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  “Arco, hold still; you have to listen to me,” my sister says, now inches away from me. “You have to keep your adrenaline levels down. It disrupts the tracking interface.”

  “All I see are numbers and symbols! Where did Jazz go? I just saw her!”

  “I know, I know…you can see her again, but you have to relax or your brain will shut everything down and you’ll seize. Are you listening to me? Take a deep breath.”

  “We need to get them out of that place. Did you know too? Was it just his brothers, or did you know about the Slide too? Tell me!” I shout into the number storm.

  “Arco, get level, and I’ll explain everything to you, OK? You have to level first. Just breathe.”

  I take in a few deep breaths and push them through my teeth until the numbers start to slow down in the corners of my eyes. They’re almost gone except for a series of coordinates that just keeps flickering.

  “Atmospheric 90 12.17 16.7…what are those numbers?” I ask, lowering my hands from my eyes. I blink, and my sister comes into view. “What are they?” I ask again, turning to Tark. He just watches me for a second with an open mouth. “What are they!?”

  “Those are the coordinates to the Slide right now,” he says quietly.

  I punch them into my console, but the asinine ship voice is all I get in reply.

  “Authorization denied.”

  I feel the heat in my chest light again, but Arwyn immediately starts talking.

  “Arco, listen…by the time we’d get there, they’d already be gone, OK? The coordinates are going to shift in eight minutes, and that slip link will close. The Slide will show up somewhere else. They’re going to leave right now, all right? Calm down. You have to breathe.”

  Everyone is above deck now, standing along the back wall and watching me like some kind of split sideshow. My hands start shaking, so I ball them into fists at my sides to make them stop.

  “You’re a Nav/Coder hybrid, aren’t you?” Lyden asks, taking a few steps toward me.

  “Get away from me.”

  I see Tark nod at him out of the corner of my eye, and before I can shoot him down too, my sister is in front of me again with her hands up like I’m some kind of rabid dog. I look past her at Avis, who’s looking at me the same way—in fact, everyone is looking at me like I’ve just bitten the head off something.

  “Arco, hold still, OK?” my sister says, then raises a cloth to my nose. When she pulls it back, it’s smeared with blood.

  CHAPTER 11

  Leaving the Slide

  Jazz

  Dot punches something into her console, and a miniature white, 3D cylindrical building with a few lines of text underneath it appears on the illuminated grid. She reaches for the building, then presses it all into a tiny square and hands it to Liam. I look at Vox, who is just as shocked as I am.

  “Here are the hab coordinates. I suppose you’ll be needing new bioprints?” Dot sighs as Liam slips the square into his pocket.

  “Ah…well these biochips—“ Liam pulls the bag Vox got from Frenchie out of his other pocket.

  “Those will get you and your puppies locked up like the rest of us in here. Hasn’t Lyden taught you anything, Dr. Wright?”

  “Yeah, well Rheen and the rest of her psychopaths have kept him busy the last few years. What’s the problem with the chips?”

  “Aren’t you adorable? That’s a bag of spare parts you have there, sweetheart. Meant to be taken apart and put back together again. Swallow any one of those as is, and the first shift track you board will bring a patrol down on you so fast, we could continue this meeting in person tomorrow back at Lima.” Dot holds out her hand for the bag, and Liam hands it to her. “Julius!”

  “At your service,” the system voice says.

  “Tell Neri I need three biochips for Admin City, one male, two female…Skyboard class, designer clearance.”

  “Of course,” the low voice says again.

  Liam tacks a smile to one side of his face. “I didn’t know you cared, Dot.”

  “I don’t,” she says quickly before taking in a long, bored breath. “Your big brother gave me the cycling schedule that let me tap into the port-cloud in the first place—did you know that?” She rifles through the contents of the little bag with two fingers. “If it weren’t for him, Lima really would be a prison, so I owe him, is all.”

