Mina took the baton from Chase's hand in one smooth movement. She tucked it under Dornan's chin, pressing it to her throat as she reached down and removed the blaster from her hand. She tossed it on the floor. “Chase won't hurt you because he's human, but I'm a machine. Tell us where to find Lilli Garrety.”
Dornan lifted one shaky hand and pointed toward the hallway.
“She's here?” asked Chase incredulously. When his sister said,
I'm being held by the one who led the end,
had she meant Dornan?
“Why don't you take us to her?” suggested Mina, pressing the baton harder against Dornan's throat. She hid the weapon as they moved out into the hall and held the woman's hand as if they were old friends. Dornan led them down the antiseptic corridor to a small, inconspicuous door guarded with a three-part locking system.
What Chase saw on the other side of the door knocked the breath out of him like a punch to the gut. The room was filled with various blinking machines, with a long table in the center, and laid out on the table like a tiny corpse was the girl from the café.
Thin cables from a few of the machines ran to her body, connected to her with tape and bandages. Her blond hair stuck out in all directions, and the deep circles under her eyes stood out like purple crescents in her pale skin. She wore the same light blue pajamas that he'd seen her wearing before. How had she ended up like this, when he'd seen her so alert and aggressive in the café?
“Wake up,” Chase whispered, laying his hand on her arm. He half expected her eyes to open when he touched her cool skin, but they remained closed. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breathing. He pinched her arm lightly. “Hey? I'm here. I'm sorry it took me so long to come get you.” He wanted to pick her up and carry her out, but didn't know where to begin with all the cables that ran from her body.
Behind Chase, he heard Mina ask Dornan, “What did you do to her?”
“She's under heavy sedation,” said Dornan slowly. “She's an extremely dangerous child.”
“She's just a little girl,” said Chase.
Dornan made a harsh noise. “You, of all people, should know exactly what she is.”
Mina stepped forward and began systematically detaching the lines by removing the bandages and tape strips that held down the flat metal disks on the end of each cable.
“Do you have any idea what you're doing?” asked Dornan. “You'll kill her, is that what you want?”
Chase's heart pounded in panic. “Mina?”
“Check the medications,” said Dornan. “It's ganglaphin, the strongest sedative available. You can't just take a patient off without a step-down protocol, especially at this dosage.”
Mina frowned and looked at the IV machine, and Dornan quickly reached for the communicator at her belt. Parker leapt forward to tear it from her hand. They struggled over the device for a moment, and then Dornan wrested it free, smacking Parker across the face with it. With a grunt, he fell backward, but before he even hit the floor, Mina had seized Dornan by the wrist. She wrenched the woman's arm behind her with such force that she dropped the communicator with a shriek.
Parker climbed back to his feet, holding the side of his face. “Take that,” he mumbled.
“Chase, take your sister off the table,” said Mina.
He went to the girl's side and hesitated. There were still three lines attached to her. “I don't know which one to take off first.”
“Just take them all off, it doesn't matter,” said Mina. “You can do it. You're not going to kill her.” Warily, Chase pulled at the edge of a tape strip on the girl's skinny arm and lifted off the metal disk.
“You may not kill her, but she'll never wake up again,” said Dornan.
“Shut up,” said Mina. She wrenched Dornan's arms higher up her back, and the officer squawked and buckled to her knees.
Chase paused, looking at the frail girl. Mina wouldn't lie to him about this, would she? He wasn't even sure if she could lie. With trembling hands, he pulled off the three pieces of tape and lifted the metal disks from the girl's skin. Her eyes remained closed.
“Shouldn't she wake up now?” he asked.
“No, not right away,” said Mina. “You'll have to pick her up.”
Gently Chase slid his arms behind her shoulders and under her knees and lifted her from the table. She felt as light and fragile in his arms as a little bird. He stared at her in wonder. Behind those closed eyes was all the information he craved so badly.
Mina forced Dornan to take a few steps, so that they were standing alongside the table.
“Parker, come over here and tape these lines on her arm.”
