Mirror's Edge: Impostors 3, page 17
Something passes through my anguish, delicate but boundless, a ripple on a vast sea.
In Rafi’s and my private language, the name Noriko was a muttered warning—a reminder that the truth of us was dangerous. A lesson we forgot before the Revelation.
All the people we betrayed that night may never forgive us, but at least Noriko has.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
She answers with a small and perfect bow.
And then Boss X is beside us, abuzz with the havoc of battle.
‘The first shuttle’s being loaded. We need you aboard.’
Col takes my hand. ‘I’ll come too.’
‘Only one commando per shuttle,’ X says.
Right—our extraction transmitters are in demand.
‘Let me stay a little longer, Boss,’ I say.
‘You have to be on the first shuttle out. For you, the free cities will definitely hold their fire.’
Col frowns. ‘I’m fairly certain they won’t shoot me down.’
X smiles and pats him on the shoulder. ‘That’s why we’re sending you second.’
Boss X takes my arm, ready to get moving. But I resist, turning one last time to Sensei Noriko.
There’s no etiquette for saying good-bye to someone you sent to prison for eight years.
She speaks first. ‘And your sister? Did she escape him in the end?’
Escape him? She’s a rebel queen in the wild, with her own army, her own mountain, and my name.
But she’ll never be free from him the way I am.
‘She got away,’ I say.
A smile. ‘I suspected she would. Please give her my best.’
I promise to, and Noriko’s eyes release me at last.
43. SEANAN
Col and I surrender ourselves to Boss X’s impatience.
We push our way through the crowd, into the control room with its host of flickering airscreens. Half the Security officers are cuffed and sitting on the floor. The other half are at their screens, under the vigilant watch of Yandre and Lodge.
I catch a glimpse of Kessa Shard in conversation with Zura.
How many people in my father’s regime are making deals with the free cities tonight?
We don’t have time to stop and listen. X hustles us through Kessa’s anteroom and out into the parking bay.
A giant hovershuttle looms there in the dark, its row of windows reinforced with heavy ceramic mesh. It rests on the permacrete floor, its lifting fans churning the air.
‘How many people does it carry?’ I ask.
‘A hundred seats.’ X’s eyes are bright—a challenge is in front of us. ‘If we crowd them in, four shuttles can handle everyone.’
‘Through a war zone,’ I remind him. ‘And how do we get across the border?’
‘We’ll make an exit.’
There’s a line of prisoners already boarding. In the time it took me to apologize to Noriko, my friends have organized a mass evacuation.
Col gathers me into a hug. ‘I should get back to the control room. Stay safe. I’ll see you in the wild.’
We kiss, fitting together as if our new bodies are the originals. Col’s surged face seems true now, like some side of him I hadn’t seen before.
I’ll miss it, just a little, when he transforms back into himself.
‘In the wild,’ I say.
X and I go aboard. Cruel-looking restraints hang from every seat, and I recall military history classes about ancient warships rowed by slaves. The shuttle is only a quarter loaded but already has a scent familiar to me from fighting in the field—chem rinse.
My father didn’t give his prisoners enough water to bathe.
X sits us down at the front, in the empty cockpit. A solid wall of metal surrounds it, to protect the crew from the prisoners.
‘You’re coming with us?’ I ask.
‘Of course.’ X shuts the door to the cockpit. ‘We have a conversation to finish.’
I turn away, gazing through the front windshield at the parking bay. Through its doors, the battle rages, rendering Shreve’s skyline in flickering silhouette.
Nerves flutter in my stomach.
The last time X and I spoke was on the Iron Mountain, my father’s drones coming at us. That was when he learned that I’d killed the love of his life. Then he told me that lover’s name—Seanan, my brother.
A moment later, I was running and X was captured.
And here we are.
It’s too much to expect forgiveness twice in one day.
‘I’ve been trying to figure out what to say,’ I begin. ‘It’s been a month, but I’m still not sure.’
‘Did we save Paz?’
Right—X doesn’t know anything that’s happened since his capture.
‘We restored the Paz AI. It’s a free city again. And the backup was full of seismic data, proving the earthquake was my father’s doing.’ I wave at the flickering skyline of Shreve. ‘The world finally turned against him—this is the result.’
Boss X settles into his seat, a sigh pouring from his body. All this time in that cell, he was more worried about the mission than our shared past.
‘I killed Seanan,’ I remind him.
X gives me a look, like I’ve insulted him.
‘I suspected that all along. From the moment I heard there was another Rafia—a body double is always a bodyguard as well.’
I stare at him. ‘But if you already …’
‘Why do you think I allied with the Victorians? Because I thought they would win?’ A short, pained laugh comes from him. ‘It was only to meet you, Frey of Shreve.’
My fingers reach for my missing feels—Calm or Philosophical. Anything to help me understand.
Boss X has been my friend, my mentor. He asked me to join his crew. And yet …
‘You always knew,’ I whisper. ‘So you hated me.’
X bares his teeth, his fists clenched. Right—I’m trapped alone in a small cage with a rebel warlord twice my size.
‘Why would I hate you?’ he says through gritted teeth.
