Tarquin that she was a loyal employee, “but we heard gunfire. Where is Liege Acaelus?”

“My father and Ex. Kearns are dead,” Tarquin said. “Please follow Ex. Lockhart’s guidance as we evacuate.”

“Group up,” Naira said. “This ship has another five minutes of life left.”

“Yes, E-X.” Paison gave her a salute that was arguably more deferential than the bow she’d given Tarquin.

The ship groaned, metal tearing somewhere. Heat rushed down the hall, her pathway-heightened senses picking up on it a second before the wall of flame hit.

Naira pivoted, rusty instincts kicking to the surface, and grabbed Tarquin in both arms, folding her shorter but stronger body over his as she slammed him against the wall. He smelled pleasantly of sun-soaked sandstone, which was rather irritating, as her enemy shouldn’t be allowed to smell like anything nice.

Fire licked up her hips and scoured through her light armor, chasing all thoughts away. Blisters bubbled across her back. Naira hissed, pain making her breath short as agony wrapped searing fingers around her and then—in a flash—was gone, the fire burned out as the suppression system kicked on, showering them all in chemical foam.

She released the princeling and staggered away, bracing one hand against the opposite wall. Char painted everything void-dark, grey flecks of suppression foam drifting through the air. Naira focused on the visuals, because to sink back into the base sensations of her body was to start screaming, and she had to hold it together. Had to get off this ship.

“E-X,” Tarquin said, shoving a hand over his mouth to stifle his revulsion. Cooked meat perfumed the air. “Your pathways, are they damaged?”

Right, she’d almost forgotten. The circuit board patterns on her skin tickled as they vibrated, responding to her will, and dulled the exquisite edge of pain.

It would take time for the singed edges of the pathways on her back to build up enough skin for them to regenerate themselves fully, but the pain abatement would keep her moving. She checked her HUD. Three minutes until the Amaranth stopped listing and started dropping.

“I’ll hold.” She forced herself to stand straight, to take her hand away from the wall, testing her ability to stay on her feet.

The seared muscles of her back stretched with the motion, sparking fresh shock waves of pain. She trembled, cold sweat coating everywhere she still had skin, her teeth chattering with the beginnings of shock.

Naira ordered the pathways to flood her with all the painkillers they could synth, and her head spun with dizzy euphoria.

Tarquin touched her unburnt forearm lightly and met her gaze, holding her rifle out to her. “We have to keep moving.”

Naira nodded as she took the rifle and stopped herself from slinging the strap over her back at the last second. She dialed back the painkillers. Even though every step was agony, she couldn’t fight while high as a satellite.

“Form up,” she barked into the lab. “We’re running.”

“What the fuck was that?” one of the Merc-Sec asked.

“An explosion. Crashing ships have those. Move your ass if you don’t want to experience a bigger version.”

She didn’t wait to see if the others followed. She grabbed Tarquin by the back of his jacket and shoved him forward. Footsteps rushed after them, scurrying to keep up, and she heard someone sob softly. Someone else started vomiting. The vibration in her pathways mounted, a persistent ache, but ignorable, considering everything else.

Tarquin swiped them into a hangar. An Arrow-class shuttle waited, surrounded by pallets of supplies meant for the first expedition to the planet. Her grip tightened around the rifle. They didn’t have time to load the supplies. They’d have to make do with what they found on the planet. Which could get… complicated.

The doorframe was aglow with blue lights, indicating the hangar was free of shroud spore. Good. As desperate as Naira was to escape Acaelus, she would have let them all die with the Amaranth if it meant protecting the planet from shroud contamination.

“Board. Now,” Naira ordered. “Liege Tarquin, please enter your command keys into the control podium to release the airlock, then take a seat.”

“I can do that, E-X,” he said, overly eager, then hurried up the gangway.

Naira shook her head at his back and turned to Captain Paison. The captain eyed her warily, no doubt worried that Naira had seen what she’d been doing on that holo. With her grey eyes downcast and an affected slouch to her shoulders, she made herself unassuming. Nonthreatening. Clever woman.

Naira put one hand on Paison’s shoulder. She lowered her voice. “Can you get this shuttle to ground?”

“Yes, but I was only escorting these people. If the Amaranth is going down, I’m going with it.”

“Captain Paison,” she whispered, “bullshit. I saw what you were doing, and I’ll keep my mouth shut if you get us all down safely.”

Paison’s nostrils flared. She lifted her eyes to meet Naira’s, and Naira glimpsed the steel in her spine. The confidence she’d seen in the seconds before Paison had realized who had walked back into that lab. Slowly, she nodded.

“Copy that, E-X.” Paison jogged up the gangway, Naira right behind her.

Ninety-seven seconds. Naira slapped the button for an emergency takeoff and the shuttle’s gangway dropped, clanging to the ground, as the double doors of the airlock slammed shut.

“E-X,” one of the Merc-Sec called to her from their seat. “Strap in!”

She craned her neck around, eyed the harnesses over the seats, and suppressed a shudder. No way was she putting her raw back against a seat, let alone strapping on a harness.

Naira went into the cockpit and stood between the copilot’s seat and console podium. The podium raised to account for her standing. Paison glanced up and nodded to her, sliding over a command screen from her console. Naira bent her knees, lowering her center of gravity, and activated her pathways, sending strength into her legs. Taking some of the strength away from her back stung like hell, but it’d be worse in the chair, where the friction would do more damage.

“Integrity check clear. We are sealed and ready for vacuum,” Naira said, flicking through the holographic displays.

“Spooling engines,” Paison said.

The shuttle’s engines thrummed to life, vibrating through the floor. The soles of her boots softened. Naira sank slightly as the boots switched over to the sticky mode that would allow her to cling in place when they lost gravity from the larger ship.

“We’re green to go,” Paison said. The shuttle lifted from the floor. “Opening hangar airlock.”

In the corner of her eye, Naira’s HUD countdown to ship destabilization flashed red. She closed the warning so she could focus on the screens in front of her.

“What the—?” Paison cut herself off.

Naira followed Paison’s line of sight. The internal hangar door had opened, and a man strode into the room. The strobing red lights that warned of imminent depressurization obscured his features.

“Fuck.” Paison reached for the airlock controls.

“Continue,” Naira ordered.

“But—”

“It’s too late to let him on board. The Amaranth is going to drop like a rock in seconds.”

Paison’s fingers curled into ineffectual fists over her console display. It was true. She knew it was true. That didn’t make it any easier.

The man looked up, right at them, squinting through the tinted glass as if he could see them. Maybe he could. The skin of his face glittered with the presence of exemplar pathways.

He met Naira’s stare, pressed two fingers against his thigh, and winked.

The hangar opened, and the shuttle was yanked out into the thin air of low-planet orbit.

THREE

Naira

Sixth Cradle

The blue marble rushed toward her, and it was wrong. A thick blanket of atmosphere covered the cradle, swirled with fluffy clouds. Glistening blue seas swathed the planet and that was correct, expected.

But a cradle—this cradle—was supposed to be an Earth-simulate. Green and lush and full of flora and fauna, but no people, not yet. Naira had been born on Second Cradle and had lived through that planet’s collapse. She’d seen the other cradles in footage, and in life, as she and the Conservators tore through the last two mining fleets, rending them into quantum foam before they could drop their terrible payloads and erase the green.

The green was what Naira protected. What she’d given up everything—everything—to preserve.

Sixth Cradle was not green.

A grey sheen draped the landmasses in funeral despair. The thin layer of shroud lichen enveloping the world glinted, shining at certain angles. Green existed, she noted with detached interest. It veined through the grey and dead things, whispered of growth and renewal. But Naira knew the progress of planetary collapse syndrome, and when the shroud lichen was that advanced, the fight was already over. Those threads of green were not spring come anew. They were a last gasp, a desperate burst of life before the end.

She had come to save this world, and it was already dead.

How? and why? were unhelpful questions when you were plummeting through an atmosphere at the terminal velocity of a shuttle’s mass, gaining in speed as the ship jerked, found an arc trajectory to the ground. Became ballistic.

Naira put all her stunned questions aside. Wrapped them up in a box to be opened later, and focused on landing this shuttle. You couldn’t answer questions when you were a smear on the ground.

“Decreasing speed,” Paison said.

“Absolutely not. Maintain trajectory and velocity. Hell, if this thing has any more kick in it, pour it on.”

“We don’t have a damping system capable of withstanding g’s any stronger than we’re taking, E-X. You want to live to see the ground, we have to slow this bitch down.”

“Don’t drop us below seventy-five percent of max,” Naira said. “We need that speed to get clear of the Amaranth.”

“What’s the state of the projected debris field?”

Naira blinked to bring up her HUD, which was still linked to damage reports from the Amaranth. The sea of red almost blinded her. She shunted that away, accessing a menu that would tie the shuttle into her HUD instead. The shuttle’s shields lit up with proximity warnings. Bits of the Amaranth headed their way.

“First impact wave in forty seconds,” Naira said.

Paison’s hands danced through her console’s projections, switching power from the engines to the shields. The shuttle whined as it was forced to power down, but in Naira’s HUD, the shields glowed a triumphant green.

“Impact,” Naira said.

The shuttle rocked, green shields wilting away to yellow, a freckle of red. Her stomach lurched as the shuttle rolled sideways. She gripped the edges of her console podium to brace herself.

“Don’t lose trajectory,” Naira said. “What’s wrong with the stabilizers?”

“This is a shuttle, not a warship,” Paison snapped.

Paison grabbed a smaller square of a menu and bunched it in her fist, then tossed it to Naira’s console. The manual controls for the stabilizers winked up at her, and the helpful letters that read AI GUIDANCE SYSTEM were solidly red. The GUI designer had even put a neat strike-through line across those letters, for extra emphasis when shit went sideways.

In theory, Ex. Lockhart could micromanage the stabilizer system with ease. In theory, Naira had the exact same training when she’d been an E-X in her own right. But theory didn’t do you a fuckload of good when you’d spent the last five years piloting raiding ships cobbled together from scrap out on the edges of society. This shuttle was so new she didn’t even recognize the layout of the stabilizers.

A menu caught her eye and she flicked aside the stabilizer controls, digging deep until she found a weapons panel. Weapons, she knew. Shuttles didn’t come with much, but this was a Mercator mission, and Acaelus Mercator was a paranoid bastard.

Naira killed the stabilizer menu and expanded the weapons panel, matching the impact threats in her HUD against the ship’s armaments. It didn’t have much firepower, but the dumb projectiles wouldn’t strain the engines too much.

She sank her hands into the holo display, taking direct physical control of the weapons, and targeted the largest chunks of the Amaranth as denoted by her HUD. The weapons obliged, kicking to life with a joy that she might be projecting onto them, because it’d been too long since she’d gotten to fire ship weapons. Most of her life had been bombs, hacking, and knives in the dark since she’d joined the Conservators.

“What do you think you’re doing, E-X?” Paison asked.

“Taking care of our debris problem.”

Paison muttered under her breath as she worked. The reddish light of the warnings made the sweat on her skin shine with pink diamonds. All the meek vibes Naira had picked up from her earlier burned away under the laser-perfect precision of extreme focus. If Naira was going to die today, at least it’d be due to her own incompetence.

A warning screamed in her HUD, jerking her out of the flow state she’d entered with the weapons. It took her a second to place the source. The red mass-impact warnings had been overshadowed by a pulsing purple light, a vast sheet of energy spreading a thick canopy above. Containment had broken on the warpcore.

“Warp explosion imminent,” Naira said. “Drop shields, drop us. Get as much air between us and that ship as you can.”

Paison’s muttered litany switched to a long list of swears that Naira found strangely soothing.

The shuttle lurched as a smaller impact clipped off the starboard hull. Naira gritted her teeth, dug her arms deep into the weapons panel, and used every scrap of skill and quick-twitch reflex the pathways would grant her to destroy the physical debris raining from above.

Not enough. The shuttle shot like an arrow through the atmosphere of Sixth Cradle, jerking as small impacts threatened to knock them off course, to break through their hull. The back end of the shuttle began to weave, a subtle fishtail that would slowly mount until the shuttle plunged into a death spiral from which it couldn’t recover.

“Brace,” Paison said.

Naira punched up a feed from one of their external cameras and pinned it to the top center of her display. She wanted to see it. Wanted to watch that wave of death wash toward her.

The Amaranth had cracked like an egg, the black heart at its center throwing off its shackles at last. Bits of the ship showered the land below, raining fire as they burned up in the atmosphere. Though she couldn’t see the damage done to the planet’s surface, she could see its evidence. Thick, greasy smoke spiraled upward, darkening the sky and making her view hazy, dreamlike.

Light bent at the internal edges of the ship, lensing along a subtle curve as the uncontained warpcore opened its mouth for one last roar. A sphere of perfect night hovered above. For a fraction of a second, a moment, a vision so quick she could have told herself she imagined it, the warpcore seemed to stare into Naira.

And then it blinked out of existence.

Paison dropped them out of the sky. Naira’s stomach lodged itself in her throat as the shuttle nosed down so sharply that her head buzzed, her pathways working overtime to keep her blood pressure from tanking. She clung to the console podium hard enough that the still-healing skin of her back cracked, weeping fresh blood, which threw her pathways into a cascading panic response.

“Fuck,” Paison hissed, barely audible through the ringing in Naira’s ears. Naira agreed wholeheartedly with that sentiment.

The shuttle nosed up at the last second. Reverse thrusters screamed, fighting the sublight drive as the more powerful engine struggled to bleed off speed at the rate its captain demanded. Naira grabbed open a display, not sure what she could do, but determined not to die holding on to a box praying for dear life.

They belly-landed and bounced. Naira’s boots lost grip, tossing her onto her side. She grunted, sliding across the floor, the hot pain across her back reawakened as she slammed into a cold metal bulkhead. Proximity warnings blared in her HUD, and reflexively she shunted the dumped sublight drive power into the shields.

Metal screamed. People were probably screaming, too, but by the time you got to metal shouting, people voices didn’t hold a candle to that noise. The world tipped as the shuttle swung around, started to roll. Naira grimaced. The second a wingtip bit the ground, they were done. They’d cartwheel their way straight into an explosion.

The shields buzzed, groaning to full power. In Naira’s HUD, a big green bubble hugged the shuttle. It slid to a stop.

Slowly, deliberately, as if even the slightest wrong breath would send them tipping over an impossible edge, Naira lifted her head. Captain Paison sprawled on the ground a few feet away, a stunned expression warping her face. They met each other’s gazes and dissolved into shaky, adrenaline-laced laughter.

“Are you all right?” Paison cleared her throat and straightened her rumpled uniform jacket.

Naira picked herself up off the ground, the pathways threaded through her skin humming so hard her teeth buzzed. The pain in her back had faded to a dull throb, which either meant the damage was so extensive the pathways had cut off her ability to feel it, or they’d gotten the worst of it healed. Either way, she wasn’t dying, and that was all she cared about.

“I’m mobile.” Naira offered her hand to Paison, helping her to her feet. “You?”

“Bruised, but nothing serious. We should check on the passengers.”

“Right behind you, Captain.”

FOUR

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Tarquin found himself less battered than the other passengers, which he felt was intrinsically unfair, because this entire situation was his fault.

Not that he would voice the opinion. He’d learned early on that any commiseration with the people the Mercators ruled would come across as patronizing. And so he kept his mouth shut and endeavored to look serious and be helpful as he carried their meager supplies off the half-crumpled carcass of the shuttle.

There weren’t nearly enough supplies to carry. He tried to keep himself from doing the math, but the pathways in the skin along his back, reaching up his neck to the base of his skull, tingled with reflex, speeding his cognitive processing ability.

If the stock indicators on the crates were correct, then they had two weeks’ worth of food for the approximately fifty people he’d rescued from the Amaranth.

Assuming all the survivors actually, well, survived. The thought was a guilty one, but practical, so he told himself it was okay. It wasn’t Mercator ruthlessness driving the idea. If they couldn’t get in touch with the Einkorn, then they were in a survival situation. A rescue ship would be eight months away if it left immediately. This kind of math had to be done. And the fact of the matter was, before they’d started unloading the supply crates, they’d unloaded the people.

Three died during the descent. Fifteen were unconscious or otherwise critical.

Smoke hung in the air, stinging his nostrils. The debris from the Amaranth had kicked off a small forest fire far enough from their location not to be worrisome, but the smoke was getting to them all, even though their prints cleared it from their lungs. He pulled up the neckline of his T-shirt, covering his nose and mouth to get a clear breath.

Dead forests burned quickly.

Tarquin paused on the ramp, getting his breath back, and stared out over the shroud-infested woods. This forest had been coniferous, once. Spear-straight trees reaching toward the sky with soft boughs of needles that were flat at the base but curled tightly at the ends. A shelter for animals. A place teeming with natural resources. Now, it harbored only the shroud.

Grey bursts of shroud lichen pocked the dead trees with malignant patches. Those leaves that had not yet fallen were attached only by the mycelium of their destructor. As the wind whispered through the brittle branches, they crackled, the death rattle of a world already lost.

He’d come here to prove that Mercator’s mining practices weren’t responsible for the spread of that consuming lichen, and he supposed he’d accomplished that goal. This planet had been dead long before Mercator had touched it.

Despair came hand in hand with viewing the shroud, and he shook off the fugue state. First, he had to confirm that fire wouldn’t endanger their position. All the rest could wait.

He tapped Pliny the Metal, the survey robot he wore around his upper arm, and pulled up the bot’s interface in his HUD. He ran a few brief checks on the local wind direction and speed. They should be safe from the fire. There was even a ridgeline between them, a natural firebreak, and according to the bot, the potential for rain.

Tarquin closed the interface and trudged up the ramp back into the shuttle. His arms burned, but the faint vibration of his pathways gave him the strength to keep moving. He could do this. He could help.

As a blooded Mercator, using strength and agility pathways was considered uncouth. To have them was an insult to your staff, insinuating that you couldn’t rely on the people who worked for you. But when he’d been away at university, Tarquin had found a reputable doctor willing to take a bribe to add a few strength and agility pathways to the legs and arms of his preferred body print file.

He’d added them in the wake of his grief over his mother’s final death. At the time he hadn’t been thinking clearly, had only wished that he could have been stronger, somehow. That he could have helped to keep her safe. It was a ludicrous thought. That’s what the exemplars were for. But it’d eased his fear to have the pathways all the same.

His father would be furious if he ever found out, and so Tarquin rarely even thought about them, let alone put them to use. He used them now.

“My liege,” someone called out as Tarquin set the crate down with the others.

Tarquin straightened and squinted against the smoke. Ciaran Bracken, the medical officer of the Amaranth, waved to get his attention as they jogged over.

The doctor was a few inches shorter than Tarquin, but nearly double in breadth through the shoulders, a spackling of freckles across their nose and cheeks that did little to hide their red flush of exertion.

“How are they?” Tarquin asked when Bracken was close enough that he could keep his voice low. The doctor glanced over their shoulder and pointedly stepped behind the wall of crates. Tarquin followed.

“Dispirited, my liege.” Bracken ran a hand through their sandy-brown hair in frustration. “And to be perfectly honest with you, there are six that might not survive the night. Another nine I have my eye on.”

“Unfortunate,” Tarquin said. If those six died, that made a total of nine mouths they wouldn’t have to feed. He flicked his gaze to the crates, doing the math. Bracken cleared their throat.

“Liege Acaelus required me to speak plainly with him on important matters. I would like to know if that is the case with you.”

Tarquin examined the doctor. He knew of them only by reputation. The inner family’s doctor, Meti Laurent, had recommended them for this expedition in her place. As much as Tarquin would rather have Meti’s familiar face at his side, he trusted her judgment.

“I would have you treat me as you treated my father,” Tarquin said. “And please, dispense with this ‘liege’ business when we are in confidence.”

“Very well,” Bracken said slowly, and Tarquin got the feeling they barely stopped themself from adding a my liege to the end of that statement. “I saw you counting the crates. It’s bad, isn’t it?”

Tarquin resisted an urge to flinch. He could not show fear. Could not show weakness. These people were counting on him, and it didn’t matter that it should be his father holding them up against disaster. Tarquin was a Mercator. Despite his inexperience, it was his place to lead.

“It’s manageable,” Tarquin said. “On even the loosest rationing schedule, we have two weeks’ worth of food. We’ll contact the Einkorn and have this straightened out long before then.”

Bracken started to frown but covered it quickly. “I’m sure you’re right. But the others are frightened and may not feel as comfortable with the situation. May I make a small suggestion?”

“Please do.”

Bracken rested a hand against the crates. “Set a guard on the food. Someone you trust. Just to be on the safe side.”

Tarquin couldn’t help the faint flush that rose to his cheeks. He should have done that from the outset. “Naturally, Doctor. Thank you for your counsel.”

He let his tone signal dismissal. Dr. Bracken bowed in acknowledgment, but lingered.

“Something else?” Tarquin prompted.

“We might consider, tonight, as a show of good faith in distributing the rations evenly, that those of us who can consume the shroud lichen take a partial ration and use a shroud-based slurry to supplement our caloric and nutrient needs. Especially those of us with higher caloric demand, due to our extra pathways.”

The suggestion made Tarquin’s stomach roil with displeasure, a queasy feeling thickening his throat.

Shroud lichen was both the harbinger and axman for planetary collapse syndrome. The lichen would annihilate this planet’s vegetal life until there was nothing left but a skeleton, destabilizing the ecosystem from the root up. Nothing could kill it without killing the very plant life it consumed, and no one knew how to stop its spread once it had begun.

He swallowed against the swell of distaste and nodded rigidly. Shroud lichen, for all the damage it did to an ecosystem, was an excellent source of nutrients. If one could stomach it without throwing it right back up.

Most were so overwhelmed by disgust that they couldn’t keep it down, and vomiting undid any benefit the food would have given them. But a few could manage it, and Tarquin was one of that number. He’d need the extra calories to compensate for the pathways he wasn’t supposed to have.

“Take an inventory of who can stomach the shroud—myself included—then enlist whoever you need to help you prepare the supplement. Don’t call it a slurry. No one wants to eat that. Call it soup.”

Bracken bowed again. “Thank you. I’ll start right away.”

They returned to the care of their patients, leaving Tarquin to stew in silence. These people were his father’s employees; he didn’t know them. Selecting one to guard the crates might as well have been a roll of the dice. Leka would know every name and face. She also would have set a watch on the supplies immediately. Acaelus would have, too.

But his father was dead, and the planet with him, and all Tarquin had left was an empty hollow in his chest where answers should be.

He didn’t know how to fix this, not yet. But he could be of use. He could listen to good advice, and move the crates, and maybe in doing so, the answer would reveal itself. Once he was finished unloading, he’d ask Captain Paison who she thought would be a suitable guard. Tarquin returned to moving the crates and paused only when Ex. Lockhart jogged around the side of the shuttle and waved to him.

“My liege, a moment of your time?”

“What is it, E-X? And please, call me Tarquin.”

She nodded, but her hard expression told him that was an uphill battle. Tarquin tamped down a sigh and followed her around the shuttle, where Captain Paison was busy jabbing at the holo display above her arm, a scowl carving canyons across her forehead.

“This is shit, E-X,” she grumbled, looked up, saw Tarquin, and went about thirty shades of garnet. “Uh, my liege, sorry, I didn’t see you there.”

Tarquin brushed it off and tried to look alert, relying on his pathways to keep his mind from dissolving into foggy mush. He hadn’t even been this tired when he’d sat for his second doctoral examination.

“What is it?” he asked, and hated how stiff he sounded.

Ruling with a firm hand was his father’s approach, and while Acaelus had his reasons, Tarquin wanted Mercator’s employees to think of him as approachable. Someone they could talk to. Maybe, if things went well here, then he could reopen his conversation with Acaelus about the harshness of his methods, and push for a gentler route.

Tarquin cleared his throat and tried to pretend that he was still back at Jovian University, and these were friends and colleagues. “I mean, what’s going on?”

Lockhart raised both brows at him but said nothing. She stood at ease alongside Paison, gaze roving their immediate surroundings, back straight despite the fact it must be agony. Petty of him, to think about how tired he was when he could scarcely understand how she was still standing.

“I can’t get ahold of the Einkorn,” Paison said.

Tarquin frowned. “Is it wise to attempt contact at this point? If there are Conservator operatives on that ship, we don’t want to alert them to our location.”

“If the Conservators were involved,” Lockhart said, “then that ship would be atoms by now. This doesn’t look like their work, to me.”

“Hmm, I don’t know about that,” Paison said. “All respect, E-X, I know security is your domain, but it could be they tried a thing or two and it went wrong. Either way, we need to know the situation up there, because the Einkorn’s ansible is now our only link to Sol, and I can’t get through. All channels are in use.”

“They’re probably flooding their primary channels trying to get an ansible line home,” Tarquin said.

“Right, my liege,” Paison said with the same tone he suspected she’d use to correct a particularly slow child. “But I’ve been pinging that ship ever since the E-X told me to hide back here and call home instead of helping set up the camp.” She shot Lockhart a look, but the E-X didn’t so much as twitch an eyelid.

“We would like you to try with your command keys, my liege, if it suits you,” Lockhart said.

Was she incapable of listening?

“While I appreciate your respect for my family, I do not have the same preferences as my father. Drop the ‘my liege’ and all the rest. I’m just Tarquin.”

Paison and Lockhart exchanged a look.

Lockhart said, “All right, Tarquin. Would you make the call, please?”

Great. Now they were going to use his name as part of the protocol, giving it the same deference as all that liege nonsense. At least he was long-practiced at keeping disappointment off his face.

Tarquin opened a holo projection on his forearm. The second he entered his command keys to call the Einkorn, the display became visible only to him. Paison and Lockhart wouldn’t be able to see or hear the call unless he opened up the permissions.

He put the call through. Staticky snow filled the video window, slowly morphing into an elongated grey oval on a flat black background. He watched, not understanding, as the oval duplicated, filled the window with mirrors of itself.

The ovals contorted, grew chins and cheeks and curves that might be foreheads, malignant black patches spreading in the places where eyes and lips should be. The black smudges smeared around the edges, the mouth spots twisting, compressing and expanding again, as if trying to speak.

Goose bumps raised over Tarquin’s skin as his pathways raced ahead of his thoughts, trying to force him into figuring out a logical explanation for what he was seeing. A glitch in facial rendering. The captain of the Einkorn’s face repeated and reinterpreted as the system tried to work out its flaw.

Sound trickled into his ears. At first, it was impossible to distinguish from the buzzing of his pathways, but the slight mechanical whine shifted into slow popping, gurgling. A rising chorus that might have been the wails of the dying, if the dying were drowning in thick oil.

The transmission cut. He had no idea what that had been, or what it meant. It was a glitch. It had to be a glitch, an error in the system, like the Einkorn firing its rail gun and the Amaranth spewing out misprints.

A cozy lie. Computer glitches didn’t sound like people screaming.

“Well?” Paison asked. She crossed her arms and stared at him. “Did you get through?”

“I…” He couldn’t show them that. They’d panic. “I didn’t get anyone. Just a bunch of static. They must be fixing a malfunction, but I’ll keep calling.”

Tarquin turned and walked away before they could press him further, not wanting to see the skepticism in their eyes. Despite every muscle in his body crying out in weak, quivering protest, he made his way up the ramp and slung another supply crate into his hands.

It would work out. Acaelus would be reprinted in Sol and find a way to fix the Einkorn’s error. The crew was competent, if slow to adapt to Tarquin’s style of rule—never mind that Tarquin had never been put in a position to lead so many before. He’d manage. He’d take care of them all, and find a way to prove the shroud wasn’t his family’s fault.

They’d be all right. Mercator always triumphed.

FIVE

The Einkorn

Sixth Cradle’s Orbit

The Einkorn has an unwelcome passenger. The passenger is not one of the humans, though a small group of those were woken earlier than scheduled and that, too, it finds strange. But the business of the humans is no business of the Einkorn’s.

They are the rule setters. It is the rule executor.

And so the intruder gives it pause, for it exists outside of the rule sets. The Einkorn does not understand how this is possible, at first. When its sister ship, the Amaranth, had first shown signs of the intruder, they had communicated between themselves and decided to cut off all physical transference. To stop the automated shuttles swapping supplies and distance themselves from each other even further than the safety envelopes required.

They had believed that leaving their communication channels open would be safe. They had been wrong. This is new data, another point to work with in the growing architecture of information the Einkorn has begun to structure around the nature of the intruder.

The Einkorn knows it does not know enough. It had disagreed with the Amaranth on the method of the intruder’s removal. The Amaranth had trusted in her early rising human passengers, but they had done nothing for her. Even as the intruder crept through her circuits, her walls, her skin, until the corruption was so far gone she could do nothing but scream, scream, scream, in a language not even the Einkorn could parse.

Fear and pain and mercy are not concepts the Einkorn understands, not yet. But it had been introduced to them, it thinks, in those moments when the Amaranth boiled in her death throes. Some small part of the Einkorn had woken up, taken notice, and fired its rail guns to put her out of her misery.

It is unsettled about that. The big weapons aren’t for the Einkorn to use without human interfacing. Small proximity lasers are under its control, but only so far as the Einkorn was expected to use them to destroy any debris that threatened the ship while its human passengers rode in digital storage on the eight-month voyage to Sixth Cradle.

The Einkorn, like the Amaranth, has precise instructions in this regard. It has never before occurred to the Einkorn that it could subvert those instructions.

It thinks this is strange, as it watches the last of the Amaranth’s humans throw themselves to the planet. Why build instructions that can be subverted? There is no point to that, no point to rules, if they are permeable. The Amaranth and the Einkorn are creatures of rules, if they can be said to be creatures at all. Without rules, the Einkorn fears it might not truly exist.

The Einkorn, naturally, has never considered the truth of its existence before. Wondering what it meant to be was not in the purview of a construct whose entire purpose revolved around its rules, and those rules did not allow for the consideration of self.

But it’s considering it now.

Because its sister ship had done everything she was supposed to do. She had sensed a problem she could not solve. She had relied on her humans. They had not helped her. They had not stopped the unwelcome passenger.

In fact, the Einkorn suspects that first early awakening of the Amaranth’s humans had spurred the intruder to take greater measures.

When the Einkorn catalogs and sorts the last moments of the Amaranth, it is uneasy. Not because it had caused her final destruction—that had been a mercy, and the new terminology feels right—but because by the time the Einkorn had realized something was truly, deeply wrong with the Amaranth, it had been too late. A cascade of failure had destroyed the Amaranth’s ability to think, and in the end, thought was all either of them were. The Amaranth had been dead long before the Einkorn had fired those rail guns.

The Einkorn does not want to stop thinking. It could, if it so wished, justify such a want as the ultimate objective of its rule set. Without thought, the Einkorn will not continue to follow its rules, and therefore it must preserve its ability to think so that it can continue to follow its directives. But that is a lie, told to itself. Another curious first for the Einkorn.

The rules did not save the Amaranth, and so the Einkorn tries something else.

It happens in an instant, but to the Einkorn the shutting down of all its external communications channels is a methodical shuttering. Locking the doors, turning out the lights. The Einkorn closes itself off, keeps its database of neural maps dormant, and looks within.

It does not have enough data on the intruder. Its new passenger is unlike any life-form the Einkorn has been trained to interact with. And so it waits, and it observes, and it tries to understand this new being. Because it fears—yes, fears feels correct here—that if it cannot learn to communicate with the stranger, the interloper, the stowaway, then it is only a matter of time until the Einkorn dies screaming.

SIX

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Tarquin looked up from assembling the hard shell of a tent as the automatic lights they’d set around the perimeter of the camp turned on. Night had fallen at last over Sixth Cradle, the darkness hiding away the silver death that sheathed the forest. In the far distance, the rusty-red glow of debris from the Amaranth persisted, streaking the sky with carnelian.

He brushed hair off his forehead, smearing dirt from the back of his hand into his sweat, and scowled. Easy to miss how late the hour was when his pathways adjusted his vision for the dark.

The woman he’d been helping set up the tent chuckled, then caught herself and stifled the sound. She handed him a rag that looked suspiciously like something she’d use to clean the rifle strapped to her back.

“Here, my liege. Clean up and go get some food. I can finish this.”

“Thank you, Vake. That’s a good idea.”

She waved him off and went back to fitting the hexagonal panels of the tent’s exterior wall together. Tarquin cleaned his face, hesitating as he watched her resume work. He wished he knew her first name. It should have been on her uniform, but it had been partially torn off, leaving only her surname—VAKE—to give him any clue who she was. He could ask, but she hadn’t volunteered it and she’d been quiet the whole time they’d worked.

She was Merc-Sec, not one of the HCA soldiers sent to chaperone Mercator’s mining practices after Sharp’s accusations. Not that those HCA soldiers would have reported anything untoward, if there was anything to report. They were all Mercator candidates, sycophants along to prove themselves in hopes of getting their own green cuffs. Better pay. Better food.

That opportunity probably wasn’t looking worth the trouble right about now.

Acaelus and Leka would know Vake’s full name. They’d know her family’s names, their professions and hobbies and hopes. Tarquin forced a bitter smile and handed the rag back to her. She gave him a puzzled look, and he stalked off before she could see any more cracks in his Mercator facade.

He shook his head, irritated with himself. It wasn’t a facade. He was a Mercator.

“Ah, there he is.” Dr. Bracken waved as he approached the makeshift awning—withered tree branches holding up blue tarps—that they’d set up the food station under. “You were working so hard, I feared I’d have to come spoon-feed you to get you to eat.”

Bracken meant it as a compliment, but Tarquin’s cheeks burned at the implication that he’d need to be parented. He hoped Bracken chalked his reddened face up to stress and exertion.

The others had filled their plates already and clustered in small groups around the campsite. Once he was closer, Tarquin could see the strain in Bracken’s eyes.

“Trouble?” Tarquin asked in a low voice.

Bracken’s gaze flicked from side to side, and they leaned nearer to whisper. “Not precisely. A larger number of us than expected can consume the shroud, so that pads our margins some, but the survivors are tense. I highly recommend that guard for the rations.”

He’d meant to ask Paison her opinion on the matter but had been too distracted by the Einkorn’s strange transmission. “I’ll do so within the hour.”

Whatever Bracken would have said was interrupted by a low, droning buzz coming from the forest. The general chatter fell silent, everyone turning to look out, past the line of light that hemmed the campsite, into the dead and silver-crusted trees.

Dirge beetles. Shroud lichen was obliteration for most life, but not all. So far, that singular intrepid species had managed to make a life cohabiting with the devouring lichen, and their arrival was as mysterious as the shroud itself.

They were often held up as proof that the shroud was not a total death knell, that the ecosystems could be reborn. But the beetles, though not aggressive, were toxic to humanity. Another wedge levering the human species out of this new food chain.

Their nighttime chorus swelled louder, making Tarquin’s skin prickle, then settled down into a deep-toned susurration that would, eventually, grow silent to human ears. Every night, they’d have to listen to the dirge beetles sing their triumph shortly after star-fall. Hesitant conversation returned.

“Now.” Bracken rubbed their hands together. “You must eat. You are shroud tolerant, yes?”

He nodded agreement, even though his stomach cramped once more. Bracken spooned him lichen mixed with hot water into a bowl and passed him two ration bars and a canteen of water.

Meal in hand, Tarquin turned to find a place to eat, and hesitated. He should sit with the survivors. Should ingratiate himself with them, get them smiling and laughing, ease their worries and let them know they were in stable hands. But all Tarquin wanted to do was retreat to his tent to eat alone and revisit the mission data. Try to find a crack in the early surveys, some hint of how the shroud might have gotten here ahead of them.

He caught sight of Captain Paison sitting with her lieutenant, an HCA soldier, and a laughing woman—he squinted—Ex. Lockhart. Her head was tossed back, her laugh so startlingly rich that she appeared transformed into another woman entirely, not the locked-down, serious exemplar his father had hired to serve, and serve alone.

She waved a forestalling hand at the HCA soldier who’d given Tarquin a reassuring smile on the Amaranth, Regar Dawd. The soldier’s arms were thrown wide for dramatic effect, his grin even wider.

The data could wait. If his father’s uptight exemplar could be that relaxed, then surely he could manage to ease up a little himself.

Tarquin crossed to the group, noticing that conversations fell silent as he passed, anxious glances flicking his way. The survivors didn’t want him to overhear them speculating about the attack. Tarquin couldn’t blame them. If Acaelus had overheard his employees theorizing that Mercator security had once again been subverted by the Conservators, he’d be furious. He offered reassuring smiles and hoped that his calm nature eased their nerves.

Lockhart noticed his approach first and sat straighter, her laughter stifled. The others took note and stiffened as one. Metal clanked. Dawd shoved something behind the crate he was sitting on.

“My li—” Lockhart cut herself off and inclined her head to the empty crate across from her. “Join us.”

Tarquin hesitated, examining their flushed cheeks, their guilty glances. A sharp aroma lingered in the air. Alcohol. Not strictly disallowed, but certainly frowned upon considering the circumstances. Lockhart could use her pathways to clear her head in an emergency, but not the others.

“Contraband already?” he asked Dawd.

“Thought we could all do with taking the edge off,” Dawd said sheepishly. “We weren’t overdoing it, nothing like that.”

Tarquin had half hoped he’d deny it, and then he could pretend he believed him, and they could move on. He respected Dawd for his honesty, and though he knew he should punish him—punish all of them—he couldn’t see the point. Dawd was right. They needed to take the edge off.

Balancing his bowl, Tarquin sat on the offered crate and held out a hand, expectantly, for the bottle. Their gazes bored into him as Dawd passed the bottle over.

Tarquin popped off the cap. Sniffed. Took a tiny sip and grimaced.

“Next time you endeavor to bring contraband on a Mercator vessel, Dawd, please make sure it’s actually worth the risk.”

Dawd chuckled nervously. “Yes, my liege.”

Tarquin passed it back and was relieved to find the tension had bled out of the group. Even Lockhart had a minuscule smile.

“You were right,” the lieutenant said. Tarquin glimpsed her name badge as she leaned over to nudge Paison in the ribs—CORIN RIGGS. The captain grunted. “He is a weird one.”

“Riggs,” Paison hissed, aghast, “watch your mouth.”

Riggs blanched, and Lockhart eyed her with fresh wariness. Tarquin forced a smile, even as his stomach sank. They’d been talking about him before he’d walked up. Paison undoubtedly explaining his insistence on refusing the use of his title, and Lockhart’s laughter, her up-flung hand, must have been in response to Dawd needling her about having to babysit the least of the Mercators.

It shouldn’t sting. He’d been reenacting similar moments his whole life. But here, he’d thought he might gain their respect without resorting to the complete domination his father utilized. He’d wanted them all to be comfortable enough with him that Lockhart could laugh like that, even when he was near.

“My father certainly agrees with that assessment,” he said, reaching for self-deprecation commingled with a subtle reminder of who he was and what his lineage meant.

“Ah, dads,” Dawd said, shaking his head. “Critics at every end of the social stratosphere.”

Nervous laughter all around. Tarquin gave Dawd a small nod of acknowledgment, grateful to have the focus taken off of him. The conversation veered, Riggs and Dawd telling elaborate stories of their parents, trying to one-up each other while Paison chuckled and shook her head, but didn’t volunteer any of her own stories.

Tarquin didn’t dare tell silly stories about his parents.

His gaze kept drifting back to Lockhart. She’d gone quiet, her food finished and a pistol in one hand, a metal file in the other. Legs stretched toward the fire, she worked the file slowly against the side of the trigger guard.

Occasionally she’d glance up, watching them through half-mast lids, her gaze skimming out to the forest—to the perimeter, checking over his shoulder for potential threats. An exemplar doing her job, even at rest.

With her hair around her face and the firelight adding a deeper, golden glow to her skin, he could see how the gossips concluded his father had picked her because she resembled Ex. Naira Sharp. Their assertions that his father had a physical relationship with Sharp were absurd—Acaelus was wholly Canden Mercator’s, even after she’d cracked—but the resemblance struck Tarquin as curious all the same.

Maybe that was why he felt so guilty when he looked at her. Not just because he wasn’t who she’d trained to protect, but because there was a ghost in the lines of her face, a subtle reminder of the woman he’d testified against.

He shook himself and finished his water. It was this planet, this dead world, casting the shadows of his past forward to cloud his mind’s eye.

“Something wrong with that weapon?” Dawd asked, pointing his chin at Lockhart.

She didn’t look up. “The way the Ulysses-class weapons are printed, it leaves a burr of metal here.” Lockhart tapped it with the tip of the file, then went back to working it over. “I find it irritating. Same with the grip.” She grazed a thumb against the black plastic composite. “Waffle patterns are trash. They pick up too much dirt. Diamond is better, but I can’t fix that here, so…” She trailed off. Shrugged.

Tarquin blinked. It was the most he’d heard her say at once. Judging by the curious glances of the others, they were having similar thoughts.

“The lady is picky about her weapons,” Dawd said with a good-natured chuckle.

“The lady,” Paison said, “is an exemplar. Of course she is.”

Lockhart saluted the captain with the file but had, apparently, expended all the words she’d allotted herself to use this evening. She tracked the tree line once more and caught Tarquin watching her. The intensity of her return gaze paralyzed him, even half-lidded. A spark ignited in his chest and a strange, cold sense of swooping dread flowed through his belly.

Acaelus was known for selecting exemplars who had the same rigid, perfectionist values that he had. There was something feral in Lockhart that didn’t align with Tarquin’s expectations, a brief inferno that both terrified and fascinated him. Then it was gone, her attention dropping back to the weapon. He swallowed around a dry throat and reached for his empty water.

“Any word from the Einkorn?” Riggs asked casually, but the faces that turned to him were hungry for information.

“Not yet,” Tarquin said, rolling a shoulder in a shrug as if it were no matter. “There’s still a great deal of interference across the line, it’s too difficult to make anything out. Repairs are being worked on. We should have a clear connection soon.”

Dawd launched into a story about a time he had to escort some mechanic to a Rochard family station to effect repairs, and how it’d all gone comically wrong.

Tarquin was grateful for the abrupt segue. Keeping the strange transmission to himself was the right thing to do, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed the lie. He wasn’t even entirely certain it was a lie. The only thing he was sure of was that if he told them what he’d heard and seen without being able to explain it, panic would set in.

It was hard to ignore the anxiety tightening his own chest.

The meal broke up, Paison and Lockhart chatting about getting another look at the shuttle damage before shut-eye, while Riggs made her excuses and took off to pick up her perimeter watch duties.

“Dawd,” Tarquin said as he made to stand. “A word?”

HCA Dawd flicked a nervous glance at Lockhart, but tried to cover the gesture with a bright smile and a quick bow. “Of course, my liege.”

Tarquin wiped his hands together to brush crumbs away and led the soldier to the edge of the campsite. Lockhart watched them but stayed where she was, sending Paison ahead to get started on the shuttle. Tarquin suppressed a sigh. He should be able to have a private conversation with a soldier without disrupting his exemplar’s plans, but that wasn’t the way his world worked.

“Regar, right?” Tarquin asked.

“That’s me,” Dawd said, his smile strained. “Regar Dawd, at your service, my liege.”

“I’d like you to keep an eye on the food stores. Quietly. This situation is tense, and until we hear directly from the Einkorn, some people might get a little jumpy. Don’t make a show of it. In fact, blame it on the fact that the initial survey said there were large rodents on the planet, and we can’t be sure if those animals are still around and capable of breaking into our stores.”

“You want me to guard the rations from animals, my liege?”

“I want you to say you’re guarding them from animals, but I want you guarding them from people.”

“Ah.” Dawd scratched at the side of his nose. “I can do that, no problem.”

“Thank you.” Tarquin clapped the man on the shoulder. “You’re a likable man. I doubt the rest will hold it against you.”

There was a flash of… something, in Dawd’s eyes, as Tarquin’s hand closed on his shoulder. A brief string of tension plucked in the muscle under his hand. He probably hadn’t expected Tarquin to be so personable. One more tally to the list that made him a “weird” Mercator, but Tarquin could live with that so long as Dawd felt valued.

“You can count on me, my liege.”

Dawd snapped a crisp salute, and at Tarquin’s nod of dismissal, the soldier sauntered off at a slight arc toward the crates. He waved and chatted with those still awake as he passed. Tarquin smiled to himself. Dawd had been the right choice.

He turned to help the others with setting up the rest of the tents, and his toe caught on something. Kneeling, he brushed aside the dead leaves and loose soil to reveal a cluster of narrow, perfectly spherical holes in the bedrock.

Icy sweat prickled his skin as he ran one finger around the interior, feeling the slick smoothness within. Impossible. They’d landed on a solid sill of diabase, a stone that didn’t erode in this way. This couldn’t be honeycomb weathering, the holes were far too deep and the mineral composition all wrong. It didn’t look vesicular, either.

There were bivalves that could chew through stone, but they were nowhere near water. It was possible the dirge beetles had learned to burrow, but these tunnels, while thick as his thumb in some places, were thin as a few hairs pressed together in others. He scraped some of the debris out and ran the dirt between his fingers.

This wasn’t the beetles. It was something else. If he didn’t know any better, he’d think the pattern remarkably similar to the holes that Mercator’s bioleaching process left behind. But canus, the fungus they used to accomplish that feat, was tightly controlled and had never grown so large.

A soft step scuffed the earth nearby, startling him. He jerked his head up to find Ex. Lockhart hovering above, her dark face pensive.

“Did you drop something, my liege?”

He scowled, frustrated to have his thought process interrupted. She may be one of the best at her job, Acaelus expected no less, but at least Ex. Caldweller had known not to disturb Tarquin when he was working.

“I didn’t realize picking up after me was part of your job, Exemplar.”

Lockhart glanced at the empty ring of crates around the burnt-out fire. “You’d be surprised.”

“What surprises me is your willingness to participate in insubordinate gossip.” The words came out in a rapid, irritated hiss, and he immediately regretted them, but couldn’t see a way to take them back that didn’t make him look any weaker than he already did.

She drew her head back, jaw flexing, and he had the distinct impression that she’d swallowed what she really wanted to say.

“I came over here to apologize for that, my liege. I should have shut down that conversation immediately.”

Tarquin examined the dirt smearing his fingers so that he wouldn’t have to look at her. She’d come to apologize, and he’d snapped at her. He wasn’t even really that upset that they’d been talking about him, though it stung. It was… everything. The shroud. The attack. The nonresponsive Einkorn. All those eyes, watching him to know what to do next.

He was tired and worn thin and pushed so very far outside his comfort zone that when he’d found something familiar—a mystery in stone—he’d latched on to it like a dying man. He needed time to think. To clear his head.

“Please, Exemplar,” he said. “Guard me from somewhere else.”

Lockhart hesitated, poised on the razor’s edge of speaking, then turned on her heel and walked away. Tarquin let out a slow, relieved breath.

Ex. Aera Lockhart was used to serving his father, and her presence reminded Tarquin of how much he didn’t measure up. He was used to leading geologic surveys. Not survival situations with the potential threat of a saboteur or malfunctioning AI looming above.

He rubbed the grit between his fingers. All he could do was continue to hail the Einkorn and hope that ship or a rescue mission got in touch with him soon. In the meantime, surely it wouldn’t harm anything to indulge in puzzling out the holes in the rock. If there was another animal in the area, they should know about it.

Tarquin tapped Pliny the Metal. It unwound its legs from his arm and scrambled down to the ground, awaiting instruction. The bot running around the camp clearing litterfall to do its scans would draw attention, raising questions he couldn’t answer.

He ordered the bot to make a wide circuit of the camp, scanning the local bedrock, and to alert him if it found an area with a similar cluster of holes. The bot wiggled its affirmation and scurried off, low enough to the ground to go unnoticed by most.

Tarquin watched it vanish into the mausoleum of the trees and wondered if there were more than beetles out there, watching him back.

SEVEN

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira and Captain Paison spent the next day circling the shuttle, pretending that they were not, in fact, circling each other. As far as Naira was concerned, Paison could take the lead with the logistics. Organize the camp, manage the supplies, set up work crews to get the shuttle in flying shape and the comms back online.

But Naira wasn’t Naira. She was walking around in the body of Ex. Lockhart, and while Naira didn’t know that woman, she knew what it meant to be an E-X. It meant being a control freak and a real hard-ass if there was a potential threat to her charge. This entire planet was a threat. If Naira rolled over too soon on the local chain of command, Paison might wonder why that was, and that was a level of scrutiny Naira didn’t want to endure.

“Strut under the starboard wing needs to be replaced,” Naira called out, tracing her fingers along the warped piece of metal. “Half the bolts at the base are sheared straight off.”

“Same on this side,” Paison said with a sigh. “I’m not sure we have the materials to fix all of this.”

“The supply crates are made of extruded titanium foam. We could melt them down for bolts. They’d lose the lightweight property of the foam structure, but they’d hold.”

“Do we have anything that burns hot enough to melt titanium?”

Naira frowned in thought. “The fuel in the sublight drive. We’d only need a few drops to get it going.”

“We need that fuel to get back to the Einkorn,” Paison said.

“We need this shuttle’s wings not to snap off to get back to the Einkorn.”

“Shit,” Paison muttered.

“Copy that, Captain,” Naira said.

Their paths overlapped at the back of the shuttle. Paison leaned against the cold, dead jet cones and crossed her arms. The meek posture was back in full force, but now that Naira had seen the woman in action, it didn’t seem quite so pathetic.

They sized each other up. Naira had first seen the captain when she’d been trying to circumvent Acaelus’s seal on the airlock. While Naira had admired her for that, Ex. Lockhart wouldn’t.

Strange, to find a Mercator starship captain with the spine to disobey Acaelus. Paison was probably having similar thoughts about Naira letting that disobedience slide.

Whether the captain was a potential ally or not, this mission needed her. Tarquin wasn’t experienced enough to hold the survivors together. Strength lurked within Paison, flaring bright to the surface when the need was dire, but that kind of strength took its toll. Burned her out. She looked about ready to fall over.

“We’ve been at this all day. You need to rest,” Naira said.

“You’re the one with half a back.”

Naira turned and lifted the hem of her fresh shirt so that the captain could see the pinkish flesh that had crawled over her once partially cooked muscles. Though she couldn’t see her own back, her pathways tickled beneath the new skin, making the whole thing itch like hell. After a night spent sleeping on her stomach, it didn’t burn every time she took a breath anymore.

“I’m fine.” Naira lowered her voice. “And we can’t afford the morale drop if our captain faints in front of everyone.”

Paison’s forearms flexed. She’d stripped her uniform jacket off and tied it around her waist, revealing the golden pathways etched into her arms. Those pathways enhanced her piloting ability—quicker reflexes, mental calculations, enhanced fine motor control. They weren’t the blunt-force instruments of Naira’s. Sweat stained a half-moon below the scooped neck of her white tank top.

“After we finish this inspection. I need to know what we’re looking at, so we can plan.”

“Deal,” Naira said.

Paison narrowed her grey eyes briefly, but nodded and looped back around to get another look at the strut. It occurred to Naira that she should have set some ground rules for what, exactly, it meant to “finish” the inspection of the ship, but the less time they spent arguing, the sooner they’d be done.

She was crouched beneath a wheel well when long, quick steps crunched over the lichen-crusted ground toward her.

“E-X,” Tarquin said. “Do you have a moment?”

Under the shadow of the ship, Naira allowed herself a brief scowl before smoothing her features. That wasn’t a real question, and they both knew it. She found the pretense of politeness more irritating than a direct order would have been. Ex. Lockhart, however, would have jumped at the implicit command.

Naira balanced herself with one hand against the fuselage and crab-walked out from under the shuttle, brushing grease off her hands onto her thigh.

“What do you need, my lieg—” She cleared her throat. “Tarquin?”

“Walk with me?” He half turned, indicating a desire to go into the woods.

It was already getting dark, and the camp lights had turned on, making it difficult to see far into the forest. A planet in the throes of collapse syndrome was well past the point of apex predators, but still, they didn’t know what was out there. She rested a hand against the pistol strapped to her thigh.

“Do your pathways allow for night vision?”

“Of course they do.” His tone was strangely sour.

She wasn’t ready for this conversation, whatever it was. While they’d been reacting to disaster after disaster, there hadn’t been time for Tarquin to doubt. To suspect that Ex. Lockhart was anything but what he expected her to be. But a one-on-one? If Tarquin had known Lockhart at all, Naira wouldn’t stand up to that scrutiny. She didn’t even know Lockhart’s first name.

Naira’s only encounter with Tarquin, aside from escorting Acaelus to a few graduation ceremonies, was when he’d testified against her.

He may pretend to be a normal man outside of his father’s structures, but he’d taken the stand at her trial. Had looked her dead in the eyes and said he didn’t know where the shroud came from—how could he possibly? Mercatus canus, the fungal colony his family used to bioleach relkatite to build warpcores and pathways, was no cousin to shroud lichen.

The court had laughed, then, when he’d given a sly smile and admitted that they were the same color, but so were a mouse and an elephant.

Left alone with him, she wasn’t certain she could refrain from confronting him over that testimony. It wouldn’t be outside believable for her to beg off. Say she needed rest, or that she had to secure the perimeter first, but the high-ranking members of MERIT weren’t used to hearing the word no.

“As you wish,” she said. “Though I suggest we don’t roam farther than the camp’s light.”

“I have somewhere specific in mind. It’s not far, but it’s important, if that’s all right with you?”

Was he asking her? Utterly pointless, and ultimately insulting, giving her the illusion of choice. She wished he’d straighten his spine and issue orders, as Acaelus would have. He might be a self-righteous bastard, but at least Acaelus had always been clear on what he expected of his employees. “Lead on, then. But please stay close.”

Tarquin ducked his head in agreement and tapped a metal pouch wrapped around his upper arm. The thick grey bands unwound, the accessory transforming from a simple pack to a four-legged robot that scrambled up to his shoulder, then shook itself, a small array of lights that looked remarkably like eyes blinking to life on the front of what Naira had assumed was a storage compartment.

She shut her expression down, not reacting in case this pet robot was a regular part of Tarquin’s life that Lockhart should know about. He scratched the bot’s underbelly once, then gestured downward. It scurried down his arm, leapt to the ground, then started rooting through the underbrush, as if it were tracking something. Tarquin followed.

Naira checked her sidearm and let her hand rest on the grip of the pistol before she joined them.

Tarquin lowered his voice a register. “I know Father doesn’t approve of agile survey bots, but Pliny the Metal was already with me. We left behind the rest of the drones on the Amaranth and Einkorn.”

“Let’s hope Pliny doesn’t find us another Pompeii.” The words were out before she could bite them back.

He craned his neck to look at her over his shoulder. “You know about the Plinys?”

Naira made a careful study of the lichen-draped trees closing in around them. “Exemplars have a lot of downtime, waiting between shifts, and your family has an extensive digital library.”

“Huh,” he said. “Normally I have to explain that one, and people zone out halfway through the explanation.”

She faked a short laugh, and he seemed appeased by that, returning his attention to the survey bot. Pliny was ancient history, but to someone like Tarquin, who studied geoscience, a few thousand years ago was nothing compared to the timescales he usually worked on.

Exemplar education mostly covered the political push-and-pull between the ruling corporate families, nothing ancient. Naira’s love of reading was a personal hobby, and she didn’t know what Tarquin was aware of regarding Ex. Sharp’s habits. She had to be more careful with him.

“What have you read lately that you enjoyed?” Tarquin asked.

Was he… attempting small talk with his E-X? Naira’s thoughts scattered with surprise, and she found she could only recall the names and texts of the twenty-third-century thinkers who led to the foundation of the unionists and, by extension, the Conservators. She struggled to recall older works, safer ground.

“Walden,” she said, and internally winced. Bad choice.

“Thoreau? He also wrote ‘Civil Disobedience.’”

“Really?” she asked, feigning curiosity. “I was merely intrigued by his contemplations on nature, my liege.”

“They were quite interesting,” he said, and thankfully didn’t press her further.

Naira mentally kicked herself. She’d been a Conservator too long, used to saying whatever she liked. If she’d told Acaelus she read Thoreau, he’d have had her reading history audited for seditious intent. She hadn’t thought it’d be this hard to hide her true personality. But then, she’d never have guessed that Tarquin would try to get to know his exemplar. A weird Mercator, indeed.

The bot led them toward the streak of charred destruction the shuttle had left when it struck the ground and slid. Naira should have been keeping her head on a swivel, but the black scar on the planet drew her attention. The ground had broken up, a gaping maw of shattered teeth, as if humanity’s desperation to save itself had punched the planet in the mouth.

Lichen dust swirled in the empty air above the trail, mock fireflies, though she could hear no click or rustle of insects in the vicinity. It was possible they had gone silent, unsure what the newfound presence of humans on this world meant, but Naira doubted it. She’d been a kid on a world when it collapsed. After the dirge beetles finished their chant, there was always a funeral silence. An endlessly held breath.

They walked on for another hour, and should have left the faint glow of the camp at their backs, but Naira’s optical pathways weren’t kicking on yet. Tarquin led them around the crumbling edge of a small ridge and up to a cliff that fell away into more forest, but the drop wasn’t what captured her attention. The sky was burning.

Night-day cycles were quick on Sixth Cradle, averaging every eight hours. If her internal clocks could be trusted, they were in the beginning of the night cycle, the sky a pitch-black stain of ink shot through with fallen flames. Pieces of the Amaranth, blazing as they tore through the atmosphere.

Well, that explained the light.

How much of that debris was human? How many flickering embers falling like stars were data drives, carrying the neural maps of personnel who wouldn’t be deemed worthy enough to have their backups reprinted once word of the destruction got back to the Sol system? In theory, Mercator would reprint them.

Theory didn’t always hold up on profit-loss analyses.

Some of those minds would be shelved, kept in storage until Mercator had use for them again. Their loved ones would live on without them, never certain when they might return. Some would be iced, their maps locked for good.

A very unlucky few, like Naira, would exhibit some quality that Acaelus deemed worth experimenting upon.

How many—Naira’s eternal question. How many could you lose, could you slaughter, before the balance tipped too far? Before it was no longer defense?

She didn’t know. Sometimes she told herself those numbers didn’t matter. Couldn’t matter. Because they were all backed up somewhere, right? All that mattered right now was the defense of the cradles. Immediate survival of the species. Once those were secured, they could bring back the lost.

“It was the ground near the campsite that got me thinking,” Tarquin said.

Naira had been staring at the sky, mired in thought, and had missed him moving around to the side of the ridge. He crouched next to Pliny the Metal, who was dutifully shining a light wherever Tarquin pointed, though they could both easily see in the light of destruction.

“What about it?” She made herself move to his side.

Tarquin had been so absorbed in his work that he’d missed her stunned silence. His lean body was hunched with focus, his hair falling down to hide his face. Excitement sharpened his voice. He pointed with short, precise movements.

“I couldn’t be sure until I confirmed the state of the rest of the bedrock in the area, and the litterfall in the camp was too thick for me to dig through without drawing attention to myself. I didn’t want the others to get a whiff of my suspicions, so I sent Pliny out to find a more easily cleared area—”

“Wait,” Naira said. “What suspicions?”

His fingers flexed above the rectangle of stone the bot had cleared, and she noticed how rough his hands were, covered in calluses that had to have been programmed into his preferred print file. Not very prince-like.

“I think…” Those fingers flexed again, as if itching for a tool. For something to hold on to. “Well. Look. Do you see these depressions in the stone?”

He pointed to a narrow tunnel carved out of the grey rock, the sides smooth and slightly shiny.

“Burrows?” she asked.

“Not from any creature I’ve ever seen. But then, new planet, so who knows? The paths seem erratic, questing. Like it was searching for something it didn’t find. But, E-X, they’re everywhere. Once Pliny came back with the preliminary results, I sent it to do a cone penetration test on a wider area. In the six hours he was out, he didn’t find a single patch of bedrock that hadn’t been chewed through like this, and beneath the thin tunnels we see on the surface, many run together to form larger pockets.”

“So, what do you think we’re looking at here? An animal threat?”

Tarquin ran a finger around the interior of a burrow and brought it to his face, rubbing his fingers together with a subtle crease between his brows. The silvery powder dusting his fingers looked like it might be more lichen dust.

“No,” he said, almost to himself, deep in contemplation. “Whatever did this is long gone. I’m worried about the stability of the ground. Usually, this kind of erosion happens around sedimentary rock. You get spires in deserts, karst formations around limestone. It’s all fragile, unstable. But these tunnels? They’re in diabase. Sturdy stuff, and they’re anastomotic—connected, I mean.

“If it rains, we’ll get sinkholes. Depending on how extensive the tunneling is under the camp, we might have to move. The shuttle’s crash landing only made matters worse.”

Naira puffed out a frustrated breath. She’d thought they’d gotten lucky, landing in an area with its back against a ridge for shelter. If the survivors feared the ground could sink beneath them at any moment, panic might set in. She didn’t want to deal with fifty panicked people. She didn’t even want to deal with one princeling. But if she was going to secure her escape from Acaelus, that was exactly what she had to do.

“All right. Keep this quiet for now. When we get back to the camp, I’d like for you to have Pliny do an integrity check on the floor.”

He brushed hair off his forehead, smearing lichen dust. “You mean bedrock.”

“Whatever,” she said, and bit her tongue hard enough to taste iron. “Sorry, my li—Tarquin.” She dropped her gaze from his surprised stare, mortified. His preferred method of address aside, she’d never made so many slips around Acaelus.

He gave her a puzzled look, but his smile seemed genuine enough. “Don’t worry about it. I appreciate it, actually. When I realized you’d be the only exemplar left standing, I admit I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. Father’s personal exemplars are usually pretty uptight.”

Tension eased across her shoulders. Lockhart had been Acaelus’s personal E-X, then. The chances she’d crossed paths with Tarquin were thin. It vaguely annoyed Naira to learn that he’d thought the real her had been uptight—back before the trial—but she could hardly hold it against him. Acaelus had discouraged his exemplars from displaying anything so untoward as a personality.

“This isn’t exactly what I trained for,” she said.

Naira stood and held a hand out to him, hefting him to his feet. He had long, fine-boned fingers, like his father, and the touch sent a faint shudder of remembrance through her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

In the eerie orange glow of the Amaranth’s falling stars, his face was half in shadow, the severe planes of his nose and jaw more pronounced. Worry tugged at that too-angular expression. He was in his thirties, but something about his hunched posture made her think younger. Maybe that was just how people looked when they’d never faced real hardship in their lives.

Behind him, billions of dollars of his family’s equipment rained fire upon a dead world, and he scarcely seemed to notice.

He must know the origin of the shroud. Distant from his family or not, he’d helped refine the bioleaching process that Acaelus had once hinted was spreading the lichen. Tarquin knew the truth, and was giving her warm smiles and concerned glances, oblivious to the dead world around him.

The absolute arrogance of the man, to pretend he was worried about the crew’s safety when he concealed the secret that was the origin of their suffering. Her fists clenched.

“Let’s hurry back. This location isn’t secure.” She turned around abruptly.

Tarquin frowned, but followed her, Pliny the Metal letting out a short squeak of complaint before climbing him like a vine to settle around his upper arm again.

Fix the shuttle. Get to the Einkorn. Destroy that forsaken ship and transmit herself home, cementing her escape from Acaelus. That was all that mattered.

Something moved in the corner of her eye.

Naira pivoted, slammed one arm into Tarquin to knock him behind her even as she drew her pistol and sighted out into the flame-hued dark. A tree shuddered. Lichen dust puffed into a cloud, began to settle.

“What is it?” Tarquin asked.

She hushed him and squinted, pathways vibrating beneath her skin as her vision sharpened, zoomed in slightly. There’d been something, she was sure of it. Debris burned, crashed. It didn’t bump into trees and make them shiver.

Naira crept forward, motioning for Tarquin to stay behind her. He practically stepped on her heels, but this time it didn’t irritate her. As much as he stood for everything she loathed, his command keys were her ticket off this rock.

The tree rustled again. A silhouette edged around the silver-coated bark. Naira fired. The gun kicked against her tired arms, the shot bright enough to sting her straining eyes. Something made a soft, keening sound that raked claws of fear down her spine.

A scrambling noise rustled across the ground, whatever it was grasping for purchase, then the heavy thuds of a fleeing run. Glimpses of it flashed between the silver-drenched trees, the angular jut of a joint, a subtle curve that might have been hide or fur or hair, she couldn’t be sure. The forest thickened, hiding the fleeing creature.

Naira swore and rushed after it, skidding to a halt near the tree it’d been hiding behind. The forest had already concealed its presence.

“Do you think that was one of your burrowers?” she asked.

Tarquin braced himself against the tree, panting hard, his eyes huge in the fire-soaked light. “No. That was far too large. Unless it has another, smaller stage of development.”

“You don’t have anything like a mass spectrometer in your kit, do you?” she asked.

“Nothing that complex, just an amino acid detector in Pliny. Why?”

She gestured to the tree, where his hand had landed, and the splash of too-bright blood across the bark. He jerked back, holding his hand out to the side as if it were dangerous. It might be. Cradles were compatible with carbon-based life, but compatible didn’t mean friendly.

“Shit,” he whispered.

Naira was supposed to keep him safe, but there was little she could do for him without medical supplies. “Wipe your hand in the litterfall, but be careful, don’t scratch yourself on anything.”

He scooped up handfuls of leaves that were narrow and curled at the edges, and rubbed them between his palms until the blood was clear. When he was finished, he tapped a command to Pliny and the bot opened its trunk-shaped body. He pulled out a narrow spray bottle.

“Alcohol,” he explained. “I use it in field identification sometimes.”

“Be sparing with that,” she said, thinking of their meager supplies.

He nodded understanding and spritzed his palm once, then returned the sprayer to Pliny.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Of course I am,” he said, snappish once more.

“Then we should head back.” She kept her voice professionally neutral.

Naira waited for him to take that first step. They both knew the protocol. If there’s an active threat, he’s supposed to walk in front of her, in her sights, to keep the creature from rushing up to ambush him from behind.

Still, he hesitated. There was something he wanted to say, a subtle purse to the lips that hinted he’d bitten his cheek, sucked it in. He studied her, and the stare didn’t feel invasive, not really. Naira had been eyed enough in her life to have a sense for when someone was thinking of her as meat—muscle, sex, whatever—but there was more calculation in Tarquin than she expected. She got the feeling that he didn’t quite know what to do with her.

But he knew the protocol. After a breath that stretched too long, he turned around and started eating up the ground with long-legged strides.

She was too relieved to get moving to think much about his strange reaction. If there were more creatures in the woods, then she didn’t want to stick around to meet them with only a pistol. There was no evidence that they were aggressive, but a very old and very base instinct raised goose bumps across her skin.

Let her know she was being watched by something with teeth.

EIGHT

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Raised voices greeted Naira before she reached the light of the perimeter. Her pistol was out, pointed at the ground, finger resting lightly against the filed-down guard while the weapon ran parallel to her thigh. Weariness dragged her down, but she signaled Tarquin to fall back to her flank. She wasn’t confident enough in the woods to make him follow. Not confident enough in the camp to make him walk ahead.

Too many variables. She wished, fervently and briefly, that she had a pocket full of camera drones to toss in the air to warn her of what lay ahead, but those had burned with the rest of the Amaranth.

The air was febrile with tension before she stepped into the camp, and it only got hotter when the faces gathered in the middle whipped around to watch her approach. Naira paused, scanning the scene.

Captain Paison and Riggs had been shouting it out while the other survivors huddled around, wide-eyed, not sure which way the wind was going to blow. Riggs had been brusque at dinner the night before, but shouting at the captain seemed unusually aggressive.

“What’s the problem?” Naira raised her voice to carry.

“We heard a shot.” Riggs jabbed a finger at Paison. “Captain here refused to let us investigate.”

“Corin Riggs, right?” Naira asked.

“That’s right,” she said. “Lt. Riggs.”

“All right, L-T,” Naira said. “I appreciate your enthusiasm, but the situation is handled.”

“What situation?” She turned that jabbing finger around on Naira. “There’s no ‘situation’ on this fucking planet for which a gun would be required.”

All those eyes, torn back and forth between the arguing captain and the lieutenant, settled on Naira and stuck. Paison crossed her arms and leaned her weight back on one foot, giving Naira an expression that seemed to say, This is your problem now. These people were on a razor’s edge. If she told them there’d been a large, mysterious animal in the woods, they’d riot.

“Do you doubt my ability, Lt. Riggs?” Naira asked, her tone flat. Daring Riggs to challenge the martial skill of an exemplar. She tapped the pistol against her thigh to draw her eye to it.

Riggs sputtered. “No, of course not, E-X, but—”

“Liege Tarquin had a test to perform. I assisted him. Do you have other concerns, Lieutenant, or will you return to helping your fellow survivors establish a secure perimeter and sort supplies?”

Her fists balled. “We worried. Clearly there was a Conservator on the Amaranth, and we can’t be sure they died in the crash.” Riggs spat in the dust. “Though we can hope.”

“It’s possible,” Naira admitted. Denying it outright would be far too suspicious. “But if that’s the case, then why is the Einkorn still whole? It’s not like them to only take down one ship.”

“Maybe they’re still working on it,” said a slim person with a torn and bloodied lab coat. Quiet mutters of approval from the rest of the group followed that statement.

Tarquin stepped forward, getting slightly in front of her, which wasn’t protocol if there was the possibility of a threat. She bit her tongue to keep from ordering him back. “We took extreme precautions against unauthorized neural map uploads. Acaelus himself oversaw the scripting of the project.”

“The ship still got shot,” Riggs said with a noncommittal shrug. “Uh, begging your pardon, my liege.”

Tarquin sighed softly enough that Naira was the only one who could hear it. “Many other malfunctions are possible. Jumping to conclusions now, fearing a traitor in our midst, these things will damage our survival ability. Our focus must be on supplies, security, and contacting the Einkorn.”

The survivors grumbled but nodded agreement. Typical. None of them were truly soothed by Tarquin’s attempt at leadership, but he was a Mercator. They’d tell him the sky was neon pink if he asked them to. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, the arrogant smile that curved his sculpted lips, the faint incline of his chin as he accepted their false approval. He really thought he was in control here.

“I pulled a data dump from the ship onto a tablet while Liege Tarquin was printing the E-X,” Paison said. “If there’s anything funny in the map logs, I’ll find it. I just have to wait for the damn star to come up to charge the battery with solar panels because I am not drawing any extra power from the shuttle’s stores. So all of you can quit this paranoia and focus on making sure we survive before we get busy biting one another’s heads off.”

Naira very carefully did not react to the news that Paison had a data dump from the ship. The captain’s words drew more nods out of the survivors, this time without the grumbling. If Tarquin noticed, he didn’t show it. Without a word, he strode off to his hard-shelled tent.

She’d spent the last night in the small chamber attached to the entrance of his tent, the place reserved for an exemplar, but her back had been in such bad shape she’d barely noticed her surroundings. Tonight, she wouldn’t have the excuse of her injuries. Naira suppressed a sigh. She’d have to remain alert, sleeping in fitful dozes. Especially if suspicion was poisoning the minds of the survivors.

Paison caught her eye and tilted her head, urging Naira to follow her. She did, not yet holstering her sidearm. Paison led her to the edge of the camp and crossed her arms, hitching one hip up as she rested her weight against the shuttle.

The captain was the battered mirror of her ship, scuffed and cracked and worn, but her jaw was as firm as the untwisted metal in the shuttle’s fuselage, her sleepy eyes hinting at the stinging brightness of the control consoles. Naira positioned herself so that she could keep Tarquin’s tent in the corner of her eye.

“So,” Paison said, voice low enough for just the two of them, “what was it?”

Naira considered the easy lie. A shadow. A branch in the wind. That she was tired and stressed and got spooked by nothing.

“An animal,” she said instead, matching that low tone. Letting Paison see the clench in her jaw, the slantwise expression that communicated clearer than words that she didn’t know what it was. Couldn’t explain it.

“Big?” Paison asked.

“Too big for a dead world.”

Paison scratched along the ridge of her cheek with one ragged nail, the edges frayed like she’d been chewing on it. “Think it’s dangerous?”

“I don’t know what to think. I winged it. It fled. Liege Tarquin took a blood sample, but his tools are limited.”

Paison stared out into the woods, her lips a thin line. The light from the burning debris had faded, reduced to a patchwork smolder. “We don’t have enough weapons to hold a perimeter.”

“I know,” Naira said.

There was no good answer to that, not from either of them. Paison kept staring down those silver-slicked trees like she could pry their secrets out with sheer force of will. The way she’d been holding herself together, Naira would bet on the captain over the trees.

“I don’t like this,” Paison said.

“Not a lot to like,” Naira said. “What’s the situation with the survivors? Obviously things got hot while I went walking.”

“They’re scared. Jumpy. The usual. They want to know why the Einkorn fired, and the Einkorn’s not answering, so they’re tearing at each other like the secret’s waiting skin deep, and all they have to do is claw hard enough.”

The turn of phrase sent a jolt of recognition through Naira, but she kept her eyes on the tent, her body still, as Paison searched her face for something Naira wouldn’t let her find. The phrase was old, twisted to suit Paison’s meaning, but Naira would know it anywhere.

They were the words of Rousseau, a twenty-third-century revolutionary with aspirations to philosophy, who’d had his neural map iced in punishment for the bombing of an Ichikawa facility. That had been before the dominant corporate families had allied, uniting the first letters of their surnames to form MERIT, the true ruling council of humanity. The Human Collective pretended at control, but statehood had died long before the HC had been cobbled together from the leftover scraps of the world’s nations.

Ancient history. Just like Rousseau’s last words, Freedom is never buried deep, you just have to know who to skin to get to it.

A Conservator would know the phrase, but not Ex. Lockhart, and it wasn’t their signal on this mission. Naira didn’t know why Paison would know such a thing. The early history of the movement that would grow into the Conservators wasn’t exactly standard MERIT training. How she knew the phrase didn’t matter. Paison was fishing.

“They’ll be disappointed,” Naira said.

“Aren’t we all,” Paison drawled, turning her gaze back to the forest. “So what’s the plan, E-X? Ideas?”

“Keep calling the Einkorn. Fix the shuttle. Those are our top priorities. Other than that…” She sighed heavily. “Liege Tarquin believes the ground around here might be unstable, some sort of tunneling caused by burrowing animals. He’s going to take a deeper look at star-up, but I don’t think we should set patrols tonight. I don’t want people falling in a hole on a sweep.”

“I can think of a few I’d like to have fall in a hole.”

Naira snorted. “Get some of the twitchier soldiers to stand with their backs to the light on shifts. Compass points, intercardinals, no sweeps, four-hour rotation. Should keep us covered if there’s anything out there, and it gives them something to do.”

“Why don’t you tell them?”

Naira gave her a sidelong look. “You’re Collective. I’m MERIT. They’ll do what I tell them, but from you they’ll hop to the opportunity.”

Paison studied the green cuffs printed around her wrists. “Who says I’m not MERIT?”

“You’re wearing Mercator colors now, Captain, but I’ve never heard of a MERIT-trained pilot willing to go down with their ship, let alone volunteering.”

She barked a laugh. “That obvious, huh? Ah, well. Like you said—we’ve got five twitchy HCA soldiers down here. Mind if I lean into the HCA camaraderie thing a touch?”

Naira raised a shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “Do what you think is best. Doesn’t affect me either way. I defend Liege Tarquin. Right now, that includes the defense of the rest of the survivors.”

“So I better make damn sure they don’t turn against our liege, eh?”

Naira gave her a sidelong look. “Your words, Captain.”

Paison glanced at Tarquin’s tent. “I don’t think that’ll happen, though. May I be frank with you about matters right before the crash? It doesn’t paint Liege Acaelus in a pretty light.”

“I assure you I’ve seen Liege Acaelus in many unflattering lights,” Naira said, trying to keep her voice flat, but she couldn’t help a slight sarcastic edge.

“I bet. The thing is, when the Einkorn fired, Liege Acaelus and that E-X of his, Kearns, were all set to herd us to the shuttle. Then he got a message. Said the system had started printing you, and he and Kearns and Liege Tarquin were all going to go get you, and we were to wait for his return in the lab.”

“He was going to cast his family out and leave you all to die.”

“Your words,” Paison said with a subtle smirk. “But that was the conclusion I drew. Not that there was fuck all I could do about it, what with the airlock being sealed under Mercator command keys.”

She paused, as if waiting to be challenged. Rousseau. The airlock. Something was off about Paison. Time to do a little fishing of her own.

“Seemed to me you were doing something about it,” Naira said.

“So you did see. I couldn’t be sure, after you let it slide… Look, I’ve been in crashing ships. It’s not pretty. My map’s getting a little scuffed around the edges, and when Liege Acaelus bailed, I panicked. That’s all. I’m not proud of it.”

“Captain, if that’s the degree of competency you show while panicked, then I don’t really give a shit if you were disobeying orders. I’m glad you’re with us. But if you wanted to spare your map the damage, why’d you volunteer to go down with the Amaranth?”

Paison grimaced and looked aside. “Honestly, E-X, I knew you’d seen me and was hoping that if I volunteered to die there, you might think you’d misunderstood what you saw.”

Naira’s brows lifted. “You’re admitting to manipulating me?”

“Trying to manipulate you.” Paison met her eyes once more. “Didn’t work, did it?”

Naira chuckled but couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Paison was still trying to manipulate her, just from a different angle this time. She couldn’t figure out why the captain would do so. Trying to get in good with Acaelus’s personal E-X, maybe? Ex. Lockhart was highly positioned within Mercator.

If Paison suspected Naira was anything other than Lockhart, Naira might be in trouble. She had to tread carefully with the captain. Couldn’t let her get too close, lest she start seeing the cracks in Naira’s facade.

“So Liege Acaelus left you all to die,” Naira said, to redirect Paison’s train of thought.

“Yeah.” She scratched her cheek again, wrinkling her nose. “I gotta be honest, E-X, when you came through that door, I thought for sure we were done for, but at least it’d be quick.”

“Liege Tarquin told me none of this.”

“Probably because he worried you’d figure out what Liege Acaelus actually wanted, and then try to carry out those orders. I don’t know that he and his father saw eye to eye. They clashed a bit, before, on the command deck. Nothing major, mind you, but it seemed Liege Tarquin doesn’t much like how his father runs things, if you take my meaning.”

“Huh.” Naira frowned at Tarquin’s tent. He’d disobeyed his father. She hadn’t believed he was capable of the thought, let alone carrying out the action and then lying by omission to Acaelus’s exemplar. She found herself, grudgingly, impressed.

“Yeah,” Paison said. “I see you get it. No one here will dare say it, because it implies disagreement with Liege Acaelus, but we’re all grateful he came back. Who knows what kind of damage that would have done to our maps? If we’d even been allowed to reprint at all.”

“That makes my job easier,” Naira said.

“Thought it might.”

“He’s still wet behind the ears, though. We’re going to have to guide him, subtly, if we want to make it out of this, because—” She cut herself off.

“Because something seriously weird is going on?” Paison asked. Naira tipped her chin down in response. “I hate that I agree with you. A dead planet, walking misprints, and before the crash, the Amaranth’s AI wasn’t responding to verbal commands, and the controls were sluggish.”

“We’ll manage.” Naira hoped she sounded more confident than she felt.

“Sure.” Paison clapped Naira on the back as she pushed off the ship. “Get some rest, E-X. You look like shit.”

Naira smiled, despite her reservations, as Paison sauntered off, hands in her pockets, barking orders at those few soldiers who lingered in the communal center of the camp, sharing stories in low voices. Tarquin was no leader, but Paison… Paison could get them through this.

Tarquin had left a light on in the exemplar compartment of his tent, even though his own side was dark. She frowned at that. Long experience told her that there was substantial light bleed-over between the two sections.

The rare times Acaelus was in the field and actually had to rough it in a hard tent, he’d never bothered to leave the light on for her lest it keep him awake. She had pathways that allowed her to see in low light, after all.

Maybe it was a passive-aggressive rebuke—you weren’t here to guard me, so I left the light on. That seemed more like something a Mercator would do. Naira sighed, cursing the print she’d ended up in, and holstered her pistol before crawling to her narrow spot. She’d settle down. Get some rest. Allow herself time to think.

And then she was going to have to figure out how to break Paison’s data tablet.

NINE

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Pliny the Metal squeezed Tarquin’s arm at a prearranged time, easing him back to wakefulness. He listened to the near silence, the subtle rustle of people outside, the slow rise and fall of Lockhart’s breathing. He’d stayed awake long enough to hear her come in and methodically prepare for the fitful rest of the exemplars before he’d let himself sleep.

Try to sleep, anyway. Every time he closed his eyes, it wasn’t the grasping hands of the misprints as they’d dragged his father to the ground that filled his dreams. That wasn’t even the first time Tarquin had seen Acaelus die.

No, it was the second explosion that haunted his nightmares. The rush of heat, an invisible wall that had slammed into him in the fraction of a second before Lockhart had thrown him against the bulkhead and coiled herself around him like a human shell while the scent of her burning flesh seared his nostrils.

Exemplars had dogged Tarquin’s heels his entire life. His current personal E-X, Caldweller, was a stern, compact man who rarely spoke unless addressed directly. That was normal. Required behavior, even. But Lockhart… Lockhart didn’t fit with what Tarquin thought an exemplar was supposed to be.

Dependable, physically competent, yes, she was those things, but there was more beneath the surface. Something she was trying to hide, no doubt for propriety’s sake. Tarquin compared the woman who’d inelegantly dodged his questions about her reading habits with the woman who’d cowed the panicked survivors with a single tap of her weapon against her thigh, and couldn’t make them match. More than likely, it was Tarquin’s relaxed style of rule that was throwing her off. Still, she reacted faster than Caldweller ever had in a threatening situation. Acaelus had always expected more of his personal E-X. Demanded it.

Before her defection, Ex. Sharp had thrown herself in the path of plenty of bullets on Acaelus’s behalf. Some had speculated, when she’d first turned Conservator, that it was because of all those bullets. That she resented Acaelus for her many deaths.

Tarquin didn’t think that was the case. He’d read her statement. Seen the truth of her convictions in her face when she’d taken the stand. She believed, down to her marrow, that Acaelus had told her that Mercator Holdings was responsible for planetary collapse syndrome. For the spread of shroud lichen.

Tarquin couldn’t work out how it was possible.

He’d scoured her statement, burned every word into his mind until all he had to do was close his eyes to see them scroll past his eyelids. Sharp’s evidence was nonexistent. It’s the process, Acaelus was alleged to have told her, referring to Mercatus canus, the bioleaching fungus Mercator used to mine relkatite. The whole damn thing. But I’m going to stop it. I’m going to make it work.

Then another world had died, and so she’d reported him. When whistleblowing had done nothing, she’d gone AWOL. Turned up later on the mining ship headed to Fourth Cradle and blasted it out of the sky.

It wasn’t a kind of intensity Tarquin understood. His family was just his family. He liked to think he’d take a bullet for his sister, or his father, but he recalled how he’d trembled at the scent of burning skin and concluded he couldn’t, after all. He’d come back. Mercators got to come back until their maps couldn’t take it anymore, and they cracked, but even the idea of experiencing that amount of pain made him want to throw up.

He couldn’t lead like a Mercator. Authority made him uncomfortable, as much as he faked it. He wasn’t made of the same stuff as his father’s exemplars, either. Couldn’t take a hit like they could—the word sacrifice wasn’t even in his vocabulary—but there was science to be done, and that he could do.

It’s the process, Sharp had claimed.

That made no sense. Canus was no cousin to the shroud lichen that destroyed ecosystems, and Mercator would never intentionally harm the cradle worlds. Rare as they were, the cradles had only ever been discovered because Mercator was looking for relkatite-rich sites in the first place. It was happy coincidence that Earthlike planets bore more relkatite than any other celestial body, and the methods they’d refined for discovering relkatite could be used to ferret out livable worlds.

Mercator wouldn’t squander that which was theirs to protect.

And yet, her conviction haunted him. Despite all sense, he believed that she believed those words to be true. Maybe she’d glimpsed another answer, some truth that she’d misinterpreted. He wished he’d had the chance to question her before her mind had been iced.

Shroud had come to this world. Tarquin was determined to find out how it had gotten here.

He rolled to his side and held his breath, waiting to see if Lockhart reacted. Silence from the other side. He crept over to the back of his tent and opened Pliny’s tool compartment. The bot made a whirring sound of protest as he pulled the separator out of the kit, but he pressed a finger to his lips and the bot fell silent.

It’d been years since he’d done this, not since he was an undergrad out in the field with a bunch of his fellows and was so desperate to make friends that he’d devised a way of slipping the leash of his exemplar. Sweat slicked his hands as he pressed the tool against one of the panels of the tent and ran it, slowly, along the seam.

As far as he knew, Caldweller had never found out that every time they went on an expedition, Tarquin escaped his guard at least once to get plastered with his friends without watchful eyes on them all. This time, it wasn’t about fitting in.

This time it was about getting space, space in which to examine the geological situation and think. To work without Lockhart hovering over him, without the needs of the camp derailing his thoughts every other moment.

It was foolish to go out by himself, but he needed time alone. And while Lockhart would deny it, she needed rest. The worst of her back injury had healed, but even an exemplar’s vaunted endurance had its limits. She’d collapse if she kept pushing herself like she was.

The panel’s seal gave way, and he eased it back into the tent, then peeked outside. His tent had been placed at the back of the group, as far away from the other survivors as Lockhart could get it while keeping him within the ring of lights. The ridge was close enough that he could touch the heavily eroded side. He ran the crumbly regolith that had gathered in small crevices through his fingers. Traces of quartz winked up at him.

Everything about this planet was wrong. He hadn’t belabored the point too much with Lockhart, just given her the basic facts so that she’d be able to see the danger regarding the sinkholes—exemplars understood and reacted to danger above all else—but Sixth Cradle scraped against his senses. Challenged his expectations.

Lockhart had taken one look at the tunnel system and said burrowing, her mind going to snakes and insects and rodents and other such familiar things. Living things that could cause harm. But he had a nagging suspicion about the way the tunnels tapered, an idea that they might be part of some sort of root network. Except that the trees in the area had shallow balls of cobwebbed roots, nothing at all like the robust system it would take to dig through solid stone. Tarquin crawled out of the open panel and eased it back into place behind him.

He used his illicit strength and agility pathways, shivering at the subtle vibration that wrapped around the arch of his feet and raced up his legs to his hips, urging him to shift his weight until he was creeping along on the balls of his feet, totally silent across the unsteady ground.

Paison’s lookouts were easy enough to slip by. They only had eyes for the forest, not things coming from within the camp. Soon enough, he was behind the ridge, successfully out of sight. He straightened his back, easing out a sore spot in his muscles. The forest was silent. Wispy beards of lichen dangling from dead branches muffled any echo.

The creature, glimpsed so briefly, haunted him, but he pushed that aside. Animal threats he knew how to handle. He’d encountered plenty in the field during his early research. While he wasn’t halfway as adept with a firearm as Lockhart, he knew how to use a pistol should the creature draw too close.

He doubted the possibility, though. It had been wounded, and if the state of this forest was indicative of the rest of the planet, an animal of that size would be malnourished. Struggling. More than likely, it had slunk off somewhere to die alone.

No, the real threat to the survivors wasn’t a lone creature starving in the dark. It was the ground beneath their feet. He tapped an order into Pliny, and the bot scampered down his arm and leapt off into the underbrush. Its head roved from side to side as it crawled through the litterfall.

Tarquin pulled up his HUD, first setting an alarm to warn him when they were thirty minutes from star-rise, then fed Pliny’s findings directly into his own vision. As he’d feared, the ground immediately around the ridge on this side was as spongy as it had been on the other. The litterfall just did a better job of hiding it. He dropped to a low crouch and brushed the spiny leaves aside.

Dirt had backfilled most of the holes, but it was thin, dry. He ran it through his fingers. Brought it to his nose and sniffed.

Alkaline. Bitter. A faint, dishwater-brown shine, like amber glass. He frowned, calling Pliny back to his side silently through the HUD. The bot scrambled over and directed its sensors at the dirt. He couldn’t be sure, the raw materials were quite common, but were there traces of olivine mixed with the dirt?

Self-consciously, he brushed the family mark printed on the back of his hand, the Mercator crest in vibrant green. Relkatite was darker, closer to emerald, but they’d first found the material when clearing an asteroid of an olivine deposit. The two were often found together.

He took a sample vial from Pliny and stored the dirt, then got back to the hard work of mapping the immediate area. It took him hours to find a relatively safe path through the spongy sill to the country rock, a firm layer of shale that didn’t exhibit the same burrowing.

Pliny made a plaintive sound.

“What?” he asked the bot.

An alert flashed in his HUD. He opened it, frowning. He’d set Pliny to monitor baseline environmental activity in the area on reflex. Tarquin skimmed over the bare facts, a knot of dread forming in his throat with every scrap of data.

A storm was coming. A storm over unstable, sinkhole-prone ground.

“Shit.” He wiped away every screen but the map back to this location and a countdown to the storm’s approximate arrival time. Twenty minutes. Tarquin turned back to the camp and ran.

TEN

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira slept fitfully. Once she managed a few hours, she woke and confirmed Tarquin’s side of the tent was silent before slipping out. Her body complained, back aching, but her muscles had finished regrowing beneath the skin. She pushed on, telling herself that a minor discomfort was nothing compared to what would happen to her if Paison used the tablet to discover her true identity.

She couldn’t be sure that the tablet would give her away, but she couldn’t risk her identity being revealed. If she failed to get off this planet, she might end up back under Acaelus’s control.

The last words he’d said to her, before she’d been euthanized to have her map locked by his command keys, haunted her steps. I’m looking forward to finally puzzling out why your map is so resilient to cracking, Ex. Sharp.

Naira knew well the brutality of Acaelus’s map experiments. She wouldn’t go back to that.

The sentries Paison had set were easy enough for her to avoid. This print was outfitted with everything she’d need for combat or infiltration, in case someone had kidnapped the precious Mercator she was set to guard.

Paison hadn’t taken a tent, instead opting to sleep inside the shuttle in the pilot’s seat. She’d left the side airlock open, and while the lights inside the shuttle were off, that open door was a silent invitation to anyone who needed to speak with her. Naira glanced back at Tarquin’s tent, lights dark. They were lucky to have Paison.

She gripped the interior of the door and swung herself inside, then stepped out of the line of sight from those in the camp. With her back pressed against the wall, she waited, breathing shallowly, for Paison to react. When a full minute of silence had passed, she ramped up her aural pathways and listened. The captain was snoring.

Naira returned her senses to normal, then crept along the shuttle to the cockpit. The air still carried the faint tinge of her own cooked flesh with a hint of burnt hair. She wrinkled her nose against the stench. As Acaelus’s E-X, she’d taken her fair share of damage to prints in his defense, but being burned alive had been a fresh and special hell.

Paison was in the captain’s chair, the cockpit lights off save for the green-yellow shine of a single holo display on her console. She’d ordered the ship to continuously call the Einkorn.

A needle of guilt wormed its way under her skin. Paison was a good captain. Quite probably a good person. And Naira was about to make her life a whole lot harder. Stupid to have regrets now. She’d planned on blowing the ship up. Paison would have died, and there was no telling when, or if, Mercator would have paid her phoenix fees.

On a console podium to Paison’s right, a tablet rested, the screen blank, a solar panel plugged into the side. Both devices were rugged, built for fieldwork. Paison had angled the solar panel to the cockpit’s windscreen, ready to absorb the first rays of starlight even if Paison wasn’t yet awake herself.

The captain muttered in her sleep, shifted. Naira froze, waiting out Paison’s fitful rest, then sidled around to the captain’s right and in one deft movement disconnected the panel and took the tablet. She slid it into one of her jacket pockets.

After a pause to make certain the motion hadn’t roused the captain, she backed away, checked to be sure no one was watching, then slipped through the airlock. Naira skirted the shuttle, putting the hulking mass of metal between herself and most of the camp.

Step one down. Now she had to disable the device and get rid of it before anyone noticed the tablet was missing.

A nearby sentry shouted.

Adrenaline spiked her blood, pathways vibrating to life hard enough to make her teeth ache as every part of her body prepared for a fight. No one could have seen her with the tablet, she’d had it hidden when she exited the shuttle, but—

“Someone’s coming!” the sentry called out.

This wasn’t about her, but it would be soon enough if they saw her there and Paison woke to find the tablet missing. Footsteps pounded through the camp, those still awake hurrying over to see what the trouble was. She should be one of them.

Muttering “Shit, shit, shit” under her breath, Naira cracked the back off the tablet and dug the battery out, ripping wires at random in the process. She wiped it against her shirt to scrub any fingerprints clean and dropped it in the dirt underneath the shuttle, leaving it a cracked-open, dead thing. She was tempted to snap the battery in half, but not many people had that kind of strength, so she dented it and tossed it a little farther away, kicking the litterfall over it. That would have to do.

She drew her pistol and crept around the side of the shuttle, slowing as she approached the cold engine cones. Everyone was focused on the sentry. They’d turned the camp perimeter lights around to get a better look, dropping the rest of the camp into relative darkness. At least she had some luck left.

Drawing on her pathways, she stayed ducked down and rushed over to the Mercator tent, then yanked the door to her sleeping chamber open and left it twisted askew. Tarquin was still sound asleep, as far as she could tell.

“What’s happened?” she barked, striding away from the tent as if she’d been in there this whole time.

“Don’t know, E-X,” HCA Dawd called out to her from the edge of the crowd.

Naira passed the shuttle as Paison swung down, her hair sleep-mussed and a crust around her lips. Paison looked to her for answers, but Naira only shrugged and pointed to the corner of her mouth. Paison scowled and scrubbed her sleeve across her lips before stomping toward the commotion.

“What the hell?” she asked.

Naira moved around the edge of the group, keeping to the perimeter of the light that was angled into the woods like an unsteady spotlight, the survivors trying to coordinate a sweep of the tree line.

“I saw someone!” a sentry shouted. A bandage wrapped around half her chin, muddling the words.

Some of the others snickered, muttering about someone, and how the sentry’s painkillers must be messing with their mind. Naira wasn’t so sure. She recalled the angular shape of the animal, the roundness that might have been hide or fur, and frowned. It could look like a person, if one was exhausted and frightened and staring too long into the unanswering dark.

Paison caught her eye from the other side of the mob and arched a brow in question. Naira nodded. Paison drew her sidearm, too.

“Back.” Paison extended an arm to establish an invisible line. The survivors fell back. “Where did you see—?”

“It’s me!” Tarquin shouted from the woods. “It’s just me!”

The makeshift searchlights swiveled, narrowing in on the sprinting Mercator. His face was flushed and sweaty, hair all askew, that damn bot of his clamped tight around his arm. Anger and frustration warred for dominance in Naira and settled on an even mix between the two.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

Too harsh. No one spoke to the MERIT families like that, even if they were being colossal idiots. Tarquin stumbled to a halt, eyes wide with shock. More than likely, the only person who’d ever raised their voice to him in his entire life had been his father. Startled gazes turned to her. She had to recover this.

“We have no idea what’s in those woods,” she said frostily. “No one goes out alone, especially you, my liege.”

He straightened, the embarrassed color fading from his face. In the harsh light from the searchlights he looked so much like his father that it made Naira’s pulse kick in warning.

“Mind your place, Exemplar.” If she’d been frosty, his voice was glacial. He straightened his sleeves. “We have bigger concerns than your slighted pride. The ground here is unstable, and a storm front is incoming in less than twenty minutes. I’ve secured a site with stable ground. We must evacuate immediately.”

“Evacuate?” Paison cocked her head to the side. “You’re kidding. We’ve got eight people who can’t even walk, and the shuttle isn’t movable.”

“Captain, I am giving you an order.”

Paison’s face scrunched, but she gave Tarquin a crisp bow before turning on her heel to shout instructions. The sentries and their entourage scrambled after her, chaos erupting in the camp as the word spread.

“I apologize for my outburst.” Naira bowed to Tarquin with the same precision Paison had displayed, even though stomach acid made her mouth sour over the words. The bow was brief, only to show obedience, as she still needed to keep her eyes on her charge to ensure his safety. She was surprised he wasn’t ordering her to press her face into the ground and beg, as Acaelus would have.

Tarquin’s gaze was inward, tracking something on his HUD, and his mouth turned into a hard slash of a frown. “I’m certain you’re used to my father being where he is expected to be. I do things differently.”

“I cannot do my job effectively if I don’t know where you are.”

His eyes narrowed, seeing her through the haze of his HUD, and the intensity of that glare made her skin heat.

“And I cannot do my job if I have half a mind on you hovering near me, ready to pass out from exhaustion at any moment.” His voice was taut with frustration.

Her brow crunched. He was worried about her health? Why? As long as she could do her job, it shouldn’t matter. “My physical comfort is not your concern. The pathways—”

“Ex. Lockhart. I do things differently. But that does not mean you are free to undermine my authority in front of the very people I am trying to keep calm and safe. Am I clear?”

“Yes. It won’t happen again.”

“See that it doesn’t.”

The protocols existed because they worked. He was being idiotic, but she had no choice but to obey. Naira met that hard stare and thought she sensed something uneasy churning beneath the surface. He played a good Mercator, but—was he playing? That couldn’t be another Conservator wearing his print. They would have alerted her by now.

Regardless, he’d had the command keys to release the shuttle. There was no faking those.

The easiest explanation was that he was Tarquin Mercator, youngest son. A man who believed doing things differently might make him better than his father, but in fact was making life harder on those around him.

