Everything rolled.

  Sasha’s energy snapped out again. Soo-jin stiffened at the sensation, but the world stabilized after a few beats.

  Sol.

  She forced herself to relax

  “Try to stay still,” Sasha admonished. “That goes for your brain, as well. Try not to think.”

  Soo-jin made a noise. Try not to think? That was a good way to make her brain explode with thought. But she held still. Sasha’s power helped with that. Her energy pushed through Soo-jin’s skin, threading through muscle and bone like a series of sharp wires. She held herself still and tried not to think about how it felt like she was being taxidermied.

  Partway through her chest, the energy paused.

  Sasha made a humming sound in her throat.

  “Interesting.”

  The energy pulled, like tugging the ribbon of a bow, and Soo-jin felt the entirety of herself slip.

  It was like the floor had dropped out from under her, along with every single part of her body that had been attached to it—but only for a second. One tiny second of terror in which it felt like every piece of her body, organs and all, had gone in their separate ways and they were all falling and about to splatter and bounce off the pavement.

  Soo-jin made another noise, much more stressed this time.

  “All right, all right. I’m putting you down now.”

  Sasha’s energy released her, and Soo-jin snapped back to her physical body with a hard sway and a sputtering gasp of air.

  Gaumont caught her arm to steady her. She shook against her, leaning on the soldier far more than she intended, and blinked up at Sasha with wide eyes.

  “Can you fix it?” she asked.

  “Perhaps. I have a better idea of what is wrong now, so that helps.” Sasha eyed her coolly. “You provide a strong link, Soo-jin. I will use that.”

  “Of course. Use me however you want.”

  “No,” Gaumont and Zan said almost immediately. They exchanged a glance, then Gaumont continued, holding her a little tighter. “You don’t mean that, Soo-jin.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said hotly, twisting in her grip, the words hissing from her mouth. “If it’ll bring Bob back—she can use me however the fuck she wants. I don’t care. I’ll live. And so will he.” She was out of breath and still shaking, so her words lacked the punch she’d been aiming for, but she gave herself a shake, sucked in a breath, got her feet under her, and wriggled loose of Gaumont’s hold, turning toward the terraformer. “Come on. We got shit to do.”

  As she stalked forward, ignoring the others with enough mind-reeling tilt to make a run at a windmill, her thoughts turned back to the swirling, painful storm that was the Shadow Hive Mind.

  The Shadows were still there, just—wounded.

  Sasha could fix them. With her, she could bring them back.

  And maybe—just maybe—Bob would come back with them.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  She stomped through the open entrance of the terraformer, throwing a middle finger up at her father’s Fint Corval when it popped around the corner of the outbuilding…

  …Except, it wasn’t there.

  Dammit. Had he got away? The other Lightkeepers’ ships stood like silent sentries, eerie and watchful, catching the gate’s golden glow like wet gilt, but the Fint’s absence felt glaringly sinister.

  She gave the middle finger an extra wiggle at the empty space just for that, muttering a promise to rip out a key part of its operating system when she found it.

  Inside, the terraformer’s interior had turned even more sickly in the absence of sunlight. The transient tube-lighting threw the space into sharp delineations of light and dark, the stains and build-up morphing the walls into a mottled, ugly canvas of rust and calcium. Condensation dripped somewhere nearby, the only other sound beyond the tramp and shuffle of their boots and the hum of electric lighting.

  The tinge of smoke in the air made her lips quirk into a smile.

  Just before she hit the first corridor, some chick in a red combat suit stalked past her, cutting her off.

  “Soo-jin,” Nomiki admonished from within the suit, turning to look over her shoulder. “Have you forgotten? Soldiery-types go first.”

  She smiled again, but a pang hit her chest.

  The last time they’d been joking about that, Ji-hun had been right there, joking along with them.

  We’ll get him back. We’ll get him back, and we’ll get that thing out of his head. And if he’s already shot my father, every single person here will probably buy him a drink.