  Liam nods and puts his hands in his pockets. “He said you’d been allies for a long time…and that you’d help us. Thank you.”

  Dot takes her fingers from the bag and raises them in a sloppy salute, just like Dell and the rest of the Badlanders.

  She’s from Seaboard North… I think, and Vox rolls her eyes.

  “Do you have any channel filters she can swallow or something? Some that will let her keep her random epiphanies to herself?”

  “Vox!” I hiss, but it’s too late. Dot raises a dark eyebrow at me just as a tall woman with wide stripes tattooed over half her face comes in the room. She holds out a little box for Dot but is ignored.

  “Readers, eh?” Dot asks me, then smiles when I hear her voice in my head. Welcome to the club…

  You’re from…Gaia? You’re a Reader? I think.

  She nods. Used to be. Same class as Lyden. We ran in…different circles. She shrugs, then smiles at the tall woman, who blows out an exasperated huff and abruptly sets the little box she’s holding on top of Dot’s console.

  “Like I have all day?” the tall woman says. “The green one is male—you’re welcome.” She turns on a heel and heads back through the door with a pinched look at Vox and me.

  Dot sends an air kiss to her back. “You’re a dream, Neri!” she adds, then picks up the box and tosses it to Liam. “Swallow the green one. The other two are for your puppies here. Any of you get pinched, I can’t help you.”

  “We understand. Thanks, Dot,” Liam says. “We better go.”

  “Yeah…” Dot looks at the band on the inside of her wrist. “Got about a hundred twenty seconds.” She laughs, and all the blood runs out of Liam’s face.

  “Come on, come on!” he says, pulling back the coat sleeve to check his own wrist cuff. We run through the door behind us into the main room, which is filling with fog. Liam swears as we push through the dissipating crowd. “We just have to get across the threshold. The dome pocket will lift us back to the platform. Hurry up!”

  “Or what?” Vox shouts up to Liam.

  “Or we run straight out into space, freeze, and die! Move!”

  Vox and I pick up the pace until we’re on Liam’s heels, the haze around us getting thicker and more disorienting. I almost slow down to get my bearings but know if I do, the next step I take could turn me into a block of ice. I forget about this, though, when everything starts to vibrate.

  “What’s happening?” I shout, now completely blinded by the opaque white haze in every direction.

  “It’s the dome pocket. It’s starting to move!”

  “Are we in it!?” Vox yells from somewhere to my right.

  “Almost! Keep running!” Liam answers in the distance.

  Of all the times I’ve been afraid in my life…when that giant bullet ant was crawling on my face in the Rush, when I sat for my initial Gaia interview, and even when that jellyfish stung me the night we sneaked away from Liam’s port festival…this fear, now, is the worst.

  “Aghhh!’ Vox shouts, which snaps my attention back just in time for my ears to pop…hard.

  “Ow!” I say out loud, and both of us start rubbing our ears.

  “A little warning next time?” Vox says, punching Liam in the arm.

  “Hey!” I point at the ground, then look around frantically. The streets are glowing, and there’s the tall, salt pillar buildings… We’re back, I think.

  Salt pillar buildings? is all Vox has time to say in my head before Liam is barking at us.

  “Crite…” he hisses, then grabs both our arms and pulls us in close. We need to get to the shift transports.

  ***
/>
  We walk about ten minutes along the illuminated street when Liam holds out a little yellow triangle to me.

  “That’s a biochip?” I ask. “I thought they were square.”

  “Foreign ingestibles—easier to hack. Just swallow it; we’re almost to the shift platform.”

  I take the yellow triangle and bite it once, then put it under my tongue. I cut a glance at Vox. Don’t chomp this one, I think, remembering her coughing fit after she tried to chew the one they gave her back at The Seam building so we could go into the virtuo-cines.

  Yeah, thanks, she thinks in reply, narrowing her green snake eyes at me. “So what happens to the other bio-whatever they gave us already?” she asks Liam.

  “This will override it.”

