“Hello,” he said softly. “I’m Brian Caldswell, and I’m sorry as hell this is happening to you. I’m sure you hate us right now, but you need to know that even though you didn’t choose this, what you’re doing makes you a hero.” He reached out, squeezing her arm softly with his calloused hand. “Thank you. Thank you with all my heart. I swear I won’t let your sacrifice be in vain.”
The man in the officer’s coat scowled as Caldswell finished. “I wish you’d stop doing that,” he said coldly. “It’s demoralizing for the others, and she won’t remember.”
“She still deserves to hear it,” Caldswell said.
The officer’s scowl deepened. “In all likelihood, she won’t even make it. She’s only a ninety-eight percent match. Maat ate a ninety-nine-percenter just yesterday.”
That statement made Yasmina whimper against the gag, but Caldswell shook his head. “She’ll make it,” he said. “I have a good feeling about this one. Send her in and see.”
The officer gave a long-suffering sigh and waved his hand. A second later, Yasmina was nearly taken off her feet as her guard yanked her by the shoulders and began to drag her toward a door on the opposite side of the room.
This door was smaller than the one they’d come in through, but it was heavily reinforced and covered with a thick, glowing shield, the kind banks used to cover vaults. As soon as she saw it, Yasmina began to fight harder than ever. After Caldswell’s cryptic remarks, she wanted nothing to do with whatever was in that room, but as always, her struggles did nothing. The woman dragged her across the room like she was a tiny, unruly dog. The shield vanished when they reached it, and the heavy door slid up into the ceiling with a soft hiss to reveal what looked like a white closet. That was all Yasmina could make out before the guard yanked the gag off her mouth and shoved her inside.
She stumbled through the door, tripping on the frame. She caught herself on her hands just before she landed on her face, which was unexpected, since her wrists had been cuffed behind her not a second before. But the strange woman had removed those too, leaving Yasmina unrestrained for the first time since they’d grabbed her. There was no time to do anything with her freedom, though. Already, the heavy door was sliding back into place, sealing her into the white room.
Yasmina ran for it anyway, banging on the metal with her newly freed fists, but her hands barely made a sound. Defeated, she slid down the door, sobbing in great heaves. She wanted her papa, she wanted to go home. She’d never complain about living in the country ever again if only she could get out of here.
She was still crying five minutes later when she heard a soft rumbling. Her head shot up, looking for the next terror, but she couldn’t see anything but white. She could feel the vibrations through the floor, though. Something was happening.
Yasmina got to her feet, keeping her back to the door. She was trying to figure out if the grinding sound was coming from the floor or the ceiling when it stopped. For one second, the white cell was silent, and then the wall directly across from the door she was cowering against slid up.
The sight was so odd, it took Yasmina several seconds to realize that the interlocking mess of metal joints on the other side was some kind of moveable platform. The rumbling she’d heard had been the huge metal machinery moving it into place. The metal itself was spotless and gleaming, clearly medical, which made sense, because at the center of it all was a person.
It looked like someone had set a hospital bed on its end so that the mattress was vertical. Likewise, the person lying on it was bound upright, held to the bed with so many restraints Yasmina couldn’t even tell if it was male or female. The only part not covered by straps was the person’s head, which was instead completely encased in a smooth metal mask.
The case covered the person’s entire skull starting from the neck just above the shoulders. It had no features, no visor, not even an air vent. Just seeing it made Yasmina claustrophobic and terrified, but the terror was manageable until the blank metal face jerked up to look at her.
Yasmina screamed, her voice breaking in pure panic as she threw herself at the door, clawing at the smooth metal. “Let me out! Let me out!”
No one answered. Behind her, she heard the click of something unlocking, and then a crash as the metal mask fell to the hard plastic floor. The sound was so loud Yasmina almost turned on instinct but she caught herself just in time. She didn’t want to know what was under that mask. Didn’t want to see—
See what?
Yasmina stopped. The voice spoke softly, but she’d heard it clearly even over her panic, because the voice was in her head. At the same time, she felt something brush over her cheek, almost like a gentle hand.
Don’t be afraid.
The voice was so soft, so sad and sincere that Yasmina stopped crying and turned. What she saw almost stopped her hammering heart. There, tied to the wall like a mummy, was the girl who’d brought her here. No, that wasn’t right. This girl looked exactly like the other one—same delicate features, same olive skin, same dark hair cut straight right above the shoulders—but where the girl on the ship had looked empty, this girl looked full to bursting.
“Who are you?” Yasmina asked, her voice quivering.
The bound girl gave her a sad look. Poor little rabbit, I’m your death.
The words were so matter-of-fact, it took Yasmina several seconds to understand what the girl meant. Once she got it, though, she pressed herself so flat against the door she could barely breathe. The bound girl just gave her a pitying look. Here it comes.
Yasmina craned her neck, looking every direction, but there was no one in the room but the two of them. Then she caught the sound of something whining somewhere beyond the walls. It was a building pitch, like some huge piece of machinery was charging up. “What’s that?” she cried, looking back at the girl as the whining got louder and louder, higher and higher. “Stop it!”