  She didn’t care what he did. She just wanted this nightmare to end and to get him home.

  She was about to step forward again when a much larger, much more silent, and much more terrifying creature cut her off.

  She choked on a swear as the Lyrcos blocked out her view, its solid matte-black form so filled with muscle, she wondered if it chomped steroids for breakfast. The whisper-thin hush of its forearm blades slid along its…skin? Was that skin? Hells, the damn thing looked like it’d been made of clay.

  She stared after it. Tylanus followed, giving her a small wave as he went past.

  Sol.

  Over the next minute, about sixty percent of the party, including the other members of her own crew, also passed her by, and she was reluctantly forced to admit she was the slow one of the lot.

  Even Steudel’s gate scientists passed her, along with Eric and DiPietro carrying their equipment in a large tote between them.

  As she entered the climate dome, Nomiki’s voice came over the comms.

  “Gate room clear.”

  She was already down there? Suns.

  She sighed.

  I’m being discriminated against. By basic security protocols and my own short legs.

  And also by an overtaxed body that needed another week’s worth of recovery time before it’d work well again, no matter how much nano they stuffed in her.

  Ji-hun had promised to take her to a beach. She was holding him to that.

  After a moment, she realized she was staring at the old, curved metal of the nearest spin drum again. Memory struck her. Her gaze fell to the railing under her hand, then farther to the drop below. It looked almost infinite, the lower quarter of the dome morphing into such a smoothly-curved, mottled-gray bottom that, even with her Shadow Sight, she couldn’t tell where it ended.

  She glanced back up, searching along the walkway and railing.

  Bob had been here. He’d surprised her here, at the railing. He hadn’t meant to.

  He’d said he’d felt weird, then. That the place had been weird. That there was something unnatural about it.

  She’d thought he’d been sensing the grav pin or something. Now, she wondered if he’d been sensing the alien instead.

  Sol.

  She should’ve turned around right then and there. Turned around and called in the cavalry. Sicced Steudel and all her resources on it.

  Bob would have been safe then. And the Shadows.

  All of them would have.

  She was stupid to have continued.

  But the unnaturalness of the place wasn’t the only thing Bob had commented on. He’d also talked about her.

  “I know you’ve sensed it. We have, too. Something about you is changing.”

  “Your brain is practically half Shadow at this point.”

  After what she’d just experienced with Sasha…she believed it. Hells, she’d even knock that percentage higher.

  Gods, it had felt like Sasha had been taking her apart. And it wasn’t the first time she’d felt this way. Her body had been doing it more and more lately, mostly in the confines of the Hive Mind Ocean, but there’d been that one time a few days ago she’d thought it’d started happening in a more physical reality, too.

  What was happening to her? How was she changing?

  Hopefully, it was in a way Sasha could use.

  Speaking of⁠—

  A shiver ran through her, eerie wariness strumming her spine with little touches of ice. She glanced back and saw Sasha had joined her.

  Something about her made her do a double-take.

  Like before, Sasha appeared to be nothing but a quiet, competent professional on the outside—a scientist out for a field study—but, looking too long at her, she seemed to radiate with unseen energy. Like the air was denser around her, more malleable. A finely drawn tension slid through her muscles in response, making her stiffen.

  Clearly, Sasha’s Project Eurynome abilities were still ticking away in the background. Which made sense. Most Eurynome survivors couldn’t turn them off completely. They could mask them, sure. To a point. But once they cracked the door, it tended to stay open for a while, and Sasha clearly wasn’t making moves to close it.

  Her abilities had driven her insane once. They weren’t now, but the potential was there.

  They stared at each other for a few seconds. Then, Soo-jin broke.

  “So,” she said, forcing a grin. “Come here often?”

  Sasha snorted. Her gaze slid away, gliding over the view of the spin drums and the drop, then to the set of walkways and offices leading down. About three quarters of the way down, the sweep of flashlight beams marked where the others were.