“With pleasure,” said Parker. Dornan began to struggle as he reached for her arm.
Mina tightened her grip. “Colonel, I can break your arm in ten places before you even feel the first snapâbut believe me, you will feel it.”
Dornan ceased fighting, and Parker taped one of the disks to her arm. For a moment, nothing happened, and then her head began to droop forward and she folded toward the floor. Mina caught her and hoisted her limp body up onto the table.
“Put everything you see on herâevery line we took off the girl,” said Mina. “We'll try to knock her out deeply enough so that she can't send anyone after us right away.”
As Parker applied the lines to the unconscious woman, he looked over at Chase, who held the delicate girl as if she were made of glass.
“This lady knew what happened to you,” Parker said.
Chase looked at Dornan's slack face. There would be no getting answers from her now. “Once my sister wakes up, she'll be able to tell me.”
“It might take a few hours for these sedatives to wear off,” said Mina. “Dornan was right about one thingâthey had her on an extremely high dosage of a very powerful sedative.” Seeing Chase's nervous expression, she added, “But she'll be fine.”
Parker slapped the last line on Dornan. “Have a good sleep, you old bat.” He looked at Mina and Chase. “Now, how are we going to get out of here?”
Mina cocked an eyebrow. “I'd say we just take the stairs. Quickly, before someone finds Colonel Dornan and raises an alarm.”
The hallways of the twentieth floor were mostly empty, but as they walked toward the stairs, an older man in a lab coat stepped out of one of the offices. Chase's pulse sped up. He glanced up long enough to see the man giving them a funny look, but he didn't try to stop them. When they reached the stairwell, Mina stopped and lifted the girl out of Chase's arms. He opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off, saying simply, “Run.”
Chase rushed down the stairs two at a time with Parker at his side, Mina right behind them. At about the tenth floor, a door crashed open somewhere above them, followed by a man's shout: “We'll head down, you go to the roof!” The sound of their footsteps gave Chase a surge of adrenaline, and he started taking the stairs three at a time. Beside him, Parker was clutching the railing, and at the next landing he missed a step and skidded down onto one knee. Chase whipped around to help him up, and gasped at Parker's glassy eyes and the sweat coating his pallid face. “What's wrong?”
Parker shook his head, pulling himself quickly to his feet. “I'll be fine,” he wheezed, pushing Chase's hand away.
Chase ignored him and looped his arm under Parker's shoulders. “Two at a time. Come on, we can do this.” They ran in sync down each flight, pausing for a moment on the landings. The men's steps grew louder as they closed the distance. Their angry shouts echoed down the stairwell. Chase focused on the flights remaining.
Three to go. Two to go.
Finally they reached the ground floor, bursting through an outside door onto the street. Chase glanced backward and caught a glimpse of two soldiers directly behind them, almost within grabbing distance as the door began to swing shut. His view was cut off as Mina grabbed the handle with one hand and pulled with all her strength, buckling the metal door and wedging it securely in its own frame.
Parker was already staggering out toward the street, where he quickly hailed a jettaxi. The driver, a small creature completely covered in dark, glossy fur, barely looked at them as they tumbled into the vehicle and ferried them away from the military building and up into the streams of traffic.
“We need to get to a communication hub so I can contact Asa,” said Mina. Parker nodded and leaned back against the seat, breathing slowly.
“Are you okay?” Chase asked.
“I'll be fine.” Parker closed his eyes. “Just give me a sec.”
Chase leaned over his sister and brushed the chunks of blond hair from her face, willing her to open her eyes, but her long lashes lay closed against her cheek. There was nothing he wanted more in the world than for her to wake up and tell him everything he needed to know about himself. He smiled, imagining how happy she would be once she realized he had come for her.
Another thought gnawed at the back of his mind: Maurus. His thoughts produced a horrible image of the doomed Lyolian, strung up and tortured in Rezer Bennin's lair. He pushed the image away. Maurus was probably already deadâthere was nothing that anyone could do for him. And it had been his decision not to flee to his homeworld. Chase leaned in toward his sister and whispered in her ear, “Wake up.”