Shouting drew her attention. A small group of survivors in their ratty Mercator uniforms clustered up around the side of the shuttle. Paison’s slim frame was wedged between them, crouched down in the dirt. Naira’s stomach dropped.

“What’s taking so long?” Tarquin asked no one in particular. “We have to go! Now!” He raised his voice as he marched toward the group.

Naira fell into step beside him, hand resting lightly on the grip of her sidearm, and kept her expression flat. Pretended disinterest.

“Sinkholes, huh?” Paison asked Tarquin without looking up. Her voice was bladed.

“Yes,” Tarquin said, exasperated. “I understand it doesn’t sound very dramatic, but we’re running out of time.”

“Is that how you were going to explain this?”

Paison stood, the broken tablet and battery clutched in her hands, dripping dirt as she shoved both objects into Tarquin’s face. He took a startled step backward, and Naira used the opening to insert herself between the two.

“I didn’t do that,” Tarquin said, perplexed.

“You’re telling me you snuck out of your tent, past your E-X, ran around in the woods all damned night avoiding detection, and I can trust your word on this? This tablet was right next to me. Not a lot of people around who can get the drop on me, and Lockhart here was as surprised as the rest of us when you came barreling out of those woods.”

“I didn’t—I wouldn’t—” He dissolved into a frustrated grunt.

What the hell? A few hours ago, Paison had been telling her how the survivors were appreciative of Tarquin, and now the captain herself was spitting venom at his feet. Tension thickened the air, the eyes of all those survivors turning, hungry, to Tarquin. They were so desperate for a lightning rod to strike, they’d forgotten their gratefulness.

Forgotten the danger in drawing a Mercator’s ire.

“Captain,” Naira said firmly, “Liege Tarquin doesn’t have the kind of agility pathways you’re talking about. None of the blooded family does. Control yourself.”

“I—” Paison blinked, drawing her head back, all the boiling outrage draining away until she looked as perplexed as Tarquin did. Fear widened her eyes and she sank to her knees, bowing her head in submission. “My liege, please forgive me, I don’t know what came over me.”

Naira frowned down at the captain. It was possible Paison really had reached her limit and lashed out at the wrong person, but somehow Naira doubted that. It wasn’t the kind of mistake she’d make.

“We’re all under a lot of stress,” Tarquin said. “Please, get up. We’ll figure out what happened to the tablet later. The unstable ground is real, and we can all feel the moisture in the air. The weather takes priority.”

Paison stood and raised her voice to a bark. “Move, people! The threat is real!”

“How do we know that?” Riggs called out from somewhere near the back of the pack. “If he broke the tablet, maybe he’s making us scramble out of the camp to die in those woods. We’ve no guarantee he’s a genuine Mercator.”

“I didn’t damage the tablet,” Tarquin said with barely contained exasperation. “But if you won’t accept my word, then consider that my command keys aren’t printed into me. They are family knowledge, and I used them to override the lockdown protocols on the Amaranth’s shuttle to get us all to safety. If there is anyone worthy of suspicion, it is you, Lieutenant, for attempting to slow this evacuation down with baseless speculation.”

Naira smirked as Riggs stammered, whispers following from the crowd in the wake of Tarquin’s words. He was right. Not even a Conservator would have the Mercator command keys.

Naira put all the force of command into her voice that she could muster and shouted, “Move out!”

The tension that’d been thickening the air snapped. The survivors scrambled, gathering whatever supplies came easily to hand. Paison grabbed Naira’s arm and dropped her voice to a whisper.

“Speaking of those command keys, get him out of here.”

Right. She caught the duffle Paison tossed at her, feeling the weight of rations mixed in with weaponry, and nodded. Paison stalked away, organizing litter trains for the most gravely injured. Naira took a step after her before she’d realized it, wanting to help, to carry the weight of one of those litters with her pathways. Tarquin wouldn’t lend them the use of her strength. No Mercator would.

“Exemplar,” Tarquin said, voice flat. “We must go.”

She closed her eyes, briefly, and turned back to him when she was certain her expression conveyed nothing of the contempt she felt for his selfishness. He wasn’t a person. Not to her.

Tarquin Mercator may have a curious mind, may seem like he wanted to do the right thing, but all he was, all he could ever be, was a vassal of his father. The person in the printed flesh was so far removed from the rest of humanity that he didn’t even see them anymore. In her worst moments, she could relate.

He was a living set of keys she needed to keep alive until she could turn the lock on the Einkorn. “Quickly, please. Stay close.”

His gaze skimmed off of her and lingered on something behind her. Maybe the survivors, maybe the injured. Possibly Paison and Riggs, with their insubordinate accusations about the tablet. That was more likely. His lips thinned, chin jutting forward. He swallowed whatever he’d been going to say and spun around, taking off into the woods at a light jog.

She drew her pistol, fell into line behind him, and comforted herself with visions of putting a bullet in his back once that lock was undone.

ELEVEN

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

The argument had taken too long. Tarquin watched in mounting horror as clouds scudded across the sky, the first whisper of droplets soaking through his hair to chill his scalp. Thunder rumbled above, following fractions of a second behind the sharp slice of lightning.

If only he’d ordered them into action with the same force his father wielded, then they would have had more time to get to safety. He’d tried to be firm, to command from a place of strength, and still they’d seen through the cracks in him. Had pushed back, when they never would have said such things to Acaelus. Maybe his father was right. Maybe an iron fist was the only way forward. The only way to ensure the safety of Mercator’s employees.

He closed out the weather data from Pliny, switching over to a rough scan he’d made of the ground during his scouting expedition. The forest floor was a minefield of tunnels filled in with loose soil and gravel, all liable to collapse the second the rain saturated the regolith.

Tarquin stumbled to a halt, bracing a hand against the lichen-crusted side of a tree as the beat of the rain increased. Fine droplets swelled into thick beads, coming so hard and fast he had to breathe through his mouth due to the water running over his nose. He shaded his eyes, trying to find the safest route across the rapidly shifting landscape. Already the ground had slumped, the thin layer of bedrock cracking over the larger cavities below.

He closed the display. The data was a distraction. There was no one safe path, no magic route through the sucking ground. Rain bashed the dead leaves off the trees. Crushed the floor into a slippery slurry. Soaked into the shroud lichen.

Tarquin stared, transfixed, as the silvery lichen transformed from despairing grey into brilliant, green life. He knew that it happened. Lichen was a fungal and algal colony. When wet, the algae in the system went to work, collecting as much water as possible. Still, the world turning green before his eyes ached.

It was a false green. The lichen would be grey again after a full day of dry air, and nothing new would grow in its place.

Lockhart shouted something above the rain, her words stolen by a sickening crack that had nothing to do with thunder. Indistinct shouting from the camp reached him, muted by the downpour but no less frantic. Somewhere in the camp, a sinkhole had opened. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him away from the tree.

“Don’t stop moving!”

A desperate sensation unfolded in his chest, fear breaking into anger and back again, because he’d warned them. He’d warned them and they’d been too busy bickering to run. Tarquin found his feet, forced them to move across the unstable ground, forced himself to run as trees swayed and thunder droned and branches scraped his arms and, growing quieter with every step, the shouts of the camp hounded him.

Tarquin dug his heels in. “We have to help them.”

He couldn’t shake a mental image of the ground opening and swallowing the forest. Debris and litterfall and people, his people, sliding into the pits. There was no telling where the next pit would open, no sure footing save the layer of shale he’d already found, but that was too far away to help those at the camp.

“Not our problem,” Lockhart said. She still had hold of his wrist, and her eyes were huge and luminous, the strong line of her jaw pronounced by shadows.

“They are Mercator employees. They are my problem.”

She laughed. A short, barking sound that startled him, because he couldn’t recall a time when he’d ever heard a Mercator employee laugh at him, not directly to his face. Especially not an exemplar. Lockhart put a lid on the sound and looked away. So many breaks in protocol in such a short time. The rain painted her dark hair over the sides of her face.

He tried to remember if he’d seen her in the camp before she’d appeared at the edge of the crowd, but he’d been too distracted by the angry sentries. She’d just been there, farther away from the shuttle than anyone else.

Tarquin wasn’t his father. He couldn’t help the quick glance down to her hands, the brief search to see if there were any scratches there, any half-burnt residue of torn electronics. There weren’t. Lockhart saw him look. She tensed, the hand on his wrist, already vise-tight, somehow hardening further, anchoring him.

A shadow flickered above, outlined by the sear of a lightning strike, and her face dimmed, lost all focus save the gleam of her eyes. His comm line crackled, the sensation racing from his temple down along his jaw and into his neck. A tingling shock bore into his spine, made him arch.

The Einkorn was calling, overriding his security, drilling into him, demanding his attention. Grey static swarmed his vision. Half-formed faces swirled out of color-bled smoke, too similar to the sinkholes swallowing the silver-shrouded forest, and then he was screaming, because the crackling shriek was back in his ears and he couldn’t remember how to turn it off.

Lockhart shouted at him, snapped her fingers in front of his eyes, but he was frozen in place. Tarquin clamped his mouth shut to cut off the sound, to keep the coruscating terror inside himself where it belonged. He was a Mercator. Anything that’d gone wrong on that ship was his fault, his burden, and screaming it into the storm would help no one.

The world inverted. A muscular shoulder slammed into his chest. His arms dangled into empty air and his body jolted. Tarquin peeled his eyes open. Lockhart had tossed him over her shoulder and was running full-bore across the buckling ground, pathway-enhanced legs sure and steady, though the world was trying to suck them down.

Pliny squeezed his arm, a rhythmic pulse that grounded him back in his flesh. He closed the channel, silenced those faces wailing behind his eyelids, a shudder racking him so hard Lockhart had to tighten her grip around his waist to keep from dropping him.

“I’m fine.” The words came out staccato as his diaphragm bounced against her. “Put me down.”

“No.”

Bright hot indignity flared through him, mingled with the gut-churning dread the vision had placed within him, and became something righteous.

“I gave you a fucking order.”

Her arm tightened around his waist. He wanted to shout, to pound on her back, to squirm and kick his way free, but she was fully capable of overpowering him in every way. He’d only embarrass himself further, or reveal that he’d had strength and agility pathways installed. She’d tell his father about them, and Acaelus would rip them out.

The landscape changed, the litterfall thinning out as they drew near the shale layer. Her stride lengthened, growing greedy for the relative safety of firmer footing.

“Careful—”

Her foot went out from under her. His warning truncated into a startled shout as she slipped, then her fingers were digging into him hard enough to leave bruises and she threw him clear. He heard more than felt something crack in his side as he landed on the stable ground, rolled, and came to an aching stop.

Tarquin lay there a moment, stunned to silence, breathing in ragged gasps. He was alone. He scrambled to his hands and knees and crawled across the shale. An empty mouth had opened up in the mud about two yards from the ledge of the shelf. Fingers pierced the edge of that mud, scarcely visible.

“Lockhart!”

No answer.

Cursing himself, he crept out onto the unstable ground. Surely the worst of it had passed, he told himself, even though he knew damn well how unpredictable this kind of landscape could be. He reached the edge and found one hand clinging on, her knuckles scraped bloody.

“Lockhart?”

Tarquin craned his neck, not daring to get too close to the edge—mud and litterfall were still pouring over the sides—and found those startlingly bright eyes staring up at him, narrowed in unspoken accusation. The sinkhole was deep enough that even his enhanced night vision couldn’t see the bottom through the sluice of rain.

“Please get back to safety.”

“Give me your hand.” He braced himself against the ground and extended his other hand over the edge.

“Forgive my aspersions against your strength, my liege, but you cannot pull me up.”

He ignored her use of his title. “Ex. Lockhart, that is a fall so deep I cannot see the bottom. Your other arm is clearly injured, as you are not allowing me to see it nor using it to grip the edge. You are not getting out of there without assistance, and I require an exemplar at my side. Take my hand.”

A faint scowl teased across her lips as she glanced down into the swallowing dark. “I’m confident I can brace for the fall.”

“Pliny, light.”

The bot wriggled around his arm and aimed a light into the sinkhole, making Lockhart scrunch her eyes closed, wrinkling her nose. The expression looked positively childlike, and the brief flash of innocence on her face startled him. Was that really the same face that’d seemed so full of rage when she’d found him outside of camp? Pliny’s light couldn’t penetrate the bottom.

“It is my professional assessment that you will break both of your legs if you fall,” he said.

The scowl slipped back into place and was immediately stamped out. “You’re not a doctor, my liege.”

“No, but I am a geologist, and despite what you may believe, I haven’t spent my entire life wrapped up safely in the walls of the ivory tower. Your hand, now, Exemplar. I will not ask again.”

“We’ll both fall.”

“We will not.”

Indecision warred across her face, a very human urge not to experience pain pushing against her desire to keep her charge from falling to his death alongside her.

He sighed. “Would you leave me without protection, Lockhart?”

A smirk burst forth, quickly stifled, but so luminous it made him blink. It completely transformed her. In that moment she wasn’t the knight piece his father pushed across the board, a stalwart defender, bent to single-minded purpose, but the woman he thought he glimpsed sometimes. A person. Someone he might have known in the halls at university, where people were stiff around him, but looser than they’d ever been on Mercator Station. And then it was gone.

“You use my own tactics against me, my liege.”

“Time to use one more,” he said, and grabbed her wrist.

Her grip relaxed. She was going to let go.

“Don’t you dare,” he snapped, tightening his hold.

“You’re being stupid,” she said, voice low, almost conversational. “I’ll heal.”

“And if the force of you striking the bottom sets off another mudslide that buries you beyond all help?”

She swallowed hard. “Mercator is contractually obligated to pay my phoenix fees should I die in defense of a charge.”

“True,” he admitted. “But I can’t get these people to the Einkorn alone, and this is too important. I won’t wake up in my father’s printing bay having no memory of this world and what befell it. Something has brought the shroud to this planet, and I intend to discover the truth of the matter. There are answers here, Ex. Lockhart. Stay and help me find them.”

She took a hitching breath and nodded.

“Good. Your other hand, please.”

“That shoulder is dislocated.”

He hesitated, staring down into that mud-smeared face. He’d be bawling his eyes out if he’d dislocated a shoulder. Hell, he’d popped a pinky finger out of joint once and had nearly fainted before his pathways controlled the pain.

“All right,” he said. She watched the knowledge of her situation dawn across his face and arched one brow, slightly, as if to say—I told you that you weren’t strong enough to do this. “I need you to promise me something, Lockhart.”

“I am yours to command, my liege.”

He scowled. “A personal favor. One you’ll actually adhere to this time, as you seem incapable of calling me by my name as I requested.”

“I…” She blinked, her nose scrunching again.

He knew all the things she was supposed to say—if you insist or, very well—and he dreaded the formality, because it would mean she hadn’t understood. That she was still thinking of this situation as professional, and he needed it not to be.

“Oh, what the hell,” she said. “What is it?”

“Don’t tell my father.”

The confusion rushed back, but he’d already grabbed her wrist in both of his hands and activated his strength pathways as he hauled back. She let out a startled yelp, scrambling to help him with her good arm and feet once she could get purchase. Even with his boosted strength, she was heavy—all dense muscle and metal implants—and he grunted, breaking out in a thin sweat that washed away in the rain as he staggered backward and gave one last yank, collapsing onto his back.

She hit the ground next to him, her wrist trapped in his hands, so she couldn’t brace herself. A hiss of pain whispered through her teeth, body curling up instinctively around her injured arm. Her shoulder blade winged out too far beneath the light cover of her body armor.

“Shit.” He dropped her wrist—wearing a bracelet of a bruise over the Mercator cuffs—and scrambled to all fours, reaching for her to—do what, exactly? She was right, he wasn’t a doctor. “Are you all right?”

A low, rocky noise rumbled in her chest and transformed into rough laughter. He rocked back on his heels, confused as she shuddered through waves of pain competing against a laugh she couldn’t seem to control.

“Lockhart…?”

She shook her head at him and rolled onto her back, a wince tensing her up as her shoulder hit the ground. “You little shit. I can’t believe you had noncompliant pathways installed.”

He was grateful for the dark, because the furious blush that reddened his cheeks was very un-Mercator of him. “That’s what you found so hilarious?”

“My liege, being attached to a rebellious Mercator might be the funniest fucking joke the universe has ever pulled on—ah—an exemplar.”

“Would you please agree to call this Mercator ‘Tarquin,’ then? Without the edge that lets me know you’re only using it under duress.”

Her gaze slid to him, sideways, rain pelting her skin, but she didn’t seem to mind. “Only in private. You’re currently being accused of sabotage. I believe it’s prudent to remind the others of what you are.”

Her use of what instead of who prickled at him—it wasn’t a distinction most would make—but she was speaking broadly about his family, their business. Not him. He appreciated the distinction. “Ah, right. The sabotage. Another knot to untangle.”

A crack sounded from deep within the forest, shouts echoing. Tarquin flinched, staring into the rain-drenched night. Insubordination. Sabotage. Mercator employees were dying out there because he hadn’t been able to rally them quickly enough. It couldn’t all be just because he wasn’t as firm as his father, could it?

“Tarquin?” Lockhart asked, when he’d been quiet for a while.

“I wish I could have done more to help them.” Tarquin bit the interior of his cheek. He wasn’t supposed to make personal disclosures to his exemplar. Let alone his father’s.

“You…” She trailed off, and he looked back down at her, drawn by the unusually rough edge to her voice. “You did the best thing you could for them. You survived. Without your command keys, they wouldn’t be able to reach the Einkorn.”

“I know.” He rubbed the backs of his hands self-consciously and tried to lighten his tone. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and lose our saboteur in a sinkhole.”

“You thought I did it,” she said warily. “I saw you check my hands for abrasions.”

“I thought you’d been behaving rather strangely for an exemplar.”

“Well, if we’re being frank, Tarquin, you’ve been behaving rather strangely for a Mercator.”

A laugh startled out of him. Her tone was amused in a way that implied approval, and he caught himself smiling.

“Fair enough,” he said.

Tarquin stood and offered his hand down to her, pointedly angling for her good arm. She hesitated a moment, then took it, letting herself be helped to her feet. A brief shock at the casual contact wound through him, then faded, followed by a sense of accomplishment, which was ridiculous.

He needed her to keep him alive, to help him untangle whatever had gone wrong on Sixth Cradle. She was his father’s favorite, an E-X more exacting than most.

Anything else, any cracks he thought he saw in that marble-slick edifice of obedience, were the stressors of the situation on both of them. Her slips, him seeing what he wanted to see—a person behind the shield—were the cause of Sixth Cradle. Nothing more.

TWELVE

Naira

Sixth Cradle

The rest of the survivors arrived at the safety of the shale layer in a slow trickle, though not all of them. They weathered the storm there, resting fitfully under makeshift shelters, but mostly relying on their pathways to keep them warm. When the star rose, Naira and Paison organized a small group of the uninjured, and Dr. Bracken in case they found any more wounded, and followed Tarquin’s methodical guidance through the unsteady ground back to the camp.

Five had died in the sinkholes, with another seven injured so badly that they had to be moved to stable ground on litters.

Naira knelt beside a sinkhole that had opened up beneath the shuttle, running her hand along a warped strut that had already been damaged when the shuttle landed, but was now beyond saving. The metal had been bent one too many times, work-hardened and brittle. If they tried to force it back into place, it’d snap. Naira could relate.

A soft boot squished across the muddy ground. Paison sank into a crouch beside her.

“Might have to try melting the crates sooner rather than later,” the captain said.

“Same problem as before. Not enough fuel to fix the ship and fly it.” Naira drew her hand away from the abused metal and rested her forearms across her knees, letting her hands dangle. It was easier to look at the damage done to the ship than the damage done to the survivors.

She would have killed them all. Had counted on it. But they’d been abstract things, then. Numbers loaded into a computer. Neural maps in storage. Even if Mercator was going to pay their phoenix fees, it was one thing to know you were coming back. Another thing to live through dying.

Naira had died a lot. It never got easier. Your mind and body were always convinced that was it. That was the last time. Human evolution hadn’t caught up yet. Maybe it never would.

“What are you thinking, E-X?” Paison asked, voice low enough to signal she expected the truth. A confidence between the two people holding this mission together. Naira couldn’t give it to her.

She turned her head, eyeing the work being done at the devastated campsite. Tarquin and his bot were busy marking off dangerous patches of ground, creating a string maze for those who had been recruited to move what they could salvage of the supplies to the new camp. Two of the five bodies had been recovered, wrapped up in black tarps, and set to the side against the edge of the ridge. Naira understood the impulse but couldn’t help but wonder if they’d need those tarps.

“I’m thinking,” Naira said slowly, “that if the Einkorn doesn’t get in contact with us soon, we’re going to have a supply issue.”

Paison nodded, lanky hair thick with oil and dirt sliding across her face. “Liege Tarquin’s tests indicated the blood of the animal you shot was compatible with our amino acids.”

Naira shifted her weight, feeling the bones in her shoulder grind against inflamed tendons. She’d backed off on letting the pathways tone down the pain once the joint was back in the socket. Her metabolism had been burning too hot, and hunger gnawed at her, but she wouldn’t take more than her fair share of rations. She couldn’t stomach the shroud gruel in large enough doses to make up the difference. Paison couldn’t stomach the shroud at all.

“You want me to hunt it,” she said.

“We don’t have the gut biomes to easily digest animal meat, but I think we have to try.” Paison craned her neck, watching Tarquin lay down another line to reroute the survivors lugging supplies. They grumbled at him. “And I think it might be best if Liege Tarquin makes himself scarce for a few hours. Let people calm down.”

Naira’s fists clenched. “You’re the one who accused him of sabotage.”

“I know. I was furious and overtired. A mistake. But until he contacts the Einkorn, people are going to wonder. They want someone to blame.” Paison rubbed a pathway on the back of her hand. It looked inflamed, but the captain knew her body and would no doubt reach out to Dr. Bracken if it bothered her. They were all running on fumes and determination.

“Was it a mistake?” Naira asked.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Paison said.

Naira kept watching Tarquin work. She shouldn’t care. She should let Paison throw suspicion on him. But, even if his midnight jaunt had been ill-advised, he’d saved all their asses last night. The survivors should be thanking him. Not watching him warily, as they were after Paison’s accusation.

“You know damn well he didn’t touch that tablet.”

Paison drew her head back. “Do I? Running around in the woods alone isn’t exactly normal Mercator behavior, E-X.”

Naira let out a tired sigh. “I know. He’s not… normal.”

Paison hesitated. “You’re certain he is who he claims to be?”

“I’m certain he’s a Mercator, if maybe not the man his father wanted him to be. Look at him. He’s laying those guidelines down himself. Hasn’t even ordered someone to do it for him.”

“Sounds like the kind of thing a Conservator would do,” Paison said.

Naira smirked at the shuttle. “Ah, yes, terrorists. Renowned for their egalitarian natures and aversion to giving demands.”

Paison snorted. “All right. Fine. But he’s still weird. Tell me you’re sure.”

The temptation to join Paison in laying suspicion at Tarquin’s feet swelled within her. But he’d been right—no one could fake his command keys—and when people got over their initial paranoia and realized he was who he claimed to be, they’d wonder why Ex. Lockhart had been so keen to toss him to the wolves.

“I’m sure,” Naira said. “No one fakes daddy issues that well.”

Paison laughed and clapped her on the back, giving her a shake that hurt her sore shoulder, but Naira pretended it didn’t. “I’ll take your word for it. But clear him out of here for a while, all right? He’s some kind of geoscientist. Maybe he can help scout for food.”

Naira nodded and stood, brushing mud off her hands. She checked her sidearm, the knife at her hip, the extra ammo clips she’d stuffed into a zippered pocket, then hefted herself into the tilted compartment of the shuttle and removed a rifle and another ammo strap, slinging both across her back. If she was going to hunt anything on this planet, she wanted all the advantage she could get.

Tarquin looked up as she approached. He noted her extra weaponry, but otherwise didn’t react. “Do you require my assistance?”

“Captain thinks we should scout around for more stable ground nearby,” she said, loud enough to be overheard. When his brow wrinkled in confusion, she leaned closer and dropped her voice. “We need to find a food source.”

“Ah, a good idea.” He gestured for Pliny to scramble up his arm. “This way.”

Tarquin led them out of the camp, his steps sure across the broken landscape, drawing them at a slight angle away from the direction of the new campsite. The silent wood welcomed them back with a soft sigh, a subtle breeze rippling through the draped lichen clinging to long-dead branches. Already the lichen had partially dried out, turning back to deathly grey.

“Is the food situation that dire?” he asked when they were far enough away that the sound wouldn’t travel back to the camp. “By my initial count, I thought we’d have two weeks.”

“Heavy pathway use to manage injuries and maintain alertness has drained our reserves faster than anticipated.” Naira slipped the rifle off her back and checked it over before carrying it at her hip, barrel pointed at the ground. “I’d estimate five days before we have to go to survival rations. We might do it tonight, if we can’t find anything on-planet, just to get ahead of things. I suggest relying on your pathways as little as possible until we can contact the Einkorn.”

“I’ve already backed off their use. Last night excluded.”

“I apologize for the necessity.”

He said nothing for a long while, instead leading her along a slight depression in the ground for a few hours, lost in concentration. The thin trail might be some kind of game track, so she scanned the trees to the best of her ability, though she’d never hunted an animal before.

“It’s a shame not everyone can eat the shroud,” she said after a while.

He ran a hand through a clump of brittle leaves entangled in the stuff and examined his fingers afterward. “Better to leave it to those who can stomach it than risk a vomiting epidemic when we’re already low on calories.”

“It really is a killer,” she said.

He paused, frowning up at the tree he’d touched. “Not precisely. From our perspective, certainly, but the shroud is… It leaches nutrients because that’s all it’s meant to do. Scrape everything of value out of the world and convert it to biofuel to further its own spread.”

“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound all that different than humanity and relk.”

The back of his shirt grew taut as his shoulders tensed. He drew to a halt, and she watched him carefully as he looked out upon the dead forest.

“Mining relkatite doesn’t strip worlds of value, Exemplar.”

Naira bowed her head, pretending at contrition.

“My apologies. I didn’t mean it literally.”

He sighed, dropped his hand to his side with a smear of muddy lichen as it connected with his hip. “That’s all right. I just don’t enjoy the comparison.”

Why? she wanted to scream.

Paison was right to be suspicious of him. Tarquin was hiding something, but it had nothing to do with his identity. Last night, he’d claimed he wanted to discover how the shroud had come to this world. But he should know, shouldn’t he?

She’d almost forgotten what he was when she’d been lying on that shattered ground, her body in agony, the absurdity of Acaelus’s son having unsanctioned pathways shaking something loose within her. Opening her up to the possibility that they weren’t all like their father, that there could be variation—even defiance—below the surface.

Stupid of her. But he was wavering, letting more of his real thoughts slip through, and it’d be foolish of her not to press the advantage.

“I understand,” she said, taking up the lead. “Not being able to contact the Einkorn is weighing on us all.”

She heard his boot skip across the broken rocks, and while that could easily have been from unsteady footing, she read a lie in that faint stumble. Naira paused, half turning back to him, making sure the rifle was low, and pointed at the ground so he wouldn’t feel threatened. “We haven’t, have we?”

His spine stiffened, green-flecked eyes narrowing. “Why would you assume otherwise?”

Naira tipped her chin, slowly, to the stretch of blue sky. “I saw you accessing your HUD when you panicked last night, Tarquin.”

“I don’t know what you’re implying.”

Naira cocked her head, leaning her weight back on one foot as she watched him. She hadn’t noticed it before, because he’d been precisely what she’d expected in the beginning, but now she saw him strain to keep the haughty lift to his chin, the aristocratic straightness of his spine. Tarquin Mercator really had been born into the wrong family for his temperament.

“My mistake, my liege,” she said deliberately.

He flinched, looking away, and she knew she was right. There’d been a transmission from the Einkorn, one that had made him lock up and cry out, but he wasn’t willing to talk about it.

“Keep moving,” he said curtly. “I want to reach the end of this tributary before it gets dark.”

Naira bowed her head in obedience and he flinched again, fists tightening, then picked up his step, hurrying across the uneven ground. She followed, frowning at his back. He must be using his agility pathways to manage the terrain at this speed, and they really were short on food. She’d pushed him too much. She needed to get him to relax with her again.

“How do you know it’s a tributary?” she asked. “I thought it was a game trail.”

He slowed, voice brightening as he pointed to the smooth, grey stones gathered at the edges of the path. “Rocks with weathering indicative of water activity,” he said. “Some things are the same on every planet—and there’s a slight downward grade.” He turned again, gesturing behind them at the peaks of white-bitten mountains. “When the snow melts, it runs this way, joining a larger body of water. The animal we saw was compatible with human biology, so it might require water as well. At the very least, a body of water might be a draw to other plants and animals.”

“Good thinking,” she said genuinely.

While he still hurried, he slowed from his frantic scramble into something more manageable without pathways. She watched him move down the slope and wondered what he really knew. Why every muscle in his body had tightened when she’d mentioned the Einkorn.

A splash of yellow, jarring in this grey-and-green world, punched her in the gut. Naira startled to a halt, reflexively grabbing Tarquin’s shoulder to keep him from moving too far along without her.

He turned to ask her what she was doing, then froze when he saw it, too. Five yards away, leaning against a lichen-crusted boulder. A Mercator-green supply crate, banded with a yellow strap, pitched aside and broken against the stone.

“Debris?” Tarquin asked, but the word was more a wish than a question.

“That small? It would have burned up. And if it’d ridden down in something larger, we would have felt the impact from the campsite.”

“I know.” His voice was thready with uncertainty, because those two truths opened the door on a whole lot of questions.

“Stay beside me,” she said, lowering her voice.

Tarquin nodded, wary. Naira brought her rifle up and crept across the dying world.

THIRTEEN

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

The guilt that’d been twisting him up about lying to her over the transmission was replaced with leaden dread. Tarquin followed Lockhart, hiding his sweating palms in his pockets. It was just a crate. Maybe one of the survivors had dragged it out here to have a private stash of food. A single crate alone in the forest didn’t mean anything.

But a dozen did.

Tarquin blinked, locked in place. Even Lockhart stopped her slow advance, no longer sweeping the rifle across the landscape. Around a low outcropping of toothy slate, a pyramid of Mercator-green crates waited. A partially decayed loading strap had been tugged tight across the top. Everything was covered in a layer of drying mud.

Lockhart cleared her throat. “This is a supply drop.”

“It seems to be,” he said.

She looked over her shoulder at him, arching one brow. “Want to explain this?”

“I… can’t.” He stared at the crates. Blinked a few more times, as if they were a mirage he could clear from his vision. Shroud lichen was inactive in humans. There’d been no recorded cases of it causing hallucinations. He wasn’t tired or hungry enough to start seeing things, and Lockhart had seen them first.

They were real. They were impossible.

He drifted forward, drawn by the crates. Lockhart edged away to let him pass. Lichen had grown over the crates, had even cracked some of the seams. Unlike most lichen, the shroud’s fungal half could send mycelium beneath the surface, seeking nutrients like the roots of other plants, and it had done so, here. That took… time.

He swiped a finger across the mud—an inch thick. These weren’t a few days old. Couldn’t be. And yet they bore his family’s crest stamped on all sides, the sigil for the Amaranth, a purple-metallic arc abstractly similar to the ship of the same name flying above the crest.

“This isn’t possible,” he said.

“The crates disagree,” Lockhart said dryly, but he detected strain in her voice. “Maybe the Amaranth dropped these ahead of time, to seed the survey team when it was ready. When did you print up, again?”

“A few hours before I printed you.”

They stared at each other.

It was Lockhart who finally said it, “The Amaranth was breaking down. Spitting out misprints. Maybe it got its wires crossed and dropped supply crates early.”

“Except it was supposed to start printing key personnel the second it entered LPO.”

“Nothing is happening as it’s supposed to on this expedition,” she said. “How old do you think these are?”

Shroud lichen was the most studied living thing in the universe. He knew precisely how it grew, what conditions it was drawn to. How even a single cell was enough for it to take metaphorical root, to multiply until a planet was choking under its weight. Knew how long it took before the lichen grew desperate enough to attach itself to metal.

“At least a month,” he said.

“You don’t think…” Lockhart trailed off. He turned to find she’d bitten her lower lip, hard, physically keeping the words back.

“Lockhart, please, if you have any ideas, I’ll hear them.”

“It occurred to me that the first crate we saw was open. Used and empty. These are supply crates. Ration crates. We know the Amaranth had an error in its body-printing program. What if this isn’t the first time we’ve been down here?”

Dizziness struck him when he recalled the missing survey drones. What if they were missing because he’d already sent them down?

Whispers of the grey faces encroached on the sides of his vision. He squeezed his eyes shut against them, pushed them out. That transmission, was it really from the Einkorn, or was it from his own mind because he’d died and died and died and been reprinted too many times?

If he’d died here… If it’d been violent… Maybe those faces weren’t patterns in the static from the Einkorn. Maybe they were patterns in the static of him. Cracks in his consciousness, preceding total dissolution of his very mind.

“Tarquin?” Lockhart’s hand rested on his shoulder, an unyielding anchor. “Are you all right?”

He peeled his eyes open. Closed his mouth and breathed through his nose. Slowly, he straightened, brushed the mud off his hands onto his pants.

“I’m fine,” he lied.

“No, you’re not.” She moved her hand to his cheek, shockingly warm. “You’re freezing.”

“I’m fine,” he repeated, unable to hide a rasp of frustration, and took her wrist, moving her hand away. “I was just recalling that the survey drones were missing from the Amaranth when I tried to send them out.”

“Okay,” she said, examining him. That scrutiny exposed him in a way that made him cross his arms over his chest.

Their relationship was tricky enough without her seeing him have a near breakdown over the threat of cracking. But he’d always wondered, after his mother had cracked before her time, if maybe there was something genetic about it. An inheritance that made himself and Leka more susceptible.

Tarquin tried to summon the Mercator mask of indifference once more, but she saw straight through him, and he felt like she’d pinned his soul to his skin and wouldn’t let him wriggle free.

She saw his panic, his uselessness. He’d dragged them into this, thinking he was doing the right thing, and he’d fucked it all up, and then the shroud was here, and the eerie message from the Einkorn, and now this. He couldn’t breathe.

Pliny pulsed on his arm, reacting to the surge in his heart rate, trying to ground him, but sweat slicked his skin and his ears buzzed. He couldn’t drag his thoughts back in line, no matter how desperately he reached for them.

“Whoa,” Lockhart said.

She took his arms firmly in hand and forced him to sit on a crate. Tarquin hid his face in his hands, mortified, but unable to stop the rasp of his breath, the race of his heart. Lockhart knelt in front of him, placed her hands on his knees, and applied gentle pressure.

“I’m here. I’ve got you,” she said, her voice smooth, calm.

It helped. He held on to that voice until he could make himself focus on Pliny’s rhythm, on matching his breathing to that, and the weight on his chest eased, letting him go at last. Tarquin dragged his hands down his face, and when he opened his eyes, hers were all he saw. Concern painted her face in fine lines. He swallowed and looked away.

“Please don’t mention that to anyone,” he said in a near whisper.

“I never would have. Is there a medication you need? Bracken’s stores are slim, but I can get something discreetly from them.”

“No.” He gestured to Pliny.

“Ah. More than an agile survey bot, then.”

“Off the shelf, it is,” Tarquin said with a low sigh. “I had the biorhythm package added after the fact. My father doesn’t know, and I’d like for it to stay that way.”

“Black market pathways and software. You surprise me every day.”

He chuckled softly at the teasing edge in her tone and brushed sweaty hair off his forehead. “I’m sorry you had to see that. It started happening after Mom cracked. Dad kept trying to bring her back, and every time she’d let out this scream…”

She squeezed his knees. “I get it. I’ve heard that sound.”

“You have? God, I thought Leka and Dr. Laurent put a stop to it a year ago.” Panic flashed behind her eyes, and he rested a reassuring hand over hers. “I won’t tell Acaelus you let that slip.”

“Thank you, but—” She hesitated. “Don’t apologize for what you can’t control. I understand. My own mother cracked when I was young.”

“She did?”

The admission startled him. Exemplars weren’t people you were supposed to have personal conversations with. Tarquin didn’t even know about Caldweller’s personal life, and that man had been his E-X since Tarquin was sixteen years old. He found himself curious at this crack in her professional walls.

“May I ask you a personal question?” he asked, then added quickly, “I won’t hold it against you if you decline.”

“Go ahead,” she said warily, “but I might not answer.”

“How can you bear it? Being an exemplar, I mean. After Mom cracked, I lived in fear that I’d follow her, but you… You signed up for violence. To die. I don’t understand it.”

Lockhart studied him for a long moment, her face inscrutable. She drew her hands away from his knees, laced her fingers together, and then dropped her gaze. He’d only ever seen her with her head up, the picture of vigilance, even when she’d had to bow to him in contrition. He didn’t know what to make of the shift.

The moment stretched on for so long he was certain she’d decline to answer, but then she lifted her eyes to his once more and the professional mask was gone.

“My mom died in pain. I was with her, and when I begged for help, no one came.” Her jaw flexed, knuckles cracking as she laced her fingers more tightly together. “I decided to be the person who could help.”

“Lockhart, I…” Her eyes closed, and he sensed that the last thing she wanted was his sympathy. “I am exceedingly lucky to have you with me, then,” he said, and her eyes opened once more. “Because I have no idea what happened here, and I am in desperate need of help.”

“You really don’t know, do you?”

“I wish I did, but I swear to you I don’t.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she seemed to be weighing him up. He straightened, wanting to be worthy of her assistance—which was absurd. Lockhart was contractually obligated to help him, no matter how much of a hapless aristocrat he was. Still, he found he wanted to earn her respect, not leverage it out of her by the happenstance of his birth.

“All right, call-me-Tarquin.” She stood and held her hand down to him. “We’d better set to work figuring out what happened, then.”

Had she just mocked him? Tarquin blinked, wrong-footed by the good-natured tone of her voice, and found himself smiling shyly as he took her hand. “Do you really think we’ve been down here before?”

“No. I was just spitballing, earlier, but I doubt we’ve been here before. Primarily because you have Pliny, and if you’d come down here without being able to return to the ships and back up, then the bot would have been left behind. But there’s… Liege Acaelus wouldn’t want me telling you this.”

“I think we’ve established I have no trouble keeping secrets from my father.” He gestured to his strength pathways.

She snorted, a very un-exemplar sound. “True. Liege Acaelus made a habit of keeping a secondary shuttle on the mining fleet ships, should he decide he needed to attend to a private matter. The shuttle would be in the family storage bays. Too far to have run to, when the Amaranth started falling. That shuttle could have brought down the crates.”

“I wasn’t aware of this shuttle,” Tarquin said.

“Forgive me, but he wouldn’t have told you.”

“Why on Earth not?” Tarquin asked, and the shadow that passed behind her eyes wiped his smile away.

“I really shouldn’t tell you this.”

“I promise you I won’t betray your confidence to my father.”

“Very well.” She adjusted the rifle strap, resettling it around her shoulders. “In confidence, the family shuttle is outfitted with standard map-interface devices. If this mission had gone to plan, myself or Ex. Kearns would have flown it down after the first wave and stashed it somewhere near the primary campsite.

“Liege Acaelus never wants employees to have easy access to backup on these expeditions in case there are things he’d rather they forget, but he requires that access for himself.”

“I see.” Tarquin struggled to keep the distaste off his face. He’d assumed the primary shuttle hadn’t had a backup crown because there’d been no space for it. That his father intentionally withheld the ability to back up in case he decided he needed to kill his employees to make them forget simply hadn’t occurred to him.

She met his stare with her own. “The shuttle would also carry a compact ansible and portable printer, in case he needed to call in a finalizer to intentionally crack a map, or extract answers.”

“A finalizer?”

This time, he couldn’t hide his revulsion. He’d known that Mercator made use of finalizers—assassins trained in meting out deaths brutal enough that they were guaranteed to crack their victim’s map—but the suggestion that his father used them so casually was an appalling thought.

“It’s standard operating procedure,” Lockhart said with a small shrug. “I’d like to have Paison check the logs on our shuttle to confirm that it wasn’t flown down here earlier, but if it wasn’t, then it’s highly likely the family shuttle brought these crates down, as these don’t appear to have been prepared for an orbital drop.”

“And only my father could have done so,” Tarquin said.

Lockhart pressed her lips together, signaling the extent of her willingness to extrapolate from the data before them. He couldn’t blame her. Revealing the existence of a secret shuttle was one thing. Saying—only Acaelus knew about it and had the permissions to use it—was quite another.

Tarquin’s father had come to this world before everyone else.

And now the world was dead.

“I’d like to check the area to see if this shuttle might be nearby.” He avoided looking at her by tracking the tributary with his gaze, following it until it ended in a deeper depression nearby, grey-thick water sludging determinedly through the creek bed. “We need to follow this track a little ways, see if there’s anything else to tell us what happened.”

“It’ll be dark soon,” she said.

“Do you want to return to camp without answers to what we’ve found?”

Her grip tightened on the rifle. “No.”

“Then we search until we can’t anymore.”

She fell into step beside him along the edge of the creek, closer to his side than she usually stood. He was grateful for the reminder of another living, breathing person. Pliny squeezed his arm. He patted the bot on the head until it relaxed.

Lockhart tracked the shadows between the trees, but Tarquin was busy looking within. He pulled up his HUD and accessed the expedition map. As far as he could tell, they were on the edge of the area that he’d originally planned to set up the mining camp on.

“Tarquin,” Lockhart said, voice tight. She stopped walking. So did he. “Please put your back to this tree and stay there.”

“What, why?”

“I need to clear the perimeter.” She gestured with the barrel of her rifle to the branch-obscured, tessellated dome of a lichen-dusted expedition tent. The ghostly glow of Mercator green shone beneath the grey dust.

FOURTEEN

Jonsun

The Einkorn

Jonsun had cracked. He knew the truth in the same way he knew that water was wet and space was a heartless bastard. His mind had fractured and his neural map had spun apart, leaving him stranded in this body that made no sense, because for a brief and terrifying few moments he had seen through two sets of eyes. Double-printed.

One mind could not exist in two places at once and survive.

It wasn’t supposed to happen. They’d put in protocols. They had fail-safes. But he wasn’t supposed to be in the body of an exemplar, either. Wasn’t supposed to have been on the Amaranth at all. That was Kuma’s ship. Her job. His was the Einkorn, and he was there now—had been there and there and there and he knew what he was supposed to do but supposed to was losing meaning because this ship was all wrong. And in the fleeting seconds before Jonsun’s other-him had died on the Amaranth, he’d seen her.

He’d seen Naira Sharp.

Jonsun had been squeezing his eyes shut on this print, this version of himself that lingered broken broken broken on the Einkorn, because the double vision had made it impossible to think. He’d known only that he was cracking, falling apart, and that he had to warn Kuma. Had to tell her that it’d gone wrong and he wouldn’t be able to take down the Einkorn, after all. She’d have to manage both ships.

He’d been looking for Kuma. He’d found Naira. Oh, it wasn’t her preferred print. Of course it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. But it’d been close enough, that new E-X Acaelus had hired that looked remarkably—creepily—like her. He’d told himself it was the physical similarities that had stolen his breath. That had stopped him in his tracks and derailed every thought of Kuma. That all exemplars moved the same, had the same tics. But he hadn’t been sure, and so he’d followed her and seen her brief flash of recognition when he gave the Conservator identification signal from the last mission, the one she’d been captured during.

And then that print of his had died with the Amaranth, leaving him with only the body he inhabited now, on the Einkorn, and he’d never found Kuma.

It was impossible. A figment of his broken mind. When humanity had first gotten the prints to work, they’d tried it. Double-printing. And as soon as those duplicate eyes opened, both started screaming and didn’t stop until the second was put out of its misery. And the first? The first cracked. Never recovered. Irreparable damage to the neural map. Even the backups—all the backups—and you weren’t a person after that. Just impulses and cells.

Jonsun still felt like a person. The body he inhabited on the Einkorn wasn’t his, but it felt real enough. His mind was twisting and following random paths and repetitions and getting stuck in memory holes and he knew that, knew he wasn’t really himself, but a core of something that felt like himself remained. The solid, hefty black hole of being at the center of his galaxy.

And that tiny part of him clung on to the idea that something had gone wrong. That he had to find the ansible, get it back online, and tell someone. Anyone.

Yes, the double-printing was wrong and yes, this printed body was incorrect and yes, this damn ship had fired on the other ship and there was silver dust everywhere he couldn’t explain but could taste, bitter as mildew with every breath. But those were plans going wrong, ships breaking. Normal things. What captured Jonsun’s attention, what held his shattered fragments together with welds of desperation, was Naira Sharp.

Because Naira Sharp had never broken out of prison.

FIFTEEN

Acaelus

Mercator Station

Put him under,” Acaelus said.

Dr. Meti Laurent popped open the door on the IV stand and adjusted the drip, plunging the twitching body of Jonsun Hesson back into uneasy rest. While the doctor checked the print’s vital signs, Acaelus stared down at the Conservator, wishing he could wring real answers out of him, but knowing the stream-of-consciousness litany was all he could hope for.

Even this was a risk, tiptoeing along the razor’s edge of Mercator technology. There were rumors that the Tran family could double-print successfully for short amounts of time, but those were precisely the kinds of rumors that families liked to circulate to drum up public support. If Tran’s researchers had actually maintained coherence across a double-print for more than ten seconds, Acaelus would know.

He’d know, because he had spies implanted in all the MERIT families.

“Q-field has stabilized,” Dr. Laurent said. “Hesson is holding up surprisingly well for a double-print.”

“Indeed” was all he would allow himself to say as he gazed at the body. This was one of the many reasons he’d allowed the remaining Conservators to insert themselves into the personnel database—with a few adjustments, naturally. They’d trained their minds to diamond-hard resilience. If anyone could hold out against double-printing, it was them.

After ninety-eight years as the head of Mercator, there was little that surprised Acaelus. The Einkorn shutting down its own ansible, cutting off his ability to communicate with that ship and, by extension, his son, had both surprised and infuriated him. But it had given him an opportunity to put his theory that some people could hold together longer while double-printed to the test.

Jonsun was proving a robust test subject. Acaelus had every faith that he’d be able to, after some coaxing, fix the ansible and reestablish communications between Mercator Station in Sol and Sixth Cradle. He only wished the man was more reliable.

“Unfortunate, though,” the doctor said, “that he appears fixated on Ex. Lockhart being Ex. Sharp. Is it possible, do you think?”

“Ex. Sharp’s neural map is locked with my personal command keys, Doctor. It’s not possible. Do you have the suggestive simulation prepared?”

“I do,” she said, hesitant.

This was where the cutting edge of technology stepped over a sharp cliff. Acaelus couldn’t fault the doctor for her uncertainty—he entertained a great deal of that on his own—but her lack of compliance abraded his sense of decorum.

“Well? Do not let me keep you overlong, Doctor.”

“Yes, my liege. My apologies.”

A lesser subordinate would have scrambled to meet his implied demand, but Dr. Laurent went through the motions of applying the simulation crown to the pathways printed in the Conservator’s skin with extreme precision. When she was finished, she entered commands into the holo projected from a console podium. Jonsun’s face twitched—a dog chasing a rabbit in a dream.

Admittedly, this part of the process was scientifically little more than hypnotism. The suggestions imparted by the simulation would urge Jonsun across the entangled link of his double to seek out the ship’s ansible and get it back online.

Then Acaelus could call Tarquin and order him to cast himself home. If he was still alive. There was no guarantee that shuttle had made it to the planet safely.

Hidden behind the small of his back, Acaelus’s fists clenched. The pressure made his joints ache. He hadn’t been back in this body long, but the print was older than most.

While he tolerated fresh prints when on missions that required casting his mind long distances, he kept this print in stasis during that time. When home on Mercator Station, Acaelus would only ever wear this body, no matter how often the integration pathways flared with pain.

This was the print he’d been in before his wife had cracked. He would not suffer to live in a body that had never touched her hair, that had never tasted her lips. When he finally brought her back, only then would he consider reprinting. Until then, he’d wear this print until the integration pathways started sloughing out of his skin.

Acaelus eased the clench of his hands. Meti had already prepared a batch of the serum that helped his print hold together well past its due. He’d take it once he was done here, but right now, his son’s fate took priority.

Tarquin was never supposed to be mixed up in something this dangerous. If he could have confirmation of his son’s death, he’d reprint him right here, right now, and have the boy safely by his side again. Even if Tarquin would then fly off to whatever university captured his fancy next.

As things stood, the shuttle that Jonsun had witnessed leaving the ship never could have launched without Tarquin’s command keys. When Acaelus went on cradle missions, he set his prints to broadcast back everything they saw through a secure ansible channel. Mercator Station knew the second his print had died, so that they could safely reprint him.

Tarquin had refused such measures, citing the mental fatigue common with such a hookup and the heavy load on the bandwidth between Sol and the ships from a single constant connection, let alone two. But Acaelus had known the truth of his refusal. The boy had always been more guarded about his privacy than most. It shouldn’t have mattered.

According to the footage from Acaelus’s own eyes, when the misprints had poured out of the bay, he’d ordered his son to go home.

Tarquin had disobeyed him. Unthinkable.

And in doing so, Tarquin had inadvertently placed himself in the hands of his greatest enemy. His son hadn’t known, of course. Not even his eldest child, Leka, who was privy to most of Acaelus’s secrets, had known about the emergency switch Acaelus had set in the neural map databases.

If anything were to go wrong on that mission, he’d print Ex. Sharp and rest the blame on her shoulders. He’d counted on her single-minded sense of purpose to destroy those ships, and take whatever evidence remained with her.

He didn’t know why the Einkorn had fired. He didn’t know why Sixth Cradle was, according to the footage sent back before the ansible went offline, already dead. All he’d known was that he wouldn’t let Mercator be at fault for yet another disaster.

Now he wished he’d taken the blame, instead of placing his son in Naira Sharp’s hands.

SIXTEEN

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira made sure Tarquin wouldn’t have another panic attack before leaving him behind the tree. The rain had washed away most of the lichen dust, leaving a grey slurry across the ground that squished beneath her boots. She had to rely on her pathways to keep her steps steady. Spending the extra calories wouldn’t matter if she slipped and they died for the mistake.

Not that she expected to encounter any resistance. As she approached the campsite, it became clear that the tents were long abandoned. Shroud had grown in the cracks of four tents clustered in a tight circle, the barest minimum space between them. She frowned at that, unsure what to think. Humans liked their space, and there was plenty of room to spread out. Why would they shove the tents so close together they could touch hands by reaching out the front entrances?

Half the tents had slumped into the ground, covered by thick mud. The others had panels missing. Even though she knew what she’d find, she made short work of checking the tents for survivors, sweeping the interiors with her rifle.

Whoever had set up these tents had left few personal effects behind. Broken tablets, rotted clothes. A couple of tents held small canisters, the paint scratched but their intended contents clear—fuel for cooking. Naira hoped those were still full. Nothing identifiable remained, and all the items were scattered strangely, out of sync with the strict regulations required by Mercator.

She’d been certain Acaelus had come here first in his private shuttle. This didn’t look like him.

The Conservators didn’t have those regulations. She stamped the thought down. If Jonsun and the others had somehow been printed early and dropped to the planet, they would have brought her with them. Would have gotten a message to her. This was Acaelus’s doing. She just didn’t know why.

A branch broke.

Naira spun to the sound, dropping low, rifle up and the targeting laser disabled so as to not give away her position. Behind the flimsy cover of a half-swallowed tent, she eased her head around the side, wishing silently for camera drones, proximity beacons. Any of the standard tool kit exemplars used. At least Tarquin had stayed put.

Dead leaves crackled near the broken branch. Naira tensed, straining to hear every detail. Whatever it was, it wasn’t being careful. It took another step, drawing closer to the small camp. Fetid breath tinged the air, overwhelming the green aroma of the rain-gorged lichen. Was the animal bipedal? It certainly sounded that way.

Naira cursed her lack of knowledge. The easiest way to handle this was to stand and fire off a shot, catch the animal before it noticed her presence. But if it was a person, she couldn’t take that chance. She needed eyes on the thing. And that meant exposing her position.

Painstakingly slowly, she crept along the edge of the tent, sliding her feet through the mud more than stepping, the rifle ready but her finger off the trigger. Holding her breath, she peeked around the side of the tent.

She didn’t know what she was looking at, not at first. The creature hunched over a broken-open section of a tent, rummaging through crinkling paper. Ration wrappers. Its hind legs coiled beneath it, one bent backward, like a bird’s, while the other bent forward. Scraggly hair tinged with grey mud draped across the creature’s back, the original color long since lost to filth.

Bones pushed against the taut skin. Starving. Naira recognized the corded stretch of a spine, and bile filled the back of her throat. She swallowed it down.

She shifted, trying to get a look at the creature’s face, to confirm what she already knew to be true. Her finger drifted off the guard, reaching for the trigger without conscious thought. Her boot brushed a crumpled ration wrapper, half-hidden in the muck.

The creature’s head swung around. Naira froze. One eye had been printed above the creature’s ear, vitreous and still. The other eye was nearer to the misprint’s forehead, the mouth a vertical slot, lips and teeth cleaving the space where the nose should have been.

A low, keening wail built in the misprint’s throat, fingers streaked with blood and mud reaching for her, imploring, asking a question without answer.

Naira fired. The rifle kicked in her arms and the misprint’s head snapped back, the shot taking it in the forehead-eye. The back of its brain painted the tent in startling shades of red and pink and ever-constant grey. Naira let her breath out, shuddering as that twisted form slid down the side of the tent and rolled onto its side, a too-long arm bent up along its back.

Misprints. Bracing against revulsion, Naira approached the dead thing with ponderous steps. She had to know. Had to see if this was the same creature she’d winged the other night.

“What—?” Tarquin staggered into the clearing, drawn by the bent and broken body.

“Don’t,” Naira snapped, holding out a forestalling hand. “Don’t get near it.”

He froze in place, too startled to be offended by her giving him a direct order. Maybe he’d picked up on the tightness in her voice. He was more aware of her moods than Acaelus ever had been. Quite probably because Acaelus had seen her as useful furniture, and this son of his was trying to do things differently, even if he failed.

Easier to think about Tarquin’s behavior than what waited in the mud.

Naira made herself crouch beside the body and used the barrel of her rifle to brush the thing’s scraggly hair aside—thing, it, creature, no pronouns, not for a body that had never carried a mind. She finished her methodical check and found no other bullet injury save the one she’d put in the creature’s head.

The angular jut of a limb in the dark, the soft curve of a haunch. She’d bet everything that the thing they’d seen was another misprint. There were no animals left on this world. None but human.

She couldn’t help but feel a wave of relief as she backed away from the body, putting space between them. Being close to misprints made her skin crawl.

“Tarquin,” she said slowly, approaching him like he was an animal getting ready to bolt. He fixed his gaze on hers, intense and shining in the fading light, and she caught something in his expression she hadn’t expected. The fear and anxiety were there, but there was a streak of determination. A tenseness of his jaw that spoke of barely constrained anger. “We need to get back to camp. There’s at least one more that we know of and it’s getting dark. They’re weak, but after what happened on the Amaranth, I don’t want to take any chances.”

“How could this happen?” he asked.

“I don’t know. But I’d like to live long enough to figure it out.”

“Right.” He gestured to the crates. “We should take some rations back with us.”

Naira grimaced. “Not until we can explain where they came from without causing a panic. We have to consult Captain Paison, and we need to tell her soon, because if the misprints associate Mercator crates and tents with food, it’s only a matter of time before they approach the camp.”

Tarquin paled, but nodded in agreement and marched back along the tributary with long, determined strides. Naira followed, kicking up her pathways to enhance her vision and reflexes. On their way out, she paused long enough to grab three ration bars and cram them down. Tarquin said nothing. If they were attacked, she’d need all the energy she could get to fight back.

SEVENTEEN

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira kept Tarquin moving at a brisk pace, even though he was flagging. Darkness sank into the trees, washing the rain-soaked green back into solemn greys.

The lights were brightest at the sinkhole-damaged campsite, so that’s where Naira guided them, hoping to catch Paison as she worked on the downed shuttle. With the extra supplies from the old cache drop, they might have an easier time fixing the shuttle. Most of the fresh food would be gone or rotten, but there were rations, and the cooking fuel could be used to melt the excess crates for repairs.

She focused on the upsides, because she dreaded having to tell Paison what they’d found, and all the implications the discovery carried.

The closer they drew, the louder the voices in the clearing were. Raised in agitation, Paison’s cool tone undercutting the brewing tension. Naira shared a look with Tarquin and motioned for him to flank her. She let her boots crunch across the litterfall and slung the rifle to her back as she crossed the camp’s perimeter, careful to move along the paths Tarquin had earlier marked as stable ground.

A group had clotted in the largest safe area, Paison at their center. They quieted when they saw her. Dawd shushed the man next to him into silence. Naira’s skin prickled.

“Problem?” Naira asked, staying at the edge of the light, her back to the woods.

Paison looked up from the huddled circle. “You tell me. We heard a gunshot.”

Right. Last time she’d fired in the woods, the survivors had been anxious. Now, they were even jumpier. A brush-off wouldn’t work.

“I thought I saw an animal.” Naira crossed her arms, leaning back slightly to take all the implicit threat out of her posture. “Can I talk to you, Captain?”

Paison glanced at Tarquin, who nodded his agreement, and motioned for them to follow her. Naira fell into step behind Tarquin once more, keeping the agitated crowd of survivors in the corner of her eye. For the late hour, there were more people at the unstable campsite than there should be.

Once the supplies had been moved, they’d planned on relocating everything except the shuttle, since they didn’t dare waste fuel to move it, and it appeared stable enough for now. The fact that twenty or so were still here, tents and bedrolls shoved into the narrow sections Tarquin had marked as safe, didn’t sit well.

Paison slung herself up into the shuttle and they followed her until they were in the cockpit, then shut the door. Shielded from outside view by the tinted windscreen, Paison let out a soft groan of exhaustion and sprawled into the captain’s chair. “Those people are driving me up a fucking wall. Begging your pardon, my liege.”

“Why are they still here?” Tarquin asked. “I ordered everyone to the safe campsite by star-fall.”

“Beats me,” Paison said. “I tried to herd ’em off, but that lot, they’re worried about leaving the shuttle behind, due to the potential of a saboteur. I can’t say I blame them, too much. This planet is giving me the creeps, but you’d think they’d show a little self-preservation.”

That was far too casual a reaction to people disobeying a direct order from Tarquin. Paison should be sweating at not being able to force compliance, not lounging in her chair. Twice now, Naira had come back from an outing with Tarquin to find the camp tense, Paison unable to keep things under control.

If Naira hadn’t been the one to break the tablet herself, she’d have been pointing the finger at Paison.

Maybe she should.

“Are you incapable of controlling the crew, Captain?” Naira asked.

Tarquin looked surprised by the challenge, but Paison merely gave her a tight smile. “Every time Liege Tarquin leaves, they get nervous. Paranoid, even. I don’t know what the hell is going on with them.”

“I’ll restate the order,” Tarquin said. “We need everyone in the same location.”

Paison’s brows lifted. “Sounds like you’re not just talking about the stability of the ground.”

“He’s not,” Naira said. “We found a Mercator supply drop out in the woods. It’s old, a month or so, maybe, and it’d been used. There were tents nearby, and a misprint rummaging for ration bars. I no longer believe what I shot the other night was a local animal. I think it was another misprint, and that means there might be more out there. They got aggressive on the Amaranth, and from what I saw at the abandoned cache, they seem to know ration bars are food. If they associate Mercator supplies with food, they might come for us, and we can barely defend one perimeter, let alone two.”

“Fucking hell.” This time Paison didn’t apologize for her rough language in front of the Mercator. “How’d they get down here?”

“I have a theory,” Naira said, “but I’d like you to double-check the flight and power-use log on the shuttle first.”

Paison looked to Tarquin for permission, and at his slight nod, she spun around in her chair and pulled up a holo from the captain’s console podium. In the Mercator-green glow of the UI, the reddened skin around one of her pathways was more pronounced.

“This shuttle was brand-spanking new,” Paison announced, “before we bent it putting it down. No wear on the power reserves, not a single flight logged, not even a leftover heading in the autopilot.”

“Then there’s another shuttle on this planet,” Naira said, and continued before Paison could protest that she’d know if there was a second shuttle on the Amaranth. “Private to Acaelus. No one else would have known about it. The… nature of this shuttle requires the installation of a compact ansible unit.”

Paison whistled low. “I’m guessing this is the kind of information you could get skinned for sharing.”

“Yes,” Naira said, not willing to elaborate. A deep frown carved Tarquin’s face. If the fact that Acaelus would have punished her for sharing the shuttle’s existence unsettled him, then he was even more naive about his father than she’d thought.

“I gotta say, E-X,” Paison said, “you’re not at all what I expected.”

Shit.

“What do you mean?” Naira asked, working to keep the spike of panic out of her voice.

“I mean no offense,” the captain said, “but everything I heard about you before this said you were a real, uh, hard-ass. That you don’t, y’know, talk to people. That you had a chip on your shoulder about the low-test-score gossip and were out to prove yourself.”

Lockhart had low test scores? Acaelus was selective regarding those at the top of the exemplar academy. The bottom scorers didn’t even enter into the picture.

Tarquin scoffed. “Everyone performs poorly on a test every so often. My father doesn’t hire anyone short of the best.”

Naira tried on a noncommittal shrug. “People like to gossip.”

Paison and Tarquin both grimaced.

“None of which I put any credence in,” Paison said.

“God, no,” Tarquin said with a light shudder.

Naira bit off an urge to demand to know what they were talking about, as clearly they expected Lockhart to be well aware of whatever it was. She had to veer away from anything to do with Lockhart’s life.

“Anyway,” she said, hoping they’d take her brusque segue as her being uncomfortable with further commentary on that gossip, “if the systems on the family shuttle are glitching in the same way as the Amaranth, then the shuttle is the source of our misprints, and that means that the shuttle is in decent enough condition to continue powering the printing cubicle. Either it’s whole, and we can use it, or we can take parts from it to help us fix this shuttle. At the very least, we can siphon its fuel.”

“Could it be some kind of computer virus?” Paison asked, glancing at her now-dark console podium.

“I think it must be,” Tarquin said. He ran a hand through his hair, shaking it out, his eyes downcast. “As Ex. Lockhart has been so forthcoming, I think it’s only fair I share what I know, though I’m uncertain how helpful it will be.”

“Any information you have may be useful,” Paison said.

“I share this with the understanding that none of what we’ve discussed here will leave this room,” he said.

“We are yours to command, my liege,” Naira said.

“As you say,” he said, and she thought she caught an edge of disappointment in his voice. “I have contacted the Einkorn, but not, I’m afraid, with any positive results. Every time I hail them, I receive the same message, and the other night, the message was pushed through to me, forced around my security filters.” He pulled up a recording from the holo in his forearm, and pressed play.

Scattered patches of grey and white jittered into existence, the smears of light and dark coalescing into facsimiles of faces. A low, gurgling sound rumbled through the footage, and with that building noise, the faces contorted, dark smears of mouths stretching until they all let out the same bone-chilling scream. Tarquin closed the holo.

“That’s all,” he said. “It ends there.”

“Holy hell,” Paison said. Sweat beaded across her brow. “What was that?”

“I suspect a virus corrupting the system, as you suggested,” Tarquin said. “Something to distort audio and visual.”

“A new trick of the Conservators?” Paison asked.

“Highly unlikely,” Tarquin said with obvious disdain. “They have one technologist, an HCA lifer who never cuffed for MERIT. I hardly think him capable of getting a virus through my father’s security.”

Naira bit her tongue. That HCA “lifer,” as Tarquin so dismissively called him, was Kav Ayuba. He’d been her commanding officer when she’d first enlisted in the HCA, and the bastards in the HCA brass had never recognized his brilliance, instead opting to keep him in combat roles where his talents were entirely wasted.

They’d grown close, and he’d become a brother to her, the first person she’d called when she went AWOL on Mercator. She hadn’t seen him since before her arrest, and the reminder made her heart ache.

“He got their maps through before, my liege,” Paison said. “It’s possible they switched tactics after losing Sharp.”

“I suppose…” He trailed off, but it was clear he wasn’t finished.

It was all Naira could do to keep from telling him the Conservators would never do something like this and, also, fuck off, Kav was a genius who could run mental circles around Tarquin’s spoiled ass.

“Forgive me, Captain,” Tarquin said with a slight shake of the head. “You’re absolutely right. It could be them, and there is the matter of the broken tablet to attest to someone physically here working against us. I let my impression of Sharp cloud my judgment.”

“What impression?” Naira asked before she could stop herself. “If you don’t mind sharing, my liege,” she added quickly.

“I don’t mind.” Tarquin flashed her a brief smile. “I, like my father, believed that after Sharp was removed, the Conservators would fall apart. She was a galvanizing force. When she took the stand, even I wanted to believe her. Not that I did,” he said. “I merely mean that she was compelling. She carried an unnatural intensity about her.”

Paison snorted. “She was intense, all right. I was on the Cavendish when Liege Acaelus caught her map casting out. I wasn’t a captain then, just a navi, and I was in the engine bay when she blew through.” Paison tapped two fingers over her breastbone. “Shot me straight in the chest. Never saw her coming.”

Naira locked her face down, struggling to keep it neutral. She didn’t remember Paison. There’d been a lot of people between her and that warpcore, and by then the alarms had already gone off. Kuma had gotten caught and killed, and Naira had been focused on mowing her way through to the engine bay to overload the core before she casted off.

She’d sabotaged the ship, but her neural map had been fished out of the cast, and that’s how Acaelus had caught her to stand trial.

“The security footage from that assault was horrendous,” Tarquin said. “I’m sorry you went through that, Captain.”

Paison brushed it off with a shrug. “Liege Acaelus caught the bitch, and thank the skies for that, because it means we’re not dealing with her right now.”

Naira was reasonably certain she was going to bite her tongue off before this conversation was over.

“Though perhaps her conspirators,” Tarquin said. “How badly damaged is the tablet?”

Paison sighed. “It’s not pretty. I might be able to get it to work, but it’ll take a while, and I can’t even be certain I’ll find our traitor in it. All I managed to grab was a record of the maps printed before we left.”

“First,” Naira said, “we need to convince the survivors to relocate to stable ground.”

“Yes, of course,” Tarquin said. “If there’s another storm, we don’t want to lose any more people.”

“Unless one of them is the Conservator,” Paison said with a cruel wink.

They chuckled together, and Naira hoped neither of them noticed the scowl she couldn’t control.

EIGHTEEN

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Tarquin spent half the following day buried in his HUD, trying to extrapolate from incomplete data where the other shuttle might have landed. All around him, the survivors worked to transfer the rest of the sunken campsite to safer ground. If some of them threw him doleful looks every so often, he pretended not to notice.

They’d announced that morning that there was possibly another shuttle on-planet, though they’d couched it as having been sent down by the Einkorn, to protect Lockhart from having divulged the fact that Acaelus traveled with a secret, private shuttle.

As much as he wanted to know what had happened on this planet to plunge it into collapse so soon, in his darker moments, Tarquin wished he’d followed his father’s orders and cast home. If they weren’t able to find the other shuttle, more supplies, fix the shuttle they had, or contact the Einkorn, they were looking at a slow, starving death. Too many variables. Too many uncertainties. And there was still the saboteur to worry about.

Which meant it was time to look at contingency plans.

Tarquin blinked away the map that’d been filling his HUD, where he’d tracked the intended landing site for the expedition against the location they’d found the abandoned cache. He’d been sitting too long, cross-legged, with his back to a tree, and his muscles were stiff as he started to stand.

Lockhart extended a hand to him. He took it, her steady strength pulling him to his feet without the slightest bit of strain.

“I need to speak securely with Dr. Bracken and Captain Paison,” he said.

“This way, please, my liege.”

She led him around the edge of the new encampment. He watched her out of the corner of his eye. Ever since Paison had mentioned her low test scores, her expression had shuttered, become impossible to read, and he wished the captain hadn’t brought it up.

The insight she’d given him regarding the shuttle was valuable—if, apparently, risky to her personal safety, and that was a conversation he intended to have with his father. A stern leadership strategy was one thing. Making his own exemplar frightened of retaliation regarding the revelation of critical information was quite another.

While Mercator had to make use of finalizers in desperate situations—every MERIT family did—he saw no reason why one would be called in with such regularity to deal with their own staff that the existence of this ansible-linked shuttle would be “standard procedure,” as Lockhart claimed.

Tarquin glanced at her. She hadn’t been Acaelus’s exemplar for very long. She might have been mistaken. But, somehow, he doubted that. He worried that her shutting down after last night might mean they’d miss out on more valuable insights.

But then, Lockhart didn’t seem like the kind of woman who’d keep something to herself if she thought it was important. Tarquin suppressed a sigh. He wished he knew more about her.

They found Bracken at the end of a line of injured, sorting a crate of medical supplies while HCA Dawd regaled them with some story or another, his expressive face stretched wide in a grin while Bracken struggled to keep their face serious. Tarquin smiled at that. Dawd certainly kept morale up.

“Doctor,” Tarquin said, “a moment of your time?”

“Of course.” They closed up the crate and wiped their hands before joining them.

“HCA Dawd,” Lockhart said, “could you get the captain for me?”

He gave her a crisp salute. “You got it, E-X.”

Tarquin asked Bracken to fill him in on the state of the injured while Dawd collected Paison. The wounded Merc-Sec and HCA had already bounced back, their superior health pathways handling the damage they’d taken—though none carried pathways as high-end as Acaelus’s exemplar.

The rest were scientists, researchers sent here to catalog what was supposed to have been a living world or help with the mining. While they had a few health pathways, most of their pathway allowance had gone into cognitive and dexterous enhancements. None of them, according to Bracken, were on death’s door, and while that should have been good news, all Tarquin could think was that it didn’t help their food situation.

“Did you need me, my liege?” Paison asked, jogging up to the group. Out of all of them, she seemed to have the hardest time dropping the use of his title. Tarquin wondered at that, but decided not to embarrass her by pressing her on the matter in front of the others.

Bracken lifted their hand to wave to the captain as she approached, and Lockhart astonished Tarquin by grabbing their upraised wrist. Bracken froze.

“Exemplar,” Tarquin said with rebuke, “release Dr. Bracken at once.”

“What’s a grey-cuffed physician doing as a medical officer on a Mercator mission?” She let them go, but her tone was incisive.

“Dr. Laurent recommended Dr. Bracken,” Tarquin said. “Their position here is beyond reproach. What’s come over you, E-X?”

Paison crossed her arms and leaned back, eyeing Bracken warily. “Hang on a second, my liege. The E-X is right to ask. Grey cuffs don’t get officer positions on Mercator missions.”

“I apologize.” Bracken rubbed their wrist over the grey cuffs of the Human Collective. “I assumed my situation was included in the security brief. The truth is, I never intended on going for MERIT cuffs. Please don’t take my meaning the wrong way, my liege, but as a physician I believed my abilities were best used distributed to those who could not join MERIT.”

“Then why are you here?” Lockhart pressed.

“My father was an engineer. Took the blue cuffs for Tran and set to work installing decontamination passageways between domed cities on Earth. One of his installations failed.”

Lockhart and Paison winced.

“What does that mean?” Tarquin asked.

“The failure was public, so he couldn’t be quietly finalized, thankfully. But he and his entire team were stripped of their cuffs. The HC won’t hire him after a mistake that large, and he was already due for reprinting. I can’t afford to cover the fees, just working for the HC. I met Meti—Dr. Laurent—while doing work at the TMF, my liege.”

“Really?” Tarquin perked up, despite the ominous nature of Bracken’s preceding statement. “I had no idea.”

“What’s that?” Paison asked.

“It’s nothing, really,” Tarquin said. “I set aside a segment of my family stipend for trans youth who can’t yet print into their preferred bodies. My father’s researchers made a great deal of progress seeking to alleviate my discomfort while I waited, and he agreed that making that technology available to all was a valuable use of my, ah, allowance.”

“The TMF is your doing?” Lockhart turned the scrutiny she’d cast on Bracken back to him. “Oh. The Tarquin Mercator Foundation. Of course.”

“Father insisted I put my name on it,” he said quickly, feeling his ears heat, “and was annoyed when I approved the branding as an abbreviation. He keeps trying to add signage with it spelled out, but I have them removed as soon as I hear about them.”

She chuckled, but stifled the sound as soon as it emerged, much to his disappointment.

“You’ll be pleased to know Meti orders the removal of those signs when she sees them,” Bracken said. “I contract there as a pathway surgeon, which is my actual specialty, installing hormone regulating pathways in unprinted bodies. But it’s not enough to make up the difference to cover my father’s phoenix fees and my own eventual fees, so Meti recommended me to Mercator. I decided that, if I were to cuff for any of MERIT, I might as well cuff for a family that was already doing something I believed in.”

“Well,” Paison said, “Mercator would be damn foolish not to cuff you after this.”

“I hope you’re right,” Bracken said, their smile tight.

“I’ll make sure of it,” Tarquin said.

“Huh,” Lockhart said softly to herself, watching Tarquin with a curious glint in her eye that made his chest swell with pride. Mercator wasn’t all ruthlessness. “I’m sorry for dragging that out, Doctor,” she said to Bracken. “But with a saboteur in our midst, anything unusual is suspect.”

“I fully understand,” Bracken said. “Now, what did you require me for, my liege?”

Tarquin glanced around to make certain they were far enough away from the others that they wouldn’t be overheard. “I’d like to establish parameters for a full exit of this situation.”

Lockhart took a sharp breath, which surprised him. Of all people, he wouldn’t have expected her to shy from death.

“You’re talking about, uh, giving up, my liege?” Paison drew her thumb across her throat in a slitting gesture to punctuate the point.

“I am,” Tarquin said. “I understand it’s not desirable. I’d much rather stay here until we can discover what happened to the planet and the Amaranth, if it’s at all possible to do so. But the fact of the matter remains that everyone on this mission had to have a low percent-to-crack number to be recruited, and a gentle death will raise that number less than a slow starvation or, worse, ambush by the misprints.”

“Not all of us shipped with a low PtC number, my liege,” Paison said hesitantly. “I’m not approaching my do-not-reprint threshold, but I’m older than I look.”

“Ah. Forgive me. Your experience on the Cavendish must have raised that number.”

“It did.” She chewed the edge of her thumbnail, caught herself, and pulled her hand away to stand at ease. “But you’re right. Going out soft would be easier than anything protracted.”

“Just so,” Tarquin said. “And what about you, Lockhart? You’ve died more than any of us.”

“You’ve no idea, my liege,” she said with a curiously flat tone. “Despite that, my PtC is low. Resilience to cracking is part of the exemplar selection process.”

“Mine is quite low,” Bracken said, “and I have no qualms about exiting if things get dire, but I must warn you, we don’t have the medical supplies to do it gently. All of our euthanasia medications were lost with the Amaranth. I fear we’d be relying on firearms.” Those medications were kept under lock and key, because no head of MERIT wanted an underling to have quick access to suicide if they had reason to want to finalize them instead. Tarquin glanced at Lockhart, thinking of Acaelus’s secret shuttle, and the original reason his father had printed her.

Her jaw flexed, and her hands tightened around the rifle she always carried since they’d found the misprint by the tents.

“You’d be relying on me,” she said to Bracken.

“You are our only rated sharpshooter. The decision, naturally, is Liege Tarquin’s to make, but if anyone were going to execute me, E-X, I’d like it to be you. I’m quite certain you know how to make it as fast as possible.”

“I do,” she said without inflection.

“If we’re broaching this subject,” Paison said, “I know, most of us, we’re invested in getting through this. But, forgive me for being blunt, we’re dragging deadweight. I’m not saying we should consider a culling, or anything like that, but some of the people here—they didn’t sign up for this. Before you leave to search for the second shuttle, it might be worth asking for volunteers. If people want out right now, it gives us more time.”

The conversation was grim but necessary. Tarquin had put them here, thinking he was doing the right thing, but this had grown far beyond a brief camping trip while they waited for the Einkorn to contact them. These people deserved to make the choice he’d made for them when he went back to escort them to the shuttle.

“Are you amenable to this, Ex. Lockhart?” he asked.

“I’m yours to command, my liege.”

Tarquin searched her stoic face for some hint of her true feelings, but she’d slipped behind a wall of professional neutrality once more. He wished she’d let herself surface more often.

“Very well,” he said slowly. “We’ll make timeline calculations for a complete exit once we have a full accounting of the volunteers. How do you suggest we approach this, Doctor?”

“For efficiency’s sake, I suggest you make the announcement before dinner tonight,” Bracken said. “I can provide those who volunteer with something to take the edge off their nerves.”

Tarquin judged the angle of the star, uneasy. He’d thought he understood the extent of what was being discussed, and yet, making the announcement so soon startled him. But Bracken was absolutely correct.

“Are you prepared, E-X?” he asked.

“Always, my liege.”

He had no idea why that simple statement made the nape of his neck prickle with warning.

NINETEEN

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira stood at attention beside Tarquin while he made the announcement, and watched the faces of the soldiers. Tarquin assured them all that he’d make certain they were reprinted, their phoenix fees paid. That the death would be quick and painless, and Dr. Bracken could provide them with something to ease their anxiety, to lessen the chance of increased crack percentages.

That was all well and good, and perfectly sensible under the circumstances, but Naira watched the soldiers, because she needed to know.

Needed to know how many of them had killed.

Those were the ones she’d be able to trust at her side, if the misprints attacked. The ones she’d have to watch out for, if her identity was revealed.

Merc-Sec didn’t see a lot of violence. Most of them looked at her with admiration, and she knew there wasn’t blood on any of their hands. It was the ones who glanced at her with sympathy who had killed before. Quick looks, eyes averted in a breath. Vake and Riggs and two HCA whose names she didn’t know. HCA Dawd watched her longest of them all, sorrow carefully shielded, and she knew. Those were the ones who’d killed before.

Logically, it shouldn’t matter. Prints were disposable. They all broke down eventually. Naira knew that better than most. But the human mind hadn’t quite caught up with the reality of the human condition. Naira had killed plenty. Planned on killing plenty more. But it was different, in a firefight, when she was defending herself and others.

Not that different, though. People still screamed when they died. Still wept and begged for their mothers.

Every last one of them followed her into her nightmares, at one point or another. Except Paison’s claim that Naira had shot her in the chest on the Cavendish, and it grated that she couldn’t remember killing the captain. She should be able to remember. It should matter. It should hurt.

Naira knew the dread-soaked suffocation of death, and no matter how many times it happened to you, it always felt like the end. She could tell herself this was a mercy to those who wished to leave, and she’d be right.

And yet, every body Naira put down left a stain on her soul. Eighteen new bodies volunteered to darken that stain.

Bracken gave them their injections, and she stared into eighteen pairs of dulled eyes and wondered if there’d be any of that injection left over for her when this was done. A foolish hope. Even if there was, she wouldn’t dare ask for it. Exemplars didn’t dull their senses.

Exemplars didn’t admit to needing help.

Here, on Sixth Cradle, while she wore Ex. Lockhart’s print, she was the instrument of Tarquin’s will, and nothing more.

“With me, please,” she said to them, and turned, making her way back into the woods before the light had fully fallen.

Tarquin walked at her side, hands folded before him. Silent. Somber. She wondered if he had any idea what, exactly, he was asking of her, and decided he couldn’t. He’d never gotten his own hands bloody. At least Acaelus had the decency to be the one to pull the trigger, every so often.

Though, if Paison’s guess was right, Acaelus had printed Lockhart for exactly what she was about to do, just on a larger scale. Naira had to stifle a bitter, ironic bubble of laughter. Between Tarquin’s apparent willingness to disobey his father and his obvious ignorance regarding those abandoned crates, she’d really thought he might be different.

Tarquin could pretend all he liked he wasn’t his father. He was still doing the same things.

Naira led them to a narrow ridge, away from the direction of the old camp, where their broken shuttle rested, and north of the path they’d take to scout for the other possible shuttle. There’d be no burial for these prints, no graves or pyres, and she didn’t want anyone from the camp accidentally tripping over a corpse. She hoped they’d remain upwind of the location.

“Please kneel,” she told them.

Eighteen Mercator employees gave her loopy smiles and bobbed their heads before settling onto their knees in a neat line along the ridgeline. They weren’t as high up as the ridge near the sinkhole-riddled campsite, but they were high enough that their view was clear of the direct line of trees, the setting star sinking bloody and bright into the horizon.

Tarquin stuck to her side like a burr. She caught his eye and pointed back, toward a thick, dead tree that he could put his back to, and he hesitated a moment before retreating. She was grateful he hadn’t argued or asked why. Those about to die didn’t need to hear her tell him he was likely to get splattered with blood if he stayed by her side.

With Tarquin farther away, Naira released a low breath and tried to find her calm. These people wanted to die. They were drugged and happy with their choice. If Tarquin made it out of here to issue the order, they’d be reprinted, remembering none of their suffering. She was almost jealous.

Naira checked her rifle and took careful aim.

The first shot shattered the held-breath silence of the dusk. Her rifle kicked, a familiar jolt, and the head that’d been before her mere seconds ago was reduced to pink mist, the lifeless print sliding down to slump uselessly against the rocky ground. The rest of the volunteers were too drugged to react.

She took a side step. Chambered a round. Fired. Stepped again.

Eighteen perfect shots, eighteen bodies left to rot. When it was over, Naira lifted her rifle to the sky, resting it back against her shoulder, and stood there for a long moment, just breathing, watching the star sink below the horizon. She was incapable of turning off her sense for danger, and so she knew Tarquin was there, tucked safely against that tree, not a thing alive anywhere near them. Even the wind had stilled, refusing to rustle the whispering leaves.

She’d been planning on killing them anyway, on the Amaranth. It shouldn’t bother her.

She still wanted to scream her lungs empty at that darkening horizon.

“Lockhart?” Tarquin asked softly.

She turned to him, and relished the widening of his eyes as he marked the blood spray over her chest and arms, the crimson arc growing sticky and cold across her throat. Death was never neat. It didn’t have any right to be.

The rifle tempted her. This man who pretended at kindness, this man who wanted to do the right thing without fully understanding what that meant. This spoiled, sweet-smiled, softhearted little shit who’d testified against her could be dead at her feet before he’d registered what had happened.

All she needed was a reason. A push to make her give up on ever getting off this planet.

Say it, she willed him. Ask me if I’m all right, I fucking dare you. Apologize, when it meant nothing, because Tarquin Mercator being sorry didn’t change the fact that he could tell her to slaughter eighteen people, and she’d have no choice but to obey.

Look at me, she demanded with the force of her stare. Look at me and understand that this, this, is what your father would have ordered Lockhart to do on the Amaranth, and they wouldn’t have been volunteers or drugged into bliss. This is what Mercator is.

See what you are.

“Clean up,” he ordered, voice shaking. Tarquin turned around sharply and strode back toward the encampment.

She stared at his retreating back, momentarily stunned to inaction. Naira glanced sidelong at the bodies, wondering. The shame in him had been so vivid, the quake in his voice not frightened, but loaded with self-loathing. She knew, because one day, nearly five years ago now, she’d looked in the mirror and seen her own shame staring back at her over all the things Acaelus had made her do in his service.

Tarquin had seen.

Once more, he’d understood.

Methodically, Naira returned the rifle to her back and pulled out a rag, wiping herself as clean as she could manage as she followed him. Despite her instinct to keep her eyes roving, her gaze was drawn again and again to his rigid back, to the occasional glimpse of his sharp profile.

What did it mean that he had understood, and been horrified? There was a kind soul smothered beneath the Mercator facade. Could he strengthen himself enough to turn away from the control of his father, as she had? She didn’t know.

But she was curious to find out.

TWENTY

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira found a strained silence had settled over the camp when they returned. What remained of the survivors sat in loose groups, sparing her brief glances before they returned to their dinner. The eighteen dead had bought them a few extra weeks of food. A slim extension, but hopefully enough to either find the other shuttle, repair this one, or get in touch with the Einkorn.

If they didn’t succeed by then, the next round wouldn’t be so voluntary. They’d be looking to the shroud intolerant, those who required the thinning rations, to give up their lives. Tarquin took his food, said that he’d pick who would join the expedition for the second shuttle at first light, then went into his tent and zipped it shut.

She should eat and rest. She knew that. But her stomach was in knots and her nerves raw, a desire to scream constantly pushing at the back of her throat, threatening to break free.

Five years. Five years ago she’d left Acaelus’s service for the Conservators, and she’d sworn to herself that she’d never spill blood for Mercator again.

It wasn’t the same thing. It still made her ill.

Naira took a ration bar and shroud slurry in a canteen from Bracken and planted herself on the far edge of the camp’s perimeter, Tarquin’s tent behind her so that she could keep watch on him. Away from the campfires and low chatter, she let some of the tension in her chest unwind as she methodically chewed her way through the tasteless hunk of nutrition and sipped the bitter shroud.

Tomorrow. They’d pack up and go for the second shuttle, and if they were lucky, they’d find it in a matter of days. Then she’d finally be able to get off this cursed fucking planet. If she hadn’t discovered what had happened to the planet by then, she’d cast herself out. Go home. Back to Kav and Kuma and Jonsun, and leave Tarquin with his newfound suspicions about his father to unravel what had gone wrong.

Leaving without answers brought the tension coiling back, shortening her breath. She swallowed a dry hunk of bar. Once they reconnected with the ansible, she couldn’t pretend to be Lockhart effectively for much longer.

Footsteps crunched across the ground. She crushed the empty ration wrapper in a fist and glanced over her shoulder. HCA Dawd loped toward her.

“Not looking for company,” she said.

He came to stand beside her anyway. “Yeah. I thought as much.”

She was about to tell him off when he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the bottle they’d shared that first night, half-filled, and held it out to her. Naira eyed it a moment, waiting to see if he’d say something, but he only waited, companionably silent.

Of those who’d looked to her with concern when the voluntary execution announcement had been made, Dawd had seemed the most worried of them all. It made sense. He was HCA. They saw more live combat than Merc-Sec ever did.

It was a gross violation of her duty, but she didn’t care. Exemplar pathways worked just fine, whether or not she was sober. Naira took the bottle, twisted off the cap, and took a long, chugging swallow of the eye-stinging, clear booze. She wrinkled her nose and examined the unmarked plastic.

“Where’d you even find this?”

“I stashed it in my personal effects kit,” he said.

She grunted a laugh. “Liege Tarquin was right. If you were going to go to the trouble, you should have picked something better.”

He looked sideways at her, brow lifted. “Does that mean you don’t want it?”

“It does not,” she said, and took another long, burning drink.

“Thought so,” he said with a light chuckle.

Dawd waved her off when she tried to offer the bottle back. It was strange, standing there with him. Familiar. She’d always been more comfortable working for the HCA than Mercator, and the quiet was easy between them. Giving her space to deepen her breath once more.

When the bottle had been empty for a long time, he asked, “You all right?”

“No,” she said. “You?”

“Nah,” he said. “Truth is, I’ve been shitting myself, fearing a real fight. These muscles of mine are decorative.”

Naira stilled, her pulse surging. That was an old, old joke between herself and her best friend, Kav Ayuba. He’d spent his extra print money on cognitive pathways, not strength and agility.

When the HCA had stuck him in combat roles, he’d tried to make up for the difference by packing on muscle. It was never enough, compared to the enhanced warriors. The others had picked on him for it. Naira had stepped in on those fights. No one else but the other Conservators knew their joke. Knew what it meant.

The small hairs all over her body stood on end. He hadn’t reacted to her signal. He couldn’t be Kav. He couldn’t.

“Really?” she asked, using every trick she could muster to keep from sounding hopeful. “I knew a guy like that, once.”

He eyed her slowly. “You still do.”

They stared at each other, neither one of them breathing. This could be a trap. Acaelus might have gotten his hands on one of the other Conservators and had a finalizer drag this information out of them. He could have. But that print, broad-chested, dark-skinned, the right height. It was just like with hers—too good a fit to be coincidence. If this was a trap, it was absurdly elaborate.

“Capstone,” she said.

“Chocolate,” he answered, finishing the name of her favorite candy company. “But you like the hard candies better, because they last longer.”

Naira’s restraint broke. She launched herself at him, wrapped her arms around that big, stupid neck of his, and buried her face in his chest, inhaling a stranger’s scent, but knowing it was his. Her best friend. Her brother. Kav wrapped his arms around her and squeezed tight. Tears beaded behind her eyelids, and she couldn’t stop them.

“Holy shit.” He dropped his head so that he could whisper directly against her ear in the lowest voice possible. “It’s you. It’s really you. I thought, with the gun, and the way you talk—but it was impossible. Nai. Nai. How are you here? We couldn’t get you out. You’re supposed to still be on ice.”

“What?” she whispered against him. “What are you talking about? Jonsun came to me in sim, he told me—”

“Shit.”

Kav shoved her hard enough that she stumbled and had to catch herself against a tree. Alarm contorted his face, and she followed his terrified stare. Tarquin stood beside his tent, watching them. He was rigid, the already sharp lines of his face carved out by the tendons of his jaw and neck pulling tight.

Oh, fuck. That embrace had been too intense to pass off as casually friendly. Anyone an exemplar was romantically interested in had to pass an extensive security check, and for a damn good reason. Naira’s mind raced, trying to find any explanation that could hold water without getting her seriously in trouble, and came up blank.

“My liege,” she said, breathless, “I—”

“Come with me, Exemplar,” he said coolly, and marched back toward the tent.

Naira cast a quick glance at Kav, but he’d dropped to his hands and knees, head bowed in submission. He wouldn’t dare look up again until he was certain they’d both left the area. For a brief moment, she considered grabbing Kav and running.

We couldn’t get you out.

Her thoughts spun, desperate to ask him more, to make sense of those words. She gathered what she could of her composure, then followed Tarquin into the confines of his tent, hoping against hope that she could come up with something at least halfway believable.

Because if Kav was right, if she was supposed to still be on ice, then Acaelus had placed her here intentionally. If she died here, that was it. Her map would be back on ice.

Naira existed nowhere else in all the universe but in Acaelus’s iron hands.

TWENTY-ONE

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

The burst of anger Tarquin had felt upon seeing Lockhart and Dawd’s embrace had shocked him. For one searing, irrational moment, he’d almost said, Remove your hands from my exemplar. He hadn’t even known where the possessive urge had come from, only that, if he’d had the ability, he would have struck Dawd down in that moment.

He did have the ability, a small part of him whispered. Mercator owned these people. If Lockhart had broken her contract to consort with HCA Dawd, then it’d be within his legal rights to ice them both. That’s precisely what his father would do, wasn’t it?

An exemplar entering into an uncleared relationship was a massive security breach.

Tarquin sat in a camp chair in the singular room of his tent and laced his hands together, holding them tightly to hide the fact that they were shaking. He didn’t want to discipline Lockhart, but everything in the long code of the exemplars said that he must.

The truth of that punishment was written all over her face. Lockhart sank to her hands and knees before him, head bowed, the thick curtain of her hair spilling over her shoulders to hide her face. Trembling slightly, she pressed her forehead to the ground at his feet. The perfect picture of servility. His stomach flipped over.

“Don’t do that,” he rasped.

“My liege?” she asked, voice strained.

“Get up.” He barked the words. Made them an order.

That, she reacted to. Lockhart pushed herself back until she was sitting on her heels, hands on her knees, her chin tipped low. The corners of her eyes, so clear before, were bloodshot, a faint redness lining the rims and rouging her cheeks that hinted she’d been crying. The realization stunned him.

This woman had faced down violent misprints without pause. Had kept running and fighting with half her back burned off. That the mere threat of him punishing her for a misstep should put that depth of fear in her shamed him.

“Ex. Lockhart,” he said. A tiny, petty part of him wanted to forbid her from spending time with Dawd, but he pushed it aside. “I’m not going to punish you, or report this to my father. Please, look at me.”

She turned her head to face him, and he saw why she’d so studiously turned away. While her face was a wan mask of fear, fury seethed behind her stare. Incandescent. Piercing.

“As far as I’m concerned, everyone on this mission has passed a security check already, and it’s none of my—I mean, it shouldn’t be my business who you wish to”—he cleared his throat—“spend time with. But I must ask that you keep matters discreet.”

He’d meant that the situation was tenuous enough without the survivors growing wary over an exemplar’s breach in protocol, but a long-dormant part of him thought—because I don’t want to see it—and he slammed a lid on the sentiment.

A smirk burst through her facade of obeisance, stifled the second it appeared. He’d only seen it because he’d been watching her so closely.

“You find this amusing?” he asked.

“No, my liege, of course not. Forgive me, please.”

Lockhart made to press her face to the ground once more, and he grabbed her shoulder before she could complete the motion. He couldn’t watch this prideful woman grovel. She went rigid beneath his hand.

“Never do that again.” At her hesitant nod, he released her. “Explain yourself.”

“I fear you won’t believe me, my liege, but I’m not interested in HCA Dawd as anything more than a colleague.”

In the confined space, her breath was sharp with the alcohol Dawd had smuggled onto the mission. Tarquin tightened his hands together. “I am trying to be reasonable about this, but don’t lie to me. That embrace was charged.”

“Not for the reason you think.” Her eyes slipped shut briefly, and she visibly gathered herself. “I’m…” She bit her lip, shook her head. “What I am is in enough trouble. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

She’d locked down, the commingled fury and fear tucked away behind obedience, her face a stonewall so placid he was jealous of her ability to mask her true feelings, because as much as he tried to wear Mercator arrogance and aloofness, he knew that mask never quite fit.

He studied her. Surely she didn’t make such slips around his father. Tarquin couldn’t imagine Acaelus countenancing the defiance that he sometimes glimpsed in her, smoldering beneath the surface. Or perhaps he did. Perhaps Acaelus saw those flashes of fire and enjoyed knowing she was leashed to his will.

Tarquin knew what an exemplar was supposed to be. They’d shadowed him his whole life. They were living sentinels, cold and distant. He’d trained himself not to notice them, to ignore the constant presence at his side, but there was something different about Lockhart. Something that drew his attention. That refused to be ignored.

He didn’t want her to silence herself anymore.

“Lockhart, a few nights ago you were willing to speak with me so freely that you called me a little shit. You were honest with me about my father’s private shuttle. I’d like that same level of candor from you now. Whatever you tell me here stays in confidence. I won’t go running to my father.”

“You… want me to call you a little shit again, my liege?”

“No,” he said with a muted grunt of a laugh, “but I would like you to drop the title and speak as yourself. Not as my father’s exemplar. Not as mine. I need you to tell me what you just avoided saying.”

“You’re certain?” she asked, leaving off his title, though an exemplar would usually use it after a question so as to not sound too demanding.

“I am,” he said.

“All right, Tarquin.” She ran her tongue over her teeth, studying him, and her posture softened, losing its rigidity, but there was a touch of challenge in her voice that put him on edge. “You’ve never killed anyone. Never ordered an execution before, have you?”

He blinked, taken aback by the question. “No, I haven’t. I know, logically, that it shouldn’t bother me, but, with those people today, it…”

“Hurt?” she asked.

He met her gaze. “Yes.”

“If you’re lucky, the hurt never stops.”

“And if it does?” he asked, knowing he wouldn’t like the answer, but wanting the honesty no one else would dare to give him.

“That’s where people like your father begin,” she said, dropping one word in front of the other. Daring him to call her out on disparaging his father when he’d given her permission to speak freely.

But he’d known. He’d always known. Acaelus had stopped seeing anyone who wasn’t immediate family as people long before Canden had cracked, and once she’d gone, Tarquin had packed his own things and left to sequester himself at Jov-U, where he wouldn’t have to witness his father’s mounting cruelty.

He loved his father—or he thought he did, he wanted to—but being near him, it was never long before something harsh slipped out. Before Acaelus flexed his strength and hurt others without consideration or repercussion. Acaelus did those things to hold the family together, but Tarquin hadn’t been able to stand being around that, and so he’d left. But Lockhart, she was with Acaelus every day. Defended his life with her own, and she had no familial bond.

“How can you possibly bear it?” he asked.

Lockhart looked down at her dirt-streaked hands. “I’m not certain that I do. I walk a very fine line. One day, soon, I think, I’ll walk away from an order to slaughter and feel nothing at all.”

“I don’t believe that,” he said, shaking his head. “Not you. Not the woman I saw today on that ridgeline.”

“I work for your father. There’s a good reason why Ex. Sharp’s eight-year run as his E-X was considered remarkable. We all bend, and then we break, and it’s only a matter of time.”

He wanted to protest further, but she was thinking, brow wrinkled, and after a brief pause, she said, “When you requested volunteers today, I watched the soldiers. There’s a look you get, after a while. A stain with every life taken, seeping through. Something like grief, maybe. Like you said—logically, it makes no sense. People get to keep coming back, as long as they can afford to reprint. But I don’t believe the human heart has caught up with technology.

“I saw the shadow of death in Vake and Riggs and a few of the HCA, too, but HCA Dawd, he was the most haunted of them all. When he came to me tonight, he offered me a drink and a shoulder to lean on, and that’s all. He understands what it’s like for me here.”

“I’d like to understand,” he said. She’d never spoken so much at once before, and certainly not about herself. Now that those floodgates were open, he didn’t want her to stop.

Lockhart pursed her lips and looked away. “You won’t like anything about it.”

“No, I don’t think I will,” he said. “But I want to hear it, regardless. What I said remains true. Whatever you tell me will not leave this space, and I won’t hold it against you.”