  “How do we know what these say about us?” I ask. “Dot never said anything except that the green one was male,”

  Liam shrugs. “We can find out in the vanity district if we have time, but it’s in the opposite direction as this hab,” he says, holding out the miniature building in his palm. A small, holographic map radiates from it with a moving, blinking blue light.”

  “That’s us?” Vox asks, trying to touch the dot. He waves her hand away.

  “Yes, what do you think? We’re almost there. Just don’t talk or do anything, OK?”

  Liam puts the little building map back in his pocket and pulls the wide collar of his coat closed around his neck. He blows out a breath and pulls in another long, deep one. Everything about him is on edge.

  “We’re going to find him. We’re going to bring him back,” I say. He looks down at me for a second and nods, and even though his expression doesn’t change, the knot he’s become seems to loosen a little.

  The shift station on this…level—plank…? What did they call it before?—looks exactly like the other ones we were on with Eco and Calyx when we first arrived in Admin City. The pillars of light all have glowing names like River Plank and Solar Plank hovering at the top of them, and the illuminated street just widens like an old-time parking garage.

  “Which one of these light poles are we supposed to walk into?” Vox asks, walking a few yards ahead.

  “Just stay back here. I don’t have time to chase after you if you get sucked into the wrong column—here, come on.”

  Liam steers us to Nova Plank, and I try to remember what Lyden said about getting into a shift. Put your head against the back wall, hold your breath, close your eyes…

  Are the both of you going to Mom-and-Dad me this entire time or what? Vox says in my head as we walk into the column of light.

  “What?” I say out loud just as the shift starts to push us, and my face is immediately frozen. Vox’s neck extends stupidly halfway up the shift column like some kind of funhouse reflection. Her mouth is frozen in a wide, open laugh and all I can think is how I’m going to strangle her as soon as we get off this thing. My stomach lurches as we turn a corner, and I feel like we’ve just dropped off the edge on a solar coaster.

  Finally, the shift starts to slow down, and Vox’s head returns to a respectable distance from the rest of her body.

  “I love those. Your head was way up there!” she says, pointing to the sky. I narrow my eyes at her.

  “I hate you,” I mumble and try not to roarf. “Where are we?”

  “Nova Plank—come on, the hab is right here.” Liam pushes his chin at a tall, white building and starts walking.

  “We just walk in? What if there are guards or something?” I ask, assuming Liddick is being held against his will.

  “Just trust me, and stay quiet,” Liam says as we approach the building. Like all the buildings here, there doesn’t seem to be a door in sight until he flattens the palm of his hand on the building. “Ludwig Sprague,” he says out loud, and the door materializes in front of us. Liam raises an eyebrow at me and nods.

  The inside of the building is colorful with an open seating area surrounding a white marble fireplace. The flames are blue, green, purple, and orange, and they remind me of the Vishan’s fire.

  “May I help you?” a tall, thin man with actual waves of water for hair says to us. I can’t stop staring at him. The water looks just like it’s lapping against the shore of a beach, only the beach is his forehead. I blink, trying to remember I’m supposed to belong here.

  “Ludwig Sprague, please. We have a…confidential matter,” Liam says covertly.

  The man raises his eyebrows, which causes a shift in the current of his hair. A small wave rises and crashes on the side of his head. He snaps, then begins typing on a holographic keyboard, which appears in front of him. After a second, a 3D image of Liddick with his hair slicked back appears alongside someone about his age, with dark hair that falls loose around his shoulders.

  “I’m afraid he’s already departed for his research sabbatical,” the water man says.

  CHAPTER 12

  Push On

  Arco

  “It’s OK,” Lyden says, taking a few more steps toward me again, and for a second everything slows down. I sit down hard. “That cortisol must have flooded the tracker in your spine and synced your spheres—the part of you that’s Navigator class, and the part that’s Coder class,” he adds, checking my eyes. I pull back from him. “It’s why you saw those coordinates without knowing where we were as a reference.”