It takes a moment to speak. ‘Because I was my father’s creature. The weapon that took Seanan from you.’
‘Yes,’ he hisses, and part of me shuts down, a rabbit going still in the presence of a wolf.
He reaches out one bared claw …
… and takes my wrist firmly, painfully.
‘Seanan and I had said our good-byes already. It wasn’t the sort of mission you back away from.’
I close my eyes, trying to focus—X’s claws are still in my flesh.
Of course. My brother had no extraction team waiting, no means of escape from the heart of Shreve. He’d come there expecting to die.
‘Your father was only the first of many,’ X says. ‘If Shreve was allowed to ruin the earth, other cities would follow—the Rusties all over again. Seanan wanted to go down in history as a cautionary tale.’
I shake my head. ‘A what?’
‘A lesson for all tyrants in the future. With one speck of DNA, they’d know your father was killed by his own son.’
‘But Security kept it a secret. Even Rafi and I didn’t know.’
‘Of course. But if Seanan had succeeded, the other first families of Shreve would’ve used him to blacken your father’s legacy. Just as they’re joining us now.’
I glance at the anteroom door. Kessa Shard was plotting against my father all along. Rafi’s friends too.
His rule was always hollow, however unshakable he seemed to me and Rafi.
I look out the side window at the prisoners lined up. They’re still coming in, crowding the aisles.
If Seanan had succeeded, ending my father before the invasion of Victoria, how many of these people would never have seen the inside of a cell? That would’ve been worth dying for, I suppose.
But not everything makes sense yet …
‘Why did you want to meet me, Boss?’
‘To wreak my vengeance,’ he says gently, and releases me. ‘In a war, I knew there would be a chance.’
‘You had plenty of chances.’ A hopeful shiver goes through me. ‘When we talked on the way to the Battle of Shreve—me, you, and Yandre. Is that when you decided I wasn’t so bad?’
‘It wasn’t anything you said, not at first.’ A slow laugh moves through him. ‘You have his eyes, is all.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
Strange, how that never occurred to me. I’ve never seen a decent picture of Seanan, but he must have looked like me.
Till now, all that mattered was that I looked like Rafi.
Growing up, there was someone else out there who shared the angles of our face. Our eyes. Maybe our smile.
‘He never even knew about me,’ I say.
‘No. But he loathed Rafia.’
This stings for a moment—any judgment of my sister is a judgment of me, her mirror. But as Sensei Noriko saw that day, Rafi and I were never the same. Even when we were nine years old.
Still, my reflex is to defend her.
‘Rafi hates our father more than you can know.’
X’s teeth are bright in the darkness. ‘Then she must hate herself.’
I shake my head, but I don’t know for sure.
My sister is a mystery to me. She had a whole revolution I didn’t know about, ready to go. She sent a spy to follow me.
And that kiss from Riggs …
I make one last argument. ‘Seanan could’ve killed her that day. But he shot wild into the crowd.’
‘A decision in the moment. We had no backup plan, in case your father wasn’t there.’
The world tips a little beneath me.
‘We?’
X nods slowly. ‘I was supposed to be there too.’
I stare at him.
X is the only one of us who isn’t camo-surged. But since this conversation started, he’s turned into a stranger.
‘You were supposed to die together?’
‘I loved him,’ he says simply.
‘Doomed and in love.’ My lungs tear in my chest, and it takes a moment to speak again. ‘Did you think you were Romeo and Juliet?’
A dry laugh comes from him. ‘No, that’s you and Col. From two warring families, equal in absurdity.’
‘Maybe so, but we never planned a mission we didn’t expect to survive!’ Suddenly I’m angry—with X, with Seanan, with the world for being broken in too many ways to count. ‘You helped my brother get himself killed!’
‘Yes, I planned it all with him,’ X says, weary now. ‘And he slipped away without me. I woke up that morning to an empty bed—and every morning since.’
My anger twists into something else.
‘Why did you agree in the first place?’ I plead.
‘Your father seemed untouchable. His own people couldn’t rise up because of the dust. His military was too powerful for us rebels to take on. The free cities were spineless.’
I swallow. ‘But Seanan could hurt him.’
‘He could destroy the man, and also make him a lesson for all history—if you spoil the planet, your own children will despise you.’
He intones these last words. Like that was the argument Seanan used to talk X into giving up his own life.
Because the whole plan was Seanan’s idea. An obsession with a father who’d traded an infant son for power.
‘It was his fight,’ I say. ‘Not yours.’
‘The planet is everyone’s fight. And part of me thought we’d make it out alive.’
‘I’m glad my brother wasn’t under that delusion.’ A flash of gratitude to Seanan goes through me, for sneaking out that morning without X.
He nods. ‘It took me a long time to realize that your brother didn’t only betray me—he also saved me.’
The hovershuttle is almost full by now, the nervous, joyful hubbub of freed prisoners all around us. We’ll be leaving soon, heading into battle. Maybe we’ll be shot down by the Shreve navy.
Maybe this is our good-bye.
I squeeze X’s hand. ‘I’m glad he left you there. I’m sorry he’s gone.’
He’s gone—when I’m the one who killed him.
