Chapter 32 - HUNTER
HUNTER
I’D HAVE COME ALL the way to Mars just to find this. To find you.
‘Cleo, I—’ But there’s only a static hiss. She’s gone. My heart’s racing, but I feel strangely empty, as though some piece of me has been lifted out and all that’s left is echoes.
I’m standing on the bridge with my sister and most of her crew – I’ve been murmuring into my mic, my hand up to guard my mouth – and as I turn back toward them, Marguerite’s head snaps up.
‘Why did a rover just depart?’ she raps out, and everyone turns toward her like they’re tracking the sun.
Nico just takes off at a run, disappearing through the door in a blur of movement, and I hustle over to my sister, pulling up a display from my cuff.
‘Who was it?’ I ask her urgently, because anything that buys even a second’s distraction is worth it.
She’s pulling up displays at lightning speed, and in a moment she’ll figure out someone added Sabrina’s handprint permission back into the rover list. I try to look as if I’m helping, getting in the midst of it with her, yanking code just as she touches it, and making as much of a mess as I possibly can without giving myself away any sooner than I have to.
Then, with a flourish, I overload the system enough to bounce us both out. ‘What the—’ I mutter a false protest, throwing my hands up. ‘The power’s failing, everything’s breaking down.’
Marguerite curses as she starts all over again, so I dive back in alongside her.
My thoughts are racing across the red planet outside, chasing after the tiny rover crawling across its surface. Cleo, run!
I don’t care what it costs me – I just want her out of here. Yes, to warn people, of course to warn people. But more than that, because I want to know she’s out there living. That her smile and her sarcasm and her quick wits are out there somewhere on Mars, with another chance at life.
I should have said that, instead of going on about sending a message she already knew was urgent. But I missed my chance.
I hope one day she figures out what I really meant.
When Marguerite left, I told myself that if loving people made you vulnerable, it wasn’t worth the risk.
Something broke in me then, and hardened instead of healing, I brought up my shields. But that was never the right way. The answer wasn’t to become more like my sister.
It was to become more than her.
And that’s what’s happened, with Cleo. I’ve learned it’s worth the risk, to leap. That a trust fall can kill you, sure, but it can save you too.
Whatever happens next, Cleo’s saved a part of me. And now I’m going to go down trying to save her.
Marguerite’s back in the code again, cursing softly as she tries to figure out what’s going on, and I lean across to her.
‘Should I go help Nico?’ I murmur. ‘Maybe I can do more on-site.’
It’s a risk, this moment – she hasn’t actually told me they disabled the other rovers, but I’m hoping she won’t remember that, now I’ve got her flustered. And sure enough, she just nods.
‘Go,’ she says, soft enough that nobody else will hear it. ‘Get a rover ready for us. The solar’s almost completely gone now and we have maybe ten minutes left before your girlfriend’s into range to send a warning. I need to make sure there’s nobody there to receive it.’
I go cold all over.
She’s not in the code to try to figure out how Cleo and Sabrina got away, how Sabrina got her handprint back on the permissions list.
She’s moving up the time of the bombings, so their warning will be useless. Cleo would have had twenty-five minutes to get her message out. Now she’s got ten. And she doesn’t know.
‘Can I help with that?’ I ask, scrambling for a new plan. I need her to let me in if I’m going to slow her down.
‘I’ve got it,’ Marguerite replies. ‘I built it, I can wrestle it. There’s no time to catch you up.’ She spares me a glance then, reaching across to squeeze my shoulder, and lowers her voice even further. ‘Get us a ride out of here, brother.’
There’s an ache in me, for what my sister could have been to me – what she should have been to me. For what she’s not.
I reach up to hook Cleo’s headset over my ear and start my jog toward the rover garages.
I duck into a side passageway as soon as I’m out of sight, and then another, and wrench open the door to someone’s quarters so I can slip inside.
I try to pull the door closed behind me, but it sticks – it’s the failing power. As the station dies, it’s meant to start leaving doors open so nobody gets trapped.
I give up, stumbling over to sit on one of the bunks. I’m breathing hard, sweating now, my heart pounding.
I only have a couple of minutes before Marguerite figures out I never reached Nico. Can I get into the system and undo her detonation orders in that time?
No. She’s right, she built it. I can’t force my way in and unravel all her code in the next few minutes. I need another angle.