  “Well, that’s good, right? He’s psychic now!” Avis claps a few times and nods at me.

  “No, that’s not good, you mollusk!” Ellis snaps. “Didn’t you read any of the literature they gave us at Gaia?”

  “It’s called a surge,” Lyden explains, then drags a hand over his face and off the end of his chin. “It’s the highest evolution the nanites you received at Gaia can bring about in a person.”

  “Sooo…that’s good,” Avis says again, this time widening his eyes like everyone has missed the obvious.

  “The process is supposed to be gradual over the course of a career, but sometimes a surge can be triggered by a perfect storm of brain chemicals and a biological conduit—in this case, the tracker. “

  I stare at Lyden, like everyone else, waiting for him to drop the other shoe.

  “And…that means?” I finally ask when he doesn’t do anything but look at me.

  “It just means you may experience things you’re not quite…able to handle yet. Your abilities will outweigh your experience right now.”

  “That’s it?” Avis asks. “OK, how is he not a superhero again?”

  Tark finally speaks up. “It’s dangerous not to know your limitations, Mr. Ling.”

  “Not to mention the mental and physiological stress…” Arwyn adds, dabbing at my nose again. I take the cloth from her because I’m not seven years old, and decide that I’m done with this conversation.

  “Could you just punch in the coordinates for the Wraith? We need to keep moving forward.” I fire a look at Tark, and after a second, he nods.

  “It’s all yours.” He finishes entering the numbers, and my controls are released. I turn around and face the long, wide path in front of us with the jagged black slabs of rock glinting in the hull flood lights. I inch the Sojourner forward.

  No one says anything else, though everything they’re not saying thickens the air until they finally go below deck. Tark doesn’t say anything else as the Sojourner pushes toward the rock in front of us, which has apparently opened to let Fargo out and then close behind him.

  I press my teeth together and try to remember what Dr. Denison said when I was pulling the Leviathan toward the retainer wall back at Gaia for the wet run…push on…it will clear…

  Only this wall doesn’t clear.

  Everything in me wants to pull back on the yoke to slow us down, but instead, I push it forward. I feel the protest taking up space in my throat, growing until I almost choke on it, but I don’t stop. Maybe it’s because part of me actually wants to crash into the wall, but I know better. I would never risk everyone else’s life like that. Though…I’d just throw away my own?

&nbs
p; I push on.

  “Mr. Hart?” Tark says in a thinning voice.

  “It will clear.”

  We pick up speed when I engage the first level thrusters. I swallow hard to dislodge the questions and doubts and all the rest of the whining that wants to be heard in the back of my mind, but I’m done with it. I’m done being unsure of everything.

  “Mr. Hart!”

  “It will clear!”

  And finally, it does. I engage the last two levels of thrusters, then align the ship with the flight plan in the projected green display on the window in front of me. I watch the stars do absolutely nothing as Tark exhales hard through his nose.

  ***

  The Wraith is waiting for us as promised, but I wouldn’t have seen it without the scopes. The hull is black, and from what I’ve read about this ship, it’s also refractive, so it just looks like more stars in the distance instead of a two-ton ship. I take a deep breath and tell myself it’s just like the Leviathan.

  “The docking bay is an easy miss—just get starboard and wait for a hail. They’re waiting for us,” Tark says, and I want to know who they are supposed to be.

  “Where’s the other Sojourner?” I ask, scanning the perimeter for it, but it’s nowhere on the scope.

  “Likely already docked. There. Hold steady,” Tark says as we both watch a patch of white open in the sky in front of us.

  “What the—?”

  “Hell on the brain to watch a window in space open up like that.” Tark laughs. “Mark your scope—see the outline of the Wraith?”

  “I see it,” I say, pushing our little ship into alignment with the docking trajectory. After a second, I don’t have to push anything. A hydraulic sound whirrs to life, the vibration of it resonating in my teeth and ears.