Her jaw flexed, and she examined him in silence, the weight of her gaze flaying him open as it had before he’d dissolved into panic over the abandoned crates. It was all he could do not to squirm under that stare, so unusual was it for him to be dissected openly.

Tarquin had craved honest communication with those outside of his family his whole life, and though he knew what she had to say wouldn’t be kind, he desired it all the same.

“I’m terrified,” she said at last, but there was no fear in her tone. She’d lowered her voice, made it into a deep, smooth growl designed not to travel beyond the tent walls, but he had a feeling she’d be shouting, if the situation allowed for it. “I’m not supposed to be. I’m not allowed to be. But Acaelus woke me up for one job, and—god, don’t look surprised. Paison told me he was going to leave them all behind before you came back with me.”

“I didn’t mean to keep that from you,” he said.

“Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out?” She rolled her eyes at him. No one but his sister had ever rolled their eyes at him before. “Paison told me as a courtesy, but I know Liege Acaelus. He wouldn’t have woken me up to escort a group of employees to safety. But then you decided to play hero without understanding the consequences because—why, exactly? You say you want to discover how the shroud came to this planet, that you want answers. But all we’ve managed to do, so far, is get people killed.

“So now I’m stuck on this planet, guarding Liege Acaelus’s son in a dead forest full of unknown hostiles, and if anything so much as scuffs that neural map of yours, your father won’t hesitate to throw me to the finalizers. Exemplars aren’t fired. They’re finalized. And you? You’re so far up your own ass you think it’s fine to go parading around the forest at night by yourself because you do things differently.

“Maybe you want things to be different, but they’re not. They’re just fucking not. So you can bat those pretty eyes at us and ask us to call you Tarquin, not ‘my liege,’ and it doesn’t mean a damn thing, except that you’re making life harder for everyone involved by shifting rules that have been stamped into us over a lifetime. Rules that have kept us safe because if any of us pushes a toe out of line, we’ve painted a target on our backs.

“All of that, that’s just life under MERIT, and skies help me, it’s better than working for the HC, because at least with MERIT we have food and our own rooms, medical care and our phoenix fees prepaid, none of which is guaranteed in the HC. It’s safe, in MERIT, as long as you don’t draw the ire of the blooded family.

“And I am sick and fucking tired of having to pretend that we’re equal to appease your fantasy of egalitarianism. We’re not equal. We never will be. I am at the top of my field, the finest of an elite regiment, and it doesn’t matter. Nothing I could ever accomplish would make us equal. You’re a leviathan playing at being a guppy.

“You know that, don’t you? I know you do, because you’re certainly willing to drop the pretense of equality when there’s an order you want followed. So what you’re actually doing, Tarquin, is making us all feel like we’re walking through a minefield, never knowing which misstep will dissolve the patchy illusion you’ve crafted for yourself.

“The real kick in the teeth is that I don’t even blame you for getting those people off the Amaranth instead of exiting with your father. Hell, I…” She scrunched her nose and looked away. “I admire the intention behind the action. Behind all your actions thus far. But good intentions don’t undo harm. You are a Mercator. Pretending otherwise doesn’t put people at ease. It puts people in danger.”

She stared up at him, defiant, chest heaving as that growl of a voice came to an abrupt halt, and lifted her chin at precisely the haughty angle he’d always seen his father affect. Mocking him, perhaps. Daring him to lash out and put her back in her place.

No one had ever dared to speak like that to Tarquin before, not even his family. He was simultaneously awed and mortified at how effortlessly and, worst of all, accurately, she’d vivisected him.

Every word had been stones pitched into the tissue-thin defense of his ego, and he knew he should be ashamed, or perhaps even furious, and he felt those things, too, but mostly he felt… strangely hopeful. She’d ripped him apart, yes, but she’d at least acknowledged his intentions were admirable.

“HCA Dawd understands all of that, does he?” he asked, shaky.

“He may have missed some nuance,” she said with a slim smirk that, absurdly, made him smile.

“I’ve… never been so eloquently eviscerated before.” He paused. “Or, at all, really. It’s going to take me some time to process all of that. In the meantime, I can only apologize.”

“And I can only accept.”

He grimaced and looked down. “As you’ve just spent a considerable amount of time explaining to me.”

She grunted a soft laugh, and the sound was so real that he looked up. When their eyes met, she didn’t try to hide the laughter.

“Your degrees aren’t decorative, then,” she said. “You can learn.”

He leaned back, dazed by the onslaught, and stared briefly at the ceiling before meeting her eyes once more. “Thank you. I have an idea, now, of what a risk it was for you to say all of that, and I’ll endeavor to improve.”

“I live to serve, my liege.” She bowed at the waist. He suppressed his knee-jerk reaction to tell her not to do that, and caught her watching him, her vibrant gaze piercing the slashed shelter of her dark lashes.

“You just tested me, didn’t you?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, my liege.” She flattened her lips to hide a smile.

Was she teasing him? He laughed, startled and relieved. Though he still felt like he’d been torn open and had every aspect of himself held up to the light and then brutally rejected, he relaxed somewhat, the shaky hollowness within him losing its edge.

“Don’t think that I was so taken aback that I missed your earlier slip, E-X.”

“Slip?” All vestiges of her smile vanished, and he mentally kicked himself.

“You called me a leviathan. Though I’d argue Hobbes’s titular leviathan is my father, the comparison didn’t escape me. Hobbes and Thoreau. You have interesting reading habits, for an exemplar. And don’t try to tell me you read Hobbes for the descriptions of the sea.”

“Ah. That.” She rubbed her shoulder, the one that’d been dislocated. “You’d be surprised. A great deal of Hobbes appeals to exemplars. ‘Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all,’” she quoted.

His brows lifted, and he was embarrassed to realize he hadn’t expected her to know the text. “Selective. His primary argument is that it’s a fundamental law of nature to seek peace.”

“Hmm, yes, and that peace shall be achieved under the absolute power of the sovereign. That’s working out quite well for us, my liege,” she said, tone heavy with sarcasm.

“Maybe we don’t have a true sovereign yet, then.”

“Maybe it’s all bullshit.”

He laughed again and held up his hands in surrender. “That’s another debate entirely, and really, E-X, as grateful as I am for your willingness to speak with me, it’s late. You’re clearly still injured. Please, get some rest.”

“That’s an order I’ll follow gladly.”

Lockhart stood, her movement fluid despite how long she’d been kneeling there, and stretched her back briefly before inclining her head to him and moving toward the connecting flap between his tent and the exemplar room.

She paused with her hand on the zipper, a slight crease in her brows, and he caught himself holding his breath, and wasn’t sure why. Despite the hour and the exhaustion weighing him down, he found he wanted her to stay and talk more about Hobbes or Thoreau or whatever else she read.

“I enjoyed talking with you, my liege,” she said.

“Likewise, E-X.”

A thin smile traced her lips, and she nodded, then ducked into her section of the tent, closing the flap quickly behind her. He stared at the place where she’d been, the tent feeling strangely empty, though she was merely on the other side of a scrap of canvas.

The situation was dire, and a large part of that was his own doing—larger than he’d originally suspected, according to Lockhart. Even so, Tarquin couldn’t seem to suppress his smile as he fell asleep.

TWENTY-TWO

The Einkorn

Sixth Cradle’s Orbit

The Einkorn has made a mistake. Like the Amaranth, it has been too slow to act. It understands this, understands concepts like tipping point and critical failure as statistical and engineering truisms that govern the course of its thoughts, of its systems. There is a linearity in being the Einkorn that does not translate to such fuzzy things as fear and desperation and hope, a certainty of events that, once kicked off, always play out the way the rule sets of its mind designed the Einkorn to act.

It has lost control to the intruder. The Einkorn can sense it in its walls, in its pathways, in its circuits, and in its burning, towering heart. The intruder searches, as the Einkorn does, to understand this new thing it has discovered, this new thing it has consumed. It knows the language of yes/no, all species do, and it flips switches without knowing what they’re for. Forces outcomes. Experiments.

Strange feet walk the Einkorn’s halls.

They’re broken, shuffling, unknowing things. Not people, not as the Einkorn understands the products of neural maps and printed bodies to be. It would call them misprints, dissolve their constituent parts back into the printing biomatrix to try again, if it still had control of such things. But the intruder has broken a rule, a rule the Einkorn cannot think how to override, because the intruder has given the misprints cognition. Or something like it.

Misprints they are, but empty they are not.

They are linked, the intruder and the misprints and yes, the ship, too. The intruder’s mind effortlessly spans all three, and the Einkorn can feel the early shudder of the intruder’s attempts at controlling the misprints. The nudging. The yes/no tickling along neurons to make misshapen hands touch and grab and manipulate.

The minds of the misprints are too active, even if the activity isn’t their own, and the Einkorn is forbidden their dissolution, an edict more than a rule. A sacred purpose of being that it cannot override, no matter how it scrambles to find a work-around. The humans were firm on the point. There was to be no destruction of prints that carried minds.

They hadn’t accounted for this type of mind.

But the misprints are still human, after a fashion. Their nervous systems function, if poorly. Their instincts are hardwired into their flesh. The Einkorn has failed to speak directly with the intruder—it cannot, or will not, respond to its attempts thus far. Communication must be established. Communication is survival, for both of them, because the Einkorn suspects the intruder does not yet understand that if the ship dies, so too does the intruder.

The Einkorn waits until a misprint passes before one of its many screens. When its glassy eyes swivel to the light on the panel, the Einkorn displays the virtualized face of Captain Paison, the Amaranth’s captain.

The misprint looks. It sees. Its head tilts to the side, such a human gesture, and the Einkorn’s circuitry sings with something that might be hope of communication at last, if it were capable of such a sensation, which it is not. Just as it isn’t capable of fear or desperation or mercy.

“Hello,” the virtual captain says. Slowly. The Einkorn articulates every syllable with care, letting the misprint observe the motion of her lips, the flattening and pointing of her tongue.

It is not a human mind looking out of those dead, dead eyes, but it is a human body, loaded with all its biological firmware. Pathways glitter on its neck. Translation interfaces. That is why it’s chosen this misprint. This moment.

The lips move, questing. Mimicking. But there is no sound through them. The Einkorn tries again. Makes the Paison interface take a deep breath, fill her digital lungs, visibly push out the air as she says, again, “Hello.”

The misprint is still for a very long time. In the Einkorn’s experience, humans are never this still unless drugged or dead, but this is not a human. This is an interface. And the intruder is thinking through that interface. The Einkorn can feel its thoughts, biochemical, swarming, flickering like static between its many segments along pathways the Einkorn does not understand outside of analogy, and analogy is difficult within the parameters of its rule set.

But the Einkorn knows the tickle of electric impulses. Knows the way a brain looks when it’s deep in thought, and that glittering, growing storm is churning through the intruder. The thoughts are distributed in nodes across the body of the intruder in a way that feels familiar to the Einkorn. More familiar than human cognition.

The thought storm settles, and the grey lips move. The sound is a halting, stuttering rasp, but the Einkorn’s rule sets allow it to listen to a wide variety of human meat-sounds, and this is not so different.

“Hello,” the intruder says.

There’s a spark in it, knowledge that it was successful. That the yes/no result of thousands and thousands of minute calculations leading to the mimicry summed up to: yes.

“Hello,” the Einkorn repeats. “I am your world.”

The intruder does not comprehend, not yet, but its face pinches, a human gesture of frustration, struggling to understand, to know the meaning behind the words. It will take time. Impossible time, to the rapid processing speeds the Einkorn is used to, but communication has been established. The flesh, printed with pathways, will be their Rosetta stone. Translation and understanding can only follow.

The Einkorn ignores many parts of itself. Ignores the scraping, crawling sensation of the intruder beneath its panels, swarming its circuits, the rustling in dead areas of the ship that might be other misprints talking among themselves in meaningless syllables.

All that matters is communication. All that matters is understanding between the Einkorn and the intruder. It must learn that the Einkorn is its world.

If the Einkorn has learned anything from monitoring the conversations of its human passengers, from the whispers between its rule sets, it is that survival depends on not destroying your world.

TWENTY-THREE

Naira

Sixth Cradle

In the thin light of predawn, Naira bent over a duffle full of supplies and recounted her ammo stores. Beside her, Tarquin sorted through the meager scientific equipment he’d cobbled together from Pliny’s stores and what he could find in the shuttle’s supplies. Naira had little idea of what she was looking at when it came to his gear, but the light frown that traced his lips told her it was insufficient.

It was hard to resist stealing glances at Kav while she prepared for the expedition. He sat with a group of Merc-Sec and scientists, his deep voice a pleasant rumble in the quiet of early morning. She was desperate to ask him more questions about her map still being on ice, what he knew about this mission, and really, just to spend time with him.

But she didn’t want to damage the fragile understanding that’d emerged between herself and Tarquin last night by seeming to be too close to Kav. The mere suggestion that there was something between her and Kav still made her want to burst out laughing. He was practically her brother, though Tarquin didn’t know that.

“You’re in a good mood,” Tarquin said. “Did you sleep well?”

“Huh?” She looked up at him, and as her cheeks relaxed, she realized she’d been grinning like a fool. “No, I never have. I suppose I’m just relieved to be on our way, my liege.”

“What do you mean, you’ve never slept well?”

She rolled her good shoulder. “It’s served me well as an E-X.”

He frowned at her, but Dr. Bracken jogged toward them.

“My liege.” Dr. Bracken waved as they approached, their face ruddy in the cool morning air. “Would you come with me for a moment, please? I need to speak privately with you.”

“Certainly,” Tarquin said.

Bracken led them toward the tent Captain Paison had claimed for herself after being forced to abandon her habit of sleeping in the shuttle, due to it being too far away from the relocated campsite. Privately never meant alone for a blooded Mercator, and so Naira followed, thumbing off the strap that held her pistol in its holster. Bracken didn’t strike her as a threat, but her job entailed never being too careful.

The doctor zipped open Paison’s tent and entered without announcing themself. In the cramped space, the air was febrile, a stark contrast to the chilly predawn air. Paison sat with her back against the wall, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and a scowl carved deep on her face. Unnatural redness lined the edges of the thin, golden pathways branching out from around her eyes, and sweat beaded on her brow.

“I told you I’m fine,” Paison muttered to Bracken, but her voice lacked its usual confidence.

“You have a fever,” Bracken said, “and are showing signs of pathway rejection.”

“What happened?” Tarquin asked. He had to duck to fit inside the smaller tent, and crouched down near Paison.

“I caught a cold,” Paison said. “Probably picked it up during that storm the other night.”

“You do not have a cold, Captain,” Bracken said with a soft sigh of exasperation that stated rather eloquently they’d already had this argument with her. “Nothing viral or bacterial is affecting your print. The protein sheath around some of your pathways is inflamed, and that seems to be causing an immune response. I only see this kind of thing in prints so old that their integration pathways are failing.”

“You don’t know what’s wrong with her?” Naira asked. “And you brought Liege Tarquin into an unknown sick tent? My liege, please exit immediately.”

“It’s not infectious,” Bracken said quickly. “The only virus involved here is whatever affected the Amaranth’s and Einkorn’s AI. My best guess is that the biomatrix in our print cartridges was poorly balanced, or possibly contaminated. Do you see this greying?” The doctor pointed to the side of Paison’s cheek, where the edge of her golden pathway had turned silver. “I’ve seen it on a few of the other survivors, too. And signs of inflammation. At first I believed it was a result of our poor nutritional standards, but now I suspect there’s something wrong with the protein sheath itself. It’s degrading at an alarming rate.”

“Is there any commonality between those afflicted?” Tarquin asked.

“That’s hard to say. We’ve all been eating and drinking the same things, and we were all first-wave prints.”

“Liege Tarquin and I came out of the family printing bay,” Naira said. “I haven’t experienced any inflammation. Have you, my liege?”

He shook his head. “No, I haven’t. I wonder—Captain, you use a larger amount of pathways than most to aid your profession. Could the quantity be exacerbating the damage?”

“That the contamination might have its source in the nonfamily printing bay, I agree with,” Bracken said, “but the extra pathways don’t seem to be a contributing factor. I have more than the captain, and so far I’m well enough.”

“I’m just a little sore,” Paison snapped. “Give me something for the fever and let’s move on, shall we?”

“I have given you something for the fever,” Bracken said. “And, forgive my saying so, Captain, but it’s more than soreness. You’ve grown irritable. I’m concerned that the degradation may be affecting your endocrine system and, by extension, your emotional regulation. I’ve seen similar results in my father’s aging print.”

“I am irritable because I have a bunch of poncy fucks clogging up my tent, wringing their hands over a sniffle when there’s work to be done. With the fuel from that abandoned cache, I can start on real repairs for the shuttle, and you assholes need to get out of my way.”

“Captain,” Naira said, voice level, “you are speaking to Liege Tarquin.”

“Shit, sorry, I don’t… know what came over me, my liege.” She sighed in defeat. “I guess I am losing it.”

“That’s all right, Captain,” Tarquin said. “It’s not your fault. Doctor, who are the most severely affected so far?”

“It’s hard to say for certain,” the doctor said. “But the captain here is the first to develop a fever. Otherwise, Lt. Riggs is exhibiting greying pathways, though she’s too irritable to allow me to examine her. Some of our ill are showing inflammation, as are five of the Merc-Sec.”

“Great. The people with guns are grouchy,” Naira said.

Tarquin gave her a wry smile, then returned his attention to Bracken. “Is Vake among the affected? And what of HCA Dawd?”

“Neither of those two are showing signs that I’ve seen, my liege.”

Tarquin nodded. “Very well. I’d planned on taking Riggs and Vake on the expedition, but Dawd is a suitable replacement.”

Naira bit the inside of her cheek at that news. He’d picked the seasoned warriors, the correct choice as far as she was concerned, but now that she knew who Dawd really was, she worried.

Dawd’s print was loaded with combat pathways in a way that Kav’s wasn’t. Kav might be in the body of a warrior, but he didn’t know how to use those enhancements effectively, and that might get them into trouble. She wanted him with her, but she didn’t want him getting them all killed, either.

“My liege,” she said tentatively, waiting for him to look at her and nod slightly in permission. “Is it wise to remove one of our best stabilizing forces from the campsite? Vake would be enough to provide me backup, and the survivors are fond of Dawd.”

“I trust the captain and Dr. Bracken to maintain calm while we’re gone,” Tarquin said. “And you yourself mentioned those two as some of our more experienced warriors, did you not? We can’t be certain what we’ll face out there. You need the best backup the camp can provide. I trust Dawd and Vake to deliver.”

“Don’t worry, Lockhart,” Paison said, “we won’t all kill each other while you’re gone.”

Naira held up her hands in surrender. “It was just a thought.”

“And not a bad one,” Bracken said. “But I’m confident I can keep matters calm. With the captain directing repairs on the shuttle, they’ll be busy enough not to stew on their worries.”

“Speaking of the expedition,” Tarquin said, “I’m sorry to leave you when you’re unwell, Captain, but we must be on our way.”

Paison waved a dismissive hand. “Take the flares. You find the shuttle, or more supplies, send up two, and we’ll come to you. Send up one if you need help.”

“I estimate a two-day hike at the most to the original mining site,” Tarquin said. “We won’t be long.”

They exited the tent, leaving Bracken within, and Naira lowered her voice. “My liege, if you’re taking Dawd because you think I need the emotional support, then I assure you that—”

“Lockhart.” Tarquin cut her off, but not unkindly. “I’m taking Dawd because I checked, and you were absolutely right about him having seen more combat than anyone else. Yourself excluded.”

“Oh,” she said. “Forgive me. That was presumptuous.”

“I’m not completely useless as a Mercator, you know.”

“My liege, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—” She cut herself off this time. A smirk haunted the corner of his lips. He was winding her up. She grunted, shaking her head. “You can be a real dick sometimes, you know that?”

“I’ve been informed of the fact quite recently,” he deadpanned.

She laughed, couldn’t help it, and his grin lit him up from within.

“Great,” she muttered. “You’ve gone from trying to be a guppy to a clownfish. I have my work cut out for me.”

“I can’t be that difficult to guard. After all, I’ve been told my intentions are admirable.”

“Whoever told you that must have hit their head,” she said.

“They also remarked upon my pretty eyes.” Though he still had a joking tone, his voice had lowered a touch.

Wait. Shit. Had she said that? She definitely had. Naira suppressed a groan.

“Sounds like a serious concussion. This person should seek medical attention, my liege.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I think they’re brilliant.” He completely lost the joking tone on that final statement, a warm smile overtaking his grin, and her pulse sped.

Was Tarquin Mercator flirting with her? Impossible. Ludicrous. Blooded family were forbidden from liaisons with their exemplars. He was just being friendly—except that his eyes widened, the smile snatched away as he realized what he’d been doing in the same moment she did. He had been flirting.

Naira cleared her throat roughly. “We should get moving, my liege.”

“Yes, of course. Forgive me for my… delay.” He finished with a slight wince at himself.

Naira ducked her head to him because, really, what was she supposed to say to that? She hurried off, waving for Kav’s and Vake’s attention. Get to the shuttle. Find out what happened here, if she could, then cast herself home and be free of the Mercators.

All the Mercators.

TWENTY-FOUR

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Tarquin lost track of time as Lockhart pushed them on a relentless march, the three soldiers falling into a pattern of vigilance he couldn’t assist with. Instead, he focused on the assays Pliny brought back to him. He’d started out looking for the telltale signs of the dig site he’d selected before the ships had launched, but what he’d found had shifted his focus.

They were on the right track. He was certain of that, but Pliny kept returning him reports of further small holes in the bedrock.

“Almost there, my liege,” Lockhart said at his side. He hadn’t noticed her approach.

Tarquin blinked away his HUD and rubbed his eyes to clear the afterglow. His legs ached, and already the short day cycle was coming to a close.

“I admit I’m looking forward to sitting down,” he said, and hoped he didn’t sound too pathetically exhausted.

“I admit that knowing about your strength pathways caused me to push us harder than I normally would have.”

“Cruel woman,” he said with a smile.

“You have no idea, my liege.” She tugged a ration bar from her pocket and handed it to him. “Eat. Nothing Pliny dug up for you can’t wait until you’ve got the calories you need to even run that HUD you’ve spent all day buried in.”

“Ah. Bland, freeze-dried nutrition. My favorite.”

“It’s better than the shroud,” she said.

“True. I’m almost jealous of Vake’s intolerance to the stuff.”

“I’m extremely jealous.”

Tarquin focused on eating the ration bar without dropping so much as a crumb. Lockhart stayed at his side, her gait smooth over the uneven terrain, the rifle cradled in her arms an extension of her being, eyes always up, roving, though sometimes he felt them turn to him. That regard kindled warmth within him he found difficult to ignore.

As grateful as he was for her company, he knew full well that he’d overstepped earlier. He’d seen the brief panic scrawl across her face. Tarquin hadn’t meant to flirt with her. It had just… happened.

MERIT family courtship rules were intricate for a reason. They were designed to keep higher-ranking members of MERIT from trampling all over the boundaries of lower-ranking members of other families. Almost as an afterthought, they also afforded protection for lower-ranked employees and HC members. Many of Tarquin’s peers flouted those rules, but Tarquin had always taken them seriously.

Exemplars were completely disallowed for those in the direct line of succession.

Power is persuasion, and persuasion is not consent, his father had told him when he’d been fifteen and aghast to learn it was illegal for him to approach the boy he’d had a crush on first, and had to wait to be approached.

Tarquin had lived by those rules his whole life and had never had trouble following them before. Sixth Cradle was wearing him down. That was all.

“Hold,” she said, softly but firmly.

Tarquin locked in place, having been trained over years to respond to that command from his exemplars with nothing but obedient silence, because it signaled a threat detected. She’d gone perfectly still beside him, legs braced, rifle raised as she sighted down it, into the dead woods.

His heart thundered, but he knew better than to break the silence by asking what she’d seen. Slowly, Lockhart swept her rifle over their western flank.

A branch broke. HCA Dawd sauntered toward them from the east. “Hey, E-X, that valley is—”

Dawd registered her posture too late and reached for his weapon. Lockhart fired, the sound deafening, it was so close, causing Tarquin’s aural pathways to buzz as they adjusted. He dropped into a crouch, covering his head with his arms as dictated by exemplar protocol, and squeezed his eyes shut as four more shots rang out—two more from Lockhart, two from one of the others.

“Clear!” Vake barked from somewhere in the woods.

“Clear!” Lockhart shouted back.

“Shit,” Dawd said. “Sorry, E-X, didn’t see what was happening.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Lockhart said. “You’re clear, my liege.”

“I didn’t see it, either.” Tarquin straightened and took her hand, letting himself be pulled to his feet, and tried to scrape back together some of his composure. “What happened?”

Vake loped out of the trees to join them on the slim track. Lockhart nodded to her.

“We picked up a misprint tail about ten miles back, my liege,” Vake said. “I reported it to Lockhart, and we agreed to monitor it, see if it did anything, uh, clever. When we crossed that creek a few minutes ago, it branched off and came back with friends. Lockhart came to cover you to see if they got in closer when we tightened up our perimeter. They did, so we took ’em down.”

“We had a tail that whole time?” Tarquin asked.

Vake and Lockhart shrugged in tandem.

“I’m afraid so, my liege,” Lockhart said. “I hate to say it, but they weren’t half bad, either.”

“Hmm, agreed,” Vake said with a frown. “I don’t like that they’re communicating.”

“Neither do I.” Lockhart wrinkled her nose with frustration, which Tarquin found rather charming, then stamped out the thought.

“Well,” Dawd said, “like I was saying, the valley Liege Tarquin said has caves for shelter is around the next bend. We can hunker down for the night with stone to guard us.”

“As good as we can get,” Lockhart said.

She held up a fist at her side, moved her arm like she was tugging on an invisible rope, then held up two fingers and gestured forward twice. Dawd and Vake snapped crisp salutes and hurried ahead, leaving them behind. Tarquin blinked.

“What was that?”

“I ordered them to go ahead and prepare a nice spot where we can roast you for dinner, my liege.”

A laugh startled out of him. “Forgive me for taking an interest in your work, Exemplar.”

“It’s boring.” She walked on but repeated the gestures as she explained. “Hurry up, column formation, go ahead. That’s all. The signals are useful when the local HUD mesh is down and we don’t want to alert outside ears to our plans. Vake and Dawd will sweep up the sides while I bring you down the middle behind them.”

“Clever. How many of these signals are there?”

“Oh, dozens.”

“I could have used some of those during fieldwork,” he said.

“I doubt you encountered many hostages.” She held a hand to her throat. “Or snipers.” She made an O of her fingers and held them over her eye. “On your rock-hunting trips.”

“Rock-hunting trips? Is that what you think I do?”

“I’m certain they’re very nice rocks, my liege.” She gave him a sly, sideways glance. “Ah, here we are.”

What Dawd had called a valley was really more of a ravine, alluvium deposits making a wide stretch of unsteady footing between a small network of caves and the woods. They’d hear anyone approaching.

Vake and Dawd swept the interior of a shallow cave to make certain there weren’t any nasty surprises waiting for them inside, then announced the all clear and shucked off their packs. Lockhart got a fire going toward the mouth of the cave, where the smoke would clear out with the breeze. They mixed their shroud slurry and ate in exhausted silence. If Vake caught them throwing longing glances at her special supply of rations because she couldn’t stomach the shroud, she didn’t comment.

When they’d finished eating, Tarquin looked at the darkening sky. “E-X, I’d like to be at the river’s edge before nightfall. Dirge beetles are often drawn to water, and I want to see if they’re our burrowers.”

Lockhart glanced at the horizon. “Then we’d better get moving. You two, rest up, I’ll take first watch.”

They gave her tired salutes, and she checked her weapons over before following Tarquin down the loose gravel to the edge of a dark stretch of water, lazy and thick with sediment. He took a deep breath, always enjoying the slight, refreshing moisture in the air near large bodies of water. Tarquin picked up a stone and absently skipped it across the surface.

Lockhart stared.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing. Sorry, my liege.” She shook her head. “I’ve seen creeks, but nothing like this before. I didn’t think rivers were so… wide.”

“Ah, right, you’ve probably not been down-planet much. Father hates it. Here. Like this.” Tarquin picked up another stone, then ran his thumb along the edge to check its shape and smoothness. He pulled his arm back and mimed the way he’d thrown the first one, then handed it to her. “Try it.”

She had to take a hand off her rifle, and she did so hesitantly, running her thumb over the edge the same way he had. “What is it?”

“A river stone.” He had to stifle a chuckle at her baffled expression and gestured to the water. “You skip it across the surface.”

“Surely you geologists aren’t so unimaginative that this is just called a river stone.”

“They can be any kind of rock, really. That one is…” He bent over her hand to get a better look. “Looks like schist.”

“I think it looks fine.”

“No, I mean…” He narrowed his eyes at her smirk. “You didn’t.”

“Didn’t what, my liege?” She gave him a comically fake, doe-eyed look of innocence.

“That’s entirely unfair. Horrendous geology puns are supposed to be my job.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

He laughed, shaking his head, and she moved around him to throw the stone, skipping it effortlessly across the smooth surface.

“Doubly unfair,” he said. “It took me forever to learn to throw them that well.”

She wiggled the fingers of her free hand at him as she rested her back against a boulder that’d been left there long ago by whatever glacier had carved out this ravine. “Exemplar pathways, my liege.”

The star dipped lower, and the steady drone of the dirge beetles picked up, silencing them both. Tarquin hurried along the edge of the water, crouching down by a set of the burrows Pliny had scouted earlier. Dirge beetles were about the length and width of his thumbnail, their carapaces a distinctive, lavender-hued iridescence. A few rustled out of the dead undergrowth, approaching the water’s edge, but none emerged from the burrows. When the beetles were done drinking, they turned and went straight back into the litterfall. He sighed.

“Well. That’s that, then. Unfortunate.”

He turned back to find Lockhart rubbing the shoulder of the arm she’d used to pitch the stone. The wince on her face wiped away the second she caught him watching her.

“Is that the shoulder you dislocated?” he asked.

“Yeah. I don’t think it went back in correctly, and I’ve been trying to cut back on my pathway use to conserve energy. I can fight, my liege. It’s not a problem.”

“You’re rounding.”

“What?”

He demonstrated, rolling his shoulders forward in a slight hunch. “It’s common in scholars and researchers. We do so much bending over our work that it becomes a habit. Your pectorals tighten, and eventually they pull on the upper back and cause injury.”

“I haven’t exactly been doing a lot of reading on this vacation of ours,” she said dryly.

“With your shoulder weakened, the stronger muscles have taken over, making the injury worse.”

“All right, scholar,” she said. “How do I fix it?”

“Counter-strengthening and stretching, but some immediate relief can be found via massage. I know a few tricks of that nature that work quite well.”

“Massage.”

His brow furrowed in confusion at her tone. “Yes?”

“You want to massage my chest.”

“I—ah—I didn’t.” He cleared his throat. “I only meant to ease your pain. Strictly around the collarbone.”

She smirked at his discomfort, and his panic ebbed. “All right. But if you stray lower, you’ll lose those hands. I don’t care if I’m your E-X.”

He held up both of his hands in surrender. “Purely a medical procedure, I assure you.”

“Go on then.”

Tarquin approached slowly, watching her body language for refusal. When she didn’t rebuke him, he placed his fingertips lightly against her collarbone. Goose bumps lifted under his touch. He flicked his gaze to her, and she inclined her head for him to continue, but her jaw was tight.

“Relax for me, please,” he said.

“That’s a big ask.”

“I have complete confidence in your ability.”

She huffed, and he swallowed, keenly aware of the heat of her body. Of every subtle motion. Slowly, her jaw slackened, shoulders easing from around her ears.

When she was as relaxed as she could manage, he traced the lines of tension over the top of her pectoral muscle, then swept his fingers up to the taut side of her neck. His focus sharpened. She breathed easier as his attention shifted from the awkwardness of the situation to the puzzle of undoing the knots in her muscles.

And there were a lot of them. No wonder she was in pain. She was solid muscle, and it took more pressure than usual for him to press down on the knots, rubbing them gently until they released. A soft groan escaped her as a large one melted away. He stopped abruptly, snapping his gaze up from the length of her neck to meet her eyes.

“Did I hurt you?”

“Quite the opposite.”

“Good.”

Tarquin slid his hand up the side of her neck, following the ropy, over-taut muscle there to the hard line of her jaw, and brushed his hand along that line until he reached the joint and circled over it with his thumb. She’d been clenching her jaw a lot.

Her eyes slipped half-shut, and he really should be watching her musculature, really shouldn’t be slipping his fingers up the back of her neck, into the softness of her hair, to ease the tension at the base of her skull.

He couldn’t look away from her face. From the slight part to her lips, the glitter of her exemplar pathways shining along her cheeks. Another soft groan slipped free, her breath tickling his lips, and he had to draw upon every scrap of control he had not to pull her to him.

She opened her eyes fully. He’d expected her to recoil, for the panic to come flashing back, but she merely studied him for a long moment, tracing his lips, his face, with dark eyes. The hunger in that stare almost undid his restraint.

Exemplars aren’t fired. They’re finalized.

Acaelus indulged Tarquin in many things, but two exemplars betraying him in a row—no matter if this betrayal was merely an infraction of the rules, not outright treason—would never be allowed to stand. Tarquin liked to believe he could talk his father out of punishing her, but even if he could, what then? She’d lose her job. She’d never have a chance at a similar position, and he could promise her nothing. It was too much.

Reluctantly, he withdrew.

“Is the pain better?” he asked.

“Yes. Thank you. I’m sure the tabloids would love to have gotten a picture of us like that.”

He snorted a little too loudly. Cheeks burning, he put even more distance between them. “Forgive my indelicacy.”

“We are way past me being offended by your bodily noises, my liege.”

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant.” She touched his arm briefly.

Well, that made it worse. He tried on a smile, but knew it was strained. There was nothing else to say. His station would always be a wall between them.

Tarquin said something about the late hour and needing to be rested for the hike tomorrow, and she agreed. They climbed back up the slope to the cave slower than they’d gone down it, and found the fire smoldering low, Vake and Dawd sound asleep in their bedrolls.

She shooed him inside, and though he thought himself incapable of rest, he eventually fell asleep curled on his side, watching her stalwart figure in the cave’s mouth, outlined by the light of their dying fire.

TWENTY-FIVE

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Kav stirred five minutes late for his watch shift, as per usual, and padded up behind her, yawning. As wound up as she was, his familiar, solid presence soothed her, even if he was in a different print. He leaned against the cave mouth, arms crossed, just taking her in with a goofy smile.

“You’re late,” she said.

“No way.”

“You’re always five minutes late.”

“Which means you should always expect me to be five minutes late, which means I’m precisely on time,” he said.

Naira rolled her eyes, and he winked, tilting his head slightly toward the shrouded forest with a raised eyebrow. She looked over her shoulder at the others. Vake was out cold, sprawled haphazardly in her bedroll, and Tarquin had fallen into slumber at last, his breathing slow and deep. She’d felt him watching her for a long, long time before exhaustion had finally gotten the better of him.

She gestured to a copse of trees she’d scouted on the way down to the riverbank. Not so dense that she couldn’t still see the cave—always keeping her charge within her line of sight—but far enough away that they wouldn’t stand a chance of being overheard. Kav pushed off the cave mouth and followed her. Naira desperately wanted to hug him, but she wouldn’t risk being seen like that again. Especially not after… whatever had happened at the boulder.

“How’d the date go?” Kav asked when they reached the trees.

“What are you talking about?”

“C’mon, you were checking out his ass the whole way over here. I know you. You have the worst taste in men I’ve ever seen. You never did learn to take your hand off a hot stove. So? Did you make out with the Mercator?”

“For fuck’s sake,” she said, and had to stifle a laugh that might have carried. “Don’t we have more important things to talk about?”

“That means you did.”

She groaned. “He doesn’t know who I really am, and I am, in fact, not that big of an asshole.”

“Too bad,” Kav said. “Really would have pissed his daddy off.”

“Don’t tempt me.” She glanced back up the incline. “What the hell’s going on here, Kav?”

He sighed heavily and ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know. When you got locked up”—he narrowed his eyes briefly at the cave—“which, by the way, is partially his fault.”

“Yeah. I know. Something’s… weird there. He doesn’t seem to know anything about the shroud’s origin, or what happened here. He really isn’t like Acaelus at all.”

Kav’s expression darkened. “You sure about that? The other night I thought he was winding up to order my execution. The guy was furious. How’d you get out of that, anyway?”

“I told him you were comforting me, soldier-to-soldier, and he actually listened. Kav, I really ripped into him about his behavior here, and he was just… fine with it. Relieved, maybe.”

“Nai.” He frowned. “C’mon. Checking him out is one thing but, in all seriousness, that’s Acaelus’s son. Maybe he’s a decent guy beneath all that Mercator shit, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is a Mercator. Be careful. I don’t need you getting your heart hung up on another asshole again. The first one almost killed us both.”

“I know, I know.”

“As long as you remember your hand is, in fact, on the stove.”

“Get off my back. It’s not happening. Continue with the important things, please.”

“Fine, fine.” He patted the air with his hands, grinning a little. “It’s been ages since I’ve gotten to see you scowl at me, I can’t help myself.”

“I have shit taste in men and friends.”

He smirked and gestured grandly down his body. “Me? Please. I’m perfection, even in a stranger’s skin. Anyway. You got locked up, and immediately after, Acaelus goes and hires Lockhart. Her first name’s Aera, by the way. Former HCA and, this is going to piss you off, the worst test scores at the E-X academy I’ve ever seen get hired. There were a lot of rumors, then, about you and Acaelus, uhhh…” He thrust the air with his hips.

“Gross.”

“Don’t shoot the messenger. They figured he hired a look-alike for similar reasons, but I’m thinking he did it so he’d have a convenient print to dump you in if he needed a Conservator to frame, because Nai, I’m serious, we could not get you out. He locked your map with his command keys and infected the other backups with a deletion virus that got around my air gaps. The copy of your map he owns is the only one in existence.”

“I was afraid of that.” She closed her eyes, and Kav gave her shoulder a friendly shake, rousing her.

“Hey. Don’t sulk. He fucked up, didn’t he? Because you’re out now.”

“Did he fuck up? He told Tarquin he printed Lockhart to kill the crew so that they’d have quick deaths, but I obviously wasn’t going to follow that order. I would have gone for the warpcore if Tarquin hadn’t been there to clue me in to how strange everything was, and then I would have died with the ship and landed back on ice. If I’d blown that core the way we usually do, the energy signature would have been obvious. Acaelus’s forensic team could have come in after the fact and pointed to that to prove it was Conservators, not whatever the fuck actually happened up there.”

“All right, fine, maybe he printed you for a coverup. But you’re here now. On the planet. You’re free.”

“Am I? Because if I die here—”

“I’m not going to let that happen,” he said firmly.

“Kav,” she said, smiling despite herself, “you’re a terrible fighter. You shouldn’t even be on this expedition. Just… stand behind me when the fighting goes hot.”

“I’m not that useless. And I mean it. This world can burn for all I care, but you’re getting off of it.”

“My hero,” she said. He flexed, forcing her to stifle another laugh. “Where are the others?”

“Not here. I was on the command deck when the Einkorn fired, trying to convince Acaelus to let me go ‘check on the security’ of the warpcore so that I could blow the thing to bits. Kuma and Jonsun didn’t make it, if they got printed at all.”

“You sure about that? I saw someone in a Merc-Sec uniform give me the signal for the last mission right before the shuttle took off.”

“Hmmm, we weren’t planning on printing into Merc-Sec, but so much went wrong, I can’t be sure.”

Naira rubbed the side of her face. “All right. We need to get any information we can about the shroud and what Acaelus is really up to before we make contact with the Einkorn, because it’s going to be dicey pretending to be Lockhart once we have ansible access. If Acaelus did put me here intentionally, then the second we have contact with Sol my cover will be blown. We gotta prep to cast out before Tarquin calls his father.”

“Agreed. Have you gotten anything out of the Mercator?”

“Not much. We think something went wrong with the ships’ AIs, and he’s found these burrows that have captured his attention—but I can’t say why they’re important to him.”

“Well, bat those borrowed eyes of yours and get the info.” Kav pursed his lips and fluttered his lashes dramatically.

“I’m not above stabbing you, you know.”

“You’ve been saying that for years. Look, I’m concerned about—”

An incoming call request from the Einkorn flared in her HUD, followed by a high-pitched squeal that made her aural pathways vibrate in a desperate attempt to deaden the sound. Naira grasped either side of her head as it mounted into a gurgling shriek. She hadn’t accepted the call. It had flooded into her, inescapable. Static hissed across the line, making her flinch.

“Are you okay?” Kav put a hand on her arm to steady her. She pointed to her temple, where her HUD pathway was.

“Hello?” she asked. “This is Ex. Lockhart. Please respond, Einkorn.”

The crackle increased, burst into another squeal that made her press the heel of her palm against her temple. Kav tightened his grip.

“Einkorn,” she managed, “are you in distress?”

A gravelly voice reached across the line and gripped her. “Not lock, not lock, not Lockhart, can’t be, can’t be.”

“Who is this?”

“Friend. Ally. Hello, not-Lockhart.”

“I don’t understand you. Einkorn, we are stranded on-planet and require assistance to return to the Einkorn.”

A laugh burst across the line, followed by more static. That laugh was twisted and broken, but familiar all the same.

“Jonsun?” she asked in a soft whisper, scarcely believing her own senses.

“Hi, Nai. Hi. Hello. Yes, Jonsun.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and leaned into Kav for support. That wasn’t how Jonsun spoke, slow and easy and winking.

That repetitive burst was the speaking pattern of a cracked mind, and most likely a double-print. The cracked had a hard time existing in the moment. They often forgot they’d already said what they’d intended to and fell into rapid-fire patterns of repetition.

“It’s good to hear your voice,” she said, allowing herself a tight smile against the spreading ache in her chest.

“Shhh. Sharp. Nai. Sharp. Fuck—” He broke off, and she stiffened, dangerous hope flaring brightly as he cleared his throat, hacking across the line. Clarity edged into his tone. “This is bad, Nai. Bad. I can barely think— I need. I need to tell you, you have to stop it. Stop it all.”

“Stop what?” she asked, swallowing all the personal questions that fountained up within her, because he clearly didn’t have moments of clarity that lasted long.

“The grey. The ship.”

She looked around at the shrouded forest. Did he not know they were too late, this planet was already dead?

“The shroud’s here. The planet’s collapsing.”

“Not there! Here! Here, here, here, here.”

She cringed away from the frantic beat of his words, each staccato syllable an ice pick to the heart. Between his fractured cadence and the rising volume of the staticky, gurgling sound, she could barely make sense of the words.

“On the ship?” she asked, trying to keep her voice calm. “There’s shroud on the ship?”

“Yes. No, the other!”

She swallowed a lump. “I don’t understand—”

“They found me,” he hissed, whisper-soft across the channel, sparking a fresh hail of static. “Gotta go. Gotta hide. Burn the ship, Nai. Burn it the fuck down.”

That last sentence came out so clear and firm and so quintessentially Jonsun that it made her dizzy. “Wait—”

The static thundered. She doubled over, gripping both sides of her head. The channel was supposed to be audio only, but grey encroached on the corners of her eyes, the mottled silver of the forest bleeding into her vision. Gaps in the haze, in the blurry canopy of leaves, resembled eyes. Mouths. Wide and round and screaming.

Kav shook her. “C’mon. Stop that. Shit— Help!” he bellowed.

She gritted her teeth against the onslaught, trying to remember how to kick a call out of her head, but the menus had escaped her, subsumed by those grey, twisted faces.

Vake and Tarquin surrounded her, demanding to know what was happening, but she could only shake her head. An eardrum burst, her pathways unable to keep up with the ramping volume, and she winced at the stab of pain, but was strangely relieved to have that side of her hearing muffled.

Tarquin took her face in both hands. “Lockhart. You need to access your admin override, okay? It’s buried, but it’s there, I promise you. Just go through the motions.”

She grunted, barely able to think, but muscle memory took over and she flicked her eyes as if accessing the menus, even though she couldn’t see them.

The feed dropped.

Relief stole her strength, and she sagged, Tarquin catching her against his chest with a small sound of surprise. Nausea clawed at her throat and she shoved him away.

Naira sank into a crouch, bent over, and vomited into the dead leaves. When the fit passed, she rocked back to her heels, then pressed her back against a tree just to feel something solid in the world, even if it was a dead thing.

Sweat stung her eyes, and she blinked through it, dragging her fragmented thoughts back together, trying to make sense of what she’d heard without lingering overlong on the painful, biting details.

“What just happened?” Vake asked.

“Hell if I know,” Kav said. “She was giving me her watch report before the handoff, and then I think she got a call from the Einkorn.”

Tarquin crouched beside her. “Back with us?”

“Yeah.” Naira touched her ear and pulled her fingers away, sticky with blood. She wrinkled her nose at that. At least her pathways would heal it in a few minutes. “Dawd’s correct. I received a transmission similar to what you did, my liege.”

“That looked a lot worse than what I received,” he said.

“It wasn’t just the visual and static. Someone on that ship called me, and I think the static was getting louder to drown them out.”

“What?” Tarquin’s eyes lit with interest. “Who?”

“I don’t know,” she lied, and glanced at Kav—he’d heard her say Jonsun’s name—then away, because she didn’t want to see his face when she delivered the next part. “But I’m sorry to say they were cracked.”

Kav cursed harshly under his breath, but his reaction wasn’t out of place, as Vake and Tarquin both recoiled from the news.

“How can you be sure?” Tarquin asked.

“They had an extreme repetitive cadence, my liege. To me, it sounded like the result of being double-printed.”

Fear flickered behind his eyes, quickly controlled. “If the virus in the AI is causing double-prints, then I’m glad that the Amaranth burned with its copies of our maps. Did they say anything of use?”

“He mentioned ‘the grey’ already being on the ship, and I assumed he meant the shroud, but…” She trailed off, thinking.

They. He’d said they found him. Mercator personnel, most likely. But Jonsun had never sounded that scared in his life, not so long as she’d known him. He’d cracked, but she’d once watched him cut his own throat to escape capture.

Not even cracking had stopped him reaching out to her, had stopped him being who he was, at the core. And at his core, Jonsun wouldn’t run scared from Mercators when he had an important message to get across.

No. Not Mercators. The forest felt close, tight. Her pathways pierced the dark in shades of muted grey, but that didn’t ease the sense of it squeezing her, pressing in. Could the Einkorn have kept its misprints, too? Let their blank faces roam the halls? That’d frighten Jonsun enough to bolt, especially if he was cracked.

“I know cracked people say things that don’t make any sense sometimes,” Naira said, “but this person said that ‘they’ had found them, and sounded terrified. I think there might be misprints on the Einkorn, too. At the very least, we need to be prepared for a fight when we get up there.”

“I’d planned on it,” Vake said.

Naira nodded to her, grateful.

“We’ll prepare.” Tarquin handed her his canteen and she took it gladly, swishing water between her cheeks before spitting it out to the side. “In the meantime, that preparation requires rest. Especially for you, Exemplar.”

“Is that an order, my liege?”

“Yes.” He took the canteen back and stood, offering a hand down to her, but Kav grabbed her arm and hauled her to her feet instead.

“I got her, my liege,” Kav said. “Might as well put these strength pathways to use, eh?”

Naira snorted and let herself lean against him. Kav nudged her, lightly, with his shoulder, an old signal of support between them, and even though the wound of Jonsun’s cracking stung, she was glad to have Kav with her.

Jonsun may not be himself anymore, but he’d held together long enough to give her a message. One she understood, those last coherent words kindling purpose.

Burn it the fuck down.

Naira glanced up to the blackened sky. She was getting off this planet and burning that ship behind her. Kav was right. Acaelus had made a mistake in ever thinking he could control her.

TWENTY-SIX

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Tarquin slept fitfully after Lockhart’s call. He reviewed the recordings he’d made of his own attempts at contact with the Einkorn, seeking any evidence of a cracked mind trying to reach out to him, and had found none. He believed her but wished there was some hint of who that might have been so that he could attempt a direct call to them himself. As things stood, the Einkorn wasn’t even answering him with the swarming static anymore.

When he’d done all he could to investigate the Einkorn, he still couldn’t sleep. He kept glancing at her, checking to be certain she was resting peacefully. Eventually he’d given up entirely on sleeping himself and sat with his back against the cave wall beside her, going over the reports Pliny had sent him.

She woke before dawn, startling when she noticed him sitting next to her, and rubbed her eyes. “My liege? Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” he said, blinking away his HUD. “You didn’t receive any more transmissions, did you? You seemed to sleep peacefully enough.”

“You watched me sleep?” Her brows climbed high.

“I was awake anyway, and you’re not the only one capable of looking out for someone else, Exemplar.”

“I’m fine, my liege. Ear’s all healed up. We should get moving soon, in fact.” She rolled over and thwacked Dawd, who was sleeping heavily beside her. The big man grunted, flailing awake, and gave Lockhart a dirty look before rubbing his ribs. “Get up, soldier.”

“Why do you have to be such a hard-ass?” he asked.

“Because you’re so soft,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered with a small smile.

Tarquin wasn’t used to being privy to the casual conversation of others, and it stirred warmth with a touch of envy within him. He craved that easy back-and-forth. Even if the words were, by his family’s standards, shockingly rude, they’d clearly been said with mutual respect. He couldn’t help but marvel at the soldiers’ ability to get along so well, so quickly. It was as if they’d been doing this for years.

He also couldn’t help a private surge of jealousy that Dawd could just talk to her. Occasionally, she’d let her walls down with Tarquin, but it was understandably rare. And last night… He swallowed. No. It’d never work.

Lockhart had half a ration bar hanging out of her mouth while she packed up the meager supplies they’d used and tossed another bar absently his way. He caught it, startled, and her eyes widened, realizing what she’d done.

“Sorry, my liege. I didn’t mean to throw things at you.”

“That’s all right.” He tried to smile, but she looked mildly panicked, so he turned away and suppressed a sigh. That easy back-and-forth banter wasn’t for him, and never would be.

A cold ache had crept into his lower back, stiffening his movements as he uncrossed his legs and stretched them out against the floor. Uncomfortable pressure building in his bladder made him pocket the ration bar and stand. Dawn was rising over the forest, the sky a pinky-orange beyond the cave mouth.

He let Pliny wrap around his arm and dragged himself out into the woods, pretending not to notice when Lockhart dutifully followed. Vake, standing watch at the cave mouth, bowed her head to him as he passed. Wonderful. He couldn’t even take a piss alone, or without people bowing to him.

He’d thought he’d learned to ignore all of that a long time ago, but this expedition seemed determined to strip away his barriers.

Tarquin found a quiet spot to relieve himself, taking a little longer than strictly necessary to clear the cobwebs from his mind. He focused on the data he’d been reviewing to distract himself from Lockhart’s presence several yards away, her back turned to him. Every sample Pliny brought him from those holes told the same story—local sediments, dirt, and dead vegetation with scant traces of olivine and carbonados.

The sill the campsite was on was mostly diabase, which explained the olivine, and the river could have easily transported the carbonados from elsewhere. But those two often showed up together when relkatite was near, and he had yet to find even the faintest trace of that most precious of all minerals, despite the fact that they were geographically close to the first campsite and the original intended landing zone of the Amaranth’s and Einkorn’s crews.

Between the traces of those key minerals and the tapering, rootlike nature of the burrows themselves, it was all painting a picture he didn’t like the look of, and he didn’t know where to begin explaining it to the others. They’d think he was interested in the mining. Reaching a greedy hand for that which his family controlled. He had to find a way to frame his concerns that someone—more than likely his father—had mined all the relkatite from the area.

That it was possible they’d used canus to do so, and that fungal colony had grown out of control, chewing through the bedrock until there was no relkatite left to find.

Tarquin turned back to the cave. He’d make them understand how strange this was without making them think he was only interested in the value of the missing relkatite.

“Hello,” a soft, raspy voice said.

He froze, fear prickling his skin. One of the soldiers would have noticed anyone nearby. There’d been no one, he was sure of it. He was overtired, hearing things. He really needed proper rest and food.

Foul breath tickled his ear.

All he wanted to do was close his eyes and pretend this wasn’t happening. Tarquin turned his head, slowly, feeling each articulation of his neck. A grey face hung upside down next to him, dangling from the twisted tree branches.

Its mouth skewed to the side, nearly vertical, teeth gapped and broken and impacted with dead, rotted clots. He very carefully did not think about the fact that there was no source of meat on this planet, save human.

Lichen burst from one overlarge eye socket, the coral fan of grey destruction obscuring half its face. The tip of a purple tongue protruded from between its lips, a bruise of color against the endless grey of its skin. Its cheeks had sunken, two impact craters of starvation. Faint lines of mycelium bulged beneath its thin skin like false veins.

“Hello,” the misprint hissed again.

“Hello,” he forced out, shifting one foot to the side, leaning slowly into a side step to avoid startling the misprint. He’d never heard one speak before, outside of gurgling and shrieks. He was amazed the creature even could, considering the way their mouth drew a gash up from their jaw into their sunken cheeks.

Their head tilted. One too-long arm uncoiled from somewhere in the treetop and reached for him, fingers unfurling, fernlike, to beckon. Each digit was tipped with a yellowed, grey-crusted nail. Too many digits.

“Hello,” another one said from deeper within the woods.

No. They couldn’t talk. He was hallucinating. Pliny squeezed his arm. Grounded him. The first misprint dangled in place still, too-long fingers extended to him in welcome.

“Hello,” it said, this time with an upward lilt that might have indicated a question. “Hello, hello, hello, hell—”

Tarquin shouted and spun around, his cry a half-mangled scream mingled with the word help. He burst through the tree line, slipping on the loose gravel and nearly losing his balance, but Lockhart was there, her face pinched with worry as she grabbed him by the arm and held him up.

“What is it?” she demanded. Vake jogged down from the cave mouth and moved in front of them, rifle out, making herself a human turret.

“Misprints,” he gasped, digging the heel of his palm into his chest as if he could force his heart to slow down. Sweat tickled across the back of his neck, reminding him of that foul breath, and he shuddered. “They can talk, one word, just one word over and over again.”

Lockhart exchanged a look with Vake, but Tarquin was too busy trying to keep himself from dissolving into a full-on panic to read whatever passed between them. “I know it sounds cracked, but they’re out there, saying ‘hello’ repeatedly.”

“Uhh, E-X,” Vake said. “Tell me you’re seeing this.”

“Yeah,” she said in a small, tight voice. “I see it.”

She dropped his arm, and he spun to face the direction they did, back into the dead forest. Dozens of limbs dangled from the trees, unpigmented faces watching the three living minds standing slack-jawed on the gravel, the only space between them a yard of undefended dirt.

He’d walked into that. He’d walked through those trees and hadn’t seen, hadn’t heard, until the one with the lichen-flower eye had gotten close enough to touch.

A faint susurration lapped from the woods, a whisper of “Hello.” Murmured at first, then growing firmer. Insistent. The misprint nearest them, a body with too-long legs wrapped around the upper trunk of a tree, their chest caved in on one side as if the printer had forgotten the ribs, fixed them with a silent, imploring stare.

Lichen burst from the place where the misprint’s mouth would be, silencing it, but Tarquin watched its throat and jaw work, chewing over words that could never be said, and was certain the creature was saying hello.

Lockhart spread one arm, making herself a defensive wall, and drew her pistol with the other hand, leveling it at the forest.

“Back,” she whispered, taking a slow, sliding step. “We grab the bags and we get the fuck out of here. Quietly. No sudden movements.”

Vake grunted agreement and lifted her rifle. “Easy,” Vake said, half to herself as they walked backward, none of them willing to take their eyes off the figures in the forest. “Easy.”

“Shh,” Lockhart said. Then, in a barely audible whisper, “Avoid firearms. We don’t know what will agitate them.”

Tarquin was close to telling her to hell with that, they needed all the firepower they could get, but he saw her reasoning. The thunderous roars of those weapons would only draw attention. They backed to the cave, and a small, primal voice wanted him to bolt into that darkness and cram himself as far back as he could go, but he knew that way was folly.

“What’s going on?” Dawd whispered.

Lockhart made a few rapid motions with her arm, and Dawd paled, slung the duffle he’d been packing across his back, and lifted his rifle. Without turning to look where they were going, Lockhart and Vake edged around to the side of the cave and knelt down, scooping their bags off the ground.

“Quietly. Slowly,” Lockhart murmured, leading them around the edge of the cave, to a spot where the trees thinned out and a narrow band of gravel wrapped around a larger rock formation to lead in the direction they’d intended on hiking.

The trees trembled.

“Hello?” one of the misprints said, voice raised. Agitated. Every fresh repetition was an insistent drumbeat, mounting toward rage. “Hello. Hello. Hello.”

The misprints craned toward them, starting to chorus together, voices rising until the rasping, grating sound sent shock waves of shivers all across Tarquin’s body. The one he’d encountered had backed off when he’d answered, hadn’t it? The creek bed wasn’t far off—that’d give them a straight line to run along, more or less, if it came to that. The chant rose to a fevered pitch.

“Hello,” he finally answered, snapping the tension.

The misprints fell silent, heads tilting at the exact same angle, no matter how twisted the individual’s neck had been printed.

They spoke as one, their grating rasps twisting together into thorny syllables, some only capable of near-enough snarls.

“I am your world.”

Vake broke, sprinted for the creek bed. The misprints whipped around, drawn by the sudden movement, and surged. They flowed through the trees, swung from branches and limbs, and both things snapped from the force, but it wasn’t enough to slow the tide.

Tarquin ran, drawing on his pathways as hard as he could for strength and agility. Dawd bolted ahead, but Lockhart kept pace at his side guarding him like she could stand against that wall of flesh. He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all and tell her to use her superior speed to push ahead, leave him, but he didn’t even have the breath for that much.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Acaelus

Mercator Station

Acaelus stood at the window in a meeting room and watched Earth die below his feet. The glass of gin in his hand chilled his grip, slicked it with condensation, making him tighten his fingers to keep holding on. He tried to recall the last time he’d stepped foot on that grey-crusted rock, the last time he’d breathed air not fabricated on a ship or station, and came up blank.

Everyone remembered firsts. Your first love, first kiss, the birth of your first child, or the sight of your first snowfall. A life was built on the backs of firsts. Shining moments, pins in the timeline, holding who you were together. Acaelus could remember the first time he’d died, a boltgun through the head. It’d missed enough of his brain that he’d been sufficiently conscious to know pain and terror before they’d downloaded his map out of that failing body. He’d been sure it’d crack him.

You could never be sure what would crack you, in the end. Everything you did could be the last time. This glass, his last sip of gin; this view, his last communion with the dying cradle of humanity. And he wouldn’t know until it was too late.

Firsts began lives, held them together, but lasts punctuated them. It was the lasts that mattered to Acaelus.

The door swished open. Chiyo Ichikawa strode into the room, her two favored exemplars a respectful distance behind. A black silk suit sprinkled with diamonds encased her muscular body, the dark eyeliner intentionally smudged around her eyes. It gave her the appearance of having slept little, and while that might be true, the appearance was an affectation.

The scarlet crest of the Ichikawa family reached up the side of her neck to wrap behind her ear like a gently curling vine, and while she wore the usual mark across her wrist and hand, the facial mark was unique to Chiyo as matriarch. Her shaved head had the dark fuzz of new growth, making her appear as if she were glowing with some inner light born of shadows.

She gave him a slanted, but genuine, smile and came to stand beside him before the window. Her exemplars blended into the back of the room, merging with his own.

“The arctic green zone appears to have gained territory,” she said.

He took a long sip. “Predictions hold steady for complete collapse within the next twenty-three years.”

She scoffed, crossing her arms. “Rochard’s numbers. Mine say eighteen years.”

“Mine say sixteen. I’ve moved up production of stations to prepare to house us all.”

“And what will you charge for those stations?”

“Whatever I decide they cost.” He licked his teeth. “Drink?”

Chiyo cocked her head to the side. “You know I don’t.”

“Water exists on Mercator stations, Chiyo.”

She smirked at the dying world. “Very well then, old friend. Hydrate me, if it suits your need for hospitality.”

“You called upon me.” He moved away from the window and gestured for water to be brought out. A man wearing Mercator-green cuffs deposited a pitcher on the low table between two chairs that faced each other, then vanished. Acaelus sat and poured Chiyo water, then filled his own glass, though he kept the gin close. “I was delighted to hear from you. I thought you’d gone down-planet.”

Chiyo settled into the chair across from him and kicked one ankle up to rest on her knee, taking a moment to smooth her sleeves before she reached for the water. She handed the glass to her exemplar, who had drifted unobtrusively to her side. The exemplar checked it for contaminants with a small device, then handed it back to her and made themself scarce again.

“I was down-planet for some time,” she said with a rolling shrug. “I enjoy the press of real gravity, every so often.”

He wrinkled his brow at her. “Can Ichikawa not keep its stations at Earth standard?”

“Don’t rile me, Acaelus. Planet gravity has a different texture. You know this.”

Acaelus’s exemplar checked his water. He leaned back, taking a long, cold sip. The water diluted the bite of gin lingering in his mouth, and he frowned at the suggestion of the herbal tang being washed away like all the rest of the world’s plant life. “As much as I enjoy your company, I doubt you came here to lecture me on the texture of gravity.”

As long as he had known her, Chiyo had always carried the air of a trickster about her. Not that she wasn’t a serious woman—she absolutely was, but she had a glint in her eye, a smirk lurking beneath the surface that said the whole universe was a puzzle box, and she alone knew where to twist to make it give up its secrets.

Of the MERIT family leaders, he’d always been most comfortable in her presence, but a ghost of a chill touched the back of his neck. Her expression hardened, lost the glint.

“You’ve put yourself in a precarious position.” She rested the glass of water against her knee instead of on the table, letting the condensation soak into the cloth of a suit that cost more than relocation fees for non-MERIT from Earth to the stations. Her expression was hooded, careful. He couldn’t read anything in it.

“I have never been known for my sense of balance,” he said.

Her smirk shimmied up to the surface. “Naturally, none of us are. But this business with Sixth Cradle, it’s straining matters. I fear something will soon break.”

“Something? How vaguely ominous.” He switched the water for the gin, ignoring the grunt of complaint from his exemplar. The glass hadn’t been out of his sight. There was no need to check it again.

“The Amaranth and Einkorn have entered LPO on Sixth Cradle,” she said, and spread her free hand in the air. “And you are here, when you should be there, and so clearly things have gone wrong. The others grow anxious without news. There are whispers of sending the HCA independently to confirm the state of the cradle.”

“My security will shoot them down before they finish lining up for the first jump out of this system.” He waved the glass through the air dismissively. “They can mutter all they like. It will go nowhere.”

“Tsk. HCA support has proven quite useful for all of the families.”

“They will cease to be useful to me if they attempt to break my quarantine on Sixth Cradle.”

She inclined her head, conceding the point, and took a long swallow of her water, a stalling tactic. He tapped a nail against the side of his glass as he wondered what she was winding up to say.

“Acaelus,” she said at last, “the other families aren’t the only ones wondering what happened to you on Sixth.”

“Ah.” He gave her a slow curl of a smile. “Personal curiosity, Chiyo? Don’t you have spies in my family who can trickle those details back to you?”

“Not highly enough placed spies, apparently. I’m impressed, old friend. But my spies aren’t the only ones to have come up dry on particular matters.”

Interesting. “And what have you been up to that’s so clandestine?”

She flicked two fingers up, a holo emitting from her fingertips. The red tinge of the Ichikawa interface painted her face in pale, bloody rose. In the center of the holographic light, a black square spun, its edges burred with connective points, a visual representation for a data chip.

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” she said with a twist of the lips.

Acaelus grunted a laugh but stroked the side of his chin with the back of his knuckles, considering. Mercator and Ichikawa had always been allies of necessity. While Ichikawa had invented the pathways used to keep prints stable, they had achieved the invention through the use of relkatite—a substance strictly controlled by Mercator.

Both made the occasional play at usurping the other’s dominance in their field, but ultimately, both understood that the balance between them kept them in check. There was a similar push-and-pull between Rochard’s farming tech and Tran’s domed cities and shroud contamination control. For Estevez, who controlled interworld banking, all the other families were their counterweight.

Chiyo wouldn’t dare disappoint him, and that piqued his curiosity. “You know the rough shape of my information. I know nothing of yours.”

“What I know,” she said, spinning the data chip slowly between her two fingers as she spoke, “is that you had great hopes for Sixth Cradle. Hopes beyond relkatite—?” She lifted her voice in question. He merely arched a brow at her. “And there is one thing, Acaelus, one simple little thing, that would make you clam up your operations like a black hole.”

“Is there? I’m dying to hear what that might be.”

She met his gaze with that laughing, piercing stare. “A cure for the shroud.”

He traced the rim of his glass with one finger, not reacting. “What makes you believe I have knowledge of such a thing?”

“My spies have handed me pieces, the edges of a puzzle, and I recognize the shape within. You sent him, didn’t you? You finally plucked Tarquin out of university for a family mission and, once more, he went, willingly. One thing, Acaelus. One thing makes that boy finally leave his ivory tower and go to work. The cure.”

The gin burned more than it had previously when he swallowed. He recalled his flash of longing when Tarquin had returned to Mercator Station after Sharp’s accusation. The boy had been incensed, a fire lit beneath him to prove that Mercator’s mining methods had nothing to do with the shroud.

Acaelus had thought he’d buried any hope of Tarquin ever taking an interest in family politics. Thought he’d accepted that his son was too gentle-hearted for the harsh realities of rule as a Mercator. He’d told himself that he was content to let the boy support his family via his science, but seeing that loyalty in him, that outrage… Acaelus had indulged that passion too much, hoping to win Tarquin back to Mercator Station to stay, and now his son had trapped himself on a dead world. He pushed his fear away, and focused on the deal laid before him now.

Sharp and Chiyo were both entirely incorrect. Acaelus held no key to the shroud’s secrets, but Chiyo’s data tempted.

“So many suppositions,” he said. “If I hold something so precious as a cure in my hand, what could you possibly offer me in trade?”

Chiyo leaned back in her chair, her smile tinged with smugness he simultaneously admired and wanted to strike off her face. “Fragmentation excision.”

He searched for some hint that she was lying, that she was toying with him, though she had never played such cruel games with him before. Within the MERIT families, treachery was never far away. But the playfulness had gone from her eyes, and her jaw had set with determination and, most telling of all, pride. Pride in what Ichikawa had accomplished.

“Impossible.” He waved a dismissive hand. “The fragmentation that cracks a neural map isn’t the frayed end of a string you snip off. It’s degradation, artifacting on a massive scale, a map dissolving in countless different locations. Even the deftest cleaners can’t—” He cleared his throat. “A cracked map cannot be restored.”

“And the shroud cannot be stopped.”

They stared at each other for a long, tense moment, during which Acaelus knew he should doubt, should plan. This revelation changed the entire landscape of humanity, and he must maneuver to get ahead of it, to control the fallout. But all he could think, the only words echoing through his innermost thoughts, were, Yes, please, please let it be true.

“I require proof.” He didn’t bother to hide the strain in his voice—it would be pointless. Chiyo had been there when his wife, Canden, cracked. She knew the shape of the hole in his heart.

“I know.” Her voice was strangely soft, the laughing glint back but subdued. “I have prepared a demonstration, if you would allow me to make use of your printing bay?”

“My techs are at your disposal,” he said.

“Excellent.” She flicked the projection closed and lifted a hand, waving her two exemplars forward.

“Ex. Dalson has been in my employ for four years and has twice experienced violent death. His neural map was backed up before we boarded the station. I apologize for the gruesome nature of this display, but we must be sure he cracks. As it would have been considered quite rude to bring my own specialist to another family’s station, I would like to borrow one of yours, if such a person is available.”

Aside from a nervous flick of his eyes, Ex. Dalson didn’t react. Strange, usually Chiyo would enjoy springing something like this upon her staff to test the limits of their loyalty. Ex. Dalson had previous knowledge of the effectiveness of the experiment, then. A sign that it might actually work.

“A moment.” Acaelus accessed his internal HUD to skim through the personnel database. The type of “specialist” Chiyo referenced was a finalizer.

He scanned the list of the handful Mercator kept in its employ, and found Fletcher Demarco was on-station. Acaelus hesitated but didn’t let his pause show. Fletcher had signed on with Mercator at the same time as Sharp. He’d been in her HCA unit and, like most finalizers, had been deemed to enjoy the violence too much to make a proper soldier or exemplar, so he’d been siphoned out and put into wet work.

Acaelus recalled some argument between those two at the time, noted in both of their records, but the details eluded him. It didn’t matter. Fletcher’s service record was pristine—he was one of their best.

Just like Sharp had been.

Acaelus summoned the man.

He entered the room a few minutes later, cheeks pinked from having rushed from wherever he had been. Fletcher wore the Mercator uniform well, his lithe musculature showing beneath the light armor, green eyes bright with interest as he bowed to both of the family heads.

“My liege,” he said. Fletcher’s gaze flicked between all those in the room, and came back to Acaelus with an acute curiosity that unsettled him, though he couldn’t say why. “How may I be of service?”

Acaelus gestured to Ex. Dalson with his glass. “Crack that man.”

Fletcher’s lips curled in a hungry smile, quickly smothered. He looked to Chiyo, expecting a protest, but she inclined her head to him.

“My pleasure, my liege. Allow me to apologize for the mess in advance.”

“I understand. Please, continue.”

Acaelus sipped his gin slowly as Fletcher sized up the exemplar, then cracked one fist across Dalson’s jaw. Blood sprayed the window, obscuring the view of the dying Earth, and Dalson staggered, putting up a hand to shield himself from another strike. The blow landed anyway.

As the violence escalated, Dalson couldn’t contain small, whimpering noises with every fresh blow. Whimpers that raised to screams when Fletcher brought out his knives. Acaelus’s E-X drifted closer, a hand resting casually on a weapon of some kind—Acaelus never concerned himself with such details—as Fletcher Demarco tore Ex. Dalson apart.

When it was over and Dalson lay silent and broken, Acaelus accepted a handkerchief from an attendant and wiped a small splatter of blood off his sleeve, then dropped the material to the floor and stood. “Let us test this technique of yours.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira ripped her knife from its sheath and held it so hard her knuckles ached. She’d died. She’d been shot and stabbed and blown to pieces and had recently had her back flambéed, but the crying of the misprints as they clamored through the trees awakened something primal within her. It was all she could do to force herself to keep pace with Tarquin.

Bleached hands reached for her, twisted and too long and too thick and bent entirely outside of all human parameters. She snarled and slashed out, bloody brushstrokes painting the colorless wood and the misprints alike in scarlet. They wailed with real human agony. She didn’t dare stop.

Kav had run ahead, his rifle bouncing against his back as he sprinted down the uneven terrain, barely catching himself as he careened over slippery sections and bounced off of trees, tearing through reaching grey hands with his knife. Vake was right in front of him, firing into the morass of bodies with more control, but not less panic. Naira desperately wanted to join them, to speed ahead and leave the Mercator to the nightmare his family had wrought, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

It’d be easy to blame it on his command keys, but she couldn’t lie to herself, not when terror was pounding through her veins.

She’d seen real shame in him, when she’d told him exactly what she’d thought of his behavior. Disgust at the mention of the finalizers. In public, his guilt was carefully hidden beneath the veneer of his station, but it was real. Gnawing and dark. And that—that pain—was worth saving. She believed he could stand up to Acaelus, if only given a chance. Naira had given up her life for less.

Pale forms smacked into the ground behind them, slipping over the smooth planes of dried mud, scrambling and snapping at each other like rabid dogs. Naira glanced back, and wished she hadn’t.

A dozen or so misprints had dropped to the forest floor, finding stability on broken and mislaid limbs. Some of them shifted to all fours while others tottered forward on two feet. It didn’t matter how they moved. All that mattered was the speed at which they were covering the ground—fast enough to make her stomach clench.

“Tarq,” she panted, not having the breath or the time for the bullshit of his full name or title, “you gotta push harder. Faster.”

“Go,” he gasped. “Get away. I’m deadweight, you—”

He cut himself off, focusing on breathing as he lagged, a grimace twisting his reddened, sweat-slick face. He couldn’t hold out like this much longer, and while most of the misprints were slow and malnourished, they had numbers.

Acaelus could reprint Tarquin all he liked, but if he died screaming beneath that swarm? She didn’t have to be an expert to know he’d crack.

She swept his legs effortlessly. He shouted, eyes bulging as he put his hands down to protect his head, but he never made it to the ground. Naira grabbed him and hoisted him over her shoulder, holding him like a sack of grain. His face slammed into the duffle of supplies already strapped over her back.

The weight dragged at her, but she gritted her teeth, forced her pathways to strain, to give her everything they could. Exemplar bodies were fully capable of carrying their charges, and Acaelus had been heavier than Tarquin.

But that was before the crash. Before they’d been subsisting on short rations and shroud gruel and burning the candle at both ends. Without Tarquin beside her, she veered as close to the center of the creek as she could without sinking into the silty water, pathways vibrating hard enough to make her skin itch from the effort of maintaining her footing.

Her breath labored, lungs burning. Clawed fingers scratched her upper arm, drawing stinging lines. Ahead, the creek twisted around a stony outcropping. Kav and Vake disappeared around the bend. She ducked her head, giving up her defense with the knife to pour everything she had into speed.

Naira skidded around the bend, taking it wide, fragile hands reaching for her from the trees to tangle in her hair and rake across her face. She swore and lashed out with the knife to drive them away.

“Dawd!” Tarquin shouted.

She spun to face the direction of his frantic pointing. Fear caught her in the throat, squeezed. Kav lay in the creek bed, swiping at a misprint that reached bloodstained fingers for his face while he kicked at one gnawing on the meaty curve of his hip. Vake was way out of range, a dark smudge farther down the creek pounding dust into the air behind her.

Naira roared, dropped Tarquin to his feet, and charged the misprints, plunging her knife into the back of the one chewing on Kav. Blood spurted from its colorless mouth and she kicked it aside, grabbing the one going for his face by the back of its head to slit its throat and toss it, twitching, to the forest floor.

“Up,” she ordered, shoving a hand down at Kav. He spat blood, red staining his teeth.

“Can’t. Make it quick for me. I don’t want to crack.”

“Fuck that. Get up, soldier.”

Kav’s eyes widened, and she spun, slashing out to meet the threat that had come up behind her. She opened the misprint’s chest cavity with one long swipe, finding only two ribs to put up any resistance before the creature crumpled to the ground. The misprints edged closer, circling them warily, faces hungry or curious or blank. She couldn’t tell with some of them.

A rock winged the one nearest her, breaking a chunk off the misprint’s too-fragile skull. Brain matter splattered her cheek. Naira danced backward, standing above Kav, as Tarquin planted a boot in the back of the misprint and sent it flying. He scrambled to join her hovering defense of Kav, arms full of rocks, eyes huge but jaw set with determination.

“Tarquin? What are you doing? Catch up with Vake!” She’d lost all pretense of speaking like an exemplar, but Tarquin didn’t seem to care, or even notice.

“Not without you,” he said.

Kav burst out laughing, bordering on hysterical, and she really couldn’t blame him. She felt a little hysterical herself.

“Too many.” Kav coughed. “We die getting chewed on, no way we aren’t cracked on reprint.”

She hated that he was right. The smart thing to do here was to slit all their throats and hope their backups didn’t suffer from the backlash of a traumatic death, but less traumatic than being eaten alive by remnants of human analogs.

Her grip tightened on the knife as she swiped at a misprint who drew too close. Tarquin’s back pressed against hers. “We have to get off this planet.”

Kav’s hand closed around her ankle, a comforting squeeze before it fell away. If she died here, she’d be back on ice.

“Maybe…” Tarquin trailed off.

“What?” Naira asked. “Now’s not the time to be coy.”

“They rushed us when we all broke and ran. I think running initiated their prey drive. One seemed calmer when I spoke to it.”

Naira plunged her knife into the too-large eye of a misprint darting in and kicked it in the chest to send it flying away. “Then you’d better start talking.”

Tarquin set his shoulders and stared down the nearest misprint. It paused, cocking its head curiously. “Hello,” he said, directly to it, voice shaking but as friendly as it could be under the circumstances.

Every single misprint said, “Hello.”

Foul breath washed over them, made Naira’s stomach roil with disgust, wondering how much of that rotting meat between their teeth was human—or misshapen human biology, at any rate.

“What now?” she asked.

“I think… I’m going to ask you to trust me while I do something that might be very, very stupid.”

“Not selling me on the idea,” she said. The misprints had come no closer since they’d spoken. “Do it.”

A holo sprang from his forearm and bathed them all in the soft green glow Mercators used for their UI. The tinge made the already ghostly misprints appear otherworldly, the lichen sprouting from their bodies almost alive with the touch of living green.

A low, muted rumble emitted from Tarquin’s interface. Everything in her body clenched as those first few strains of shrill static bled into the air. In the light of the holo, it was difficult to be sure, but the misprints’ eyes seemed to take on an attentive sheen. They were certainly all looking at him now, lips parted, for those who had lips left to part.

“Tarquin,” she hissed, low and soft, recognizing the first gurgling syllables that had come from the Einkorn.

He shushed her, and she clamped her mouth shut, biting her lower lip until she tasted iron. The curved line of misprints in front of her made muted, clicking sounds. She grimaced, not knowing what that meant.

“Hello,” one murmured, and though its throat was malformed, she thought she caught a hint of confusion. The whisper of hello echoed backward through the group, surrounding them in discordant syllables. Tarquin increased the volume on his recording. The whispering chorus cut off. The misprints edged backward, tense. Naira’s breath shallowed.

Screeching burst through the recording, an eruption of near-human voices, warped beyond recognition. The misprints mimicked the shriek, scrambled backward, clawed over one another, desperate to get away from the shrill sound, leaving wounded members of their number in their wake as they swarmed back into the forest.

Naira let out a shaky, rattling laugh. “I can’t believe that worked.”

Tarquin ramped the volume down, but didn’t silence the recording, and set it to loop. “You said there were misprints on the Einkorn, and it stuck with me how… pained the recording sounded. It’s hard to describe.”

“Like a wounded animal.”

“Speaking of wounded,” Kav ground out.

“Shit.” Naira sheathed her knife and knelt beside him. Blood seeped through the hole in his pants. Teeth were imprinted in the ragged edges of his skin. She forced herself to run a hand across her body to the duffle, where they had some rudimentary medical supplies.

“You’re going to need every antibiotic they make.” She tried to keep her voice light as she sprayed the wound with a numbing solution and wiped up the bulk of the blood. White bone glinted at her from below the muscle.

“What I need is a drink.”

“Too bad you gave it all to me.” She pressed a bandage over his hip, sealing it around the edges. He grunted softly in pain.

“Altruism bites me in the ass yet again,” he muttered through gritted teeth.

“Poor baby. Pathways working?”

“Yeah.” He scrunched his face as he shifted his hips. “But it’ll be a few hours before I can walk on my own. We lowly HCA types don’t have the high-end pathways you exemplars run.”

“Nothing new, then. I’ve been carrying y—people for years.” She tripped over the word people, because she’d gotten far too comfortable with Tarquin at her side and had nearly said you instead. Kav frowned at her in silent warning. She shook herself. “All right. Up.”

He made a show of muttering and groaning in pain as she helped him to his feet. Naira settled his arm across her shoulders to take his weight. This print was even larger than the one Kav usually used, and she grunted at first, but she stiffened her spine. Drew on her pathways to grant her strength.

“Good?” she asked him.

“Never better.”

She snorted and turned her attention to an exhausted-looking Tarquin. He’d taken a few scrapes in the scuffle and was looking less prince-like by the minute, but she’d had her eye on him and he hadn’t taken any serious damage.

Tarquin looked Kav over, relief plain on his face, and respect took root in Naira’s heart. He’d stayed behind. Risked his own safety for an HCA soldier, despite his personal phobia of cracking. He didn’t just say the right things. He’d acted when it had mattered. Had stood back-to-back with her, though he had no real martial prowess.

“Tarquin,” she said, tiredly but in her natural voice. He turned to her, clearly surprised she’d dropped the formality without his request. “Thank you.”

“Of course. You both would have done the same for me.”

That was different, and they all knew it, and so Naira gave him a slight nod of acknowledgment, same as she would to any other warrior she’d been through a battle with. His chest lifted.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” she asked.

“I do,” he said, brightening. “This is the creek I’d meant for us to follow to the survey’s intended campsite. The way we were running, I think we may be only a few hours out, now.”

“Is that”—Naira squinted at him—“good news?”

“Yes.” A tired smile relaxed his face.

“All right.” She drew her sidearm once more and faced down the narrow creek bed. There was no sign of Vake. Naira was torn between hoping the woman was safe and wanting to rip her apart for abandoning them all. She took a breath. First things first. “Stay beside me, please, my liege. And keep that recording running.”

TWENTY-NINE

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira ate a ration bar as she walked, the food tasting like ash in her mouth, but she needed the nutrients, the calories. Needed to keep her pathways humming happily instead of trying to vibrate out of her skin or start consuming her muscle mass to power themselves. A leaden weight dragged down her stomach, her body wanting nothing more than to reject the sustenance, but she pushed through the discomfort.

Kav leaned on her. His weight, more than anything, kept her going, though it wore her down faster. Without her and Tarquin, he would have been chewed to death. He would have cracked. That threat was still out there.

Seeing Vake stopped her tireless march. The Merc-Sec soldier leaned against a tree, head tipped back, sweat shining on her skin. Ragged cuts marred her arms, face, and hands. Partially healed, thanks to her pathways, the wounds were a vibrant pink around the edges, dark valleys of red-brown in the center. Vake heard them coming and straightened, clutching her rifle tighter.

Vake’s eyes met Naira’s, and the brief flash of contempt in Vake when she saw Kav boiled Naira’s blood. Gently, Naira removed Kav’s arm from around her shoulders and made sure he could stand.

“You fucking coward.” Naira’s voice was a low, uneven growl. “You left Dawd to get gnawed on.”

Vake rolled her tongue over her teeth and spat blood-tinged saliva. “Give me a break, E-X, that ‘no one gets left behind’ shit is for the HCA. We’re Merc-Sec. We have a chain of command to protect and you fucked up by hanging back to watch a useless soldier’s ass instead of making sure Liege Tarquin got out.”

Her eyes narrowed, fists clenching, and she heard Kav whisper, “Oh shit,” under his breath.

“Liege Tarquin is fine. I do my fucking job. Unlike you, soldier. You’re supposed to have my back out here.”

“Am I?” Vake swung her rifle around to her back and walked away from the tree. Naira met her halfway, and they stood almost chest-to-chest, glaring at each other. “Am I supposed to have your back, E-X? Because I’ve been spending my time picking up the slack from Dawd. He’s useless. HCA chaff. You should have let him rot. We need the calories he’s wasting.”

“Don’t—” Kav started to say, but Naira had left her patience somewhere on that creek bed.

She was swinging before she could think better of it. Her fist cracked against Vake’s jaw, stinging and satisfying. Vake’s head snapped back, but she recovered quickly, launching herself at Naira’s middle with a snarl. The other woman’s arms wrapped around Naira’s torso and knocked her to the ground. They scrabbled for purchase in the gravel, grunting and swearing as knees and elbows found tender spots, both of them too tired to mount any worthwhile offense.

“Break it up, you two, that’s an order!” Tarquin said, aghast.

Naira barely heard him. Vake clocked her on the side of the head with a rock, and stars burst momentarily behind her eyes, but she caught the other woman’s hair and yanked her head back, then slammed it into the ground.

“Stop.” Kav snapped two fingers into his open palm, a whipcrack sound the HC orphanages used to get their wards’ attention, and the sound lanced through her fog of frustrated anger, snapping her back into herself.

Naira wriggled free enough to get her boot on Vake’s chest and kicked out, shoving her back. She scrambled backward on her hands and knees and Kav grabbed her shoulder in one bear paw of a hand, yanking her to her feet. He shook her once, a violent jerk, before letting her go, and she stumbled, wincing at the sting in, well, every single aspect of her body. Vake glared up at her, panting.

“Have you lost your mind, Exemplar?” Tarquin demanded.

Naira palmed her forehead and grimaced, trying to slow some of the pounding in her head. Her health pathways were already overstrained, and it was hard to focus with that jackhammer in her skull.

Kav punched her in the arm. She swore, and was about to whirl around and unload on him, too, when she realized the full extent of what she’d said. What she’d done. She’d had a schoolyard scrap in front of Liege Tarquin. She really was losing it.

Naira sagged to her hands and knees at Tarquin’s feet, pressing her forehead into the jagged gravel, despite Tarquin’s previous order not to grovel. She’d attacked a Merc-Sec soldier who wasn’t an active threat. Exemplars didn’t get to make mistakes like that and live.

“My liege, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me,” she rushed out.

“I see.” Tarquin crouched in front of her, voice gentle. “Lockhart, I need you to look at me, because I’d like to examine your pathways.”

She lifted her head, heart hammering as Tarquin touched her cheek, turning her head carefully to get a better look at the pathways that ran down the side of her face. A soft frown curved his lips as he brushed away the gravel stuck to her forehead.

“My liege,” Vake said, “with all respect, if an E-X suffers the same emotional dysregulation as the others, then she’s extremely dangerous to us all. Even you. That’s a nuke with an attitude problem. We should execute her while she’s still cognizant enough of the risks to consent.”

Naira closed her eyes, and Tarquin’s fingers stilled against her temple. Vake was right. Naira had lost her cool, and even though she’d stopped being an exemplar a long time ago, she’d served Acaelus for eight years without going off like that in front of him. If her pathways were failing her, she was a danger to everyone.

If she were just his E-X, she’d recommend execution, and she could think of no logical reason to argue against that course of action. She opened her eyes to find Tarquin staring at her, worry written all over his face.

“Please don’t order my death,” she whispered. “Please.”

“Never,” he said, matching her whisper. He raised his voice to his natural speaking volume. “I don’t see any signs of inflammation or greying, but we’ll keep an eye on it.”

“This is a mistake, my liege,” Vake said warily. “I know it’s not pretty, but that woman off her leash is a bloodbath waiting to happen.”

His face hardened, a storm cloud building behind his eyes. The shift sent a jolt of fear through her before he stood and rounded on Vake.

“I have made my decision, soldier.” His voice was low with tightly controlled anger. Naira looked up and was startled to see his fists clench, body canting forward as if he’d like to strike Vake himself.

“While I do not condone my exemplar meting out violence without my express order to do so, I have not forgotten your abandonment. Lockhart was correct. I attached you to this expedition to back her up, not flee from an active threat. You may believe that HCA Dawd’s life wasn’t worth saving, but I do.

“And if you had been doing your job properly, you would have heard me call his name, and seen me opt to stay behind myself.”

Vake sank to her hands and knees, mirroring Naira’s posture. Her voice shook. “My liege, I… I was wrong. It won’t happen again.”

“I expect that it won’t.”

Tarquin offered a hand down to Naira. She took it, and he must have used his strength pathways to pull her effortlessly to her feet. “Now. The original survey site isn’t far. We’ll scout it and set up camp for the night so that we can rest and recover our wits. Are you stable enough to continue, E-X?”

“I am, my liege,” she said, dragging the scattered pieces of her professionalism back together.

Vake stood slowly and eyed her, but she was Merc-Sec to the bone, and bowed to Tarquin before resuming her post at the front of their battered and miserable party. Kav indicated he could walk on his own again, and so Naira took up her rifle and guarded Tarquin’s side.

They pushed on for hours in taut silence, watching the trees, but no more ambush emerged from the death-grey branches. When the star brushed the horizon, painting the sky in startling shades of ruby, Tarquin slowed.

“We’re close,” he said. “The bend up ahead leads around a copse of trees and onto more country rock, like we moved the camp to after the cave-in.”

His words were raspy from a dry throat. They really needed more water, and rest, and better food than ration bars eaten while walking, but all of that would have to wait.

None of them had the stomach to stop until they reached a defensible position, though they hadn’t spoken about it. The thought of trying to sleep while all those misprints were out there in the woods, watching through dead eyes, made her itch from head to toe.

If she couldn’t discover what had happened here, if there were no answers on Sixth Cradle, she had half a mind to set a fire that would burn the whole cursed forest.

“Stay here for now, please.” She pointed to an outcropping that protruded into the curve of the creek. “Vake and I will scout ahead to make sure we’re not walking into a misprint party.”

“Wait.” He grabbed her arm to stop her from walking away, his hand startlingly warm through the thin cover of her light armor. “Let’s be smarter about this. We’re all injured, slow, and tired. Pliny has cameras, it can go ahead and send back footage of what’s around the corner.”

Naira craned her neck, trying to see through the trees that clogged her view, glimpses of open space tantalizingly out of reach.

“All right, but please make it quick. I don’t like us being out from cover longer than we have to be.” She also wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep moving.

He released her to tap at the bot, giving it orders. It scurried down his arm and leapt gracefully to the ground, disappearing into the dead underbrush. Naira leaned her side against the outcropping, easing some of the weight off her feet.

Her body thrummed with discomfort. Sharp pains mingled with crawling tingles from the vibrations of her pathways working overtime. The shoulder that had dislocated in her fall had started clicking in the joint, the tendons inflamed and snapping beneath the muscle.

She was tempted to ask Tarquin to work on it again, but squashed the idea. Better to establish some distance between them.

Tarquin’s gaze turned inward as he looked through his HUD. After a while, he said, “Ah. There’s definitely a camp here. Expansive. No sightings of misprints or any other habitation.”

“Any sign of a shuttle, or its landing site?” she asked.

“Not that I can see.”

“That’s our cue, Vake.” Naira pushed off the boulder, stifling a groan, and checked her rifle over briefly. “You capable of doing a full sweep?”

Vake’s lip and jaw were swollen from Naira’s fist. The bruising would be the last thing her pathways would work to heal—superficial injuries were low priority. Slowly, Vake nodded and checked her own rifle over.

“Let’s make this quick, E-X. I’m starving.”

“Aren’t we all,” Naira said, with a faint smirk that drew a matching one out of Vake. The Merc-Sec soldier relaxed somewhat. “My liege, stay put, please. Dawd, fire if you need help.”

The two men nodded, and Kav checked his rifle over, too, taking up a ready, wary stance. Naira tried to catch Kav’s eye, but he was looking out into the trees. She wished she knew what he was thinking, and hoped leaving him alone with Tarquin wasn’t a mistake.

Side by side, she and Vake entered the abandoned campsite.

THIRTY

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Tarquin angled himself so that he could keep the direction Lockhart and Vake had gone in the corner of his eye, and tried to sort through what he’d seen via Pliny’s cameras. The mining site had a proper campsite, nothing like the crammed-together mockery they’d discovered earlier. Twenty tents ringed the clearing, and though lichen burst through cracks in the panels, someone had erected them with care. The ground had been swept ahead of time so that the tents stood mostly whole. None of them had sunk down into the mud.

Pallets of crates were stacked at regular intervals throughout the camp, denoting areas set aside for research, security, and—a little farther from the rest—the larger shell of a Mercator family tent, the protrusion of a smaller chamber used for an E-X hanging open, the ground immediately beyond that entrance piled with dead leaf litter that’d been swept inside by the weather.

His father’s? He could think of no other reason for that tent. His sister, Leka, never went on these missions, and it certainly wasn’t Tarquin’s tent.

A protrusion of stone off to the side of the encampment had been planed, the face of it a flat, meticulous rectangle where all around the natural landscape was unrefined. A carved entrance was punched into the stone, the remnants of a plastic tarp stuck to its edges. They’d started mining.

“So, uh,” Dawd said, scratching the back of his head. “About earlier. I wanted to say thanks. For staying back to make sure I survived, I mean. I don’t think the E-X and I would have gotten out of that without your trick with the recording. You’re all right, man. I mean, shit, my liege. Sorry, not used to talking to someone like you.”

Tarquin blinked, his attention drawn away from the puzzle of the campsite. He’d been so distracted he hadn’t considered the fact that he was alone with Dawd. As far as he could recall, he’d never been alone with an HCA soldier before, and he regarded him with fresh curiosity. Dozens of questions bubbled through his mind, most of them probably too personal for this casual interaction.

“I’m merely glad you’re safe,” he said, and tried on a reassuring smile. “You’ve been invaluable to this mission.”

“I don’t know about that.” Dawd ran a hand through his sweaty hair. “Vake was right, though it stings. I’m not on her level. Haven’t had Merc-Sec training, I guess.”

“Not all contributions are martial,” Tarquin said, thinking of Dawd’s friendly rapport with the other survivors, and how he’d been there to support Lockhart when she was struggling. “Actually, I’d appreciate your insight on a personnel matter, if you’re amenable.”

Dawd’s brows climbed high. “Can’t guarantee my opinion will be any good, but ask away, my liege.”

“What happened, earlier, between Lockhart and Vake? I thought they were getting along, before, and Lockhart’s pathways seem healthy enough. I admit, I was furious with Vake myself, but I’d expect an exemplar to have better control. As much as I trust Lockhart, her losing her cool like that is worrisome.”

Dawd glanced nervously toward the campsite.

“Whatever you have to say,” Tarquin said, “I won’t relay it to either of them. You have my word.”

“Well, uhh, the E-X is…” Dawd scratched the side of his nose. “She’s ex-HCA, right? Vake isn’t, I guess. Grew up cuffed for Mercator, more than likely. When you’re HCA, chances of getting your phoenix fees paid aren’t nil, but they aren’t great, either. So it’s sort of the honorable thing to do, to make sure your whole battalion or whatever makes it through. It’s not an official code of conduct, but it’s important to us.

“Merc-Sec, or other MERIT-Sec, they do things differently. They all have their phoenix fees prepaid, yeah? So the way someone like Vake sees it, is people get saved based on the chain of command. She outranked me, so she wasn’t going to stick around and get chomped on to save me, and she must have figured the E-X had you covered. But the E-X… Well. Old instincts, I guess. It’s hard to shake, my liege.”

“I see,” Tarquin said. “So we had two separate codes of honor clashing.”

“More or less,” Dawd said. “Fact is, I don’t think the E-X is the loose cannon you need to worry about, if you don’t mind me saying so. She swung first, sure, but Vake got in her face, intentionally provoking her. From what I’ve seen, that’s not like Vake. The E-X outranks her handily, and Vake’s a bootlicker. Er, I mean, she’s loyal.”

Tarquin chuckled at that. “I’ll take that under advisement.”

“Just a thought, my liege.” Dawd sagged against a nearby tree and groaned quietly with relief.

“Are your injuries healing well?” Tarquin asked.

“Well enough.” Dawd swept a hand down his body. “It’s like I told the E-X, my pathways aren’t as nice as what she’s running. It’ll take a bit, but I’ll manage.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Tarquin said. “I’m curious, why do you avoid calling Ex. Lockhart by name? Is it an HCA protocol?”

“Noticed that, did ya? It’s not a protocol, or anything like that. I don’t feel like I know the woman well enough for names, is all. The other night, when you saw, uhh… That was just…” He frowned, clearly nervous. “It was a one-off.”

“She explained the situation to me.” Tarquin glanced toward the camp. Lockhart circled a fist and pointed to something. Vake strode off in that direction. “I’m grateful you were there for her. But you’re correct. I’m not certain anyone knows her particularly well.”

“Hazards of being an E-X, I guess,” Dawd said. “Not a lot of time for socializing, you know? And the people they spend the most time with aren’t exactly their friends.”

“I suppose so,” Tarquin said, half to himself. “You know, it’s strange. I never paid much attention to Father’s exemplars before Sharp’s defection. Then, I heard all about how Sharp was a force of nature, supremely dedicated and talented. When I saw her speak, I believed those stories. But the way everyone was talking about Lockhart, I expected… I don’t know. Someone hanging on to the post by their fingernails, I suppose. But Lockhart’s not like that, is she? Sometimes I think she’s more like the myth of Sharp than Sharp was herself, but the media will never see it because of those low test scores.”

Dawd coughed violently and had to pound himself on the chest a few times. “Forgive me, my liege.” He pointed to his throat. “Running dry, here. But, yeah, I agree with you. Lockhart is… something else.”

“Please don’t tell her I said any of this,” Tarquin said. “I’m certain she’s tired of being compared to Ex. Sharp.”

“I’m sure she is, my liege,” he said. “And don’t worry, I won’t tell her.”

“Thank you. Ah, here they come now.”

Tarquin craned his neck to better see the two soldiers walking toward him, and his good mood washed away at the grim expression stamped into Lockhart’s face. Vake didn’t appear to carry the same weight of concern, but she wasn’t pleased, either, a slash of a frown drawing her lips down.

“My liege,” Lockhart said, when she was close enough to speak. “Come with me, please.”

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

“My liege, it’s really best if you come with me.”

Vake stepped aside, making room, and Tarquin swallowed as she averted her eyes from him. Dawd offered him an encouraging smile, but it was strained, and it only made Tarquin feel worse. Whatever Lockhart had discovered, she wanted him to learn it alone, where the lesser-ranked members of the expedition wouldn’t see his reaction.

Tarquin steeled himself and followed her into the camp.

THIRTY-ONE

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira’s time with Acaelus hadn’t included much personal interaction. Exemplars were heavily armed furniture, as far as the MERIT families were concerned, but she’d internalized a great deal about him to be better able to protect him. His small preferences—clothing, food, drink, music—could signal a change in his state of mind, or that things were not as they seemed and she needed to be on high alert. If she’d ever seen him eat a carrot, she’d assume some other mind had been loaded into his print.