  Suns, they’d gotten far. How long had she been standing here?

  “Tell me what happened when the Shadows vanished,” Sasha said. “What did you feel? Did you see anything?”

  She grunted. “There was a big, bright light. Lots of energy. Felt like the room was moving. I thought the gate had activated.”

  She flinched, a strip of grief ripping as she remembered Bob’s arms vanishing from around her, the Hive Mind screaming. She gave herself a shake and refocused on the other part of Sasha’s question.

  What had she felt?

  “I felt…sick. Nauseous. The gate pieces set Bob and me off before, so I thought it had to do with that, but…” She frowned. “Maybe it was something else?”

  Maybe it had been the alien.

  “I see.” Sasha paused a beat, thinking. “Nomiki said the light went out in a wave but only affected you, Bob, and Dae-jin. Everyone else was unaffected, except for mild retinal burn.”

  “Odd that it targeted Dae-jin, too,” she said. “He didn’t have a Shadow in him.”

  “No, but you two share genetic profiles. You also share genetics with the person who had either allied himself with this thing or is commanding it. Depending on how this alien interacts with the world—what senses it possesses and how it differentiates between things—that genetic link is a plausible factor.”

  Sasha tilted her head. Darkness seemed to shiver in her eyes, but Soo-jin suspected the effect had more to do with the energy flexing around her than anything deliberate on her part.

  She stayed quiet, waiting.

  After a few moments, Sasha broke free of whatever reverie she’d been in. She gave Soo-jin a pleasant smile, then nodded forward and indicated the stairwell with her hand.

  “Go on. I’ll follow. I need to speak with this one first.”

  Movement shifted by the wall farther up the stairwell, and a dump of adrenaline hit her bloodstream when she realized the Lyrcos had been standing right there, in all its muscly, deadly nightmare glory, quiet as you please.

  She may have squeaked.

  “Yeah, no problem! I’ll go…catch up with the others. See you soon!”

  Wasting no time, she hightailed it down the stairs where the others had gone, grateful she was running downhill for once.

  The reactor base looked much as she’d left it: a grime-encrusted donut mold with a shrine and a gate engine stuck to one of its sides.

  The science team was already poking at it, the big tote Eric and DiPietro had been carrying now open and glittering with science instruments.

  When she swung around to its side, she was surprised to find it looked like a souped-up version of the ship breaking kit she herself was carrying.

  In hindsight, it made sense. These scientists were engineers. What else would they use? Magic wands? It wasn’t like they were going to stuff chemistry beakers into the thing.

  No, that was more Zan’s territory.

  Most of the team, Nomiki included, gathered around the engine itself. The damn thing looked like it had been forged in the bowels of a junk shop—they’d clearly made some hasty additions since her last visit. At least three more tubes and a network of quickly-taped-and-capped wiring. A large, fresh welding scar shimmered across its front like someone had done open heart machine surgery on the thing. If the gate glow outside wasn’t proof enough, the contraption was also clearly active, thrumming with a low, resonant frequency that made her brain itch.

  Shit, was it still affecting her?

  If it was, it wasn’t as bad as it had been before. Barely a tickle.

  She wrinkled her nose when she caught a hint of incense from the shrine.

  Ugh.

  “Just to be clear,” Gaumont said, coming alongside her. “I still find you hot, even with the freaky stuff.”

  “Thanks.” Soo-jin laughed, then nodded toward the gate. “How’s she looking? Any luck?”

  They both looked at where the engineers were poking around. Zan and Nyland stood next to them, frowning down at some part of the engine she couldn’t see.

  “Well,” Gaumont drawled. “The good news is it’s in System Standard.”

  She snorted.

  That was a start, at least.

  “The extra good news is Robert can tell where it’s pointing. Wolf 359, a solitary flare stare with a couple planets.”

