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  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.

  Needless to say, I blew up at him so hard I almost reopened my wound. The captain didn’t usually pay much attention to my opinions, but he must not have wanted to be down two security guards, because he caved in the end. Ten minutes later, I’d walked into the desert with a borrowed pickax on one shoulder and Cotter slung over the other. I found a good spot with a nice view in minutes, but digging the actual grave took longer than it should have. My pickax wasn’t made for armor, and Cotter was a big man. By the time I’d made a hole large enough to fit him, I was thirty minutes past Caldswell’s time limit.

  Not that I cared. I’m no priest, but I’ve been in armored combat for nine years. I’ve buried a lot of partners, and I consider it my business to do a proper job. I took my time getting Cotter’s grave arranged just right, using my suit’s star map to make sure his feet faced Paradox so he would be ready to stand when the king called and tapping a double measure of salt into each of his hands, a tip for the death guide who would ferry Cotter’s soul to the warrior’s gate of heaven. Finally, I covered him in a white sheet and reached up to the grave’s edge to grab the bottle of whiskey I’d snatched from the kitchen on my way out.

  I unscrewed the cap and raised my visor, drinking quick before too much of Falcon 34’s thin, hot, dusty air could get into my suit. The dry heat was already evaporating the whiskey in the bottle, but I didn’t rush as I poured the remaining liquor up and down Cotter’s sheet-covered body while I spoke the ancient prayer that would commit his bones to the dirt. I actually teared up a bit when I got to the part about soft green hills and flowing water, but I kept it together by reminding myself that when the terraforming was eventually completed, Falcon 34 would probably have those, and the last words I spoke to Cotter wouldn’t be a lie.

  When all the whiskey was gone, I set the empty bottle at his feet and climbed out of the grave. The broken-up rocks and dirt went in much faster than they’d come out, forming a tall mound over my dead partner. He’d have liked that, I thought. A big grave for a big man. When the last of the dirt was back in, I weighed the mound down with small boulders so the wind wouldn’t undo my work and headed back to the ship.

  Caldswell’s Fool had never been an impressive piece of machinery, but it was looking especially pathetic now. Whoever had attacked us had done a bang-up job. The Fool’s nose was blown almost clean off, damaging the bridge beyond repair. Another even larger blast had taken out the side of the cargo bay, slagging the new door we’d just put in plus several inches of hull. Mabel had covered the holes as best she could, overlapping the plasma patches until the ship looked like a pearly white mud wasp nest, but no amount of layering changed the fact that we would be going into space with hardened plasma where metal should be.

  Bad as the outside of the ship was, though, the interior was worse, even by the Fool’s normal bullets-in-the-walls standard. The upper hallway was black with blast shadows from grenades, and the floor had so many shots lodged in it that I could feel the bullets under my boots like pebbles. The lounge took the prize, though, with its huge dents and the terrifying man-sized hole that had been ripped through the blast door. I didn’t even know what could do something like that, though I should have since it was my blood that had been smeared over on the battered floor. Whatever had happened here, I’d seen it, but I couldn’t remember a damn thing, and since there was no footage, I wasn’t going to be getting any hints.

  You’d think on a ship with so many cameras there would be something, but the explosion that had taken out the bridge had fried all the feeds, and my own cameras hadn’t done any better. Whatever had happened during that fight that had gotten me out of my armor had also erased my footage. All of it. Even my Final Word Lock and Mercenary’s Bargain had been wiped clean, which was blatantly impossible unless I’d colluded with the enemy for some reason, which was a possibility I wasn’t willing to consider.

  Just thinking about the fight that had taken all my memories and nearly taken my life put me in a terrible mood, so it was good that I didn’t have time to brood. I was forty-five minutes later than I’d promised, and the captain must have been waiting with his hand on the launch button, because the thrusters fired the moment I was inside. I barely had time to get to the safety handles in the cargo bay before we launched into the air and away from Falcon 34. Forever, with any luck.

  With the bridge unusable, the captain, Nova, and Basil were reduced to flying the ship from the engine room. It was a horribly cramped setup, so rather than call me in and squish things further, the captain came out to the cargo bay as soon as we entered orbit. “Took your sweet time, Morris.”

  Since I was safely hidden behind my visor, I rolled my eyes. Good old Caldswell, always sensitive. “I did it right, sir.”

  The captain nodded, looking me up and down. “You good to go back to work?”

  “Yes sir.” Hyrek hadn’t officially cleared me yet, but if I was fit enough to dig graves, I was fit enough to walk in circles.

  “We’ve got a three-day flight to the jump gate,” Caldswell warned. “Might be a little rough.”

  I shrugged. “What else is new?”

  The captain actually laughed at that. “Make yourself useful, then. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

  “Yes sir,” I said, jogging to help Mabel, who was already getting the patcher fired up to repair the bits of the ship that had shaken loose during takeoff.

  In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been so flippant. I’d done hell shifts before, so I thought I knew what I was in for, but nothing could have prepared me for what I’d later come to remember as the worst three days of my life.

  It started with the patches. Hardened plasma is meant to fill small holes temporarily, not to be a replacement for a hull. We’d barely cleared Falcon 34’s orbit before the plasma shell that kept us spaceworthy started cracking. Since I was the only one strong enough to haul around the patcher, I was the on
e who ended up following Mabel around the ship like a talking, walking equipment cart. Under better circumstances, this would have been beneath my dignity, but I was too busy trying not to panic over the cracks growing in the brittle layer of hardened gunk that was the only thing separating us from certain death to fret much over my image.

  Cracks weren’t our only problem, either. Patched as we were, any idiot with a density scanner could see that the Fool was heavily damaged, and a damaged freighter is to pirates what a wounded seal is to sharks. It wouldn’t be so bad if we were flying through more civilized space, but the Falcon Sector wasn’t even half terraformed yet. Other than building a jump gate to haul in supplies, the corps developing this sector hadn’t done a thing except bring in a bunch of expensive machinery to an undeveloped, undefended area. I couldn’t have invented a better hunting ground for pirates if I’d tried, and we were flying right through the middle of it in a busted trade ship with only one working gun and a single security officer. The situation was so ridiculously bad it could have been the punch line of a joke, and if I hadn’t been the one getting punched, I probably would have laughed myself sick.

  Between maintaining the patches and keeping an eye out for trouble, I didn’t catch more than forty-five minutes of sleep altogether in the three days it took us to reach the gate. My only comfort was that I wasn’t suffering alone.

  I’d never actually appreciated the work it took to be the engineer on an old junker like the Fool until I started following Mabel around. Caldswell’s sister-in-law was everywhere at once, applying patches, keeping the engines going, crawling up into the maintenance tunnels with the dexterity of a monkey half her age. Even more impressive was how she stayed cheerful about it. While I was ready to bite off heads by hour two, Mabel never once complained. She just worked, keeping a hundred technical problems in her head so effortlessly I finally broke down and asked.