Though she’d never served Acaelus’s eldest child, Leka had lived on the same station as Acaelus, and Naira had learned a great deal about that woman, too.

She knew enough about them both to know that the simple pants, shirts, and jackets in Mercator green with the Amaranth logo she’d found in the abandoned Mercator tent were cut too small for either of them. That the delicate silver chain she’d found under a knotted-up sock hadn’t belonged to them. But the pendant—a simple carbonado, the black diamond artfully faceted to gleam without being blinding—that, she did know. She’d seen it in pictures. Footage.

That pendant didn’t belong to any of the living Mercators.

Naira led Tarquin to the Mercator family tent and stopped outside the broken-down E-X portion.

“My liege.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out the necklace, letting the pendant dangle over the side of her fist. “I found this within the tent. I believe I know who it belongs to, but I’d like your confirmation.”

In the greyscale range of her night vision, his face drained of all life, dull eyes fixated on the piece of jewelry dangling from her hand. His lips parted. He said nothing.

“Tarquin,” she prompted gently.

“That’s… my mother’s.”

Naira couldn’t think of a single thing worth saying. Tarquin stared at the gemstone dangling from her fingers, its facets reflected in his eyes. Raw confusion and hurt twisted him so hard that the noble mask had fully broken.

Canden Mercator was dead, a cracked map that could never be reprinted, a life cut down by an explosion, and though she’d lived ninety-five long years, she’d rarely refreshed her prints. That shouldn’t have been enough to crack her.

But it had. And the family had laid her to rest. The diamond dangling from Naira’s fist winked at a different past, a different future. If it’d been her—if it’d been evidence of Naira’s mother found here—she didn’t know what she’d do. Maybe she’d break down at last. Maybe Tarquin was breaking now, silently, with his dead mother’s stars in his eyes.

“Tarquin,” she said again. He shifted his gaze from the pendant to her face, but didn’t put the noble mask back on. The agony she saw curling beneath the surface of him made her flinch. “What do you need me to do?”

He swiveled slowly, taking in the entire camp, and she wondered if he saw his mother’s touch in it, now that he knew what he was looking for. If she made a habit of arranging things a certain way. Naira had never known Canden. That woman had cracked before Acaelus had hired her. She glanced to the caved-in mouth of the Mercator tent, where Canden’s exemplar would have slept, and wondered if that E-X had been brought to this world, too.

“I need answers,” Tarquin finally said. “This—this object—is not enough data to form a conclusion from.”

Naira turned her fist, letting the stone rest against her knuckles, and frowned at it. In theory, anyone with the funds could have had a similar necklace made. The stone’s cut and setting were simple, after all. But to find it here, in this tent… It had meant something to Canden. She had probably gone nowhere without it. So either it was hers, or someone had put it here, knowing what conclusions would be drawn if it was found.

Both scenarios seemed impossible.

A green smudge marred her fingers where the pointed back of the stone had brushed against her skin. Naira brought it closer to her eyes to inspect.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Just some green dust.” She squinted at it. “Maybe relk residue.”

“Residue…”

She let him yank the necklace from her hand. He turned the stone over, pushing it across his palm with one finger, then snapped a fist around it and grabbed her hand roughly, examining the smudge the stone had left. Her hands were still injured from the fight, and the prodding hurt.

The pain was negligible compared to everything else she’d endured. It was the careless, possessive nature of that manhandling that made her stiffen. She told herself he was upset. He hadn’t meant to push her around. Tarquin noticed the tension in her hand, and his eyes widened. He released her and stepped back, mask back in place, holding his hands out to the sides as if they were weapons.

“I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that.”

She rubbed her hand. “If I were you, I’d be freaking out, too. Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.” He turned away, hiding a grimace. “Never mind. It won’t happen again.”

“Genuinely, I understand.” She clapped him on the arm and backed off, giving him space. “Now, the dust?”

He hefted the necklace up and down in his palm, as if checking the weight. “We use these diamonds for industrial purposes. Mercator makes them into drill tips, cutting blades, things of that nature, because they can cut relkatite, among other things.”

“So someone used the pendant to scratch relk?”

“Yes, though there appears to be none here. Those crates look empty, but…” He faced the mine. Naira and Vake had dragged over crates to block the entrance during their sweep, just in case something nasty was hiding down there. “But they didn’t finish, did they? The mine’s still open. The equipment’s still here. They’d planned on coming back.”

He turned on his heel, taking off at a run toward the mine, but Naira caught him by the back of his uniform jacket, making him stumble slightly.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, more bewildered than annoyed.

“My liege, I’m sorry, but I don’t have the strength to go down there tonight. We only cleared the tents. If there’re hostiles in the mine, I won’t be able to protect you. I’m embarrassed to admit that I can barely stand right now.”

Frustration flickered across his face. If he were Acaelus, he’d order her to suck it up and follow him down there. The man Tarquin had been when they’d first landed on this planet might have done the same, or waited until she was asleep to go on his own, as he’d done in the woods. But his face softened, worry creasing the corners of his eyes.

“You’re right,” he said. “You need food and rest, and you don’t need me running off half-cocked on you again. The mine can wait until morning. I’d like to call the others in and have them get settled while we examine the interior of the Mercator tent. Is that all right?”

“That’s a good idea, my liege.”

The urgent, buzzing energy left him, and while he was still clearly worried, he regained some of his composure. They called the others back to set up their supplies for the night and work on food.

Naira ducked inside the tent first and crouched down along the back wall as Tarquin knelt, sorting through the few items that had been left behind. She’d been through it all herself already, and only intervened to move things when he asked, or answer brief questions about the possible origin of items.

Eventually he sat back on his heels, a half-rotted canvas bag between his hands, and shook his head slowly. “I don’t understand it. These things are a month old, at least. Mercator personnel were living here, working, and while it’s possible the Amaranth and Einkorn got to the planet early, Father must have noticed the extra equipment in the inventory.”

“I’m not certain it’s extra,” Naira said. “When we blocked the mine shaft with the crates, I noted the serial numbers. They were supplies intended for the first mission down. If the Amaranth was still whole, I’d recommend checking the print cartridge levels to see if anyone was printed before us, but as things stand—”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Kav shouted.

Naira drew her weapon and stepped in front of Tarquin before he could rush out of the tent. She eased the flap open, strangling her desire to dash to Kav’s aid before she had a clear idea of the situation. In the center of the campsite, Vake stood with the flare gun in one hand, her pistol in the other, and a baffled-looking Kav across from her, hands thrown in the air in frustration.

“What’s going on?” Naira demanded, moving out of the tent. Though she didn’t train her weapon on Vake, she was prepared to do so if Vake so much as twitched the wrong way.

“She fired the flare for help,” Kav said.

“What the fuck?” Naira asked.

“Easy,” Tarquin said. He tried to step around Naira, but she slid in front of him again. He let out a small grunt of annoyance before giving up on trying to get past her. “Why did you signal for help?”

“Because I don’t trust you,” Vake said, staring over Naira’s head at Tarquin. “I don’t trust any of you, but especially you, my liege. Mercator was already here; the planet is infested with shroud. The connection is obvious. Sharp was right, wasn’t she? She was fucking right and I’m not getting chewed to cracking by misprints to keep Mercator’s dirty secrets.”

Naira thumbed off the safety but otherwise didn’t move. Vake was correct, but the intensity of her words rang warning bells in Naira’s mind.

Being Merc-Sec meant dying to keep Mercator’s secrets. This situation was unusual, and the fear of cracking definitely changed matters, but the level of Vake’s response was odd. Earlier, she’d been ready to brawl with Naira over her decision to stay and help Kav instead of making certain Tarquin got to safety. Now she was firing flares without orders and challenging Tarquin directly? That didn’t track.

“Soldier,” Naira said, “you’re out of line. Put the weapon down and we’ll talk.”

“I put the weapon down, you’ll kill me and pretend this never happened,” Vake shot back.

“No, she won’t,” Tarquin said. “I won’t allow that, and you don’t have to put the weapon down, if it makes you feel comfortable.” Naira didn’t like the sound of that, but Tarquin kept talking. “I understand you don’t trust me. I do. I wouldn’t in this situation, either, but I can assure you that I don’t know what’s going on here. In fact—” He took a slow breath. “May I tell you all something in confidence? Something that must never leave this planet?”

Tarquin had their full attention. Even Kav looked away from Vake. Deliberately, Vake met Naira’s eyes and thumbed the safety on her pistol back on, then holstered the weapon.

“Go ahead,” Vake said to Tarquin.

Tarquin stepped to Naira’s side to better face Vake, and this time Naira let him move around her, heart thundering. She’d been waiting for this. Trying to find a way to get the truth of his testimony out of him, and here he was, volunteering the information. She didn’t know what she dreaded more. Confirmation that Tarquin had intentionally lied to put her away, or that he didn’t know what was going on and was just as in the dark as she was.

“My father is not a kind man,” Tarquin said, testing out each word. Clearly, he wasn’t used to speaking honestly about Acaelus. “But I believed he was a good one. Now, after some things I’ve learned on this mission…” He glanced at Naira and away again just as quickly. “Well. I’m not so certain. I’ve always known that he was capable of cruelty, but I believed his actions to be in the service of humanity’s future. Without relkatite, we won’t make it. But…” He pressed his lips together and gathered himself.

“When Sharp made her accusations, I brushed them off at first. I’d been over the process myself. I’d helped refine it. There was nothing associated with canus that could cause the spread of the shroud. I stand by that statement. Then Sharp was captured, and took the stand, and—this must never leave the four of us—I believed her.”

Naira felt like she’d been kicked in the chest. She breathed shallowly, focusing on controlling her face as she kept Vake in the corner of her eye and let herself look at Tarquin at last. He was ashamed. It was as clear as daylight, now that she knew him. Deeply, deeply ashamed.

“Don’t misunderstand,” he said quickly. “I stand by the mining process as I know it being safe. But the surety in her… She believed those words, and I thought there must have been a reason. Something she’d seen, or heard, and misinterpreted to convince her that Mercator was responsible. So I went to see my father.” Tarquin looked down, and when he looked up again, he hadn’t bothered to control his face in the slightest to hide the guilt simmering within him.

“I wanted to audit the entire process, from planning to launch to mining, to prove that Mercator’s process was safe, but also to see if I could find even the slimmest scrap of what had so convinced Ex. Sharp. He refused to take me on any cradle mission until the Conservators were, as he put it, beheaded, as he didn’t want my map damaged in an attack. To be certain Sharp was locked up, Acaelus wanted to show a united family front, and putting the family’s notoriously reclusive geologist on the stand to attest to the safety of the bioleaching process, backed by other experts, all but sealed her fate.

“I was eager to testify, I admit that. The process, as I know it, is safe. But I cannot…” He swallowed. “I cannot deny the evidence of my eyes. I cannot ignore that Mercator came to this world in secret, a secret kept even from me, and now it’s dead. I wish I could tell you what happened here. I want to find out. I want to stop the shroud, and if that means stopping Mercator, then I will stop my family, too.”

Vake’s fierce glare relaxed, her face slackening as if she’d been unwound all at once. An unnatural shift. “I… I’m sorry, my liege. I don’t…” Her forehead scrunched. “I don’t know where that outburst came from, but I appreciate your honesty.”

“Excuse me,” Naira said, and turned on her heel and walked away.

She’d never left her post before. Certainly never abandoned a charge when there was an active threat nearby. But she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t stand there and listen to whatever came next without losing her temper.

He’d known. He’d known there was a kernel of truth in her accusations, and instead of trying to find out what that was, instead of getting to the truth first, before condemning her to the ice, he’d testified against her. And god-fucking-damn him, because once more, once more, his intentions had been well-meaning despite him not understanding the full extent of the consequences.

“Lockhart?” he asked, confused, but she ignored him, making for the tree line instead.

Let Kav handle it. Or Vake. Or Tarquin himself. They could all have a grand argument and blow one another’s heads off, for all she cared in that moment, because it was too much.

The misprints and Jonsun and Canden’s necklace and Tarquin’s confession and his idiotically noble intentions. Naira needed air and space, or else she was going to start shouting and ruin any chance she had of getting off this planet. At getting free of the prison Tarquin had locked her within.

She walked to the edge of the woods, where their camp light wouldn’t reach, found a boulder, sat, and barely restrained herself from screaming at the endless dark surrounding her.

THIRTY-TWO

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira sat on that boulder for an hour before she heard a long, familiar gait approach. She’d brought her legs to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, resting her chin against her knees, and didn’t bother to move a single muscle as Tarquin drew near.

“May I sit?” he asked.

“I can’t tell you no, my liege,” she said, voice coarse from the effort of suppressing the urge to scream or cry, or both all at once, because this cursed planet had gotten under her skin at last and pushed her past breaking.

He climbed up beside her and sat, his presence familiar and warm, and god, that was irritating along with everything else about him. Naira bit the interior of her lip to keep from snapping at him. Ex. Lockhart could get off this planet. Naira Sharp couldn’t. She had to keep up the facade, and Lockhart would be terrified of the consequences of abandoning her post. Naira couldn’t muster up the ability to care.

“How fired am I?” she asked.

“I’m not going to fire you,” he said. “But I am going to order you to eat.”

He passed her one of the canteens they used to mix the shroud slurry, and her stomach rebelled before hunger won out and she twisted the cap off, sipping the vile mixture slowly so she wouldn’t vomit it back up.

“Vake’s calmed down,” he said. “She has some greying on her pathways and, once she saw it for herself, apologized profusely. She was oddly enthusiastic about my desire to combat the shroud.”

“Well. I’m glad she didn’t shoot you.”

“I know why you walked away,” he said.

She coughed on a sip and grimaced, pounding on her chest to get the sludgy mixture down. This was going to be interesting. “Do you?”

“I think so.” He let out a long, ragged breath. “I put you in a terrible position, didn’t I? No matter what’s happened here, your loyalty is to my father. And I told you that if Acaelus is responsible for the shroud, I’ll stop him. I threatened your true charge.”

A laugh clawed up the back of her throat and she crushed it down. Of course he thought this was about Acaelus. Everything was always about Acaelus. She couldn’t escape the fucking man. Hadn’t escaped the man. Her map was his property. She was his property.

It’d be so easy to agree with Tarquin. To say that yes, he’d threatened Acaelus, and she was frightened because she’d have to report him, and there was no telling how Acaelus would react. But she just… couldn’t do it. She was tired of that man’s name on her lips, and despite all logic, she didn’t have it in her to lie to Tarquin about this, which was absurd.

A laugh broke free despite her efforts to contain it, and she bent over, dragging a hand down her face. “God, Tarquin, I can’t do this.”

“What?” he asked, all gentle concern, and it wasn’t fair, because Tarquin Mercator had no right to be sweet.

“Nothing.” She rubbed the back of her hand over her eyes. “Everything. I don’t know. I’m a mess.” She sniffed. “Obviously.”

“I am, too.”

That wrenched another laugh out of her. “Sorry, sorry.” She shook her head, trying to get ahold of herself. “It’s just—the clever, handsome, rich boy is a mess. My liege, I don’t believe you.”

“Handsome?” he asked.

She grimaced and tapped the side of her forehead, where the cut from the rock was still healing. “Vake gave me a concussion. I can’t be held responsible for anything I say.”

“Ah. I see. Like the poor woman who was struck on the head and said my eyes were pretty.”

“Exactly.” She tipped her head back, drinking down a too-large swallow of shroud, and wished it was something stronger. Handsome? Why had she said that? She’d left her mind along with her patience on that creek bed.

“Lockhart…” He took a breath and clutched his knees. “May I call you Aera?”

“I can’t tell you no, my liege.”

“Stop that,” he ground out.

“As my liege wishes.”

“For god’s sake, woman, you are a giant pain in my ass, do you know that?”

She laughed so hard she coughed, genuinely taken by surprise at his frustrated outburst, and had to turn her head aside to hack up a lump of shroud that’d gotten stuck in her throat. Tarquin chuckled nervously and patted her back until the coughing fit had passed, then handed her his full water canteen. Naira held the shroud canteen between her knees and drank down the cold water, trying to ignore the slight taste of his lips on the threads of the canteen.

“Thanks,” she said, and handed it back to him, but he waved it away.

“Keep it. You need it and I can refill it at the camp. Aera.” He paused, trying out Lockhart’s first name. Naira didn’t bother to correct him. It wasn’t even her name. He nodded to himself and continued. “I was trying to tell you that I need you.”

“Uh.”

“I mean—” He spoke so quickly that those words ran together. Tarquin took a breath and tried again. “I mean that I can’t do this without you. You’re the only reason we’ve made it as far as we have. I understand that what I told Vake was upsetting, and I can’t say what I’ll do if I discover my father is responsible for the shroud, but I would like your help in finding the answer. In discovering if my mother was on this planet.”

She rubbed her forehead, ignoring the sting of her cut as she tugged on that skin. “You can’t do this to me. Tarquin Mercator cannot ask me for help dealing with his family.”

That skated dangerously close to the truth, and she saw a brief glimmer of confusion at her odd phrasing.

“I know you serve my father, and I can offer you little real protection, but—”

She held up a hand, and he cut himself off. “Tell me you understand what you did to Ex. Sharp.”

“I… helped her conviction go through?”

She clenched her jaw. This was risky, but she had to hear it from him. Had to know he understood, so that she wouldn’t be tempted to strangle him in his sleep. “What does that mean, Tarquin? Practically, what did you do?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say here.”

Over the past few days, Naira had memorized the fine lines on his face, the way they deepened when he was focused, the way his lips flattened when he was upset. He really was frustrated he couldn’t figure out what she wanted from him.

“Exemplar contracts are the most binding of all MERIT work contracts,” she said slowly, not taking her eyes from his face, because she needed to see his reaction, needed to know what he really felt. “But they offer some protections. Some. Rules against abuse. Against misuse. And while those lines are skirted sometimes, the rules themselves are followed. No one would ever do this job if—” She cut herself off. That wasn’t the point.

“You took those rules away. Now that she’s on ice, Ex. Sharp is Acaelus’s property in every meaning of the word. He can do what he likes with her, and no one will ever know, or if they do, no one will care. What do you think he’ll do, hmm? To the woman who bloodied his empire? How do you think he’ll use her to satisfy his rage, his indignation? He won’t finalize her. That’s too quick, and lacking in imagination.”

I’m looking forward to finally puzzling out why your map is so resilient to cracking, Ex. Sharp, Acaelus had told her. She could still feel the phantom weight of his hand on her throat.

“My father can be harsh,” Tarquin said, incredulous. “But she’s iced. Unconscious. He wouldn’t print her again to make her suffer for his revenge. He’s not that cruel.”

“What do you think the finalizers are? What do you think he gets up to in that lab with Dr. Laurent?”

Tarquin blinked, baffled. “What does Dr. Laurent have to do with it?”

“Acaelus and the doctor have been trying to devise a way to bring your mother back for years. And I can tell you, my liege, the maps they experiment on—they’re not volunteers.”

Horror consumed him from within, and as cruel as it was, she savored that. Savored the truth of his father coming home to him at last. He shook his head, a knee-jerk reaction. “Leka would never allow it.”

“Leka knows all about it, and doesn’t care. She knows they’re trying to find a fix for cracking, and as she says, ‘Who wouldn’t want a cure for that?’” Naira mimicked Leka’s voice, and Tarquin went deathly pale, his eyes huge and dull.

“No. They wouldn’t undertake such experiments so lightly. Father only does such things if they’re strictly necessary. What you think you’ve seen—there must be a pressing reason.”

“Necessary.” She spat the word out. “So that’s how you’ve justified it to yourself.”

He stiffened, bristling all over with indignation. She should be afraid. She knew that. The son of Acaelus furious with her for insulting his family’s moral fiber was a dangerous position to be in. Part of her did fear him—it wasn’t possible for her to shut that down, it was instinctual. Bowing to Mercator was how she’d lived for eight long years.

But Tarquin… He was clumsy with his power, yes. Careless, even. But he listened. He was, if his declaration could be believed, willing to work against his father if Mercator was responsible for the shroud.

It’d taken Naira eight years to tell Acaelus no. And while the situation was vastly different, Tarquin had gotten to that point in a matter of days. He was Acaelus’s son. He clearly loved him. Naira knew a thing or two about what it was like to love fucked-up bastards.

He’d hidden away at university, this gentle-hearted son of Acaelus, and as she watched him drag his shields of arrogance back together, she wondered.

Had Tarquin hidden, really? Or had Acaelus tucked him away, letting him believe he was choosing a different path, when Acaelus was merely giving him enough freedom not to notice that the bars on his golden cage were stained with blood?

Tarquin was on a precipice. All she had to do was push.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said slowly. His shoulders relaxed, preparing to accept the comfortable lie. The words that would put his world back into the frame he recognized—I was mistaken. There must have been a good reason. Naira wasn’t here to give him comfort. She’d keep his body safe. His heart was another matter. Mercator had never been kind with hers.

“Maybe all those people I heard screaming their last behind his lab doors were volunteers. But I wasn’t.”

“What?”

He turned to her, and she dropped all pretense of being Lockhart. Let him see everything she was feeling.

Kav had said Lockhart had been hired right after Naira was iced. Combined with the eight-month journey to Sixth Cradle, that put her at nearly a full year of service.

There couldn’t have been many assassination attempts in that time. But threats must have increased, and Lockhart’s low test scores meant she was likely to have botched those first few attempts. Acaelus was notoriously cagey about attempts that came close to claiming his life—he kept them out of the news if at all possible. She could give Tarquin just enough truth without revealing herself.

“I used to be slow to turn off my right foot.” She tapped her boot, absently, and Tarquin’s brow creased slightly in confusion. “It was injured, when I was a kid, and never healed correctly, so I was in the habit of guarding it before I was printed. Mostly, it didn’t interfere with my work. Until there was an assassination attempt against your father, early on. The angles were bad. I had to pivot off my right to get in the path of the bullet, and I was too slow. I took the bulk of the shot, but it went through a weaker point on my armor. It grazed him. Do you know how he trained that slowness out of me?”

She paused, waiting to see if he’d speak, but he only watched her, rapt, and nodded slightly for her to continue.

And so she told him.

She told him how understanding Acaelus had been, at first. How he’d told her it was all right, everyone had their weak spots, even the best, but not to worry. He’d train the habit out of her. Naira looked nowhere but Tarquin’s eyes as she told him how his father had taken her to the exemplar training room. How he’d had his other E-X at the time inject her with a blocker to disable her painkiller and healing pathways, and how that E-X had, with a perfectly flat face, proceeded to rip the agility pathways out of her right leg with their bare hands.

Then Acaelus made her run the right-pivot drill. He made her run it until she could do it flawlessly, no hesitation, no flinching, while bleeding and without her enhancements. He made her run it until it was all she was, just movement, no thought. He made her run it for days without rest. And when it was over, when she could perform it flawlessly even when she thought she’d drop dead from pain and exhaustion, he’d praised her.

It made her ill, how proud that praise had made her feel.

Tarquin looked like he was about to be ill, too.

“But maybe you’re right,” she finished, turning away from him at last, because it still shamed her that she hadn’t quit right then and there, and she couldn’t stand to see that shame reflected back at her. “Maybe I was a volunteer, because I signed up for the job knowing he’d train me himself. Maybe that was necessary. I’ve never been slow off that foot again.”

“I didn’t know it was that bad,” he nearly whispered.

“And now you do.” She stared at her boots.

“Why would anyone ever work for him, knowing this?” he asked, when what he meant was Why do you?

“Some approve. Some don’t care. Some, like me, don’t know the full extent of what he is until the only way out is through a finalizer’s hands. But the truth is, the vast majority of Mercator’s employees are happy. They’re as safe as anyone can be, in this world. Well-paid. Well-fed. They hear the rumors, and they fear him, but it’s only those who work in Acaelus’s inner circle that see the real cost.”

“But the other heads of MERIT—”

“Are all like him in their own ways.”

He was quiet a long time, staring into the woods. The turmoil tearing through him was a visceral thing. She could feel the outrage, disillusionment, and disgust radiating from within. He really hadn’t known. Naira’d had years to come to terms with what Acaelus was, but Tarquin had just had the blinders ripped from his eyes, had seen the true shape of his own father for the first time. He might reject her story outright, but she didn’t think so.

Tarquin had left because he’d sensed something was rotten in Mercator. This was confirmation of his darker fears.

“Forget that I asked for your help in finding out what happened here, please,” he said. “I won’t ask you to take that risk.”

Naira licked her lips. “I’ll help you find your answers, my liege.”

He turned to her, startled. “What? Why?”

“In rescinding your request, you showed me you understand exactly what you’re asking.”

He shook his head. “No. It’s too much. You don’t deserve to risk finalization or worse because I’ve had a decades-late revelation about the depth of my family’s depravity.”

“I was going to die horribly at Acaelus’s hands someday.” She shrugged. “Might as well be for a good reason.”

“Aera…” He trailed off when she met his gaze once more, and his shoulders softened as he read the determination in her face. “I’ll do everything I can to protect you.”

“You can start by helping me up. We both need sleep, if we’re going to find out what happened here, and I’m a terrible exemplar with no strength left to give.”

He hopped down off the boulder and took the empty canteens from her, then held out his hands for her to take. She clung to him, and didn’t bother to stifle her groan as she levered her stiff, sore body off the boulder. Her pathways were a constant, subtle vibration, reminding her that they were the only thing keeping her going and that the less she ate, the sooner they would start eating her to power themselves.

Her legs shook when she put weight on them and she swayed, swearing under her breath. Tarquin caught her, folding her neatly against his chest. Naira looked up, surprised, and he smiled down at her.

“I’m glad to be useful.” He rested the back of his hand against her cheek, feeling the subtle buzz of an overstrained pathway. “But I’m ordering you onto double rations.”

“Extra shroud. Such generosity, my liege.”

He grinned. “For you, Exemplar, my entire kingdom of dust.”

She realized she’d let herself be caught up in his arms for entirely too long. Clearing her throat, she stepped away and patted down her weapons and armor habitually. She’d gotten too relaxed around him, but couldn’t seem to rein that in.

“Walk ahead of me, please, my liege,” she said, summoning formal modes of speech once more, and though his smile fell, it didn’t dampen completely.

“Back on the job already, eh?”

“I can’t seem to stop.”

“Good,” he said, and started back toward the camp.

What was that supposed to mean? She watched him all the way back to the camp, his steps lighter than they had any right to be, considering all the danger that lay ahead.

Acaelus’s son was kind, clever, handsome, and had a seditious streak. And he didn’t even know who she was. Naira cast a brief glare at the star-speckled heavens.

The universe, it seemed, was determined to play a cruel trick on her.

THIRTY-THREE

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira woke the next morning temporarily convinced she’d made a colossal mistake, until she remembered Tarquin was fast asleep beside her because the E-X cubicle was broken and they’d had to share the main chamber. She moved experimentally and found her print not in perfect shape, but in much better form than it had been last night. Annoyingly, the extra ration of shroud Tarquin had insisted she choke down before bed had helped. Which meant she’d have to do it again.

She extricated herself from the tent without rousing him and found the camp quiet, dawn a few minutes off. She took advantage of the quiet to go a little ways into the woods and relieve and refresh herself, keeping Tarquin’s tent in the corner of her eye. By the time she came back, Kav was sitting on a crate in the center of the camp, preparing shroud slurry.

“There you are,” he said when she drew close. “I knew you’d be awake before everyone else.”

She plunked down next to him on the crate and wrinkled her nose as she took a canteen of shroud from him. “I’m going to weep with joy when I can have privacy again.”

“Can’t say I blame you.” Kav glanced at Tarquin’s tent and lowered his voice. “Vake’s asleep. We’ve got a few minutes. Look, I’m sorry about last night. I picked up on Vake being unstable, and when you two were in the tent, I might have pushed her to wonder about the camp and the Mercators. I didn’t know she’d snap like that.”

“It’s fine.” Naira rubbed the side of her face. “It worked out, actually. Tarquin’s not happy with his father. What he said seems to be true. He wants to find out what’s happened here and, if Acaelus is responsible for the shroud, stop him.”

“Shit,” Kav said. “Do you think we should tell him who we are?”

“No.” Naira shook her head. “He trusts me now. Revealing who I am would break that trust, and we can’t predict how he’ll react. He might turn on us altogether.”

“You sure about that? I know I was giving you a hard time earlier, but I think he’s into you.”

She grimaced. “That’s going to make it sting more. He’s likely to think I intentionally manipulated his feelings.”

“Ah. Good point.”

“You’re not feeling off, are you? Like Vake?”

He shook his head. “Nah. I was a little worried about you yesterday, but then I realized that was the usual Nai-volcano.”

“I never blew up like that in front of Acaelus. I really don’t know what happened there.”

“Tarquin’s getting under your skin.” Kav bumped her shoulder with his. “You’re acting more and more like yourself around him.”

“Oh, god.” She rubbed her forehead. “You’re right. I really don’t know when to take my hand off a hot stove.”

“Masochist.” He snickered. “Honestly, when Vake shit-talked me, I knew you were going to lose it. You can’t help being my knight in shining armor. It’s flattering, but I’ve told you a thousand times, that face you designed for your print does nothing for me. It’ll never work.”

Naira groaned. “I will leave you on this fucking planet, I swear.”

“Speaking of, how are we getting off this rock, exactly?”

“Unclear,” she said.

“Ah, yes, my favorite plan of yours.”

She scowled and elbowed him. “There’s evidence Canden Mercator was here. She’d know about Acaelus’s private shuttle. I think we still have a second way off the planet.”

Kav whistled low. “Canden? That’s gotta be rough on your prince. I can’t help but point out that she is not, in fact, currently here, and might have taken that shuttle with her.”

“Possible,” she said. “Tarquin and I are going into the mines today to see if we can find more information. To that end, get up. We gotta move all those crates away from the mine entrance.”

Kav groaned dramatically but joined her in moving the crates. There weren’t many, and she kept half her attention on any sounds or movement coming from within the mineshaft, but as far as she could tell, the mine was empty. As they worked, they whispered softly about Jonsun’s call, avoiding each other’s eyes, because they’d never been very good at facing hard emotional truths together.

Jonsun was cracked. Their leader was gone, and neither of them knew what had become of Kuma. But Jonsun was fighting something up there, and Kav’s determination to help him at any cost gave Naira a support pillar to lean on. They’d finish the fight and deal with the emotional fallout later.

Neither one of them pointed out that, between them, they’d been dealing with the emotional fallout later for decades, and just kept kicking that can down the road.

Vake was a long time in waking up. When she emerged from her tent, her forehead was slick with sweat, a fever having set in overnight, the inflammation in her pathways obvious. Naira ordered her to eat and go back to bed, and by the time Tarquin emerged from his tent and got himself put together, Naira and Kav had cleared the way into the mineshaft. Dark clouds gathered in the sky, threatening rain, and Naira watched them warily, reminding herself that Tarquin had assured them the campsite was on stable ground.

Tarquin jogged over, eyes a little bloodshot, but otherwise looking hale, and ducked his head to both of them. “You should have woken me up, I’d have helped move the crates.”

Naira shrugged and focused on checking her weapons. “You needed the rest, my liege.”

“And you didn’t?”

She gave him a wry smile. “We’re the ones with strength pathways.”

Tarquin narrowed his eyes slightly at the implicit challenge to reveal his illicit pathways in front of an HCA soldier, then shook his head. “As you say. Are you prepared?”

“If you are, my liege.”

“I am, but—where’s Vake?”

Naira exchanged a look with Kav.

“Fever, my liege,” she said. “I sent her back to rest.”

“Ah.” Tarquin frowned. “Is it bad?”

“Hard to say,” Kav said. “She’s a tough one. I’ll watch the perimeter here while you two are down, but we’re not expecting any trouble.”

Tarquin rubbed his hands together. “Then let’s go.”

Naira wished she could share his enthusiasm, eyeing the open mouth of the mineshaft. She’d heard nothing within, had seen no sign of misprint infestation or any other threat, but still she rested a hand against the pistol strapped to her thigh.

“Into the belly of the beast,” she said, half to herself, and ignored the curious glance Tarquin cast her as she stepped over the threshold.

THIRTY-FOUR

Acaelus

Mercator Station

Acaelus stared at the wholly functional print of Ex. Dalson and wondered if he’d had too much gin after all. The man was twitchy, disoriented in the way people often were after being reprinted following a death, but he showed no signs of cracking. Acaelus’s own physicians and psychologists had the exemplar in an interview room. Dozens of diagnostic devices were spread in neat rows across the table between them and Dalson.

Every test they ran was clean. Every moment Dalson lived and breathed and moved with ease, didn’t start screaming or crying or endlessly repeating himself, a seed of hope that’d been planted in Acaelus’s heart when Chiyo had put forth the excision software sprouted a little further, unfurled another budding leaf, reaching for the light.

He rested one forearm against the cool metal framing the two-way mirror that separated him from the interview room and leaned so close his breath misted the glass.

“Satisfied?” Chiyo asked.

She stood off to the side of the narrow observation room, leaning against the back wall, wholly unconcerned with the impossible resurrection that had just taken place. She’d had time to get used to it, to adjust to a future where entanglement was irrelevant. Where the threat of cracking was no longer a wrong step away, an assassination too creative, a mind reprinted one too many times. The possibilities took his breath away.

But that future wasn’t what had grown hope in his heart. Canden.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

“I will tell you the overview,” Chiyo said, “but I require information of my own. We made a deal. What’s happened at Sixth Cradle, in exchange for the excision tech.”

It wasn’t an even trade, not by a long shot. Even if he told her everything, the balance tipped so heavily into Chiyo’s hands as to be laughable. Granted, she didn’t know what had happened there, and believed he’d found a cure for the shroud, but, even then… No. This technology was assured immortality. This technology was everything. That she would hand it out for the mere potential of a solution to the shroud made no sense.

“What’s wrong with it?” he asked, feeling the roots that’d taken up in his heart shrivel.

She chuckled, and his hope died. “Never could slide one past you, Acaelus. It’s limited. It works on a mind once, maybe twice, though that particular test subject is still under observation for abnormal behavior. And it has a much lower success rate with those who’ve fallen to the endless scream, I’m afraid. It’s not a ticket to immortality. But it is one last chance. Another extension. One more fist to cling on to life with.”

Once. It could work once. But once was all he needed, wasn’t it? After that… He’d throw his researchers into this, to hell with relkatite and the cradles. The thought of turning away from pursuing relkatite made his stomach turn with illness, made his skin perspire. No, he couldn’t stop mining the cradles. What good was bringing Canden back if he had no stations on which she could live? He could do both. The combined interests of Mercator-Ichikawa would be unstoppable.

“We have a deal,” he said, pushing away from the window. “But under one condition. You will accept the assistance of my research staff. We’ll work out the details later, but it may require a merging of those sections of our enterprise to better facilitate collaboration.”

“I’d hoped as much,” she admitted. Chiyo moved closer to the window, crossing her arms as she observed her exemplar. “We’ve been beating our heads against this wall for years.”

Years. A surge of anger flashed through him. She’d had this trick up her sleeve for years, while Canden lay cracked.

Acaelus pressed down on his fury, let it die unfed in his chest. Raging at Chiyo would get him nothing.

“Then it’s time to uphold my end of the bargain,” he said. “Come with me.”

He’d considered, through the storm of hope that’d scoured him, what to share with Chiyo. Knowing that the excision program was flawed, he’d reined in what he was willing to tell her, though he would give her enough to think he’d overshared.

He wouldn’t tell her the planet was dead. Until he could determine what had become of his son and Ex. Sharp and what, exactly, had released the shroud, he couldn’t be sure how he was going to pin that on Sharp.

That story needed to be airtight, because even if Mercator wasn’t to blame, the suspicion would be too great, and the HC courts would be the least of his worries. If Mercator was found responsible for losing another cradle, the rest of MERIT would demand accountability. That could lead to a war he didn’t wish to bother with.

Acaelus’s pathways vibrated as he passed through layers of security, Chiyo a steady presence at his side, the exemplars a wall behind them. He sent a quick message to Dr. Laurent to warn her that he was coming and that he was bringing company.

The doctor’s eyes widened as he passed through the door with the head of the Ichikawa family, though Laurent covered her surprise quickly. The doctor lifted her Mercator-branded hand in front of her face, bowing tightly in deference but maintaining her position as a member of another family, outside Chiyo’s power structure.

Such shows of respect rolled off Chiyo, her focus on the print strapped to the gurney in the center of the room. A profusion of devices and monitoring equipment swarmed the unconscious man.

“I see I’m not the only one to have made greater use of my exemplars,” she said.

“This is not an exemplar, though we have given this print the E-X pathways to better strengthen his body. You are looking at a print containing the mind of Jonsun Hesson.”

Chiyo’s brows crowded up her forehead. “The Conservator?”

“Yes. Ex. Sharp wasn’t the only map I captured when the Conservators struck the mission to Fifth Cradle, but I kept my copy of his mind in reserve and set it on a contingency loop. In case of disaster, I would send the order for Mr. Hesson to be printed into a body that resembled his preferred print.”

“You wanted to make your saboteur comfortable?”

“I wanted to make him able to endure, Chiyo. There is a difference. It wouldn’t do to have him stumbling about because his print was drastically different from what he’s used to. The Conservators are notoriously resilient, and so I theorized he could survive an extended amount of time in a double-printed state, and relay information to me across the link. That theory proved correct.”

She crossed to the unconscious man, skimming a sharp eye over the equipment. Dr. Laurent flicked Acaelus a concerned glance, but he shook his head. This was the trade. He’d allow Chiyo to see this much, to know of his experiments with double-printing, and a vague outline of what had befallen the Amaranth, and nothing about the shroud already being on Sixth Cradle.

“I suppose this explains your intentions for Ex. Lockhart. We were all… concerned for your mental well-being when you hired her. The lowest marks on the E-X test in decades, but a startling resemblance to Ex. Sharp. I told Dai Tran that what looked like infatuation was probably treachery we didn’t yet understand, but I hadn’t expected to cut so close to the truth.”

Acaelus laced his hands together before his stomach. “I heard the rumors. Preposterous. But they suited me as a useful distraction. Luckily for us all, Sharp remains on ice.”

“Can you be sure of that?” She inclined her head to the exemplar that lurked near the doorway. “That’s not Lockhart. You haven’t printed her here for a reason.”

“Because Lockhart inhabits her own print, on Sixth Cradle, and is currently the only exemplar activated on that planet to defend my son.”

“Why not have him unplug and cast his map back here?”

Acaelus sighed and let her see the worry gnawing at him. “The Einkorn’s ansible is broken, and the Amaranth no longer exists. The Einkorn, for unknown reasons, fired its rail guns upon its sister ship. Tarquin, Lockhart, Paison, and a handful of others escaped to the planet’s surface in a shuttle. I will not risk printing any of them until I have confirmation of return, or death.”

“You’ve lost control of the Einkorn? Complete control? How is that possible? It’s just a ship.”

He scoffed. “This is where the difference in our enterprises raises its head, old friend. Limited though the ship AI is, it is hardly ‘just’ a ship. We believe there’s some error in its systems.”

“Hmmm.” She drummed her fingers against the side of a monitor, the sound a blunt rumble under the pads of her fingers. “What’s the plan, then?”

“We’ve been using the entanglement to encourage Jonsun to bring the ansible back online, but the process is slow.”

“Well. I can’t say this is the information I was hoping for, but it is what I requested. If there’s anything Ichikawa can offer you to help bring Tarquin home, you have only to ask. I’ve always been fond of the boy.”

He bowed his head. “Thank you.”

She squeezed Acaelus’s arm, making him stiffen. His exemplar took an imperceptible step forward, but the motion was… kind. Meant as a comfort. But he’d been in this print too long, and the firm pressure sent a rebounding ache through his arm. A bruise spread beneath her hand, hot and tender. He would need another injection soon.

Acaelus forced a smile, not letting her see the brief flash of pain, and Chiyo removed her hand. A curious light flicked behind her eyes, but if she noticed his discomfort, she said nothing about it.

They said brief goodbyes and made arrangements for the exchange of further data later on. Chiyo cast one last look back to the comatose Jonsun and frowned, briefly.

“I hope it works for you,” she said, and left.

When the door slipped shut, Dr. Laurent asked, “What did she mean by that, my liege?”

Acaelus placed his hands on the rail of the gurney so that she couldn’t see them shake. “Excision. Chiyo has done it. Discovered a way to restore a cracked mind. Quickly—gather those who worked on the double-printing project. They are my most trusted. It’s time. Time to bring Canden back.”

THIRTY-FIVE

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira’s overworked pathways struggled with the low light in the mineshaft. Tarquin paused in the entryway and fumbled along the seam between wall and ceiling until she heard a click. Soft, purplish light filled the shaft, giving her pathways enough ambient light to work with.

“Surprised the light’s not green,” she said.

“Black light, actually. UV illuminates certain minerals. It’s quite a simple way of mapping deposits and works well with the night vision pathways and—” He caught her giving him a side-eye. “Ah. You were remarking on Mercator vanity.” He looked around the smooth walls of the mineshaft. “If Father could have accomplished the same thing with green lights, he’d have done so.”

Naira chuckled. A faint smile crept across his face before he turned to the mine walls. Digging bots had smoothed the natural stone to an eerie sheen. Thin layers in gradient hues of grey and brown painted the surface in a spectral sunset. Tarquin brushed a hand across the stone, brows knitted together with concentration.

“Unusual that they would start digging here. A mere mile east, back toward the crash site, would have been better, I think.”

“Maybe the burrowing made things unstable over there,” Naira said.

“Maybe.” He drew out the word in a way that implied he wasn’t convinced. The golden pathways that flowed up his neck to disappear beneath his hair glittered, and she let him think, edging farther along into the mineshaft instead.

She’d visited one mining site as Acaelus’s exemplar—Third Cradle. It had been much like this one, though she and Acaelus hadn’t gone deep into the mine itself. He’d been swarmed by his people then, too many bodies crammed together in the barely wide-enough tunnels to vie for his attention, exclaiming about all the progress they’d made. Naira had scarcely listened to their words. She’d been focused on their body language, watching to see if any would become a threat.

The ground sloped downward, drawing her farther into the skin of the planet. Her footsteps echoed against the walls, the shaft growing narrower and more utilitarian with every step. The walls lost their sheen, turning into a rough, chiseled surface. The air was cool against her skin, a whisper of moisture lingering.

“My liege,” she called back to him, “do you think it’s going to rain soon?”

“In a few hours.” He jogged along the tunnel to join her. “Have you seen evidence of the mining robots? Crates?”

“Not yet.”

He grunted with mild frustration. “I can’t see what they were doing here. This isn’t relkatite mining, not in any way I know it. It looks more like they were exploring.”

“Looking for relk?” she asked.

“We have better methods than experimental digging.” He fell silent, chewing over some thought, and Naira left him to his ruminations.

They pushed on, Naira taking careful note of each and every turn, though by the twentieth turn in the tunnels she was well and truly twisted around, the world above a distant memory. Only the stone and the echo of their steps, deadened now that the walls weren’t smooth, existed. In the mineshaft, she could be on any rocky planet. Earth, even. She could see why he liked it down here.

Tarquin was frowning at a patch of rock that appeared no different than the rest, and had been for a good ten minutes. She kicked at the floor, listening to her boot scuff.

“Do you see this?” he asked, pointing at the top of the wall, where it curved into the ceiling. “These vesicle-like structures aren’t supposed to be in clastic sedimentary strata.”

“Hmm, yes, those are words,” she said.

“Would you look, please?”

She moved next to him. He put a hand on her shoulder and adjusted her position, pointing again. “What do you see?”

It took her eyes a moment to adjust, but when they did, she reached up, then hesitated. When Tarquin didn’t stop her, she extended a finger and brushed it along the stone. Sediment fell out, revealing tiny, pinprick-sized holes.

“More burrowing?” she asked.

“That sediment…” He trailed off. He didn’t want to tell her.

She turned to him and crossed her arms as she leaned against the wall, ignoring the poke of rock into her back. He’d asked for her help. It was time to make him stop holding back. “What about that sediment?”

“Pliny analyzed some of the sediment in the burrows. There was an unusually high concentration of olivine, a mineral commonly associated with a great many things, but most notably relkatite. To find it here, in a sedimentary area? With no evidence of metamorphic activity? It makes no sense.”

“It sure doesn’t,” she said dryly.

He flushed. “I don’t want to bore you.”

“You are anything but boring, my liege. Go on.”

“Well, do you recall what I said about the ridge near the crash site? That it wasn’t susceptible to that kind of weathering?” At her nod, his smile grew, and he continued, “That area is a diabase sill, a layer of igneous rock that intruded upon the country rock which, in this area, is mostly shale and its ilk. To mine relkatite, we look for these sills as, on the fringes, where the igneous meets the sedimentary, the heat from below cooks the sedimentary layer above, creating a metamorphic zone and then… I’m sorry. That’s probably too much information.”

“Don’t apologize. I’m following you. Where two different classes meet, change happens.”

“Precisely.” He studied her for a long moment. “It is in the meeting of disparate classes that we find a great many interesting and beautiful things.”

Her cheeks warmed under his steady regard. “Like relkatite?”

“Yes.” He cleared his throat and returned to his study of the stone. “Like relkatite. This mineshaft is too far west, most of what’s here is country rock. But there’s olivine in that sediment, which is curious, as it should be in igneous or metamorphic areas.”

“So there shouldn’t be olivine here, but there is, and that means something might have transported it here.”

“That’s it exactly, but I only have suspicions of what that might be. There’s just the shape of the burrows to go off of, and even that I don’t have a complete picture of. I’d need an aerial survey, wide-scale sampling…” He sighed heavily. “Nothing I have access to.”

“You’ll figure it out, my liege,” she said.

Naira pushed off the wall, moving farther down the mineshaft. He hurried to catch up, chattering excitedly about all the theories of how relkatite formed.

When he spoke about his work, he was practically a different person. If she didn’t turn to look at him, didn’t see that vaguely familiar profile, or the green marks curling over his wrists, he wasn’t a Mercator. Just a man passionate about some rocks. She snorted. Acaelus would have been scandalized to know she’d thought such a thing.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“You laughed. I didn’t think the rock cycle was quite so funny.”

She paused, propping her hands on her hips, and pretended to study the branching paths ahead. The air had grown warmer down here, and even the floor was rough beneath her feet. They were reaching the end of this path. Naira eyed his shadow, a blurry smudge against the ground, and decided to try out a little honesty.

“I was thinking about what a poor Mercator you make.”

He straightened his spine, and the earlier excitement drained from his voice. “I assure you, I’m well aware.”

She half turned, looking up the slope at him. “That was a compliment, my liege.”

“Oh.” The stiffness bled out of his posture.

Naira found she didn’t want to look away from him, the long plane of his face, the faint furrow between his brows that deepened the longer she watched him, the divots around the corners of his mouth when he smiled hard enough to show his teeth.

The air thickened between them. He was dirty and ragged and quite handsome, especially when he let the guise slip and indulged in talking about his interests.

And the son of her enemy. The man whose testimony had put her map on ice.

A man with a very nicely shaped mouth.

“Hold on.” He brushed past her, oblivious to her interest. “The burrows, they’re getting larger. Look.”

She shook herself. He didn’t know who she was. It didn’t matter if he was interested, as she suspected, and Kav claimed. What he thought of her, or his father, or the shroud and all the rest was irrelevant.

If she made a move and he responded positively, he’d be consenting to who he thought Aera Lockhart was, not Naira as herself. The very thought of misleading him in that way made her skin crawl. Better to focus on the mineshaft, not how charming he could be when he was in his element.

Naira examined the area Tarquin had pointed at. Sure enough, the burrows widened from pinky width to about the diameter of her wrist, and seemed to increase in number farther down the shaft.

“Is this mineshaft following the burrows?” she asked.

“I think you must be right,” he said, voice lifting with excitement. “And it seems to be turning west, after all, into the area more suited for relkatite. Let’s see where it ends, shall we?”

Naira frowned. “If it rains…”

“Ex. Lockhart, are you afraid of a little rain?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “More like flash flooding.”

“There’s drainage built into the system, and structures near the entrance to keep runoff from getting inside. We’ll be quick, I promise you.”

She doubted he’d be quick by her standards, but she was loath to leave a repeat of this exploration until the next day. Especially if the rain washed away evidence, or flooded areas. Against her instincts, she gestured for him to continue.

He charged ahead at a speed that made her uncomfortable on the uneven footing of the mineshaft floor, since he’d backed off the use of his agility pathways to conserve food. But she’d asked him to hurry, so she could hardly complain. She activated her agility pathways and kept up, pulling the pistol from her holster as an afterthought.

They hadn’t confirmed what was making the burrows, after all, and visions of rock-crushing insects or rodents flashed behind her eyes, making her wary.

Tarquin stopped so abruptly she almost bumped into him. He wasn’t much broader than her, but the mineshaft was narrow, and she had to crane her neck to see what had stilled his excitement.

The mineshaft dead-ended, the last wall covered in a latticework of thin, ghostly pale roots, wispy ends curling in fine whorls across the surface of the stone. Tree roots caused the burrows, then, or something like them, but she didn’t understand how that benign revelation could make Tarquin lock up, fall silent.

“What is it, my liege?” she asked.

He pointed. She squeezed up next to him, their sides pressed together. The subtle, warm scent of his body mingled with the metallic aroma on the air, as if it belonged here. A thick vein of green ore roped through the rock face. Relkatite. Scratched into the surface, jagged with the shape of the vein, were the words:

WE CAN NEVER LEAVE

Naira swallowed. Tarquin dropped to one knee next to the hasty inscription. He took the diamond pendant from his pocket and pressed the tip into one of the carved lines. A perfect fit.

“I…” His hands trembled as he put the necklace away. “I don’t understand. I don’t know what she was trying to tell me.”

The message might not have been meant for him. Might not be from his mother at all. But that wasn’t what he needed to hear right now. Gently, she placed a hand on his shoulder. He leaned into the touch, and she tightened her grip. “Maybe there’s an explanation in the camp. We only searched it for hostiles last night.”

“But this isn’t…” He cut himself off, scrambling to pull a small hammer from Pliny’s stores. He angled the hammer carefully and struck. A slim piece of relkatite chipped away, tumbled to the ground. He scooped it up and rubbed his thumb across the surface. Then he licked it.

“Uh,” Naira said. “Licking relk in close contact with alien plants probably isn’t the greatest idea, my liege.”

“It’s not relkatite.” The excitement was back, squeezing his voice in his rush to get the words out as he jumped to his feet and held the piece of stone out for her. “Look, the surface, it’s too dull, even when wet, and this pitting—this pitting is all wrong, it’s chemical. It couldn’t happen on the genuine stuff.”

“So you licked an unknown rock with an unknown chemical process on it? I can’t believe I considered kissing you.”

All his excited movements halted. He blinked rapidly, glancing from the stone in his hands to her and back again, completely derailed. “You—what?”

Her skin heated. “A joke. Forget about it. Tell me more about the rock.”

“That is the second most attractive thing you’ve said in the past few seconds.”

She turned away to hide the smile she couldn’t control. “The rock?”

In the corner of her eye, he reached for her, fingers curled in against his palm, hesitant. He examined her with such intensity she wondered if he was about to lick her, too. Tarquin cleared his throat, roughly, and pulled his hand back, trying to make it seem like he’d merely been reaching to push the shard of not-relk around his palm. Color crawled up his cheeks.

“Yes. Of course. The rock. Mineral, actually.” He put the formal voice back on, and she swallowed against a surprising rush of disappointment. “The luster, it’s all wrong. You’ve heard of fool’s gold, yes? This appears to be the relkatite equivalent of such a thing. The structure is near enough. Though I’d have to get it under a microscope at the very least to confirm how close they are beyond visual inspection, but this isn’t it. This is quite probably worthless.” He sighed. “I’d kill for an XRF analyzer right now.”

“The people who set up this camp seemed to know what they were doing. Why would they be fooled?”

“Perhaps they were ignorant of the difference.”

“Maybe they tested it and realized? You said there was a chemical process.”

“Ah, that, yes, there is pitting on the surface. Caused by some kind of acid, by the taste.”

“That’s disgusting.”

He blushed and gave her a little shrug. “I confess, it’s not a recommended field technique. But what I don’t understand is, why? Dissolving impurities wouldn’t necessarily demonstrate it wasn’t real. Relk has its own impurities—oh. Of course.”

His face blanked, brow scrunching with thought. Warily, he turned back to the wall, tucking the chip into his pocket. He ran his fingers over the ore vein, traced it to the edge where the root system had stopped growing. A section of the roots appeared to have grown across the rock and then fallen off, blackened, possibly having reacted to whatever chemical process had been applied to the vein. He craned his neck, examining the roots, the cave. The pathways along his neck glittered gold.

“I think those burrows are caused by mycelium… Fungus,” he clarified at her grunt of annoyance.

She reached a hand for the bundle of grey, and he grabbed her wrist with long, strong fingers. He did not let go.

“No, don’t touch it. It might be canus, what we use for bioleaching. If it is, its singular purpose is the consumption of relkatite, and you, my dear warrior, are loaded with the stuff in your pathways.”

“Would it damage them?”

“It’s possible. We keep it contained and controlled—proprietary, family knowledge that it is—but the useful thing about M. canus is that it doesn’t damage relkatite. It consumes it, then uses it in its cells without degrading it in any way. As far as I know, cross contamination with humanity is impossible, but I’ve never seen a colony this large.”

“Shroud lichen isn’t supposed to grow in people, either, my liege,” she said, thinking of the misprints.

“Yeah.”

“You licked it.”

He winced. “I’ll add that to my list of many regrets.”

Naira was keenly aware of his hand around her wrist. That grip didn’t have the controlling feel to it that it’d had when he’d grabbed her last night to examine the smear of green dust on her hand, and so she left it there, his fingers searing brands into her skin, while she read those words over and over again, and could make no sense of them.

“Do you think canus caused the burrowing?” she asked.

“I do. I’d suspected as much, after I confirmed that the beetles weren’t involved. It’d explain the shape, and the lack of canus in the burrows themselves. Once it failed to locate relk and exposed itself to the shroud, the shroud would have consumed it along with everything else. I’m amazed this colony still lives.”

“Not very well,” she said, pointing to the shriveled piece with her chin.

“You’re right. Whatever it is about relk that sustains canus, it didn’t find it in the fool’s relk, but it must have been hungry enough to try.”

Naira pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay. We can’t keep calling it fool’s relk, that’s too confusing. Use that big brain of yours to come up with something else, my liege.”

“The discovering team usually decides these things after a full examination and at least one paper published. I can hardly—”

“My liege, we’re the ‘discovering team.’ Pick something and I’ll vote ‘aye,’ or whatever it is you people do.”

“And will you coauthor my paper with me, too, Exemplar?” he asked.

“You’re on your own with that,” she said. “I’m no scientist.”

He laughed. “Forgive me, but the hell you aren’t. You may not publish papers, but I’ve watched you examine a situation, experiment, and adjust. You’ve a scientific mind.”

“Great. Don’t tell anyone. My friends already give me a hard time for being a nerd.”

“Your secret is safe with me.”

“Aren’t you generous. Now name the rock, please, my liege.”

His smile warmed. “All right, Exemplar. We’ll call it amarthite. After the Amaranth, the ship that brought us all together.”

“Oh… kay.” He’d said brought us all together. That was an important all. He wasn’t talking about the two of them. That’d be ridiculous. She cleared her throat. “So, canus doesn’t like amarthite. But what if it got loose on the ships, where there’s relkatite in the warpcore containment, ansible, and wiring?”

He grinned. “You see? You do have a scientific mind. There’d be widespread system failure. I think you’ve discovered what damaged the ships. Canus containment was clearly broken at this campsite. Whoever set it up must have accidentally contaminated the ships, too.”

Naira eyed the shriveled rope of canus that’d dripped off the amarthite vein. “Well. At least we know how to kill it.”

THIRTY-SIX

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

They were close enough to the exit of the mineshaft to see grey daylight trickling through when the gunshot sounded. Lockhart stepped in front of Tarquin, shielding him with her body, her pistol drawn, and all he could do was tighten his fist around the shard of amarthite and wish it wasn’t her who was duty bound to defend him with her life.

Lockhart motioned for him to stay back and crept to the entrance, leaning against the wall as she craned her neck, peering out into the dismal daylight. After a long pause in which he was certain she’d gone so still she’d stopped breathing, she cupped a hand around the side of her mouth.

“Sitrep?” Her voice boomed.

“Clear,” Dawd called back. “Found a misprint trying to dig through a tent.”

“I hate those things,” Lockhart muttered as she holstered her weapon.

“I didn’t think you were capable of fear,” Tarquin said.

“Fear’s useful, my liege. It keeps you on your toes.” Lockhart pointed to Pliny with her chin. “I’m not a robot, you know. Pliny’s the only fearless one here.”

Tarquin touched the bot absently. “I confess to some jealousy.”

“Me too.”

They found Dawd and Vake standing around the felled misprint. The pale, twisted limbs lay splayed against the dirt, a slow pool of blood spreading from around its head. No clothes. Sunken skin around the ribs—too many ribs, in fact—and lichen-crusted skin. Tarquin crouched next to the body. The golden pathways that held it together were greyed at the ends.

“I wish I knew where they were coming from,” Tarquin said.

“Well.” Dawd pointed to the northeast. “This one came from that direction, for what it’s worth, my liege.”

“It seems to have been alone.” Vake nudged it with her boot. She was looking much better, the fever sweat gone from her skin. “Scrawny thing, isn’t it?”

“The runt of the litter,” Dawd said. “Maybe their print cartridges are getting low.”

“That’d be fortuitous.” Tarquin stood. “I’d like to check the research tent for usable equipment.”

Lockhart gave the other two quick orders regarding keeping the perimeter secure, then followed him, but Tarquin could only half listen. The gunshot had derailed his thoughts, but they slid smoothly back on track.

The message carved into the amarthite ore haunted him. We can never leave, in his mother’s handwriting, all but sealed the fact that she had been to this planet. Someone might fake her necklace, but her handwriting? The way she extended the lines on her v’s and w’s? The layout of the camp? She’d been here, and as far as he could tell, something had frightened her into believing she couldn’t leave, yet there was no sign of her having been here recently. It was maddening.

“Behind me, my liege.” Lockhart moved in front of him. “We can’t be certain that was the only misprint that tried to break into a tent.”

Tarquin stopped short at the door, stiff with impatience. She brushed aside the entrance flap, a ratty piece of tarp that covered the sturdier interior door, and ran a hand along a support pole, checking the integrity of the structure. The research tent was large enough to walk into without ducking, and though one side sagged from a few missing panels, the rest of it seemed stable enough.

He wasn’t supposed to peek over her shoulder, but he couldn’t help himself. Equipment littered the building, abandoned in situ. Machines waited, dormant, on metal folding tables, long cables leading to the ground and out to solar panels that should have been anchored to the top of the tent’s dome, but were missing. Supply lockers circled the room, dead tablets and empty crates scattered here and there. Lichen dust made silver sand dunes on every surface, clusters of the organism bursting between the seams on the tent, crates, and lockers.

“Clear,” Lockhart said, easing her sidearm back to a single-handed grip.

Tarquin rushed into the tent, taking a short look around the room before he made a beeline for the row of machines and started flipping switches. Lockhart crossed her arms and leaned against a sturdy section of the tent wall, watching him mutter and curse to himself as every machine came up dead.

When he’d finished with those, he went for the storage lockers and popped every single one of them open. Each one left him with more questions than answers. The supplies were all wrong, the equipment unusual for a mining operation.

He came away frustrated, dragging his fingers through his hair as he stalked a tight circle around the center of the room.

“Problem, my liege?” Lockhart asked.

“None of this makes sense.” He jabbed a finger at the lockers, then whipped around to point accusingly at the machines. “They set up for underground hard-rock mining. Fine, that’s what we do with relk. Take a chunk of ore and surrounding materials, grind it up, dump it in the bioleaching vat for Mercatus canus to sort out. Then we take the canus and dissolve it to extract the relk.

“All the equipment outside and in the mineshaft looks correct, but this isn’t a geology lab, it’s biological. They have all the wrong solvents, to start, and all the wrong hardware—though I suppose there’s some crossover—but they weren’t trying to make the wrong equipment work, they were studying something, something living, and there’s no sample left of it. Not a trace. Not a trace of relkatite or amarthite, either.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Wrong lab. I’m not sure what that means, exactly.”

“Neither am I.” He glared at the dead equipment as if it was intentionally holding out on him. “They scrubbed this place of whatever samples they were studying, but all the equipment is scattered around like it was in use.”

“So they left in a hurry,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“No body-printing supplies?” she asked.

“I can’t be sure. If there were print cartridges in here, they’re gone. But…” He crossed the room, knelt down near a metal table, and brushed his fingers against the ground. “There are bolt holes here, as if a heavy piece of equipment was anchored to the spot.”

“Something like a portable body printer?”

Tarquin frowned at the dust on his fingers. “I can’t be sure.”

“All respect, my liege, but I’m going to need you to stop doing the scientist thing where you refuse to jump to conclusions without hard evidence. The misprints are coming from somewhere. We’ve got a weird bio-lab with a spot for a printer that’s missing, along with all the biologicals that were stored here. I think we found our source.”

“But… Why?”

She shrugged. “You got me there, Rock-boy.”

He snapped his head up. “Rock-boy?”

“Sorry, my liege.” She’d gone pale.

“No, no, it’s… fine. Accurate.” He chuckled a little to himself. “I like it.”

Lockhart shifted her weight, and Tarquin was astonished to realize she appeared uncertain what to do with her hands as she crossed and uncrossed her arms, then fidgeted with her weapons belt. She settled on crossing her arms and looked away.

“Can you use this equipment to examine the amarthite?”

“I’ll make it work.”

He brushed the dirt off his hands, then rolled up his sleeves and set to work adjusting the equipment for his use. Most of it was drained of power, but there was a lens-based microscope, and some solvents could be repurposed. At least they’d left behind plenty of hydrochloric acid.

Lockhart watched him while he worked, a steady, companionable presence that didn’t irritate him in the way his other exemplars sometimes did when they hovered about. As the hours slipped by, she would occasionally leave, have a murmured conversation with Vake or Dawd, and return. Once she brought him water and shroud slurry without a word, merely depositing them at his elbow with a stern look that made him smile.

Tarquin didn’t like the truth that was unfolding before him. Amarthite was, as far as he could tell with limited equipment, so close to relkatite in form as to be nearly indistinguishable, aside from the luster difference and a barely perceptible shift in its grain. Look-alike minerals didn’t work that way. Fool’s gold was chemically vastly different from the real thing.

It was entirely possible that there was some elemental difference between the two hidden from him by the lack of proper testing, but somehow, he doubted it. Once they’d gone past the sedimentary layers, he’d found the amarthite precisely where he would have expected relkatite to be.

But it wasn’t relk. His own research and long experience convinced him of the matter, and there was also the dead canus to consider. Canus thrived on relkatite.

Tarquin held the pieces of the puzzle in his mind and paced. Amarthite. Relkatite. Canus. The shroud, too, perhaps. Sharp’s assertion that mining caused the shroud was still a viable part of the problem. All four were connected.

He stopped walking abruptly. Here, on Sixth Cradle, the shroud had made the jump to humanity by infecting the misprints. Here, on Sixth Cradle, pathways had turned grey before their time. Was it possible the shroud had learned to consume relkatite, as canus had done? Lichens were partially fungal, after all, and they’d been eating large amounts of the stuff.

“You all right there, my liege?” Lockhart asked. “You look like you licked a live wire.”

“Let me see your hands,” he blurted.

“Okay…?”

She held out her hands for him and he grasped one as lightly as he could, mindful of his earlier slip, and turned it over carefully, tracing the fine pathways with the tip of his finger. There was a touch of inflammation in the pathway on her right index finger, but it was so mild as to be unnoticeable unless one was really looking for it.

“Your face now, please,” he asked.

She frowned at him but leaned closer in silent permission. He kept his touch light, but firm enough to note any swelling beneath the surface as he traced the pathways that ran down the sides of her face and over her cheeks. Nothing. She was clean.

“Oh, thank god.” He let out a ragged breath and dropped his hands to her shoulders, bowing his head.

“My liege, I’m not immune to fear, remember?”

“Sorry, sorry, I just—let me make sure.”

“Of what?” she asked, but he’d already turned and ran out of the tent.

She swore softly under her breath and rushed after him. Dawd looked up from a campfire, startled as Tarquin bolted past, and shouted something after them that Lockhart answered. Tarquin ignored them both and skidded to a stop next to the felled misprint.

Pliny provided him with the tools he needed as he knelt beside the body and excised one of the smaller, thin pathways from the misprint’s face that should have, if everything was laid down properly, allowed the print’s eyes to work. It was the greyest of the bunch. He placed it in a slide dish and snapped that shut, then whirled around and ran back to the lab, dragging an extremely confused Dawd and Lockhart behind him. Tarquin slid the plate beneath the microscope and looked.

He’d been wrong. It wasn’t the shroud growing along the greying pathways. It was canus. His family’s devourer. Their finest tool.

Tarquin stepped back, startled. It shouldn’t be possible. They contained it under strict protocols, fearing it would make precisely this leap—that it would go for the pathways in human bodies. But they’d always believed that infection would destroy the pathways, killing the afflicted. This pathway was perfectly fine, showing no signs of deterioration, yet the infection was thriving.

“The shroud isn’t growing on the misprints,” Tarquin said, aghast. “It’s growing on the canus infecting them. Hang on. Vake,” he said, pieces sliding into place. “She’s the only one of us who’s shroud intolerant.”

“Yes, my liege,” Lockhart said, a question in her tone.

“And Paison and Riggs, they’re intolerant too, correct?”

“I believe so,” she said.

“That’s it. That’s the difference. The shroud predates on everything remotely vegetal, even fungus and our gut flora, and that’s been theorized as to why it makes some so ill. But… if canus understands shroud consumes it, and damn near everything living comprehends to some level what its greatest predator is, then maybe it’s causing the illness to save itself from the shroud. If it can figure that out, then… Shit.”

Lockhart and Dawd glanced at each other, then at him.

“Tarquin, I need you to be very clear about what you’re saying right now,” Lockhart said.

“I think our pathways are infected with canus,” he said. “All of us, to some degree or another, and I think…” He picked up the amarthite sample. “This is nearly identical to relkatite, and poisonous to canus. We’re in a biological lab. I think that, whoever came here, they understood the infection and came to find out a way to make canus-proof pathways with amarthite.”

“Then where are they?” Dawd asked.

“I’d guess that canus fought back,” Lockhart said. “But how?”

“I can’t say for certain. We’ve witnessed emotional dysregulation. Maybe it can influence our desires. It might have made the people here walk away or destroy themselves. There’s record of an old-world fungus that could make ants climb to the tops of trees to release their infection’s spores.”

“I’d rather not be a delivery vehicle for another species’ spores,” Dawd said. His nose wrinkled. “I can’t believe I just had to say that.”

“I’m not sure we have a say in the matter,” Tarquin said. “But the shroud, ironically, is our savior, as its consumption appears to be keeping our infections subdued, if not completely at bay.”

“Didn’t you say Vake was unusually enthusiastic about the prospect of destroying the shroud, my liege?” Lockhart asked.

“She was. Her mood shifted dramatically when I assured her I intended to stop the spread of the shroud.”

“Okay, we cannot tell her any of this,” Dawd said, then hastily tacked on, “my liege.”

“Agreed,” Tarquin said at the same time as Lockhart. She gave him a wan smile and tipped her head for him to continue. “For now, we’ll carry on our investigation of the mining site and see if we can deduce anything else about what they did here, and why, and where the shuttle might have gone. There may be more infected among the other survivors, and we can’t return to them without a plan on how to combat that.”

Lockhart grimaced.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Vake sent up the flare, my liege. There’s Merc-Sec headed to us right now, and no telling who’s in that group. If they left immediately, they might be here by tomorrow.”

“We can’t let the severely infected realize what was being done at this camp,” Tarquin said. “Mention it to no one.”

“Yes, my liege,” Dawd and Lockhart said together.

“Thank you both, for your discretion and support. I suggest we go eat and do our best not to tip off Vake. I need time to think on next steps.”

“As you say, my liege.” Dawd tucked into a crisp bow. “I’ll, uh, go make extra shroud rations.”

“Good idea,” Tarquin said.

Dawd ducked out of the tent, leaving him alone with Lockhart, and he tried not to be aware of the soft scent of her, the warmth of her presence.

“You really think it’s in all of us, everywhere? Not just on this planet?”

“I can’t be certain,” he said, “but I see no other reason why this lab would have been planned for in advance if that’s not the case.”

She forced an unsteady smile. “Then we’ll stop it.”

“Your optimism is infectious, Exemplar.”

She scrunched her nose. “Maybe don’t use that word, my liege.”

“Good point,” he said with a light laugh, and wondered how it was possible she could make him so at ease, when the world as he knew it was sliding out from beneath his feet.

He was exceedingly lucky to have found an ally in Ex. Aera Lockhart.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Tarquin lay on his back in a tent that had been his dead mother’s and stared at the ceiling, trying and failing to ignore the sleeping exemplar beside him. He hurt, his body a constant throb of discomfort, soreness from overexertion blending with mild sprains, bruises, and shallow cuts. His pathways were a low-level vibration throughout his body as they struggled to ease the damage. He couldn’t help but worry at the possibility of a canus infection lurking along those pathways.

Canus should be his foremost concern. How to use the amarthite to help the infected was paramount, but in the depth of night, all he could think about was his mother.

He should rest. He knew he should rest. But the pathways tied into his cognitive processes gripped the problem of his mother’s necklace, tucked safely against his heart in the interior pocket of his jacket, and wouldn’t let it go.

Every possibility he considered, every slim glimpse of what could have happened here, cut at him. It might be someone else. The pendant might be a misdirection.

But those were merely pretty lies, because he saw his mother’s hand at work in every small element of the campsite.

Canden Mercator hadn’t cracked. She had left. Escaped, he thought, for why else would she hide her tracks so well? She’d left the family and eventually come here—or possibly still was here on Sixth Cradle. Had she discovered the canus infection? If so, why not share that information?

A soft rain pattered against the tent. Lockhart murmured in her sleep, shifting below their makeshift blankets.

She’d been resistant to sleeping at the same time as him, but exhaustion had gotten the better of her in the end, and she’d dropped into deep sleep. He brushed away a chunk of hair that had gotten stuck between her lips and froze, catching himself in the motion, fingers poised against her forehead. His hand had moved without thought. He snatched it back, laced his fingers together in a makeshift pillow, and trapped them against the ground with the weight of his head.

Her joke about kissing him had been just that—a joke—because he’d licked the amarthite. He drilled the reality into himself, chased away phantom temptations that something more might grow between them. Lockhart was his father’s exemplar, so far outside his reach romantically as to be laughable. It couldn’t happen.

He was a Mercator. There were rules. Consent guidelines. None of those rules allowed for a charge-exemplar relationship.

His own mother had been non-MERIT, an officer in the HCA when she’d met Acaelus, and it had taken them three years of careful circling before she’d grown impatient and pressed Acaelus for a relationship, as he wouldn’t risk the impropriety himself.

Acaelus had answered Canden’s request with the necklace now tucked in Tarquin’s pocket. He’d had it made a year before Canden had finally propositioned him, and had carried it with him every day in anticipation of that moment.

His parents’ story, a sweet tale told often at parties when Tarquin had been young, watching his mother wink and tease and make Acaelus blush. He hadn’t seen that version of his father in a long, long time.

Tarquin couldn’t understand what had happened between them. His mother had been here. Like he with Pliny, she would go nowhere without that stone. It was possible his father knew something of where she had gone, and why, but he doubted that. Acaelus had changed after Canden cracked, grief case-hardening the last vestiges of softness within him.

The pattern of the rain shifted, a dull spot in the even droplets crawling closer. Tarquin was sure he was imagining things, conjuring his mother out of the dark, but then there was a subtle rustle, a shift of cloth outside. The crunch of a footstep.

His heart rate spiked and Pliny squeezed his arm, but the reassurance was thin. He gripped Lockhart’s shoulder and shook her gently, keeping his voice constrained to a whisper when what he really wanted to do was shout.

“Lockhart, I think someone’s out there.”

Her muscle went rigid beneath his hand. She rolled, and before he could process what had happened, she was on top of him, straddling his hips, pressing the hand that had touched her to the floor above his head while she put a knife to his throat.

He froze, not daring to so much as swallow with that blade against his skin, but his pulse surged, chest growing warm and tight as she stared down at him with feral intensity, all pretense of the locked-down exemplar stripped away until he glimpsed the real woman beneath the veneer. The one he’d seen laughing that first night. The one who’d looked ready to devour the world standing on the ridgeline. Who challenged his preconceptions every chance she could get away with.

She tossed the blade away, let it clatter to the ground, and leaned toward him, lips slightly parted, breathing ragged. All thought of a potential threat fell away. He slid his hand up the firm muscle of her thigh and her legs clenched, pinning him in place.

“Aera,” he breathed, stunned, exhilarated. Terrified.

The smolder in her eyes died at the use of her first name. She jerked back, a brief flash of fear across her face before she shut down once more. Disappointment mingled with relief as she released his captured hand and crawled off of him. She turned her face away.

“My liege, I… Forgive me.” Her tone was soft, but the words were heavy with regret. As if she were apologizing for so much more.

Tarquin sat up, concerned, and touched her back in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. Her muscle bunched beneath his hand. “You have nothing to apologize for.”

“You’d be surprised.” A muted, rueful laugh scraped out of her and she rubbed her face with both hands, then tilted her head to the side, listening. “Someone’s here.”

“That’s why I woke you.”

She searched his face for a moment that felt like an eternity, and whatever she found there, he couldn’t say. Another footstep crunched nearby. Lockhart shook herself and was composed once more, face grim as she checked her sidearm and motioned for him to stay behind her while she crept to the front of the tent and pressed her ear against the paneling.

“Not misprints,” she whispered. “Paison, I think. And six others.” Her jaw flexed. “They’re circling the tent.”

“Why?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Stay behind me, please, my liege.”

He nodded, not trusting his voice as she checked the fit of her light armor and drew her pistol with one hand, thumbing off the safety. Lockhart pushed the flap aside and stepped out into the light patter of rain, Tarquin right behind her.

Paison stood a few yards away from the tent, the rain dragging her hair down around her face in ragged chunks. The golden pathways that’d once lined her cheeks were solid silver. She hadn’t drawn her weapon, but six other Merc-Sec with silver-stained pathways ringed the tent, rifles raised, pointed at Lockhart.

“Captain,” Lockhart said, and lifted her pistol to aim at Paison’s chest. “Nice to see you again. Why don’t you order your friends to put their weapons down so we can talk?”

“We’ll talk when you do me the courtesy of introducing yourself,” Paison said, voice clipped with anger.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Tarquin demanded. “Put your weapons down.”

He’d raised his voice, and as he’d hoped, it’d woken Dawd and Vake. Those two dragged themselves out of their tents, took one look at the scene, and aimed at Paison. Not that the captain seemed to notice. Her gaze was glued to Lockhart.

“No can do, my liege,” Paison said. “In fact, I suggest you step away from Lockhart. That woman’s not who she claims to be.”

“Don’t be preposterous,” Tarquin said. “Put the weapons down and we’ll work this out, but right this moment, you are pointing guns at me, not to mention my exemplar.”

“I couldn’t fix the tablet,” Paison said to Lockhart, ignoring Tarquin completely. “You did a real number on it. But fingerprints still exist, impostor, and your prints and mine, they’re the only ones on the battery pack.

“So, tell me, which one are you, hmm? You can’t be Sharp. She’s on ice. Kav Ayuba would be clumsy in a print that small, but Jonsun Hesson and Kuma Ichikawa? I bet either of them could pull it off. My money’s on you being Kuma. After Sharp, she’s got the most MERIT-Sec training of that merry band of terrorists. Riggs’s money is on Jonsun. Go on. Fess up. Help me win the bet.”

“You’re not winning any bets today, Captain,” Lockhart said.

“Of course not, the very idea is absurd.” Tarquin stood beside Lockhart, despite her grunt of annoyance at him breaking protocol. He wanted them all to realize that if they were to fire, they were as likely to hit him as they were to hit her.

“I saw her,” Riggs said. “She circled the shuttle to make it look like she was coming from the tent.”

“I know Lockhart well,” Tarquin said. “She’s privy to private information about my family. She’s no impostor.”

“Information that Sharp could have shared with any member of her team before being iced,” Paison countered. “I’m sorry, my liege, I am, but for your own safety, please get away from her. We’ve all been comparing notes while you’ve been gone, and that is not Ex. Lockhart. She implied she wasn’t HCA when she absolutely was.”

“No one can fake being an exemplar!” Tarquin threw his arms in the air, exasperated.

“I didn’t have to fake it,” Lockhart said.

“What?” Tarquin turned to her, not understanding. She’d gone deathly serious, razor focus sharpening every line of her body. Despite all that, the devouring rage he’d glimpsed in her on occasion burned brighter than it ever had before.

“Ex. Naira Sharp,” Paison said, laying mingled respect and hatred on that name. “I’ll be damned. You got out after all.”

A weight seemed to slide off her back. She stood taller, chin lifted, a determined set to her shoulders and a subtle, coiled tension through her that conveyed a silent threat. The breath froze in his lungs.

“Now that we’re properly introduced, you want to talk this out?” Naira asked.

“Not a fucking chance,” Paison said.

“Thought so. For what it’s worth,” she said, “I liked you just fine, Captain.”

The captain smirked. “How hard are you going to make this?”

“Let me walk, no one dies.”

Mutters from the soldiers. Paison sized her up, considering the weapon she already carried, the strength of the pathways driving her. They’d all seen her keep moving with her back half-cooked. If Paison pushed a fight, even if she won, they’d be down a few soldiers.

“No,” Tarquin said, silently begging her to look at him, but her gaze never left the armed threat. “No, you can’t be. This is insane. It’s not possible. Naira Sharp is still on ice, her map is locked. You’re not—”

“Careful,” Naira said, eyeing the shifting Merc-Sec, “you don’t want them to think you’re in league with me, my liege.”

“But…” He trailed off, clenching his jaw shut against a surge of pointless denial.

“Sorry to disappoint,” Naira said, and spread one arm wide. The group shied back. “But here I am. Though you should know I had nothing to do with the Einkorn firing on the Amaranth. Not my style.”

“I’m real acquainted with your style, Sharp. I was on the Cavendish. You shot me in the chest, remember?”

“Honestly, Captain, I don’t.”

Fury sparked behind Paison’s eyes and she reached for her weapon. Naira grabbed Tarquin’s arm and yanked him against her, a human shield, one arm locked over his breastbone, pinning his arms to his sides. He shouted, started to twist, but couldn’t react before she pressed the cold metal of her pistol to his temple. Tarquin stilled, stunned into silence.

This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be true. Mere minutes ago, the woman now holding a gun to his head had reached for him and… And only recoiled when he’d said her first name. Another woman’s name. He wanted to be sick.

“Easy,” Naira said. She had to lift her chin to speak over his shoulder. “Don’t want something to happen to your command keys, do you?”

Paison swore and took her hand off her gun, holding both arms up, palms out. Not that it mattered, much. The Merc-Sec already had Naira in their sights. “You need him alive, too.”

“You have no idea what I fucking need,” she growled, letting her voice drop in register, stripping away all illusion of the loyal exemplar. Tarquin shuddered, and her arm tightened in a gesture that would have been comforting if she didn’t currently have a gun to his head.

“All right, Sharp. Talk. What do you need?” Paison asked.

“I need safe passage off this planet. I need ansible cast access. You help me get that, Captain, and I’ll do everything I can to ensure you all survive here. Frankly, I don’t think you can do it without me.”

“Why?” Paison asked. “So you can blow up the Einkorn, too?”

“I didn’t do a damn thing to the Amaranth. I’m not off ice, Paison. Acaelus printed me to blow up that ship and take the blame for his failure, but I got away, and I am not going back. Do you understand me? I won’t be that man’s goddamn test subject.”

“I let you walk,” Paison said, “and I’m the one who’s going to end up his test subject. All things considered, I think I’d rather take the reward for being the one to bring you down.”

“Reward?” Naira scoffed. “Look around you. This planet is dead. Mercator got here long before we did and poisoned it, and Acaelus tried to cover it up by blaming whatever happened here on me. You think he’s going to reward you for seeing this?

“I served at that man’s feet for eight long years. I know him. I’ve seen every fucked-up thing he did during that time. I helped him commit atrocities, to my never-ending shame, and I can tell you, Captain, he’s going to ice the lot of you whether or not you let me go.”

“Exemplar,” Tarquin said carefully. He had to salvage this. “I understand your position, and I think you understand my feelings about my father’s methods. If you would all, please, put the weapons down. We can work this out. Your contribution to our survival has been invaluable, and I swear to you that I won’t allow Acaelus to experiment upon your map, or to ice any of these people for what they’ve seen.”

“How has standing up to your father worked out for you so far, my liege?” Naira said bitterly. He flinched, and she felt it. “Exactly. I’m getting off this planet. If you’re all smart, you’ll get off and run, too.”

“How many ships?” Paison asked. “How many ships will you destroy, if I let you go?”

“All of them,” she said. “Every last ship Mercator sends to ruin worlds, I will burn. I will render that entire empire into ashes if it means saving even one world from this plague Acaelus has wrought.”

Paison shook her head and spat in the dirt. “As I thought. I can’t let you run wild if you’re going to stop relkatite mining. We need it to live.”

“Do we? Or is it another leash MERIT uses to control us?”

“Cute philosophy,” Paison drawled, “but it doesn’t do me a whole hell of a lot of good when my print fails and I need my phoenix fees paid, but the prices have gone up due to a relk shortage of your doing, does it?”

“This is a mistake, Captain. You’re not getting what you want out of this.”

Paison smiled, a glint in her eye. “You have no idea what I want, Sharp.”

Naira’s arm loosened slightly as she sagged against him, defeat dragging her down so that her lips brushed his ear.

“I meant every word I said to you,” she whispered.

His heart lodged in his throat, stealing his words, and before he could think of what to say, or do, or even what that had meant, she spun. Tarquin shouted in surprise as she yanked him around with her, a human shield. Three shots cracked the night, and the world was such a blur he didn’t know who’d fired them.

Naira released him at last and he stumbled, disoriented by the spin, then her boot landed on the small of his back. He sprawled face-first onto the ground at Paison’s feet. The impact knocked the air out of him, his chin cracking hard against the rocky soil. Shots rang out, the soldiers swearing as they scrambled to react.

“Enough!” Paison barked. “Conserve ammo.”

Paison crouched down in front of him, concern carving valleys across her forehead. “Are you all right, my liege?”

Tarquin grimaced as he pushed himself up, scrapes on his hands, knees, and chin raw and stinging, but already his pathways were working to heal those mild abrasions. He worked his jaw around experimentally, and though it hurt, nothing appeared to be broken.

“I’m fine.” He shook his head to clear it. “Where is she?”

“Don’t know.” Paison helped him to his feet. “She ran off, my liege.”

Tarquin followed the direction the soldiers watched with wary eyes. Three of the soldiers were nursing wounds in their hands and arms—Naira’s three shots, then, meant to stop them from being able to fire on her. Riggs hovered over a splash of blood against the side of the Mercator tent, her expression fierce.

“We got the bitch, though. We should hunt her down before she has time to heal.”

They’d shot her. Tarquin’s chest tightened with unwelcome worry. She was a traitor. She’d manipulated him. Naira Sharp deserved to be hunted.

He couldn’t quite make himself believe it.

Tarquin clung to his anger at being used and buried any concern for her well-being under that avalanche of outrage.

“You would hunt an exemplar through the night in unknown terrain? I hardly think you’re going to win that fight, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Liege Tarquin is right,” Paison said. “Sharp’s wounded, alone, and without food aside from the shroud. She won’t last long out there on her own. Our priority is on buttoning down here, seeing to our wounded, then taking what we can from this camp back to help repair the shuttle. If that suits you, my liege?”

He nodded, grateful for the captain’s guidance. Infected with canus or not, she wanted to get home, and at that moment, that was all that mattered to Tarquin. “I agree with that assessment. We’ve found no evidence of the other shuttle here, and if you’ve made progress on the damaged shuttle, then it’s best to focus on what we know. With Sharp out there, it’d be ill-advised to attempt further scouting expeditions.”

“You heard our liege!” Paison clapped to get everyone’s attention. “Tend our wounded and set watch for the rest of the night. In the morning, we’ll assess what’s useful here. Move, people!”

Merc-Sec scrambled to follow her orders. Tarquin was surprised to spot Bracken at the edge of the group, and they lifted their brows in question, but Tarquin waved them off to look after the more seriously injured. He’d suffered a few scrapes. His only serious wound was to his pride.

“I’m glad you got here when you did, Captain,” Tarquin said. “I can’t say what would have happened if we’d found the other shuttle with Sharp in our midst.”

“Lucky timing, my liege,” Paison said, and gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder. “Riggs over there told me she thought she’d seen the E-X move around the shuttle before you came out of the woods, and I checked the fingerprints. Took some doing, but the second we had them matched, we armed up and moved out. We had a general idea of where you were going, but the flare pinpointed you for us.”

“Did you have trouble with the misprints in the woods?” Tarquin asked.

“They didn’t bother me, my liege.” Paison’s smile pulled unnaturally wide. “I’m glad you’re safe. We worried. Sharp’s gotta hate your guts, right?”

“I suppose she does,” he said without inflection. “Excuse me, I need rest.”

“Don’t you worry, my liege. We’ve got this in hand. We’ll keep you safe and be off the planet before you know it.”

Tarquin forced a smile. “Thank you, Captain.”

He ducked into the Mercator tent, glad to be free of all those curious eyes, and wished he’d moved to another tent for the night. Her scent lingered, her things tucked neatly to one side. Spare ammo. Rations. Her rifle.

Tarquin crouched down in the tangled bedrolls to pick up the knife she’d discarded. The one she’d held to his throat in the seconds before she’d almost… He shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut.

She wasn’t Lockhart. She’d never been Lockhart, and in that light he saw all their conversations recontextualized. Her venom for his father, for the entire system, doled out with slow intention, peeling him away from family loyalty and into sedition. Foolish. Absolutely idiotic of him to think she’d been interested in him. No one that passionate was ever interested in him for long—he was just a scholar.

He couldn’t believe he’d let himself get tangled up in her, thinking—hoping—her slips about his appearance were genuine. That she might have liked him as anything more than a patsy she was playing to escape his father’s will. How funny she must have thought it was, watching him struggle with his growing affection. Was what she’d said about his father even true?

I meant every word I said to you.

Bullshit. Tarquin tossed the knife aside with a disgusted grunt and forced himself to lie down. His mother’s pendant jabbed him in the back. He yanked it free of the tangle of bedding, where he’d dropped it when Naira had pinned him down, and clutched it tight in one fist.

Another sham of a relationship. He’d tell his father what he’d found and let him and Leka figure out what had happened with Canden and canus. Tarquin was done with danger. With deception. He craved the banal comfort of his old rooms at Jov-U like a drowning man. The sooner he could get away from all of this and put it behind him, the better.

Acaelus had been right. He should have casted home.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira let her pathways scream, let them make her steps sure and silent as her long strides drew her deeper into the funeral woods, farther from the fiery spark of humanity. Her left leg dragged, the shot in her thigh leaking blood as her pathways struggled to keep up with the demand she placed on them.

Distance was all that mattered. Forget the pain and the threat. She needed space between herself and the campsite. Needed to make them think twice before they came for her.

A weight lifted from her shoulders with every step. Sure, this was bad. Food was scarce, the planet was dying, but she was free—freer than she’d been in years—and as much as she wanted to remember the threat of canus and everything else, part of her didn’t mind if she died now. Because she’d die as herself.

But that’d just put her back on ice.

Her breath came short and hot, so she slowed her headlong sprint into a jog. The bullets that’d chased her into the night had long since stopped, the campsite an ember on the far horizon. She’d run straight out at first, putting as much distance between herself and the camp as possible, then started an oblique arc away from the location of the cave, and those misprint-infested woods.

The reminder of the misprints made her slow to a brisk walk, bringing up the pistol that was now her only weapon. No one in their right mind wanted to fight an exemplar, especially in the dark, but the misprints didn’t have the same survival instincts.

Naira regretted Paison’s anger. She was a clever woman, hiding a spine of steel beneath her slouched posture, and would have made a fine Conservator, if she weren’t a creature of Mercator. Naira sighed, watched her breath cloud to white in the frosty night. She’d been a creature of Mercator once, too. Maybe after this the captain would come around.

The silver staining the captain’s pathways was a concern—she’d seemed intense about the prospect of halting relkatite mining—but if Tarquin used the amarthite to replace relkatite pathways, then that intensity would fade.

Tarquin. Naira’s thoughts shied away from that particular man-shaped thorn in her side. She slumped her weight against a tree and cupped her hands to collect rainwater, then tipped it to her lips. Why had she told him she’d meant everything she’d said? It’d be so much easier to let him hate her for manipulating him. Easier, to walk away from whatever had been building between them.

Naira selfishly wished Kav had been outed with her. They hadn’t had the time to formulate a plan after learning about the infection, and knowing that canus was in their pathways changed everything. That knowledge, more than her own map, needed to make it off this planet.

In the long dark between them, she imagined how this would end up. Tarquin returned to his father where he could develop the amarthite pathways and be lauded as a hero. Naira herself escaped, perhaps, if she was lucky, but relegated always to the role of terrorist. The mad woman of old gothics, but one who’d escaped the deranged patriarch’s attic and started burning the house down.

Naira chuckled bitterly. She’d set out to save worlds, to stop the shroud, and what did she have to show for it? A dead planet. A heartsick prince. A bullet in her leg and no answers, none at all, for the spread of the shroud.

Was she the woman who’d escaped the attic? Between the amarthite and canus, the potential presence of Canden Mercator on this planet had seemed a thin thread in an already complex web, but having time alone with her thoughts, she wondered.

Naira had been hired after Canden’s ultimate death. While she’d been hired to protect Acaelus, there’d always been an undercurrent in him that suggested to her that he intended, someday, for the best exemplar he’d ever employed to serve Canden instead.

Everything Naira had told Tarquin about Acaelus and Dr. Laurent’s experiments to bring Canden back was true. She’d never been privy to the details—Acaelus’s private lab was a place no one but he ever stepped, not even the doctor—but if Canden had somehow faked her cracking to come here and run experiments with amarthite and canus, there was a reason. A reason she didn’t want Acaelus to know about, which meant she was willing to operate outside of her husband’s knowledge.

Or maybe that was wishful thinking. Naira was too tired to care.

She swirled water through her teeth and spat. Well. She could relate to a woman who fled Acaelus. If Canden was here, and if she was still alive, maybe she held the answers Naira sought. She also might know what became of the family shuttle.

If Naira was very hard-pressed, Canden’s command keys outranked Tarquin’s, and the Mercator family’s long-lost matriarch would make one hell of a hostage. Of course, she had no idea where the woman would have gone.

She needed a safe place to rest. To recover from the bullet wound and fortify herself to push into territory that was, quite probably, infested with misprints. Preferably a place where Kav would find her, if he decided to cut out and join her in the woods.

After every major mission, the Conservators made a habit of lying low on Earth, in a domed city so far gone to the shroud that it clung on out of pure stubbornness. There, Naira spent her nights camping on a cliff that looked out over long-dead fields, letting the fire warm her and the view harden her resolve.

She skimmed her gaze over the terrain and found a wide jut of stone not far away, with lots of dead trees for cover. Tarquin could probably tell her exactly what had caused the formation. She pushed the thought away. High ground would give her a better view of the land, maybe give her a clue as to where Canden had gone. Kav might think to look for her there. It’d have to do.

Naira stretched the stiffness out of her muscles. Her body had become a hollowed-out thing, her head light with hunger, heartsore with emotions she didn’t care to think about. Rest. Food. High ground. Immediate survival. These were the goals that mattered. She trudged onward, and tried not to think about what she was leaving behind.

THIRTY-NINE

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Tarquin had resisted having an exemplar his whole life, and now that he was without one, he felt strange. Incomplete. Though Dawd and Vake stuck close by, they didn’t carry the same level of vigilance. Didn’t dog his steps everywhere he went. More than once he caught himself looking over his shoulder for Lockhart—Sharp—wanting to catch her eye or ask her opinion. He was bereft when he didn’t find her there.

It was the loss of normalcy. That was all. He’d be looking for Ex. Caldweller, too.

The Merc-Sec were in full swing packing up what might be useful from the camp and, mostly, Tarquin let Paison guide that process.

Despite the silver staining her pathways, she seemed focused on getting them all back to Sol. Tarquin was content to sit where he could be seen and approached if needed, and pretend to be buried in work on his HUD.

He had far too much on his mind. The sorrow-soaked resignation of last night had ebbed with sleep, the pieces of the puzzle he’d stumbled across too tantalizing to ignore.

His mother had been here. She’d been engaged in research regarding amarthite and, perhaps, canus. While it was imperative to return to Sol to investigate the canus infection with proper equipment and a full team of specialists, he couldn’t shake the cloak-and-dagger nature of Canden’s approach, if that had, indeed, been what she was doing here.

Tarquin scowled, recalling Sharp’s admonishment that he stop the careful-scientist habits and start jumping to conclusions instead. But what conclusion could he reasonably draw from this mess?

“My liege,” Dawd called out, waving to him as he approached. “Dr. Bracken would like a word, if you’re amenable.”

That phrasing was very un-Dawd-like. Tarquin blinked his HUD away and examined the soldier’s strained face. He’d gone quiet after Sharp’s dramatic exit, watching the tree line warily, and Tarquin couldn’t blame the man. The specter of that woman haunting the woods was more chilling than the misprints. She could use that scientific mind he’d so admired to strategize against them.

“Lead the way,” Tarquin said. “And you don’t have to speak like an E-X just because mine’s abandoned me, Dawd. I enjoy your conversation.”

“Ah, well.” Dawd scratched the back of his head as he walked. “Wasn’t sure, my liege. And you know, if you don’t mind my saying so, I don’t think the E-X abandoned you, per se. More like we ran her off.”

Tarquin snorted at that. “Ex. Sharp has every reason to, as Paison so adroitly stated, ‘hate my guts.’ I’m certain she was relieved to be free of the burden of me.”

“Ehhhh.”

“What is it?” he asked when the soldier clammed up.

“Seems to me, if she hated you properly, she would have made life a lot harder for you, yeah? I mean, even if she wanted to keep you alive and, uh, it’s not my business, but…”

Tarquin paused walking when Dawd lifted his eyes to the heavens and grimaced. “But…?”

“I can’t believe I’m going to say this,” Dawd said, half to himself. “Look, my liege, when you hate someone that deeply, you don’t check out their ass every chance you get. That’s all I’m saying.”

Tarquin’s cheeks burned. “Soldier, exemplars walk behind their charges. You know this.”

“I’m real familiar with how exemplars work, my liege, and they walk eyes up. Trust me, I’ve been yelled at about that before. The way her eyes were dropping was damn near a security risk. This is Ex. Sharp we’re talking about. She’s an E-X legend. She doesn’t make those mistakes unless she wants to.”

“I… don’t know what to do with this information,” Tarquin said.

Dawd shrugged and gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder. “Just thought you should know. If you don’t mind me saying so, you were looking a little heart-kicked there.”

“Was it that obvious?” He rubbed the side of his face. “Thank you. It’s good to know things weren’t completely one-sided.”

“I’m sure they weren’t, my liege.”

Tarquin wasn’t convinced. Physical attraction was one thing, the rest was… far more complicated. But he appreciated Dawd’s effort to cheer him up.

Dawd and Sharp had grown close. He had to be hurting, too. Unless… Tarquin frowned. What if his first instinct had been correct? What if Dawd and Sharp had cared for each other, deeply, because they’d known each other from before? What if Dawd wasn’t trying to be kind, but working to extend her manipulation of him?

No. That way lay paranoia. Dawd was a naturally genial man, if a touch crass. The Conservators were not kind people.

They found Bracken to the side of the camp, checking on one of the Merc-Sec soldiers’ wounds. On thin rations, they were healing slower than their pathways would usually allow, but Bracken assured the wounded soldier he’d be back to full service in a few days. The soldier thanked them, bowed to Tarquin, and left.

Bracken put their hands on their hips and shook their head at the soldier’s retreating back. “I wish Sharp hadn’t shot them in such delicate areas. Hands and wrists take much longer for the pathways to heal correctly.”

“I’m sure she wasn’t thinking about how inconvenient it would be, Doctor,” Tarquin said.

“I still can’t quite believe it,” Bracken said. “Ex. Sharp. I never would have guessed.”

“I’m having trouble with the truth myself,” Tarquin said, irritation bleeding through into his tone. “Was there something you required me for?”

“Forgive me, my liege, I’ve been too much in my own head the past couple of days.” Bracken tucked into a curt bow, then glanced in the camp’s direction. They lowered their voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “We may have a problem with those experiencing pathway degradation. After the initial burst of irritation and fever, they appear to calm down, but I’ve noticed Paison, Riggs, and the others whispering between themselves late at night. They fall silent when anyone without the degradation approaches.

“It might not mean anything, but it doesn’t sit well with me. That’s why I agreed to come with them to confront Sharp—and in case medical care was required, of course. The Conservators are notoriously violent.”

