I’m the only one in the passenger section who’s not making a sound, and that’s only because I’m screaming inside my own head.
“We’re fine,” says Sasha, a large fussy man who’s the second-in-command among the Perfectionists. “Everything’s fine. Nothing to worry about. Everything’s totally fine. Why should we worry? We’re doing great.” He keeps saying these things until Nai hisses at him to shut up. A sour odor hangs in the stale air around me. I think of Reynold saying, Some primitive fear from before our ancestors discovered fire.
Bianca keeps smiling at me from the front of the Command Vehicle, where she sits with Nai, Dash, Sasha, and an older Alva loyalist named Marcus, all of them still dressed in normal clothes. She kisses Dash, holding his face in one hand, across an instrument panel full of muddy topographic readings and warnings about the dangerous thickness of ice coating our outer shell. Our conversation in the junkyard repeats in my mind, and I can’t believe how stupid I was.
Bianca went with me when I said goodbye to Ahmad and Katrina, and she kept nudging me so I wouldn’t say anything about where we were going, but also to hurry me along. She said, It’s exciting, we’re going on an adventure, oblivious to how I flinched.
The people around me are still crying, thrashing against their harnesses, making invocations to various gods and devices. Dash is joking about Xiosphanti food again. The indicator lights on the front panel make rainbow trails along the scuffed aluminum walls.
Bianca said she loved me, long after I’d have sacrificed anything to hear her say those words. I would have worn a tower of ribbons and gone to a hundred terrible parties, just so I could pile every shining toy in the world at Bianca’s feet. I would have braved every gun and every gloved hand in Xiosphant to bring Bianca jewels from the Palace vault. But now I see her in the cockpit, whispering to Dash and twirling one slender hand for emphasis, and I feel empty.
The vehicle lurches, and someone’s gloved fingers grab at my arm for support, and I freeze. I can’t breathe. But just as I’m spiraling into panic, I feel a nudge on my right wrist. My bracelet has woken up, and it’s urging me deeper into midnight. I take a deep breath and I concentrate on the hum that I feel through my skin. The Gelet haven’t given up on me, even after all the times I failed them. They still want me to join them.
All that matters is that bracelet, and the knowledge that my friends are near, and everything else is nothing. Except I don’t know what the Gelet will think when they see a fleet of armored vehicles, spiked with weapons, and they realize I’ve led a whole army to their territory. Bianca’s friends designed these vehicles to look just like the ones the Gelet tore to pieces before.
I never loved anybody the way I have loved Bianca. But I know in my shattered core that I would have been a better friend to her if I had walked away in that scrapyard. I need to learn to belong to other people the way everyone else seems to, with one hand in the wind.
Something strikes our vehicle, and we rock sideways so hard we’re perched on one set of treads for a moment. Then we fall flat again with an impact that crushes me into my safety harness. “What was that?” Nai says, and nobody answers, except to groan. A second impact pushes us off one of our treads, and the vehicle sways harder.
The cockpit’s night-vision screen shows a glimpse of fuzzy segmented armor.
“Fucking bison!”
“It’s a lot bigger than I thought it would be.”
“It’s a lot bigger than we are.”
“Get it off us!”
“There’s more than one of them.”
At least three shapes move around us on the screen. We rock onto our side again.
“We can’t move forward,” Marcus says.
“Shoot them! Shoot them!” Sasha has sweat pooling on his forehead. “Where’s the bloody flamethrower?” A woman named Lucy puts on protective gloves and fumbles for a port in the side, letting in a stabbing draft for a moment until the port seals around her wrists. Sasha picks up a short-range radio and shouts, “We’re under attack. Roger, you’re in the rumbler. Can you get a clear shot?”
Nai starts to say, “No, wait—” Dash tries to slap the radio out of Sasha’s hand.
A heartbeat later, I feel an impact that makes my teeth snap together. My neck hurts, and my ears ring.
“You missed the bison, but you hit us,” Sasha says into the radio. “Try aiming.”
A second mortar blast rattles our vehicle.
“Sasha, you idiot,” Nai says. “Tell them to stop shooting at us.”
Lucy’s flamethrower goes off, turning the night vision a shimmering green, and Lucy shouts, “Got one of them!” The viewport shows an impression of a shrieking round mouth and stringy white fur on fire, then goes dark again.
We’re back on our treads, moving forward in fits and starts.
“Bad news,” says Marcus. “Those mortars cracked one of our engine casings. We’ll have to keep stopping every few kilometers, or the chamber will overheat and flood with toxic fumes.”
“We can’t stop,” Nai says. “We’ll get stuck in the ice.”
“You should have thought of that before your goon ordered the other vehicle to shoot at us,” Dash says. Nai starts to respond, but thinks better of it. Most of the people in this vehicle answer to Dash.
Sasha sees me sitting nearby, and looms over me. “You,” he spits. “You’re supposed to be the magic talisman that gets us through the night in one piece. That’s what we were promised.”
I just look up at him. Whatever Sasha sees in my face, it makes him back away, hands raised in a defensive cower.
“Stop bothering Sophie,” Bianca says. “She’s not an all-purpose protector. She’s good if we run into crocodiles.”
“Oh god, spare me. Bianca! Everybody swoons whenever you open your mouth, like you’re some Xiosphanti princess out of an old storybook.” Sasha grunts. “This whole mission was your idea, and we’re depending on your friend’s so-called magical powers, and I can tell you’re just a cheap grifter.”
Bianca smiles up at Sasha, as if he just said something innocuous about Zagreb opera, and I can’t help feeling a sugary rush of pride in her.
Everybody else in the Command Vehicle goes quiet, not even moaning anymore. We’ve stopped driving already, because our engines need to cool down. Dash breaks the silence. “Sasha, put on some protective gear and go outside to look at the damage you caused. Take a few engineers with you.”
Sasha starts to say, “I don’t answer to you,” but Nai just gives him a look, and he trails off. His face falls, and he slumps forward. After a moment, he says, “Fine, great. See you soon.”
“We’ve lost number-five troop transport,” Marcus says as Sasha puts on the gear, accompanied by two men and a woman from the engine section.
“What does that mean, ‘lost’?” Nai says.
“It’s just not there anymore. Maybe it fell down a crevasse. The ice is full of fissures.”
I can smell the smoke from the cracked engine, and my head swims.
“We… lost a vehicle,” Nai says.
These are the people that Bianca decided to trust with everything. She tries to give me a conspiratorial smile, cocking one eyebrow. But I just stare past her, at the instrument panel that’s gone bright pink with warning lights.
Sasha has his survival gear on, helmet in hand, and he hesitates at the inner hatch. “Okay,” he says. “I’m going outside now. If… if you still think I should.”