They had the jettaxi drop them off in an abandoned alley, and Mina broke into a closed warehouse. Chase carried his sister, keeping an eye out for somewhere to set her down, and followed Mina and Parker while they located an office with a communication console.
“How do you even contact him?” Parker asked, sinking into a chair and watching her fingers fly across the console.
“I ping him first with a series of code fragments inserted at specific intervals into a shifting order of public bandwidths based on forty-three algorithms.” She glanced at Parker's baffled face. “It's complex.”
Chase laid his sister on a cot in a corner of the office and crouched beside her. The connection he felt to her was so strong, he made a decision at that moment: He was Chase Garrety, not a clone, nothing man-made. He had to be. And he had saved his sister, and soon Asa would come, and she would wake up, and everything would be right.
Only it wouldn't. Because Maurus was still out there, and maybe he was alive, and Chase would never know if he could have saved him too. Now that all the answers were right at his fingertips, walking away would be the hardest thing he'd ever had to do. But he couldn't leave Maurus to his fate without knowing that he'd tried to help. Maybe Chase didn't completely understand the rules of the galaxyâwhich species he could count as allies, who not to trustâbut he knew in his gut that Maurus was one of the good guys. He couldn't just leave him to his fate.
Chase touched his sister's cool temple as he whispered good-bye and promised to return, and then he stood and turned to the others at the console.
“I'm going to look for Maurus,” he announced.
Parker whipped around. “What? No.”
“Parker, I have to.”
“Then I'm coming with you.”
“You're in no shape to go anywhere, and you know Mina won't let you.” She didn't even glance up from the console. “Besides, I need you to stay here and make sure my sister is safe.”
“You'll get yourself killed.”
“Come on. It's me.” A quiet confidence had been building in Chase ever since he'd broken out of the brig on the
Kuyddestor
. “I don't know what I am, or what all I can do, but I don't think there's anything that can hurt me. I'll be fine.”
Parker laughed and shook his head, but he looked angry. “Sure, you're special. You can do things that make no sense. I've been trying to come up with a rational explanation for how you jump through doors, but I can't. It's insane. So you're magical, whatever. But you're not invincible. Remember when you first showed up at my home, how you were wounded? Bleeding? You don't know what can hurt you, but obviously something can. And if that Rezer Bennin guy catches you, he'll keep trying until he figures out what that is.”
Chase considered this. He'd survived being shot at, stabbed, and locked up, but his phasing ability hadn't kept him from almost drowning in the mud seaâMaurus had. So he wasn't immortal, but if he played it smart, he knew he had a chance. “I have to go. I can't just leave him there. You know that. Promise me you'll keep my sister safe.”
Parker gave him a long, troubled look before he nodded.
Mina said something in a low voice, and Chase turned around to see that she had pulled up a screen on the console. It was silver for a moment, and then Asa Kaplan's face materialized.
“Thirty-second window, Mina,” he barked.
“I've got Parker. We're on Qesaris in a district called Nano City. I'm sending you the coordinates right now.”
“Is the Garrety boy there?”
“Yes, and his sister,” said Mina.
Asa's brow furrowed. “I'll pick you up in twenty minutes.”
“I won't be here,” said Chase, stepping in front of the screen. “I have to go help a friend first. He's being held by a man named Rezer Bennin.”
“No,” said Asa abruptly. “Stay put. Who is your friend?”
“He's a Fleet soldier. Well, he wasâ”
“Don't go anywhere,” Asa interrupted. “I'll be there in twenty minutes.”
“I'll be fineâI can do this. I'm different.”
“I know you are,” said Asa in a harsh tone. “Just stay with Mina.”
The words almost slipped past Chase.
I know you are?
If Asa Kaplan knew about Chase's ability, maybe he actually knew more about Chase than anyone else. Maybe he'd just been pretending not to recognize him. “What do you mean? Do you know who I am?”
“I'll be there in twenty minutes.
Do not leave
.”