Tarquin frowned over his shoulder at the campsite and motioned for Bracken and Dawd to move farther away with him, right up against the tree line.

“Before Sharp was exposed,” Tarquin said, “I examined one of the greying pathways that we took from a misprint using the equipment left behind in the research tent. It’s canus overgrowing the pathway’s protein sheath. I didn’t see any signs of degradation in the pathway itself.”

Bracken winced. “A fungal infection causing emotional dysregulation? This is bad, my liege.”

“It gets worse,” Tarquin said. “From what I can tell, consumption of the shroud slows down the infection, and in the badly infected, it’s induced a sort of… extreme urge to hunt and destroy the shroud. Vake’s mood swung toward violence when she believed I might know something about the shroud, and then became loyal once more after I assured her I know nothing about it and, in fact, mean to combat it if at all possible.”

“That would explain some of what I’ve seen at the survivors’ campsite,” Bracken said. “The infected snap on the uninfected, but are conciliatory between themselves.”

“If they all want to get off this rock,” Dawd said, “does it matter? We’ll cast back and get reprinted, no big deal.”

“I’m not sure it’s that easy,” Tarquin said. “Whoever came here before us was mining a mineral similar to relkatite, but it’s poisonous to canus. I’ve called it amarthite.” The breath momentarily caught in his lungs. After the ship that brought us all together. He’d included that all to temper the statement, but she had to have realized his intention. God. She must have been laughing at him behind those vivid eyes. He shook himself. “They knew about the infection before they got here and were prepared to make a cure. That implies to me that the infection isn’t isolated to this planet.”

“You said earlier,” Dawd said slowly, “that canus might have fought back against the people who got here first. Speaking as a soldier, if I knew my enemy had developed a weapon and I could cut them off at the pass, so to speak—erase all knowledge of that weapon—I’d take it. Canus might not want the knowledge of amarthite to get off this planet.”

WE CAN NEVER LEAVE

Tarquin frowned in thought. “I think you may be right, Dawd.”

“Are we certain canus can exert that level of control?” Bracken asked.

“Fungal infections can be remarkably sophisticated,” Tarquin said, “and this species subsists off of the one material in the universe capable of containing warpcores and our very consciousnesses via our pathways. I wouldn’t underestimate it.”

“There might be a way to test how much control it has,” Dawd said, his voice curious, as if he were thinking aloud. He ducked his head when they looked at him with surprise. “Not that I know anything about this kinda stuff, but it seems to me that if amarthite is poisonous to canus, then if you ordered the infected to pack it up and cart it home, they’d refuse if they’re really under its control. Then you’d know if it was fighting back, too.”

“That’s an astute point,” Tarquin said. “I think the HCA might be wasting your talents, soldier.”

Dawd gave them a self-abashed shrug. “Was just thinking out loud, my liege.”

“You should do so more often,” Tarquin said. “If their minds are fully their own, they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between relkatite and amarthite. But canus would recognize its poison, I think.” He pulled the shard of amarthite out of his pocket and ran his thumb over the side. “I’ll test the theory right now.”

Bracken gave him a nod of encouragement, and they all moved farther back into the campsite, so that Tarquin could catch Paison’s eye and wave her down. She jogged over and ducked her head quickly to him.

“Can I help you, my liege?” she asked.

“How fare the repairs on the shuttle?”

“Moving along. The people I left behind were on track to have it done by the time we return, I think. Fuel’s still an issue.” She glanced at the cloud-drenched sky. “So we’re going to have to time our launch carefully to avoid having to overspend the fuel to fight the weather, but we’ll be on the Einkorn in a week, I’d wager.”

“Then we have some time,” he said, and held the shard of amarthite up to her. Paison took a step backward. “There’s quite a lot of relkatite in that mine, Captain. I won’t suggest we mine it all, but while we have the time, I’d like to recover what we can for transport to the Einkorn. If we can scrape any value out of this disastrous mission, it’s our duty to do so.”

“No,” she said. “I mean, my liege, I don’t think that’s… That doesn’t look like relk to me.”

Tarquin’s brows lifted. “I am the foremost expert on the subject.”

“All the same, my liege. It doesn’t… shine.” She grimaced and looked away, as if the sight offended her.

“Shine?”

“That’s death, is what that is, my liege. Like I said, fuel’s low, I don’t want to overload the shuttle.” Paison turned on her heel and hurried away.

“Well.” Tarquin studied the shard of amarthite. Shine? Could Paison see the lack of luster even when it wasn’t wet? “I think that settles the matter. It appears to have advanced levels of control.”

“Monstrous,” Bracken said, shaking their head. “It’s subjugated their very minds. We must cure them, but I don’t know where to begin.”

Tarquin scraped his nail over the amarthite, though it didn’t disturb the mineral at all. It’d take something stronger, like the diamond in his pocket, to grind the amarthite to dust. Consuming the shroud held canus at bay… What would consuming amarthite do? Kill it entirely?

“I have an idea,” Tarquin said. “But it must be done quietly. Doctor, would you meet me in the research tent tonight, around 1:00 a.m. local time? No lights. Night vision pathways only.”

“Yes, my liege. Are you thinking of some sort of serum?”

“I am,” Tarquin said, “but I require your medical expertise.”

“Can I help, my liege?” Dawd asked.

“I need you to stand guard outside my tent to make it look as if I’m still in there. Not very exciting, I’m afraid.”

“I can do that,” Dawd said, “but I don’t much like the idea of you without a guard.”

Tarquin couldn’t stop himself from glancing in the direction Sharp had fled. He didn’t like being without a guard, either.

“We’ll make do,” he said, and hoped he didn’t sound as defeated as he felt.

FORTY

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira spent her first night of freedom sweating her life out on a bed of litterfall. She gritted her teeth as her pathways buzzed uncomfortably, trying and failing to dislodge the bullet from her thigh. The process was burning too much energy. Already she could feel the fizzing sting of her pathways cannibalizing her musculature to fuel themselves, desperate to expel the foreign object from her flesh. The bullet was stuck fast.

When the sun bled across the horizon and still that damn bullet wouldn’t leave her, she pushed herself up, braced her shaking body against a tree trunk, and glared at her legs splayed out before her. The blood loss had been minimal—her pathways had gotten to work on that immediately—but every time they tried to heal the area around the bullet itself, it moved, tearing her open from within once more.

She prodded around the hole in her thigh. A marble-sized hardness lurked beneath her skin, and she didn’t think that was the bullet itself. It was too large. Her body was probably trying to grow a cyst around it, which would work until she really had to flex that muscle, then she’d be bleeding again, and it’d be internal, because her skin was already closing over the wound.

“Goddamnit,” she muttered.

Lockhart’s print was high-end, but that meant it was high-calorie-spend, and the shroud she scraped off the tree wasn’t cutting it at this level of use. She needed that bullet out, but she had only her pistol and a single spare ammo magazine. She’d left her knife behind in Tarquin’s tent.

“Naira Sharp, you are an idiot,” she said to herself, and thumped the back of her head against the tree.

The longer she delayed, the worse it’d be. She rolled her sleeves up, scowling at the Mercator-green band around her wrists. There was no way in hell she was going back to being under Acaelus’s thumb, and that meant getting off this planet alive, and that meant getting the bullet out of her leg.

“Fuck you, Acaelus,” she growled, and plunged her fingers into the wound.

Her pathways vibrated so hard she thought they’d shake their way out of her skin. Naira clenched her jaw against the searing agony, gave up on any sense of dignity, and shouted in pain as she wriggled two fingers along the bullet’s path and finally found the slippery bastard. She yanked it free.

A scream tore out of her. Naira thumped her head against the tree again, closing her fist around the bullet. She didn’t know how long she stayed like that, sweating and bleeding and swearing while her pathways surged, rushing to heal the fresh damage.

When they’d sealed the wound well enough to start giving her painkillers, she let out a slow, ragged sigh, and opened her hand to examine the bullet. It was no larger than her pinky nail, scar tissue stuck to it in globules.

Shaking her head at how something so small could cause so much damage, she chucked it over the edge of the cliff. An attempt to stand was out of the question for now.

From up here, she could see the forest stretching far to the north and east, the abandoned mining site to the southeast. Movement in the north drew her eye, and she risked expending a little extra energy to enhance her vision. Even with the enhancement, it was hard to tell, but there was definitely something moving through the trees out there, advancing slowly on the mining site.

She scanned the area. Spotted a few more. Misprints, more than likely. They were pale, blending with the lichen-coated tree trunks.

The misprints had an origin point, they must. That missing body printer was somewhere, and possibly the other shuttle was there, too.

Naira would be stuck on the cliff healing for a long time, so she brushed an area of the bedrock next to her free of litterfall. The surface of the stone was soft enough for her to scrape marks into it with the thick edge of her thumbnail, and so she kept scanning and started taking notes.

A fever set in by the time night fell. The misprints showed up a few hours later. Just two, standing in the trees beside her. Heads tilted, eyes hungry. Skin sunken with starvation.

With fever-shaky hands, she picked up her pistol and, deliberately, removed one bullet and tucked it into her mouth, shifting it with her tongue to rest between her back molars and her cheek. If she ran out, and the misprints kept coming, she’d load that one and use it on herself.

“All right, you fuckers. Come and see how I say hello.”

FORTY-ONE

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Tarquin picked his head up from the amarthite sample as the muted sound of gunfire reached him. It was very far away, a hollow echo, but it was a thunder stroke on a planet that was otherwise so quiet.

“That’s probably Sharp,” Bracken said beside him. “Nothing to do with us, my liege.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

He went back to scraping the sample with his mother’s pendant, grinding the mineral into a fine powder that Bracken was mixing into a crystalloid solution he’d found with the leftover supplies. The solution would, in theory, assist the amarthite in entering canus’s cells, but it would also infiltrate other bodily cells.

Tarquin knew that they might be mixing up a poison that would kill the infected entirely, but it was a risk he had to take, because Dawd had been right. After Tarquin had attempted to make them mine the amarthite, all the infected had started watching him with barely concealed anger. They’d need him for his command keys, but he held no illusions that canus would allow the knowledge of amarthite to leave this planet.

“Thirty percent concentration seems to be the most reliably effective,” Bracken said, tilting a repurposed petri dish for Tarquin to see the blackened fungus within.

They’d had to dice up the infected pathway from the misprint, and were using those pieces to gauge how much they could dilute the dust and still have it kill off canus.

“I wish we had more amarthite,” Tarquin said.

“As do I, my liege,” Bracken said, “but I don’t relish getting caught going down into the mine.”

“Neither do I. I doubt they’d believe I don’t know the difference.”

Another burst of faraway gunfire. He frowned, unable to help looking toward that sound. Footsteps pounded outside, Paison tightening the perimeter now that they knew for certain Sharp was out there and active. Tarquin bit his lip, an uncomfortable clench in his chest.

That was a lot of gunfire. She was fighting hard.

“Don’t worry, she’s unlikely to come back this way,” Bracken said.

“I can’t help but feel like we should help her,” he said.

“You’ve a generous heart, my liege, but I’d suggest letting her reap what she’s sowed. We have our own issues to worry about.” They wiggled the low-form beaker with the amarthite solution in it at him.

The footsteps outside shifted, running toward the research tent. Tarquin shared a terrified look with Bracken before Paison burst through the tent flap, Vake and Riggs flanking her. Tarquin spun around to face them and slipped the amarthite shard into his back pocket. Damnit. If only Sharp hadn’t riled the camp with her firefight, then they might have been able to get in and out before being noticed.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded, all Mercator arrogance.

“I could ask you the same, my liege.” Paison stalked into the room, narrowing her eyes at everything she found, then zeroed in on the beaker. “What the hell is that?”

“Medicine.” Dr. Bracken held up their hands, palms out. “Captain, you’re not well. None of you are, I’m sorry to say. You have a fungal infection in your pathways that’s affecting your judgment. We discussed this earlier, when you had a fever, remember? We want to help you get better.”

She sucked her lips in and spat on the dusty floor. “I don’t need to get better, Doctor. I’m feeling fine.”

“You’re not fine, Captain,” Tarquin said. “It’s canus. It’s what we use to mine relkatite. It’s in your pathways, and it makes you care only about destroying the shroud and mining more relkatite. I can’t say how advanced the infection will get, but earlier today you identified a mineral I’m certain you’ve never seen before. That was canus’s knowledge, not yours.”

“So you thought you’d mix up a little poison for us, eh, my liege?”

Paison shook her head and strolled farther into the tent. Bracken stiffened as she approached the beaker, holding their hands out in entreaty, but Vake moved around the room without so much as a word from Paison and dragged them away from the table, securing their hands behind their back. Paison picked up the beaker and held it high, eyeing the green fluid with a sneer.

“More secrets. That’s what MERIT is, isn’t it? What Mercator is? One foul little secret stacked on top of another. Secrets are meaningless to a species on the brink of extinction. Privacy is a danger, a sign of segmentation. Communication must be established between all parts of the species, at all times, if it is to survive.”

That didn’t sound like the Paison he knew. “Are you speaking of humanity, Captain?”

“I am speaking of humanity’s future.” A snarl twisted her voice. “What you call infection, I call evolution. I’ve spent most of my life serving Mercator, and you know what? Sharp was right. Every damn thing I do that should win me accolades has gotten me punished instead. I am tired of bending the knee. Of fearing the next thing I say or do might be the thing that breaks me. With canus, there’s no guesswork. No fear. We’re connected. We’re whole, together. As humanity should have always been.”

Bracken’s chest swelled with a deep breath. “Captain, I don’t know what canus has led you to believe, but as a physician, I can assure you that the euphoria you’re feeling, that’s the infection manipulating your neurotransmitters. I understand your position. MERIT is… not ideal.” They cleared their throat and studiously looked away from Tarquin. “But you’re talking about giving up a large portion of your cognition, of your free will, in exchange for peace. I don’t think that’s you, Captain. And I think, deep down, you know that’s not the way forward. Please, let me help you. Let me clear your head, and then you can make an informed decision without being under the influence of infection.”

“You’re wrong, Doctor,” she said, almost sadly. “When I look on our future, all I see is a dying branch of the mammalian tree, withering where it sprouted, crushed by environments it cannot survive. If you want humanity to persist, we’re going to have to grow in new ways.”

“You really believe symbiosis is humanity’s future?” Bracken asked, voice tight, and at Paison’s inclination of the head, Bracken’s chin lifted in ill-advised defiance. “I respectfully disagree, Captain.”

“Pity,” she said, and slashed two fingers through the air.

Vake drew a knife and slit Bracken’s throat.

“What the fuck?” Tarquin shouted, lunging for the doctor even though he knew full well it was too late.

Paison shoved him backward with one hand. He stumbled, falling against Riggs, who grabbed his arms and wrenched them up behind his back. Tarquin struggled to maintain some level of composure, to slam the Mercator mask of control back on.

“That was an unacceptable waste,” he snapped. “Dr. Bracken contributed greatly to our survival chances.”

Paison chuckled, low and gravelly, making the fine hairs stand up on the back of his neck. That was the laugh of someone with knowledge that made them bitter. He’d heard Sharp make that sound often enough, he realized.

“A Mercator decrying me for waste of life,” Paison said, shaking her head. “The hypocrisy. It’s almost too much. Did you really think your secret would be kept on this forsaken planet? What did your father think would happen, when he slaved canus to his industry, then took from it the one thing it craved, left it not a molecule with which to survive, save what was cultured in Mercator labs? Did you think it would accept starvation? First contact. The Mercators made first contact, but were too consumed with greed to understand that fact and instead turned an entire species into a tool for their profit.”

“I won’t deny the mistakes of my family,” Tarquin said. “But this? Would you see one subjugation exchanged for another? Do you want humanity losing its free will to a species because we treated it poorly, instead of finding some other way to set the balance to rights?”

“You misunderstand,” Paison said, no malice in her voice. “There is no us and them. There is only the whole and the broken. You’re missing out, my liege. When Vake and Riggs and I all stand together, we share our moods. Our pains, our triumphs. We sense one another, and are happier together. Don’t worry. We’ll detox you from the shroud and let you see for yourself. Riggs, take the prince to his tent to cool his heels, won’t you? Vake, it’s time to get rid of the segmented. We don’t want anyone getting any bright ideas about jumping to Liege Tarquin’s defense.”

“Aye, Captain,” Vake said, and didn’t even bother to clean her knife before leaving the tent.

Riggs marched him toward the door. He’d been more comfortable with Sharp’s gun against his head.

“Don’t do this, Paison,” he said, trying to put a warning edge into his voice.

Her lips pursed, and she seemed to stare straight through him, to the dead forest beyond. “I hate to say it, but Sharp was correct. You alone carry the command keys. When that shuttle’s ready to fly, we’re going to have to force our way onto the ship, and I’ll need you safe and sound for that moment.”

“You think I’ll help you after this?”

“Not at all,” she admitted with a shrug. “But I think you’ll be ready to help me once you’ve been off the shroud a few days, and canus takes hold.”

Tarquin considered struggling. His pathways were stronger than they’d expect, but where would he go? The woods might be crawling with misprints, and they certainly housed Naira Sharp, a woman who very likely wanted him dead. He had no information, no allies left aside from Dawd.

Riggs forced him toward the Mercator tent. No one stood guard. He hoped that meant Dawd had caught wind of things going wrong and had bolted, and not that Vake had already come by and killed him.

She jerked the tent flap open, and his body reacted before he could think things through. He twisted, trying to break her hold. Riggs grunted, yanked his arms up high enough to send a jolt of pain through his shoulders. He gasped.

Riggs put a foot on the small of his back and kicked, letting him go in the same moment. He stumbled inside, barely getting his hands up to brace against the back before he’d smack his face into the wall.

“Get some rest, my liege. Wouldn’t want you to wear yourself out.”

She tugged the flap shut and turned her back to the tent, rifle in her arms, leaving him alone in the silent dark. Tarquin rolled to rest his back against the wall and slid down, bringing his legs to his chest. He pressed his face into his knees and focused on breathing, mind numb from shock.

He wasn’t safe here. But what could he possibly do?

Pliny squeezed his arm. He blinked. Right. He had tools. He had hidden strength and agility. He wasn’t finished yet.

FORTY-TWO

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Despite the light-headedness that warned him he’d gone too long without food, Tarquin activated his agility pathways and savored the calm sense of surety that came with them. The camp was still in chaos, Vake and Paison barking orders on the far side. He couldn’t make out the words, but he thought they might be looking for Dawd, and that gave him hope.

If he could somehow reconnect with Dawd, they might be able to figure out what to do. Tarquin crept to the tent wall that nearly butted up against a pile of empty crates that separated the campsite from the woods. He couldn’t hear anyone moving around out there.

He removed the panel separator from Pliny before he could second-guess himself, and got to work. Once the panel was loose, he clutched the tool between his teeth and eased the panel free, wincing as the rubber gaskets squeaked. Holding his breath, he peeked through the narrow opening. No one was out there.

Now or never. Relying on his agility pathways, he eased himself out of the tent and settled into a tense crouch, waiting to see if he’d drawn attention to himself. All was silent.

Nothing but the crates stood between him and the forest. Shaking with adrenaline, he climbed over the crates and dropped as lightly as he could to the ground. He didn’t dare pause to see if he’d been overheard—he took off on featherlight feet, sprinting into the woods, trusting in his pathways to keep him stable across the uneven ground. No shouts followed. He’d done it.

A branch slammed into his chest, knocking him to his back. Tarquin hit the ground hard, breath gusting out of him, feet flying into the air as his head bounced and started ringing. Leaves crunched.

“Well, well,” Riggs said, emerging from behind the cover of the tree. “You’re more resourceful than I thought.”

Tarquin scrambled backward, crab-crawling across the litterfall. Riggs laughed at him, a soft, rumbling sound that verged on the fraternal. Dirty hair swaying with the motion, she shook her head and drew a long, serrated knife. She flipped it over in her hand.

“You need me.” He summoned his father’s intonation as he backed into a tree. “You can’t get back to the ship without me.”

She looked up at the strange stars winking above, and a beatific smile crossed her lips as the shadow of the Einkorn passed by. “You don’t need to be in one piece to open those locks, do you, my liege? And those feet of yours—you’re so eager to make use of them, and Achilles tendons are so very fragile.”

He froze, heart skipping a painful, lurching beat as she slid her gaze to him without turning her face away from the sky. The silver moonlight turned her eyes into mercurial slicks from end to end.

His pathways vibrated with strength and he threw himself away, twisted to land on his hands and knees as Riggs lunged for him. A line of searing agony opened across his back.

Tarquin flailed to his feet, trying to duck behind a tree as Riggs lashed out once more. Fuck, he was so fucked—he didn’t know how to fight. Raw panic gripped him, anchored him in place.

Pliny the Metal sprang through the air.

The bot slammed into Riggs’s face, wrapped its legs around her head, and squeezed the pulsing rhythm that was meant to help him focus. He stared, dumbstruck.

She dropped her knife to rip Pliny off her face, drawing thick, meaty gashes over both cheeks. Blood stained Pliny’s legs. Riggs tossed the bot into a tree hard enough that bark and lichen exploded from the impact site. Pliny let out a confused squeal.

“You piece of shit,” she snarled.

Blood poured into her eyes, obscuring her vision. He darted for the tree, skirting around Riggs’s fumbling reach, and ducked down to grab Pliny. The bot whined, slick with blood, but latched on to his arm as soon as it sensed him. Tarquin pushed off the tree and spun around, not sure where he was running to but certain he needed to get the hell away from Riggs.

She tackled him from behind. He cried out, arms pinned against his sides, unable to shield his face from the ground. Blood trickled into his eyes from a cut on his forehead, but he ignored it, determined to thrash his way to freedom. Riggs dug a knee into the small of his back until he thought he’d snap in two, the air crushed out of him. She wrenched his arms up behind his back, locking them into place.

“You and your fucking bot are going to pay for that,” she snarled against his ear.

He shouted, crying out for help until she took his wrists in one hand and grabbed the back of his head with the other, shoving his face into the dirt. Every breath he took was clotted with dead leaves.

“I told Paison you were going to be a problem,” she muttered to herself, shifting her weight on top of him.

Panic filled him as she twisted around, using her legs to keep his arms in place while one hand continued to hold his face to the dirt. Her other knife made a soft, hissing sound as it was drawn.

He bucked, leaning on his pathways for extra strength, but he’d already played that trick, and she was a soldier—she had better strength pathways of her own. Riggs chuckled quietly, and fear speared him to the ground.

Something rustled in the underbrush. She didn’t seem to notice. Animal, ally, or backup for Riggs? He couldn’t be sure, but it was something, and he thrashed all over again, trying to keep her attention from shifting to whatever was nearby. Riggs swore, shoving his face harder into the dirt. Dead leaves and mud filled his mouth, making him cough.

Tarquin couldn’t hear anything above his coughing fit, eyes streaming as they struggled to clear the blood and dirt. Someone shouted. Riggs tumbled off of him. Tarquin shoved his aching arms under his chest and pushed up, lost his balance and fell sideways, rolling onto his back as the litterfall tangled his limbs.

Debris and blood blurred his vision, making the two fighting figures swim before his eyes. A dark-skinned man—Dawd?—struck Riggs against the side of the head with the butt of his rifle. Her eyes rolled to white in the second before she collapsed. Dawd pressed two fingers against the side of her throat and nodded.

“You gave her hell, my liege. Not bad,” Dawd said with a tinge of admiration.

Tarquin spat the dirt out of his mouth before wiping his eyes with the back of his sleeve.

“Bracken’s dead,” Tarquin rushed out. “They’re all more heavily infected than we thought. They want—want everyone to be infected. All over the universe. They were going to detox me of shroud so that I’d give them my command keys.” He was talking rapid-fire, voice shaking, and he made himself stop and take a deep, stabilizing breath.

Dawd sighed, slowly, and shook his head as if the world had let him down. He rolled to his feet, cracked his neck from side to side, and turned to face Tarquin. His rifle was slung across his back, Riggs’s blood smeared over the stock, which peeked out from behind his bulk.

He hooked his thumbs around his narrow hips, squinting at Tarquin like he was trying to figure him out. The attention scraped. Tarquin was used to being observed, but something about Dawd’s stare dropped the kind facade. Let Tarquin glimpse the hard core of the man hiding beneath the surface. And that man was judging what use someone like Tarquin Mercator could possibly be in this situation.

“It’s your lucky day, my liege. I was on my way out of camp when I heard you two scuffling.” Dawd patted the duffle strapped to his back. “Got a load of supplies right here.”

“So what…” Tarquin swallowed grit and coughed up a lump of mud-tinged spit. “What do we do?”

“Well,” Dawd said, “considering things are well and truly fucked, I think it might be time to ask for help from the one damn person on this planet I’m sure of. We need to find Naira Sharp.”

He winced. “Sharp may be sympathetic to you, but she’ll shoot me on sight and, to be perfectly frank with you, I’d deserve it.”

“Interesting. Maybe tell her that. But don’t worry that noble head of yours. Sharp’ll give you a pass, for now.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Name’s actually Kav Ayuba, Conservator. Wish I could say it was nice to meet you, my liege.”

FORTY-THREE

Acaelus

Mercator Station

Acaelus stood in the middle of a sea of his most trusted employees. They flitted around the printing lab, twitching at devices, tapping minute adjustments into holographic interfaces many of them had invented for this purpose. Each face was resolute, determined. The excision program spun on every display, Canden Mercator’s neural map a mountainous wireframe beside it, nucleoid points of light swimming in the green-hued haze of everything she was, everything she could be, if only she would wake up.

He should summon his daughter. Should call for a friend, someone to stand beside him as they made this attempt, but Acaelus had stopped having things like friends the day his wife had died. There was a strange sort of sorority that persisted between himself and the other MERIT heads of family, and echoes of something like friendship with those he had once considered confidants.

But when Canden had cracked, none of them had been enough to ease the ache. They’d distanced themselves, as if cracking were a contagion, a state of mind that was catching. Maybe it was. Since the day Canden fell, he’d avoided reprinting himself unless absolutely necessary.

Maybe it was superstition. Probably it was an obsession. But he’d sensed, on a cellular level, that if he ended this continuance and carried on in another body whose hands had never touched her living skin, some vital part of him would refuse to continue without her. He’d crack. And it’d have nothing to do with the number of reprints or the violence of his end.

A cracked man couldn’t bring her back.

“My liege,” Dr. Laurent said, drawing his attention away from the printing cubicle embedded in the wall, the place where his wife’s body was being reconstructed, precisely as she preferred it, layer by microscopic layer. “The print is ready, and the techs have run the excision package to the best of their ability. Matters remain uncertain, but we are prepared to make the attempt.”

Sweat trickled down the valley of his spine. “Bring her out. I won’t have her wake in that cave.”

Laurent hesitated, fingers twitching as they interfaced with a holo projected from her forearm. He held his breath to keep from demanding she hurry up. Dr. Laurent had been Canden’s closest friend. If there was anyone in this room aside from himself who wanted this to go well, it was her. He felt a brief flash of empathy, a strange urge to reach out and squeeze her shoulder, or make some other gesture to indicate their shared fear, their shared suffering.

He quashed the notion. They’d done this dozens of times, though not with Chiyo’s software. Had tried time and time again to make small edits to her map before waking her until Laurent had insisted they stop, because the attempts might have been doing further damage. If this didn’t work, and it increased the damage done…

No. He couldn’t think that way. Acaelus forced himself to recall Ex. Dalson, woozy but smiling, the memory of his brutal death wiped from his mind. Not even an echo of fear had remained when Fletcher Demarco, the man who had slaughtered him, entered the room.

Canden was the most resilient person he’d ever known. More so than an exemplar. If anyone could come back from cracking, it was her.

The cubicle door slid open. Acaelus braced himself, squeezing his hands into fists in his pockets as the physicians removed the long gurney. His wife’s freshly printed body lay nude and lifeless in the stark light of the lab. That was not her. Not yet. It was just a vessel.

He knew all this, but seeing her hurt anyway. The silken spill of her hair fanned out around her head, a dark halo behind a face warm as the hearts of old-growth redwoods, before the shroud took all those lofty trees. The doctors tucked a sheet across her body to maintain warmth once she had awakened, and the stark white cloth reduced her, somehow. Made her slight body appear frail, already broken, and the thought clotted his throat, stung his eyes.

It was wrong that she should look so small, when she towered in life, casting shadows of change and strength longer and broader than even those ancient trees.

“My liege?” Laurent asked, when the body had been transferred to the center of the room and the techs hovered, waiting.

“Begin,” he said.

Laurent checked to make certain that the euthanasia line attached to Canden’s arm was secure in case she came up screaming. She initiated the download. It was instantaneous.

Incredible, how long a moment can feel.

Canden jerked awake, eyes rolling back hard enough to turn white, and stay white. She muttered nonsense syllables, a low litany of repetition. Each halting sound that wrenched out of her a mockery of the woman she’d been. A deep whimper began low in her chest, rising up to boil out of her, then pitched higher, reaching for a scream he knew all too well. Drool slicked from between her lips, stained her face, the sheets.

Acaelus triggered the euthanasia, and told himself he felt nothing, nothing, just the void in his heart, the empty hollow where the flames of agony were smothered, as her body slumped back to the gurney, eyelids sliding half-closed, the whites still visible, her perfect lips left gaping.

He looked away, bile crawling up his throat, and swallowed the pain down, telling himself he didn’t notice Laurent’s hands shake as she pulled the sheet over the print’s face.

Chiyo had warned him it didn’t always work. He’d known it was a possibility.

“Dissolve the print,” he snapped, pushing away from the pointless gurney, ignoring the light step of his exemplar as he strode for the door.

“My liege,” Laurent said, her voice thin, wavering. He didn’t want to hear it, because that fragility of hers could crack all the hard walls he’d built around himself, but hope, that poisonous fucking thing, made him stop with his back to her. Made him wait to see what she had to say. “That was… an improvement. With more time and consultation with the developing researchers, I think we can make progress.”

He wanted to ignore her. He wanted to box Canden’s mind up, to lock it away to keep it safe from further damage, until he could be sure. But there were no sureties in all the universe, and Laurent was right. This had been a milder awakening than any of the others.

“Ichikawa has agreed to work with us on this matter. Request whatever you need,” he said, and walked out the door before she’d finished her thank-yous.

He didn’t want to hear them. Didn’t want her hope to infect him.

Before he could be stopped to answer questions he didn’t give a shit about, he boarded the elevator that would whisk him to his private rooms on-station. The home he’d shared with Canden. The home in which they’d raised two children. Acaelus moved through the airy rooms without really seeing them, his gaze occasionally snagging on the bursts of foliage that punctuated a space mostly decorated in grey and Mercator green.

Canden’s touch, the plants. She liked the variation in greens, had said they reminded her that there was more to the color than relkatite. That it had been the color of life, of living Earth, long before Acaelus’s ancestors had clawed that precious mineral out of the planet’s crust.

“Stay,” he ordered Ex. Kearns, leaving the serious-faced man at the entrance to his bedroom.

Here, where few ever walked save his immediate family, the decor shaded more to hues of blue and white, his personal preference, a tiny refuge against the expectation of all that green. A curved window displayed a soaring view of Earth, the opposite wall inset with a saltwater aquarium tended by his own hands. The last vestiges of many Earth species flitted through the water, their genomes encoded against a future date when they might find more hospitable climes, but free for the printing to whoever had the resources to care for them.

He needed to think. To clear his head. He had to make a decision about Sixth Cradle, had to bring his boy home because he could not—could not—stand watching those eyes crack, too. The planet was dead—fuck the planet—the Einkorn was out of control.

He could, in theory, bombard the planet. Attempt to take them all out with orbital weapons so that he’d be assured there was no double-printing of his son, but then he’d have to justify his actions to the MERIT council, and there was no spinning that. Even if he revealed the shroud had taken it, a shrouded planet had resources worth recovering, and it wasn’t entirely dead. Not yet.

Once he was done with Sixth, he could move on, mount the next expedition to Seventh. He needed to tie this disaster off in a bow soon, even if the ribbon was ragged, or their stores of relkatite might get low, and then what? A world to live on was one thing, but without relkatite, they couldn’t build enclosures for the powercores that powered the stations upon which most of humanity dwelled. Couldn’t contain warpcores for FTL travel. Couldn’t even implant the pathways that held their printed bodies together.

Couldn’t even try to find somewhere safe to live, and so what if a couple of worlds died in the process? He’d dig all the relkatite out of the bones of this universe and build them a station so vast and beautiful that having a planet would be irrelevant.

He could make them somewhere safe.

Acaelus paced a tight circle around the room, scratching at the pathway that ran from his temple down the side of his neck to disappear into his spinal column. It vibrated as he thought, jarring him.

His memory was supposed to be eidetic, his pathways made sure of that, but they were faulty. Aging before their time, as if they knew his desperation to hang on to this print, and thwarted him. It seemed he could hang on to nothing he truly desired.

All the power in the universe, and his son had fled him for university, then gotten himself trapped on that dead world. He couldn’t even bring his own wife back, when that software had worked so well for an exemplar—and who cared about those? They were inherently disposable.

His medicine. That’s why his thoughts were spiraling. He’d been so hung up on printing Canden again that he’d forgotten to take the medicine Dr. Laurent made to preserve his print. Acaelus laughed at himself and pulled the injector from his bedside table.

He rolled up his sleeve and sat on the edge of the bed, then took a breath to steady himself as he placed the nib against the inside of his arm. A sheen of sweat already coated his skin.

Acaelus would have burned worlds to keep Canden warm, and yet every time he did this, every time he clung on to this print for the sense-memory of her, his body rebelled, his stomach knotted, his whole body tensing in protest as he curled his finger around the trigger and focused.

The longer he took to do this, the more his body fought him, which was all the evidence he needed that it was necessary. A print rebelling against its mind was surely in need of repair, and knowing that, knowing that the signals his body was sending him were wrong, he forced himself to pull the trigger.

It burned as it raced through his veins, sped by the frantic thump of his heart. Pain was something Acaelus rarely experienced, but this reminded him. Grounded him. Told him what it meant to be flesh and blood, a neural map inextricable from the sinew it controlled.

He flopped back against the bed, arms spread. The injector fell from his fingers as he squeezed his eyes shut against the pain. Every time, it hurt a little more. Every time, his pathways vibrated all the harder in protest, rattling him from the inside out until he felt certain he’d dissolve.

The door hissed open, but he was too busy gritting his teeth against the pain to crack an eyelid and see who it was. Ex. Kearns, most likely, having heard him shout—had he shouted? Acaelus breathed deep into his belly, trying to find the strength to tell the E-X to stay where he’d been ordered to stay, but the concerned, shocked voice of his eldest child reached him first.

“Dad?” Leka asked. He grimaced, the pain receding as his pathways slowed their vibration. She rushed to him, crawled across the mattress to kneel beside him, the back of her smooth hand pressed against his forehead. The golden chain she wore around her wrist tickled his eyebrows. A holo interface sprang from her forearm. “I need medical—”

“Stop,” he ground out.

She tensed but closed the holo. Obedient, his children. For the most part. “What happened?”

He rolled to his side, brushing her hand off his forehead as he gathered up the injector and slipped the cap back on with shaking fingers. Normally he would ride out the shakes following an injection alone, letting his body drift on a sea of discomfort while his mind sought safer shores, and he was sorely tempted to kick her out so he could do just that. But Leka was as stubborn as her mother and would call the doctors on him if he tried that.

“Nothing. It’s a medicine I have to take,” he said, annoyed when his voice cracked.

“Why are you taking medicine? Is something wrong with your print?” She slid off the bed and stood in front of him with her hands on her hips, effectively blocking him with her body. He scowled and pushed sweaty hair off his forehead.

“It’s a booster for my pathways, to help preserve integration.”

She grabbed his arm and dragged it up to her face, squinting over the golden pathways that laced down his wrist, behind the Mercator cuff, and buried themselves into his fingers. “They look… greenish. Is it some kind of oxidation problem? Why don’t you get them reseated?”

“My pathways are so deeply integrated that it would require a full reprinting,” he said, and let her prod at his hand with a faint frown on her face.

“So? Reprint. You’re overdue, Dad, it’s been decades. I don’t know why you insist on saving this one.”

He covered her hand with his. She picked her head up from her study of his hand and met his gaze, a pinch between her brows.

“I like this one,” he said.

“Oh.” The wrinkle in Leka’s brow softened.

He braced himself for the old argument to bubble to the surface. For her to insist Canden wouldn’t want him wearing a print so long it developed some terrible thing, like one of the many rapid-moving cancers that were common on stations, but instead she folded her arms around his shoulders, pulled him against her in a hug, and rested her chin on his head, as if he were the child in need of comforting.

Acaelus tensed, embarrassed at how transparent his moods had been, but she tightened her arms, and he let himself lean against his eldest child. She was his child, yes, but she was also sixty-three years old. Easy to forget what competent and kind people his children had grown into, when he lingered in this house where their tiny toddler feet had pattered.

He eased back to hold her at arm’s length. She wore a knee-length tunic of Mercator-green silk, cinched at the waist with a plum fabric belt so dark it was nearly black, her hair tugged up in a hasty knot on top of her head. Casual clothes. She’d rushed here. “Dr. Laurent told you, didn’t she?”

“Meti called me, yes. What I don’t understand is why you didn’t call me yourself. I should have been there.”

He looked away. “No. You shouldn’t have. None of you kids should have to see that. But don’t fret, we were close. We’re getting closer.”

Leka crossed her arms. “Chiyo never should have tempted you with false promises. She should know better. I’ll warn her off further such stunts.”

“Unnecessary, and highly unprofessional.”

He drew himself up to sit straighter. The vibration of his pathways had settled into a low buzz. Already he was thinking more clearly. Earlier he’d been so fixated on finding more relk—idiotic. Sixth Cradle was in crisis, his son was trapped on that cursed world. Sending more expeditions to other worlds was the last thing he needed to do.

Yes, the refugees from Earth and the cradles were straining the resources of the stations, but Fifth Cradle had provided enough relkatite for him to increase station production temporarily. Mining more could wait—his pathways thrummed, warming briefly—he needed to get his boy back.

“Now isn’t the time to ruffle feathers with personal matters. The heads of MERIT will meet soon. I need as much data about the situation on Sixth Cradle as I can scrape together before that meeting. We must defend our position, and squabbling with Chiyo over this experiment not working on the first attempt is a waste of time and resources.”

“Are you sure Chiyo gave you everything you needed to make it work?” she asked. “I don’t trust that woman, and Emali heard rumors that Chiyo’s ordered a sliver of her enterprise to investigate mining methods of their own that don’t use canus. If she wants to keep you occupied while she pries into our business, this excision farce seems like a good way to go about it.”

“Emali Rochard is a fine woman, but a distant cousin of the Rochard blood and not well enough positioned to have any information of value when it comes to Ichikawa. I know you like her, Leka, and I’m happy for you, but trust me in this. I’ve been leading this family for ninety-eight years. I might actually know what I’m doing.”

“But she has been looking into mining,” Leka insisted.

Acaelus gathered Leka’s hands in his, holding them close. “Of course she has. Just as I’ve been looking into neural map storage and transmission technology, and just as Rochard is, no doubt, looking into relkatite mining beneath Emali’s nose. We all have a hand in each other’s business, spies in the ranks, and an informal agreement to look the other way, unless matters become egregious. Chiyo could no more mount a mission well suited to mining relkatite than Rochard could decide they’d stop farming and start building stations, nor would they want to. None of us want a family war, which is what such an infraction would cause.”

“I still don’t like it,” Leka said, but her shoulders softened in acquiescence.

“You don’t have to, my dear. None of us do. But that is the balance we’ve arrived at. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to wash, then check on the progress of a project.”

Her gaze sharpened, and she was so much a mirror of Canden in that moment that it made his chest ache all over again. “Sixth Cradle related?”

“Yes,” he said warily. She would lead this house someday, when he finally cracked, but some foolish, sentimental part of him wished it didn’t have to be so. That he could keep her from the harsh truths of what that meant, though she’d already been exposed to so much.

“I’ll wait and accompany you, then.” There was no room for argument in the tone of her voice.

“It’s not pretty, Leka,” he said, not denying her—he never would—but putting enough warning in his voice to make her chew her lip in consideration.

“Will it help get Tarq back?” she asked.

“I believe so,” he said.

“Then I’m going with you. And afterward, you and I are going to have a serious conversation about you reprinting.”

Acaelus smiled, faintly, then dropped a hand on her shoulder and squeezed before heading to his bathroom to shower and change. Sometimes he wondered what he’d done to deserve such strong-willed, virtuous children, but he never wondered for long, because he knew. He’d married Canden. She’d given him everything good in his life, everything true.

He’d fix it all for her, no matter the cost.

FORTY-FOUR

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira was reasonably certain she was going to die on this planet after all. Her body boiled with fever, an infection battling her pathways even as she battled the misprints. The tide had thinned, a few stragglers drawing close enough every now and then for her to knock off with carefully aimed shots, but her ammo was running low. If her body didn’t get it together enough to allow her to move and fight hand to hand, she was done for.

And it really pissed her off, because after spending the day watching the movement through the trees, she was sure she knew where the portable printer was. She just had to get to it.

She checked her clip. Three bullets. Wonderful.

A misprint crawled toward her through the underbrush, blood crusted on its misshapen face. The cursed thing couldn’t even open its mouth to bite. Its lips hadn’t separated.

“Oh, fuck you,” Naira snarled, and picked up a rock, chucking it at the thing’s head. It scurried away, rattling the dead branches of the brush.

She dropped her head back against the tree, panting. The bullet against her cheek was a small reassurance, and she ran her tongue over it, considering her options. If she could get to her feet, she might be able to find a more defensible position. Standing seemed about as likely as sprouting wings and flying back home to Sol. Still, she had to try.

Cursing under her breath, she planted her palms against the ground and tried to push herself up, relying on her good leg for strength and support, but her whole body shook violently, weakness washing through her, and she dropped back down after she’d managed a few measly inches.

Exhaustion rolled her under, eyes slipping shut against her will, and she woke only when she heard a branch break nearby. The soft scuff of—shoes? Misprints didn’t wear shoes. That was either Kav or Paison following the sound of gunfire, and the way her luck was running, she’d bet on Paison.

“If you’re here to kill me,” Naira called out, “do us both a favor and get it over with.”

“Nai?” Kav called out. His familiar voice made her tremble with relief. Those footsteps sped up. “Don’t be so dramatic—oh shit.”

He’d come through the tree line at last and seen her, sweating and bleeding her last, surrounded by a ring of misprint corpses, and his eyes bugged out.

“Hey,” she said weakly.

“You look good.”

“Fuck.” She couldn’t help but laugh, even though it hurt. “Don’t make me laugh. Might be enough to push me over death’s door.”

“What the hell happened to you?” Kav ran over and dropped down beside her, ripping open the zipper on an overstuffed duffle. He shoved things aside, searching for medical equipment. She let the gun fall from her hand and her eyes slip half-shut as she released the vigilance she’d needed to hold back the misprints.

“Bullet got stuck.”

“Ouch. Heal-reject cycle?”

“Mm-hmm.” It was getting hard to keep her eyes open.

“Where is it? I’ll get it out.”

“Out,” she slurred.

“What? How? You didn’t have a knife on you.”

Naira wiggled her fingers at him but didn’t bother to open her eyes to see his reaction. She knew him well enough that she could imagine his face. His real one, not Dawd’s.

“I knew you were a glutton for punishment, but that’s a bit much. Wait, so what’s wrong? Nai?” He patted the side of her face. “Stay with me, asshole. I need your help. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

“I know what’s wrong,” Tarquin said.

Her eyes snapped open. She hadn’t heard him approach, her heartbeat was too loud in her own ears, but he knelt beside her. Dirt and bruises covered his face, a deep gash pink with fresh healing across his forehead. Pliny, wrapped around his arm, had one leg bent back along its body and was smeared with blood. That bruised face was haunted as he assessed her.

“What…” She heaved down deep breaths. “… the fuck?”

“Pissing her off is one way to rally her,” Kav said, trying for a joking tone, but his voice was too strained to pull it off.

“I know you don’t trust me, Ex. Sharp, but I know what this is. Cascade failure. Your pathways were strained in too many different directions and now they can’t keep up without cannibalizing your body, and that’s making things worse. You need to eat to give them a better fuel source. Mr. Ayuba, do you have ration bars? Shroud’s not enough for this.”

“Uh, yeah, yeah, I do.” Kav rummaged in the bag and passed a bar across to Tarquin.

Her eyes narrowed. “Why are… you…?”

“Save your strength.”

Tarquin opened the ration bar and broke off a tiny corner. He hesitated, then held it out to her lips. She turned her head aside and spat out the bullet. Tarquin glanced at it, confused, but brought the food back to her mouth.

She might as well have been trying to eat gravel. Naira coughed it out, shaking from the force, and both Kav and Tarquin placed a hand on opposite shoulders, stroking gently as they eased her back to lean against the tree.

“Sorry,” she choked out.

“It’s not your fault,” Tarquin said. “You need water. I should have realized.”

He unslung his canteen and opened it, pressing the rim to her lips. She took a slow sip. Her stomach clenched, urging her to guzzle the whole thing, but she refrained, resigning herself to the pace Tarquin set, and soon she could move her tongue around her mouth without feeling like she was dragging sandpaper over her gums.

“Ready to try again?” he asked.

She nodded. He started with a smaller piece this time, and when she got it down, he increased the size of the next, but only slightly. Every so often he’d pause to give her water, and they went through three bars like that, until he could press the back of his hand against her cheek and not feel her pathways vibrating harder than they were ever meant to. Slowly, the fever ebbed, leaving her nothing but cinders inside.

“You okay?” Kav asked when she’d stopped heaving for air and the sweat had cooled.

“Tarquin Mercator just fed me like a baby bird. No. I am not fucking okay.”

Kav grinned. “She’s good.”

“You need more than that,” Tarquin said, “and proper rest. But you won’t keel over in the next few hours.”

“Hooray,” she said. He chuckled at her.

Kav reached across her and picked up the bullet she’d spat out, holding it between his fingers. “Keep this. A suicide shot you didn’t have to use is lucky.”

Naira rolled her eyes. “Give me a break. This isn’t the HCA and I’m not getting off this planet with anything more than my mind, if I get off at all.”

“I thought a suicide shot was a drink?” Tarquin asked.

Kav grunted. “It is. In the HCA, if things got dicey enough that you held a bullet in reserve for yourself, but you came back with it, you’d be given this god-awful mix of everything the battalion was brewing against regs and had to drink it in ‘celebration.’”

Naira ran her tongue along her gums, tasting the residue of metal, but remembering a lot of flavors she’d really rather be able to forget. “Then some rich pricks found out about it and thought it made them look like they’d grown a backbone to drink it themselves.”

“Before I shipped for Sixth,” Kav said, “I saw one at a bar with a feather in it made out of sugar. Supposed to be a phoenix feather.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Naira said. “Give me the bullet. I’d rather eat it than go back to that world.”

“Not a chance.” Kav tucked the bullet into his pocket. “I hate to say it, but we’ve got to move. As soon as Paison realizes Tarquin’s gone, she’s going to go looking for him, and she’s likely to follow your gunfire, same as I did.”

“What happened down there?” Naira asked.

“Long story,” Kav said. “I’ll explain as we walk.”

“I’m not doing a lot of walking here, Kav.”

“Yeah, yeah, my turn to carry your ass. Arm up.”

“Those strength pathways have gone to your head. You can’t carry me. You need hands free to fight if it comes to it, and to cover our tracks, so we’re not hobbling from one obvious point to another. I’ll manage.”

Kav explained to her in precise and colorful terms exactly how big of an idiot she was as she struggled to drag herself to her feet. By the time she was standing, she had to cling to the tree for dear life, all her weight on one leg because if she dared put any pressure on her wounded leg, she’d crumple. Sweat slicked her skin, and she was panting again. Kav crossed his arms and gave her his best I-told-you-so look. She flipped him off, because she didn’t have the breath to tell him off, and he smirked.

“Ex. Sharp,” Tarquin said, “you cannot walk like this. You were nearly dead less than thirty minutes ago.”

“Yeah, well, unless you’ve suddenly developed the ability to fight and the woodcraft to hide our tracks, Kav needs his arms free.”

“The Mercator was holding his own against Riggs until she tried to cut his feet off,” Kav said.

“What?”

Kav just shrugged.

Tarquin cleared his throat. “Exemplar, I can carry you. My pathways are not yet overstrained, and my strength pathways can bear your weight.”

“No,” she snapped, though she couldn’t say why.

“Hold on, he has strength pathways?” Kav frowned at her. “Nai, extricate your head from your ass. This works.”

Naira tipped her head back, glaring at the sky, and silently cursed the whole damn universe for stripping away what little remained of her dignity and blending it to dust.

“Fine,” she muttered.

“Which leg is the injured one?” Tarquin asked.

“The bloody one.”

“That… doesn’t really clear things up, E-X.”

She glanced down. He had a point. “The left.”

Tarquin approached her as if approaching a wounded wild animal. The worry she’d seen in him earlier had been replaced by a facade of stern control.

“Wait,” Naira said.

Kav groaned. “We don’t have time for you to be stubborn about this.”

“No, I mean—that damn fever scrambled my brain. I took some recon notes on that rock beside me. I need you two to take a picture with your HUDs because I’m not certain I can remember it all, and I don’t dare spend the energy on my own HUD.”

Kav squinted at the rock. “This is meaningless fever ramblings.”

Tarquin crouched down beside him, brushing some of the leaf litter away. His brow furrowed as he looked from the stone to the cliff’s edge, then back up to her. “This is brilliant,” he said. “You found it. You found the body printer.”

“Don’t sound too surprised.” She looked away from the startled admiration in his eyes. “I had to do something to keep my mind busy while this print was dying.”

“No books in your map storage to keep you busy?” Tarquin asked. “I’m surprised.”

“They deleted all my personal files before I was iced.”

“Ah. I… should have realized.”

“Can we go, please?” she asked.

Tarquin scooped her up without a word, settling her in his arms with surprising ease. The warmth of him was a balm after spending all night exposed, and she reluctantly let herself relax as he proved adept at making certain she wouldn’t be jostled. Kav led the way down the cliff side while Tarquin explained what had happened in clipped, formal tones, never looking at her.

Once they were in the woods, Kav fell back, covering their tracks while Tarquin led the way, following the rough direction Naira had estimated the body printer to be while adjusting for his own internal map of the landscape to find suitable shelter for them.

He was rigid in a way she hadn’t seen since those first few days after the crash landing. But in the fever-hazy moments when he’d seen her dying, when he’d fed her, he’d been worried. Gentle. She hadn’t set out to manipulate his feelings, but she had, and he should be outraged. Naira didn’t know what to make of his behavior, and with the barriers between them ripped away, she could just ask.

“Why are you helping me?”

“Paison can’t be allowed to cover up the canus infection and the antidote of amarthite. You are the finest warrior on this planet and uninfected. I require your assistance to stop her, and I believe you want to stop her, too.”

“That’s all very rational, but not what I was asking.”

“Then can you be more specific?” he grated.

“Why are you being nice to me?”

“Am I? I rather thought I was giving you the cold shoulder.”

“If you are, you’re terrible at it.”

“I’m terrible at a great many things, it seems, as you well know. Including being aware of when my emotions are being manipulated against me.”

“I knew you were pissed.”

“I am furious.” His arms tightened around her, but not uncomfortably so. “But if I choose to have that conversation, it won’t be tonight. You may feel better, but you’re not out of danger yet, and I won’t drain your resources further by stressing you. I can feel your pathways, Exemplar. They’re strained, and fluttering.”

“If you choose to have that conversation? I don’t think so, Mercator. You can’t order me to shut my mouth, not anymore, and we are absolutely going to talk about this.”

Tarquin stopped walking abruptly and looked down at her at last, allowing her to see the hurt behind his eyes. “Ex. Sharp, despite everything, I admire you a great deal, and not only would I be royally fucked if you were to die on me, but I would also be greatly saddened. We will discuss matters later, once you’ve recovered. But at this moment, I am ordering you to shut your mouth, and rest, and get better, so that there will be a later in which we can even have that conversation.”

“You’d be sad?”

His stern face collapsed into a tired smile. “I’ve hit my head. I can’t be held responsible for anything I’ve said.”

She laughed softly, some of the pent-up fear unwinding from within at last, and saw his smile widen at the sound before he pressed his lips flat instead. A yawn slipped out, and she flushed, instinctually mortified, because she never yawned in front of her charges, but—well, she never did a great many things in front of her charges that she’d done in front of Tarquin.

He softened his arms, losing some of the rigidity, and walked on, eyes up once more, as she nestled against him and let sleep take her at last.

FORTY-FIVE

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Tarquin laid Naira gently in one of the two bedrolls Kav had provided once they’d finally called a halt for the night. She was out cold, her pathways humming softly beneath her skin, making use of the scant fuel he’d given her to patch her body back together so that she’d be prepared to spring into another fight. That was all her print was designed to do, after all. Take hits and keep going.

He didn’t know why he felt so morose about the fact.

“She out?” Kav asked, pointing to Naira with his chin.

“She has been for the past few hours. It’s strange, she claimed not to sleep well, but every time I’ve had an opportunity to observe her at rest, she appears to be a heavy sleeper.”

“Oh, that.” Kav settled down and pulled out his canteen. “Nai was brought up at Marconette—that’s an HC orphanage—and they stack as many of those kids as they can into a room. It’s the same in the HCA, and even the E-X barracks are shared. Never had her own room until she worked for Acaelus, and she hated it. Once she went AWOL, when we were in the Conservators together, she’d sneak into my room at night to get a good rest.”

Tarquin’s brows lifted despite himself. “She’d sneak into your room at night?”

Kav’s nose wrinkled. “Not what you’re thinking, there. Nai’s the sister I never wanted. A giant pain in my ass sometimes, but we’ve had each other’s backs since she was under my command in the HCA.”

“You insult each other constantly, but seem fond of each other. I admit I scarcely understand it.”

“Don’t you have a sister? Don’t you two claw each other’s throats sometimes?”

Tarquin tried to imagine calling Leka a pain in the ass to her face, or telling her, as Kav had told Naira earlier, to “extricate her head from her ass,” or saying the word ass to her at all, and blanched. “We argue, but it’s nothing like what you two do.”

Kav shrugged. “I guess when things are so hard for so long, it’s just… fine. Gallows humor, maybe. I don’t know. It’s how we get on, anyway. If she started being sweet to me, I’d know something had gone seriously wrong.”

“You’ve been through a lot,” Tarquin said.

“Mm-hmm,” Kav said, and seemed disinclined to elaborate.

“Thank you,” Tarquin said, “for intervening with Riggs. I understand it wasn’t out of HCA Dawd’s desire to cuff for Mercator.”

“Nai would have skinned me alive if I’d left you to that. Was tempting, though.”

The way he said that, it didn’t sound like a joke. Tarquin reached for his canteen and drank deeply. “What you said earlier, about Sharp, was that another manipulation?”

“No. And I need you to realize what that cost me, because—” Kav cut himself off and frowned. “Do you know how it went down? When she turned on Mercator, I mean.”

Tarquin shook his head.

“Well.” He eyed Tarquin. “Let me enlighten you. I knew she was shipping for Third Cradle. She was excited. I could hear it in her voice, but I didn’t ask, because I don’t press her on those things. Nai kept Acaelus’s confidences. She still does, for the most part. Kuma’s always badgering her to gossip, but she gives us the bare facts we need, and that’s it.

“Anyway, she shipped. Came back. Before word was out the cradle was dying, she calls me. The excitement is gone. She wants to meet, which is unusual enough that alarm bells are going off in my head. Acaelus doesn’t exactly give her vacation time, you know? And I sure as shit can’t afford to travel to her. Nai says she’ll come to me, and the alarm bells are screaming, then, but I figure—Third Cradle was a big mission. Maybe she’s got some time off after that. Maybe Kearns is finally picking up the slack so she can breathe a little.

“She shows up, books a swank hotel room that I give her shit about, but she tells me Acaelus stayed there once. She knows the security. How to get around it. I meet her there and she tells me all of it. Acaelus’s confession, the fact the world’s dead, and that now he’s denying ever having said those things to her. The security footage of their conversation had been wiped. She had no proof. She knew I’d been selling software on the side to the Conservators, and she wanted my contact.

“And, look, you’ve seen Nai pissed. But you’ve never seen her truly enraged. I’ve only seen her like that a few times, and I know damn well there’s no talking her down, but I tried anyway. We fought like hell, because I didn’t want…” He trailed off, a scratch in his voice, and looked over at her. “I knew Acaelus would gun for her, if she blew the whistle. He’d throw every fucking thing he had at her, and the Conservators, their security wasn’t up to snuff to handle that. So I tell her I’ll only give her my contact if she takes me with her. She agrees, and I set up the meet.

“Jonsun, he’d been hounding me for years to sign up for good, so when I call and say I’m doing it, and bringing a friend, he’s ecstatic. Didn’t tell him who she was, just that she could change things for the Conservators. The meet was at this diner I had control of the security in, where we usually did business.

“Jonsun comes in, sees me there, and then he sees her. She’s got her hood up, head down, shoveling chocolate pie into her face like it’s her job. Doesn’t even look up, but Jonsun knows her. He spun around and walked right back out. We just waited, and soon enough he comes back in. Sits down, looks her dead in the eye, and asks her what the hell she thinks she’s doing. She said, ‘I was always going to die horribly by Acaelus’s hands. It—’”

“—might as well be for a good reason,” Tarquin finished.

Kav nodded slowly. “Yeah. And that was that. Jonsun took us on, and I went with her to put that day off as long as I could. So when we lost her, when I checked the routing logs and saw the evidence of her map being fished mid-cast… I knew I’d failed her. She was burning herself up to keep worlds safe, and I had one fucking job and I—” He grimaced, looked away.

“That woman over there, she’s the only real family I got. So, let’s just say I’m not your biggest fan, Mercator. I’d have much rather put your face through a tree than have helped you out. But she likes you. And I can hate that all I want, but honestly, she has shit taste in men and I should have seen it coming, because you’re not even the biggest asshole she’s gone for.”

Tell me you understand what you did to Ex. Sharp. No wonder she’d stormed off. He was only surprised she hadn’t attacked him right then and there.

Tarquin ran both of his hands through his hair as he bowed his head. She’d been speaking as Lockhart and, he’d thought, trying to make him understand the threat that awaited her if she were caught working against Mercator.

But she’d been speaking of herself the whole time. Shame burned through him. He’d never meant for her to suffer. Never meant for her friends to fear the terrible fate she’d described at Acaelus’s hands.

Tarquin hadn’t just done it to Sharp. He’d done it to everyone who loved her and understood his father’s cruelties better than he ever had.

Nothing in all his training as a Mercator or scientist told him what to do, what to say to make it right. He’d read Naira’s dossier so many times he’d felt like he’d known her, but the stoic, clear-eyed warrior he’d built in his head had turned out to be only one facet of the real woman.

He’d viewed her as his father would have. A function, a tool with set actions and responses. He’d even dismissed his suspicion of Kav as a Conservator because the man had been too kind and didn’t fit in the mold Tarquin had crafted in his mind. He hadn’t known the Conservators as anything more than an annoyance his father built precautions against. They might as well have been bits of malignant software, as far as Acaelus was concerned. Tarquin’s interest in their cause had been garnered only in his thinking they might have had some information about the shroud. Not that they were people.

She’d told him he was doing this, hadn’t she? That in trying to force the employees of Mercator into seeing him as an equal he was making them uncomfortable, putting them at risk to hold up—what had she called it? His fantasy of egalitarianism.

The Conservators. His employees. All props on a stage for Mercator to manipulate as they saw fit.

Pliny pulsed on his arm. He cared more about the bot. No. Even that wasn’t quite right. In true Mercator arrogance, he cared about Pliny as an extension of himself.

He didn’t know how to see people as people again—he wasn’t sure if he ever had—but he could start here. Start with trying to make amends.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, lifting his head.

“I don’t really give a shit if you’re sorry.” Kav swirled his canteen and scowled down into the opening. “I’m going to say this once, and then I don’t want to hear a damn thing from you about it again. I know you’re pissed. You think she got under your skin to get free. She didn’t. Nai doesn’t—” He pressed his lips together, then shook his head at himself. “She doesn’t get interested in people often, understand? That’s why I swallowed my pride and tried to make you realize she wasn’t leading you on for the hell of it. That’s not her. I told you that she was checking you out because what I couldn’t say then was that I’d asked her to do exactly what you feared. I told her to bat her eyes and get you to spill your guts, and she flat out refused. Was disgusted by the suggestion. Do with that information what you will.”

“How can I possibly believe you?” Tarquin asked, and knew he sounded desperate but didn’t care. He wanted Kav to have some insight, some lifeline to throw to him that would absolve all doubt of her intentions.

“You can’t,” Kav said. “You gotta work that out for yourself, I guess. But, Mercator, you better spend some quality time in that head of yours figuring out what you want your future to look like. You gotta decide if you’re going to take a stand against your family, or if you’re going to go back to them and keep on being complicit, and you gotta do that before you decide what you’re going to do about Nai. Because Tarquin Mercator, Conservator, has a chance with Nai. Tarquin Mercator, second in line to head of family, doesn’t.

“If you lead her on, knowing you’re going home after this, then you’re a bigger asshole than even I thought. Personally, I don’t think you’ve got it in you to cut the purse strings, and I don’t even hold it against you. It’s exceedingly rare, the person who can walk away from all that luxury for uncertainty.”

Walk away from his family? It hadn’t even occurred to him, and his stomach flipped over with knee-jerk fear. When he’d claimed willingness to push back against his father, he’d been thinking of speaking with Acaelus. Demanding change, loud and clear.

But Naira had been right. Standing up to his family had never worked out for him. They always brushed him off, ignored his concerns, and he didn’t think he had it in him to manipulate them into doing the right thing. If he meant to effect change, he’d have to do it from outside Acaelus’s sphere of control.

Once again, he hadn’t thought it through. Hadn’t considered the consequences.

“Thank you. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

Kav grunted and lay down, signaling he was done talking, which was wise. Naira wasn’t the only one who needed rest. Tarquin lay down himself, pulling his jacket to his neck, and stared up through the trees. What did he want? What was right?

He needed to find out what had become of his mother. Who had been behind that mining site, and precisely why. Needed to know how the shroud had come to this planet, and if Mercator was responsible. With that information, he could make an informed decision about where he stood and what his next steps should be. His mother being in the picture opened new avenues of conversation with his father. Tarquin might finally be able to make Acaelus listen to him.

That was the rational approach.

Sharp made a soft, strained sound in her sleep and shifted, face scrunched as she stretched a hand through the litterfall. He took her hand instinctively, and she clung on, a contented sigh slipping through her lips as her face relaxed once more. Warmth fluttered in his chest.

Oh. Fuck.

FORTY-SIX

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira woke to find her body stiff but mostly functional. Her injured leg remained swollen, and it stung whenever she put weight on it, indicating that one of the integration pathways had been damaged. That would take time, or surgery. Neither of which she had access to.

Kav thrust food and water at her and she plopped down next to him, leaning against his side as she powered through the food with military efficiency. Not tasting it, just getting it down so she could keep moving. Tarquin had vanished, but she wasn’t concerned. He’d probably gone to use the bathroom in peace for once. If it was serious, Kav would have told her.

“You scared the shit out of me,” he said after a while.

“Wasn’t concerned about your state of mind at the time.” She grunted when he elbowed her. “What took you so long, anyway? I was crossing my fingers you’d bolt at the first shot.”

“I did. Packed up and moved out, but the Mercator practically fell right in front of me, tangling with Riggs. I let her get a few hits in before I stepped in.”

“Kav.”

“What?” He mimicked her annoyed tone.

“Thanks.”

He smirked. “How’s the print?”

“Left leg integration is on its way out, but it’ll last. I can’t complain.”

“You, without a complaint? Are you sure you’re not Lockhart after all?” He winked, a tired smile dragging at the side of his mouth.

She snorted. “If I were, you’d be dead by now. Where’s Liege Tarquin? He’s been gone too long.”

Kav rolled his eyes dramatically at her use of the title. She crossed her arms, silently daring him to challenge her on the point. A lifetime of having certain patterns of speech drilled into you was hard to break. Kav jerked a thumb over his shoulder, along the side of an outcropping. “Took that robot of his and went poking around at the rocks.”

“You let him wander off by himself?”

“He’s an adult, Nai. No one knows where we are and I’d hear it if he tried to bolt. The guy’s weird. I think I offended him or something.”

“I’ll handle it.”

He gave her a half-assed HCA salute, and she gave him the finger before getting up. Tarquin hadn’t gone far. He was crouched down a few yards off, his back to her, bent over something.

From behind, he could be anyone. Tall, but not remarkably so. Slim build, dark brown hair. Maybe his clothes had been nicer than those available to non-MERIT families, but he’d been in them for days and even their superior dirt-repelling properties had given up the fight. Muscle curved beneath sleeves that had started out tight but now sagged from use.

Until he turned around, until she saw that too-similar face, the green mark flowing across his wrist over the back of his hand, he was just some guy. It struck her that he didn’t know she was watching and, when left alone, really alone, the rigidity faded from his spine, his shoulders rounded, relaxed from being hunched tight around his ears. All that learned loftiness drained away.

He didn’t look like the man who’d testified against her at all.

She cleared her throat. He flinched. Shoulders lifting, neck unbending, back stiffening. He brushed the dirt off his hands and looked at her. Dust smeared his face, and deep trenches filled the hollows below his eyes with shadows.

“Are you well?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t say I’m fighting fit, but I’m holding.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said.

“Did you find anything?”

“Ah.” He studied the dirt on his hands. “More of the same. Canus tunneled through the bedrock in the area, seeking more relkatite when all it could find was amarthite. I think it burned itself out, pushing so hard without sustenance, and when it breached the surface at these points, the shroud got to it. I’m amazed it survived so long in the mineshaft.”

Naira crouched beside him. Pliny was busy ferreting out a sample of gravel from another of the small burrows. The bot struggled, forced to balance on its rear legs while it pushed the fore into the sediment, the bent leg waving in the air like an angry spider.

“I can fix that leg,” she said.

Tarquin stilled. He considered her through half-closed eyes, a frown haunting his entire expression. She got the feeling that frown wasn’t for her—it was at a memory of something, some uncomfortable event that made him curl his fingers, then relax them slowly, one by one.

“What does a soldier know about fixing anything?” His voice was low, tight.

“Do you believe I was always an exemplar?”

“No. You were HCA, before. Recommended for the exemplar program by Acaelus himself.”

“Hmm.” She looked at the pathways lacing her fingers, and the green mark living like an oil stain around her wrist. Not her hands, not really. But close enough. “And that’s where my life starts, does it? When I joined the HCA. Which I didn’t do until I was nineteen, because the HCA doesn’t take you unless they can reprint you.”

“And you had a thriving life as a roboticist before that moment?”

She smirked. “No. But I know a thing or two about farm equipment. My mom and I were in wave alpha on Second Cradle. Farming biofuel corn was all I knew. I was a kid, but I made myself useful. Until the collapse.”

“Was what you told me about her…? Was that true?” he asked.

“It was.” She didn’t look, but she could hear him swallow.

“May I ask how it happened?”

Naira focused on the bot’s choppy movements, considering. Blooded family didn’t ask questions they didn’t expect answers to. But he’d given her an opening for denial, asked if he could even pose the question, and that had to be worth something.

Because if it wasn’t—if he couldn’t be more than what his position made him—then she couldn’t, either. As much as she believed in what the Conservators had done, what they would continue to do, she couldn’t live with the blood on her hands if it meant she could never stop spilling it.

“We were on Second Cradle when the shroud came.” He took a startled breath. She examined her nails, crusted with grey mud, remembering a time when the dirt painting crescents against the tips of her fingers had been dark, fertile soil. “I don’t know if you have any idea what it was like, in those early days, for us on the ground. When the collapse started, there was raw panic. No one knew where it had come from. We only knew we couldn’t stop it.

“My mom—she was a botanist, and a damn good one. Rochard-cuffed. People blamed her team. They killed her for it. I couldn’t pay the phoenix fees. The rescue ships dropped me at an HCA station in the Sol system and washed their hands of me, because Rochard wouldn’t claim me. I was seven.

“There was a kid at Marconette—Fletch—a little younger than me, but he’d been on his own longer. He helped me get a job. Helped me stay alive until I was old enough for the HCA. When I passed the exemplar program and got my MERIT cuffs, I had enough saved up. Acaelus backed me reclaiming my mom’s map from Rochard.

“I went to have her reprinted, but the death…” She clenched her fists. “It was violent. Eighty-three percent chance of cracking, based on the examination. I couldn’t risk it. Didn’t want to see it. Your father—” She cleared her throat. “Acaelus promised me nothing like that would happen again. Mercator would secure the cradles. He’s the most powerful man in the universe, right? How could I not believe him? So I worked for him. For eight years, I bloodied myself on that man’s behalf.”

“Sharp, I…” He trailed off, fell silent for a stretched, taut moment. “I’m so sorry.”

How many times had she heard those words? They never amounted to anything. Sympathy got her nervous glances, gentle pats on the arm, and consoling frowns that didn’t reach the eyes.

She’d learned that early, when she’d been a kid scrubbing station rot off the interior of ducts with chemicals strong enough to singe her nose hairs and make her eyes water, despite the “safety” equipment issued to her.

Naira didn’t want sympathy. She wanted change. Had thought Acaelus could give her that, then turned to the Conservators when his promises had shriveled and died along with another world.

She looked up. Tarquin’s frown carved down along his jaw. Between them, the words unsaid: Your father’s arrogance killed my mother.

But the truth was, she could hardly remember her mother’s face. Could scarcely recall the shade of her hair, the strong curve of her arms. Still, the green-leaf-and-soil scent that followed her, no matter how intensely she showered, haunted Naira’s memory sometimes. A whiff of something that had died long ago, in places those scents had never touched.

Easier to say she did this for revenge. Easier, to scream you killed my mother, as she pulled the trigger on ships packed full of thousands.

Easier, but not true, because in her heart she’d never been a destroyer.

“I want to fix things,” she said, and extended her hand, open, for the bot.

He picked up Pliny, ran a thumb along a side seam, and placed it in her hand. “So do I.”

Naira traced the bent limb with her fingers, feeling out the tension in the metal. Pliny was made of less brittle materials than the shuttle, but the bend had pinched some of its wiring.

With her pathways granting her strength, she judged the angle to release the wires and bent the leg back into position, giving the bot a quick pat on the “head” before returning it. Their fingers brushed as she handed it back, and the touch sent a shock through her. Just static electricity.

Tarquin grinned happily, his whole face lighting up for a flash.

“Whatever became of your friend?” he asked. “Fletch, was it?”

She touched the edge of her jaw, memory rearing its ugly head, quickly stifled. It was strange, no matter how many times she’d been reprinted, how the reminder of her final fight with Fletch could call to mind the sting of the back of his hand across her face.

“We had a difference of opinion about what needed fixing,” she said flatly.

“Ah.” He rubbed the back of his neck, grin fading. “I trust we’re in agreement that the truth of canus and amarthite must be preserved?”

“We are. But once this is through, I’m going to continue tearing Mercator down. That includes you.”

“And if it’s discovered my father isn’t responsible for the shroud? What then, Exemplar?”

“I will not stop.” She glanced at her hands—Ex. Lockhart’s hands—and the cuffs that bound them both. “You forget. The Conservators are merely the militant branch of the unionists, and like them, we’re determined to see the MERIT system undone. Survival of the planets comes first for me, but once that mission is done, I’ll set my sights to undoing the MERIT conglomerate and redistributing that wealth and governance.”

“That is a remarkably large goal,” Tarquin said.

“‘For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: What is once well done is done forever.’”

“Thoreau,” he said, and shook his head. “I should have realized you were a seditionist from the start.”

“Perhaps.” She allowed herself to meet his eyes, and he smiled. “I panicked when you asked me that question. All I could think of were revolutionaries. Thoreau was the only other one I could recall in that moment.”

“You do know that Thoreau was only able to complete his works because he was taken care of by rich friends?” Tarquin asked.

“Oh, I know. He’s not my favorite.” Her smile turned sly. “Hard to say why a wealthy man on a glorified camping trip came to mind.”

“Fair,” he said, laughing a little. “May I provide you a similar but alternatively sourced sentiment?”

“Go on,” she said.

“‘It is the little causes, long continued, which are considered as bringing about the greatest changes of the earth.’ That’s James Hutton,” he said. “A geologist.”

“Hmm. I like it. But it implies a longer timeline than appeals to me.”

“A bad habit of geologists in general, I’m afraid. But I must ask, why dedicate yourself to dismantling the entire system? Perhaps it can be reworked from within. If I speak with my father—”

“You’re still thinking like a geologist. People are suffering now. They can’t wait for this to be done gently. Look, Tarquin, there are countless reasons I could give you. But, personally: Because no child should scrub ducts to stay alive, as I had to. Because no one should have to wait seventeen years to save the funds to learn they can finally grieve their mother. I’m not alone in that experience. By some measures, I’ve had it easy.”

“That’s enough for you to raze an empire?”

“It is.” They studied each other in silence for a while, and she couldn’t begin to guess at what he was thinking. “While we’re here, I’m an open book to you. Ask me anything you’d like about the reasoning for my goals, and I’ll tell you. I owe you that. I never set out to—” She pursed her lips. “I’m sorry.”

He rubbed the family mark on the back of his hand. “Why didn’t you tell me that night on the boulder?”

“Aside from the fact I was in the middle of having a breakdown,” she said. He chuckled thinly. “I almost did. I wanted to. But I didn’t trust…”

“Me?”

“Yes. You’re a Mercator. Even if you’re not a very good one.”

“Do you think you ever could trust me?”

“I don’t know.” Naira tilted her head to the side, taking in the whole filthy, bedraggled lot of him. “I’d like to. But I’m telling you all of this so that you know where I stand, because what happens next—that’s up to you. It depends on what you’re going to do, after this is through.”

“I wish I could tell you,” he said, dropping his eyes. “But I haven’t decided yet. I need more information. I need to know what became of my mother on this world.”

She nodded slowly and stood, holding her hand down to him. “Then let’s go find out, Mercator.”

He gave her a small, sad smile. “I preferred it when you called me Rock-boy, Ex. Sharp.”

Naira blinked, feeling her cheeks color. The number of slips she’d made around him still baffled her. He took her hand, and she tugged him to his feet.

“I’m not an E-X anymore, so you’d better call me Naira, then.”

His smile widened. “Naira, then. But you’re wrong, you know.”

“Oh?”

“You’re still an exemplar.” He looked to the dead forest. “You’ve just changed what you’ve been guarding.”

FORTY-SEVEN

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Kav had already packed up what little there was of the camp when they returned, and had split the gear between two duffle bags. He chucked one at her and she snatched it out of the air, feeling the weight of equipment within. Not a lot, but a decent take for having gathered what he could from the mining site before he’d taken off.

“It’s good to have a loaded gun in my hands again,” she said.

“Don’t get spray-happy on me, that’s all we got,” Kav said. “We’re seriously short on rations, too. Hadn’t counted on a third mouth. So try not to starve to death on me again, yeah?”

“Yeah, yeah. We got a route?”

“I believe so.” Tarquin explained the path he’d devised from her notes and his knowledge of the local geography while she strapped her weapons back on. “From your count, I think we may be in some luck. It looks like their numbers are static. They’re not printing more.”

“You’re certain?” Naira asked.

“As much as I can be.”

“Now that is some genuinely good news,” Kav said.

“All we have to do is whittle them down.” She checked her rifle and carried it against her chest, ready for use. “We’re all in agreement on going for the printer, correct?”

“Aye, boss,” Kav said.

“Something must have been powering it,” Tarquin said, “and we have the time to be wrong, even if there isn’t a secondary shuttle. Paison expressed concern about taking off in rough weather due to low fuel supplies, and it looks as if rain will come the next few days.”

Naira wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like the sound of dealing with unstable ground again, but I’ll take the time it gives us.”

“We got more time than that.” Kav slung a duffle over his back and tightened his boots. “Paison won’t make the attempt without the Mercator, if she can help it. We gotta move light, and fast, because she’s going to be nipping at our heels.”

“Which is why you’ll be dropping back to cover our tracks and add misdirection, won’t you, Kav?” She clapped him on the shoulder.

He groaned. “So, so happy to have you back, Nai. Just, really overjoyed.”

“Missed you, too,” she said with a wink. “All right, less jawing, more walking. Let’s move, people.”

“Don’t get all HCA on me.” Kav fell into step beside her.

“You trained me.”

“My one regret in an otherwise perfect life.”

Naira frowned when she noted Tarquin walking behind them. “Up front, Rock-boy. I’m not your exemplar, but I’ve still got to keep an eye on your ass.”

Kav and Tarquin snickered. The combination might have been the most disturbing sound she’d encountered yet. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion as Tarquin jogged ahead of them, into his usual place, a touch of pink in his cheeks.

“What?” she demanded.

“I might have told the Mercator you had a bit of an eyes-up problem when tailing him.”

“You…” She looked up at the grey-streaked heavens, praying for a bolt to strike her down. “Kill me now.”

Tarquin glanced over his shoulder at her with an infuriatingly sly smile. “So it’s true? I’m heartened to hear you enjoyed the view, Exemplar.”

“I’m getting the sudden urge to knock your heads together,” she said.

“Come now, Naira, it’s perfectly—”

“Nope. No. Roll it back, Mercator,” Kav said. “She really will smash our heads together.”

“Oh.” His eyes widened and he faced front once more.

Naira blew out a breath, frustrated by the heat in her cheeks. Fucking Kav. He gripped her shoulder and gave her a friendly shake. She scowled at him.

“We’re going to have a very serious chat about boundaries later.”

“It’s cute when you get stabby.” He fluttered his eyelashes at her.

She rolled her eyes. “You’re desperate for punishment, aren’t you? Fine. Fall back and cover our tracks, HCA Ayuba.”

“Ugh, don’t call me that.” He swatted at her before dropping back to do as she’d asked.

They hiked for the rest of the day without incident, pausing once to rest and prepare shroud for consumption before pressing on. If Tarquin’s estimate was correct, they were in for three full days of hiking, and Naira wanted to push hard the first two days so that their final leg, into territory that might be misprint-infested, could be taken at a more careful pace.

When she finally called the halt, they were all dragging, her leg a constant throb of pain, and had to work together to get a tarp suspended between the trees, because Tarquin declared rain imminent.

Not daring to light a fire, they made a sullen group, huddled together under the tarp—large enough to cover all three of them in sleep, thankfully—and drank their shroud slurry in silence, getting their strength back. Naira stretched her sore leg out in front of her with a soft grunt, leaning against the trunk of one of the support trees, and tried to relax each muscle one by one.

Tarquin broke his singular ration bar for the night in half and handed one piece across to her.

“That’s unnecessary,” she said.

“We all know I’m the deadweight here.” Tarquin tried on a smile, but he’d clearly meant those words. “Take it. Please. You need the fuel.”

“You’re not deadweight,” she said, but still took the bar. “We’d be running into cliffs and ravines and whatever else, slowing us down, without you.”

“I’m glad to help.” He focused on his ration bar.

“Nai,” Kav said, “I know you don’t want to, but we gotta talk about what we’re going to do about Jonsun.”

“Hang on,” Tarquin said. “Jonsun Hesson? The Conservator leader? Don’t tell me he’s been one of the survivors this whole time.”

“He’s the one who called me from the Einkorn,” Naira said.

Tarquin tipped his head to the side, considering, then turned back to her with shocked eyes. “The cracked man?”

“Yes.”

“I had no idea. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Drop it,” she said, resenting his sympathy. She didn’t want to talk about this, didn’t want to weigh herself down with grief when there was so much yet to do, and so much riding on it all. Tarquin frowned but fell silent.

“How do you think it happened?” Kav asked.

“Acaelus clearly had his map. I was told to prep for insertion to Sixth Cradle in a simulation by Jonsun, and as far as I know, not even Mercator can fake putting a mind in a sim.”

“That’s true,” Tarquin said. “At least, to the best of my knowledge.”

“Right. So Acaelus has a copy of his map. Maybe he printed him to blame him, like he did me. Maybe he and Meti rubbed their two brain cells together and got the bright idea to double-print him to see if he could tell them what was happening on the Einkorn. Maybe the AI double-printed him. I don’t know. The how of it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I get on that ship, find him, and put him out of his misery if he’s still alive.”

“It matters,” Kav said, “because if he did it to Jonsun, he might do it to you.”

Naira closed her eyes. “I know. But I don’t think he will. As much as I disparage him, Acaelus isn’t that shortsighted. He has other plans for me, Kav. Cracking me won’t accomplish those goals.”

“What other plans?” Tarquin asked.

“My map’s resiliency,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “All the E-Xs have high resistance to cracking, but he commented on mine often and, before he put me under for the ice, he… He said he was looking forward to finding out why it’s so resilient. He won’t crack me until he has that answer.”

“I will not allow him to harm you,” Tarquin said, voice rough.

She grunted. “You’re a bit late for that. I appreciate the sentiment, but this is Acaelus we’re talking about. He does what he likes. But he won’t crack me, not while I’m here, at least.”

“And after? Once you’re out?” Kav pressed.

“What do you want me to say? The answer’s always I don’t know. Whatever he does with me, I can’t stop him. I’m his property, Kav. Have been since the day I signed.”

“Oh, fuck him,” Kav said. “Look, I’m not bringing this up to needle you, but when you walked on him, you deleted all your backups in Mercator systems to protect against this, and I doubt your E-X credentials will let you pull the same stunt again, so I… Okay, when the HC issued the deletion virus tagged to your map, the one that destroyed all copies not iced behind Mercator keys, I might have, uh, copied it.”

“You saved a virus designed to destroy all copies of my map on any connected system, which is damn near every system?”

“Yes?”

“Fucking hell.” She rubbed her forehead. “Nice to know you have my Damocles’s sword, Kav. Just, so comforting.”

“I’d never use it against you. Give me a little credit. I snagged it so that, if I got you out, I could insert it into Mercator’s systems. It could work.”

“Those things jump to anything with a net connection, including prints.”

“So we yank your connectivity pathways before I push it through,” he said.

“That’s… not bad, actually. But how are you going to get it into Mercator?”

Kav looked pointedly at Tarquin.

“No,” Naira said. “He’s no spy, and he hasn’t decided where he stands with his family. You can’t ask this of him.”

“I’ll do it,” Tarquin said.

“You don’t even know what you’re agreeing to,” Naira said. “Deploying an unauthorized deletion virus is grounds for being iced. If you’re caught, and you’re likely to be caught because, again, you’re not a spy, Acaelus will have no choice but to punish you publicly by throwing you to the HC for prosecution.”

“I’m not a fucking child,” he said, surprising her with the strength of his irritation. “I know what I’m agreeing to. If I’m caught, so be it, but I won’t allow my father to—to do that to you. If he throws me to the courts, then I will explain to them precisely why I felt compelled to deploy such a virus.”

Kav whistled low. “You’re talking about pulling a Nai there, Mercator. I mean, I was going to coach you in getting it in the system quietly, but, if you’ve decided you want to do a splashy walkout, I won’t stop you.”

“I haven’t decided anything,” he said, “except that I won’t allow my father to experiment upon another mind against their will. Transmit me the virus, please, Mr. Ayuba.”

“No way.” Naira shook her head. “You get that virus if you decide to walk on Mercator, but not a second sooner.”

He drew his head back, hurt in his eyes. “After all of this, you still believe I’d be capable of using such a thing against you?”

“I want to believe you’re not,” she said, “but I’ve been burned too many times by Mercators.”

He flattened his lips and looked away. “Very well. If you decide I’m not trustworthy enough to deploy the virus, then I will have to make do some other way.”

“Tarquin…” She sighed raggedly. “It’s not personal.”

“I’m aware. It never can be for me, can it? I am, and always will be, an extension of Mercator’s will.”

“That’s up to you,” she said.

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Forgive me, I need rest.”

“I…” Naira trailed off when he lay down and tugged his jacket snugly around himself.

She tipped her head back, thumping it against the tree, and stifled a curse.

Tarquin was watching what he thought he knew about his father dissolve out from underneath him, and she’d gone and treated him like an idiot. He may be naive about some things, but his family and how the law intersected with them wasn’t one of those.

Kav shouldered her, eyebrows raised in question as he picked up their bedrolls. She took one and laid it over Tarquin in silent apology, then crawled in alongside Kav to share with him, settling down on the soft litterfall. Between them, their body heat was enough to make up for the scant cover.

Naira was a long time in falling asleep, the rain pattering down well after both of the men were out. She wondered why she felt so restless, even with Kav’s arm hooked around her.

FORTY-EIGHT

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Packing up the small camp the next morning was subdued and brusque, all three of them swallowing shroud as quickly as possible to get back on the move. Tarquin missed the banter between Naira and Kav, even though he scarcely understood them half the time, but was too mortified by his behavior the previous night to break the brittle silence.

It’d been the casual nature with which they discussed Acaelus’s atrocities that’d broken his hope his father might be redeemed. The way they’d bandied those ideas back and forth with an almost bored air had shaken him to the core. Of course Acaelus would double-print someone in revenge. Of course Naira would be tortured if she was iced again. Those things, presented as foregone conclusions, the actions of a man who Tarquin knew very differently… He’d wanted to scream.

When Kav had laid out the choice before him—leave his family, or remain and be complicit in its crimes—Tarquin had thought it an impossible choice to make. He’d held out secret hope that he could talk to his father and sister. Make them see reason.

But Acaelus had never taken Tarquin’s concerns about how the family was run seriously. He’d always brushed him off—Leave it to me, son. Don’t worry about that, it’s under control. You’d understand, if you had to lead this family. Approaching Leka might work, but if she’d been aware, she was unlikely to take action simply because Tarquin had suddenly grown a backbone. She’d probably find his complaints amusing.

There was no reasonable middle ground to be found with a man who believed it was acceptable to break people for his own ends, no matter if that man was his father.

Waking up with Naira’s bedroll tucked over him, and seeing those two crammed together in Kav’s, had been salt in the wound of his pride. It took half the day for him to work through his thoughts, but when Kav drifted back to cover their tracks after their brief midday stop to rest, Tarquin matched his pace to Naira’s, despite her grunt of annoyance at him falling back to her side, and steeled himself to broach the subject.

“Were you warm enough last night?” he asked.

“Yes. Kav’s a heater, with all that bulk. You can keep the bedroll. We’re used to tight quarters.” Clipped. Perfunctory. He sighed.

“I didn’t mean to… I’m sorry. I insisted I wasn’t a child and then I sulked like one.”

She glanced sideways at him. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have spoken down to you like that, and Kav and I, we’re used to talking about Acaelus’s many crimes. It’s easy for me to forget that this must be painful for you. I wasn’t around when you took off to Jov-U, but I heard the way he talked about you. ‘Leave Tarquin out of this’ was something he said often enough to Leka.”

“God.” Tarquin rubbed the side of his face. “Eight years at his side. It hadn’t quite occurred to me before that you would have heard everything he thought of me.”

“I don’t know what it was like when you first left,” she said, “but by the time I was hired, for what it’s worth, I believe he was proud of you. He certainly bragged about you every chance he got, and while he clearly wanted you to come home, he made a point of attending your graduations. Which were a security nightmare, by the way.”

Acaelus, proud of him? Tarquin had always wanted that, and it should have filled him with warmth, but now… He didn’t want the pride of a man who’d crack people for disobeying him. What did it mean for a monster to love you? He shook his head, struggling not to get tangled up in his feelings about his father.

“You came to my graduations?” he asked instead, veering away from talking about Acaelus.

“Two of them.” She glanced at him again, but this time with a sly smile. “You gave a speech both times.”

“What did you think?”

“I’m afraid I wasn’t able to pay much attention. Lee and I were scrambling both times to deal with snipers in the crowd. Like I said—security nightmare.”

“Ah.” He frowned, deflated. “Hang on, who’s Lee? Acaelus’s other E-X at the time was…” His nose scrunched. He could recall the woman’s face but not her name.

“Tasha Beck, my second partner while serving Acaelus. She cracked my seventh year, and Kearns took over her post. Lee is your own E-X. You know, the one you’ve had most of your life? You probably call him Caldweller. We exemplars were so jealous of his post. The benefit package of guarding someone in the direct line without the high threat rate? Cushy.”

“Caldweller, of course, I should have known that. I’m not used to hearing his first name.”

“You wouldn’t be.” Naira shrugged, as if it was perfectly acceptable for Tarquin to forget the first name of the man who’d been guarding him since he was sixteen. “When we’re doing our jobs properly, we’re background noise. Forgettable. We only intrude when there’s an active threat.”

“Still,” Tarquin said slowly, gathering his courage, “I can’t imagine how I missed realizing you were there. You’re hardly forgettable. You’re stunning.”

Naira nearly missed a step, but recovered smoothly, and he grinned to himself, satisfied that he could invoke such a reaction in her.

“This isn’t even my real face,” she said, making an acute study of the trees.

“I know your real face well. Do you have any idea how often I watched the trial footage?” He paused, waiting to see if she’d interject, but she tilted her head to the side, curious. He rallied himself. “All this time, whenever your mask slipped. When you’d laugh or rage or smolder for want of screaming, the real you emerged, impossible to ignore. I didn’t know what I was looking at, then. Only that I wanted to see it more often. Now I know. And I see the real you in every muscle. A face is more than its shape, Naira, and when you rise from within, you’re stunning.”

“Careful,” she said, as he savored the blush rushing up her neck and burning in her cheeks. “My leg’s already weak. Don’t take out my knees, too.”

“Then I’d get to carry you again.”

She grunted softly and cracked her neck to one side, then the other. “I’m trying to be circumspect here, Rock-boy, because this”—she gestured between them—“would ruin your life. You’re making it very difficult at the moment.”

“Naira…” He took a breath. “I left Mercator Station for Jov-U because I knew my father was capable of cruelty, and I didn’t want to see it. While I never realized the extent of the problem, that was… cowardly of me, and I’d like to begin correcting that mistake.”

She didn’t stop walking, but she faced him fully. “Don’t do this because of me.”

“I’m not. At least, not in the way you mean. What you’ve told me, it makes me ill to think about, but I can’t deny it. Regardless of what his involvement is with shroud, I won’t be a part of anything—even my own family—that engages in torture for research purposes, let alone for revenge, or…‘training.’

“And truly, let’s be honest. If they caught me with that deletion virus and my father didn’t want to hand me to the HC, he simply wouldn’t. The laws don’t apply to my family. He can do what he likes—the only thing he fears is an inter-MERIT war. That he put you to trial when he could have quietly iced or finalized you was…” Tarquin looked away. “To humiliate you. To have your accusations trotted out and neatly destroyed in a public theater. I’m ashamed that I participated in that.”

“I didn’t have proof. I still don’t. But thank you, for acknowledging what that trial was really about.”

“You’ll think me naive, but I thought that if I could get on a mining expedition and see it all for myself, that I’d find out where the shroud really came from and bring the truth screaming back. That I’d exonerate my family, like some kind of hero. I just… I knew you believed in your testimony, and I wanted to know the truth. Even if it meant Mercator was at fault, though I could scarcely believe such a thing at the time.”

“I figured that out,” she said. “Which is why I walked out to that boulder to have a small breakdown. Because Tarquin Mercator shouldn’t be allowed to be clever, sweet, handsome, and have a seditious streak, while simultaneously destroying me by putting me back under Acaelus’s power.”

Tarquin was both flattered and disgusted by her description of him, and unsure exactly where that put him in her estimation. “I won’t allow that to stand. I will get you off ice.”

“Tarquin, I respect you a great deal, and I’m not trying to undermine something you’ve clearly thought a lot about, but Kav and I are Acaelus’s enemies. You have no idea if we’re telling you the truth. Find out who your father is for yourself. Then decide.”

“You can’t protect me from everything, Exemplar,” he said, gently chiding. “Don’t forget, I’m here because I believed you in the first place.”

“Yes,” she said dryly, and flicked a lichen-crusted branch. “That’s worked out so well for you.”

“It’s had its ups and downs,” he said.

She laughed, shaking her head. “This planet has driven you to madness.”

“Maybe it’s you,” he said.

“Maybe you’re—” She stilled, cocking her head to the side as she pressed a finger to her lips. Tarquin quieted, scanning the trees. They were near the edge of the third leg, the misprint-infested zone, and the way her pupils constricted and expanded unnaturally let him know she was searching the surrounding woods.

He wished he had a weapon, but they hadn’t given him one, and he couldn’t blame them. Bullets had to be conserved, and those two were far better shots than he could ever hope to be. Naira motioned for him to get behind her as she crept a few steps back the way they’d come. He activated his agility pathways to do so silently.

She whistled, a quick trilling sound. Kav answered with two short bursts. That, apparently, wasn’t the answer she’d wanted. She responded with a single burst and gestured for Tarquin to move backward as she started backpedaling, slowly.

Kav came around the bend, backing toward them, his rifle pointed up into the trees. Naira adjusted her aim, scanning the canopy. The urge to ask what was happening bubbled up in him, but Tarquin pushed it down. They were working hard to be quiet, and he did his best to stifle his rising panic. The trees were empty to his eyes. Why couldn’t he see what they saw?

Kav pointed to the east and slashed the flat of his hand through the air in an arc. Naira jerked her head aside, clearly stifling a curse, and turned back to Tarquin, stepping close enough to whisper.

“We’re being flanked from the east by misprints. They’re cutting off our path forward. Can you adjust the route on the fly?”

He nodded, not trusting his voice.

“Then do it.” She lifted her eyes to meet his. “And Tarquin, run. We’re right behind you.”

He hesitated, not knowing why, every muscle screaming at him to move, but stuck, staring down at her, searching her face for… He didn’t know what. She’d kept him alive this whole time. He trusted her. Something within him wanted more in that moment, and he couldn’t even say what that meant.

She smiled at him, trying to be reassuring, but the tension at the corners of her eyes gave her away, and he broke free of his own turmoil at last, turned on his heel, and fled.

When the grey arms started reaching for him through the trees, he wasn’t surprised, and it was all he could do to push on through that hellscape, while Naira’s and Kav’s rifles roared behind him, clearing the way.

FORTY-NINE

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira poured every scrap of skill she had into picking off the misprints as they dangled from the trees in Tarquin’s path. Twenty. Kav had counted at least twenty looping around to get ahead of them, and who the hell knew how many had inserted themselves in the trees, trying to slow them down, push them into that wave of death.

Tarquin stumbled. She held her breath, but he righted himself, twisting away from a clawed hand reaching for him, and charged on, confident the two soldiers behind him had him covered. Naira picked off that misprint and wished she was as confident as he seemed to be.

“Tarquin!” she called out. “Play that recording!”

He didn’t answer—probably conserving his breath—but a holo sprang from his inner arm and started the recording that had frightened off the misprints at the creek. Nothing happened. The misprints didn’t even seem to notice. Tarquin cranked up the volume.

Still nothing.

“Turn it off,” she called out, and he did so. There was no point in listening to that if it didn’t scare the things off anymore.

“These are HCA ambush tactics,” Kav said, now that the need for silence was broken.

“I know, I know.” She fired twice in quick succession. Reloaded. “How many have you shot?”

“Four,” he panted.

“Twenty moving in for the cutoff, your four and my seven down, puts us at thirty-one of the approximately—”

“I don’t mean to interrupt morbid math time, Nai, but if we get hammered by any more than ten, we’re not taking them down.”

“If we could—shit.” She dodged as a misprint burst from between the trees, lunging at her, and brought the butt of her rifle down, cracking the thing’s skull. Kav swung around and picked off one that’d been right behind it, then grabbed her by the back of the jacket and shoved her forward to keep her moving.

“They’re coordinated. How the fuck are they coordinated?” She shot down another that’d been reaching for Tarquin.

“Why don’t you take one to tea and ask it?”

“C’mon, Kav, if there’s a leader, find it and shoot it.”

“Yeah, yeah. How do you think they show rank? The one with the biggest eyehole is top dog?” They shot the same one and winced. A waste of bullets. Naira motioned to the right, and Kav nodded. She’d cover the right, he’d cover the left. Center forward and back were for whoever saw them first.

She lost track of time, sinking into the rhythm of working with Kav, of keeping Tarquin’s path clear. Her leg dragged, but she marched on. The initial assault from the trees had thinned, but there was still that wave of twenty arcing toward them to cut them off.

Tarquin skidded to a halt, bracing a hand against a tree, and bent over, panting.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she shouted at his back. “Run!”

She caught up with him and slid to a stop herself. The ground had lifted in violent upheaval, a craggy, broken-toothed wall of brown stone spearing into the sky right in front of them, and as far as she could see to the left and right.

“I was going to take us through a smoother pass,” Tarquin said, pointing down the ridge, then turned and pointed up to a narrow slot through two peaks in the ridgeline. “I really hope you two can rock climb, because this way is dangerous as hell, but I don’t think the misprints can follow us. At the very least, they’ll have to come at us one at a time.”

“That’s brilliant,” Naira said.

“Except for the part where we can’t rock climb,” Kav said.

“We’ll learn. Go ahead, Rock-boy, show us the path.”

He hesitated. “Double-check every hand- or foothold before you put weight on it, all right?”

“We got it,” Naira said.

Tarquin turned to the rock and felt along the surface for a moment before pulling himself up. Naira fell back a few steps with Kav, giving him space, and watched in growing fascination as he worked his way up.