The girl began to laugh, a horrible, mad sound that turned Yasmina’s bones to water. I can’t. Her mouth split into a wide grin, and Yasmina recoiled in terror. In her entire life, including the horrors of the last two days, she had never seen anything as awful as that insane, hopeless smile. See you on the other side.
As Yasmina opened her mouth to scream, the whining pitch reached its highest octave. For one painful second, the room was filled with a piercing shriek, like an alarm going off right by her ear, and then all sound stopped as the bound girl began to seize.
She writhed against her restraints, her mouth moving in huge screams, but nothing came out, not even a gasp. Her face was contorted in horrible pain, her brown eyes bulging, and despite her own terror, Yasmina felt a sudden wave of pity. Before she realized what she was doing, she began to move forward, reaching out automatically to help the suffering girl a few feet away.
She’d only made it a step when the hand landed on her spine.
It was the most peculiar sensation, like the invisible touch that had stroked her cheek just a few moments before was now reaching through her skin to grab hold of her vertebrae. For five seconds, Yasmina stood frozen as her mind tried to make sense of the feeling of fingers touching parts of her that had never been touched. Then, like a hand running up a pole, the fingers on her spine slid up her neck to wrap around her brain.
Across the room, the bound girl’s convulsions stopped, but Yasmina didn’t notice. Her whole world had shrunk to the fingers closing around her brain. And as Yasmina’s scream finally broke the silence, the hand began to squeeze.
Brian Caldswell stood inches away from the reinforced door of the conversion chamber, listening. The girl had been in there for a little over an hour. The rules said he couldn’t go in to check until the full exposure period had elapsed, but things weren’t looking good. In his experience, if it wasn’t over by the hour mark, the girl wasn’t coming out. He was about to call Commander Martin back in to discuss the next girl on the docket when the door alarm went off.
His hand shot out, punching the button that would close the panel inside. Through the heavy metal, he heard Maat’s sobbing cut off as the drugs kicked in, forcing her back into sleep. Crying was a good sign. Maat usually laughed when they died.
Behind him, the two Eyes who’d brought the girl in were restless, watching him for clues. Caldswell ignored them, focusing on the reinforced door until, at last, it opened.
The girl standing in the doorway looked nothing like the girl who had gone in an hour ago. The twelve-year-old the Eyes had dragged off the ship had been brown skinned and tall for her age with wavy, thick dark hair that tangled around her face. The girl who stood before him now was a good six inches shorter with olive skin, straight black hair cut above the shoulders, and calm, empty brown eyes, just like every other daughter of Maat.
Caldswell reached out at once, grabbing her hand. With newly imprinted daughters, you had to act fast to ensure obedience. But despite Commander Martin’s worries that she’d be trouble, the new daughter accepted his grip meekly, letting him pull her forward until they were standing right in front of each other. When she was in position, Caldswell bent down until he was staring straight into her empty eyes.
“My name is Brian Caldswell,” he said firmly. “You are my daughter, Ren Caldswell. Say hello.”
“Hello,” the girl whispered, her voice little more than air.
Caldswell nodded, adding his other hand so that her thin palm was sandwiched between his fingers. “We’re going to do bitter work, Ren,” he said softly. “But I’ll be with you the whole way. I’ll care for you until the end, and when it comes, I’ll do it myself. I promise.”
The girl didn’t answer, but they never did. Caldswell let her go with a sigh and turned around, waving for her to follow as he walked out of the room. Ren obeyed silently, her brown eyes watching nothing as she trailed him through Dark Star Station’s blank tunnels to the dock where the little shuttle was waiting to take them back to the Glorious Fool.
Behind them, buried beneath the most sophisticated security system in the universe, bound by restraints strong enough to stop enraged symbionts, Maat’s silent sobs went on and on and on.
CHAPTER 1
Three years later, present day.
If you asked me how I came to be standing in a baking desert on a half-made Terran colony world trying not to get emotional while I buried a skullhead, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you.
I’d be hard-pressed to tell you a lot of things, actually. Like how I’d broken both my arms, or what had given me the huge gut wound Hyrek had only just okayed me to move around on. I didn’t know who had attacked our ship on this rock in the middle of nowhere or why they’d done it. I couldn’t even say for certain how I’d ended up outside my armor to get the blow on the head that was the cause of all this not knowing. Still, things could have been worse. After all, I was the one doing the grave digging instead of the grave filling. I bet Cotter would have switched places with me in a heartbeat, though he would have bitched about having to use a borrowed pickax. Skullheads could bitch about anything.
But though I knew I was lucky to be alive, all I could think about as I stood out there in the blazing sun and the gritty wind, pounding a hole into the rocky yellow ground, was that this wasn’t right. Skullhead or not, Cotter’s ruined armor and empty gun showed that he’d gone down like a Paradoxian should, defying his enemy to the very last. He deserved more than an unmarked grave in the middle of nowhere dug by a girl who couldn’t remember.
Unfortunately, an unmarked grave was all I had to offer him, and I’d had to fight just to get that much. Caldswell was chomping at the bit to get off-world. If it had been up to him, we’d have been in space two days ago. The only reason we weren’t was because the Fool was so banged up it had taken Mabel two days just to get us spaceworthy. That delay was how I’d found out the captain had made arrangements to leave Cotter’s body with the terraforming office for disposal like a piece of trash.