But for the first time, I don’t carry all the blame. Seanan expected to die; X could’ve talked him out of the mission. And, of course, my father is always at fault in the end.
‘Seanan saved you too,’ X says with a smile. ‘Do you really think you and Rafi would’ve survived if I’d been there?’
I turn away, reimagining that day with two assassins, one of them the formidable Boss X.
A laugh bubbles up in me. ‘So … you were going to sneak into my father’s ballroom as a wolf?’
‘That was my old body. I went to the surgeons a month later.’
The world skids beneath me again. Everything is connected to that day, the first time I saved my sister.
Something makes me reach out to stroke Boss X’s fur. It’s longer than I remember, unkempt from his month in a cell. But it’s a beautiful chaos, a thousand fractious tangles intertwined.
X watches my fingers move.
‘In losing him, I found myself,’ he says softly.
It makes perfect sense—the same thing is happening with me and Rafi, in slow motion. The more we pull away from each other, the more I become my own person.
X is part of the distance between us. He has his own gravity, drawing me away from her.
Toward being a rebel, maybe. Or maybe just being me.
‘Are we really friends?’ I ask.
‘Family,’ X says. ‘You lost him too.’
PART V
DEATH WISH
I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.
— John Donne
44. SHUTTLE
Zura sends us someone who can fly the shuttle.
‘Navich,’ she introduces herself.
She has the long and shaggy hair of a freed prisoner. She squints at the controls, her hands running across them uncertainly. Her fingernails look bitten.
‘How long since you’ve flown?’ I ask.
‘A few months, and that was a cargo truck.’ She gives us a sad laugh. ‘They brought me in on one of these shuttles. Should’ve paid more attention.’
So she was arrested after the Revelation.
‘Take your time,’ Boss X says. ‘My friend here will navigate to the border.’
My friend—the words settle gently in my heart.
After a long inspection of the controls, Navich twists both flight sticks at the same time.
The shuttle lifts into the air, gliding forward on magnetics. But at the entrance to the parking bay, the lifting fans roar to life.
I bite down hard, crushing the false tooth that hides my extraction transmitter. It vibrates three times to tell me it’s working. I feel the jagged edge of broken ceramic and taste blood.
I touch my cheek, wondering why city-level tech is always so painful. We leap forward, a storm of leaves and dirt swirling around us. The maelstrom covers our view until we rise up, clumsy and newborn, above the treetops.
We lurch right, then left, holding on tight. Behind us, I hear the standing prisoners stumbling.
‘Sorry! Got it now!’ Navich calls, even though she doesn’t.
We make a wide turn in halting stages, away from the bright and flickering center of Shreve.
‘Are you certain you know how to fly this thing?’ X asks.
‘As long as we stay in the air.’ She points at a red button. ‘And for landing, there’s always the emergency autopilot. But that’ll send a distress signal.’
I hook into my safety harness. ‘Manual it is, then.’
More shudders go through the cabin, but these aren’t Navich’s fault—the battle is all around us now.
We’re part of the air itself, trembling with every explosion, every roaring passage of armored hovercraft. On our right, two squadrons of minidrones are in a dogfight, their running lights twisting and coiling, streaks of tracer rounds skimming the black sky.
Navich’s hands twist, and we bank hard, away from the skirmish. I hear shouts from behind as passengers stagger and fall.
‘Easy,’ X says. ‘Neither side will shoot at us.’
She stares at him. ‘You sure about that.’
‘Yes,’ I say—as long as the army of Shreve doesn’t figure out this shuttle is in enemy hands.
Navich straightens our course, heading north. ‘What about the border defenses? This thing’s too overloaded to get any altitude.’
Boss X and I exchange a glance.
‘We have friends at the border,’ I say.
As we fly away from the city’s center, the fighting thins out. Ahead of us, smoke rises from a row of bombed-out greenhouses, but the battle out here seems over and done.
A few drones in Shreve livery are guarding a solar power field to our west. Navich angles us gently away from them.
In the rearview monitor, the Shreve skyline still has its familiar shape. The free cities haven’t knocked down any skyscrapers.
Maybe the whole attack was really a diversion after all, more fireworks than bloodshed.
Lights twinkle into existence ahead, like stars on a dark expanse of ground. I realize where we are—not far from where Col and I woke up this morning.
I point through the windshield.
‘Avoid that patch of lights—it’s a restricted area.’ I don’t mention the nuclear waste. Her hands are nervous enough at the controls.
As the lights grow closer, I remember the blinking red of my safety meter. My skin starts to itch.
The scratch in my throat might only be thirst. The ache in my bones, two solid days of hiking. My nausea, simply battle nerves.
But my bigger worry is, what has my father done with all that nuclear waste? Is one day enough time to create some kind of weapon with it?
Navich veers away from the construction zone. The pristine darkness of the wild beckons from beyond the border floodlights. Safety and freedom, if we can only get there.
‘Something’s trailing us,’ Navich says.
In the rearview, the pursuing craft are almost invisible. No running lights, just black silhouettes blotting out the flickers in the sky.
‘Two heavy craft,’ I say. ‘Unmarked.’
Are they Shreve drones, wondering what a Security shuttle is doing this far out? Or is this our extraction team?