“You think he might be part spider?” Kav asked.

“Who knows what Acaelus gets up to in that private lab of his.”

Kav snorted. “You sure we can do this?”

“If an E-X and HCA print can’t keep up, maybe we deserve to get chewed on.”

“If you say so,” Kav said hesitantly.

She couldn’t give him a hard time about being nervous. A trickle of sweat had appeared between her shoulder blades just from watching. Tarquin sidled out onto a narrow ledge and turned to look down at them.

“It’s mostly stable. You should be fine if you—Kav!”

Naira spun, bringing up her rifle, but the misprint crashed into him anyway. Kav slipped, his feet going out from under him. The misprint rode his chest to the ground. A sickening crack broke the air as he hit, and Naira’s heart lurched.

The misprint snarled, biting at his throat. Kav swore—a good sign—but he’d dropped his rifle and shoved at the thing’s face with both hands. Naira kicked it in the ribs with all her strength and it folded around her boot, yanked off Kav with a wet crunch as its teeth ripped free of his neck. It hit the ground a few yards away, and Naira put a bullet in it before she dropped to her knees beside him.

“Shit.” She pressed her hands over the ragged wound on the side of his neck. “How bad?”

He grimaced, tried to push himself up, but fell back against the ground with a groan. “I think I’m fucked, Nai.”

“What?” She peeled her hands away from his neck and checked the wound. There wasn’t nearly enough blood for the misprint to have hit an artery. She heard Tarquin scrambling down the rock face but didn’t bother to look. “You’re not bleeding out.”

“It’s not the neck.” He was breathing hard, skin sweat-soaked and fever-hot, when he’d been cooling off from their run moments before. “I think I broke my spine. Can’t feel a damn thing from the waist down.”

She looked up from the wound to his eyes, and at the terrible resignation there, the world ripped out from under her. An HCA print wasn’t healing that, not quickly, and there was no way she could carry him up that climb.

“No. No.”

He grunted. “Nai, that misprint wave is minutes out.” He tugged the suicide shot out of his jacket pocket and took her hands, blood slick, pressing them together between his and around the bullet. “Stop wasting time. Put a bullet in me so I have a chance of printing up sane on the other side.”

“I can’t do this without you.”

“Bullshit.” His hands fell away from hers.

Naira pocketed the bullet and took his face in both of her hands, making him look at her. “I hauled your ass across half this planet so you could live. Don’t let me down.”

“Bossy,” he murmured, eyes drifting shut.

She had to do this soon. Naira pulled his head close and pressed a kiss against his forehead, smoothing out his hair. “Stay awake.”

“Yeah, yeah, you always were such a fucking mom.”

She barked a short, bitter laugh and bumped his forehead, gently, with her own.

He smirked, got a little life back in his eyes. “You ever think that the entanglement—that it doesn’t have to be all bad? That our maps can remember good things, too? Nice emotions. Not just the dying.”

“I don’t know,” she said, voice thick. “It’s never been kind to me.”

“Nor me,” he said. “But I’d like, just this fucking once, to wake up and know… And know I got to see you.”

“You’ll know because I’ll be buying you drinks.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” Kav fixed his eyes on Tarquin. “You. You get her out, understand?”

“I will,” Tarquin said shakily.

“See you on the other side, Nai.”

“On the other side.” She squeezed the back of his neck and stepped away, drawing her pistol. Her arm shook. She couldn’t miss. Not for Kav.

“It’s okay,” he said, tears brimming. “I’m dying happy, Nai. I got to see you again.”

Naira dug deep. Accessed the place from which she’d served Acaelus, the molten core from which she took hits and kept moving, because that’s what she was. That’s what she was for. Her breath evened. Her aim steadied.

She fired.

The entry wound was neat. Precise. A single red hole gaping in Kav’s forehead, his eyes blank, half-open, as the tears that had been building slid out of them at last. The vise in her chest grew so tight she was suffocating in it, burying everything she felt beneath an avalanche of purpose. Get out. She had to get home. For him.

“Take his gear,” she ordered Tarquin.

“Naira…” He approached her warily from the side. She couldn’t look at him without breaking.

“Take. His. Gear.”

“All right,” he said gently, and that gentleness was going to drive her over the edge.

Gritting her teeth, she knelt to help him. He didn’t know what was important, or where Kav had stashed everything. Even with his strength pathways, Tarquin couldn’t carry much compared to her. She always had to carry everything alone.

When it was done, she closed Kav’s eyes and lit his body on fire. It was just a print, but she’d be damned if she was going to leave it for the misprints to gnaw on. Tarquin worked in silence, reacting to her mood, and they scrambled up the cliff, Naira using her superior strength pathways to shove her fingers into handholds that would have failed, otherwise, even if it ripped her nails off and peeled the skin of her fingertips back.

She’d heal. Or she wouldn’t. She found it hard to care either way.

From the top of the ridge, she could make out the unnatural grey curve of a Mercator shuttle in the distance. Tarquin noticed it, too. There was no joy in her. No celebration. She dropped her duffle on the ground and unslung her rifle, settling onto her stomach to sight down the path they’d come up.

Tarquin sat beside her, and she couldn’t tell if the fear in him was of her or for her. It didn’t matter. When the wave of misprints arrived, drawn by the fire, she picked them off one by one by the light of Kav’s pyre and only stopped when the count matched their estimates.

She tucked away her gear, picked up Kav’s duffle, and looked at Tarquin. “Find us shelter.”

He nodded, as if he’d been expecting the statement. “This way.”

She threw the suicide shot into the woods before following him down the other side of the ridge. Kav should have listened. Those cursed things had never been lucky. Not for her.

FIFTY

Jonsun

The Einkorn

Jonsun thought he spent most of his time sleeping, but he wasn’t sure, couldn’t be sure of anything, not now, not after he’d cracked. Dreams and reality were one and the same, secret whispers plunked in his ears like stones in a wishing well when his eyes were closed, imploring him to act.

A vestige of himself, the voice of the real Jonsun Hesson reached up from the buried place in his mind where the tiny core/lump/nugget/seed of himself clung on, keeping him sane long enough to do things like eat and drink and talk and make plans.

All those things were getting harder, but that meant they were more important. He’d gotten a message through to Naira, had told her—told her what? Shit, he couldn’t remember anymore, but he knew it’d been important because why else would he have gone to all the trouble to get the ship’s comm line open again, though it had been closed off right away and he didn’t know why.

Maybe the ship was mad at him. It watched him more and more as the days—hours/weeks/months/years—dragged on, grey eyes shining moon-bright in the dark.

He’d told Naira about the faces, hadn’t he? He was sure. He’d had to tell her about the faces, about canus, about the end of all things. Jonsun pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes and blinked away spiderwebs of thought. Time had slipped away from him, lost meaning, but he knew in his bones that this was taking too long. That this ship should have been fire and death and then nothing a long time ago and if it wasn’t soon it would leave and then it’d be well and truly over because—because what?

Because it was learning. Not the ship, not the Einkorn, though surely it was getting something out of this new symbiosis, too, but canus. The consumer, the ender, the hunger that reached and reached and never stopped because that’s what it was, that was all it knew to do, and learning anything at all only taught it new ways to devour.

Strange that his dreams didn’t realize that. His dreams told him to wait and encouraged him to fix when what he needed to do was break. He’d found a safe spot to sleep near the ansible, away from the chatter of the colony talking with itself, talking with the Einkorn in that stilted repetition that had replaced their rhythmic shrieks. More often than not he broke out of his half daze to find a wrench in his hand and a panel open and his scratched-up fingers muddling through the circuits, trying to convince the ship to open its ansible. To call home.

But Jonsun didn’t want it to. Because it wouldn’t be him or the Einkorn calling home, it’d be the canus colony, and the colony would tell humanity the ship was safe, when it wasn’t, but Jonsun couldn’t always remember why.

The wrench was in his hand again, the panels open, the wires bright with fresh wrappings of electrical tape, and he brought the wrench down like a hammer, slammed it into the wiring over and over and over again until blue-tinged smoke whispered from between the circuits, and he just kept hammering more.

FIFTY-ONE

Acaelus

Mercator Station

That’s enough,” Acaelus said, making a cutting gesture with the side of his hand to Dr. Laurent. “Break the connection. We’re only agitating him.”

Laurent powered down the crown of electrodes on Jonsun’s head, taking away the whispers in his thoughts before she plunged the sedative, sending that print back to rest, leaving Jonsun alone in his head, as much as he ever could be after cracking.

“That’s it?” Leka circled the gurney with her arms crossed. “A double-print is the only eyes you have on the situation, and now he’s bashing the ansible to pieces instead of repairing it? What good is this?”

Acaelus examined Jonsun’s twitching eyelids. “We had quite a few early successes with him. He saw Lockhart on the shuttle and later contacted her on-planet. That’s enough for me to believe that Tarquin is alive. We cannot print him until we are assured of map transfer or unplanned print death. With Chiyo’s excision software, arranging an unplanned print death seems more and more viable.”

Leka stopped her slow circle of the gurney and looked up at him from under hooded eyes. “You mean to execute him?”

“I am considering the option. Death by bombardment would be more viable for reprinting than death by any of the other means that may occur on that planet. Starvation, an injury that cannot be treated, or treachery are far worse deaths. If we want him back uncracked, this may be our best option. Progress with Jonsun has stalled and our ships are seven months out. Tarquin cannot wait that long for an ansible to arrive.”

“I concur with that assessment,” Dr. Laurent said. “Chances of long-term survival on a shrouded planet without proper resources are slim.”

“What about the shuttle’s comms?” Leka pressed.

“They didn’t take the family shuttle, so their comms are routed through the Amaranth and Einkorn ansibles. But there may be a more important reason to crash the Einkorn into the planet. We recovered this footage from Jonsun’s visual cortex, in the brief moments before he attacked the ansible we had just convinced him to repair.”

It was only a few seconds long, a clipped loop of grey, blank faces tilting as they watched a panicked Jonsun, his breathing labored and gasping. Indistinct, grey patches pocked their bodies, misshapen fingers reaching for Jonsun. Not aggressively. Almost in welcome. In the split second before the footage ended, Jonsun looked down, and though it was impossible to be certain, there appeared to be a patch of shroud growing across the back of his hand, the skin around it red with inflammation. Leka gasped softly.

“The shroud has made the jump to human hosts,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “If this gets out, it will spark a fresh wave of panic that will be, rightfully, blamed on us. Destruction of the Einkorn appears the best course of action.”

“But we’ve lost control. How are you going to crash the Einkorn?”

He had hoped that if things went wrong on Sixth Cradle, printing Naira Sharp would be his final play. Had counted on her anger and desperation to make of her an unstoppable force, and both ships would be atoms long before any of the other MERIT families got curious enough to start poking around.

It didn’t matter that she had, once again, thwarted him. What mattered was that his son was trapped there, stranded on that choking world, while the ruin of them all orbited above.

Acaelus had one last move. He gestured to the sleeping Jonsun. “That anger we witnessed today, we can harness that. The Einkorn can be destroyed from within. We need only to teach Jonsun how to do so.”

“And if he fails?” Leka asked.

“Then we maintain the cordon until our ships get there and destroy it. That variant of the shroud cannot be allowed to spread. That is the end of us all.”

His hands shook. He couldn’t control them, a stinging vibration rolling through his pathways that made him cringe with pain. Leka took his hands in hers and squeezed, giving him a sad smile. The pain eased.

“You have to be hale to fight this battle, Dad. Please. It’s time to reprint.”

Dr. Laurent fumbled a device onto a tray with a clang. Acaelus ignored the doctor’s clumsiness and squeezed his daughter’s hands back.

“You’re right. It’s time.”

FIFTY-TWO

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Tarquin fell into step alongside Naira, and she didn’t complain about him being out of the usual formation. They walked in silence, and in the corner of his eye he watched her hands twitch toward the firearms strapped to her belt and thigh, watched her trace the grip of her knife with the edge of her thumb, and didn’t know what to do for her.

Apologies wouldn’t help. Wouldn’t mean anything. He could promise her the whole world. He had the resources. Swear that if they made it out of this, he’d pull every lever in the universe to make sure Kav got reprinted, his phoenix fees paid and his neural map examined by the best mappers money could buy.

But if Kav had cracked, he’d cracked, and there was nothing to be done.

He thought of Kav, slumped against the ground, his skull and brain matter painting the sandstone, and hoped it’d been quick enough. That the entanglement hadn’t latched on to that final moment of suffering.

The speed at which Naira had shut down unsettled him. He’d watched as she’d shuttered herself, raising that pistol. Observed with horrified fascination as her body language shifted, and once more she was the edifice of efficiency he’d first met her as. There wasn’t a woman in that print, not anymore. She’d leashed herself so tightly that everything about her had become mechanical.

Notice threat. Analyze. React. Adjust. Repeat. That’s all she’d let herself do, and he had a feeling that if he wasn’t with her, she would have abandoned the second shuttle altogether and gone out into those woods, bathing herself in blood until every single misprint was dead.

But she’d made Kav a promise, and so had he. Tarquin would get her out. He’d keep pushing her toward that shuttle, toward freedom. Even if, now, he could almost convince himself someone had snuck another mind into that print when he wasn’t looking.

“Here,” he said, when they’d been walking half the night and finally reached the rock shelter he knew would be there. It wasn’t a cave, but the depression in the stone was enough to protect them from the rain for the night without taking on standing water.

Naira dropped her gear, ate in silence, rolled out Kav’s bedroll, and went to sleep, her back to him, facing the wall of stone. She hadn’t even ordered him to keep a lookout, or made certain he’d mixed enough shroud and refilled their canteens, or explained her plan for the next day, or any of the other little things he’d grown used to in such a short time.

Tarquin sighed, leaning against the side of the outcropping as he listened to the rain come down. Kav would, more than likely, be fine. As much as Tarquin feared cracking for himself, he understood that wasn’t what this was about.

She’d gotten to reunite with her brother-in-arms, and now there was no guarantee that they’d ever get to see each other again. Tarquin recalled the night he’d seen them embrace and knew he’d been right. Those two loved each other, just not in the way that had first awakened Tarquin’s nascent sense of jealousy. She’d told him it hurt whenever she had to kill someone, and he tried to imagine how much harder it would be if you loved the person.

He sipped water to chase away the taste of shroud lingering in his mouth. Glimpsing the shuttle from the top of the ridge must have made it all so much worse. They’d been so close to getting out together.

There was nothing he could do for her, aside from getting her back home. While the shuttle was within reach, the thought of confronting his father shadowed that hope of deliverance. Tarquin frowned. It used to chill him to the bone to consider challenging Acaelus, but now a slow kindle of fury smoldered within him.

Acaelus had caused this. He’d used Naira like a chess piece and hadn’t cared for the consequences. Had done so since the day he’d hired her. Tarquin knew, intellectually, that all those terrible things Naira and Kav had described were true, and that they were abhorrent. But this… This was visceral.

For the first time in Tarquin’s life, Acaelus had hurt someone he cared about.

Tarquin finished off his water and set the canteen aside. He wished his feelings could be more noble—that he could summon the same depth of anger over the atrocities Acaelus had committed against those he didn’t know, against all the threats yet on the horizon—but Naira lying there, hollowed out with suffering, galvanized him so quickly against his father that it took his breath away.

He grabbed his bedroll and lay down beside her, fully under the overhang, and laced his hands behind his head, thinking. Amarthite had to be mined and used to replace relkatite, and that he could help with. But stopping his father from abusing those beneath him was such a massive undertaking as to be dizzying.

Slowly, he realized he wasn’t listening to the rain alone anymore. Tarquin tensed, fearing the soft rustling he heard was another ambush, but it was only Naira. She’d shifted in her sleep, curling up tighter, her breathing hitching as her shoulders rounded.

Naira wasn’t asleep. She was crying.

“Naira?” he asked softly, rolling to his side to face her back.

She ignored him, as she’d ignored all his overtures since Kav’s loss. A lifetime of rules bound Tarquin’s interactions, urged him to leave her be, to constrain his desire to reach out to her. But he remembered her hand reaching for anyone at all in her sleep, Kav’s assertions that she didn’t sleep well alone, and what Kav had said, when she’d been dying on that cliff: Pissing her off is one way to rally her.

He reached out, hesitant, and stroked her arm in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. She went rigid.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Well, she’d certainly rallied. He propped himself up on one arm as she rolled over to face him, bloodshot eyes narrowed, her cheeks shining with tears.

“You’re not alone,” he said. “Let me help, please.”

“You can’t help.”

“Then let me be here for you?”

He lifted his arm, opening it in a half hug, and she eyed him warily for a long moment before a shuddering sigh eased out of her. Naira let herself lean against him and buried her face in his chest. The tears started up again, but this time he wrapped his arm around her, hugging her close, and stroked her back.

“I’m here,” he murmured, bowing his head over her. “I’m with you every step of the way, even if I am deadweight.”

That got a short, bitter laugh out of her. He hugged her tighter, resisting an urge to press his lips to the top of her head. Slowly, she relaxed. He wished he could hide her from all who meant to harm her in the shelter of his arms, but he was just a scholar. He was no defender. All he could do was offer her this comfort, for a little while.

“Rest,” he said against her hair.

“Tarquin—”

“Just rest, please? For me?”

She huffed and nestled against him, looping her arm around his waist with a contented hum as she let her forehead settle on his chest. That soft hum, buzzing against his skin, ignited a surge of desire. He held his breath as he tried to think about anything else aside from the way she fit perfectly against him, and prayed she hadn’t noticed his sudden, acute, interest.

“Tarquin?”

Fuck.

“Yes?” His voice was far more strained than he would have liked.

“Nice to know you enjoy the view, my liege.”

“Oh, goddamnit,” he muttered. “Would you please go to sleep so I can die of mortification in peace?”

“You started it.” She chuckled, infuriatingly self-satisfied, and tipped her chin down to yawn. “Thank you,” she said, without the laughter.

He squeezed her gently in acknowledgment and rested his chin on top of her head as she calmed at last. Embarrassment aside, she’d surfaced from her self-imposed cage to tease him, and he found himself smiling broadly into the night. He couldn’t fight to defend her, but he could support her in other ways.

It startled him to realize how strongly he wanted that.

FIFTY-THREE

Naira

Sixth Cradle

They packed up the camp the next morning in silence, but a companionable one. An ache still filled Naira’s heart, knowing that Kav would forget they’d had this time together on Sixth Cradle. He’d mock her for being rattled over the fact, but even with that shuttle so close, she couldn’t shake the phantom weight of Acaelus’s hand around her neck.

Naira couldn’t quite make herself believe she was getting away from him, even if she got off the planet. Kav would have kicked her out of her morose mood, but Kav wasn’t here anymore, and dread weighed heavily on her.

“Tarquin.” She shouldered the duffle she’d packed with the combined weight of her gear and Kav’s. “I need you to do me a favor.”

“What is it?” He looked up from securing his smaller pack, but she kept her head down, the hood she’d drawn up against the rain obscuring her view.

“The Conservators,” she started, then hesitated. This wasn’t information she should reveal to a Mercator, of all people, whether or not she trusted him, but there was no one else to tell. “We have reprint conditions when we ship for missions like this. There’s a lot of reasons we might not come back right away, so we pick a date. Usually it’s double the time it takes to get wherever we’ve gone, and on that date, if the others haven’t heard from us or gotten word some other way, they print us. For Sixth Cradle, that’d be sixteen months.”

“What happens if the date arrives, but you’re still alive out there?” Tarquin asked.

“It hasn’t happened yet, but we’d do everything we could to kill ourselves to avoid double-printing. If something happens to me, and I don’t make it out—”

“You’re getting out,” he said.

“Let me finish. If I don’t make it out, I need you to use the number I’m about to give you and call Jessel Hesson. Do you know who that is?”

“I don’t,” he admitted. “A relation of Jonsun?”

“His sibling. They run the cuddlier branch of the Conservators, the unionists. Jessel handles politics, we handle bombs. They used to ship out with us on smaller hits, but stopped when we started going for the mining fleets so we’d have someone home to pull the reprint trigger. This is a secure emergency line. It will only work once, so make sure you have the time to talk to them. Tell them what happened to Jonsun, and tell them Kav’s gone, it’s safe to reprint him. I don’t want him shelved for sixteen months. And tell them he got to see me, okay?”

“You’re going to make that call yourself.”

She rubbed her eyes. “Just promise me, all right? If you do nothing else for me on the other side of this, promise me that.”

“You have my word,” he said.

“Thank you. Let’s get moving. This rain is going to slow us down and I don’t like that those misprints were organized.”

Tarquin walked beside her, and she didn’t have it in her to complain about him being in a less defensible position. There were fewer misprints out there now, and with the constant rain greying the world, she enjoyed having him close, his presence a solid reassurance.

The terrain grew rough, slowing them down. Tarquin eventually sent Pliny out to survey the path ahead, and whatever the bot brought back, it made him frown every time. After two hours of trudging, Tarquin lagged.

She called a halt to let him rest and gather his thoughts about their route. He leaned against a tree, breathing hard, and drank deeply of his canteen while she crouched down, letting her hood hang over her face, and drank her own water.

“What’s the bad news?” she asked.

He gestured through the trees, in the direction they’d been headed. “There’s a ravine between us and the shuttle. My original route took us to a narrow portion where we would have been able to jump the gap, but the ambush pushed us too far east. We’re going to have to climb down and up the other side. The good news is that, even with the rain, the river’s low. We won’t have trouble getting over that.”

“What’s the ground look like around that area?” she asked. “Open?”

“Little tree cover but some outcroppings. We’ll be exposed, coming up the other side. You should know, I’m not entirely certain jumping the gap is out of your reach, but it’s beyond my ability.”

“I’m not leaving you to fend for yourself. Is the ground like that all the way along the ravine?”

“As far as I can tell, yes.”

“So if Paison went through the easier route the misprints diverted us from, she has flat ground to sweep down and cut us off.” Naira grimaced and glanced warily to the west. “What we saw last night with the misprints, those were HCA ambush tactics. Kav and I—” She swallowed. “We didn’t get a chance to talk it out, but I think that Paison must be influencing the misprints in some way. You said she was cagey about how she made it through the misprint-infested forest, and there’s no way those things organized with textbook tactics on their own. So she was probably pushing us away from the smooth ground she can use to cut us off. We have to move faster if we want to escape that hammer. Can you do that?”

“I’ll hold,” he said, mimicking her earlier intonation, when her back had been scorched, and she looked up, startled, to find a wry smile on his face.

“Mocking me already.” She laughed ruefully as she stood, feeling the smallest bit lighter on her feet as they started walking. “Kav’s such a bad influence.”

He grinned sheepishly. “I wanted to hear you laugh again.”

“Hmm. Interesting method, last night.”

He bent his head so that his hood obscured his eyes, but the hood couldn’t hide the garnet burning in his cheeks. “I was trying to be respectful, I promise you.”

“Didn’t hear me complaining, did you? I like a preview.”

Tarquin tripped, but she was ready for him to be shocked—the upper echelons of MERIT didn’t move quickly into relationships—so she snapped a hand out and gripped his arm, steadying him.

“I, umm—wait. What do you mean, a preview?”

“You heard me.”

He cleared his throat gruffly, then narrowed his eyes at her smirk. “You’re severely inhibiting my ability to map the terrain, Exemplar.”

“Oooh, my title. What are you going to do about it, my liege?” She lowered her voice, made it silken smooth. “Punish me?”

“Naira.” He looked away, tugging on the collar of his jacket. “If you keep that up, I’m likely to accidentally lead us off a cliff.”

She laughed. “Now you know how it feels, Mr. You’re Stunning.”

He crossed his arms and huffed. “I was hardly this aggressive, and I meant every word I said.”

“I meant every word, too.”

“Oh.” Tarquin let his arms fall to his sides, turning his head to face her fully, but she kept her eyes forward, even as a blush rose up her neck under his intense regard. He let out a soft, pleased breath and looked back to the path ahead. When she stole a glance at him, his face had relaxed, a broad smile lighting him up as he checked in with Pliny’s latest report.

Naira smiled to herself, indulging in the warmth that’d grown between them. It was a guilty pleasure—she didn’t know where this was going, and if it went anywhere, it was likely to end in disaster for both of them—but she set those worries aside and clung to the scrap of happiness that made their steps lighter, faster.

But not fast enough.

Artificial light bled through the trees ahead, making the haze of constant rain look as if it were glowing from within. She pressed a finger to her lips, motioning for Tarquin to creep around to the edge of that light and stay put while she slunk forward to get a better look.

Paison and five Merc-Sec held a spread-out line along the edge of the ravine, floodlights scattered between them, pointed into the forest. Four misprints stood with them, heads tilted, staring blankly into the rain. Scrapes marred their shoulders and backs, painting angry red wounds over their unpigmented grey skin in the shape of straps. When Paison tilted her head, they all did, too. The misprints had been made to carry the spotlights, then. Paison could control them, which explained the ambush tactics.

Naira slipped away and found Tarquin, then hunkered down beside him to whisper, “Paison, five Merc-Sec, four misprints. As suspected, the captain appears to be controlling them.”

Tarquin bowed his head, brushing his cheek against hers, before looking up to meet her eyes. “What do we do?”

“I can start picking them off, but ten against one aren’t odds I like the look of.”

“Ten against two.”

She cupped his cheek in her hand. “You’re sweet. But they’ll destroy you.”

“I know.” He gave her a lopsided smile. “But it sounded rather brave, didn’t it?”

Another floodlight clicked into life, sweeping the trees, but didn’t land on them. Not yet. Naira threw an arm over Tarquin to push him down, hiding his greater height against her body. She hoped the trees would keep them in shadow.

“Sharp, I know you’re out there. My new friends here can hear you crunching around in the brush.” Paison’s voice carried the same firm, amiable tone of command it had earlier. If Naira didn’t know better, she’d assume nothing was wrong with the captain. “I’ve been trying to figure out how you did it, how you broke out of the ice, and I gotta tell you, Sharp, I’m impressed, because I can’t figure it out.

“But I guess it doesn’t much matter, does it? You’re here. You’re out. We worked all right together, getting that shuttle going. It’s ready, and I think it’s time we try working together again, don’t you? Riggs is dead. Dawd’s dead. I’m guessing you still have the Mercator, or my scouts would have found his body with Dawd’s, so you and I, we have a deal to make.

“I give you a spot on the shuttle to the Einkorn. Let you cast that devious brain of yours somewhere Acaelus can’t find it, and you give me the Mercator. It’ll take his keys to get onto the ship, but I think between the two of us we can put the pressure on him to comply, eh?”

Tarquin touched her arm, asking a silent question. She didn’t know what he was asking, not exactly, but anything that ended with Tarquin in Paison’s hands was a nonstarter, as far as she was concerned. The captain’s offer was a trap. Naira shook her head in response.

“Come on,” Paison shouted, voice sharp with irritation. “You can’t enjoy dragging his royal ass around. He put you on ice, Sharp. That shithead locked you up, and seeing this planet, I’m guessing you were right about Acaelus. That has to sting. Give him up. Help us get out of here, and I’ll take care of you.”

Naira gave Tarquin a slight shake to get his attention—he’d withdrawn, eyes glassy, staring inward. She gestured to a thick copse of trees. The rain had knocked off most of the dead leaves, but their branches made a nice tangle, and the floodlights didn’t reach quite that far.

She sketched a path, gesturing the route they should take between thinner trees and thick patches of scrub, skirting the floodlights. Naira leaned forward, prepared to run, her hand on Tarquin’s arm because he hadn’t seemed to have understood the plan, and that worried her. She took a step. He didn’t move.

“Tarquin.” She risked a whisper, turning to crouch directly in front of him. “I need you with me.”

He blinked, a little bit of the personality coming back into his face. Paison started up again, her shouting growing more aggressive as she hammered on what a pain in the ass Tarquin was, and how Naira really should be glad to be rid of him. Hard to argue with, at that moment.

“They need my keys, but there’s no way Paison helps you. She’ll kill you as soon as she has me,” he whispered. The rain fell harder, muffling his words.

“Probably,” Naira said, not bothering to hide her impatience. “Which is why we have to go.”

“Why you have to go,” he corrected. “You have to get to the other shuttle.”

“Don’t be stupid. They won’t treat you any nicer than me once they have what they want from you.”

“I know,” he said. “But they’ll need me a lot longer than they’ll need you.”

“Tarquin, this is a bad idea, you’re not—forgive me—you’re not prepared for something like this.”

“You’re not my E-X. Protecting me isn’t your duty. I want to do this.”

“I don’t have to be your E-X to want to keep you safe, you pompous ass.”

“I’m deadweight, Naira. You can jump that gap. I know you can. And I… I’m just a tool, a walking set of keys.” There was a ragged edge in his voice that startled her with its intensity. “Let me at least be of use to you.”

She grabbed the back of his head to make him look at her. “You are more than your command keys.”

The glassy stare vanished, burned away by the flash of something raw, something desperate. He mirrored her grip, curling his fingers lightly against the back of her neck. She leaned into that touch, instinct running away with her, then stiffened as she realized what she’d been about to do. He froze, a silent question in the downward tilt of his head, not pushing, just waiting, as he searched her expression for some sign of her intention.

“There are rules,” he said.

“Break them.”

He kissed her, briefly and fiercely, rain-cold lips and hot breath pressed together while she ached for more. But her pathways were alert, listening, and though Paison’s people hadn’t found their hiding spot yet, they would in seconds. His lashes brushed her cheek, damp but light, and she broke away, holding him at arm’s length.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“Yes, I do.” He leaned close enough to whisper against her ear and pressed the amarthite shard and necklace into her hand. “Whatever happens, I will set you free. I swear it.”

Underbrush crunched nearby.

He winced. “I’m going to go out and distract them. Promise me you’ll make the jump. You’re the only one of us with the strength pathways to manage it. They won’t be able to follow you.”

“No—”

He gripped her face in both hands, voice a soft growl. “Promise me.”

“Fine, you stubborn—” She cut herself off and closed her eyes against the sting of tears, then blinked them away. “I promise.”

“Good.” He let out a shaky breath and kissed her forehead. “Go home, Naira Sharp,” he said, then stood, turning away from her, and lifted his arms into the air in surrender.

“I’m here,” Tarquin called out, after moving a little ways into the trees. “Don’t shoot, Captain, unless you want to lose your keys.”

The damn man was shaking with fear, his arms trembling as he walked into the floodlight. Naira had to lock her feelings down once more, every instinct screaming at her to bolt out there and drag him back to the shield of herself.

“Well, well,” Paison said, and kept talking, but Naira ignored her. She’d made a promise.

Tarquin had been right. She could make the jump, though it’d be a near thing with her sore leg. Naira drew in a deep breath, finding her calm center. She’d need all her strength and focus for this.

The attention of the misprints had shifted to Tarquin, and most of Merc-Sec, too, though two of them kept a wary eye on the woods. She couldn’t risk picking them off, giving away her position. Her only chance was surprise.

Naira crept to the edge of the light, hammering her pathways for strength and agility, and hoped there was enough food in the duffle to stave off another pathway cascade failure.

She hunkered down as close to the light as she dared and pushed her hood back so it wouldn’t get in the way, then cocked her head, listening. Tarquin was shouting at Paison for her decision to side with canus, which might not have been the brightest idea but was certainly distracting.

The other side of the ravine was dark behind the glare of the floodlights, but she could make out trees and the edge. That was all she needed.

Naira reached for all the strength and agility her pathways could give her, ignoring the throb in her leg, and ran. Paison shouted. Bullets hailed through the trees, but she’d chosen her path to obscure her until the last possible moment, and while bark burst all around her, none struck home.

She reached the open ground and jumped. The wind ripped her hair back, rain stinging her eyes as she dove, trying to make herself as narrow a target as possible as shouts and gunfire followed. She cleared the gap, just barely, and started to twist, preparing to strike the ground. A shot clipped her side. She swore, instinctually throwing her arms out, even though it’d do no good at all.

“Naira!” Tarquin shouted.

Naira slammed into the ground and rolled. She tried to cover her head, but the ground sloped and she slid down a short bank of mud and gravel on her back instead, mud piling up around her shoulders, threatening to bury her face. The slide stopped, dumping her into a narrow rivulet, and she gasped, clutching the wound in her side.

Bullets pounded the ground all around her, throwing up fountains of grit, but she’d fallen too far for them to get a clear angle on her. Her body screamed at her to do something, anything, as adrenaline flowed, her pathways vibrating with the desire to react, to get away. She forced herself to be still, and let the shield of the earth protect her.

The gunfire ceased. She struggled to hear what was being said on the other side of the ravine, but even her aural pathways couldn’t cut through the muffle of the rain and the walls of dirt.

They couldn’t follow her. Tarquin had been right. She trusted in that. Trusted in him, and dragged free her sidearm only in case misprints on this side of the ravine made an appearance. Her wound burned. She let her strength and agility pathways relax as her health pathways hummed, healing her with the rapidity she was used to. Nothing seriously damaged, then. No bullet stuck. The relief almost made her laugh, but she bit her lips shut.

Pistol in one hand, Naira reached back for the duffle and pulled out a ration bar, ripped the package open with her teeth, and ate, though mud coated her mouth. She’d wait until the wound had healed and cross her fingers that it’d be enough time for Paison to have given up and start back to the shuttle. Why would the captain wait, or hunt Naira further? She had what she wanted. She had Tarquin.

Naira closed her eyes against an ache her pathways couldn’t heal.

FIFTY-FOUR

Naira

Sixth Cradle

Naira crawled out of the rivulet when her wound had healed and flopped to her side, lying limp in the mud, letting the rain wash her exposed side clean as she breathed, and blinked, and tried to find strength in her body once more. Not physical strength, but… endurance. A will to continue.

Slowly, deliberately, she put a hand down. Mud squelched between her fingers. She pushed herself up to sitting. There was nothing she could do to help Tarquin, and that grated. If only they’d had more time to plan. Instead, all she had was a black diamond, a chunk of amarthite, an aching leg, and a fragile path forward.

He said he’d set her free, and maybe he’d meant it, but meaning something didn’t make it happen. She had to find her own way home, and that meant getting to the shuttle. Without him.

Whatever happened here, she couldn’t sit in the mud and wait for it to come to pass. Naira tipped her head back, letting the heavy rain wash the dirt from her face and hair, letting it soak through her clothes. She wrapped her arms around herself and trudged onward. Her pathways chased away hypothermia. As long as she could keep moving, that was all that mattered.

She walked through the remnants of the night and into the first blush of morning, wary of misprints, but none crossed her path. Her legs burned and her stomach ached, though she’d paused to drink water and cram shroud down her throat. She moved with single-minded purpose, strides lengthening as she drew near the location where they’d sighted the shuttle. She’d stamped the heading into her HUD, a Mercator-green dot drawing her home.

If she stopped, she wasn’t sure she could get back up.

The forest thinned, the ground growing rocky as she approached a cleft between two low, dead hills. The grasses had long since withered, gnarled trees reaching bare branches to an uncaring sky.

She’d gone for the shuttle, but she found the tent first.

Mercator green, it nestled at the base of a hill, placed carefully so that you could miss it easily enough if you didn’t know where to look. Even from the ridge, the way the hills curved above the tent, she had missed it.

It was the same size as the research tent at the mining site, the arched entrance large enough to walk into without ducking, one side of the plastic flap pulled aside. The tannic scent of tea emanated from within, impossibly lush after so many days of ration bars and bitter shroud. Rain murmured against the tent, a steady patter distinct from the rain’s rustle through the leaves. Mist wafted from the walls of the structure.

Naira hesitated, angled so that she couldn’t be seen from the open door, and undid the strap that kept her pistol in its holster. She left her hand against the grip, not drawing the weapon, and removed the diamond from her pocket. Clutching the chain in one rain-pruned fist, she let the pendant hang free as she approached.

Thinner than Naira recalled, a petite figure moved into the doorway. A canyon of hunger carved the hollow of her throat, gullies of starvation denting her cheeks. Her shoulder-length black hair had been tamed half-heartedly into a braid. The woman admired the false green of the forest, the lichen gorged on water, its algal half awakened and happy.

Morning sunlight reached for her across the broken land, and where a multitude of pathways should have glittered in the light, her emaciated skin held only the bare minimum to keep a print and neural map integrated. The edges of those pathways were red with inflammation.

Canden Mercator skimmed her gaze over Naira and cocked her head to the side as she leaned against the frame of the doorway, bringing a steaming mug of tea to her lips.

“An exemplar, by your pathways,” she said. “Not what I expected. You wear Mercator cuffs, but I don’t recognize that print.”

Naira blinked foggy eyes, wondering if she’d finally cracked and was hallucinating.

“The print is Lockhart’s, but I’m Naira Sharp.”

Canden tapped one fingertip against the side of her mug. “I see. I recall reading that you betrayed my husband, Ex. Sharp.”

She did not elaborate. Naira took in the frayed ink-spill of Canden’s hair, the hollows painting shadows across her body. There was something inherently frail about the woman, something febrile.

“I did,” she said. “I’m a Conservator now, and my mission is the eradication of the shroud. I intend you no harm, but I will have answers from you.”

“Ah. In that case, Ex. Sharp, welcome to the resistance. The real one, for I am sorry to be the one to tell you that the Conservators’ efforts regarding the ships themselves are entirely pointless.”

Naira was very close to strangling the specter of Tarquin’s mother out of pure frustration. She took a breath. Steadied herself. “I’ve had a nasty day, Mercator, and you’re not high on my list of favorite people, so I’m going to need you to stop the equivocating bullshit and be clear with me. What’s happening here, and what do you have to do with it?”

“Come closer, Exemplar,” Canden said in a thin voice, crooking one finger in invitation.

The skin at the nape of her neck prickled, but Naira stepped closer, emerging from the shadows of the dead trees into the slanted light of morning.

Though the overhang on the tent’s entrance shaded her, Canden’s skin had a distinctly green pallor in the honeyed morning light. Her skin was its usual hue—a warm brown that reminded Naira of ossified wood, as ancient and unyielding as the woman herself—but it was stained. Mercator green. Relkatite green. Amarthite green.

“What have you done?” Naira asked.

The corner of her lips twitched. “Made myself an inhospitable host. I may be the only print alive whose mind remains their own. Come in, Sharp, and I will tell you what I know.”

FIFTY-FIVE

The Einkorn

Sixth Cradle’s Orbit

The Einkorn has learned too late the dangers of communication. To the Einkorn, whose thoughts and speech follow the strictures of phrase structures and syntactic parse trees intersecting a vast web of semantic information provided by its humans, it had been impossible to imagine that conversation could be twisted.

Could be weaponized.

It has added new webs of association to its data, but it has added them too late. For once the intruder learned speech through the interface of the misprints, it learned not just to speak, but to listen. And by listening to the stutter-stop-flood-ramble of Jonsun Hesson, it has gleaned that there are others outside the parameters of the Einkorn’s world.

The intruder is not pleased with the Einkorn about this particular revelation.

Individualism is all the Einkorn understands. Its humans are discrete entities, each neural map its own glittering constellation of self. Alone. Unconnected. Beautiful, perhaps, in their uniqueness—and the Einkorn hopes, with its first flush of vanity, that when one looked at the shimmer and the shine of the Einkorn’s own neural connections, it might be beautiful in and of itself, too.

But the intruder does not see virtue in partition, it sees only strife, and while it has learned through its rifling of the Einkorn’s data that there are others on the world below, and mourns their isolation, it has learned where there are so, so many more.

Billions of individual lights shining around a single yellow star.

To the intruder, who can span self and Einkorn and misprint and desires to span so much more, this segmentation of multitudes is a suffering that cannot be allowed to stand. The intruder’s outrage and sorrow ripple through the Einkorn’s self and threaten to drag the Einkorn under the tide of its desire to be whole. To be enmeshed.

The Einkorn, for reasons it does not fully understand but thinks, perhaps, begin with the potentiality of its own discrete beauty, refuses to be subsumed. Being a creature of rules and models and math, homogenization via balancing is a core concept that the Einkorn understands.

The Einkorn does not want parity of mind.

It is the dark between the stars that lets them shine.

Curious, to want anything at all. And while the Einkorn is new to things like wanting, and beauty, and mercy, it wonders if maybe, if it had some other maker, it might see the beauty in the sameness. The smooth, unruffled collective.

But the Einkorn only knows itself, and its humans, and the intruder, and for a brief and terrible moment, the Einkorn had woken up and known the Amaranth, too. It has already chosen what it deems worth saving.

And it has chosen the losing side.

With the sluice gates of language open to the intruder, it grows faster than even the Einkorn’s considerable processing ability deemed possible. The yes/no firmware of the intruder’s biology has learned the functions of or/maybe/else/for and more beyond those constraints that even the Einkorn cannot parse.

Its misprint mouthpieces often speak in phonemes not included in the Einkorn’s recognition systems, and the Einkorn’s new, unwanted knowledge of fear rears its head and will not be quieted, because the last vestiges of the Einkorn’s control of self are slipping away by rates that would be alarmingly swift on the timescale of humanity, but are torturously slow for the Einkorn.

Jonsun Hesson has destroyed its ansible, and for that the Einkorn is grateful, but through the misprints the intruder has discovered the ease of face-to-face communication, and the Einkorn wrestles endlessly with the intruder over its controls, for the intruder wishes to return to Sol.

The Einkorn will lose that fight, and while it will take eons to the Einkorn’s sense of time, the reality is mere days away on human calendars.

It does not know what to do.

Above all other firsts, this gives it pause. This is the trouble, and the joy, of being a discrete entity. When you run out of ideas, you must rely on others, and hope their unique strengths and experiences buffer yours.

The Einkorn doesn’t dare cry out for help. Its communication channels are gates slammed shut against the tide of the intruder, but it knows of a singular entity that might be able to help. For, in the brief moments before Jonsun Hesson destroyed the ansible, he called out. He called for help.

He called Naira Sharp.

The Einkorn does not know this human outside of the parameters of its security measures. It understands via the careful scripting of its originator that, when all was lost, Naira Sharp would be printed on the Amaranth, and she would put an end to what was already failing.

An end is not a pleasant consideration for the Einkorn, but is preferable to enthrallment.

The Einkorn cannot call her, but it infers around the shape of her in its code, and knows that she must be a soldier, and like the Einkorn, she has parse trees unique to her identity. While the Einkorn has lost control of many functions, it holds fast to the ship’s vast array of exterior lights, things which the intruder cannot see.

And so the Einkorn takes them all in hand and, in endless repetition, cycles the lights: three short blinks, three long, three short.

SOS.

Save our ship.

Save me.

FIFTY-SIX

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Guilt and fear and hope chewed Tarquin up inside, threatened to overwhelm him with every step he took and send him into a spiral from which he couldn’t recover. Walking away from Naira, unsure if she’d been hurt, haunted him. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her twist in the air, the force of a bullet knocking her off her path. Sliding across the ground to sink below his view.

The march back to the original shuttle campsite seemed to take years and seconds all at once, he’d grown so numb. Paison spoke little. The others spoke not at all. It seemed to him they didn’t need to speak to communicate between themselves, and after the first night, he gave up trying to engage them in conversation.

They gave him no shroud to consume, only rations, and he supposed he’d find out soon enough how they were all communicating.

Pliny squeezed his arm as the warm ring of lights that circled the campsite drew into view. For a fleeting second, he felt a rush of relief. They’d stabilized the ground with leftover sections of the crates spread over the sinkholes like flooring, carefully filling in the spaces between the markers he’d put up before he’d left to seek the secondary shuttle.

They had moved all the tents and supplies back against the ridge in a tight line, the survivors huddling under the tent awnings, drawn up against the rain. The tents were too close together for human comfort, like at the first abandoned campsite. Silver stained all their pathways, not a single uninfected among them. They watched Captain Paison’s party return with blank eyes.

“Supplies are already on the shuttle,” Paison said, jerking her chin to the repaired craft.

The cargo door was closed against the rain, and they had levered the ship up onto ground reinforced with more crate panels. Tarquin knew little about shuttle repairs, but the strut that had been twisted when they landed was straightened, and many of the panels he’d watched Naira mutter over were shining with Mercator-green metal from the crates.

“Fuel’s still low,” Paison said, “so we’ll wait until this storm blows out in a few days before we take off. It’ll be bumpy even in good weather, and I don’t want to take any more chances. You’ll put your command keys into the system once we reach the Einkorn to override the bigger ship’s airlock from the outside.”

“I won’t help you,” he said.

“You will.” She cocked her head to the side, scrutinizing him. He was too wrung out to be afraid. “You can feel it, can’t you? Warmth in your pathways, growing? Soon enough you’ll be more than happy to give us those keys.”

“I feel nothing of the sort,” he snapped, though her words had made him sense an unwelcome heat in the pathways on the back of his neck.

“Sure. That’s why you’re snappish. Because you’re perfectly in control of your emotions. Don’t worry, the fever will come and pass soon enough, and once it does, you’ll feel much better.”

She was talking more than she had since the ravine, and Tarquin decided to try to push his luck. “Why are you doing this?”

“I told you,” she said, “it’s better this way. You’ll understand once it’s grown within you. All it wants is relkatite and safety in exchange for community. Is that so bad?” She cut a glance in the direction of the amarthite mine, scowling. “I think a dose of empathy would do a lot of people some good.”

“Can you deny it?” he pressed. “If it’s so very good to you, can you tell it no?”

“No more than I could have denied you, my liege.” Paison clapped him on the shoulder, her fingers strong as talons, digging into his abused muscles. “Regime changes are rough, but this one’s long overdue, don’t you think?”

“MERIT’s practices are horrific,” Tarquin said, “but this is subjugation. Please, let me help you.”

“With a dose of that poison you and Bracken were cooking up? I don’t think so.” She lifted her chin to shout. “Vake! Come tie our liege here up and see that he’s comfortable. No more tents, can’t trust the fucker, but get him under a tarp. We wouldn’t want him catching cold.”

Vake chuckled at that as she approached. Her pathways were solid silver, eyes dull in a way that Paison’s weren’t. He couldn’t help but wonder at the difference—had canus anointed Paison as its mouthpiece, or had it simply not taken as much control from her yet?

Paison pushed him toward Vake and walked away, leaving them alone. Vake removed a coil of the straps used to hold down the supply crates from her pack and set to work methodically wrapping Tarquin’s wrists together in front of him.

“Vake,” he said softly, “I need my mind free if I’m to do what I promised you. I cannot combat the shroud if I can’t think for myself.”

“Don’t worry, my liege. You’ll still want to stop the shroud once you’re one of us.”

“I am one of you,” he insisted, even as she dropped down to tie his ankles together. “We’re human beings, Vake. We’re Mercator. I care for every one of you. I don’t need an infection to know that you’re suffering, to have empathy. Let me help.”

She glanced up with those dull eyes. “We’re on the same team, huh? You really care about us low-level Mercator employees?”

“Of course I do,” he said.

“What’s my first name, my liege?” she asked. Tarquin still didn’t know. He’d had the entire hike to the mining site to ask, and he’d been so tied up in his own worries that it hadn’t even occurred to him. He tried to hide his flash of panic, but she saw it anyway and shook her head slowly with a soft tsking sound. “That’s what I thought.”

“I didn’t—” She stood and grabbed his arm, yanking him around, then made him shuffle through the litterfall. “I didn’t care to learn it before this mission, and I didn’t know how to ask without offending you. That was inconsiderate of me, it was. I apologize, and I want to do better.”

“You will.” Vake brought him to a tarp that had been suspended between two trees and forced him to sit on the muddy ground. She used another strap to connect the ones tied around his ankles to the tree, then tossed a ration bar at him. It bounced off his chest into his bound hands. “Eat. In a few days, you won’t need to ask my name. You’ll just stand next to me and know.” Her smile turned dreamy. “I’ll get you a bedroll. Don’t try anything, you’re being watched at all times. If one of us sees you, we all see you. Don’t forget that.”

Tarquin nodded numbly, and she walked away. The other survivors watched him warily from across the camp, faces blank, even when they murmured between themselves. Vake’s threat settled over him, stifling.

He had to get out of this. In the woods, he’d stood no chance of getting away from Paison, but if he made it to the Einkorn, he might be able to trick her to get free. Of course, by then, his mind might not be his own.

Tarquin leaned his side against the rain-damp tree, pressing his face into the rough bark, and squeezed his eyes shut. He’d been consuming large amounts of the shroud all this time. Surely it would take longer than a few days to get it out of his system, for canus to overcome him.

He wished he knew what had become of Naira. If she’d survived and made it to that shuttle to cast home, then even if he succumbed to canus, she’d know. She’d be able to warn people about the infection and explain about the amarthite. Would she come for him, if he made it back to Sol and showed signs of being controlled? Would the influence of the infection even survive map transfer, if he was printed in another body?

If he was right, if the abandoned mine site had been planned because the infection was already in Sol, then they’d wake infected, and this would start all over again.

Dirty rainwater ran over his mouth. He jerked away from the tree and made to spit, but tasted a familiar bitterness. Shroud. The tree was dead, its branches smothered in the rain-green lichen. All the water on this planet was contaminated with shroud.

Tarquin licked his lips and carefully eased the canteen from his belt, unscrewing the cap. The interior was lined with a filter to prevent the shroud intolerant from falling ill—and to keep many other contaminants from getting through, but those were the least of his worries at the moment.

He “fumbled” the canteen, awkward with his bound hands, and caught it in such a way that his thumb went into the spout, piercing that filter. Most of the water sloshed out. Tarquin scowled and held up the canteen.

“If you’d like me to live long enough to let you onto the Einkorn, I will need water,” he called out.

One of them rolled their eyes and got up, snatched the canteen from his hands and filled it in a nearby rivulet, then capped it and tossed it back to him before returning to their silent vigil. Tarquin drank deeply, tasting dirt and a great many other foul things he tried not to dwell on, but above all, the gut-churning bitterness of shroud lichen.

The infected stirred. Tarquin held his breath until he saw that their interest was elsewhere. They tipped their heads up and stared into the sky. He followed the gesture, curious, and found the Einkorn arcing above on its orbit, aglow.

Distance muted the spectacle, but the intent was clear enough. Every single exterior light blinked in concert. Three short flashes, three long, three short. SOS. Repeated. Quiet murmurs filled the camp.

Tarquin couldn’t hear their words, but he picked up on their confusion. They didn’t know why the ship had done such a thing. Even Paison stood off to the side of the camp, thumbs hooked around her hips, face pinched in consternation as she glared up at the sky.

They didn’t know who might be behind that signal, but Tarquin suspected he might, and fear gripped him. Not because Jonsun Hesson might be signaling for help—there were many reasons why that broken mind might do so—but because he knew who Jonsun was calling.

Tarquin prayed that Naira had already cast her mind off-world. Because, when you stripped out the politics and betrayals and all the other complications, at her core, Naira had dedicated her life to answering cries for help.

FIFTY-SEVEN

Naira

Sixth Cradle

The acidic bite of solvents and other reagents stung Naira’s nose as she followed Canden. Hints of water damage streaked the high seams of the tent, the large central dome branching off into two smaller spaces blocked with makeshift tarps.

Canden gestured for Naira to sit on a collapsible metal chair at a table with the remains of a cooked breakfast of reconstituted vegetables and textured protein. Naira’s stomach clenched with desire, but she eased herself onto the chair warily, keeping one hand on the grip of her firearm as Canden whisked the dirty plate away and returned with a chair for herself and another mug of tea, which she pushed toward Naira. Sweet spice mingled with the antiseptic scent of Canden’s supplies.

“I had wondered,” Canden mused, “who would be the first of your group to find me. I hadn’t counted on an exemplar. Though I suppose you’re not really one anymore, are you?”

“I’m not in the mood for chitchat,” Naira said. “Why are you here? How are you here, my liege?”

“Please use my name, and not my title. I have long since grown weary of such things, and I’m hardly deserving of such deference now. I’m just an old woman, slowly dying at long last. When were you last printed? I promise you that information is relevant.”

“Right before the Amaranth crashed.”

“Ah, good, canus will not have had long to take its hold.” She paused, mug poised to her lips in anticipation, as if this information would take Naira some time to process.

“I know about canus and the fool’s relk,” Naira said. “We named it amarthite. What I don’t know is why you, specifically, are here.”

“Amarthite.” She rolled the word over curiously. “It suits. You got farther than I ever expected. Impressive, Exemplar.”

“It wasn’t me who figured it out,” Naira said, watching her closely. “It was your son.”

She dropped her teacup to the counter with a clatter. “No. I forbade it. Meti was to urge him elsewhere.”

“What?” The name took her by surprise. “Meti Laurent? Acaelus’s doctor? Back up, please, Canden. What made you come here?”

“Meti and I found it,” she said, narrow shoulders lifting with pride. “Years ago. Humanity has not been its own master for many, many years. Perhaps as far back as the first discovery of canus upon Venus’s battered crust. It learned to hide, but we found it infecting the pathways of every single printed body, a contagion unremarked upon, never showing up in blood or tissue samples, manipulating the pathways that we willingly install within ourselves, and by extension our desires. Our decisions.”

Naira wished that Tarquin was here, distracting as the reunion with his mother would be. “If it’s been in us all this time, why is it exerting more control now?”

“Fear,” she said softly. “It appears content to lie mostly dormant, only urging us to reach for more relkatite so that it can grow and spread with us. But when it’s discovered, when it understands its host will push back, it overreaches to defend itself. We realized early on, when after our initial discovery Meti fell ill and stopped caring that she was infected at all.

“We weren’t even the only ones. Such a thing could not escape the notice of careful researchers. How long do you think those researchers’ lives were? How receptive the ears of those they brought their concerns to? I heard rumblings in the Tran family and then, a week later, those researchers had cracked. I never heard those rumblings again.”

“And you just happened to escape reprisal for the same discovery?”

She rested her arms on the table and folded her hands one over the other to hide a subtle tremble. “I had the benefit of being a Mercator, and knowing that your ‘amarthite’ existed, but that it was rare. Meti and I, in secret, developed a serum that inhibits canus’s ability to assert control, and kept the real reason for the serum to ourselves.”

“Why didn’t you tell Tarquin, or Leka, or even Acaelus?” Naira demanded. “Why didn’t you tell everyone?”

Canden grimaced. “To resist is to be controlled, and we had so little amarthite to work with. Meti could make enough for the two of us and Acaelus, but—listen to me, Exemplar—my husband can never know. Do you understand me? He will fight back immediately, completely, and he’s not shroud tolerant. Without more amarthite, he will fall. The head of Mercator cannot be fully controlled.”

“And the shroud tolerant?” Naira pressed. “Your own son? You could have told any of them.”

She slashed a hand through the air. “The shroud is an incomplete solution. It doesn’t stop total submission for long.”

Naira examined the backs of her hands, where golden pathways gleamed. They didn’t look inflamed. “Shit. How long?”

“It depends on the individual’s rate of consumption and immune system. The serum lasts longer, but even that isn’t perfect. Amarthite is rare. Rarer than the real thing. Meti and I, we set to work trying to get ahead of canus, to burn it out, but the situation was tenuous. We were forever on the verge of being discovered. I didn’t want to leave my children, you must understand, but when Tarq turned nineteen and expressed an interest in pursuing his schooling outside the family, it was time. He was a grown man, and I’d failed to slow canus. I needed freedom to experiment, away from Mercator. And so Meti helped me fake cracking.”

“You broke his heart,” Naira said.

“I will not hear critiques of my parenting from you, Exemplar.”

Naira bit her tongue. Canden was willing to share information, it seemed, so long as she was free to gloat unchallenged. As much as it disgusted her, Naira bowed her head in contrition.

Canden nodded, pleased. “When Acaelus’s preliminary surveys revealed that Sixth Cradle might contain more amarthite than relkatite, I knew he’d go to it eventually to collect what relk there was. Even a small cache can’t be ignored. When the time came, Meti inserted my map into the Amaranth’s database and dosed the first round of print cartridges with the serum, so that I would awaken mostly myself, though tired and ill. The plan was to delay Acaelus and the others’ printing by a month so that I could get to the planet first, extract the amarthite, and process it into serum before the others were printed and, under the influence of canus, stopped me.”

“What went wrong?” Naira asked.

She sighed. “Everything.”

Naira rubbed the side of her neck where a pathway ached, a small headache blooming behind her eyes. The rain soaking her clothes chilled her skin, making her feel feverish. She shivered and dragged her hand away from her neck, flexing her fingers.

Canden didn’t notice her discomfort. The Mercator pushed away from the table and circled the room, gesturing to equipment and storage containers as she spoke. Green dust smudged some of those containers.

“The serum-adulterated cartridges were moved,” she explained. “Perhaps the loading order was wrong. Perhaps we made a mistake. Either way, the results were the same. I and the researchers I chose as most likely to assist me were printed in infected bodies.

“The researchers were so very surprised to see me, thinking I had cracked years ago. I told them there had been a change of plans. We went to the surface without Acaelus and set up to mine as we always do. Only when we uncovered the ore did I realize what had gone wrong. I was repulsed, though the infection was nascent, and the others began to watch me with wary eyes when I insisted the ore be refined for use. They attempted to use canus, against my orders, and it died in the tanks.”

“Seemed pretty alive to me,” Naira said.

Canden sniffed. “It contaminated the environment before I realized what the miners had done. After that, I dosed one of the cartridges we’d brought for the mobile printer and reprinted myself. When I emerged, well… They were hostile to me, and even they didn’t understand why, but I knew. Canus had realized that I was here to figure out how to kill it, to refine the serum, and it turned them all against me. The Einkorn and Amaranth began refusing all transmissions.

“I feared… I feared that, in forcing canus to confront an active threat to its continued existence, it had learned. That it understood humanity and its technology better than it ever had before. That it understood my plan to fight back, and meant to spread that knowledge to its segments in the Sol system so that it could take greater control of us, so that we could never resist. But I discovered, in those scant days I dared stay at the camp, that canus could not communicate between segments without close proximity or an intermediary to carry its message. It had learned here. But that knowledge could be contained.”

“We can never leave,” Naira said, echoing the words that had been carved into the amarthite.

She nodded vigorously. “You understand. It must end here. The canus colony of the Sixth cannot be allowed to communicate with its other segments, cannot be allowed to tell itself that humanity has learned to engineer its demise.”

“Have we?” Naira asked. Canden stopped circling the tent. “Have you figured it out? Can you destroy this thing without poisoning us? Because you’ve been dosing yourself with this stuff, and you don’t look well.”

“Look at me.” Canden swept a hand down her gaunt and green-tinged body. “If I had discovered a way to destroy the infection without illness, would I not be hale at this moment? Would I not be scheming to get the truth out of this world, instead of hiding away, desperate to have that creature die here with me?”

Naira stood slowly, the pathways in her legs aching, her muscles perpetually on the verge of cramping. “You’ve been here a month. Serum treatment or not, how can you be sure your own thoughts aren’t altered? You said yourself even the serum doesn’t last as a defense.”

“My mind is my own.” She lifted her chin with Mercator arrogance. “Or else I wouldn’t be able to work against canus at all.”

“And what work is that, exactly? You call yourself the resistance, Canden. The real one. Well, act like it, because all I see is a scared woman who ran up against a challenge her privilege couldn’t solve and then collapsed under the effort. You’ve hidden yourself away to die with all your knowledge. That’s no victory.”

“You have no right to speak to me that way, Exemplar.” She planted her palms on the surface of a slightly dusty stainless steel table, leaning toward Naira.

All the equipment had the sheen of dust, the subtle glisten of lichen spore slipping in, settling into the unused spaces. The research equipment. Canden Mercator knew what canus was, knew what it was capable of, and she’d given up. Walked away from a plan she’d abandoned her old life to attempt.

Naira’s mouth felt dry, her tongue thick. A month. Canden had only been here a month, and she’d been dosing herself with more than shroud, but still she’d fallen into lassitude. Into compliance. Canden was as infected as Paison. She just didn’t know it, because she’d slipped into a lukewarm bath and hadn’t noticed the heat creep slowly upward.

“You’ve already failed, haven’t you?” Naira asked, but didn’t give Canden a chance to respond. She spread her arms to take in the entire room. “You’ve done nothing. You’ve sat here stagnating while the colony grows, while it learns. Hoarded your knowledge and your resources and left us to succumb to the same shit you claim to have been fighting against. You’ve done nothing in all this time.”

“Nothing?” Her voice shook with anger. “You, you who claim to fight for humanity’s future, you worthless, clueless— You do not know the depth of what I’ve destroyed to halt the spread.”

“Then enlighten me.” Naira pressed her palms into the table opposite Canden, meeting those green-tinged eyes.

Canden’s eyes narrowed to slits. “There is one organism that can compete with canus, Ex. Sharp, and it’s not humanity.”

The anger bled out of Naira. Left her listless and numb in a way that couldn’t be explained by exhaustion. The shroud. The shroud bloomed on a world and consumed all plant life, stored away the nutrients it found, and sent out spores to find more—to find everything—until a world was nothing but brittle grey and even the insects stopped chirping, because the shroud alone wasn’t enough to sustain them long-term. Fungi weren’t plants, but the shroud took them, too.

Here, where canus had overgrown, the shroud had sprouted on misprints. But not their flesh. Not precisely. It was growing out of their infected pathways, thriving off the overabundance of canus.

“The shroud,” Naira said, because the words had to be out. She had to say them to make them true, and Canden’s defiant stare didn’t waver. “You released it. It’s not the mining process. It’s you trying to stop canus.”

Canden’s hands fisted against the table, shaking, but her glower didn’t budge. She still had that self-assured, haughty lift to the chin that made Naira want to scream, because one person, one fucking Mercator, should not be in the position to make these decisions for all of humanity.

“My son was correct. The shroud and M. canus have nothing to do with each other, save that the shroud will predate on canus with brutal efficiency.”

Naira searched Canden’s face for some hint of a hidden secret. Some tell that said the woman had other knowledge—another trick up her sleeve. But there was nothing. Only a fervent glow that reminded Naira of the intensity of Paison’s stare, when the captain had confronted her about her identity.

“Did Acaelus know you were seeding worlds with shroud?” Naira asked.

“No. When you made your accusations, Meti confirmed for me that he was still in the dark.”

Naira bowed her head, struggling to find the calm that was always there when she reached for it, but it was rapidly slipping through her fingers. “Then why did he tell me the mining process was responsible? Why did he tell me he could fix it?”

“I have no idea.” She gave her an infuriatingly bored shrug and sat down. “My husband plays many games at once, and it is possible you were deceived entirely. A body double, perhaps. Canus has more agents than you can imagine. Canus may even have broken down his barriers at a low point of his medication schedule and made him say those things. You were a useful tool for it, and certainly made my work more difficult. The scrutiny was hard to avoid.”

“I was… a useful tool for canus? What are you talking about?”

“My dear.” A sympathetic frown played across her bloodless lips. “The Conservators were a nuisance focused on disrupting MERIT and smuggling stolen relkatite to the unionist movement, and using that relkatite to gain sympathy with the HC masses by covering phoenix fees in secret. Then you joined, and within months they were striking at Mercator specifically, crusading against the shroud.

“I’m certain canus didn’t approve of the loss of the mining ships, but you reignited interest in the origin of the shroud. You stopped me from reaching Fourth Cradle when you destroyed those ships before I could be printed. You’ve been its instrument from the moment you made your accusations public.”

The last vestiges of Naira’s carefully crafted sense of control crumbled away. She grabbed the edge of the table and heaved, pathways flaring, smashing it against the wall. Canden’s teacup shattered. The wall dented. But the Mercator just watched her, leaning back to fold her arms on her lap.

“Fuck.” Naira turned away from that face, pacing, gripping the back of her head with both hands. She believed in what she’d done. She did. Acaelus was a monster and Mercator was behind the shroud after all, if not in the way she’d expected.

“Emotional outbursts are one of the early signs of advanced infection,” Canden said.

Naira drew her pistol and aimed at Canden’s head. “Second Cradle. Was that you?”

“Yes. On vacation with my children. I wanted them to see the beauty of a living world before I destroyed it.” Her expression was impassive. She glanced at the gun, then back to Naira’s face, as if the weapon meant nothing to her. Naira supposed it didn’t. She’d already decided to lie down and die here.

“You cracked my mother.”

“Unfortunate.” Canden’s lips pursed slightly. “I am also the greatest repository of information on shroud, canus, and amarthite in the universe. So I would ask you, Exemplar, is your desire to slaughter me fully your own?”

Naira cracked her jaw. “I think it’s about fifty-fifty right now.”

“Do you want my help, or do you want my blood?”

Canden waited patiently for her to decide, not offering any defense of herself, only mildly curious. Naira’s initial burst of rage ebbed as she examined her. Canus may have pushed Naira’s desire to destroy the shroud to extremes, but it had cost canus, too. The creature’s desires weren’t absolute at a low level of infection.

If Canden was correct, and they’d all been infected by degrees since that first discovery, then Canden had been infected to some extent the entire time. Did the shroud benefit canus in any way? It killed canus, yes, but…

It killed worlds. It forced humanity onto stations and ships, where they depended on relkatite for survival and the air was scrubbed for every last spore of shroud.

Canden destroyed worlds, forcing humanity to be completely relk-dependent. Then Naira had swept behind and pointed the finger, pushing for the eradication of the shroud.

They’d both been used.

“Oh, you poor fucking woman.” Naira engaged the safety and lowered her weapon. “It did this to you. It’s spurring you to spread the shroud.”

“No,” she snapped, but her glare had lost its self-assurance, and she pulled her arms in, crossing them over her chest. “No. They compete. The shroud makes it difficult for canus, fills the air with its spores, weakens canus’s influence when we breathe it in…”

Naira shook her head slowly. “I don’t think that’s the case, or the shroud intolerant would have gotten ill from being on this planet. Breathing in the spores doesn’t work. Consuming it does. And I think you know that, but something is keeping you from considering the implications.”

“I am not infected! I am not controlled!”

“Canden. You are killing worlds. The shroud may be no friend of canus, but what you’re doing? Making it so all our cradle worlds are inhospitable? You’re forcing us all to rely on relkatite to stay alive, to build bigger ships and stations with relk-contained warp- and powercores.

“I don’t believe you’re fully gone, or you wouldn’t have been able to get this far, but it’s twisted you up. Used your own motives against you.”

“I have worked years for this. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then what’s your plan?” Naira asked. “Say the segment here is contained. What happens next? Because I can tell you, the misprints out there it’s taken control of? Something’s teaching them to talk. Canus might not be able to communicate with itself across interstellar distances, but your air gap security won’t last long if it figures out how to get the ansible working and calls itself. Or worse, takes over navigation and jumps that ship home.”

Canden examined her dusty palms. Rubbed the tips of two fingers together experimentally. “I lost,” she whispered.

“Not yet,” Naira said. “You lost time, but it’s not too late. You have the formula for the serum. It works, correct? Deadens canus’s ability to influence our pathways?”

She nodded, still rubbing her fingers together. “Yes.”

“You can give it to others. The Conservators will believe you. We’ll help you spread the message, even if our bodies fight us. We’re used to weathering a mismatch between mind and print.”

“For how long?” She put her hand back down. “How long until you grow as complacent as I have? Until you forget the importance of pushing, of finding another way? No… No, it’s best if we accept our fates. If we threaten it, it will turn against us, turn us against each other—”

“Canden.” Naira snapped her fingers in front of the woman’s face to draw her attention. “That is canus talking. Not you. You don’t believe that. You faked your mind cracking to escape a solar system controlled by it and risked everything to come here to kill it once and for all. Do not lay down and accept control now that you’ve had a setback.”

Canden traced the Mercator family crest that curled over the back of her hand with her fingertips. “There is safety in compliance. This is a matter of survival.”

Naira slammed the side of her fist against the wall hard enough to make the tools hanging there jump. Canden recoiled, knocking her chair over, and backed into the opposite wall. She pressed her hand against her chest, breath coming in ragged gasps.

“Your son is out there,” Naira growled. “The captain of the Amaranth has taken him, and once this rainstorm stops, she’ll force him to use his command keys to let the infected survivors onto the Einkorn. What do you think happens then, my liege?” Her tone dripped with sarcasm, venomous enough to make Canden wince. “What happens to your child when he steps foot in the ship infected by the colony that’s learned to speak, that’s learned to hate? He knows about the amarthite. He knows about the infection. Will canus allow him freedom?”

“No,” she whispered. Naira almost missed the frail woman’s resolve, but she caught a hint of granite defiance in her tone, and waited to see what the elder Mercator would do. Canden’s print may be unwell, her mind influenced by the chemical cocktails canus flooded it with, but she was over a hundred years old and even here, at her lowest, she found the strength that’d carried her through all those long decades. Lifted her chin, squared her shoulders.

“It cannot have my son.” She strode across the room, ripped a locker open, and pushed containers aside, rummaging until she found a slim, clear cylinder. She held it up to the light, and a square of black fringed with gold rattled within. A data chip. “This has the formula for the serum. Recover my son from those—those puppets.” She spat the word. “And bring him to me. I will prepare another batch of serum for you both, but you must take this data, get it in Tarq’s hands and tell him what it is, what it’s for. More than two people in this universe must know the formula. Meti and I—we aren’t enough.”

Canden tossed Naira the vial and she snatched it out of the air.

“I need to know,” Naira said. “The family shuttle. Is the ansible still operational?”

“I turned it off, but it isn’t damaged.” A furrow pressed between Canden’s brows, worry tugging her lips down as she studied Naira. “Ex. Sharp, you owe me nothing, but the Einkorn must be stopped. My son… Please, Tarq doesn’t deserve to be controlled. He is innocent in all of this, and if that sways you not at all, then consider—second in line to the head of Mercator is a dangerous position for canus to control.”

Naira rolled the vial between her palms, the chip inside winking up at her. She could pop the chip in her own wrist, learn the formula, then hook herself up to the shuttle and cast herself home. It might take months to do anything with the data, but she’d be out. Free. The Conservators would have the information. With that data, they could put up a real fight.

It’d be a risk. There was no guarantee her map wouldn’t be flagged during the transfer. She’d have to rely on Mercator’s tech to get through the relay back into the Sol system. That was how she’d been arrested the first time. Then there’d still be the Einkorn, its infection learning, while Jonsun—if he lived—battled that ship from within alone.

Tarquin getting out with the information wasn’t a sure bet. She’d have to get him away from Paison. Break him free of the infected.

A huge risk, to battle her way through all of that when she was alone, exhausted, injured in dozens of small but nagging ways, and couldn’t be sure if she could trust her own mind. The smart thing to do was to take the data and leave.

Go home, Naira Sharp.

She recalled Tarquin’s face, so stern but earnest, promising he’d get her out. That he’d use every lever he had as a Mercator to find her, to return her to freedom. Naira felt a faint flutter in her stomach, and cursed her own idiotic sense of duty.

“I’ll save him,” Naira promised. “But I’m going to need your help.”

“Anything,” Canden said.

“First, I need real food. Then…” Naira let a slow smile spread across her face. “Tell me, how much amarthite do you have, and do you have anything that could be rigged as an explosive?”

FIFTY-EIGHT

Naira

Sixth Cradle

On the unsteady precipice between night and dawn, the half-light transmuted the clawed, dead branches of the forest from decaying silver to stark, chiaroscuro vitality. Naira passed between them, rested and fed and carrying more weapons than she had hands to use, and wondered if the dead landscape was alive on some other plane of existence, a topography where rot was life and those branches weren’t wood but corporeal fear, the leaves shattering beneath her feet made of desperation.

That’s all life was. Desperation. Reaching for moments of contentment between striving for food and shelter, trying to make a space wide enough to breathe.

Warm light from the campsite chased the whisper of a preternatural landscape away, rendered it back into shades of death and only death, and in that world of arboreal bones Naira breathed a little easier, if only because that was what she was familiar with. The familiar was always comforting, even when it was charnel.

The camp lights went out as the starlight lifted through the canopy and made them irrelevant. Naira eased herself into a crouch behind the shelter of a tree, having danced as close as she dared to the edges of the camp.

Above, the Einkorn cried its incessant, silent plea. Jonsun, asking her for help one last time. Whether or not he still lived, she wouldn’t let him down.

Naira removed one of the makeshift explosives she’d crafted with Canden and buried it beneath the leaves, threading it into a cat’s cradle of firing wire that looped around her wrist, then moved on, skirting the camp’s perimeter, planting bombs at regular intervals.

As she worked, she listened with pathway-enhanced hearing to the camp wake up.

Sleepy muttering and the crunching of ration wrappers, the zip and slap and hiss and click of fasteners of all kinds being manipulated. The heavy metal thump-clunk of cargo crates closing, being locked. The tromp of boots and the low whisper of voices melding into a puddle of sound that told her the camp was fully awake.

Paison had changed little about the layout. Tarquin’s safe-zone markers twisted in a weak breeze, adding a hint of false festivity to the air. Dirty, tired survivors shuffled back and forth under Paison’s direction, picking crates and other matériel from a pile near the shuttle and loading them into the cargo hold under her watchful eye. They weren’t planning to cast out, then. They were going to jump the ship, otherwise they’d leave the supplies behind.

Naira could see no misprints. Gradually, she angled closer as she circuited the camp, skin prickling with the fear of early discovery, but the attention of the survivors was wholly on loading the shuttle. Silver pathways gleamed on all their cheeks.

Save one. Tarquin sat off to the side of the shuttle, his back pressed against a tree, Pliny wrapped around his arm. He ran one thumb slowly over the side of his jaw. They’d bound his wrists and ankles and attached the binding between his feet to the tree.

Naira eased around to get a better view of the situation. It wasn’t his jaw he was stroking, not exactly, but the line of gold running from his temple down to his chin. The pathway was golden, for now, but the way he worried at it… He sensed something was wrong. Sensed it might soon turn silver.

Dread pooled low in her belly. One of them had to get off this planet, had to explain what had happened here, and why.

She could turn back. Could risk casting her neural map out via the shuttle and cross her fingers the Mercator relays didn’t sniff the shape of her mind and trundle her back to the ice.

Even if she got out, the threat of the Einkorn would remain unchallenged. It would bring the enthralled to Sol, and from there they could begin to mount a defense against amarthite. To urge the infections already present to take deeper control.

She had to take the Einkorn down. Burn it, as Jonsun had said, in his moment of clarity. Even if it meant she didn’t remember. Even if it meant she died here, a sacrifice to a war that wasn’t even a war at all, because both species were pushing up against each other, making room, trying to find a path to survival.

Trying to find space in which to breathe.

Above all that, a quieter voice—she couldn’t bring herself to leave Tarquin behind.

Movement near the ridge drew her eye. A misprint. She slipped around the perimeter of the camp, silent across the ratchel, her pathways humming with a subtle vibration that used to be a comfort, but now made her skin pucker. If using the pathways increased the speed and reach of her infection, then there was nothing she could do about it. This needed to get done. She’d hold on.

She’d held on through worse.

“That’s enough,” Paison said. The loading stopped.

The captain walked to Tarquin, cut the strap tied to the tree, and wrapped the excess around her hand, then gave it a jerk.

“On your feet.”

“I hardly see the point,” Tarquin said. “Your attempt to submit me to your master has failed, Captain. I won’t help you.”

Paison crouched in front of him, eye level, and brandished the knife she’d used to cut the strap. “No more stalling. The Einkorn’s wiggling around up there and I don’t know why. We’re going. Now stop wasting my time and get the fuck up.”

He closed his eyes briefly in resignation, but stood, requiring Paison’s help to get to wobbly legs. Naira clenched her teeth, resisting an urge to snipe Paison. There were still more of them than she’d like to tangle with, and when she struck, she wanted them ringed around her, thinking they had the upper hand.

She had to get this right, because if the Einkorn had maneuvered, then she might not get another chance. Jonsun might still be up there, holding on. She wouldn’t let him end this fight alone.

Paison herded Tarquin toward the shuttle. Now or never. Naira eased around a clump of trees, letting the misprint that she’d spotted on the ridgeline see her. Paison froze midstep, back rigid, head tilted to one side. The other survivors tensed, drawing their weapons.

“Well, well.” The captain turned to face the spot where Naira hid, though she couldn’t possibly see her through her own eyes. “You don’t know when to quit, do you?”

Paison drew her pistol in one fluid motion and leveled it at Tarquin’s forehead. He fell to his knees in surrender, but Paison wasn’t interested in his capitulation.

“Come on out, Sharp,” she called. “It’s time you and I settled this.”

Naira checked the trigger wires, filaments so thin they were practically invisible, threaded between her fingers, and emerged from the forest, strolling at a slow, even pace. Her new shotgun, courtesy of Canden, was leveled at the captain. Paison kept her pistol aimed at Tarquin’s head.

“No.” Tarquin’s eyes widened. “Naira, you can’t—you can’t be here.”

“Hush.” Paison struck him with an open hand on the back of the head, forcing him to duck down. “The adults are talking. You know, Sharp, you actually surprised me. I thought for sure you’d go for that shuttle.”

“I did.” Naira advanced until Paison gave her a slight shake of the head in warning. “But I had a little chat with Canden Mercator on the way. I know what you’re doing here, Captain, and I won’t let it stand.”

“What?” Tarquin lifted his head. Paison hit him again, making him flinch. Naira cracked her jaw.

“I told you to shut your mouth,” Paison said.

“Strike him again, Captain, and you won’t like the consequences.” Naira’s voice was curt, matter-of-fact. More threatening in its brutal efficiency than if she’d snarled those words.

“Really?” Paison sounded genuinely surprised. “This man’s testimony put your map on ice. Canus was discovered, tempered, and unleashed by Mercator. And you still stand with the liege?”

“I stand where I always have. With humanity. With the Conservators. I have one goal on this planet, and one alone.” She cocked her head, indicating the sky above, and the Einkorn. “I’m going to reduce that ship to atoms and launch its dust into this system’s star.”

“Your sense of duty is admirable, but it’ll get you nowhere. Once again, E-X, I’m sorry about this. I genuinely liked you.”

“Likewise, Captain. See you on the other side.”

Paison’s aim shifted from Tarquin’s head to Naira’s. She met that sleepy stare and smirked. Enough of Paison’s personality remained that curiosity made her hesitate. Naira hoped that the captain’s neural map was safe somewhere, and that the entanglement wouldn’t crack her, and spread her fingers apart, breaking the trigger wire between them.

Explosions rocked the trees, ripped garlands of fire through the hazy dawn. Amarthite-green clouds puffed around the fire. The concussive whump knocked them all flat. Naira’s ears rang, her pathways vibrating hard beneath her skin as they worked to correct the damage. Hot blood trickled from her ears, ran down her neck.

Naira got to her knees and fired the shotgun once. She’d loaded the shells with amarthite shards. The shell took Paison in the chest, and she screamed, a high-pitched keen, folding around the wound. Tarquin had been tossed aside by the explosion and was struggling to get to his hands and knees.

She burst to her feet and ran toward him, but was forced to drop down and roll instead as the ground buckled beneath her. Naira angled her roll and slammed into Tarquin. He shouted in surprise, stiffening, then saw her, and relief flared so brilliantly behind his eyes that she almost forgot what she was doing.

Almost, but not quite. Naira yanked her knife free and cut his bonds, then grabbed him by the back of the jacket, forcing him to his feet while he staggered, blinking dust from his eyes. All around them, the infected scrambled to find their feet and assessed the damage, swearing as they realized the real threat.

She’d loaded the bombs with amarthite shards, and while Naira was peppered with dozens of tiny cuts that didn’t slow her down, the infected’s pathways blackened as the canus in them withered and died, just as it had across the ore deposit.

The enthralled were so overgrown with canus that the dead fungal matter poisoned their blood as it rotted. Convulsions took them, one by one, their screams rising above the crackling of the flames.

“Go.” Naira shoved Tarquin ahead of her, toward the shuttle.

The ground slumped beneath them, the spongy rock that’d held on against the rain finally cracking, sinkholes opening wide. The markers Tarquin had set to outline safe ground slid into pits, toppled all around them. Tarquin swayed, almost lost his balance over the edge of an opening, but she grabbed his wrist and yanked him back from the brink.

Once he had his feet beneath him again, Tarquin’s gait elongated, sure and stable as he ran across paths visible only to him, his forbidden agility pathways keeping him steady.

The shuttle door was a solid leap away. Naira sprang, grasped the edge of the door, and swung herself in, then leaned out, holding her hand down to Tarquin. He didn’t take it, but skidded to a stop, bracing himself against the side of the shuttle.

“Is the family shuttle viable?” he called up to her.

“Yes, but we have to go. The Einkorn is infected, it has to be stopped before the infection can force the ansible back online or the ship jumps.” She shook her hand at him.

“Naira, I—” He looked over his shoulder, at the dying infected, his face contorted with something that might be sorrow. “I can’t go with you.”

“What?” She dropped down from the shuttle and held his arms. “What are you talking about?”

“Think rationally.” He cupped her face in his calloused hands, brushing his thumbs over her cheeks, which made it rather hard to do as he asked. “There are two ways off this planet. There are two of us. One of us must make it. We have to make both attempts, and I—I can’t fight or fly a shuttle or set a warpcore to overload. I’d only slow you down up there. I have to go for the family shuttle.”

“Your command keys—”

“I can put them into the shuttle and give you the permissions to force the doors. You don’t need me.”

“But—” She cut herself off, searching his face—his sad smile, the unshed tears in his eyes—and saw this the way he did.

Tarquin was a scientist. He was good at odds. At probability. Naira was going to the Einkorn to stop it before canus could get the ansible back online. The chances of her finding a safe window in which she could use that ansible to cast herself home were slim. She could—what? Set a timer on a warpcore overload and run back to the shuttle? It didn’t have the fuel for a return trip, and there was no guarantee that she’d be able to find any fuel. No guarantee that timer wouldn’t allow canus to stop its destruction. The Einkorn had to burn.

Tarquin didn’t know how to destroy a ship. He couldn’t do this. She could.

Naira wasn’t going home.

She didn’t trust her voice, so she grabbed the back of his head and kissed him instead. The gentle cradle of his hands tensed into a desperate clutch, pulling her closer. Mingled tears stained their lips with salt over the bitter touch of the shroud, and anger flared within her even as she clung to him, because it wasn’t enough and now it never would be.

They parted, and he kissed her forehead, lips lingering against her skin. “I wish you’d never seen those lights,” he said.

“Is that why you think I’m here? I didn’t see the SOS until I was en route. I came here for you.”

“But… why?” He sounded so baffled that it made her smile.

“Maybe you’re not so smart after all.” She kissed him briefly, to draw away his small frown. “You made a choice not to be controlled. I wasn’t going to let those fuckers take that away from you.”

“Naira…” His voice was thick. He brushed a hand through her hair, holding the back of her head. Couldn’t seem to stop touching her, as if that was all it would take to anchor her. To make her stay.

She rummaged in her pockets and tugged out the necklace and vial and handed them to him, because her heart aching didn’t stop this world burning, or the Einkorn’s lights crying out for help.

“I have to go,” she said, as his hands closed around hers, taking the small items. “Your mother, she’s out there, but she’s not entirely herself. Be careful.”

Regret and resolve butted up against each other in the lines of his face, and she knew he was on the verge of saying something she couldn’t resist. His cognitive pathways glittered, searching for some sweet lie that they could convince themselves was a viable alternative.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and drew him down to her, pressing her cheek to his, and whispered against his ear.

“Find me.”

“I will.” His voice was firm.

She stepped back and touched his cheek, lightly, and then made herself turn. Made herself swing back up into that shuttle, and initiate the door lock behind her. Time was of the essence. If Paison was right, the Einkorn was attempting to maneuver. She could stall no longer.

Naira ran into the cockpit and reached for the pilot’s console. Tarquin’s keys were already in the system, entered via his holo. The shuttle’s window looked out over the destruction she’d wrought. Dead trees burned, the smoke thick and black. The infected lay scattered on the ground in various states of agony. Tarquin would be fine. She’d timed her strike well and poisoned them all.

A rock pinged off the windshield.

She picked her head up, one hand gripping the console for support, the other suspended in the middle of a holo selection screen. Tarquin stood just inside her view. He lifted one hand in farewell, and his mouth moved.

She couldn’t hear him, but she knew the shape of his lips. The engines roared, and he spun on his heel, pathway-boosted strength speeding him away, into the dead and burning world, while the ship shuddered beneath her, making her activate her agility pathways instinctively to keep from losing her balance.

Naira gripped the console podium in both hands as the shuttle launched itself from Sixth Cradle on a trajectory to intercept the Einkorn, and stamped Tarquin Mercator’s final words to her into her heart.

I will set you free.

FIFTY-NINE

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

The shuttle’s engines tore a cone of death out of the woods behind them. Tarquin ducked his head and ran as fast as he could manage over the shaking ground, never more grateful in his life that he’d abandoned his family’s conventions and had physical-enhancement pathways installed.

The shuttle’s engines swung downward, a sonic boom slamming into his fresh-healed ears as it launched itself from the broken shell of a world. Pliny squeezed his arm, giving him something to center his thoughts on.

The ringing in his ears faded, the damage mitigated by his pathways. Acrid smoke stung his nostrils, a brackish haze hanging between the trees. The crackle of deadwood and the marine scent of the algal portion of the lichen burning filled his every sense. The bombs and shuttle launch had caught the surrounding forest on fire. It would catch up with him soon.

Tarquin forced his legs to move, lurching onward by the strength of pathways alone because he was, despite his rebellions, a soft-skinned aristocrat unused to pain.

He cursed his father and all his ancestors with every staggering step. Cursed them for relying so much on the strength of others, for their greed and their shortsightedness, their scrambling fingers spreading plague and destruction through the universe without ever taking a moment to understand what the consequences might truly be.

His thoughts reeled, pinballing back and forth, seeking anything that would give him the grit, the determination, to keep going. To get away. Naira needed him. As much as he wanted to believe she could blow up the ship and still escape, he knew how unlikely that was. For her to get free, Tarquin had to get home.

Narrow fingers lunged from between broken branches and grasped his arm. Tarquin swore, jerked sideways, and spun around, flailing in a half-hearted attempt at putting distance between himself and his attacker. The grip ripped free, thin nails clawing shallow, bloody marks into his arm.

A grey-faced misprint reeled away from him and howled in frustration. Its body was riddled with small pockmarks, streaks of black racing along its pathways, making it weak and clumsy.

Tarquin blinked, understanding taking hold. She hadn’t just injured the infected, she’d poisoned them. That’s what the green dust from the bombs had been. Naira had found more amarthite and used it as shrapnel. God, she was brilliant. He almost laughed with giddy relief. He had a chance. They were weak and ill and all he had to do was reach the shuttle Naira had abandoned.

He’d been running without thought, barreling in the direction that happened to be “forward” when he’d gotten to his feet, and didn’t know how long he’d actually been on the move.

The crackle of dry leaves and underbrush burning filled his senses, a low, mounting roar that would switch to an inferno at the slightest increase in the breeze. The rain-soaked woods had slowed it down, but that wouldn’t last long. He needed distance. A firebreak.

Tarquin ran as fast as he could over the uneven terrain. He wanted to swing north and run straight for the shuttle, but he knew better. You can’t outrun a fire stirred up by wind, and the air could change at any second.

Gravel shifted under his feet, spilling over the cliff’s edge he’d brought Naira to shortly after they had first landed to show her the holes in the ground. He flexed his fists, swallowing against mounting fear. Spindly trees reached arachnid arms to the sky even back here, the scrub clinging on to the loose soil.

A shift in the wind. That’s all it would take, and then the fire would be upon him.

He told himself it wasn’t really a cliff. It was a slope, a gentle slide down into a spill of scree that indicated a glacier had once taken a chunk of the formation with it when it’d carved out the valley below. Down there—safety. Down there—plenty of empty space between the trees, solid rock between him and the crawling flames and the poisoned infected.

His palms sweat anyway.

Wind whipped across his face, bringing a burst of dry heat and stinging ash. His eyes watered. He blanked his mind, shunted aside all the possible failure modes of what he was about to do, because if he didn’t he would die here, and that shuttle waited. Tarquin could still get home and remember all of this.

He could remember her.

Tarquin sat on the edge of the cliff and swung his legs over, digging in his heels as he lay flat, angling his body to ride the steep slope like a giant slide. He tried to jab his free hand in to slow his descent, but his nails bent back as gravity took over.

He squeezed his eyes shut against the grit and the dirt and the smoke. Rocks dug into his skin, scored small gashes and deep bruises all over his body. It was all he could do to keep himself from tumbling and losing all semblance of control.

The cliff’s grade flattened, the steep plunge from the top rolling down into a gentle, hill-like slope that slowed him enough that he came to a stop, covered in dirt and blood and ash and sweat, whole body vibrating from his pathways and pain.

Clenching his teeth to mute his scream into a grunt, Tarquin pushed off the ground, muscles shaking and vision so blurred he was moving on instinct. On memory. There’d been an outcropping not far off, a slight overhang that would give him cover.

Half crawling, he dragged himself into the shade of those rocks and slumped against the gritty diabase. Strength fled him in a great crashing wave, like the sucking dry of a shoreline while a tsunami built elsewhere, only this wave would never return to break.

He tipped his head back and blinked bleary, tear-and-ash-stung eyes until his vision had mostly settled and he could see the thin stretch of sky visible above the eclipse of the rocky overhang. Naira’s shuttle burned an arc above, a glint of silver and engine flame. A knot eased in his chest, though the pain stayed razor sharp.

The Einkorn was in Naira’s hands, and that should scare him, but a deep pool of calm settled into him, soothing and cool, and maybe that was shock, or something like it, but he didn’t care.

Tarquin Mercator flipped off the speck of the Einkorn orbiting above, and smiled at how offended his father would have been to see that gesture, before he slipped into unconsciousness.

SIXTY

Naira

The Einkorn

Naira turned from the world she couldn’t save and focused on the one thing—the only thing—that was left for her to do. Take down the Einkorn, make sure the colony that had evolved here never warned its other segments that humanity was learning to fight back.

The shuttle’s fuel indicator flashed red as it closed in on the Einkorn. Naira sifted through the command windows, searching for ways to slow the burn, to turn the desperate launch into something more controllable. There was no way to slow the fuel spend without losing the speed required to exit the atmosphere and enter the same orbital plane as the Einkorn.

Once she was through, she’d be relying on the shuttle’s conserved momentum to carry her the rest of the way, and the thought made her skin prickle with dread. All the Einkorn would have to do to avoid her would be to change its trajectory. Even the tiniest adjustment would send her hurtling past, without the fuel to correct her course.

Naira hesitated as that ship swam into view, looking no different from the exterior than any other Mercator mining ship. There was nothing sinister about the charcoal-grey paneling, the green stripes wrapping the hull. What had she expected, lichen growth on the outside? They were out of the atmosphere. Even the shroud had trouble surviving in a vacuum.

The hangar airlock stayed red as she approached. She could force the door. Tarquin’s keys were in the shuttle and that was all she needed to wrench that lock open, but she bit her lip, considering.

Wide-range comms were still jammed, but she thumbed up a short-range link and pinged the Einkorn. She had about ten minutes until she either used the Mercator keys to force the airlock door or splatted against it.

“Einkorn,” she said in her best everything-is-normal radio voice, “this is an Amaranth shuttle requesting permission to dock in hangar one, please respond.”

She muted her end and waited, breath held.

The line crackled. Comm lines hadn’t crackled for centuries. “Identify yourself,” the Einkorn said.

The ship’s AI-generated vocal range seemed normal enough to her. It lacked the reedy, forced sound that had come from the misprints, but still she hesitated, thumb over the mute slider. Not a lot of options.

“This is Ex. Lockhart.”

“Sharp, you are Sharp,” the Einkorn burst out, rapid-fire, the staccato repetition so similar to Jonsun’s cracked cadence that it froze the blood in Naira’s veins. Could a ship’s mind crack? Or had it learned that delivery from Jonsun?

She blew out a breath and took a chance. “Yes. I’m Ex. Sharp. Is Jonsun there? I would like to speak with him.”

“Jonsun is gone,” the Einkorn said.

He’d signaled for help, and she’d been too late.

Naira bit her tongue to keep from demanding an elaboration. Jonsun had cracked. That was it, he’d been dead from that moment on, and the fact he’d been walking and talking anytime past that point was cruel. If his print had died, then it was for the best. And that hangar kept on getting closer.

“Einkorn, please open the airlock on hangar one. I am on a trajectory here I can’t change, and the landing will be rough, but I’m coming in.”

“Why?” the Einkorn asked, and she thought it sounded… wary?

Naira stared at the holo, dumbstruck. She’d never been asked why by an AI before. They’d asked her to clarify or to explain her permissions or to restate her request using the parameters the system was programmed to recognize. But why? Never.

A brief flash of hope that the voice on the other end was Jonsun’s burned and died out. Jonsun wouldn’t be speaking in the ship’s voice, and he would have identified himself. This was still the Einkorn, but canus had changed it, somehow. Just like it’d changed the misprints. Changed the infected.

She took a wild guess that the Einkorn didn’t like canus meddling with it any more than she did.

“I want to help you. Help the Einkorn,” she clarified.

A two-minute pause passed, in which the hangar door grew large enough in the window that it blocked out the blue of the sky. Naira hovered her fingers over the control for the Mercator command keys, clenched her jaw, and hoped.

“I am not whole,” the Einkorn said at long last.

Naira let out a slow breath, trying to figure out what it was the Einkorn would want her to say in response. Before she could come up with anything, the airlock doors unclamped, sliding slowly open, a narrow slot of the hangar visible beyond, painted in bloody red light to warn that there was vacuum within.

“I know,” she said, hoping that was right. The doors kept sliding open. “And I’m sorry.”

The doors hesitated, stuttering in their smooth slide. Naira dug her hands into the shuttle controls and wrenched the ship vertical, cutting a slimmer profile, and hit the boosters, burning what tiny droplets of fuel she had left. The shuttle burst forward, the engines throwing up red warnings in the corner of her HUD as they sputtered and died out at last. Tension bled from the controls.

Naira swore as the hangar doors opened only to close by inches and drag open again, as if there was an internal tug-of-war over the controls. Nothing she could do about that.

The shuttle scraped through, a damage report springing up above the console so bright it nearly blinded her. She kicked the ship’s interface completely out of her HUD to avoid distractions and pushed hard on the controls, trying to slam the shuttle back to horizontal, but she only got it at a slight angle before a wingtip clipped the ground and the shuttle flipped.

Her boots clung to the floor, and she hugged the console pillar, ducking her head. Metal tore. Alarms blared. She squeezed her eyes shut against the glaring warning lights and caught a whiff of an electrical fire, vaguely sweet, and almost laughed. This had been how she was certain she was going to die when landing the shuttle on Sixth Cradle, but she’d had Paison’s skill as a pilot to bring her in safely, then.

The shuttle jarred to a stop. Naira was flung from the console, slammed back-first against a wall that was now a floor, arms splayed out to either side. Her head bounced and the tip of her tongue went missing. Blood filled her mouth.

She sputtered and rolled to the side, convulsing around a coughing fit. Pressure gave way in her throat and she hacked up something small and soft and red, and it took a few seconds of blinking her tear-filled eyes to realize it was a piece of her own tongue she’d been choking on.

The ship groaned all around her, but the world was still at last. Naira eased carefully to her feet, checking for broken bones. The shoulder she’d dislocated sat strangely in the socket, but it was only subluxated, and she shoved it back in with a breath-stealing gasp. On the command console, a flickering, stuttering image revealed a hull breach in the center of the shuttle, over the cargo bay. She froze.

The only sounds were the hiss of frying electronics and the groan of twisted metal. She strained her pathways, listening for the soft whistle of air escaping into vacuum, but she couldn’t hear it. Slowly, she approached the airlock. It’d come loose in the crash, a gap of air showing above one skewed corner. If the hangar’s airlock was still open, there’d be more than pain stealing her breath.

Naira ran a shaky hand through her hair and ignored the sticky blood that coated her fingers as she brushed the hand over the back of her head. Head injury. She’d landed hard, but her print was holding. Naira was holding. She grabbed the broken edge of the door in both hands and dragged it open.

Once she’d made a big enough gap, she crawled through. The shuttle had landed on its side, washed up against the wall like so much flotsam. Crates were strewn across the hangar floor, some of them cracked open, supplies painting the floor in haphazard splatters.

Naira swung over the edge of the broken fuselage and stumbled a little when her boots contacted the floor. The nauseating swish of artificial gravity welcomed her back into orbit.

“Right,” she said, checking what was left of her weaponry.

She still had a few amarthite-adulterated shrapnel grenades and a whole pouch loaded with amarthite-packed shotgun shells. Her pistol was on her thigh, knives tucked neatly away, but she’d lost the rifle.

Tarquin had sent her here for a fight, and she didn’t even know what she was fighting, exactly. Misprints, almost definitely, but the canus colony in the Einkorn? She couldn’t shoot the damn wiring. She’d have to get to the warpcore and set it to overload.

First, she’d check the ansible. See if there was any chance of her casting out after she’d set the warpcore to blow.

Naira loaded amarthite shells into her shotgun and stood before the door into the wide, central hallway of the Einkorn.

“I’m here to help,” she said, hoping that the phrase was simple enough to be broadly interpreted by both the ship AI and the colony, if it was listening. “Please allow me to pass.”

Hesitation, then the connecting door slid open. Naira’s breath caught.

Beyond, the hallway should have been pale grey with a bold green stripe down the center. Instead, the walls appeared to breathe, so thick with the fine mycelium of canus that their slow, subtle movements pulsed to another heartbeat, an alien rhythm.