  Her attention moved to where Robert, the science team lead, was bent in front of the machine, fiddling with a panel.

  Interesting. Why there?

  The name sounded familiar, like she should know it. Had it been in one of the Lightkeeper texts?

  Gaumont was waiting. Soo-jin realized she hadn’t finished yet.

  Hells.

  She winced. “And the bad news?”

  “The gate controls are locked out. Someone fused the e-stop into the chassis. They need to cut it apart before they can trip it.”

  “Ah.”

  That sounded like a problem—but a surmountable one.

  “Any idea how long that’ll take?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Yeah.

  “Something is coming.”

  Soo-jin spun around at the words, staggering with the momentum.

  What the…

  Was that her voice? And… had that just been in her head? An auditory hallucination, perhaps?

  She’d had her fair share of those in the past.

  Across the room, Sasha walked into view, captivating her attention. The doctor looked even wilder now than she had before, like she was more than herself but every piece of her power was kept locked down on a hard leash, under tight control.

  The hair on the back of her neck rose in a wave.

  Then, Robert, the head engineer, looking into the engine with a pen light on his hands and knees, swore viciously.

  The moment broke, everyone looking his way.

  “What is it?” Soo-jin called over.

  “The control for this unit has been routed to another location,” Nyland translated, a slight accent curling around his words.

  Hells.

  “Let me guess,” she said, then jabbed a finger upward. “It’s probably moved in with the floating assholes upstairs?”

  “That would be our guess, too.”

  Damn.

  She blew out a breath and grimaced, doing a slow pivot to turn back to the door Sasha had just come through.

  “Right.” She started walking. “Let’s go climb some stairs.”

  FIFTY-NINE

  The alien ship was attached to the twelfth level of the pyramid, which was about eleven floors too many, in her opinion.

  At least they were in the Shadow World where she could wheeze to death in relative peace.

  “Fuck this,” she gasped, staggering over to brace herself on both her knees and a wall. “And fuck these people. Gods, would it have killed them to put an elevator in?! Or park on the ground? Like sane people? Fuck. Do you know how many times I’ve been up and down these gods-damned stairs?”

  Gaumont gave her shoulder a commiserating pat. “There, there. It’s all right. The cardio is over.”

  “Bullshit,” she spat. “It’s over for now, you mean.”

  Gaumont chuckled, then gave her shoulder a gentle pull. “Come on. If you have the breath to swear, you have breath to go fifty meters this way and do your swearing by the ship. I want to see what this thing looks like.”

  So did she. Begrudgingly, she allowed herself to be led through the next corridor and into an open area where something was casting a fluctuating, eerie green glow.

  When she got through the hatchway at the end and saw what was casting it, she forgot to breathe.

  The place looked like it had been laser-cut. Two levels of terraformer had been sliced right through, making a cross-section of concrete, prefab, pipework, and dangling wires. It was like looking into a mangled dollhouse, except from the inside. As if she were the doll, and she was getting an unsettling glimpse of just how her world had been constructed.

  She’d experienced this feeling before, mostly on job sites. Often, it was a sign she needed more coffee. Or sleep.

  And, illuminated in a mix of vivid and pale green, the alien ship swayed on its mooring, tethered by cables sunk into the outer walls like harpoons, its engine noise only a low, baseline rumble that tickled her soft tissue.

  Soo-jin stared, every part of her going still.

  For an alien ship, it looked uncannily familiar. She’d noticed that before, looking up at it from below. Closer up, this feeling only amplified. She’d expected something more alien-looking in an alien ship. And, sure, this one looked different, but it wasn’t as off the charts as she’d been expecting—and definitely not as strange as varying netdramas had led her to believe. No looking like it’d taken a chunk of some funky-looking rare earth mineral, added glow worms and woo-woo magnetic handwavium engines, and floated it in space. No crystalline fractal of superior technology. Not even the classic flying saucer configuration.

 

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