I need to distract her enough that she can’t speed up her plans. Think, Hunter. What would Cleo do?
Cleo would go for the vital systems, find something that threatens Marguerite herself, so that she has to stop and do something about it.
I flick up the display from my cuff and dive into the code one more time, pushing past numbers, chasing something I can use quickly. Then I see it.
I set off the air-quality alarms on the bridge, so the whole space fills with a deafening WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP that I can hear even from this distance.
Hunter! Marguerite’s barely audible over comms. Get into the controls. Get me some air!
‘I can’t,’ I shout back. ‘I don’t have access. You’ll have to do it!’
I lurk in the back of the life-support system as she tries to silence the alarm, listening to her swear over the headset. It takes her longer, because she thinks the alarm is legit. It’s another minute she hasn’t spent speeding up her timeline – I’ll take it.
Then she tags me, finding me where she’s working and bumping me out of the life-support sections. Suddenly my display fritzes in front of me and disappears.
I thought you couldn’t get in, she snaps over comms.
I’m silent a moment too long, before I find a reply. ‘It’s your air, I kept trying. I’ll head for Nico.’
She doesn’t reply.
Cleo, run faster.
I reset my cuff and start again – what else can I do? Cut power to the bridge? It’s so protected, but maybe …
And then my sister’s voice sounds in my ear again, as she comes back on comms. You know, Hunter …
The hair on the back of my neck stands up at her tone.
What did your little friend think she was going to do with my cuff?
You said it yourself – she knows nothing about code.
Was she going to give it to someone who does know what to do?
Oh, shit.
I look up to find Nico in the open doorway.
He lunges for me, where I sit on the bed. I throw myself across the room, out of his way. He moves like a fighter, and I might be fit, but I’m not that.
‘Come on, now,’ he says softly, hands spreading wide as he stalks across the room toward me. ‘Game’s over.’ I can hear the soft buzz of Marguerite’s voice in his earpiece, and I flick through the channels on mine to catch the last of her words.
—him quickly.
I edge around the tiny room as Nico turns toward me, shifting to block the path to the door. Fumbling behind me, I run my hand along a shelf, searching desperately for anything I can use as a weapon.
The hell with it, shoot him, Marguerite snaps. He’s picked a side.
‘You don’t want to do that,’ I tell Nico. My fingers reach the end of the shelf and find a flat panel fixed to the wall.
‘No?’ he asks, sounding a lot like he does want to shoot me. He’s not drawing his gun, though. Not yet.
‘You don’t want to shoot a Graves,’ I point out.
Nico shrugs. ‘I’m warming up to the idea.’
‘She’s lost it, you know that. You know these aren’t orders you should follow. There’s barely a way out of this now, but if you kill me …’
Nico lunges again, and an instant later I’m pressed up against the wall, his forearm across my throat, cutting off my air. ‘Who’s going to know she gave orders?’ he murmurs, eyes meeting mine. ‘Or that I followed them? Terrible that you died when the station vented.’
And now he reaches for his gun.
Black starts to creep in around the edges of my vision, and I wrench at his forearm with one hand, scrabbling behind me with the other. My fingers find the edge of the panel fixed to the wall again.
They’re easy to pull out. It’s Cleo’s voice, back at the engineering offices, making excuses for heading to the greenhouse in person. They were thinking about maintenance, not sabotage.
Just have to watch for the live ones.
My vision’s going black, my throat spasming at the lack of air.
I dig my fingertips in and wrench off the access panel, reaching inside to grab a handful of wires. Then I yank them free and jam them against Nico’s chest.
In a shower of sparks he goes flying backward, crashing into the wall opposite. The lights flicker and go out, plunging us into darkness, and I shove myself at where I think the door was – already there are flames leaping to life where the sparks fell on the bedding.
I ricochet off the frame and stumble out into the hallway, where the emergency lights flicker once and then die.
Nico’s somewhere behind me, roaring a curse, so still alive, I guess.
I start sprinting toward the one source of light I can see, a glow around the corner. I need a new hiding place before Nico gets back onto his feet.
I pound down the hallway, swinging around a corner to find an intersection lit by one failing overhead light.
I’ve been here before. I’m by a familiar stack of crates, with the signs pointing at all the different settlements nearby. Suddenly the numbers feel impossibly large.
Cleo, run!