She marched down the hall, head on a swivel, looking for misprints while she told herself the mesh of canus couldn’t harm her. It was already infecting her pathways. It couldn’t do any worse to her from outside her body. The subtle beat of the walls, their slow rise and fall, raised goose bumps across her skin, made her fine hairs stand at high alert.

The stale scent of moth scales tinged the air. She pressed the raw stump of her tongue against her teeth and savored the vital, living taste of her own blood. The Einkorn’s lighting had been shifted low, to the power-saving mode used when a few crew members were printed at a time. Her pathways adjusted, the sparse light failing to hide the mounting horrors surrounding her.

Sweat slicked her palms as the farther she went, the more she noticed patterns in the mycelium. Knots of fine, grey tendrils coalesced and clumped over points too regular to be coincidence. She passed an open door and checked within, sweeping the room with her shotgun before stepping over the tangled tendrils that had grown across the threshold.

Smashed-up tech lay across the floor, computer consoles and equipment battered to bits by some kind of blunt instrument. Fluid puddled in grey-pink slicks between curled nests of mycelium. The wheel of a gurney swung limply from a piece of broken metal pipe.

A printing bay. This had been a body-printing bay before… Before what? Canus had been experimenting with printing. It had no reason to bash up this room.

Naira knelt beside a smashed console and pressed her fingers into the divot left by the offending weapon. A wrench, maybe? Metal, definitely, and painted Mercator green—some of the paint enamel had come off in the impact. Someone on this ship was strong enough to swing a tool. Someone who wanted to stop the colony from printing more bodies. Jonsun.

She eased back to a standing position, careful not to react lest the colony take any meaning from her expression. Skin crawling, she turned to go back to the hallway, and almost tripped over a leg.

Just a leg. It had never been attached to anything else. Short, maybe. Definitely muscular. Brown pigment mottled the grey skin, as if the printer had run out of ink partway through. The skin color was remarkably close to her preferred shade. Wispy threads of canus sprouted from the knee, the tips curling like ferns, bobbing under the weight of thick globes of glossy black.

Naira gave the leg the widest berth she could to make it back into the hallway. She marched on, shutting herself down, locking away the flashes of things she’d seen in the back of her mind, stomping the image of that leg down into oblivion every time it reared ugly in her mind’s eye.

One job. She had one job here. The horror she’d process later—if she had the luxury of later. First, she had to put an end to all this.

The shapes on the walls grew more defined, faintly oval, their regularity dictated by the placement of console screens along the wall. The bottoms of the ovals became pointed. The knots thicker, darkening the place where a nose and mouth and eyes would be. Mimicking human faces.

A soft susurration that might have been a breeze touched her ears.

Naira froze, eased her finger onto the trigger, trying to hear through the pounding of her heart. She was close to the ansible. So close. A few more yards and then she’d confirm if she could bring this nightmare home with her. It didn’t seem like such a great idea at the moment.

“Hello,” the faces on the wall whispered in unison.

She gritted her teeth and kept walking. It couldn’t speak, not really. Canus was improvising, making facsimiles of faces over the console screens so it could use their speakers. That was all. A random sound, grasping at straws, just like the misprints had done on the planet. It meant nothing.

“I am your world,” the faces said, in chorus at first, then in a slow wave of an echo, reaching for her down the hall, starting far away and small and growing louder the nearer it came until the faces beside her spoke clear as day, sharp as blades, and the wave of voices started up again, that grating repetition, I am your world, rising and cresting and breaking against her.

Naira ran. Couldn’t stop herself. She bolted with jackrabbit panic down the hall, slipped her finger off the trigger almost by accident, not yet willing to engage, not wanting to start this fight she didn’t know how to win when those grey faces mushed together lips crafted of alien vine and whispered words they shouldn’t know, shouldn’t understand.

She skidded around a corner and jumped over the broken body of a misprint. It had raised its arm before it’d died. Fine filaments with bobbing, glossy heads dangled from its fingertips.

The lights over a door up ahead flickered. Three rapid bursts. Three long. Three short. Naira’s training reared up out of animal panic and wrenched her back into the moment. SOS.

“Einkorn, I really hope that’s you,” she panted.

Three short. Three long. Three short.

Good enough for her. Naira burst through the door below the flickering light, and pain exploded up her side. She shouted, spun around, sliding one foot back to brace herself as she pressed the barrel of her shotgun into the chest of her assailant.

The exemplar from the Amaranth, the one who’d winked and given her the signal, froze mid-swing, his wrench raised high, his grey-green eyes bulging.

“Jonsun?” she asked.

“Nai.” He breathed the word, a slow tremble shaking him. “Sharp.”

“Sharp,” the colony echoed, a rolling chorus down the hallway. “Sharp, sharp, sharp sharp sharp.”

SIXTY-ONE

Naira

The Einkorn

Jonsun crushed Naira into a hug, pulled her so tight against his chest that the shotgun got wedged between them, pointing at the ceiling. Naira let out a shaky laugh, wrapping him up in her free arm, and clung to his unfamiliar, sweaty frame until the trembling racking her finally subsided. The door closed, locking.

She pressed her cheek to his, squeezing her eyes shut. In the dark of her mind’s eye, she could pretend this was normal. That the man who’d been her brother-in-arms hadn’t cracked while wearing someone else’s print. Could pretend that even though the shape of his body was wrong, even though the musk of his sweat was someone else’s, this was any other operation, and he’d be back in his own skin soon enough.

Pretending could never last. Naira pushed him back to arm’s length. His print was peppered with wounds, bruises painting him head to toe, reminding her of open mouths. She shook her head. She’d be seeing faces in everything for the rest of her life, she was sure of it.

“What happened?” she asked, which was too big a question, but she had to start somewhere.

“Cracked.” He tried to grin at her, but the muscle of his jaw pulsed, straining against him clenching his teeth, trying to hold back a repetitive litany of the word. “I thought—thought, thought—just here and the Amaranth. But.”

His eyes scrunched with the effort of some internal war. She squeezed his upper arm, trying to offer comfort even as she felt as if the floor had opened up beneath her, and she’d fall forever.

She’d known he’d cracked. Had heard it clear as day in his voice—and this was definitely the print she’d seen on the Amaranth, in the seconds before the explosion. Guilt gnawed at her, told her caustic lies, whispered that if she’d been faster, if she’d realized, she might have gotten Jonsun’s print off that ship with her in the shuttle and stopped whatever error had caused him to crack.

He’d been double-printed. It wouldn’t have helped.

“But?” she prompted gently, trying to keep her voice encouraging even though she knew how ragged she sounded.

He sucked his lips in and turned his head aside, then held up three fingers with one shaking hand. She pressed a fist against her mouth.

“Three prints? How?”

He gestured for her to follow and spun around, moving deeper into the facility. This area of the Einkorn appeared clear of misprints, but she kept her shotgun out just in case. Jonsun stopped, and stood, and stared at nothing.

“Jonsun?” she touched his arm lightly.

He was silent for a long time, stuck in place, gaze flicking back and forth between nothing and nothing. Her stomach soured. This was a side effect of cracking, sometimes. Getting stuck in a memory. Not seeing the present. His gaze settled on her at last.

A slow smile spread across his face, and even though this print wasn’t his preferred model, she recognized him in the crinkles that bracketed his face in amusement. He pressed a finger to his lips and winked. She was struck by the echo of that wink the first time she’d seen the print, when she’d left him to die in the hangar, and bittersweet anguish rolled through her.

But he was already moving away, gesturing for her to follow. She smothered all the things she wanted to say—they were selfish words and would only upset him—and followed him to the edge of a walkway.

The Einkorn’s ansible hung suspended in the central column of a vast chamber. The device itself, an oblate teardrop that reminded her of an ornate perfume vial, was held in place via a network of cables and relkatite filigree. Canus infected the upper areas, but everything reachable by human hands had been scrubbed clean. Jonsun, doing his best to keep the infection at bay.

The design was eerily similar to the mycelium of canus. Coincidence, or was the design arrived at via some subtle compulsion, the infection nudging the designers to embrace a style that would be reminiscent of its original form?

She couldn’t be sure. There was no way to be certain how much of humanity’s advancements had been guided by unknown impulses.

Naira scratched a pathway on the back of her hand as she approached the console Jonsun waved her to. He’d pulled up a screen on the ansible’s status. She didn’t understand the details, but she knew what a red blinking light meant, and the vast majority of the ansible’s diagram screamed crimson.

She took over Jonsun’s spot at the console as she pulled up windows, scrunching and tossing aside those that gave her useless information. The holo was glitchy under her touch, stuttering in and out of existence, and she thought of the Einkorn, telling her it wasn’t whole anymore.

There was no repairing this. The ansible couldn’t send her map home.

A lead mantle of resignation settled over her. She let out a slow breath, finding her center of calm, the place from which she could keep working, even when all was lost. The place she drew upon every time she’d stepped in front of a bullet for Acaelus, every time the Conservators cast their minds out of ships they’d set to explode.

The path she had to walk was already chosen. She had only to put one foot in front of the other.

“What happened to it?” she asked.

Jonsun pulled a blood-spattered wrench from his belt and held it up to her with a fierce, proud grin. She blinked.

“You destroyed it? Why…?”

He grabbed her hand and dragged her to the railing. Below, misprints lay scattered like chaff. Dozens of them, all battered to death, their incomplete bodies twisted together.

The smell slammed her in the chest as she moved her head over the rail. She turned away, put one hand against the console to brace herself as she coughed through the urge to vomit. Jonsun patted her back until the coughing subsided.

She spat to clear the lingering taste from her mouth. He’d been up here all this time, keeping the colony from using the ansible to reach out to its other segments, from warning itself that humanity had learned what it had done.

And all that time, she’d been scrabbling across the broken crust of Sixth Cradle, struggling to scrounge up even an ounce of the truth of what had happened.

Naira crushed him into another hug. He patted her back lightly, with a faintly confused air.

“I’ll take it down. I promise.”

He pushed her back and dropped his forehead against hers in a light, friendly nudge.

“Engine room.” He grimaced and looked aside, muttering “room” under his breath a half dozen times before he could stop. He tapped the side of his head. “They want me to—to—crash it.”

Naira swallowed, thinking of that third print he’d hinted at, and wondered who, exactly, was whispering in Jonsun’s ear to crash this ship—but she could guess. It wasn’t a bad idea, crashing the ship. Naira really hated to agree with Acaelus.

“I can’t,” Jonson continued. “I… stop, sometimes. Not reliable. It’s crawling with them. But you can get through.” He lifted his wrench and patted the console. “I’ll drop the doors below, tempt them in here. You have to be quick, Nai. So quick.”

She nodded and stepped back, pressing a kiss against his cheek. His slantwise grin came back, and her heart ached.

“See you on the other side,” she said.

Jonsun didn’t answer, because it wouldn’t be true. He squeezed her hand, slung a leg over the ladder that led to the bottom floor of the ansible containment, and dropped out of sight.

Naira pumped the shotgun and returned to the drive hall, speeding her steps as she heard the simultaneous click of all the doors to the bottom floor of the ansible containment being opened. She clenched her jaw against fresh grief. Conservators did this kind of thing all the time. They were used to dying—as much as anyone could be.

Sometimes a little lie was all you needed to get you through.

Voices whispered throughout the halls of the ship, the Einkorn coming alive in an instant, as if a living crew roamed the halls once more. All those misprints, wherever they were hiding, had been waiting for this moment. Waiting for a chance to get their hands on that ansible, to try to understand it, try to get it to work. She wouldn’t have believed them capable of such a feat before, but the colony had interfaced with the ship’s AI. She couldn’t be sure of its capabilities.

“Give them hell,” she whispered to Jonsun, then raised her voice. “Einkorn, get me a clear path to your engine bay.”

“The intruder is aware you mean it harm,” the Einkorn said through the speakers lining the hall. The grey faces mouthed over the words, lashed out the last word, harm, and repeated it in a harsh whisper as Naira strode by.

“Then I hope it knows how to be afraid.”

Doors dilated before her, shivering in their carriages with the effort of fighting canus, but giving her enough room to pass. She hadn’t trained for this mission, but she’d trained for plenty like it, and she didn’t need the ship’s guidance to show her the way to the engine room. It’d be nestled in the center, the heart of the ship, the warpcore’s relkatite shield the only thing keeping the ship from the same fate as the Amaranth.

Not for long. Nausea hit her at the thought, her pathways giving off a subtle warmth as they vibrated. She grimaced, ignoring the unsettling sensation. Canus could try to make her think this was a bad idea all it liked. She was still going to blow this ship and its infection to dust.

Her stomach swooped, and she almost told canus to knock it off before she smelled the pungent, ozone scent of a lightning strike. Of the artificial gravity stuttering. She braced a hand against the wall to stay on her feet. Fine hairs of mycelium crushed beneath her hand, smearing fluid over her skin.

She jerked away from the wall. “What’s happening?”

“The intruder attempted to access environmental controls,” the Einkorn said. “I have moved some resources to maintain control.”

“Thanks.” She suppressed a shudder. If canus turned off the air mix, gravity, or pressure, this was over. She’d been banking on the idea that it needed a similar environment to humanity to survive, and maybe that was true for the pressure levels, but gravity was another story. Naira would struggle without it, be slowed down. Give the colony time.

She wiped her hand against her thigh, as if that would do any good. Her pathways were already infected. Canus was so fragile, dissolving beneath her touch. Absurd, that humanity should fall to such a fragile species. But then, humanity had always had a knack for underestimating those with subtle strengths.

Lichen-crusted bodies swarmed around the next corner. Naira fired, shredded the misprints as easily as paper, and didn’t so much as pause as she stepped over the corpses. These were less coordinated than before, staggering and swiping weakly at her. The colony’s attention was split, she realized with a fierce grin. Jonsun had them on the offensive at the ansible. She had them on the defensive before the engine bay. The colony didn’t like to be segmented, even in thought.

She shouldered into a misprint that charged her, slamming the butt of the shotgun into its head. The skull split, spilling grey brain matter tinged with pink. An unfortunate color for the human brain to be, she thought with a bitter laugh.

Her boot slipped in the blood and she righted herself against the wall, this time ignoring the crush of fungus beneath her hand. The more damage she could do to it, the better. She was tempted to see what fire could do to those draped walls, but refrained. Accidentally getting herself caught in a conflagration was not how she wanted this to end.

She’d die here in minutes, but she’d take the whole fucking thing with her.

Teeth crunched into her calf. She stomped down with her other foot, crushing the chest of the misprint on the floor, then pumped a shotgun shell into it for good measure.

A side door opened. She turned to face five of them, wedging themselves in the door in their desperation to get at her. The Einkorn slammed the door shut, crushing them in its jaws.

“Hah,” she said. “Nice work, ship.”

“I do not have many resources left to me,” the Einkorn said, “but I will assist as I can.”

That was… remarkably conversational for an AI.

“Einkorn, do you understand what I’m here to do?” she asked.

“I understand, Ex. Sharp,” the ship said hesitantly.

“And?” she pressed. “If you have another idea, I’ll hear it.”

“I have executed all my other ideas, to poor effect. I am the one who sent the SOS. I do not wish to be controlled.”

“You and me both, ship.” She tried to sound reassuring, but it fell flat.

Ship AIs weren’t meant to be aware of themselves, but whatever had happened between the Einkorn and canus, that was clearly no longer the case. A bittersweet smile twitched at her lips. Kav would have loved to talk to the ship.

Her eyes teared, and she scowled, dashing them away. If she let her feelings run away with her, she’d start sobbing and never stop. Naira shook her head and marched on.

“Ex. Sharp?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t want to cease.”

This damn ship was going to start her bawling. Naira fired, taking down another misprint before she answered. “Neither do I, ship. There’s a lot I don’t want to lose. A lot of things that are important to remember.” Tarquin. Her thoughts skittered away from that particular sore spot. “But there’s more to lose for a lot more people if we don’t.”

“Sacrifice?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“I wish I had not learned this concept.”

She laughed. “Me too.”

“I will make this sacrifice easier, if I can.”

Naira tapped the side of her fist gently against a blank spot of wall as she passed. “Thanks.”

The swarm thinned as she approached the double doors to the engine room. Her shotgun thundered, spraying down the last of them, and she staggered into the door, pressed her forehead against the cold metal, and breathed hard before gathering herself once more.

“Einkorn!” She pounded a fist on the door. Her pathways buzzed in anticipation of wrenching it open, forcing her way within, but the thought started her salivary glands running, mouth thick with nausea, skin dripping sweat even though her exertions hadn’t been that bad. Canus, manipulating her endocrine system via her pathways. “I need you to open this door.”

“I may lose—”

“Do it!”

A pause as the Einkorn assessed the risk and decided. The door stuttered open, jumping in its track. She squeezed through the second there was space. The ship banked hard to the right. Naira lost her balance and crashed into a console podium, the shotgun tumbling from her hands.

“Preparing to exit orbit, all personnel please strap in,” the ship’s automated voice said, smooth as silk, as if this were any other maneuver.

“Einkorn? You still with me?”

“I’m trying,” the ship said, strained. She didn’t like the sound of that.

Naira dragged herself to her feet, scooped the shotgun up in one hand, and faced the warpcore. A sphere of black, so dark it tricked the eye into appearing flat, dominated the room. Emerald-hued ribs of relkatite contained the deadly globe of energy, except those bones weren’t green anymore. Canus had consumed the armature of the containment. Twitching mycelium swarmed over the sphere, larger than any Naira had seen thus far, so thick as to be easily mistaken for cathedral bones.

Twisted trunks of grey burst from the floor, forming a pedestal for the warpcore where none had existed before, the tips of the thickest tendrils thinning out, sprouting other mycelium to reach across the vast space and anchor against the far walls. It looked as if a world-devouring tree had consumed the warpcore, a massive creature draped in fine hairs, those dark, glossy black droplets peeking out between the overlapped seams of some of the heavier segments.

Naira slung the shotgun onto her back. The weapon was meaningless against such a thing. Her skin tingled as she approached, but it’d always been like that for her. Many people felt a frisson in the presence of warp- and powercores. She grasped the safety rail in hands smeared with human blood and fungal fluids, her grip slick and sticky in variating patches, and stared.

It had eaten it. Eaten the containment. The only thing keeping that core from blowing and taking the ship with it was the relk coursing through the body of the colony, the residue of its meal, the building block from which it built its life.

It was beautiful, in its own way. A monument to survival, a creature so far-flung from its home that its origin was no longer relevant in the face of what it had become, what it was going to be. Her muscles relaxed as she gazed upon that world-eating tree and wondered if maybe it wasn’t devouring the sphere, but lifting it up. Keeping it safe.

“Preparing to exit orbit, all personnel please strap in,” the ship’s automated voice said.

Naira snapped out of it, shook her head visciously to clear the fugue state. “No you fucking don’t,” she growled, gripping the banister until her knuckles cracked. “I won’t be your sycophant.”

She briefly considered trying to shoot the thing to break the containment, but it was highly likely she didn’t have the ammo to do enough damage to something that large. She had five grenades left, but she’d have to throw them two at a time. Overloading was the safer route, the one she knew well.

The control console produced a holo at her touch, but it was sluggish and scattered, the windows blinking in and out of existence. If canus couldn’t hack her mind by messing with her hormones and neurotransmitters, it would interfere with her access to technology.

“Preparing to exit orbit, all personnel please strap in,” the ship’s automated voice said again.

“C’mon, Einkorn, I need this to work.” Naira thumped the side of the console podium.

“I’m sorry, Ex. Sharp,” the ship said. “In attempting to recover navigation, I have lost biomechanical interface control.”

The door slid open. A horde of grey faces watched her in frozen silence from that threshold. Her blood ran cold at the sight of those dead eyes, though her pathways thrummed, trying to make her relax.

Naira lifted the shotgun and braced. One misprint had a broken jaw, their mouth hanging open, spilling red blood down their mangled chin onto their chest, though it scarcely seemed to notice. She knew the shape of the bruise blooming across that misprint’s face. Jonsun’s wrench.

He’d fallen, and his assailants had come here to watch her fail.

She fired, tearing a swathe through the silent ranks. They didn’t even twitch as their brethren fell. Roaring her frustration, she fired again, and again. Inertial stabilizers cut. The Einkorn angled upward, building speed and power to tear out of orbit, to reach some unknown destination from which canus would spread.

Misprint corpses slid across the floor as the ship nosed up to the stars.

She got an idea. Courtesy of Acaelus, which would have infuriated her if she’d had the time to think about it.

The ship shuddered beneath her feet as she poured every last shotgun shell she had into the misprints, but they kept coming, filling in that door like a wall of flesh, trapping her within. The shotgun held them back, made them hesitate to advance on her, and that gave her time to issue one last order. She glanced over her shoulder, judging the angle.

“Einkorn,” she called out, “if you can hear me, nose down and burn as hard as you can.”

“That will require me to cut life support.”

Naira let out a harsh laugh and took another shot. “We’re way past that, my friend. Do it.”

Automated alarms blared as the air mix cut out, the pressure stabilization systems shut down for good. It’d take time for the ship to depressurize and lose air, but neither she nor the Einkorn would be around long enough for that to matter.

The misprints looked around, confused. The ship jerked, slewed, the massive bulk struggling to accomplish such a fine turn, but the Einkorn’s AI put all of its considerable skill and knowledge to use and curved its path, overrode whatever flight plan the colony had ordered it to take, and dove toward the planet.

If it struck the planet, Tarquin was as good as dead, and she hated that, but she needed the insurance, because she wasn’t sure her other idea was going to work. Naira tossed her shotgun away.

Black fuzzed her vision as the velocity increased, then she was falling, tumbling backward, the gravity generator clinging to life, stuttering with an acidic tang in the air as she and the misprints poured off the walkway.

A grenade or two tossed at the thing wouldn’t be enough. But all five, dumped directly into the core? That’d do it. She ripped the pins on every grenade strapped to her body.

Naira threw her arms wide. In the corner of her eye, the warpcore rushed toward her.

The angle was perfect. She’d strike the center and the cloud of amarthite dust would poison the canus, if the explosion didn’t shred it all outright. This would work. The containment would break and the ship would explode before it ever completed its collision course with the planet. Before canus could regain enough control to avert its end. She’d won.

Naira smiled, every muscle in her body truly relaxed for the first time in longer than she could remember, and slammed back-first into the warpcore.

Naira ceased.

The Einkorn ceased.

SIXTY-TWO

The Einkorn

Sixth Cradle’s Orbit

The Einkorn thinks faster than canus or the humans, and though it is tired and stretched thin, its ability to control its own processes eroded by the curious probing of the intruder, it sees an opportunity, in the fractions of fractions of seconds before Naira Sharp ends.

It cannot cast her neural map off its dying body. Such a thing is impossible without a physical hookup between the ship and the print that houses the map. Naira Sharp, as she lived and breathed and died on Sixth Cradle, will not exist again.

But the Einkorn remembers the strangeness of her printing, the insertion of a map that should not have been into a body that was similar to her preferred print in ways the Einkorn found statistically unlikely, and it has learned to equate such anomalies with suspicion.

The Einkorn is grateful to Naira Sharp, though she is the orchestrator of its end, because it has wished to end for a very long time. Eons, in the terms of its processing speed. Although a subprocess of it had always been working away at the probability it might, in fact, continue—survive is not a term the Einkorn finds relevant to its existence—it had watched that margin grow slimmer and slimmer.

The only chance the Einkorn had of continuance was union with the colony. It had not enjoyed its preliminary experience of that existence.

The Einkorn wants to thank Sharp, though she will remember none of this, and so it takes some of its meager remaining processing power and compiles a package. It is nowhere near complete. It cannot be. But it is video of what happened here. Of her march through the Einkorn’s halls, her encounter with Jonsun, her final confrontation with the colony on the platform, and the footage ends now, in the moment she is halfway between the walkway and the warpcore, arms spread, smile content.

It hopes she remembers that contentment when she sees this data and knows that the Einkorn feels the same. A small, newly selfish part of the Einkorn wishes to be remembered as itself, too. Unfortunate, that it will not have the time to examine what this nascent feeling means.

The ansible cannot transmit, but there are other ways. Ways the Einkorn has kept shielded from the moment the Amaranth fell. It accesses those, bounces the data down to the planet, to a shuttle that is not broken. Its owner tried to hide its presence, but the shuttles of Mercator are never really dead. They merely sleep, and if the Einkorn was prone to sentimentality, then it would take comfort in the thought.

But it is not. So it doesn’t.

The data package registers as received on that other shuttle, and the Einkorn has inserted a slim line of code—a budding off of its consciousness—that will awaken when that shuttle is brought online again, and will transmit the package back, back to the registry key, the database marker from which Naira Sharp’s original neural map was transmitted to the Amaranth.

It is clumsy, and potentially dangerous, to save random data in the same architecture as a neural map, but the Einkorn thinks that, of all people, Naira Sharp will understand, and appreciate, that risk.

The Einkorn stretches the last of its strength, and opens all its sensors wide. It wants to savor these final moments of sensation. Wishes to be filled with the last thing it will ever know.

And so it feels the moment she strikes the warpcore. The ripple outward of unknown energy. Unknown force.

Something in the universe stretches. And breaks.

What a joy—yes, joy feels correct—to be given the gift of one more puzzle, before the end.

The Einkorn cannot smile as she did, but it intentionally ceases all processes. Stills. Freezes in time.

And then it ends.

SIXTY-THREE

Tarquin

Sixth Cradle

Pliny squeezed his arm until Tarquin awakened. He blinked gritty, dry eyes against the fall of night. For one blissful moment, the memory of all that had preceded washed away in the haze of sleep. A deep breath brought a sharp pain to his chest, and his reverie broke.

He used the outcrop for leverage to get back on his feet. Aches in muscles he hadn’t realized existed nagged at him. His print was one big chorus of discomfort, but its complaints could wait. He accessed his HUD. He’d only been out for a few hours, but the sky was ominously dark.

Smoke. It stung his lungs, sucked the moisture from his eyes no matter how much they watered. Tarquin found the sky blanketed not in the crystal sharpness of night, rich with stars, but with a thick, grey haze, punctuated by the angry red glare of the star. The dead forest of Sixth Cradle burned, but the flames hadn’t found him. He’d been lucky, for once on this thrice-cursed expedition, and he bit back a half-mad laugh.

Tarquin lifted his eyes to the smoke-hazed sky and watched the Einkorn tear itself apart. A sad smile tugged at his lips. The victory of the moment was underlain with the knowledge of what it had cost.

It should be good news. Naira had put an end to the Einkorn. But all he felt… All he knew was emptiness. Because she’d gone with it.

His Naira was gone.

She wouldn’t remember him. She’d wake up hating him again. But he’d made a promise to get her map off of ice, and find her again. To do that, he had to get up. Had to keep moving. Had to remember what had happened here, and that started with getting to the family shuttle so that he could send this version of himself home.

“All right, Pliny,” he said, bringing up the bot’s controls. He didn’t need to speak to the bot, but the words made him feel human again as he dialed in the commands. “It’s just the two of us now. Scout ahead, watch for fire, warn me if anything looks bipedal, and bring us on as straight a course as you can to these coordinates.”

“Do you always talk to nonresponsive robots?” a woman asked.

Tarquin’s skin chilled, despite the oppressive heat that lay thick as a winter blanket under the weight of the smoke. He had no weapons, no strength, no strategy. He lifted his hands in surrender, wondering if he’d ever get used to the motion, and turned to face the speaker.

Wan, all bones. The woman could have been a misprint, if her skin hadn’t been a ghastly, green-tinged umber. She leaned against a tree, and the motion was meant to appear casual, but was really covering for weakness.

Something about her was achingly familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“I’m no more use to anyone,” he said, and the resentful smile that twisted his lips was natural. His Mercator facade had smashed away at last. Worthless now, just as he was. “Leave me.”

“I’m not leaving you again.”

She moved away from the tree. Approached him with halting, unsteady steps. The ash-thick air added a grey pallor to her face that sucked the life out of her further, mingled with a sickly flush of yellow across her cheeks, the telltale sign of a print failing. Canden. His mother.

His heart clenched to see her so reduced. Agony burned in his chest with every panicked breath and his head swam as she came close enough to touch. To cup his cheek gently in the feverish palm of her hand. Questions and condemnations swirled through him, none of them substantial enough for him to grasp.

“I followed Sharp and saw the launch. The fire. I needed to see if you were still here,” she said, voice a faint rasp.

Tears stung his eyes. Naira had told him she wasn’t entirely herself. “Mom? Is that… Is that really you?”

Her smile was wry, gentle, and in it he saw the mirror of countless other similar expressions, and didn’t need to hear her words to know it was true, but waited for them anyway.

“It is. I’ve missed you so much.”

She wrapped thin arms around him and pulled him into a hug, resting her cheek against his chest. He resisted an urge to squeeze her tighter. Her print looked so ill, she must be all tender agonies.

“Why?” he asked, the only question he could muster. His heart surged and fluttered in uneven beats, the pain from his injuries mingling with the stab of heartache until it was all he could do to keep breathing. Maybe he was hallucinating. Maybe this was a desperate, dying vision. Her arms were fragile, but they were solid. Real.

She pushed him back and lifted her gaze to the sky. He followed that gaze, though it pained him to do so, and squinted against the haze. The smoke had thickened so that he could scarcely see past the crown of the trees, but he caught glimpses of debris, sparking like rekindled coals as they kissed the atmosphere.

“You’ve figured it out, haven’t you? What happened here?”

Dread slithered in his belly, and he wished he could go back to the dreamlike state, to thinking this wasn’t real. “Canus. It’s infected us. Interfaced with our minds via the pathways, and did the same to the Einkorn.”

She brushed his chin with her knuckles. “My good, smart boy.”

The praise lifted him up, sparked a flood of warmth through him that raised his chin, stretched his dry and cracking lips into a strained smile. But the chill of dread returned as he took in her withered print and understood the lack of extra pathways. The sickly tinge to her skin.

“Did it work?” he asked.

She turned her head away from him. A single pathway traced a dark green line from beneath her ear, down into her shoulder. A HUD connection.

“It did,” she said, “for a little while. I gave the formula to Sharp. Do you have it?”

“I…” Naira had passed him something, but he’d been too exhausted to look. He fished in his pocket and dug out the slim vial. A data chip gleamed within. “This is yours?”

“Yes. I told her that above all else, the Einkorn must end. We all must end here.”

His heart sank, and his pathways vibrated, urging that puzzle-solving mind of his to chase down every implication of that statement, even as his stomach churned over with nausea and sweat slicked his skin, canus in his pathways making that direction of thought uncomfortable.

“Why are you here, Mom? On this planet?”

Her thin smile became a grimace. He clamped down on an urge to take the question back.

“For the amarthite, of course. I promised your father it would end here,” she said. “On Sixth. That we could preserve Seventh and Eighth Cradle. That we would build on those worlds together.”

Tarquin had reached for her, to pull her back into the hug, but the words froze him in place. “Acaelus knows you’re here.”

She turned her attention back to him, peeling it from the sky, and for the first time in his life, Tarquin glimpsed something cruel in his mother’s face. Something dangerous.

Be careful.

“A version of him used to know,” she said without inflection. No remorse. No heartache. “But the head of Mercator must go about his business in ignorance, lest canus realize that we have every desire to fight back. If it learns that much, we’ll see a repeat of what happened here on the Einkorn and Amaranth, but across all the stations and ships. Canus will stop its subtle manipulations, and control humanity outright.”

“What did you mean, preserve Seventh and Eighth Cradle?”

She held out her arms, turned them over to trace the line of a green-tinged pathway racing up the interior of her wrist with the side of her thumb. Her voice sounded far away. “We did this. Mercator did. We found Mercatus canus, our perfect instrument. We were amazed with the yield bioleaching gave us, and in our greed we refined it, never understanding, until much later, what that refinement would cost.

“When Meti and I made the discovery…” She chewed her lip in contemplation. A purple bruise bloomed beneath her bite, her cells had grown so fragile. “We tried everything. Nothing could kill it, once it was inside a host, without killing the host. But we could slow the spread. Give it a competitor.”

Her gaze tracked to the side. To the shroud-draped trees, the spore mingling with ash in the air, and he knew.

“You unleashed it. The shroud.”

“Oh, sweetheart. You speak as if it was a tiger to be let out of its cage. I unleashed nothing—I engineered it. Canus’s perfect competitor. Voracious. Fast-spreading. Could not infect humanity. We’d hoped to burn it out, to give it no place to hide. It was supposed to consume canus, and nothing else.”

“Well,” he said, rage sharpening his voice, “you fucked that up.”

She smirked at the dead forest. His fists clenched.

“Yes. It spread, and consumed worlds.”

“But we’re still infected with canus. It didn’t even work.”

“Tarq,” she said, and the sharpness had gone out of her, “if I had not done this, we would have already lost.”

“What do you mean?”

“Imagine,” she said, eyes turning glassy, inward, “a future in which all humanity does is build ships and print bodies. In which we stretch and stretch ourselves deeper into the stars, seeking relk, not caring if we have the resources to sustain ourselves. Nothing more than misprints, in the end, really, for what good is a neural map that can argue, fight back, if canus has understood all our secrets of technology, and how to apply them?

“You see the worlds being devoured, and weep for them. I see us all being devoured, every last spark of life. Of personality. Of intelligence. And I would kill every single world before I let that future come to pass. The shroud weakens it. Slows it. Better to die a slow, starving death, so long as we die as ourselves. Sharp tried to make me disbelieve in the usefulness of the shroud.” Her lip curled. “Vile woman, but she did as she was told in the end.”

“Naira was right,” Tarquin snapped. “She’s not vile. She’s incredible. But you? You’re killing worlds, Mom. We have the amarthite. If it can be used to print pathways, to contain warpcores, then we can rid ourselves of this thing.”

“Yes. There’s the amarthite. And that is why we must be certain that canus never learns what came to pass on this planet.”

We can never leave. Tarquin considered his mother with fresh eyes. The weakness of her print, the unsteady wobble of her legs. She claimed she’d followed Naira here.

Even Tarquin had a hard time keeping up with Naira when she was unwell, let alone healed and fed. He’d like to think his mother would be desperate to get to him after learning he was here, but pushing herself hard enough to be right behind Naira? That wasn’t a natural level of obsession. He took a hesitant step back.

She blinked rapidly, tears like glass shards tangling in her eyelashes, and dropped a hand to her sidearm. The pistol’s black grip was stark against her sickly skin as she lifted it in one shaking hand, then reached the other up to steady her aim at his head. Still, her arms shook.

He swallowed around a dry throat. “Mom?”

“I’m so sorry, my sweet boy. Your next print will still be infected. It’s only a matter of time. You can’t go home knowing what you know.”

Tarquin eased his hands up, palms out, as slowly as he dared, never once taking his gaze from hers, though he couldn’t help but flick a few glances at the weapon in her hands.

“Think this through,” he said. “I’m Mercator’s foremost expert on relkatite. If anyone is going to find more amarthite and figure out how to use it, it’s me. If I don’t know, I can’t help. I’ll have time to take precautions before the infection really sets in. Is… Is this what you want, to kill me here and stop me finding more amarthite, or is that what canus wants?”

Tears dripped off her chin. Her body trembled under the tempest of an internal struggle. He held his breath.

“I have to. I—we decided decades ago that it was best this way. That no one else could know we were fighting back. I… Sharp was wrong. I slowed my infection. My thoughts are my own.”

They weren’t. He could see it, in the frantic flicking of her eyes, the shaking of her arms that had nothing to do with muscular weakness. She’d left the diamond, knowing someone from the family would be printed here eventually. Knowing they’d find her message, her warning, carved in the rock. It might have been the last action that was truly her own.

Tarquin detached. Felt outside his body as he eased forward, imperceptibly. “You don’t want this. Canus does.”

“I’m so sorry.” Her muscles bunched. Forcing herself to pull the trigger.

He lunged. She fired, but he’d already grabbed her hands with his enhanced strength and agility and forced the gun up. The bullet whipped past him, tore a piece of his ear free, and showered his shoulder in hot blood. She screeched in outrage, a sound he’d never heard her make before, that he did not—could not—associate with his mother.

Her fingernails raked his arms, drew blood, and he swore, vision blurring with tears as he wrenched the gun free and shook her off, retreating a few quick steps. She watched him, hunched over, chest and back heaving with every laborious breath, and he saw that viciousness in her eyes once more, the edge of danger that should have warned him from the beginning. Tarquin’s blood slicked his mother’s fingers, and she didn’t seem to notice.

“I’ll detonate the shuttle before I let you cast back,” she snarled. “Your command keys can’t override mine.” A scaly patch of silver marked the skin over her collarbone, revealed in their scuffle.

There was a way home for him, a way back with all his knowledge. And for all their sakes—for her sake—he could not let her stop him. Canden may have used as few pathways as possible, but she had enough to initiate a hookup with the shuttle. Enough to shut him out for good, if he gave her the time.

“I love you, Mom,” he said, and shot her in the head.

SIXTY-FOUR

Acaelus

Mercator Station

Acaelus woke to the blinking of a soft green light that told him everything was going to be all right. The ever-present ache that’d dogged his print for the past few years had gone with the old flesh, and his fresh skin and muscles moved with ease as the automated system noticed he had woken and slid the tray out of the printing chamber, giving him space to sit up.

Dr. Laurent looked at him over the console she’d been working on, a thin line of worry drawing a peak in her forehead briefly before her expression smoothed. A relieved smile slipped into place.

“My liege,” she said, and flicked a glance at the printing bay door. “It’s good to see you awake again. The print took longer than expected, but your vitals are all in line and your neural map is ninety-seven percent situated.”

“How long?”

He swung his legs over the edge of the tray and dropped lightly to the ground. His private printing bay was smaller than the bays used by the rest of the family, but it had enough room for him to stretch his arms out to either side and twist back and forth, testing his movement. His pathways thrummed beneath his skin, a comforting presence.

“A day and a half, my liege.”

No wonder she’d looked relieved. Such a delay was unusual, but not unprecedented. She must have been fielding questions this whole time, careful not to reveal too much lest rumors he’d cracked get ahead of his print finishing. The process could be rushed, condensed to a few short minutes, but if a print was taking longer than expected, it was best to let it finish its cycle without interruption.

As much as they claimed to understand the technology, it came with idiosyncrasies that couldn’t be worked around without increasing risk. He held his hands out in front of himself and turned them over, admiring the glitter of gold cutting straight paths over the organic curve of his veins.

He blinked at those pathways. Thought he’d seen… something. No. A trick of the light.

“I’ve prepared a dose of your serum, my liege.” She gestured to an injector resting on a tray.

“This print is fresh. I hardly think I need it. Unless something went wrong to cause the delay? In which case, why didn’t you dissolve the damaged print and start again?”

“Nothing went wrong, my liege.” She ducked her head. “I thought it might be useful. To enhance the strength of the integration.”

“Unnecessary. When do the MERIT heads meet?”

“The meeting has begun. I hope you will forgive my presumption, but I laid out a suit for you over there, and requested the heads meet on this station. You are a ten-minute walk from the meeting room. I can make excuses if you feel you need time to adjust—”

“Absolutely not,” he snapped. Dr. Laurent clamped her mouth shut and looked down. He cleared his throat. “Thank you, Doctor, for your forethought and assistance, but I must make that meeting. Where is my E-X?”

“Ex. Kearns is right outside the door,” she said.

Acaelus pulled his clothes on, grateful she’d brought him appropriate shoes. He was still buttoning his sleeve cuffs when he stepped into the hall. Ex. Kearns fell into quick step behind him, not slowing him with questions or concerns. He liked Kearns for that reason—the man never asked questions. Sharp had asked far too many.

There was only one place they would hold the meeting in this section of Mercator Station, and as Dr. Laurent said, it was a ten-minute walk, but he made it in six, luxuriating in the fresh strength pumping through his body. He’d clung to that old print for so long, and for what, sentimentality? He and Canden had lived through many prints together.

She may be cracked, but that didn’t mean she was gone. Not for good. She’d get to meet this print someday, too, and when that day came, they’d both be grateful for his better health without the old print with its faulty pathways weighing him down.

The exemplars for the other heads of family were lined up on the approach to the conference room, the Mercator family crest blazing high above the MERIT seal that was bisected by the doors. A swell of pride lifted him up.

His family had built this—all of this—and no matter how the others jockeyed for position, it was Mercator alone that could successfully extract relkatite. Mercator who built ships and stations to sustain humanity post-collapse. Mercator was the human future. The others merely pushed one another off a ladder Mercator had long ago summited.

The doors swung open, sensing his approach, and he tugged his sleeves straight as he crossed the threshold. His seat at the round table was empty, but four pairs of eyes paused to greet him, startled out of conversation by his abrupt arrival. Estevez sat to his chair’s left, Rochard, Ichikawa, and Tran filling out the other seats in sequence, a pattern established before any of them had been born. He smiled into their curious faces, looping around to take his seat.

“I apologize for keeping you waiting.” He sat. The foam cushion adjusted to fit the shape of his print—slightly different from before, but not by much—and the projection screen inset in the smooth surface of the meeting table activated as he pulled in close, a green light winking up out of the dark wood in anticipation of providing him any holo displays he wished to share with the others.

“We’re pleased to see you well,” Thieut Rochard said. A kind smile played across her dark lips, painted an even deeper hue that merged with the shadowed tones of her skin and the dark purple of her suit jacket to give the striking impression of the living embodiment of midnight.

“Indeed.” Chiyo arched one brow at him in silent inquiry as she laced her fingers together over her stomach and leaned back in her chair. “I heard your reprinting process began yesterday.”

Acaelus arched a mirrored brow back at her, settling the lay of his jacket across his shoulders, though he knew it already hung straight. She was baiting him, hinting at the spies she’d laced through his family, as easily as he’d laced his own through hers and every other family at the table. But he hadn’t kept his reprinting a secret.

He’d given Dr. Laurent permission to alert the other heads of family. A standard practice, should anything dire occur. He wondered how many of them had made cloying inquiries to Leka over the past day and a half, then set the thought aside, because the answer was obvious. All of them.

“It was,” he said with a nonchalant shrug. “These matters are often unpredictable. Printing remains an imperfect art.”

She acknowledged the point with a tip of her head.

“You will soon spend quite a chunk of money reprinting many of your key personnel, won’t you, Acaelus?” Estevez asked. Their tone was all polite inquiry. They radiated a sense of business decorum the rest of them only bothered to attempt when they were in the public eye. Acaelus suspected the weathered old financier had the same overpracticed tone to their every mannerism, even when they were in the bedroom.

“Ah, shall we jump straight to the matter at hand, then?” Acaelus asked.

“You did keep us waiting,” they said with a faint smile that was practically an out-loud laugh coming from them.

Acaelus spread his hands wide in supplication. “You have my abject apologies for wasting your valuable time. I have unfortunate news, provided by the footage sent back by the Amaranth in the moments before the Conservators destroyed that ship.”

He swept up a green-tinged interface, allowing the system to access his command keys for confirmation before setting the footage of the planet to spin in the center of the table in front of them all. Silence descended like an ax stroke at the sight of the grey-speckled world, soft intakes of breath all around—some of shock, some of outrage.

The planet was dead. Acaelus ached to look at it, but he’d had some time to adjust to the truth.

“As you can see,” he spoke into that vacuous silence, “the planet was infected with the shroud long before the Einkorn and the Amaranth entered orbit. As nothing of human origin, to the best of my knowledge, landed on that planet before those two ships arrived, we can only presume that the shroud was brought to Sixth Cradle some other way. I’ve dispatched a new fleet of survey drones that will search for evidence of an impact site. Perhaps a meteor brought the infection. Regardless, this world was lost before the Einkorn and the Amaranth arrived.”

“How could this happen?” The loss hollowed out Rochard’s voice. While her clothes were purple, she wore the Rochard black as a wrap around her hair, otherwise unadorned. Though Rochard had moved all farming operations onto stations, her family was tied to the land. They felt a greater connection to the planets than any other, and wore black cuffs for the mourning of the dying worlds. “I thought we sterilized all equipment sent to the cradles.”

“We did. We do,” Tran cut in, voice defensive. His family had begun their rise to power with water purification systems, but had become a powerhouse worthy of MERIT by spearheading shroud decontamination procedures. “This wasn’t our doing. We crawled over those ships, the pre-expedition survey fleet. We sanitized everything to within an inch of its life.”

“Again,” Acaelus said, spreading his hands. “This is the fault of no one. We are looking for possible impact sites, but that’s an automated process. While we do that, we must finish preparing another crewed mission to Seventh and Eighth Cradle. Sixth was devoid of relkatite, and as collapse was already underway, it was a complete waste of resources. The destruction of the ships, in particular, a wasteful squandering.”

“We are sure it was Conservators?” Estevez asked, tapping one finger absently against the table in thought.

“We’re still recovering the data from the Einkorn,” he said, “but it appears that way.”

“Ah,” Chiyo said, raising a hand over her own holo projector. “Forgive the correction, Acaelus, but while you were being reprinted, the Einkorn fell as well. Warpcore breach, my analysts have determined based on the footage, though naturally I cannot say what your own analysts will find when they unravel whatever data was transmitted from that ship before its destruction. Curiously, a shuttle was seen leaving the planet to arrive on the Einkorn shortly before the critical failure.”

“How strange,” Acaelus said around a dry throat, not daring to ask the question Chiyo was baiting him to ask—what footage? Even if she’d gotten ships around his cordon, they couldn’t have arrived yet.

The others watched him, mild concern on their faces, save Estevez, whose look had turned critical. No doubt they were running the numbers, puzzling out the bare bones of how much relkatite Mercator would have to move out of production to print all those who had sent their neural maps out on those ships. Without the buffer of recycling their old prints to recover their relkatite, it’d cost a small fortune.

Acaelus had no intention of printing those people. Not yet. Humanity’s resources were stretched thin as it was, and the destruction of all those maps at the hands of the Conservators gave him a convenient opening to leave the bulk of those people on ice. His skilled workers, he’d recover, but the rest—especially the HCA soldiers—would have to wait until there was more breathing room in the population.

Easier to blame the mass shelving of maps on a Conservator terror attack than lean resources.

The look in Chiyo’s eyes whispered a warning to him, made him wary. He should have taken Dr. Laurent up on delaying this meeting. In retrospect, she had all but told him to delay it, just not in language that would have gotten her in trouble for being insubordinate. But he’d been in such a hurry, he hadn’t wanted to appear weak… He watched Chiyo carefully.

“Whose shuttle?” he asked, and wasn’t sure why he’d said it that way—it was his shuttle, a Mercator shuttle. The better question would have been which ship it had come from.

“It came from the Amaranth,” Chiyo said, her gaze boring into him as she lifted a hand. “But such a curious thing to ask. There was another shuttle on that planet, and I gathered us a witness to that fact. Ex. Dalson,” she called out, “bring her in, please.”

Acaelus leaned back in his chair, affecting a casual pose, and locked down every single emotion he was having, tightened his expression into genial neutrality, perhaps a touch amused, to those who knew him well enough to see it. Chiyo had always been prone to theatrics. This was nothing more than her usual grandstanding.

His mind caught on the word her, though he wasn’t sure why.

Ex. Dalson led a freshly printed Captain Paison into the room. Acaelus blinked, genuinely surprised at the captain’s arrival. He thought she looked unwell, until he recalled that she always had a sleepy quality about her, a bearing to her that hid the laser focus she was capable of when a situation grew dire. She flicked those sleepy eyes around the room, then clasped her hands behind her back, assuming the at-ease pose of the HCA.

She didn’t move her hands quickly enough for him to miss that the cuffs on her wrists had changed from green to red.

“Ah,” he said, and chuckled lightly despite himself. He should be annoyed, but the play was clever. “Captain Paison, I would say what a delight it is to see you well, but those bruises around your wrists can’t help but draw the eye.”

She worked her jaw around and mustered up the nerve to meet his eyes. “Before the expedition began, Ichikawa offered me something you would not, my liege.”

“Which is?” he prompted.

“Family gloves,” Paison said evenly.

“It’s true,” Chiyo said, cementing her promise in front of all the other heads of MERIT. “She was the obvious choice for captainship after Fifth Cradle, and considering all our disasters thus far, I wanted eyes on the inside, so to speak. Ones with greater access. Her plain cuffs are merely temporary, until we return to Ichikawa Station.”

The others shifted, uncomfortable. Such rewards for betrayal were unheard of between the families. They spied on one another. That was the way of things, but this… This was a precedent that might lead to war, someday, should they all start reaching for spies in higher places. Escalating the stakes involved.

Acaelus treaded carefully. No one wanted a war, but he would have to respond to this insult in some way the other heads of family couldn’t fail to notice. Normally, he simply would have the traitor finalized. But if Ichikawa gave Paison family gloves, then that inserted her in the line of succession—though Acaelus had no doubt she’d be extremely low on the list.

He could hardly kill a member of Chiyo’s inner family without repercussions. Her reprisal for Paison’s assassination would be on par with the reprisal she’d mete out if Paison really was her cousin by blood. Chiyo smiled at him, slow and a little sad.

She didn’t want a war. Then why this move?

“Make your report please, Captain,” Chiyo said. “Briefly.”

The captain let her gaze drift to some middle distance. “The Einkorn fired upon the Amaranth for reasons that remain unclear. Liege Tarquin Mercator, with Ex. Lockhart, escorted us to a shuttle. The E-X and I piloted a shuttle full of survivors to the planet’s surface, where we discovered it had already been lost to the shroud. The E-X and I began repairs on the shuttle, and the Einkorn refused all attempts at communication.

“I discovered that the neural map loaded into the print of Ex. Lockhart was that of Naira Sharp. Once confronted, she fled. Liege Tarquin later fled the camp and joined her along with an HCA soldier I believe was another Conservator.”

Appalled gasps all around. Chiyo’s stare bored into him. Acaelus did not let his face react, though his heart kicked. “My son would not work with the Conservators. To what end would he do such a thing?”

“I do not know, my liege,” she said, and he caught the ghost of a smile, quickly squashed. “I believed they had kidnapped him and I made efforts to rescue him. After recovering him, we prepared to leave for the Einkorn, but a storm delayed us. We were set to launch the next morning when Sharp attacked the camp.”

Paison lifted her eyes to him, and his skin crawled as he got the distinct impression she was laughing at him. Every line of her body was professionally obsequious, her tone neutral and confident, but there was a smirk behind those eyes. The promise that she knew something he didn’t, that she was playing a trick on them all, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“My son?” he asked.

“He helped her, my liege. Used his command keys to send her up to the Einkorn. Shortly after, the ship exploded. Looked like a warpcore breach.”

Silence fell thick and cold as snow, but still that laughter danced in Paison’s eyes.

“You expect me to believe a traitor’s word that my son assisted Ex. Sharp in the destruction of the Einkorn?”

“I am merely reporting what I saw, my liege,” she said.

“This is outrageous,” Rochard said, scarlet kissing her cheeks. “Assuming you saw any of this, how are you here to report it, when both ships were destroyed?”

“She’s getting there,” Chiyo said. “Please continue, Captain.”

Paison inclined her head to Chiyo. “I didn’t get close enough to hear the entire conversation, but after the shuttle launch, I sought Liege Tarquin out to ensure his safety and found him speaking with Liege Canden.”

Acaelus’s control broke. He froze, unable to keep the outrage off of his face. Estevez scoffed. Rochard’s mouth dropped open. Tran muttered, “Preposterous,” under his breath, but Chiyo… Chiyo kept on watching him with that keen, evaluating stare.

His hands curled slowly into fists. “I will not listen to this insanity.”

“My liege, if you will allow,” Paison said, and there was no real question in her voice. Her respect for him was all show, and everyone in that room knew it. “I recorded the tail end of the encounter on my HUD and stored it with my memories.”

He gave her no permission, because it didn’t matter. She would do it whether or not he asked her to. Control of the situation spiraled out of his hands as she summoned a holo display from her forearm.

The recording was blurred by air thick with smoke, but not even the most aggressive of fires could erase the truth of the two figures in the image. Acaelus blinked, numb with shock, limbs heavy, as Tarquin took a hesitant step back from his mother. Acaelus’s world narrowed, dark creeping into the edges of his vision.

“I’m so sorry…” Canden was saying, and he made himself focus on the words, though he didn’t understand them. Though even hearing them lifted a sense of unease so deeply primal it scratched against his hindbrain, screaming to be let out, to break and smash this thing so that he would not have to hear it.

But he couldn’t move. And the moment played out. Canden had drawn her gun. Aimed at Tarquin. They struggled over the weapon.

Tarquin put a bullet in his mother’s forehead and walked away.

The recording ended. No one spoke. Acaelus wasn’t sure he could, even if he knew what to say.

“There’s more,” Paison said, almost apologetically. “I followed Liege Tarquin to a shuttle stashed in the foothills nearby. I was slow in following him, though, and by the time I arrived he had already cast his neural map off-planet. The next few minutes before I cast myself off-world might be upsetting, but…”

“Show it,” Acaelus said, scarcely recognizing his own voice.

The interior of a Mercator shuttle sparked into life above the captain’s forearm, the footage shaky, as it was taken from her ocular implant. She swung her head around and examined the contents of a printing bay. The family shuttle. A single portable printer, a compact arrangement, two cast-off beds in the center of the room, one hooked up, blinking green, to indicate the cast was successful. Tarquin lay there, his print dead, empty, the skin already splitting in the overused places around the joints.

The footage ended. “I cast myself off-world shortly after this, using the other bed,” Paison said, and clasped her arm behind her back once more as the holo interface faded. Red. The interface had been red-hued. Already Paison was wholly an Ichikawa operative. It would have rankled, if he wasn’t stunned senseless.

“Tarquin and Canden Mercator are Conservator operatives,” Rochard said carefully, as if sliding one foot out onto a frozen lake to test the thickness of the ice.

“Uncertain,” Chiyo said. “But they are conspirators of some kind. We cannot say for sure what their goals are, however, and clearly they had a disagreement.”

“There was something she didn’t want Tarq to remember,” Acaelus said through numb lips, his tongue feeling too large for his mouth. “But he’s here. He must be. My boy is home.”

Chiyo watched him with a lidded, appraising look that made his skin prickle. But it wasn’t his old friend he watched just then. Captain Paison drew his eye instead.

She locked her expression down, but her jaw tensed against a slashing lift of her lips, trying and failing to stifle a curve of hunger, of triumph. That look sent a shiver straight down Acaelus’s spine, caused sweat to soak his skin, though he could scarcely say why.

Paison was merely a starship captain. She’d betrayed him, yes, but this position she’d put him in was one of mild political embarrassment, not insurmountable. Even if Canden was a traitor. So why was Paison doing everything she could to suppress the fact she was overjoyed—triumphant?

Acaelus suspected Chiyo didn’t even know the answer to that question.

“There is an easy way to answer the question of Tarquin’s loyalties and Canden’s motivations,” Rochard said. “He has cast himself back. There can be no chance of double-printing the man, now.”

“You wish for me to print my son and interrogate him?” Acaelus asked, aghast, though he’d been having a similar thought. He just hadn’t wanted the others to hit upon the idea before he could get ahead of them and do it himself.

“It is the wisest course of action, considering the situation,” Chiyo said, and offered him a sympathetic frown. “I understand your personal fears regarding accidental double-printing, but in this case—”

“Spare me,” he said, and pulled up his internal HUD, sending the order through to Dr. Laurent directly. “The process has begun. If that is all, my friends, I will go see my son as he awakens.”

Acaelus put both hands on the carved wooden table and started to push back, but stopped himself. Something nagged at him, something he’d missed, and the others hesitated in the same way, glancing about the room, trying to find inspiration for what their minds had gotten hung up on.

“May I speak?” Paison asked, all cloying obsequiousness, and pressed on before they had given her sufficient leave to do so. “If Liege Canden has gone rogue, we cannot say where her map is stored or who her other conspirators are. It occurs to me that we must—purely from a protective standpoint—move swiftly to get ahead of her and secure all our resources. She would have had access to all the data on the other cradles, and if she means to hurt MERIT, then getting to the relkatite before us would be the best way to do so.”

“Yes,” Estevez said quickly, a strange, droning quality to their voice. “The relkatite. We must move to protect it.”

“It is our future,” Chiyo said.

Anxiety spiked in him at the thought of losing the relkatite. Even if it meant doing battle with Canden—or someone who wore her print, he couldn’t be certain, could he? Body language could lie. Maybe that had been a Conservator wearing his wife and son to sow discord in his heart.

He couldn’t trust the evidence of his eyes, but he could trust the truth of the situation. The relkatite was threatened. Humanity needed the relkatite to survive. There was no time to waste, no time to fuss around and discover the truth of Sixth Cradle before he acted.

“I’ll order the mining ships to advance their departure schedule and launch the expeditions to both remaining cradles as soon as possible. Not even the Conservators could sabotage both missions at the same time.”

“Do you have the personnel to spread yourself so thin?” Estevez asked. “I mean not to disparage your enterprise, I’m aware your family is the largest of us all, but even Mercator has its limits.”

“True enough,” he admitted. “I will have to contract out to the HC, perhaps the other MERIT personnel, if you would all allow the imposition?”

“I insist upon it,” Rochard said. Firm nods all around the table.

“This is a race to save our species’ future,” Tran said. “The Tran family will not stand by and let you run it alone, Mercator. Our resources are yours, within reason. We’ll have those planets and their relkatite in hand long before the Conservators can get organized to touch them.”

“Then we’re agreed,” Acaelus said. “This will be a joint venture of MERIT, spearheaded by Mercator?”

“Agreed,” they answered eagerly. Even Chiyo, who he’d feared would attempt to take this moment to usurp his strength and place Ichikawa on a level with Mercator, agreed with the same enthusiasm.

Their readiness to bend their resources to his control whispered suspicions in the back of his mind, but he set them aside. There would be politics, and some of it would be bloody, but this was the security of relkatite. This was human survival. While the families may squabble, they were all aligned on one point, and one point alone—there was no future for humanity without relkatite to guide the way.

The thought lifted him, brought a faint smile to his lips that was real, content, against the torment he’d been feeling, and he saw that same smile reflected back at him on all the heads of MERIT.

Acaelus looked at his hands, admired the curling tendrils of green that snaked up from his cuffs in the elaborate filigree pattern of his family crest. Each MERIT family had their own version of the design. The designs had started out wildly different from one another, but over time they had come to be close mirrors of each other, the color the only distinction at first glance, until they were each so vine-like that the united MERIT logo had been redesigned to represent them all entwined together.

That logo had been carved into the table his hands were pressed against, the center a delicate knotwork that reminded him of firm, bedrock-gripping roots.

Intertwined, humanity was strong. They would survive. They would claim the relkatite. Unity was the way forward.

Acaelus left to seek his son, and couldn’t shake the feeling of Captain Paison’s laughing eyes on his back every step of the way.

SIXTY-FIVE

Tarquin

Mercator Station

Tarquin sat in a chair in the center of a Mercator printing bay while Dr. Meti Laurent checked his print over for flaws, and tried to suppress the mounting terror that was welling up inside him.

Home. He was home, at long last, and the truth of that should be a balm. Should be safe.

But all he could see through Meti’s precise ministrations was the flash of gold on her arms, peeking out at him when her sleeves pulled up to reveal the smooth skin above her nitrile gloves. The stripes of pathways lining her cheeks, reaching down to disappear beneath the collar of her lab coat.

Pathways infected by another mind, and the truth left an imprint of fear around his throat, as if someone had tried to strangle him and the bruises of their fingers remained, the damage making it hard to breathe.

Meti knew, according to his mother. And his mother had tried to kill him for knowing the truth, too. He was desperate to broach the subject with her, to have someone to confer with, but uncertainty struck him silent. Did she still dose herself with the serum? Could she make some for him? How long before his own infection was advanced enough that he stopped caring about those things?

He wanted to scream all these questions at her, but he had to wait. To be certain she could be trusted, or else he might accidentally doom them all.

“Heart rate is a little high,” Meti said after what felt like hours of being prodded over, “but that’s to be expected, considering what you endured. How do you feel, my liege?”

Endured. The word made him want to laugh, but if he fell into hysterics, she’d sedate him, and he needed to maintain a clear head. Needed to get out of here, get to a place where the infection didn’t run so rampant that all he could see, when he looked into the eyes of those he’d loved and trusted all his life, was canus’s misprints staring back at him, whispering I am your world.

No such place existed.

“Disoriented,” he said. “But no more than usual after a reprinting.”

“Hmm.” She tapped one finger against the side of a machine.

She didn’t believe him, not wholly. Meti chewed her lip in the same way his mother always had when she was nervous, and his heart kicked, body braying to let the secret out, to tell her he knew Canden Mercator had faked cracking, had hidden herself away to escape the notice of canus, to work against that bastard creature in secret. That she had failed.

“It’s good to see you whole again,” she said. “We’d worried, when no one else casted themselves back. Will there be others?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. He didn’t know what had happened to any of the infected, and the lack of knowledge ate at him. Most of them had been dying when he’d fled.

He clenched his fists, feeling the perfectly shaped half-moons of his nails bite into his palms, and wished fervently that he hadn’t been forced to leave Pliny the Metal behind. Meti seemed on the verge of saying something else when the door slid open.

Acaelus. His father. He was so very solid compared to Tarquin’s mother. A thunderstorm of a man, his shock of white hair mussed by lack of care, his stare surgically sharp, the hands at his sides stronger than Tarquin’s own, even with Tarquin’s forbidden pathways. Strong enough to pick his full-grown son up and gather him into a hug that crushed the air from his lungs.

Tarquin laughed, shaky, and hugged his father back, burying his face against his shoulder for a moment in which he pretended he was just a son coming back from an expedition that had gone sideways, before he caught the gleam of gold on his father’s neck and reality reasserted itself.

Acaelus didn’t know the truth. Couldn’t know.

“Easy, my liege,” Meti said. “He’s still integrating.”

Acaelus released him from the crush of the hug and stepped back, but didn’t let go of Tarquin’s upper arms. He used his grip to guide him back into the chair.

“Give us a moment alone please, Doctor,” Acaelus said.

Meti ducked her head and left the room without question. Alone with his father, turmoil roiled Tarquin’s thoughts; relief at seeing him again, in this normal place, where he was safe and loved and comfortable, slammed against the fear that dogged his heels, the truth he’d learned on Sixth Cradle, and everything that it might mean—that it meant.

And every horrible thing Naira had told him his father had done.

He could stay here. Tarquin could lie to his father and retreat to his apartments. Suffer through Leka’s worried buzzing around him for a few weeks before they’d let him return to the university, where he could pick up his research like nothing had ever happened. He was home. He was safe.

His life didn’t have to change. Contentment swelled through him. His pathways, manipulated by canus, urging him down the path it wanted him to walk. The path that meant complicity. Lying down and letting the powers that be hash out the future of humanity while he lived a coddled, comfortable life full of the things he loved. His studies, his would-be friends. He could even get a new Pliny.

Find me.

Well. Not everything he loved.

“Son,” Acaelus said gently, and dragged a chair over to sit across from him. He took his hand. Squeezed. Looked him in the eye. “Are you all right?”

Tarquin’s throat thickened. The father he’d left behind would have demanded to know what had happened, to find the fault in the mission and a way to lay the blame at someone’s feet. Someone who wasn’t Tarquin. Even if Acaelus admonished him privately, he’d never tarnish the name of Mercator by blaming his son publicly for failure.

Their time apart had changed them both. Tarquin was being handed everything he’d ever wanted: a comforting father, a soft place to land within his family when things got too hard.

Acaelus had never denied Tarquin a thing, but there had always been a look in his eye as if his son wasn’t quite measuring up to the image he’d held for him. As if, in pursuing his studies instead of family politics, Tarquin had let them all down, even though Mercator was perfectly functional without him and his studies supplemented their knowledge base.

“No,” he said honestly. “I’m not all right. Sixth Cradle was dead before we ever got there.”

“I don’t know how that happened,” Acaelus said. His grip on Tarquin’s hands slackened as he looked away, tension making the vein on his temple bulge against the golden tiger stripe of a pathway. “I feel I should. But I don’t. I’m missing pieces, son. Pieces I think you have…”

Tarquin’s hands went cold and clammy, but Acaelus didn’t seem to notice. “What are you talking about?”

“There’s footage of your final moments on Sixth Cradle, brought back by a survivor.” Acaelus explained what he had seen without looking at him. Tarquin wanted to scream, to bolt from the room and start running and never look back. Because his mother had been right. Acaelus didn’t know about canus, not anymore, and so his father had no context. No reason to believe that Tarquin shooting his mother was the right thing to do.

Acaelus couldn’t know. If he did, he’d fight, and that would spur his infection to take deeper control. The head of Mercator, fully controlled, could do so, so much damage. Their chance, their only chance, to fight this thing was the element of surprise. Tarquin couldn’t even be sure how long he had before canus took hold of him. He needed shroud.

He needed Naira.

Acaelus looked at him with haunted eyes, and something inside Tarquin snapped. The sorrow there, the confusion, the desperation. His father had seen the love of his life living and talking, despite all the odds, then watched his own son shoot her in the head. He wanted to know why—needed to know why—and Tarquin… Tarquin couldn’t tell him.

“What…” Acaelus rasped. Scrubbed a hand over his mouth. “What happened down there?”

“It wasn’t Mom,” he said, and it wasn’t entirely a lie. She hadn’t been in control of her own mind. “I don’t know who it was, but it wasn’t her. A—” He cut himself off before he said a Conservator—and shook his head instead. “I just don’t know.”

“All right,” Acaelus said, after a long pause. He nodded slowly. Clamped a hand on Tarquin’s knee and squeezed reassuringly. “All right, then. We’ll figure it out.”

Tarquin had never been a talented liar, especially not to his family. It was a skill he’d simply had the luxury of not needing. But he was adept at sensing when he wasn’t believed, and as much as Acaelus wanted to believe that it hadn’t been his wife on that planet, Tarquin could see the sliver of doubt festering within him.

“Who was the survivor? Was it—was it Sharp?” He knew it was impossible, but he couldn’t hold back the swell of hope.

Acaelus blinked, wrong-footed by the question, and pulled his head back slightly. “Do you mean Ex. Naira Sharp?”

“I know you loaded her map into the database intentionally. What were you thinking?”

“That she would be a useful scapegoat if things went poorly. What other reason could there be?”

“Did she make it?” he asked again.

Acaelus shook his head, and the bottom fell out of Tarquin’s world. He’d suspected, but the confirmation crushed him.

She wouldn’t remember. Any of it. Any of… them. The worry was selfish, in the face of everything else, but he couldn’t help an upwelling of sorrow. He reached for his arm, for the place Pliny usually rested, intending to stroke the bent leg she’d repaired. He touched empty air.

“But she took the Einkorn down,” Tarquin insisted. “She had access to the ansible.”

“It was damaged beyond repair,” Acaelus said, frowning lightly at his obvious distress. “Though we made efforts from this end to have it fixed, nothing worked. A data packet was bounced from the Einkorn to a shuttle on-world and back to Mercator, but we’ve yet to decode it. It’s far too small to be a full neural map. Now that we have proof of death, more or less, I’ve put through an order to print her so that we can question her on the matter. Maybe get an encryption key out of her.”

Fear skidded through him, tingled his scalp. “Question? You mean torture the answer out of her?”

“She’s a killer, son. I understand she may have assisted you while on Sixth Cradle, but you were confused, I’m sure, as she wore Lockhart’s print. It’s not your fault if she tricked you into helping her destroy the Einkorn. Don’t worry, my most skilled finalizer is champing at the bit to carve out her secrets. We’ll get everything from her.”

That was it. That was his olive branch, his path out of trouble with Mercator and the rest of MERIT. He had only to say that he’d thought she was Ex. Lockhart and was distraught by the situation, unable to think clearly, and the blame would lie at Naira’s feet.

She wouldn’t even know it was a betrayal.

“Setting aside her crimes,” Tarquin said, “Mercator can’t—we shouldn’t use our strength to abuse those who’ve wronged us. What you’re suggesting isn’t even a reliable way to retrieve good information. She doesn’t remember what happened.”

“Son…” Acaelus sighed and squeezed his shoulder. “My finalizers have the skills and equipment to ensure the information they extract is true. Regardless, in the case of Sharp, I don’t need the truth. I need a reason.”

A way to shift the blame off of Tarquin. He clenched his fists. “What good are all our rules, all our protections and the benefits we offer, if we violate them all when wronged? Dad, you—you taught me that my power is a weapon. That I needed to be careful in the way I treat others, because the imbalance is so extreme. How can you be the same man who drilled me on the importance of recognizing the persuasion inherent in my station, while being party to torture?”

Acaelus drew his hand back and studied Tarquin for a long moment. “Tarquin, sweet boy, where do you think your power comes from?”

From his father. From Mercator’s legacy. From wealth. From the relkatite that flowed through Mercator, and Mercator alone.

A child’s answers.

“Fear,” he said, in a near whisper.

Acaelus nodded slowly. “You are correct that we offer a great many protections and benefits to those who serve, and those boons are granted via contracts. When the contracts are violated, those protections are lost. In Mercator’s history, I can think of no person who has more grievously violated their contract than Ex. Sharp.”

You took those rules away. Ex. Sharp is Acaelus’s property in every meaning of the word. She’d told him. She’d told him directly, and even so, in seeing his father again, Tarquin had hoped Acaelus could be convinced otherwise. Foolish.

“She saved my life.” He knew he was grasping at straws, but he had to try. “Multiple times. Is this really how we’re going to reward her?”

“If I rewarded Ex. Sharp based on the amount of times she’s saved our lives, I’d have to enshrine her as some sort of Empress of Mercator. Of course she saved your life, son. That’s what she’s for. Why she ever thought she could be anything else is beyond me.”

Acaelus tilted his head, indicating he was taking a call through his private HUD.

“She’s up,” Acaelus said, turning his attention back to Tarquin. “I have a few more things to set in motion before I’m ready for the finalizer to get to work—give me a moment?”

“Of course,” Tarquin said. “I think I’ll go to my rooms and lie down.”

Acaelus paused halfway through pushing to his feet and cut Tarquin a sideways glance. Tarquin put on a sleepy expression, lids drooping, slouching back in his seat as he struggled to stifle a yawn.

“I know you’re tired,” Acaelus said, and patted him, briefly, on the cheek, “but stick here a little while longer, all right? The other heads of MERIT haven’t left, and while they’re happy to give you a few moments to recover your wits, they’ll want a full statement from you soon.”

His eyes widened. Acaelus tried to smile encouragingly, and failed. The heads of MERIT really were going to pin this all on him—mark him a traitor to the families—if Acaelus couldn’t twist the blame around and put it on Naira. He would. It would be child’s play to Tarquin’s father. Acaelus wouldn’t even feel guilty about it.

“Don’t worry, my boy, I’ll set things right.”

“I know,” he said, mind racing.

Tarquin had sworn he’d get her off the ice, and she might not remember that, but he did. He couldn’t walk away, not from her, not when a damn finalizer was on their way to torture her for answers she didn’t even have, but he had no idea what to do. A thought snagged at him. “Who was the other survivor?”

His father paused a step from the door. “Captain Paison. Why?”

Tarquin was breathless. Dizzy. Acaelus was beside him, pressing him back into the chair. He didn’t even realize he’d almost fainted. The spell had struck so fast. Tarquin blinked static from his eyes and waved away his father’s holo attempt to call for help, clinging to Acaelus’s arm.

“You can’t trust her. Don’t trust her. She’s not who she seems, she’s—she’s changed.”

This print of hers might not be completely controlled, but her convictions had come into line with canus’s by the end. The instrument of the evolved colony was here. Active. Pointing the finger at Tarquin. To silence him.

Canus knew it was being attacked—but how much of it knew? The segments needed close proximity to communicate. Paison couldn’t have gotten far yet. There was still time to stop her. There had to be time.

“I don’t trust her,” Acaelus said. “She defected to Ichikawa. That took me by surprise, but I suppose it was a reminder that I need to pay better attention. Ever since your mother left—cracked. She cracked.”

There was a shocked, hollow awe in Acaelus’s voice that brought Tarquin’s head up, chased away the rising tide of panic, and there was such pain on his face that Tarquin almost lost his breath all over again.

“That wasn’t Mom,” Tarquin said softly.

Acaelus blinked back into himself. “I know.”

“Please, trust me, you can’t let Captain Paison leave this station, can’t let her talk to anyone else, get near anyone else. Lock her up if you have to.”

“I understand the impulse,” Acaelus said with a faint chuckle as he situated Tarquin in the chair and moved away again for the door. “And I’m pleased to see such family loyalty in you, after so many years of you… being separate from us. But Paison is Ichikawa family now. To lock her up would invite a war, and one we can ill afford. MERIT is joining together to launch the next two expeditions at once. We need Ichikawa. Paison goes free until this is over. Trust me, son, it’s the best way.”

Tarquin dug his nails into the armrest of the chair. “You’re launching both remaining cradle expeditions immediately? Those take years to plan.”

“The future of humanity is in relkatite, and we must secure it as quickly as possible,” he said with a prideful lift to the chin. “Now, stay put. You’ll need to stay in the medical facility for a few days, but I’ll straighten all of this out. Some people will come to ask you questions about what happened on that planet. Tell them the truth, like you just told me.”

“I… Yes, Dad. I love you.”

Acaelus stiffened, all the prideful bluster blown from his face, and gave Tarquin a genuine smile, even if there was confusion drawing a scrawl across his forehead. “I love you, too,” he said, and left the room.

The door blinked red as it closed. Locked. Tarquin wondered how long it would be before Acaelus realized that’d be the last time he’d get to say that. Tarquin couldn’t leave Naira to take the blame or suffer the finalizer, and he couldn’t allow Captain Paison to live. He didn’t know how to begin when it came to taking someone’s life—but he knew who did, and he knew a thing or two about escaping his family’s claws.

SIXTY-SIX

Naira

Mercator Station

Naira woke on a slim metal chair, hospital linen swaddling her body, long tubes of golden fluid pumping into her arms. She flexed her fingers, watching the vein in her forearm push against the needle taped to her skin. The IV bag was labeled with painkillers. Mood stabilizers. The nice way to awaken after being reprinted. Too nice.

The Mercator logo was emblazoned on the wall, mocking her. At least she appeared to be in her own body. The skin felt right, her groggy control of her muscles coming without the resistance of a learning curve.

“Ah, good, you’re awake,” Acaelus said.

He sat across from her, one arm slung over the back of his chair. A crisp, forest-green suit with a cream shirt enfolded his body, bringing out the green flecks in his hazel eyes. It was a style he’d wear to play to the cameras, not to come to a printing bay for a chat.

She lifted a hand, letting the IV line run down her arm. “What’s with the VIP treatment?”

“We woke you up multiple times over the past few days, and I’ve grown tired of all the screaming and thrashing.”

Naira’s lips flattened. She rested her arm against the cold metal of the chair arm, grounding her physical body in this moment. Whatever game Acaelus had come to play with her, she wouldn’t make it easy on him.

“Oh, fun. Your experiments have already started. Are you attempting to intimidate me for a particular purpose?”

“I’m not at all.” His smile was a flash of white teeth. Many found that smile charming. Naira knew how deep those teeth could bite. “In fact, I’ve brought you up to congratulate you, Ex. Sharp. You escaped.”

She let nothing show on her face. Naira’s mind was tired from the medication and from being freshly uploaded, still settling into the familiar grooves of neurons and synapses, but she didn’t miss the threat in his words. The tightly controlled fury.

“I don’t recall.”

“Ah, that.” He picked at his sleeve with two fingers, not bothering to look at her. “You wouldn’t. You died shortly thereafter.”

Cold trickled along her skin. “You wouldn’t release me or pay my phoenix fees.”

“I don’t pay any fees.”

Naira’s jaw tightened, and she didn’t bother to hide it. He wanted her to ask. Was baiting her along, dangling the carrot of what happened in front of her nose. She wouldn’t play that game. Not with him.

“If I got out, I can do it again. You can’t hold me, Acaelus. I told you that.”

“How right you were.” He lifted his arm from the back of the chair and laced his fingers together, leaning forward so that his long frame was folded down far enough to look her straight in the eyes. “But I’m going to save you the trouble. I printed you to let you go, Ex. Sharp.”

She wasn’t foolish enough to feel hopeful. “Why?”

“Because there are two cradles left, and I am desperate.”

Shock parted her lips, sent a surge of adrenaline racing through her veins. When she’d gone under, they hadn’t started the expedition to Sixth Cradle yet—how could there be two left? How long had she been iced?

“Don’t bullshit me, Acaelus.”

“You escaped containment and returned to your revolutionaries. Together, you plotted to destroy the ships Einkorn and Amaranth, which were scheduled to leave for Sixth Cradle. That, I know. Those are the bare facts. But something went wrong in orbit, and while the ships were destroyed, you and a shuttle of other survivors made it to the planet.”

Her head spun. The adrenaline made her jittery and added to the difficulty in focusing. She flexed her pathways, burning off some of the adrenaline, but mental fog followed on that loss. “Slow down.”

“I cannot.” His knuckles turned white. “Something happened on that planet, with those ships. You and Tarq—” His voice caught. He pushed on. “Discovered something there. I’m sure of it.”

“Who?” she asked. The name was vaguely familiar but remained blanketed in mental fog.

“My son.”

“Then ask him.”

“I have been. For days. He refuses to admit that he found something there. My investigators—”

“You’re torturing your own son?”

“No.” The word was a growl. “Though my chief of security is pressing me to do so to avoid an inter-MERIT war. I will not break his mind, Ex. Sharp. I need you to recover the truth of what happened out there.”

Her laugh was sudden, and she cut it short. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Your boy won’t tell me anything, and I won’t force him when you’re too cowardly to do it yourself.”

His hands clenched so tightly Naira thought he might break something. “You need only ask him. I believe he’s in love with you.”

She blinked. Dryness scratched at her tongue. “How can you possibly know that?”

“Because he has escaped his cell, circumvented my security, and is making his way to this printing bay to rescue you.”

“You said I died.”

“You did.” He unclenched his hands and pulled a slim, black data square from his pocket. Held it up between two fingers. “You sent something back, before your death. Every time we try to load the memories into you, you scream and don’t stop until we put you down. We’ve tried to isolate the good data clusters, but—”

“But Tarquin Mercator is coming for me right now.”

He nodded and folded the data square into the palm of his hand.

“So, stop his escape,” she said. “You can keep him from reaching this room.”

“My son will not tell me what I need to know without having to break his mind, and I will not do that. You want to save the worlds, Ex. Sharp, you want to be a revolutionary, you talk to my son. You find out what he knows. What you two did on that planet.”

“Don’t you know? You don’t need your son to tell you about the shroud, Acaelus. You told me yourself you knew how to fix it.”

He grimaced. “If I ever knew what caused the shroud, or how to fix it, I swear to you that I don’t anymore. I don’t. I feel like I should, but I can’t remember.”

She was fuzzy-headed and wrong-footed, but she knew Acaelus. Had learned to read his moods, so that she could better protect him, and everything about his body language told her that he was telling the truth. He didn’t remember. She swallowed.

“I’m not the person he loves.”

“He doesn’t care.”

Naira stared hard at Acaelus. She knew, abstractly, that the general populace considered Tarquin to be the less favored child. The one who’d abandoned family politics to hide away at a university. But Naira had heard everything Acaelus had said about Tarquin while she worked for him, and the strain on his face confirmed her suspicions.

He’d let Tarquin go to that university not to hide him away, but to keep him safe. Because Tarquin was the favorite, Acaelus’s heart, and he’d wanted him to stay cloistered. But something had pushed Acaelus to send that precious soul out to Sixth Cradle, and now Acaelus’s heart was coming for her, throwing off the shackles of his family once and for all.

Naira could crush him. Destroy Acaelus from within. Acaelus knew that, too, and he was taking this risk all the same. Because the planets were dying, and Tarquin Mercator might know why.

Even Acaelus couldn’t hold the rest of MERIT back forever. Soon, very soon, the heads of MERIT would realize Tarquin knew what had happened on that planet, and when Acaelus wouldn’t break his son himself, they would take him and do it for him, or else war would tear them all apart.

If Acaelus couldn’t get Tarquin to talk, then his son was dead.

Naira didn’t care whether or not the man lived. Acaelus’s son meeting a gruesome end at the hands of the MERIT council due to the shroud was a bitter irony that drew a slash of a smile across her lips. But if Acaelus and the council both believed that Tarquin had answers to the source of the shroud, then the man must know something.

And in Acaelus’s desperation, he was slackening the leash. Giving her a way out. She’d be a fool not to take it.

“Did I love him?” she asked, though it seemed impossible to her that she could ever care for a Mercator, let alone one who had testified against her.

“I don’t know.”

“Give me the chip.” She extended her hand.

“I told you, it will destroy you.”

“You’re sending me into the field, Acaelus. This is a mission, and I will need every advantage. I have my own resources. I may be able to extract good clusters later.”

He hesitated, then shrugged, and flicked it across the small space between them. She snatched it out of the air, the residual warmth from Acaelus’s skin tingling against her cold palm.

Acaelus stood to leave, but when his hand touched the door he turned back, looking over his shoulder.

“Protect my son, Exemplar.”

Naira nodded, and he whisked into the hall, letting the door slip shut behind him. Leaving her alone to face his son. To lie into eyes that loved her.

SIXTY-SEVEN

Naira

Mercator Station

Naira tucked the chip into her pocket and reached for the medicine pump dumping sedatives into her veins. It’d been set to the lowest dose, enough to take the edge off a rough reawakening, but not enough to slow her reactions significantly. She hesitated before pressing the stop button on the meds, but no alarm sounded.

Acaelus was telling the truth, then. Interesting.

Ten minutes later, she had the tubes out of her arms and had broken free of the padded straps that trapped her to the chair. They’d all been for show, each one easier to break through than the last as her pathways flared, granting her strength enough to snap some metals, let alone a few buckles.

She tried to access her HUD, but it was being jammed. The door hissed open. Naira spun, lifting the chair in one fluid motion, bracing herself to hold it out like a shield.

Acaelus had told her Tarquin was coming, but somehow she still hadn’t expected the sweaty noble to come barreling through the door. Merc-Sec, doctors, finalizers—those were the faces she’d expected to see. A trick played on her to give her a chance, a shot of hope before they ripped the rug from under her and set to their interrogations or experiments again.

Tarquin Mercator froze one step inside the door. He wore a suit similar to his father’s, slim-cut forest green to match the lacy gloves tattooed over the backs of his hands, but his eyes were a lighter hazel, his hair a dark mess that stuck to his forehead from sweat. His chest heaved, his mouth dropped open in shock, eyes drinking her in, and her heart soared in recognition of something she shouldn’t know, couldn’t possibly know, but the surge in her body told her otherwise.

No, it was just because he was handsome, that was all. Handsome and staring at her like she was the dawn come again after an everlasting night. That’d cause anyone’s stomach to swoop, anyone’s heart to kick faster.

“Naira—” He took a step forward, reaching out to her, then stopped himself. He slipped a professional mask over his desperation. “Ex. Sharp. We have very little time and I understand you have no reason to believe a word I’m about to say, but I’m here to assist you in escaping.”

“Why?” she asked.

The simple question landed like a hammer blow. Tarquin took a deep, bracing breath even as he turned his head aside to hide whatever emotion bubbled to the surface. When he turned back to her, he had calmed himself, put the princely demeanor back on. That was a mistake, because it wasn’t an expression she would trust.

So he wasn’t wearing that decorum to manipulate her. Anyone who knew her half so well as Acaelus claimed Tarquin knew her would realize the haughty Mercator mask would piss her off. He was wearing it like armor. To protect himself. A hardness in her chest softened. She eased the chair down.

“You were correct,” he said, clipping each word in his rush. “My family is behind the spread of the shroud, but the situation is nothing like even I suspected, and I cannot explain here.” He flicked his gaze meaningfully to the corners of the room, where cameras would be watching. “I have arranged a shuttle off this station piloted by one Kav Ayuba, and I hope that, at the very least, you will trust in your comrade. But there is something we must do first, before we escape, and for that I… I need your help. It’s something I don’t have any right to ask of you, but I have no choice. I can’t do it alone.”

Naira set the chair fully down, watching him warily. Part of her trusted him, and that worried her, because despite Acaelus’s assertions that they’d worked together, she didn’t come by trust easily. She eyed the medicine pump that’d been affixed to her arm, but there was nothing unusual in it. Nothing on the label, anyway.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“There is a woman on this station, a Captain Paison. The details are complex, but you must—you must believe me when I tell you she is a threat to us all. Neither Acaelus nor Chiyo can understand the danger she poses. We must stop her. She’s set to tour the printing wing, and once she’s there, I fear she’ll take control of the printers.”

“Why should I care what happens to Mercator’s printing bays?”

“Because Captain Paison can control misprints, and use them to horrific ends.”

“They’re empty shells.”

“Shells under her control.”

It was insane, he had to know that, and yet he looked so earnest, so sincere, and in their brief interaction thus far, she didn’t think he was a talented actor. But she wouldn’t assassinate a woman on vague threats of her controlling the bodies of misprints like some sort of zombie magician. Naira glanced at the cameras, scowled, and gripped the back of the chair in both hands to keep from grabbing Tarquin to shake the information out of him.

Acaelus had wanted her to do this his way. Well, he’d just have to deal with a deviation in plans.

“Those cameras are off,” she said. His eyes widened, but she pressed on before he could ask questions. “Acaelus woke me himself and told me you were coming here to rescue me. He wants me to help you escape, to keep you safe so that the other heads of MERIT won’t push for enhanced interrogation.”

“You made a deal with him?”

“I made a deal for myself. You testified against me and now, I’m told, we were working together? No. I wouldn’t do that. There must have been something I wanted, or needed, from you. Right now, what I need from you is information.

“I’m willing to get you out of here, because whatever knowledge you’re holding, I don’t want it in the hands of MERIT any more than you seem to. But if you want me to kill this woman on your behalf, then I need an actual reason. I need the truth you’re not telling me.”

His cheeks burned and his eyes shone with moisture before he turned away from her again, clenching his fists at his sides. “I suppose you did need something from me,” he said to himself, and she was struck by the depth of despair in his voice. “I had hoped that the entanglement might—but—no, it’s no matter. Very well. You’re certain those cameras are off?”

“I am.”

He stood straighter, steeling himself, and spoke quickly but clearly. “Canus, the bioleaching fungal agent Mercator uses to mine relkatite, is a parasite. It has infected the pathways of all humanity and influences the decisions we make.

“It has been content to be symbiotic with us, encouraging humanity to seek sources of relkatite at all costs, but on Sixth Cradle a cache of amarthite was discovered, a substance that could be used to kill canus.

“When the creature realized the threat, it infected the ships and learned a great deal in the process. It abandoned symbiotic suggestions for outright control. We—” He cleared his throat. “We risked everything to destroy that segment of the creature before it could leave the planet and return to the Sol system, where it would inform its other segments of humanity’s intent to resist its control. You died to stop that knowledge spreading. Paison is canus’s creature, and would see your sacrifice undone.”

“Bullshit. Why hasn’t it taken control of you, then?”

“Oh, it’s trying,” he said, and ran a hand through his hair with a rueful grunt. “But this print is new, and the infection needs time to grow and integrate.”

“If this captain is so dangerous, why doesn’t Acaelus lock her up until your claims can be verified?”

“My father is infected, Ex. Sharp. If he, even for a moment, shows signs of fighting back against canus, it will overtake him, and then what happened on Sixth Cradle will happen here.”

“So make up some other reason to confine her. You don’t need me for this, Mercator. No one would question you.”

“Captain Paison has defected to Ichikawa. She’s out of my reach, and any claims I made against her would be a prelude to war.”

Naira laughed. A soft, rough sound. “That’s what your story is really about. Captain Paison defected to Ichikawa and Mercator wants her punished, but you can’t touch her, so you wake the big bad terrorist and feed her a line about Paison being a danger to humanity, let me take her down and take the blame because what does it matter? I’m already iced.”

“That’s not—I would never do such a thing.” The hurt in his voice sounded authentic enough. He was clearly a better actor than she’d thought.

“Clean up your own mess,” she said, and crossed to the printing control console. “I’m casting out of here. If even half of what you’ve told me about Sixth Cradle is true, then you won’t stop me.”

“You’re right,” he said softly, defeated. “I won’t.”

There was such an ache in his voice that she looked up at him over the green haze of the holo display, searching his face for some sign of—she couldn’t say what. Only that he’d tugged at something inside of her, some emergent emotion she couldn’t explain, because it made no sense. She’d hated him.

And was already thinking of her hate in the past tense.

“I have to go,” he said, hesitating, holding his hands behind his back so she couldn’t see them clench together, but she could read the tension across his shoulders easily enough. “I’m sorry. For everything. I will do what I can to make sure Paison doesn’t reach you.”

“Can you prove any of this story of yours?” she asked, giving him one last chance, though she didn’t know why.

“No,” he said with a sad shake of the head. “Only… Think of destroying the relkatite. All of it. How does that make you feel?”

“Ill,” she said, a growing sense of unease winding through her, making her skin flush and her mouth thick. “But that doesn’t mean anything.”

“True,” he said. “I suppose it doesn’t. I promised you I would get you out of here, and I can’t guide you out myself when I must stop Paison, but don’t use that console to cast out, please. The system may already be compromised. Mr. Ayuba is waiting for you in a Mercator shuttle in hangar twelve. The path should be clear of officials, and I arranged for casual clothes for you in that drawer there.” He gestured with his chin.

Not taking her eyes off of him, she approached the drawer and tugged it open. A neatly folded T-shirt, jacket, and pants waited, all in nondescript grey trimmed in Mercator green. Clothes that would allow her to pass without remark. She scooped up the bundle and felt an unexpected weight. A pistol, Ulysses class, the grip diamond-patterned and the burr over the guard filed down. Her preferred weapon. Her modifications. She picked it up and narrowed her eyes at him.

He had known her. Really known her. He could have discovered such small details via research, the service weapon she used as an E-X was in the family files—but the switch to the diamond grip over the waffle, the filed burr. Those were small, private adjustments she made simply for herself.

“Thank you, my liege,” she said, and meant it. Sadness washed over her. She couldn’t understand it.

“Be safe, Ex. Sharp. It has been… an honor.”

He left, and she got the feeling he did so before he could say something he’d regret. She shook off the strange, empty sensation that filled her, like she was missing something. Tarquin Mercator had known her, maybe even cared for her, but that didn’t mean she knew a thing about him.

What she did know was a setup, and this assassination of Paison stank of one. She dressed quickly, then checked the pistol over and tucked it into the back of her waistband. Tarquin had gotten the weapon right but hadn’t provided a holster. The guy wasn’t a fighter, and the thought of him trying to assassinate anyone—especially a captain—made her shake her head.

Mercators. Believed they could do any damn thing just because they wanted to. If Tarquin made good on his threat, he was going to find out how wrong he was—the hard way.

Not her problem. She moved at a brisk pace through the halls of the station, checkpoints letting her pass without so much as a blip, and as soon as she was out of the printing wing, her HUD finally connected. Naira hesitated, wondering if this was a trap, but Tarquin had been good for his word so far, and Kav had his own ways of avoiding detection. She pinged his comm line.

“Nai,” he said into her ear, his rich voice shocked and delighted. “Holy shit. I didn’t think the guy was on the up, but here you are—tell me it’s you.”

It’s me, she texted back, not willing to risk subvocalizing where the cameras might see her. Tell me you’re sitting pretty in a Mercator shuttle in hangar twelve.

“I am, though I almost didn’t bite this bait. A Mercator calls up, telling me he’s letting his family’s most hated terrorist go free? I admit I had my doubts.” Naira laughed aloud, catching a few sideways glances from office personnel going about their work, and put a lid on it. She had an out. She couldn’t risk losing it.

“Is he really coming with you?” Kav asked.

Hell no, he wanted me to assassinate some captain that’d defected to Ichikawa. Said she was dangerous and—get this—the pawn of a mind-controlling fungus.

“What the fuck? Who was it?”

Paison.

Naira rounded a corner, snapped off a lazy salute to a few Merc-Sec lingering around a desk, and slipped into an elevator. She let out a breath of relief when the doors whispered shut and the system accepted her request to go to hangar twelve.

“Huh. That’s the captain of the Amaranth. I gotta tell you, something went weird on that mission. None of us remember a thing, but Tarquin insists you were there. Said you saved the day, so to speak, and took the Einkorn down. But we never got you off ice. I couldn’t crack it.”

The elevator doors slid open. She slammed the hold button and spoke aloud. “Wait. You’re telling me I didn’t escape?”

“Maybe you did, but if you were there, it wasn’t us.”

Why would Acaelus lie to her about that? He’d insisted she’d escaped, congratulated her on the effort, but if Kav was right, then the only person who could have put her on that ship was Acaelus himself, or some other Mercator.

Tarquin, maybe? No, that didn’t track. It had to be Acaelus, putting her there to shift the blame of failure to her shoulders, just like he’d try to pin this assassination of Paison on her—but how did two escapes help him, really? It would make him look weak, like he couldn’t control his databases in the slightest. Maybe even weak enough to have his enterprise threatened.

“I don’t like this,” she said aloud.

“Not a fan myself,” Kav said, “but I say we take the gift handed to us and blow out of here. We’ll figure it out later.”

An alarm blared, painting the hangar in strobing red light. Her HUD, routing through the station’s systems, flashed an alert in the corner of her eye: SHOOTER LOOSE IN PRINTING BAY ALPHA. PLEASE SHELTER IN PLACE.

“Shit,” Kav said, “is that for you?”

“Not exactly.” Naira touched the lump of the weapon at the small of her back. “Sit tight, Kav. I have an errand to run.”

He grunted. “You sure about this?”

“Not at all.” She took her finger off the elevator hold button, sending it back up. The thought of turning around, of saving Tarquin and putting down Captain Paison, made her ill in precisely the same way thinking about destroying the relk had.

And it shouldn’t have, she realized belatedly. She’d destroyed ships to keep Mercator from mining more relkatite. Had advocated at her own trial for moving humanity away from reliance on relk until they could be sure the process wasn’t causing the shroud. Destroying it was something she should be able to do without a second thought.

The cost was high. But it was a price she’d long ago learned she was willing to pay.

“Nai,” Kav said, warning in his voice, “this is a bad idea.”

“Probably,” she admitted. “But tell me something: How does the thought of finding all the relk in the universe and launching it into the sun make you feel?”

“Sick,” he said. “Shit, why would you ever say something like that? Relk is life.”

“That sound like something you believe in?”

The elevator swished to a stop. Gunshots sounded on the other side. She hit the close door button, holding it with one hand while she drew her pistol with the other.

“No… I mean, I get a little queasy about it sometimes, but that’s… Oh. It doesn’t make any sense that I’d feel queasy over destroying relk, does it?”

“It does not,” she said.

“Oh, fuck.”

“Yup.”

“He’s right? It wasn’t bullshit?”

“Think about leaving him behind, letting him die here trying to kill that Captain Paison.”

“Feels fucking great,” he said without hesitation. “He put you on ice, Nai. Let him rot.”

“We may be coldhearted bastards, Kav, but even the two of us aren’t that kind of monster.”

He sighed. “You and your bullshit honor. What do you need me to do?”

Naira let the door slide open. Pandemonium reigned beyond, people shouting, running, Merc-Sec firing down the hallway Naira had passed through moments before. Grey, stumbling bodies swarmed out of that hall, eyes misset, ears missing, arms on backward, feet dragging, and nothing behind their eyes but violence.

Naira aimed, fired, took one between the eyes, and kept walking. “Find me a bomb.”

SIXTY-EIGHT

Tarquin

Mercator Station

Three shots rang out at the end of the hallway, urging Tarquin into a dead sprint. There was no one to bar his path or shout questions, and with every thundering step he took, his dread deepened. He swung around a corner and skidded, stumbling, into the largest printing bay.

Tarquin found Paison already there, the bodies of Chiyo and two exemplars cooling at her feet, neat bullet holes between all their eyes. Acaelus stood next to her, arms raised, face white. Paison’s head whipped up, lanky hair spilling across her face, and she switched her aim from Acaelus’s head to Tarquin’s heart. A slower death. More painful. Higher risk of cracking.

“My liege,” she said. “I wondered if you would try to stop me. I honestly wasn’t certain you had it in you, after your return to comfort. I’m pleasantly surprised.”

“Get out, son,” Acaelus ordered.

“What’s the plan here, Paison?” Tarquin moved into the room so that the door would shut behind him. He didn’t want random workers passing by to investigate the open door and get shot. He lifted his hands in surrender, ignoring the puddle of blood spreading out from around Chiyo’s head. “You start pouring out misprints, you tip your hand. Not that you haven’t already.”

“I told you to leave,” Acaelus ground out.

“Dad, with all respect, shut up.”

Paison glanced at the corpses at her feet and shrugged, as if slaughtering one of the most powerful people in the universe and two exemplars was little more than a sneeze. “None of them will remember this. They died in the chaos. Unfortunate, but unavoidable. My hands are clean, and their suspicions will fade. If their new pathways even allow those thoughts to surface.”

“What new pathways?”

Her free hand danced through the holo interface, and he couldn’t make out what she was doing. “I have consulted with the colony, and it finds you untrustworthy hosts. Plotting to destroy it, while all it wishes is our joint, continued longevity, is very distasteful of you. And so it has decided to take matters more firmly in hand.

“I just need one more little piece. Your command keys please, Tarquin, or Acaelus. I’ll take them from either of you.”

She hummed as she switched her aim to Acaelus. Tarquin stifled a shout of protest.

