“No, it’s the red one.”
Gwen jumped, nearly slicing the black wire. The BD-001 droid hovered around her head like a pesky fly. Before her, the bomb strapped to the fuselage of the colony ship continued to count down. Five minutes. Reaching over and tapping the screen on the droid’s belly, Gwen checked the schematic again.
“Idiots!” Admiral Paul Seward exploded as soon as the doors closed behind him, cutting off the hearing chamber with its three transparent sides showing a stunning starfield view and its dreary bureaucratic interior.
His navigator, who had waited outside, jumped straight. “Sir?”
“Turning down humans, the most promising Lightwarden candidates, just when we’re in dire need of recruits.”
Pete clung to the crawl handles on the skin of his spaceship and hoped he’d catch a breath before reaching the upper atmosphere. He’d looped his pilot’s harness straps hastily through a handle and clipped them together, taking most of the strain during acceleration, but he was already regretting his recklessness.
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It hardly qualified as a graveyard. Nineteen graves in a single row, no fence, no road, no flowers. The foliage grew unchecked. Raw boulders from the nearby stream served as tombstones. They didn’t need markings, for each grave contained the same person.
Me.
A sheen of fresh rain coated every mossy branch and shrub. Fog hung low against the leaf-strewn earth.
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Circuits humming, he calmly plotted his next move. There. Jepedo leaned across the table; arms too short to reach while seated and set his bishop down in front of his opponent’s king. “Checkmate.”
Father studied the board. Running a hand over his thinning hairline, he sighed. “You win again, my boy.” He smiled at Jepedo.
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Flashes of memory assaulted me—wandering alone in a blizzard, standing on the edge of an icy sea, the word “DEAD” flashing in the air. And always, waking up in the same place.
Everywhere I looked, prismatic light reflected off a sparkling surface. And the cold crept into my bones.
I glance up at the heavens as I stride toward the launchpad. The usual thick, gray clouds churn in their eternal cauldron.
There’s no reason to be nervous, I tell myself for the hundredth time. Most of the tests have gone perfectly fine.
Our airship has the long, rounded body of a submarine, albeit one with massive engines slung along the back. The resizer agent is built into those hefty engines, so I can adjust our size at will. In theory, anyway.
It was my job to lead us out of our underground dwellings when the surface was finally safe. I expected to encounter many things upon our emergence. Destruction, scorched earth. But not a summoning.
It was just lying there. Waiting for us. A metal cube. When I picked it up, it projected a trail of red footprints on the cracked ground.
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Gray. My entire world is gray. The foliage is dead, and the sky’s covered with a cloud of pollution. The factories, the prison buildings, our radiation-resistant uniforms. Even our skin is gray from malnutrition and lack of sun.
I adjust the mask pressed against my face and step off the bus from the women’s penitentiary, following the line of other prisoners toward the factory.
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Finlay’s alarm blared at eight a.m. ship’s time, waking him from another dream about Alaia. He opened his eyes to a room flooded with cold light. The stale, chilly air of the ship filled his lungs, and the distant engines whirred sharply.
For one moment, he still felt her arms around him.
Amara hummed as she worked in her tiny lab, her makeshift greenhouse tucked into a corner of the roof of the industrial complex. She remembered reading about a study done many years ago on the positive effects of music on plants. What must it have been like back then to have so many plants to study?
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I shambled to the mailbox on day 37 of the most boring summer ever. “1000 FREE MINUTES!” the little, blue, compact disk screamed. It looked like a dozen other disks we’d received in the mail and subsequently relegated to coasters. I’d seen disks offering 100 minutes, 400 minutes, and even 750 minutes of free internet access, but I’d never seen an offer for 1000 free minutes. This was going to change my life.
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