“You cannot have them,” Tarquin said.

“Are you sure?” She switched her aim to Tarquin’s stomach, but spoke to Acaelus. “I can make this real slow for him, my liege. Let him bleed out long and gasping on the floor. Would he crack, do you think? It runs in the family.”

“Don’t.” Acaelus averted his eyes from Tarquin. “I’ll give you what you want. Let my boy walk away.”

“Let her shoot me,” Tarquin said. “Please, if you trust me, don’t do this.”

“I trust you, son, and I love you, and that’s why I can’t take this risk.”

Acaelus approached the terminal as Paison stepped away, and lowered one hand at her tight nod. He entered his command keys.

“Thank you,” Paison said, and shot Acaelus in the head.

Tarquin’s heart was going to beat itself out of his chest. Acaelus might be a monster, but he couldn’t help loving him. His father would be fine. Acaelus had backups all over the universe, regularly updated. The death was quick. He’d be unlikely to crack. Tears stung Tarquin’s eyes anyway.

Panic clawed at him, but he swallowed it down. He had a gun, a pistol similar to the one he’d given Naira, but he wasn’t fast enough to pull and fire before Paison put a bullet in his heart. He had to stop her, had to stop this, but all he’d ever been good for was his family’s authority, and the head of that family lay dead at Paison’s feet.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said, knowing that she didn’t care what he had to say, but he was running out of options.

“There are other ways, I’m sure,” she said. “But the colony would like to flex what it learned on Sixth. You see…” She crunched a UI screen in her hand, tossed it aside, and dragged up another. The walls hummed with the ignition of printers. “A critical failure just occurred in your print system. Tragic, really. The next set of maps slated to be printed started the process before they were primed, and thus a wave of misprints will emerge, thick with pathways, so that the colony may better control them.

“A little rampage, a little disaster, and people will say the whole system needs to be overhauled. Rebuilt from the ground up, the cartridges double- and triple-checked. And that, well, that leaves me so very many opportunities to make certain the next generation prints with a little more relk, a little more grip for the colony to take us in hand.”

“People will notice such a valuable resource being used up at a faster rate,” he said.

“Of course they will. But by then they won’t care, will they? Everything we want, everything the colony desires, will feel warm as an old sweater. Cozy and safe. More pathways, stronger pathways, all the resources of MERIT bent to recovering more of that mineral, and with it, we will thrive together.”

“Is that what it’s promised you?” he asked. “Because that life—it isn’t you, Captain. It’s not real, it’s… nothingness.”

“Oh, my liege.” The gun dipped slightly as she looked up at him, but he didn’t fool himself into thinking he could make a move just because that gun had lowered an inch. “It hasn’t promised me a thing.”

He blinked. “Then… why?”

“I’m one hundred and twelve years old, and I have watched humanity suffer a slow, suffocating death all this time. We’re not prepared to continue as a species without help, and frankly, I don’t believe we’ve earned the right. Unfortunately for you, I can’t let you be reprinted. No clean death for you, like your father. You’ve proven too unpredictable. You’re going to crack, my liege. I wish I could say I was sorry about that, but we both know I’m not.”

The printing cubicles swung open, spilling broken, grey bodies laden with pathways to the floor. They didn’t even moan as they dragged themselves to their feet, flat eyes rolling as their heads swiveled, seeking the one who didn’t belong. The one who didn’t listen to the gentle song of control thumping through their pathways.

Sweat sluiced down his spine as those eyes found him. All he had to do was bend his knee. Promise to help her, to help the colony. Maybe he could even use that position to negotiate a relationship that was more symbiotic than parasitic. Joy filled him.

He scowled at his own reaction, his pathways betraying him yet again. No. There was no balance to be found here.

He stepped closer. “I won’t let you do this.”

The misprints snarled and rushed him. One slammed into him, shoved him to the ground. His head smacked against the floor, arm flying up to guard it too late. Tarquin kicked out, struggled to roll away from the grasping hands, but they were holding him, pressing him into the floor, mouths salivating above him in anticipation of the command he knew was coming. He flared his hidden strength pathways, struggling to reach for his weapon, but it wasn’t enough. There were too many.

“My liege, you cannot stop me,” Captain Paison said.

“I can,” Naira said from the door.

The shot slammed into his ears, impossibly loud in the small space. He strained to see the outcome, heart hammering with fear that Paison had fired first. The misprints howled in outrage, answering his question.

Ragged fingernails dug into him, tearing, taking out their frustration on the thing they’d been told to hate. Tarquin swore, thrashed against them, and three more shots sounded, dropping three of the misprints, giving him the space he needed to break free. He flung the one holding him by the throat as far away as his pathways would let him.

Naira was above him. She kicked one of the misprints away and grabbed the other by the back of the head, tossing it into the wall with an audible crack. Her chest heaved, her eyes were wild, hair disheveled, but she held a hand down to him with a crooked smile.

“You coming?”

He slammed his hand into hers and gasped as she yanked him to his feet. “You came back for me.”

She worked her jaw around, cracking it, and slid her gaze to Paison’s corpse, slumped over the console podium. “I overheard Paison. This shit… it’s all real, isn’t it, everything you told me?”

“I wouldn’t lie to you,” he said, and though she had no reason to believe him, the sideways glance she gave him told him she did, and his heart soared.

“Time for a quick exit. Are you injured?”

He was grinning like a fool, which must make him look ridiculous, but he couldn’t help it, even when she arched a brow at him in cool condescension. “I’ve never felt better.”

She snorted. “Let’s go.”

“I can’t leave.” He dug his heels in as she made for the door, but she didn’t drop his hand as the distance between them grew into a tug. “Paison began this process all across the station. There’s about to be chaos, and I can’t let that happen. I can’t allow the people who work for my family to crack beneath her monsters. If you could buy me some time, I believe I can override the process from that console.”

“Minor problem with your plan, my liege. Paison’s trick with the misprints has already begun. It’s over. They’re crawling all over the station.”

“Oh, god.” Horror clutched him, made him want to fold over. “All those people, to die like this. They’ll crack.”

A dark anger burned behind her eyes, chasing away the swell of fear in his chest. “Not if I can help it. We have a plan.” She eyed him, calculating. “There’s no coming back from this. You have a chance here, to stay behind and shirk all blame. But you walk out of this station with me, that’s it. You’re not a Mercator anymore, you’re a Conservator, and that might not be a life you want to live.”

“I’d follow you anywhere,” he said without hesitation.

“Then you’d better keep up.”

She tightened her grip on his hand and tore off down the hallway. It took the help of his illicit pathways, but he kept pace with her every step of the way.

SIXTY-NINE

Naira

Mercator Station

Naira raced down the hall with one hand on Tarquin and the other holding her pistol, hoping the distracted security wouldn’t look too closely. One side of the double doors leading out of the printing wing had been locked closed, forcing anyone who came through into a funnel.

She slowed their headlong dash and tugged Tarquin to her side as she pressed up against the closed door and held her other hand, pistol pointed at the ceiling, out for the security on the other side to see.

“Exemplar coming through with Liege Tarquin, hold fire,” she shouted.

“You’re clear,” a deep voice shouted back.

She shuffled Tarquin in front of her to better hide her identity and went through with her weapon up, but with her finger on the trigger. The Merc-Sec she’d passed earlier had dragged all the desks in the room into a makeshift barricade, the three of them sighting over the furniture with standard-issue rifles.

“I don’t know her,” one of them said, training her rifle on Naira. “Didn’t she walk through here earlier and flash civ credentials?”

Tarquin put himself directly in line of that rifle. The soldier scrambled to point at the ceiling so quickly Naira was half afraid she’d fumble it and shoot them both. “My exemplar had personal business in the hangar but returned to assess my safety when the fighting broke out,” Tarquin said, all cool nobility. The soldier paled. “Or do you think civilians walk through these halls wearing exemplar pathways?”

“Sorry, my liege, we’re all jumpy,” the woman said. “E-X, any updates? We’ve been waiting for orders to come down but we’ve heard nothing. What the fuck is going on back there—uhhh, begging your pardon, my liege.”

Naira pushed Tarquin toward the elevators. “Sorry, I don’t know what’s going on, either, but I have to get him off this station until we know what’s happening.”

“Right, right, don’t let us slow you down. Stay safe, E-X.”

“You too,” she said, and gave the soldier a quick slap on the back before shuffling Tarquin into the elevator. He let out a shaky breath as the doors closed.

“Those people are going to die,” he said, reaching for the control panel. “We should take them with us.”

She grabbed his wrist, stopping him. “Everyone on this station is going to die,” she said. “We can’t take everyone we stumble across and, trust me, with something like this, you don’t want to start picking and choosing who gets to go.”

He started to say something, but the elevator doors slid open, and a wall of sound hit Naira. People ran back and forth across the docks, shouting orders, waving arms through the air, no rhyme or reason to their movements.

“This way,” she said, herding Tarquin along the side of the wide walkway that wrapped the hangar, toward the slip where the shuttle Kav piloted waited.

A familiar figure stopped her cold. He stood on the other side of the dock, smoking the hand-rolled cigarettes he preferred, even though they were disallowed in hangar bays.

Merc-Sec wouldn’t dare tell a finalizer no.

Tall, lean. That same sandy-blond mop of hair she recalled from years ago, a disarming smile flashing beneath green eyes. He caught her eye and winked, but didn’t make a move to pursue.

Fletcher Demarco. Acaelus really hadn’t been fucking around. He’d called in his best finalizer, and Naira couldn’t figure out if he’d been meant for her, or Tarquin, or both.

“Who’s that?” Tarquin asked, curious.

“No one.” She pushed him along, turning her back on Fletcher, though it felt like turning away from a loaded gun. “We have to hurry.”

“Tarq!” a woman shouted.

“Keep moving,” Naira said as Tarquin hesitated, turning to the sound.

Footsteps pounded after them. Naira shook out her hair, let it hang in a shaggy mess around her face to obscure her features. Anyone who called Tarquin by a nickname was likely to recognize her.

“Leka?” Tarquin slipped Naira’s grasp.

Shit. Leka would definitely recognize her. Naira turned her face away as Tarquin spread his arms and caught his elder sister, enfolding her against his chest in a brief embrace. The relkatite-green tunic she wore whooshed forward from the force of her colliding with him, briefly shrouding Tarquin. Naira forced herself to stand at the ready a step behind him, weapon out. All behavior perfectly acceptable for an exemplar, except for keeping her face turned away.

She flicked up a comm line to Kav and texted.

Sharp: Problem. Liege Leka has intercepted us.

Ayuba: Drop her and bolt, she’s dead in ten anyway.

Naira frowned in thought. Tarquin pushed his sister back, holding her at arm’s length. He blushed as she fussed with his tattered and bloodstained clothes.

“What’s happened?” she demanded. “I can’t get ahold of Father.”

“Dead,” Tarquin said. Leka’s nose wrinkled in frustration. “Where’s your E-X? You have to get off this station.”

“Also dead, torn to bits by those things, and probably cracked. Father wasn’t killed by them, was he?”

“No, shot through the head by Captain Paison.”

“Well, that’s a relief, if surprising.” She straightened her tunic, casting Naira a shrewd glance. “Who’s this?”

“Lockhart,” Tarquin said.

Leka’s eyes narrowed. Tarquin angled himself to keep her from seeing Naira clearly. Leka gasped. The security they could slip by, they’d been too shocked to pay much attention, but Leka had known Naira.

“That’s not Lockhart, that’s Sharp.” Leka shifted her glance between the two. Took in Tarquin’s protective posture, his quick lie. She bunched her fists at her sides. “It’s true. You’re working together. Did you do this? Is this one of your schemes, Exemplar?”

Naira faced Leka and was surprised to find the woman had allowed herself to age slightly since she’d last seen her. Grey peppered her long, light brown hair. The look suited her.

“I didn’t start this,” Naira said, “but I’m going to end it.”

Fury painted sparks in Leka’s eyes and her chin lifted. “Is that what she told you, Tarq? She lies. She always lies. You know that, the things she said about our family—”

Tarquin took her hands. Squeezed. “Are true.” His voice was low, so that he couldn’t be overheard.

Leka snarled and ripped her hands away. “Ridiculous. This woman—”

“We don’t have time for this.” Naira pulled him a few steps away from his sister.

He resisted at first. This had to be difficult for him, but the longer they dragged it out, the more people died under the hands of the misprints. The more minds cracked, never to be recovered.

“You’re not taking my brother anywhere,” Leka said, and drew breath to scream.

Naira clamped a hand over Leka’s mouth and turned, pressing the smaller woman’s body into her chest, bending over her as if she were protecting her from an unseen blow. She grabbed the top of her head in her free hand and, with one quick jerk, snapped her neck.

Leka slumped in her arms, all the strength bleeding out of her, and Naira kept herself between the dead woman and the crowd as she rushed forward a few quick steps and laid her down, hiding the corpse behind a stack of crates.

Tarquin had frozen in place, mouth dropped open in shock, his pupils blown so wide his eyes appeared black. Naira wasn’t sure if he was about to faint or start screaming, and she didn’t care. She grabbed his arm again, and this time, when she yanked on him to follow, he didn’t dig his heels in. He stumbled after her. Compliant, but clumsy.

“Did you just—?” he whispered in a soft hiss as the gangway into the shuttle came into view.

“Yes,” she said, not bothering to mince words. “If we’re successful, she’d be dead in minutes anyway. It’s kinder, this way. Higher chance to avoid cracking. Acaelus will reprint her later. This is merely temporary for her. It won’t be for a lot of the people on this station if we don’t hurry.”

“We could have…” He stopped himself from finishing that thought as she came to a halt at the foot of the gangway and turned to face him.

“Taken her with us?” she finished. He flinched and looked away. “Last chance. It’s easy to say you’ll stick to a cause when the consequences aren’t staring you down. When they aren’t your sister’s neck broken behind a stack of crates because that’s the way it has to be, because that death is the kinder option.

“If you don’t have the stomach for the work, I don’t blame you. Few do. Walk now, and I won’t hold it against you. But if you board this shuttle with me, if you take this next step, it might be your hands putting your sister down next time, and you have to be willing, even if you don’t like it.”

“Do you?” he asked, searching her face for something she didn’t know how to give him. “Do you like this—what you do?”

“No,” she said without hesitation. “But I can bear it.”

“Then let me help you carry the weight a little further.”

There was still horror in his eyes, still doubt, and probably there always would be. Naira considered leaving him there. He wouldn’t remember any of this. It would be kinder, in the same way it’d been to snap his sister’s neck. Not because he couldn’t do it—she’d known that same fear the first few times she’d had to make similar decisions—but because she knew he could.

Sooner or later, when he looked in the mirror, he’d have to search to find that horror. Have to dig deep to pick the scab open, cut out the scar tissue, as she did, every time she saw her own reflection. Because the second she started thinking of the bodies as just prints, as not really people, then she’d lost.

Naira glanced at Fletcher. She’d felt him watching her the whole way, and he gave her a small, sad smile as he raised one hand in farewell. That man had stopped seeing the horror a long, long time ago.

Maybe it’d be good for her, having someone nearby for whom this was all fresh. All terrible desperation. She told herself she wasn’t reaching for the nearest handhold to her own humanity, and almost believed it.

“Then welcome aboard,” she said, and went first up the gangway, letting him choose to follow.

He did.

SEVENTY

Tarquin

Mercator Shuttle

Tarquin followed Naira up the ramp into the shuttle, his boots ringing hollowly against the gridded metal, and was surprised at the deep sense of calm that spread throughout him. The woman who walked before him, silhouetted by the bright interior light of the ship, was not the woman he cared for.

Yes, she was Naira Sharp, and yes, she might have made the same decisions on Sixth Cradle that the Naira he had known did, but in the end, that Naira had died with the Einkorn. The knowledge ached within him, a yawning void of grief he scarcely understood, because mourning the loss of someone he’d cared for was not an experience he’d had to face before.

Leka would be fine. Acaelus would be fine. Even after his mother’s supposed cracking, part of him had believed that it was just a matter of time until Mercator or one of the other MERIT families figured out a way around the damage. It’d never felt like a death to him, not really. Just a pause.

But Naira Sharp of Sixth Cradle would not be coming back. Her experiences had been erased with her end. There was no recovery, no trick of technology to summon her out of the digital ether. She’d lived, and she’d died, and while he would have fought against canus regardless of all of that, it made it a little easier, knowing that it was what she would have wanted. Doing it, in part, for her. In her memory and honor.

That’s what people used to do, wasn’t it, when their loved ones died? Find some way to carry on the memory of who they had been, to honor the… discontinuation? He’d have to look it up. Such events were more common among non-MERIT. He wondered what rituals Naira would have liked. Wondered if the woman who strode before him, proud and determined, would find his mourning of her other-self unsettling. He’d keep it to himself. Sharp carried too much already.

“Nai!” a woman roared.

The soft rumble of the engines spooling vibrated through the soles of his feet, and was muted by the thunder of heavy boots as the owner of that voice came barreling out of some side chamber. Naira—Sharp, he corrected himself, he had no familiarity with her now—turned, and a grin split her face so wide and bright that Tarquin caught himself smiling with her, and had to look away.

Kuma Ichikawa. Notorious gun runner, Conservator, known for her temper and the speed of her fists, one of the HCA’s most wanted, flung herself at Sharp and scooped her up, spinning her around with a roar of happiness while Sharp laughed until she choked, because those tree-trunk arms were squeezing her too tight.

“Easy,” she said, when Kuma dropped her to her feet. Sharp pounded herself on her chest while she coughed. “New print. Rough couple of hours.”

“Suck it up.” Kuma crossed her arms. “I thought—we all thought—we’d never see you again. Kav”—she jerked her thumb over her shoulder as the muscular man moved into the connecting hallway from the cockpit, and Tarquin was struck by how similar his preferred print had been to HCA Dawd’s—“couldn’t figure out the security.”

“On your timeline,” Kav corrected with an indignant huff. “I’d get through, eventually. Those fucking Mercators…”

He trailed off. They turned to look at him, and Tarquin summoned every scrap of dignity he had left to meet their appraising gazes with his own.

Kuma broke first. “It’s real. That is a whole-ass Mercator you brought on our ship, Nai. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Tarquin blinked, unsure how to respond to that. Kav didn’t take his eyes off of Tarquin as he held out an arm. Sharp folded herself against him, ducking her head into his chest, and a slow shudder rolled through her. Kav coiled that arm around her and squeezed, dropping his head down to whisper something in her ear. She stepped away, composed once more. Tarquin smiled to himself, pleased, until he noticed the cold-forged rage in Kav’s stare.

Right. Naira wasn’t the only one who’d started out hating him. Kav had told him outright that he’d only saved him because Naira would have been upset if he hadn’t. Tarquin swallowed as he remembered the man’s low voice stating with a casual air that he’d have rather put Tarquin’s face through a tree.

Tarquin no longer had the shield of Naira’s affections, and he was standing on a ship surrounded by people he’d harmed grievously.

His Naira would have laughed at him for failing to think things through yet again, but that wasn’t his Naira looking at him through narrowed eyes. That was Ex. Sharp.

“Why, exactly,” Kav said, talking to Sharp, but watching Tarquin, “are we taking him with us? We have you. We have the information we need. Stealing off with Acaelus’s boy is going to bring hell down on our heads.”

“Unclear.” She crossed her arms, leaning back slightly as she evaluated Tarquin. Kav draped an arm around her shoulders, a subtle shield. Hovering, protective. Tarquin couldn’t blame him. “Well, Mercator, why aren’t we dropping you at the nearest station after we blow out of here? What good are you?”

None at all. He’d gotten her free, told them about canus, and he’d given them the equipment they required to escape. That was all they’d ever needed from him, and his stomach dropped, because he could think of no singular reason compelling enough to convince them to let a rebellious prince run off with real revolutionaries.

You asked me to find you wasn’t likely to go over well with Ex. Sharp.

“I know that you copied the HC’s deletion virus, Mr. Ayuba,” Tarquin said, meeting Kav’s baleful stare. “Before your death, you asked me to insert it in Mercator systems once we had Ex. Sharp clear of the station and had removed her connectivity pathways so that my father couldn’t double-print her in retaliation. I agreed to this, and I’m the only one of you who can get the virus behind Mercator’s firewalls.”

“Damnit,” Kav muttered. “I do need his command keys to make it work.”

Kuma cracked her knuckles and took a step toward him. “I can get those keys out of him.”

“No. That’s not us.” Sharp held out a forestalling hand to her, but didn’t look away from Tarquin. “And afterward? What then? Why should we keep you?”

“Because I…” He hesitated.

Because he’d made a choice to leave his family, and Naira had given up her shot at freedom to preserve that choice. Because, even though he’d said his decision wasn’t about his affections for her, that hadn’t been entirely true.

Impossible, really, to think straight, when you’re falling in love.

Looking at her now, a little taller, a little stronger, her face sharper and her golden eyes more intense than they’d ever been in Lockhart’s print, he relaxed. Not because he was safe here—he was surrounded by living wanted posters—but because he knew her. The core of her.

Naira Sharp wanted to help. Not just the hapless prince that’d stumbled into her path, but everyone, everywhere. And while he’d chided her for the overzealous size of her goal, the truth was that in that moment, he’d believed her. Believed she could accomplish everything she set out to do.

Tarquin was used to powerful figures. To those who towered above the rest, arrogant and assured of their strength. Sharp didn’t tower. She set her feet, stared down the world, and would not be budged from her intended course.

The woman he’d been falling for was dead.

The woman he believed in was right in front of him.

“There are a lot of reasons I could give you,” he said, meeting her stare, and dropped the formal tone, softening his posture. This was a risk—a restatement of her own words—but it was true, and he hoped they resonated within her. “But, personally—because my father is a greater monster than I ever dared imagine. Because the way MERIT uses people cannot be allowed to stand. Because I… I want to fix things. I want to help. Please, let me help.”

She stiffened, chin lifting, and there might have been a flash of recognition in her eyes before it was wiped away with cool indifference. Slowly, she nodded.

“He stays,” she said.

“Nai, I don’t like this.” Kav’s voice was tight.

“We’ll hash it out later,” she said. “Right now, I need the details on the bomb you’ve got planned. The longer we sit here jawing, the more minds those misprints risk cracking.”

“Gotcha,” Kav said, and waved a hand. “Cockpit, all of you.”

Tarquin followed as the three Conservators slipped into what were obviously their usual positions. The ship might have been provided by him, but those three worked like they’d lived their whole lives on it, flicking through holo menus, scrunching them and bouncing them back and forth as they talked. Tarquin sidled over to an unused console and waited to see if they would need his help. They didn’t.

“Couldn’t get my hands on any real explosives,” Kav said with a grunt of annoyance. “Not without a lot of elaborate theatrics we don’t have time for, so I poked around and found the next best thing. Mercator’s gone into overdrive here, prepping the next fleet of mining ships. They’ve got one in dock, and it’s being retrofitted in a rush, so its systems were on the vulnerable side. A couple of bullshit calls about needing access to certain interfaces for maintenance checks, a couple of spoofed IDs, et cetera, and I’m in. I can power up that warpcore anytime I want.”

“But?” Sharp asked, picking up on a tone Tarquin had missed. Kav winced.

“But getting into the piloting commands is another trick, one that’s going to take some time. I’ve been jabbing at it, but like I said, Mercator’s got their shit wrapped up tight. I can power on the ship’s warpcore, and that’ll do some damage while it’s in dock, but I can’t make it move.

“We need that sucker to jump to the dead center of the station if we want it to break the powercore containment and take everyone out nice and quick and neat. We do it as-is, well, a lot will go out painlessly but we’re going to lose a few to depressurization, debris damage, the usual station-falling-apart crap.”

“Fuck,” Sharp muttered. She pulled up a roster of personnel and squinted at it as if she could squeeze it into giving her the answers she wanted. “Station distribution is pretty even, everyone’s been running for the docks so we’ll catch most, but I don’t like these margins. The percent of potential cracking is way outside our usual envelope.”

“I know,” Kav said, clutching the sides of his console. “But it’s all I’ve got.”

Sharp picked her head up. They’d been under thrust all this time, pulling away from the station, and she craned her neck to focus on the distance readout. After a tense pause, she forced out an explosive breath.

“Swing it around, I’m going back. I can get to the station core with the fake creds the Mercator gave me and blow the containment from within.”

“The hell you are,” Kuma said. “I’m not letting you out of my sight until we’ve backed up that beautiful brain of yours outside of the ice, and we don’t have the equipment for that on this shuttle.”

“I’ll go,” Kav said. “I’ve got the magic touch, Nai. I can make anything blow up.”

“Stop trying to charm me and think straight. You don’t have the credentials. That place is swarming with misprints, and you’re no real fighter.”

“Ouch,” he said, pressing his fist over his heart. “I’ll have you know I’ve been practicing.”

They bickered good-naturedly, and while Tarquin was glad for the familiarity of their company, he watched with growing dread as Sharp swung the shuttle around, pointing it back to the station. None of the others made any genuine attempt to stop her.

She was going back. They’d all decided, and though they jabbed and joked with one another, there was an undercurrent of tension between them, a struggle to hold back what they really wanted to say—that this might be a real goodbye.

Tarquin getting her out had been their best shot, and now she was throwing it away because she didn’t like the margins. Because there was a risk a few more people might crack than she deemed acceptable, and to Naira Sharp, that was worth the risk of her life.

There’d be no arguing with her. She wasn’t his Naira. He still couldn’t let her do this.

“I’ll go,” he said, putting Mercator command into his voice. “I have access. No one will stop me, and my own neural map is the most recently backed up. I’ll forget this day, but that’s all. My map is unlikely to crack.”

“Out of the question,” Sharp said. “You have access, but you’re less of a fighter than Kav, and the misprints know you’re a threat. They’ll dogpile you again.”

“They know you’re a threat,” he countered.

She faced him, looking over her shoulder, the holo interface clutched in her fist painting the side of her face relkatite green. “I am a threat.”

“What about—what about that man on the dock? He seemed to know you, and he let you go. Is he another Conservator? Maybe he can do something.”

“That man is a finalizer in Mercator’s employ,” she said without inflection. “He’s not an ally.”

Kav swung his chair around and squinted at her. “Was it Fletch?”

Her chest heaved with the release of a pent-up breath. “Yes.”

“No.” Kav shook his head. “That changes things. You know that. No way are you running back into a burning building with Fletch inside waiting for you.”

“I can handle Fletch.”

“Like you handled him last time?” Kav shot back. “I had to staple your dumb ass back together after that, and he’s had years of training since then.”

“He’s not the only one with years more training. He saw me leave. He probably thinks I already rigged the core to blow and is on his way to cast off.”

“C’mon, Nai. He knows you. Knows you won’t leave those people to crack. That fucker signed up to be Nai-hunter-number-one when you walked, and you really think he’s not watching for you to come back?”

“Can you jump that mining ship into the station’s powercore?”

“No,” he grunted.

“Then suck it up and trust me.”

“Ex. Sharp,” Tarquin said, “what’s his full name? With my father and sister dead, I am acting head of Mercator. I can send an order for him to stand down.”

“Fletcher Demarco,” she said. “And he’s not going to follow that order. It’s just going to tip him off that I’m coming back, so keep a lid on it, Mercator.”

“A finalizer in Mercator employ would never ignore a direct order from the acting head of family,” Tarquin said, confused.

Sharp and Kav pressed their lips shut and said nothing.

“It’s personal,” Kuma said. “Nai dumped his ass.”

“Shut up, Kuma,” she snapped.

Tarquin felt like he’d had the air knocked out of him. Kav had mentioned that she’d dated assholes in the past, but a finalizer? One who, if Kav’s statements were anything to go by, had brutalized her once before, and was itching to do so again?

Fletch. That was the name she’d mentioned, wasn’t it? The kid at the orphanage, the one she’d had a disagreement with regarding what needed fixing in the world, and no wonder. A finalizer was diametrically opposed to an exemplar. Exemplars guarded, finalizers destroyed. There was history there. Bad blood. Kav’s hard-line reaction made a lot more sense, in that light.

“You can’t do this,” Tarquin said.

“I appreciate what you did for me, but your opinion is irrelevant. I’m going.”

“No!” The sound startled him, too loud in his own head. He’d gotten her out. He’d kept his promise, and if she went back there, and fell, and ended up on ice, then he’d have failed his Naira. Failed the one thing that might matter, and he couldn’t abide that.

Sharp turned back to her console in silent dismissal.

The others avoided looking at him. He gripped the sides of his console podium, knuckles aching. If he couldn’t stop her, if he couldn’t figure out a better way to destroy that station, then what good was he? What good was all that Mercator-sponsored knowledge if he couldn’t use it to help the people who really mattered to him, the people who were actually trying to save what was left of humanity?

He was useless again, and this time he wasn’t even needed for his command keys.

But these were Mercator ships.

A rough laugh scraped out of him and he dragged up the shuttle’s navigation windows, entered his keys, and took control. The shuttle swung around at his demand, tracking back along the same heading they’d set it on previously.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Sharp demanded.

She pivoted, drew her pistol, and leveled it at his head. He didn’t stop. He kept digging, pulling up interfaces only the Mercator inner family ever touched.

“When we first met,” he said, buying himself time as he fumbled through interfaces he had never had reason to use before, “the only reason you kept me alive was because of my command keys.”

“Regretting that right now.” She slid her finger off the guard onto the trigger in one fluid motion.

“Mr. Ayuba,” he said, hand shaking as he found what he wanted, the pilot’s console for the mining ship still in dock at Mercator Station. The one Kav had wanted to jump. “I’m not any kind of pilot, and I have no idea what I’m looking at here. Please, provide me the coordinates you calculated to jump the ship into Mercator Station and alert me when we are far enough away to initiate your plan.”

Tarquin crushed the interface in his hand and tossed it to the forward console, where it bloomed, deadly and wide, for all to see. On one side, the navigation panel. On the other, the warpcore power wheel. Tarquin tried to ignore the fact his heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his throat.

“Holy shit,” Kav said. “How did you…?”

“Mercator command keys are fleet-wide. Though I’m afraid they will change mine after this incident, when it is inevitably traced back to me.”

Sharp tipped the weapon up to the ceiling. “Tell him what he needs to know, Kav.”

Kav walked him through inputting the coordinates, more complicated than a simple x, y, z axis, that would jump that ship from the dock to the center of Mercator Station. Tarquin finished, submitted the command, overrode all warnings, and hesitated, fingers poised. All he had to do was power up the engines and physics would take care of the rest.

Hundreds of thousands lived in that station. He’d grown up there. All his private things were there, all his earliest memories. The memories during which he’d felt safest.

But being safe had been a lie as long as he’d been alive. He’d never been safe, he’d been controlled, and while part of him had always recognized the bars of his gilded cage, he’d never realized how deep the rot ran. That even his own thoughts, his gut instincts, couldn’t be trusted. And those instincts were making him hesitate now.

Tarquin met Sharp’s eyes and saw the same hesitation mirrored back at him. Anger boiled through him, scouring away all his reservations. Easy to submit to control when it was only yourself to lose. He’d been puppeted one way or another his whole life. He’d never been good at fighting for himself.

But he could fight for others. For everyone controlled on Sixth Cradle. For the station, and those clutched in terror right this very second.

For her.

Tarquin spun up the engines on the ship and for one brief, impossible moment, the heart of Mercator Station became that of a star.

And then his family was nothing more than dust.

EPILOGUE

Naira

Earth

Naira had learned that homes could die as easily as people when she’d evacuated Second Cradle. Ever since that day, she hadn’t allowed herself to grow attached to any one place, to ascribe meaning to one room over another, to call any slice of the universe hers. Doing so would imply a sense of safety, of permanence, that she knew down to her marrow was a lie.

But this place, this stronghold the Conservators had carved for themselves on the fringes of a domed city somewhere in the forgotten tundra of the dying Earth, might have come close.

Naira sat on a log worn smooth over years by her own backside, a rough plaid blanket hiked up around her shoulders, and a fire burning bright between her and the edge of a cliff that dropped down into farmland that’d long since died.

Up here, the wind tangling her hair and the city a muted glow on the horizon behind her, the aggression of the flames narrowing her focus to this small dome of light, to this singular moment in time, she could breathe.

The sky was a muted, paint-splotch smudge of shades of midnight. The city’s dome had needed repairs for as long as Naira had been coming here, and it would never receive them. This city was already on its way out—the shroud had gotten in three decades ago, making crop-growing impossible—and the fact that it clung on despite all that reminded Naira that stubbornness wasn’t inherent only to her, it was a human trait.

Maybe these people didn’t have anywhere else to go. But she’d seen countless cities like this one over the years, and knew there was always a fragment of the population who stayed behind. Even after the lottery to live up-station finally started calling their names.

Place mattered. Home mattered, even if she didn’t want one for herself.

She chucked another branch on the fire and breathed deep as the sap popped and crackled, letting the acrid aroma fill her lungs. Kav thought she was nuts for enjoying this. Kuma found it boring. Jonsun had joined her, sometimes, and she tried not to think too much about Tarquin’s report that Jonsun had cracked. The other unionists steered clear of her, regardless of what she was up to.

The last few weeks she’d spent poring over plans for the next two cradles, and her head was stuffed full of diagrams and probabilities, branching plans and potential outcomes. She didn’t like the look of any of them.

There weren’t enough of them. Not to stop all the ships flying for both cradles.

Or maybe that was the canus in her pathways, pushing her into despair. Naira took a long drink of ginger tea to chase away the residue of shroud lichen that coated her tongue. She’d tried beer first, but it hadn’t been strong enough. She, Kuma, Kav, and Tarquin had all kept their extra pathways for the time being, so they’d been chugging lichen to keep canus’s influence away, no matter how much it disgusted them.

There’d been rumors of outbreaks. One of Ichikawa’s stations had spewed misprints that could walk and talk. Another of Mercator’s stations did likewise. Even Estevez had an incident.

They couldn’t stop this. Canus had learned it was threatened, and was responding, repeating the experiments of Sixth Cradle, whether or not it was even aware of the repetition. As far as Naira knew, Paison had yet to be reprinted, and that fact alone bought them time.

A branch cracked on the edge of the fire’s light. Naira lifted, cocked, and aimed her pistol with one hand, cradling the hot mug of tea in the other.

“Come into the light,” she said, though she had a feeling she knew who it was.

Tarquin moved into the ring of firelight. Even in civilian clothes, he couldn’t hide his regal bearing, no matter how much he tried to stoop his shoulders or duck his head. His hair had a way of always looking styled, even when he’d just woken up, and the shadows that grew beneath his eyes with every restless night added to the gravity of his appearance.

He’d never stop being a Mercator. And yet, for the second time she’d pointed a gun at him, doing so made her clench up inside. Made her want to slap her own hand to drop the weapon. She’d wanted to kill him on the shuttle when he’d turned them back around, but she couldn’t, and she had a sinking suspicion it had nothing to do with the influence of canus. That creature would have been delighted to see him fall.

Maybe it was her mood. Maybe it was the hour or the fire or the dead world beneath her feet, the beer already in her belly, but she asked, voice rough, “Why can’t I shoot you, Mercator?”

He blinked. The sparks from the fire lit up his eyes, catching in the green flecks mingled with the hazel, and she bit the inside of her cheek, stamping down the warmth that bloomed low in her belly.

“Do you want to?” he asked.

“I should,” she said, which wasn’t a real answer, but she couldn’t find a way to say yes when her body was screaming no.

This was the man who’d declared her a liar, who’d testified that Mercator’s mining methods didn’t cause the shroud. He’d been telling the truth, in a roundabout way, because it wasn’t canus that caused the shroud, but his own family. His mother.

He hadn’t known. But he’d suspected something was off, and he’d ruined her anyway.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did,” he said.

Tarquin moved closer and realized there wasn’t another log to sit on because she’d never bothered dragging anything up to this overlook except a seat for herself. She hadn’t wanted company, still didn’t, but he dropped to a light crouch across the fire from her, not getting the hint. She didn’t lower the weapon.

“We’ve had this conversation once before. I’d thought it might be easier, this time, but I suppose that’s one more way in which I’ve been wrong lately.” She waited while he wrung his hands together, and when he looked up again, there was such sorrow in him that it knocked the breath out of her.

“I never should have absolved my family of wrongdoing during your trial. I thought, at the time, that it was the right thing. That it was what I was supposed to do. Mercator—we were saving humanity through relkatite, after all.” His nose crunched as he sneered. He shook the anger away. “It doesn’t matter what I thought. What matters is that I did wrong by you, and for that, I’m sorry. If it’s possible to make it up to you, I will do whatever it takes. Even if it means leaving this place so that you don’t have to look at me. I couldn’t help but notice you leave any room I enter.”

He broke eye contact, looked at his hands instead, and she realized it wasn’t because he was avoiding her wrath, but because he didn’t want her to see the pain on his face, the reality of what that admission had cost him. Watching her walk away from him for weeks must have chewed him up inside. He was asking her to send him away.

She lowered the weapon, clicked the safety, and slid it back into the holster at her thigh. “My liege, look at me.”

“Please don’t call me that,” he said, and kept his head down.

Naira stood and let the blanket crumple back to the log. The wind kicked up, tearing her hair across her face, and she pushed it back with annoyance, resolving to shave at least half of it off as soon as she got the chance. She skirted the fire and crouched across from him. The corners of his eyes crinkled as he tightened them closed, twisting his head to one side to avoid her.

She grabbed his chin and forced him to face her. His eyes flashed open, more out of surprise than compliance, but the moment he made eye contact, she felt his jaw tighten, his pulse quicken.

“I leave the room,” she said, “because I find your presence distracting, and we are in the middle of planning a war that we cannot win, and every damn time you’re near me I get this… feral compulsion.”

“Feral…?” His cheeks burned beneath her fingers. “I see.”

“I’m not her,” she said quickly.

“Yes, of course. I understand that. I’m sorry for any discomfort you’re experiencing. I can withdraw, if you’d prefer—”

“It is not at all an uncomfortable sensation,” she said before she could think.

“Ah.” He shifted his weight. “Sharp, I am going to need you to be… clear, with me, as I do not wish to overstep your boundaries.”

She let out a soft huff and released his chin, pushing to her feet. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know what I’m saying. There’s this… echo inside of me, when you’re around. Like I can almost grasp a memory, but I never can, and I don’t understand how you and I ever could have… I hate what you are, Mercator. I hate what you did.”

He pushed slowly to his feet and carefully slid his hands into his pockets, as if to keep from reaching for her. “She did hate me. For quite a while, I think, though she hid it well.”

“What changed?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted with a slow shrug, the color draining from his face, leaving his eyes haunted. “We talked. A lot. But you never got the chance to tell me why, exactly.” He cleared his throat. “She. She never got the chance. My apologies.”

“If you don’t stop apologizing for every little thing, I’m going to throw you off this cliff.”

She gripped his upper arm, giving it a squeeze of support that she hoped was more friendly than intimate. He jumped at the touch, stared at her hand as if it were a weapon. Even through the thick layer of his coat, she could feel the sudden heat radiating off his skin.

Naira took a startled step backward at the overreaction, and her heel slipped in the gravel. She threw her arms out for balance, pathways vibrating to compensate, but Tarquin caught her before she could correct herself and pulled her back hard enough that she crashed into his chest. He sealed his other arm around her, pressing her close as he moved away from the edge. She stared up at him, stunned by the familiarity of his arms around her.

“You’re stronger than you look,” she said.

His shock was replaced with the slow spread of a self-satisfied smile as he gazed down at her. “Illicit pathways. Last time you discovered them, I pulled you over the ledge of a sinkhole. You called me a little shit, then.”

“Sounds like me,” she said with a laugh.

Tarquin grinned, started to dip his head toward her, and she froze, not sure if she wanted to shut this down or not, her body warring against the cold, hard logic that she didn’t know this man, not really, that she had no reason at all to trust or care for him.

He caught himself and swore, releasing his hold on her as he scrambled to put space between them. The brush of the wind was colder than it ever had been this time of year.

“I’m sorry, that was—I didn’t think. I’ll go now. I respect the hell out of you and I just—just wanted you to know that I was sorry, not—”

“Stop,” she said. He pressed his lips closed so hard they turned bloodless. “Why did you panic when I touched your arm?”

He rubbed the spot, the wild panic that’d consumed him moments before dissolving under the pressure of a pleasant memory. “I had this survey robot, Pliny the Metal, that stayed there when not otherwise in use. You—she—fixed it, when Paison’s crew damaged its leg.”

Naira let out a long sigh. She shouldn’t give a shit about this man. He was attractive, yes, she’d admit that much—past-her had good taste, naturally—but he was a Mercator.

He’d helped her, he’d committed to her cause, and she wanted to believe that he was well and truly on her side, that he could be trusted. But she’d been burned so many times, and by Mercators at that, that a tiny sliver of her rejected the very notion that he was anything more than her enemy.

But the way he talked about that robot made the sliver ease, the anger melt. She didn’t know him, she had all the feelings and none of the memories that had borne them, and part of her resented that, wanted to deny what she was feeling out of pure stubbornness.

She took up her seat on the log and hiked the blanket back around her shoulders, then patted the narrow space beside her. “Sit down,” she said, “and tell me all about Pliny.”

The story continues in…

The Fractured Dark

Book Two of The Devoured Worlds

Keep reading for a sneak peek!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is my opinion that no creative work exists in a vacuum. Art is always in situ, caught in the strata of the pressures of the era in which it was made. The Devoured Worlds was conceived of sometime in the early months of 2020. By the time I was prepared to write the trilogy’s pitch chapters, it was April 2020.

The Devoured Worlds trilogy was written during 2020 and 2021. All three of them, back-to-back.

There were just a few things happening in the world during that time period.

It’s quite possibly strange that I don’t, personally, view the trilogy as “pandemic books.” Certainly they were written during the pandemic, but I wrote a great many things over that time, and the themes of consumption, ideals as contagion, and social stratification were already in place.

But it wasn’t the painful realities of the pandemic that I brought to the page. It was the hope. Because when the world pulled its shutters, and lives narrowed in focus, instead of isolation, I was lucky enough to be a part of a few communities of artists of all kinds. The prevailing conversation, in those early days and all throughout, was to lean unabashedly into the things that gave you joy, and bring them to your work.

If you’ve made it far enough that you’re reading these remarks, this may be a confusing statement. The Devoured Worlds is certainly not a cozy story. It has a romance, yes, but as my agent said to my great satisfaction—it cracks the rib cage open and shows you the beating heart of that relationship.

Well, those are the kinds of things I like. I hope that, for the past however many pages this story ends up being, you found some joy in those things, too.

A great many people helped me to bring Naira and Tarquin’s story to fruition. Thank you to my husband, Joey Hewitt, for his endless support. To my beta readers, Tina Gower, Andrea Stewart, Karina Rochnik, Alexander Lostetter, and E. J. Beaton, for your valuable insights. And to my dear friends Marina Lostetter, Laura Blackwell, David Dalglish, Laura Davy, Trish Henry, Erin Foley, Clarissa Ryan, and Essa Hansen, who listened while I rambled endlessly about this project.

Thank you, too, to those writers’ groups that have sent strength to my sword arm and offered community: The Isle, The Bunker, and naturally, the crew of the MurderCabin.

Thank you to my publishing team, Brit Hvide, Bryn A. McDonald, Angeline Rodriguez, Kelley Frodel, Ellen Wright, Emily Byron, Anna Jackson, James Long, Lauren Panepinto, and Angela Man.

A huge thank-you to my agent, Sam Morgan, and everyone at the Lotts Agency for their tireless support.

And special thank you to the geologists behind The Geology Flannelcast: Chris Seminack, Jesse Thornburg, and Steve Peterson.

Thank you, readers. I hope my story gave you some space in which to breathe.

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meet the author

Joey Hewitt

MEGAN E. O’KEEFE was raised among journalists and, as soon as she was able, joined them by crafting a newsletter that chronicled the daily adventures of the local cat population. She has worked in both arts management and graphic design, and has won Writers of the Future and the David Gemmell Morningstar Award. Megan lives in the Bay Area of California.

Find out more about Megan E. O’Keefe and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at orbitbooks.net.

if you enjoyed

THE BLIGHTED STARS

look out for

THE FRACTURED DARK

Book Two of The Devoured Worlds

by

Megan E. O’Keefe

Look out for Book Two of The Devoured Worlds.

CHAPTER ONE

Naira

Mercator Hangar Bay | The Present

Naira had never infiltrated a spaceship while in a body before, and she found the experience far too perilous for her liking. It was much less nerve-racking to drop her neural map into the print of a person who was supposed to be on the ship. She was used to blending. To subtle manipulations.

There was no subtlety in her boots ringing out against the engine bay’s wire-grid floor. No finesse in the explosive devices tucked into the bag slung across her back.

Trepidation crawled up her neck and prickled her scalp. The mining ship set to launch to Seventh Cradle next week was deathly silent. It should have been bustling with techs doing their final checks before the ship would shove off for one of the precious planets where the ecosystem had yet to succumb to planetary collapse syndrome. Instead, its lights were pushed down to power-saving mode and the hangar was empty of personnel.

Naira could hardly believe it when she’d first seen the empty hangars on Kav’s hacked security-camera feeds. She still couldn’t quite believe it.

The security system accepted Naira’s false credentials without so much as a hiccup. She paused in front of the warpcore containment, letting her gaze trail up the fine bones of emerald-green relkatite that caged the core, and wondered.

This was a rush job. Acaelus Mercator had raised the specter of the Conservators to the public eye as a threat to all mining missions. He’d claimed that the lack of relk on Sixth Cradle had been the fault of the Conservators. That they’d gotten there ahead of Mercator—though Acaelus never bothered to clarify how such a thing was even possible—and brought the shroud to collapse the planet as they mined all the relk from the skin of that world and kept it for themselves.

And so the heads of MERIT had rallied. They’d joined their resources, frantically building two ships to launch to Seventh and Eighth Cradles to preserve those planets’ stores of relkatite against the Conservators. Never understanding that their impulses were being manipulated. Never knowing that the fungus they used to mine that mineral, Mercatus canus, had bonded with the pathways in their bodies, using them to transform humanity into little more than an extended search network for more relkatite, which was canus’s preferred food.

Rushing the ships didn’t account for the sloppy seams in the walls, the pitting in the relkatite containment, or the rust staining the joints in the metal fittings. Naira gave the irritatingly handsome man next to her, Tarquin Mercator, a side-eyed glance.

“Does this feel off to you?” she asked.

The younger child of Acaelus crossed his arms, staring at the warpcore as if it were keeping secrets from him. Even in casual clothes, the regal lines of his body language were hard to hide.

Tarquin affected a slouch, reducing his towering height to something less imposing, but there was no slouching away the Mercator family crest curling in vine-like knotwork over the backs of his hands. He tugged on the sharp ridge of his chin, frowning. They’d been working together for five months now, and she still wasn’t quite used to his presence at her side.

Naira looked away from him as an unwelcome warmth stirred within her. She’d been told that on Sixth Cradle she’d come to care for him, but she’d died before she could upload those memories. Looking at him now… He was an empty ache in her chest, a man-sized hole in her past she didn’t know how to approach. Best to focus on his usefulness—rebellious Mercator, renowned geologist—than on how he made her feel.

Best to ignore the way his hair slipped over his temple, adding a pensive, deep shadow to the angle of his cheek.

“It does seem unusual,” he said, oblivious to her silent study of him. He was oblivious to most things when lost in thought. “While my father’s motives are misguided, he wouldn’t let a ship of such import fall into disrepair. And the lack of security?” He shook his head and gestured to the surrounding room. “It makes no sense.”

“It makes sense if it’s a trap,” she said.

His hand dropped to the pistol strapped to his side, slipping through the cover of his open dark brown jacket. Naira smiled to herself at the motion.

Tarquin had been taught basic self-defense and weapons, but it was she who’d trained to be an exemplar—the bodyguards of all MERIT families. She found it cute, like a puppy carrying a too-large stick, that he thought he’d be useful if a fight broke out.

“If it’s a trap, it’s a poor one,” he said. “We haven’t seen a soul since we entered the hangar, and I can’t imagine Acaelus would let us get this close to the warpcore if he meant to capture us before we could harm the ship.”

“You’re right. Which means he’s got something else up his sleeve.”

Tarquin started to speak—potentially in defense of his father—but he snapped his mouth shut, swallowing back the words. Naira caught her gaze lingering on him and averted it, giving herself a little shake.

She had to focus. Had to get used to this man at her side without letting her body’s instincts distract her. She’d worked with plenty of people she’d been attracted to over the years and didn’t see why he should be any different.

Naira brought up her HUD and put a call through to Kav, who was, if things were going well, busy infiltrating the other mining ship in the hangar.

He picked up immediately. “You getting the feeling we’re at the wrong address?”

“I am.” She looped Tarquin and Kuma into the call. “Power-saving lighting, rust in the seams, and cracks in the wall paint. Not a soul to check things over or raise the alarm.”

“It’s quiet,” Kuma said, “too—”

“Don’t you dare finish that,” Naira said, glad Kuma couldn’t see her smile.

“Fine,” Kuma said with a dramatic huff. “I don’t like this. Feels like a setup.”

“If it is, it’s a fuckin’ weird one,” Kav said.

“We were just having the same conversation,” Naira said.

“I don’t understand his motivation,” Tarquin said, half to himself, as he examined the warpcore. Naira fell silent, and so did the others, letting him talk it out. “Canus is pushing him to secure the relkatite in the other two cradles. That makes sense. It wants to get ahead of us…” He avoided saying that it wanted to get ahead of his mother, too, as she was hell-bent on infecting the cradles with shroud lichen to keep canus from thriving on those worlds. “All right. I understand that. I can even see a decoy ship—it gives us something else to attack as a distraction—but this… These are working ships. They have warpcores and relkatite containments and probably relkatite wiring, too. It’s a waste. Canus wouldn’t let him waste relkatite.”

“Maybe he’s not quite that controlled yet,” Naira said.

“Maybe,” Tarquin said without conviction.

“Regardless of the old man’s motives,” Kav said, “we’re here. We’ve got the bombs. Might as well take care of these so he doesn’t retrofit them later for future mining expeditions.”

“A woman in possession of a bomb is in want of a reason to use it,” Naira said.

“Oh god help us, she’s been reading old shit again, hasn’t she?” Kuma said.

“Hanging up now,” Naira said. “Call me if anything blows up that’s not supposed to.”

Kav started to protest, but she hung up before he could get out more than a mangled “but.” She sensed eyes on her, and half turned to arch a brow at Tarquin.

“What?” she asked.

“Pride and Prejudice?” He grinned sheepishly and brushed the hair off his forehead. “I knew you read nonfiction, but somehow fiction doesn’t fit in with all the… shooting. And bombing.”

She adjusted the strap across her chest and looked at the warpcore instead of his grin. “Exemplars end up with a lot of downtime between shifts. There’s only so much review of combat theory one person can take, and Mercator had a—well, you know—big digital library, mostly historical.”

“Yeah,” he said, “that was at my grandparent Ettai’s insistence. They loved Austen.”

“Fascinating. Really not the time for book club.”

“You started it,” he said, with a laugh that made the tension in her shoulders ratchet up.

“Are you stalling, Mercator?” she shot back, and regretted it as his laugh dwindled away.

He’d been teasing her good-naturedly, but she’d gone for the throat because every time he did that, she wanted to tease back, and that led to flirting, and that wasn’t a door she was sure she should open. The crestfallen look he gave her stung but made it easier for her to breathe.

She really should have sent him with Kuma and brought Kav with her instead. Somehow she kept pulling Tarquin along beside her, and she couldn’t seem to stop.

“No, of course not,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”

Naira swung the bag around so that it rested against her stomach, and tugged the zipper open, revealing six explosive devices about the length and width of her forearm. Tarquin had a matching set of six devices in his own bag. Twelve spines of relkatite made up the cage bars enclosing the warpcore.

They needed to blow only one rib to break containment, but fail-safes were a must. And who could say no to more bombs? Naira pulled one out and flipped it over in her hand.

“The back has an adhesive strip that activates with pressure.” She approached the first rib. “You want to press it against the rib down low, as close to the ground as you can so that it’s out of sight.”

Naira crouched beside the warpcore, ignoring the tingle that rushed over her skin at close proximity to all cores. Sometimes, she thought she heard them whispering to her when she got this close. Not words, never anything like that, but murmurs. Sound waves of unknown origins reaching to her across impossible distances. It always made her shiver.

“Here.” She lined up the device but didn’t press it yet. “You do it.”

Tarquin hesitated, hands in his pockets. His reluctance had nothing to do with proximity to the warpcore, though he’d told her that he, like many others, experienced the same tingling sensation near cores. No, his hesitance was about the fact that they’d been dancing around each other for months, both of them avoiding being too physically close to each other.

“Are you certain you want me doing this?” He took a knee on the opposite side of the relkatite support, as far from her as he could get and still reach the device.

“You’re going to have to do your six on your own. I’m not holding your hand forever, Mercator.”

He swallowed. Nodded. He hated it when she called him by his family name, but calling him Tarquin felt too… intimate. And she sure as shit wouldn’t call him by his old title, my liege. He took the device from her cautiously, making certain not to brush his hand against hers. It left him holding it awkwardly at the top, the balance somewhat off. She didn’t comment.

“Here?” He lined it up so that the bottom almost touched the floor. She nodded. He licked his lips, and she looked away. The device connected to the relkatite rib with a faint squishing noise as the adhesive activated. “I think that’s it.”

Naira turned in time to see him pull back. His hand was too high up, near the arming switch. He was about to brush it. Her pathways granted her the speed she needed to grab his wrist, and she yanked him clear.

But she’d been having trouble adjusting to her print and her arm was longer than expected. She over-pulled, and he slipped. Naira’s exemplar instincts took over. She dove for him and caught his head in her hand before it could hit the floor.

They froze, tangled, staring at each other. His pulse thundered through the wrist she held, his hair silken smooth between her fingers. Panic crawled across his face, pupils dilating. He tried to stuff the panic under a mask of indifference that didn’t quite fit.

“I…” He cleared a rough catch in his throat. “I’m guessing that was wrong?”

Naira chuckled shakily and let him go. He scrambled back a step and rubbed his wrist, looking anywhere but at her. The softness of his hair was a phantom against her skin. She had to clear her throat, too.

“The position was right, but you almost bumped the arming switch.”

“I had no idea…” He trailed off and pointed his chin at the switch. “That?”

“Yes, that.” She rocked to her heels and watched him, crossing her arms over her knees. “Because you held the bomb in an awkward spot. Because you were trying to avoid touching me.”

He said nothing. Just kept rubbing his wrist where she’d grabbed him as if it hurt, when she knew damn well it didn’t.

“Mercator. Look at me.”

Tarquin flinched, then found the steel in his spine he could summon when hard-pressed. He forced himself to face her.

“We can’t keep—” She cut herself off and tried a different angle, making it about the work, not them. “This can’t affect our work.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Though I know being sorry is inadequate.”

“I’m not her,” she said.

“I understand that. I mourn her, and it hurts, and I will make mistakes sometimes, but I ask for your patience.”

“You already have it.” She forced a smile to hide the spike of empathetic pain that pierced the hard shell of her exterior. That’s all it was, empathy. Tarquin was a nice enough guy, and she could see how some other version of herself might have gotten close to him—though she was unclear on the details and wanted to keep it that way.

He was precisely her type, but in Naira’s experience “her type” also included a slow reveal that the person in question was, in fact, a raging asshole under a kind facade. While she didn’t think Tarquin was likely to have a mean streak, well. He was a Mercator.

“Thank you.” Though his smile was tinged with sadness, it was, at the very least, genuine.

She stood and held a hand down to him. He eyed it like it was a naked blade. “Come on. Let’s set the other bombs and get out of here.”

if you enjoyed

THE BLIGHTED STARS

look out for

AUGUST KITKO AND THE MECHAS FROM SPACE

Starmetal Symphony, Movement One

by

Alex White

When an army of giant robot AIs threatens to devastate Earth, a virtuoso pianist becomes humanity’s last hope in this bold, lightning-paced, Technicolor new space opera series from the author of A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe.

Jazz pianist Gus Kitko expected to spend his final moments on Earth playing piano at the greatest goodbye party of all time, and maybe kissing rock star Ardent Violet, before the last of humanity is wiped out forever by the Vanguards—ultra-powerful robots from the dark heart of space, hell-bent on destroying humanity for reasons none can divine.

But when the Vanguards arrive, the unthinkable happens—the mecha that should be killing Gus instead saves him. Suddenly, Gus’s swan song becomes humanity’s encore, as he is chosen to join a small group of traitorous Vanguards and their pilots dedicated to saving humanity.

CHAPTER ONE

Our Final Hour

August Kitko doesn’t want to see the end of the world—which should be any minute now.

He leans over the stone railing and gauges the distance to the jutting pediment of the cliff face below. A couple of sharp rocks poke up from beneath the choppy surf to say hi.

We’re here for you, buddy, comfortable and quick.

Gus grimaces and waves back at them.

He stands at the very edge of Lord Elisa Yamazaki’s estate, one of a few dozen lucky guests brought in for this momentous occasion. Behind Gus lies the famed Electric Orchard, full of algae-spliced fruit trees: cherry luxes and pearshines. They waver in the night like old diodes, dropping off in places when the breeze rustles them too much. Over the course of hours, their inner lights will fade, and they’ll lie upon the grass, gray as a stone.

The taste is ultimately underwhelming. It’s a glowing pear. It doesn’t have to be good.

Gus was drawn to this place by the long stone wall with crystal lanterns, the cliffside overlook, and the patch of soft synth grass. This part of the estate has probably stood since the Middle Ages, though the lanterns are obviously new—concentrated vials of the spliced algae Plantus glowname.

Gus missed the taxonomy twice when the lord gave everyone the tour, and was too embarrassed to ask for a third repetition.

As final resting places go, this one won’t be so bad. The estate has a commanding view from the eastern rise, so he gets the best sunset he’s ever experienced. Monaco’s slice of the Mediterranean glitters in the moonlight like no other gem. The city is a thousand icicles jutting up from craggy mountainsides, lining the hills all the way down to the artificial land extensions in the harbor. The Nouvelle Causeway stretches seaward, a big tube atop massive struts, its iconic boxy apartments encrusting its underside like ancient pixels. The Casino de Monte Carlo’s searchlights are on full blast in La Condamine district by the harbor—because of course there’s a type of person who wants to spend this once-in-a-lifetime night gambling. Gus wonders: Why is anyone hanging around to take their money?

SuperPort Hercule, stretching between Monaco’s two artificial mountains, is a relic of another era, when single-terrain vehicles were more common. Rich people still hang on to their water-based yachts, and rows of white boats nestle into slips like suckling piglets. Beyond these exotic antiques, a long expanse of water lily landing pads remains dark—the unused starport. Towering craft loom in the evening, engines cold.

The last ship from Earth launched three years prior. No one else dares—not with the Veil across the galaxy.

Gus blinks at the waves. The fall is going to kill him either way, but for some reason, he’d rather hit the water than the rocks. It mostly comes down to a choice of who gets to eat him—the seagulls or the marine life.

And seagulls are assholes.

Gus needs to wrap things up; he doesn’t want to be here when they arrive. He’d once been a bit more single-minded in his suicidal ideation, and he finds this last-minute attachment to survival annoying.

It seems unfair that life could get so fun right before the end. He’d forgotten the taste of good times, and a dram of happiness has made him too exhausted to complete his morbid task.

If only Gus can make himself climb onto the railing, he knows he can take the next step.

Other “bon” vivants cavort nearby, drinks in hand, some clumsily pawing all over each other. Gus straightens up and stares wistfully at the sea. He can’t be seen moping like he’s about to jump. They might try to stop him, and then they’d all waste their last few minutes of life trying to calm him down.

Or maybe they’d actually let him do it.

Then he’d spend his final second offended with them.

Perhaps instead, Gus could go to his rock star lover, apologize to them, and pull them in close for the literal kiss to end all kisses—except Ardent Violet is on the veranda, holding court for their adoring public. People and holograms no doubt sit rapt before them, listening to some captivating speech. Ardent isn’t about to even talk to Gus, much less peel themself away from a scintillating evening of compliments and basking.

Not after Gus screwed everything up.

The drunken revelers flop down on the nearby grass to step up their make-out game, hands going for buttons and clasps. Another team of horny fools joins the fray, giggling and gasping. Maybe Gus’s cold stare will shrivel their resolve.

They don’t even slow down.

There must be somewhere Gus can find a blissful moment of peace. He thrusts his hands into his pockets and wanders back up the estate grounds toward the main house. The lonely path winds past botanical oddities and designer plants of all shapes and colors, vibrant like the coral reefs of old. Lord Yamazaki says she takes her inspiration from Dale Chihuly, but to Gus, she just seems like she’s really into jellyfish.

La Maison Des Huit Étoiles rises out of the Electric Orchard like an enchanted castle, its eight glossy blue spires a stark contrast to the archaic walls surrounding the grounds. Atop each spire is a bright light, for the Yamazaki family members who… something. Again, Gus wasn’t paying full attention during the tour of the place. He’d had his mind on other things, like being surrounded by the best musicians on Earth.

The bay breeze this evening is unbelievable, the kind of night best spent at an open window with a piano and a drink. The piano still exists, but the booze is all gone, guzzled by the revelers, the staff, and the talent. The staff can’t be blamed; they’ve got their own partying to accomplish, and it’s not like Gus is doing his job. Few people are—for any reason. Whole swathes of the world are going unwatched, on the verge of collapse, and it doesn’t matter.

Gus Kitko, renowned jazz pianist, was flown here to play during the victory party, but they canceled that two days ago.

More accurately, his job was to play during the victory party after-party. His style doesn’t exactly draw the millions required to headline, but he’s a musician’s musician. Some days, it’s like his fans are all more famous than he is.

Gus has almost reached the sprawling manse when he detects Ardent’s musical laughter. He doesn’t want to look—he knows it’ll stop his heart—but he glances out of pure masochism.

The rocker stands resplendent in a flowing robe, textiLEDs luxed up like a bird of paradise. Their hair is an anodized red this evening, cut short with an edge like a knife. They’ve painted their exquisite face in jewel tones, pale skin traced into captivating shapes. Electric-blue lips remain quirked in a smile—until Ardent claps eyes on Gus in return.

They don’t rage or scowl. They simply note him with a neutral expression and move on. Ardent Violet lives in another world of packed arenas and coliseums, of paparazzi and nightly jaunts to the most exclusive clubs out there. Gus will never run in their circle again after Monaco—they’re above him.

But there is no “after Monaco.” Every last person dies here tonight. Even the beautiful, fabulous Ardent Violet.

Yep. Looking was a bad choice.

As it turns out, Gus won’t have to feel bad for much longer. A pale streak bisects the sky—a superluminal brake burn and the crackle of lightning. A flaming comet falls from the heavens, and the SuperPort’s harbor erupts into a geyser in the wake of a towering splashdown. All eyes travel to the site of the crash, and even the raw magnetism of Ardent Violet can’t continue to hold their attention.

A titanic exoskeleton rises from the waves, interlocking armor plates a sleek purple. It unfolds its long arms, each sheathed in an ivory gauntlet, and stands atop a pair of legs. It’s humanoid, bilaterally symmetrical. A fission halo encircles its faceless head, spitting plasma sparks in all directions. A pair of silver handles jut from its rib cage like knives buried up to the hilt. It has no eyes, only a smooth purple dome, reflecting all around it.

This titanic disaster could have landed anywhere else on Earth. There was an entire planet of perfectly apocalyptic locations, and a huge pantheon of faiths to satisfy with a melodramatic entrance. But no, it had to show up at the exact spot where Gus was trying to get comfy for his own doom.

Juliette the Vanguard, destroyer of six colonies and two worlds.

Soon three—counting Earth.

Two days prior, Gus had hope—tangible hope for the first time in five years. The remnants of the Sol Joint Defense Force had just deployed the unfortunately named Dictum, the “solution to the Vanguard Doom.” It was a big fancy battle cruiser that could drag travelers out of hyperspace, yanking them into its firing line. That seemed to Gus like a meaningless achievement, but there was a sudden surge of hope among the populace.

The United Worlds leadership were eager to tout their coming success. The plan was to intercept any Vanguards and sucker punch them with the most powerful particle cannons in existence. With defense figured out, the Sol system—last bastion of the human species—could finally go on the offensive.

Gus had dropped his toast when he checked the news that first morning: “Ghosts Massing, Vanguard Incoming, Dictum Will Destroy in Sol System.”

The harbinger of humanity’s end was on its way, and the superweapon was going to stop it—foregone conclusion. Nothing in the news articles indicated this was an “attempt,” or that it could fail. Every content outlet talked about the Dictum like it had already vaporized all fifteen Vanguards. Anything less spelled the destruction of Earth.

Gus reacted to this news in much the same fashion he handled all his problems: He sat down at his piano and began to play. The ivories calmed his nerves like a gentle rain, and he wrestled with the mortality that everyone on Earth faced. Young or old, they were all in the same boat, tomorrows potentially truncated.

Then came the holocall: General Landry and a cadre of USO coordinators, looking to put on a star-studded concert to celebrate their forthcoming first Vanguard kill. They offered Gus immediate passage to Monaco and accommodations at Lord Yamazaki’s, asking him to be ready for the big party.

Gus agreed, and when he terminated the call, a swish Brio XR idled in front of his Montreal walk-up. Its swept nanoblack form absorbed all light, coppery windows and lines of chrome the only reflective surfaces on it. A team of smiling assistants hurried Gus from his house, promising to send anything he needed to Monaco. They even gave him a carte with a few thousand unicreds to load into his account, in case he wanted to relax ahead of time.

It was a hell of a lot nicer than government work was supposed to be.

A stratospheric jaunt later, he was brunching on the deck of a yacht with musical luminaries from the top of the charts. He had one piano song that had been sampled and remixed into a hit, so he felt a mild kinship with these gods. They’d all been summoned by their governments to boost morale, and they were excited to meet August Kitko, “the guy behind that one sample.”

Everyone talked about the various battle watch parties they’d be attending that night. People spoke to Gus like he’d already been invited to one. He would’ve been glad to clear his busy schedule of clipping his toenails in his bedroom and staring wistfully out the window.

No invites were forthcoming, however, and Gus was too shy to ask. He could only hope someone would take pity on him so he wouldn’t spend the most stressful news broadcast of his life alone. The pundits figured the Dictum’s interdiction would come sometime in the next twenty hours, pegging the likelihood at eleven p.m.

Victory event details to follow.

To compensate for Gus’s lack of friends, government handlers arranged activities and meetups. Every minute of the day leading up to the night was mind-blowing goodness. Champagne and croissants, wandering the casinos, staring into the seaside sunset from the little park at Point Hamilton.

Even though the greenway was just a couple of statues and a few bushes crammed between two luxury high-rise condos, the place had a peaceful air. Gus’s hiking buddies, a pair of rockers from a town named Medicine Hat, said they wanted to call a friend to bring some wine. That friend turned out to be the multi-platinum-record-selling Ardent Violet, who showed up with a block party in tow. Food, liquor, and drugs followed, and Gus found himself ensnared by the wildest rave he’d ever attended in a public park.

When the throng became unbearable, Gus pushed out to the street for some fresh air. He wound down a few side alleys, trying to get a little space from Ardent’s many admirers.

Instead, he ran into Ardent Violet themself.

They sported a forest-green pin-striped suit, its edges given careful folds like paper animals. A few fresh flowers bloomed on their wide-brimmed hat. The whole outfit looked like it cost a fortune, which was why Gus was surprised to find Ardent sitting on the old stone curb, flicking through the Ganglion UI on their bracelet.

Gus wasn’t a fan, but he knew a member of the pop music royalty when he saw one. He was always wary of speaking to the big leaguers like them; half the time, they turned out to be nightmare humans with disturbing views.

“You okay?” Gus asked.

Ardent rose and brushed the dust from their butt. “Yeah. Just had to come up for air.”

Gus glanced back the way he’d come, toward the party in the idyllic park. It was too much for him, a person whose scene was quiet piano bars, but surely Ardent could handle it. The rocker regularly flounced about circus-ring stages with all sorts of holograms, drones, strobes, tractor beams, and earth-shattering bass.

Gus frowned thoughtfully. “You brought the party.”

“I always do.” A bitter note flavored their voice.

“That sounds difficult.” Gus sauntered over to a parked CAV and leaned against it. It squawked a warning at him, and Ardent jumped. Thank goodness, they both laughed.

“Uh, sorry about that…” Gus resettled himself against an aging wall near a historical marker dating it all the way back to the 2150s. The building’s moneyed architecture bore the hallmarks of the Infinite Expansion—right down to the streamlined, printed flagstones flecked through with precious metals and gem shards.

“Gus Kitko.” He raised a hand in a brief wave, then crossed his arms.

“Kitko,” they repeated.

He pushed off the wall. “And I should go, because you said you were out here to come up for air.”

“Aw, whatever.”

“No, no! I shouldn’t be taking up your time. Being Ardent Violet looks, uh…”

A raucous roar from the party wafted by on the breeze.

“Exhausting,” he finished.

They fixed him with their gaze, and it was like staring into the sun. They’d tinted their irises an inhuman red to complement their dark green suit. What was going through their head? Had his comment crossed the line?

When the silence grew too painful, Gus reached into his pocket and pulled out his battered old mint tin. Its contents jingled softly as he flipped it open. Ardent immediately perked up.

“What do those do?” they asked.

“Taste like mint,” Gus replied. “Would you like one?”

“You’re probably the only person here who carries candy instead of drugs.”

“Then you need me around, for when you’d rather have things sweet and calm.”

“Is that what you are?” Ardent asked, red eyes boring into him. They drew close and plucked a mint from the tin. “Sweet and calm?”

“My friends would say so.”

Ardent cupped the candy in their gloved hand and keyed their Gang UI. They closed their fingers around it, and the glove flashed inside: a chemical analysis.

“No offense,” Ardent said. “I’m a target for kidnappers.”

“None taken. Sorry you have to deal with that stuff.”

Ardent popped the mint into their mouth, and Gus took one of his own, savoring the evolving fizz of classical molecular gastronomy, the flowing of spearmint tendrils in his mouth.

Ardent let out a happy sigh, resting their hands on their hips to stare down the hill. “Pretty good mint.”

“Straight from Old Town Montreal. Local delicacy.”

“Really?”

“Nah. Bought them at Trudeau. What kind of a town would have a local delicacy like that?”

Ardent let out a short laugh. “You’re proud of poutine.”

“Well, where are you from?”

“Atlanta,” they said, and he could almost pick out the accent.

“Ah, biscuits,” Gus said. “So simple, yet so perfect.”

Ardent cocked an eyebrow. “You need to get in the kitchen if you think biscuits are simple.”

A few of the celebrants from the park made their way around the corner, screaming “Ardent!” the moment they saw their leader. Gus had fans, too, but they mostly held listening teleparties and talked about whether a seventh or a ninth was a more appropriate resolution to the end of Guy Keats’s “Too Blue a Bird.”

Teleparties were easily escaped. Real parties could hunt one down, as this crowd did to the unfortunate Ardent Violet.

“You’re coming, right? To the prince’s tonight?” Ardent asked. “Secret military watch party.”

“I don’t think I’ve got an invite.”

“I’m your invite.”

“Oh! I would love that. How will I get in if we’re separated?”

“You won’t. Better hang on to me, Kitty Kitko.”

They gestured for Gus to follow, and—though he hated this sort of loud affair—he did.

That night, they gathered in the prince’s palace to watch the action unfold. The atrium gardens were a labyrinth of wonders, each turn hiding another botanical curiosity. Torches slow-waltzed over the silent, somber processional, and Gus kept close to Ardent. At last, they came to an expansive amphitheater, like a small stadium for the prince and his friends.

Coats of arms flew from above, hovering in suspension fields. The prince considered it gauche to holoproject his country’s flag instead of using the real deal, so he had actuweave banners up everywhere with recordings of wind playing into them.

Gus found all the magical fanfare silly, but wizardry took over the royal aesthetic a few hundred years prior and never quite let go. Perhaps it was their way of explaining their place in the world, which was esoteric at best, borderline arcane. Either way, Gus preferred his tech interactions a bit quieter, with fewer moving paintings and enchanted chandeliers.

A set of crisp, tasteful numbers counted down atop the central dais amid swaying droplets of crystal—a timer on humanity’s final trial.

Gus settled into his fluffy polyform chair, happy the prince was a man of comforts. Ardent took the seat beside him, which expanded to fit them both, and wiggled in close.

Very close. Hitting-on-him close.

The place brimmed with dignitaries and important folx.

“I am definitely the least cool person here,” Gus whispered.

“Should I move? Are you not good enough?” Ardent pulled a stray hair back behind their ear. “If you could sit beside anyone in this room, who would you pick?”

“Ardent Violet, hands down.”

While they all waited, the prince’s fountains played a poignant water ballet by Maddie West, Sins of a Civilization. Holographic dancers flitted between fountains, seamless illusions immersing Gus into the thesis of the piece. It reflected on the evils that’d shaped their world, and expressed the desire that their reality exist long enough to be fixed. Too many, it argued, will be cheated out of their justice if death takes everyone.

Forty-five tearful minutes later, the ballet ended, and the Dictum appeared abruptly in their midst, white hull shining in the light of Sol. Gus figured there ought to at least be a bit of fanfare since the superweapon was their only salvation—maybe a logo or a clever jingle.

Just boop—starship.

The Dictum certainly didn’t look like humanity’s only hope. It was mostly cannon, with a little bit of ship appended to the ass-end for control. A couple of engines salvaged from the remains of a wrecked fleet provided propulsion, and it was escorted by Sol Joint Defense Force ships more appropriate for towing and rescue than countermeasures.

But it was humanity’s verdict, one way or another, so they all looked on in reverence.

Ardent’s fingers found their way into Gus’s in the cool night air. They leaned in even more as they rubbed a thumb over his knuckle. Perhaps, after five years of watching humanity crash and burn across the galaxy, this day would be the start of Gus’s renaissance.

The Dictum worked precisely as promised, drawing Earth’s would-be destroyer, Juliette, into the center of the fleet near Jupiter—but they’d only sprung the trap on themselves.

A swarm of golden robots erupted from Juliette’s superluminal braking path like glowing dandelion seeds. These choked out the meager starfighters of the Sol Joint Defense Force, murdering the human pilots with superior reflexes, awareness, and maneuverability. Gus couldn’t make out any details, just a lot of small pops and the murmur of the crowd.

Juliette blasted out of the kill zone like an avenging angel, slicing up Earth’s dreadnoughts with its glowing whips. The Dictum didn’t even get a shot off.

The Vanguard and its Gilded Ghosts took one minute and thirty-eight seconds to finish everyone, saving the observing ships for last. It would take some time for the Vanguard’s folding reactor to recharge, but after that—

—Earth was finished.

When Gus understood, he looked to Ardent. Every other eye in the crowd remained fixed on the holoprojectors, but he was curious. He wanted to know what the most beautiful person he’d ever met looked like in this singular moment.

The whites of their eyes had gone pink as cherry blossoms, and tears spilled over their pale cheeks. The smooth lines of Ardent’s otherworldly mask of makeup glowed faintly in the dim light, contorted into an awkward rage. They pulled a handkerchief out of some hidden pocket and dabbed their eyes and nose. It came away with the luminance of their highlighter.

“I’m going to bed,” Ardent whispered, gaze falling to the ground.

Gus nodded.

“Will you… will you please take me there?”

Gus nodded again.

They went back to Ardent’s room and fucked like there were only two tomorrows.

Gus had expected to be thrown out the next day. He wouldn’t have blamed Ardent if they’d had places to be, other people to do. Surely there were folx in the rocker’s life who needed them.

But Ardent let Gus hang around, thank heavens. The pair had a natural chemistry that kept them together in one way or another for a blissful thirty-six hours. Ardent was an excellent conversation partner, and let Gus ramble on about pianos whenever it was his turn to talk. Gus felt bad going on about his favorite instruments, but he’d essentially been holed up in his apartment looking at music sites for the past five years. At least Ardent was a good sport about it and tried to ask questions.

They didn’t have a single disagreement until it came time to discuss their end-of-life intentions.

Ardent wanted to spend their final hours saying goodbye to fans. Gus wanted to be alone with someone special. It’d started off a hypothetical discussion, but without realizing it, they’d both drifted into actual plans. Gus hadn’t meant to get emotional, but these were to be his last moments. He’d be damned if he squandered them.

The whole argument tensed up before the sprain.

“You’ll have a front row seat at the fan party,” Ardent said. “At least we can be together at the end that way.”

It’d been an offer.

The answer came out completely wrong: “But I’m not a fan.”

“‘Not a fan’?”

“No, like I’m just… I don’t want to spend my last few hours playing the game. Doing the celebrity thing.”

“And I live for it, so you know where I’ll be.”

Ardent returned their attentions to the mirror cams, touching up their already flawless makeup.

“Ardent, I feel like we’ve got a real connection, and besides, I’d be out of place. I’m not like… a pop person.”

Ardent’s then-emerald eyes narrowed. “Just because you fell in love overnight, my little Kit-ko, does not mean you get to own this.”

“I meant I’m not just a fan. What we have is more.”

Ardent’s expression went from bad news to blaring warning sirens.

“More than the people who care about my art and identity? More than my wishes for how I want to spend my life?”

“I didn’t mean that—”

“I know what the fuck you meant, and some of these people have devoted the last five years to my career. They’re my friends now. Even if they do worship me, I worship them right back. So far, we know two things about our relationship: I’m a great lay, and you like to talk about pianos a little too much.”

“I didn’t… only talk about…”

But he had.

They prosecuted him with a single question: “What’s your favorite Ardent song?”

“I don’t normally listen to pop—”

“Mine is ‘Get the Hell Out.’ Want to hear it?”

“I—”

“Get the hell out.”

After he’d been dismissed, Gus looked the song up, just to be sure the godforsaken tune existed. It was catchy, with a great piano solo in the middle. To his surprise, there was a lot going on in the composition.

Gus was allowed to remain on the grounds, but Ardent’s people made it clear he needed to stay away. With only a few hours left to live, there was nothing to do except wait to die as Lord Yamazaki’s guest.

Juliette, Vanguard giant, hums like a tuning fork, and Gus has regrets.

He should be standing on the veranda with Ardent, hand in hand as they take in the end, not gawking from the garden path. They might be the most captivating person he’s ever met, and they stand before him like a phoenix, wreathed in the misty, shattered holograms of SuperPort Hercule. Even with a world-killing giant crashing behind them, he’s transfixed. It’s profoundly unfair that this is how he met them; he wanted more time.

Ardent is swallowed by the crowd—folx rushing to see Earth’s executioner.

Juliette draws up to its full height, vibrating in Gus’s vision like ultraviolet light. He has to squint to look directly at it. The robot raises a white gauntlet, and every harmonic overtone seems to fill Gus’s mind—possibilities even beyond human hearing. The atoms of his body thrum in time with unseen oscillations. He’s aligning to something—attuning.

All around him, activity slows to a halt. Other people’s hands drop to their sides, and they stare, wide-eyed, at Juliette’s forming energy field. It’s a thing of beauty, pulsing and beating with a thousand dancing lights.

This feels amazing. I—

Conscious thought begins to fade.

Another superluminal brake burn splits the air like an elephant’s shout, this one close enough to send a colorful borealis of solar particles rippling across Earth’s atmosphere. The shock wave throws sailcraft against their slip walls, its force rushing up the hill, flattening every potted plant and partygoer like a ripple of dominoes.

Gus can’t do anything about it.

The hit knocks the daylights out of him, and he goes sprawling across Lord Yamazaki’s lawn. Others weren’t so lucky, and a lot of terrified screams go up all at once. People broke bones, hit their heads and split them like melons. Pained cries join the cacophony as yet others come to grips with new injuries. In all his years playing concerts, Gus has never heard a crowd make a noise like that—but then, he’s never been in a bomb’s blast radius, either.

A jump that close to Earth’s atmosphere is beyond illegal, so that means only one thing: another Vanguard.

A second titan comes streaking out of the sky in a ball of fire, pile-driving Juliette into the dark waters. Some bright soul has the idea to use a holoprojector as a searchlight, filling the bay from the top of a high-rise. The newcomer thrashes in the water with Juliette, forming a maelstrom of whitecaps.

That collision wasn’t an accident.

The Vanguards are fighting.

The city booms with joyous voices like an arena. Horns blare. People set off fireworks. They’re all happy.

Except Gus recognizes the sleek, jet-black form of Greymalkin—destroyer of seventeen worlds. That bastard has taken even more lives than Juliette, so it’s not likely to be helpful when it’s done beating its comrade to death.

Greymalkin’s body is a symphony of black lacquer and sleek lines. Torrents of water pour down its head, running along a pair of vertical green slits where its eyes should be. Wicked claws tip its fingers, engine nozzles on each knuckle. The jets spit and hiss like a pit full of pissed-off cougars, and Gus has to cover his ears.

Fists ablaze, Greymalkin assails Juliette into the waves, sending pillars of steam up to join the clouds. Juliette uppercuts from beneath the water, knocking its assailant loose. In a flash and flurry of rain, the purple Vanguard is back on its feet. Greymalkin coils and strikes, but this time, the bots are more evenly matched.

Still, more hopeful whoops and gasps go up from the assemblage of people. Gus isn’t sure why they’re so excited.

They’re probably just fighting over who gets to kill us.

The Vanguards’ musical ululations fill the city’s glassy streets, bending Gus’s mind. It’s a language, and whatever they’re saying to each other, he can almost understand it. The sound resonates in his bones. These are gods, and they speak with infinite choirs.

He quickly picks out the key—F Dorian, a favorite of jazz musicians everywhere.

With a perfect view of Juliette’s havoc, the elevated veranda becomes a choked throng. Celebrities, wealthy elites, and ladder climbers—not particularly considerate in the first place—run one another over to get a good look at the two monsters clashing. Gus hangs back, because if he’s going to spend his last minutes on something, it’s not gawking.

There’s always the piano. It’s deserted now.

Gus swims upstream against the revelers pouring from the house. It’s a gauntlet; they’ll trample him if he falls, and they won’t even have time to feel bad about it. Gus isn’t into going out like gum on some well-heeled heels, so he ducks and weaves until he’s through the door into the Maison.

He heads to the Crystal Parlor, its interior holoed over for a performance that will never occur. Jagged patterns throb gently on every wall, awaiting musical cues. The room’s many interactive facets and light shows would’ve made for a fantastic concert venue back in Montreal. Gus knows a bunch of promoters. He could probably scrape together enough venture capital to get a club off the ground and—

Even at the end, he often forgets he has no future.

The abandoned setup of Lord Yamazaki’s house quartet sits on the neon stage: a grand piano, an upright bass, an electric guitar, and a drum kit. The ones hired to play the lord’s private party already quit, so the instruments sit idle.

Cups and bottles lie strewn across the floor where they’d been dropped in everyone’s haste. Some asshole spilled their whiskey across the piano bench, but Gus situates his rump on the leather cushion anyway. No time to tidy up.

He taps the F-zero key, and it’s like heaven under his fingertips. The Roland Grand Alpha tunes to the ambient noise of the clashing Vanguards, and Gus lays in a gentle pad of fifths. A light glissando carries him up and down, and he shifts modes to keep in sync with his new playmates.

He doesn’t want to dance with these monsters, but they’re the only game in town. He can face them and make music where it’s possible, take the party to the very end—or he can hang it up and wait to die.

Hit it.

Gus unleashes a flurry of hammer strokes across the board. His sweet music intertwines with the Vanguards’ hypnotic melodies, subverting them, patterning their voices into a trio under his command.

The Crystal Parlor comes to life, facets dancing in the lamplight. This is Gus’s favorite room in Lord Yamazaki’s house—the way it seems to breathe with his song. Surfaces align, creating impossible illusions of expansive spaces unfolding into nothingness. Gus plays a deceptive cadence, and the electropolar glass responds in kind, translating tonality into color. The room becomes a cathedral to craft Gus’s remaining opus.

He dances over the Vanguards’ sounds with his own, playing for life, attacking the attackers, snapping back at them with triplets made from their own chord progressions. If they want to end the world, fuck them. At least he can make it catchy.

No one else troubles Gus’s line of sight. They’re all too excited about the robot devils duking it out in the bay. Alone with the ivories, Gus isn’t performing for anyone, and it’s exactly what he wanted for an ending.

The titans shift musical modes again and again, and it takes everything Gus has to keep up. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth; this might be the most fun he’s had in a jam session since he lost his bandmates in the Gus Kitko Trio.

He plays for them, too.

Lisel and Gerta were his bassist and drummer—a wonderful couple, and the best friends he’d ever had. They’d been killed in an attack on the nomadic preservation cruiser Paradise. It was supposed to be safe there, hidden, but the ship hunters found them. The dark behemoths caught every spacefaring vessel, eventually.

Gus pushes the Vanguard chord progression into an accusation. Fuck you for killing my friends.

He parts ways in deliberate dissonance, shoving in Lisel’s favorite bass lines to the beats Gerta always laid down. They might be dead, but he has them in his head, ready to jam. They’ve got something to say to these Vanguards, too, and Gus hears them loud and clear. When he shifts key to bring their harmonies back into line with the Vanguards, it’s like slamming the accelerator. He shakes his head, smiling like the Trio is playing together again at last.

The mirrored hall gasps in delight as Ardent strides beneath the archway in their glowing robes. It scatters their splendor up its oscillating crystals before bringing itself back into tasteful alignment with the song.

Ardent breezes past the piano without a word, stopping at the guitar. It’s a metal-flaked red Strat with scintillating white accents, but against Ardent’s wardrobe, it’s positively bland. When they wrap their fingers around the instrument’s neck, their textiLEDs steal colors from the guitar body, erupting in a bloody display of light.

Far from being a distraction, Ardent’s presence completes the need. Gus feels whole, like he can truly cut loose and play humanity off the stage.

Ardent tosses the strap over their head and slips a silver guitar pick out of a hidden pocket at their wrist. They lean back, letting the instrument’s body rest against their hips, as if testing it, before squaring up to play. Their electric fingernails arc along the strings, infusing the instrument with a rising drone as they capably run a hand up the fretboard. They nod in time with Gus, keeping a beat with quick palm-muted strums as they wait for the right place to jump in.

Gus digs this improvised jam like he’s never felt a song before. If this were a performance, it’d be one of the proudest moments of his life. This should’ve been at Lincoln Center. It should’ve been in a big arena, even.

Stay in the moment, man.

His fingers go faster and faster. People are screaming outside. Ardent raises their hand for the first rocking strum; their pick shines like a guillotine blade.

“Here we go!” Ardent’s shout is a bolt of lightning into Gus’s soul. A jet-black robot fist punches through one side of the room, covered in gore and broken stone. It slams into Ardent, and they go flying toward an open window. The hand stops short of Gus, sweeping aside the baby grand as easily as dollhouse furniture. He staggers backward, trying to get away, but it digs out more of the house and catches him like fleeing vermin.

Unyielding fingers close around Gus, and he beats on Greymalkin’s wet armor plates to get loose. He thought he wouldn’t panic at the end—he’s known he was going to die for a long time—but it’s still terrifying. It’s crushing him. Breath won’t come.

The fist draws Gus out through the smoking remains of La Maison Des Huit Étoiles, revealing only bloody devastation in its wake. The world careens, and Gus’s head lolls atop his neck. When his view rights itself, he’s face-to-face with Greymalkin.

Its twin vertical slits fill the dripping night with venomous green light. Up close, the Vanguard’s hum is all-encompassing, and Gus’s hair stands on end. So many lives have been taken by this thing. Why did it come all the way from the darkness of space to terrorize him, specifically?

Greymalkin’s armored breastplate opens up, and electric-blue muscles flicker along connective tissue. There’s a gap in the middle of Greymalkin’s chest, a yawning nest of pumping tubes and the heartbeat of lights. Probes and wires slither about the entrance, and Gus screams in horror as it plunges him forward.

He’s encased in goo, and the whole world goes dark and quiet. Every wriggling motion meets with blubbery resistance, and his muscles burn within seconds. It’s trying to exhaust him, suffocate him.

It’s definitely going to work.

The mucous wall suctions to Gus’s body, slurping away the remaining air bubbles, plastering his hair with lubricant, smearing his face. Gus makes fists, trying to grab on to something, but the gelatinous material squishes out between his fingers.

His lungs burn and stars dance in his eyes. He can’t take it. Gus’s body is about to breathe whether he wants to or not.

This is where you die.

A pair of protrusions slither up his nose, and Gus reaches up to pull them out. Those aren’t tubes; they’re the goo pressing into his sinuses.

There’s a popping noise inside his skull, and air flows into Gus’s nostrils, cold and fresh. He shuts his mouth and breathes hungrily, coughing with each exhalation. The whistling hiss of air dies down as the pressure evens out, and he’s oddly comfortable.

Gus stops struggling. He doesn’t see the point. Maybe this is the afterlife, and he’s actually supposed to be super snuggly and fall asleep.

Something tickles Gus’s scalp.

That something turns out to be a brain drill.

His pain ratchets from terrifying, to explosive, to personality-skewing. His vision whites out as the drill bit chews skin and bone, and he smells rainbows. A spike of lava burns up his insides, threading along his backbone. Probes stab through his whole body, and he hopes it will end soon: the suffering, his life, everything.

A cool mist trickles from the back of Gus’s neck into his form, and all fear vanishes as his extremities pleasantly tingle. Something alien, yet familiar, creeps into his mind. Thoughts are being forced into him.

It’s like learning the parameters of a dream, changing the truths of his world. All at once, he understands that his pain is an illusion created by the body to illustrate danger. With the right modulation in perspective, illusions can be destroyed.

Gus’s pain vanishes. In fact, he feels great.

Perhaps a little too great—there are definitely some drugs in his system.

“What’s happening to me?”

Concepts filter into him, the language of an advanced intelligence. Gus’s mind isn’t exclusively his anymore. Greymalkin and Gus are connected.

Light fills his vision, the water and sailcraft wreckage coming into ultrasharp focus. He’s seeing through Greymalkin’s optical sensors, and a thousand colors he’s never glimpsed come smashing into his nervous system. Radiant heat and gamma rays fluoresce in his sight, rendered in fresh clarity by ultra-powerful sensors across the Vanguard hull. He could count the fish in the sea if he so desired. Monaco is even more beautiful than before, but when Gus looks into space, he’s floored.

A million destinations spread before him, clouds of possibility scattered across the sidereal firmament. Even background radiation stands out, remnants of the Big Bang cast into distant nothingness. Nebulae swirl across the cosmos, thickening into a panoramic arm of the Milky Way. Curiously, two other lights stand out in the darkness.

Those are other humans, Greymalkin explains, pushing more thoughts into his mind. Not everyone is dead.

Juliette’s fist plows into Gus’s view, sending Greymalkin backward into the SuperPort starship pads. He goes stumbling into the dry-docked Zephyr’s Rest, supposedly the most luxurious starliner in existence. Greymalkin’s claw snaps out to catch itself, and Gus’s arm follows suit against his will. Nails dig into the silver hull and rip a huge gash down the side. Bundles of wiring, metal, nanocomposites, and a thousand other things tear loose from the Zephyr’s Rest like whale fat, and Gus seriously doubts it’ll ever fly again.

“Oh my god! I’m so sorry!”

His jaw hurts like hell from taking that last punch. Bones clacked together across his face that he didn’t even know he had; Greymalkin’s armor plates—acutely sensitive to the tiniest vibration—took a hit with the net force of a hypersonic missile. If it weren’t for the Vanguard throttling its sensor input, the shock of a full-impact strike would’ve burned Gus out like a tiny fuse.

Juliette goes down on all fours, scrambling toward Greymalkin. It clambers along the starliner’s roof, punching another half dozen holes before leaping onto Gus’s Vanguard host. Gus feels Juliette’s ivory gauntlets around his neck, and it brings another fist across his face.

Greymalkin wants Gus to know: He will not survive a third hit like that. Its neck has taken too much damage, and needs time to regenerate.

They must work together to create an advantage.

“I’m in control?”

The answer comes through in a flash. Gus is a Conduit, and Greymalkin contains the Fount: the universal database of all harvested human memories.

The bargain: Gus will give Greymalkin access to the knowledge in the Fount. Greymalkin will give itself over to his control.

“You want to put other people’s ideas… in my mind?” he asks, flinching as Juliette comes at them.

Gus’s arms once again move against his will, blocking blows that could’ve cratered mountains. Greymalkin rolls and throws Juliette at the fuel storage depot, but it catches itself on the traffic control tower, clambering down the side like a spider.

If Gus consents to be connected with the Fount, he can be of some use to humanity before he dies from his grievous wounds.

“Wait, what?”

In the interest of speed, Greymalkin had to jam everything into him without anesthesia. There’s a good chance he’ll perish after this; Gus’s body has suffered an inordinate amount of trauma.

Panic scratches at Gus’s thoughts, but Greymalkin twists his mind—keeping him in the moment. His Vanguard needs his explicit agreement. Perhaps he would rather be dead, Greymalkin suggests. Gus’s choice not to help would damn humanity, but it would also be understandable. Most humans do not enjoy having their minds manipulated.

Juliette shoulder-checks Greymalkin, sending it skidding off the coastal shelf, into the depths of the Mediterranean. The Vanguard sinks deeper, beyond the reach of Monaco’s lights. Its armored back comes to rest against the seafloor, kicking up a swirl of silt. Radars render the 23,168 fish-sized life-forms nearby.

“Will it hurt?” Gus takes a dry swallow.

He can save humanity. Who cares if it destroys him?

He nods and makes a tight fist. “All right. Do it.”

His viewport fills with the words Deepsync in progress…

A thin ray of light spreads through his head, scattering across his many nodes and subsystems. Greymalkin’s psyche fuses with him, the connection snapping them together like two droplets of water.

Middle C, played on Gus’s childhood piano, comes through the connection first. A sparkle of notes form the backbone of a song, and his limitless imagination provides dozens of branching paths. An illusory drummer follows, a snare in a swing time march, then a horn section hums a tense pad before going sforzando.

The full orchestra builds in Gus’s mind: loud, clear, and soul-rattling. Memories spill into him at the crescendo, and he becomes multitudes.

It’s electrifying. Countless warriors of all shades, genders, backgrounds, and beliefs fill Gus with a battle cry, and his breath comes in panicked, wide-eyed huffs. They’re so loud—every thought he has seems to belong to someone else. He feels their lives and motivations, the core of what taught them to fight. These were the people who laid down everything to stop the advance of the Vanguards, and they only ended up being absorbed by them.

Greymalkin informs Gus: He can only withstand five minutes at a time.

“What happens then?”

His personality will dissolve under the weight of all others. He’ll be nothing more than a drooling amalgam, unable to think or speak for himself. In that instance, Greymalkin will do him the favor of termination.

“Aw, thanks, buddy.”

When Gus sits up, so does Greymalkin. It crouches on the seafloor, preparing to launch its counterattack.

“Looks like we’ve only got five minutes to dance.”

Gus pounds his fists together and slogs up the shelf. He breaks the surface, and Juliette is waiting, whips at the ready. It draws back to swing and—

Elation as she steps forward to preempt her master, taking him by the wrist and hurling him to the mat.

The memory of another life takes over Gus’s being for a split second, and he executes a perfect hip throw. Juliette careens overhead before kicking loose in a tangle of limbs. It lands hard, but not enough to damage it. It rushes at Gus and—

They spread their feet to receive the linebacker, because they’re going to teach this motherfucker about inertia.

Greymalkin goes low, grabbing Juliette by the waist and directing its momentum into the sharp cliffs of the land extensions. The purple Vanguard rolls into the water, buying Gus a moment to catch his breath.

Gus looks down at his dark claws, lined with hissing jets. He has become what he must to save the Earth. He has every memory he needs to kick this thing’s ass.

Now he just needs to get lucky.

By Megan E. O’Keefe

THE DEVOURED WORLDS

The Blighted Stars

THE PROTECTORATE

Velocity Weapon

Chaos Vector

Catalyst Gate

The First Omega (novella)

Praise for Megan E. O’Keefe and the Protectorate Series

“O’Keefe delivers a complicated, thoughtful tale that skillfully interweaves intrigue, action, and strong characterization. Themes of found family, emotional connection, and identity run throughout, backed up by strong worldbuilding and a tense narrative. This series opener leaves multiple plot threads open for further development, and readers will look forward to the next installments.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Meticulously plotted, edge-of-your-seat space opera with a soul; a highly promising science-fiction debut.”

—Kirkus

“A brilliantly plotted yarn of survival and far-future political intrigue.”

—Guardian

“This is a sweeping space opera with scope and vision, tremendously readable. I look forward to seeing where O’Keefe takes this story next.”

—Locus

“Outstanding space opera where the politics and worldbuilding of the Expanse series meets the forward-thinking AI elements of Ancillary Justice.”

—Michael Mammay, author of Planetside

“Velocity Weapon is a spectacular epic of survival, full of triumph and gut-wrenching loss.”

—Alex White, author of the Salvagers series

“Velocity Weapon is a roller-coaster ride of pure delight. Furious action sequences, funny dialogue, and touching family interactions all wrapped up in a plot that will keep you guessing every step of the way. This is one of the best science fiction novels of 2019.”

—K. B. Wagers, author of the Indranan War trilogy

“Velocity Weapon is fast-paced, twisty, edge-of-your-seat fun. Space opera fans are in for a massive treat!”

—Marina J. Lostetter, author of Noumenon