Prodigy

“I guess,” I say.

He pulls me upright then, so that I face him. “I don’t know if they’ll let us communicate with each other,” he says. His voice drops so low I can barely hear it. “The plan sounds good, but if something goes wrong—”

“They’ll keep a close eye on me, I’m sure,” I interrupt him. “Razor’s a Republic officer. He can find a way to get me out if it starts falling apart. As for communications . . .” I bite my lip, thinking. “I’ll come up with something.”

Day touches my chin, bringing me closer until his nose brushes mine. “If anything goes wrong, if you change your mind, if you need help, you send a signal, you hear me?”

His words send shivers down my neck. “Okay,” I whisper.

Day gives me a subtle nod, then pulls away and leans back against his pillows. I let out my breath. “Are you ready?” he asks. There’s more to his sentence, I can tell, but he doesn’t say it. Are you ready to kill the Elector?

I give him a forced grin. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

We stay like that for a long time, until the light filtering in from the windows is bright and we hear the morning pledge blaring out across the city. Finally, I hear the front door swing open and close, and then Razor’s voice. Footsteps approach the bedroom, and Razor peeks in right as I straighten and sit up.

“How’s that leg of yours?” he asks Day. His face is as calm as ever, his eyes expressionless behind his glasses.

Day nods. “Good.”

“Excellent.” Razor smiles sympathetically. “I hope you’ve had enough time with your boy, Ms. Iparis. We’re moving out in an hour.”

“I thought the Medic wanted me to rest it for—” Day starts to say.

“Sorry,” Razor replies as he turns away. “We have an airship to catch. Don’t push that leg too hard just yet.”

THE PATRIOTS DISGUISE ME BEFORE WE HEAD OUT.

Kaede cuts my hair so it stops right below my shoulders, then she tints the white-blond strands a dark brownish red. She uses some sort of spray to do it, something they can remove with a special cleanser if they need to strip the color out. Razor gives me a pair of brown contact lenses that completely hide the bright blue of my eyes. Only I can tell that it’s artificial; I can still see the tiny, tiny specks of deep purple dotting my irises. These contacts are a luxury in themselves—rich trots use them to change their eye color—for fun. They would’ve come in handy for me on the streets if I’d had access to them. Kaede adds a synthetic scar to my cheek, then finishes off my disguise with a first-year air force uniform; a full black suit with red stripes running along each pant leg.

Finally, she equips me with a tiny flesh-colored earpiece and mike—the first embedded discreetly in my ear, the second inside my cheek.

Razor himself is decked out in a custom Republic officer uniform. Kaede wears a flawless flight outfit—a black jumpsuit with silver wing stripes wrapped around both sleeves, matching white condor gloves, and wing goggles. She’s not a Pilot in the Patriots for nothing—according to Razor, she can pull off a split-S in the air better than anyone he’s ever seen. Kaede should have no trouble posing as a Republic fighter pilot.

Tess is already gone, whisked away half an hour ago by a soldier who Razor says is another Patriot. Tess is too young to pass as a soldier of any level, so getting her onto the RS Dynasty means dressing her in a simple brown collar shirt and trousers, the outfit of workers who operate the airship’s hundreds of stoves.

And then there’s June.

June quietly watches my transformation from the couch. She hasn’t said much since our last conversation over my recovery bed. While the rest of us have our various getups, June is unchanged—no makeup, her eyes still dark and penetrating, her hair still pulled back in that shiny tail. She’s dressed in the plain cadet uniform Razor gave us last night. In fact, June doesn’t look all that different from the photo on her military ID. She’s the only one of us who isn’t equipped with a mike and earpiece, for obvious reasons. I try to catch her gaze a few times while Kaede works on my appearance.

Less than an hour later, we head down the main Vegas strip in Razor’s officer jeep. We pass several of the first pyramids—the Alexandria dock, the Luxor, the Cairo, the Sphinx. All named after some ancient pre-Republic civilization, or at least that’s what we were taught back when the Republic actually allowed me in school. They look different during the day, with their bright beacon lights off and edges unlit, looming like giant black tombs in the middle of the desert. Soldiers bustle in and out of their entrances. It’s good to see so much activity—all the better for us to blend in. I go over our own uniforms again. Polished and authentic. I can’t get used to it, even though June and I have technically been passing as soldiers for weeks. The collar scratches at my neck, and the sleeves feel way too stiff. I don’t know how June could stand wearing this stuff all the time. Does she at least like how it looks on me? My shoulders do seem a little broader.

“Stop tugging on your uniform,” June whispers when she sees me fiddling with the edges of my military jacket. “You’re messing up its alignment.”

It’s the most I’ve heard her say in an hour. “You’re just as nervous,” I reply.

June hesitates, then turns away again. Her jaw is clenched as if to keep herself from blurting something out. “Just trying to help,” she mutters.

After a while, I reach over to squeeze her hand once. She squeezes back.

Finally, we reach the Pharaoh, the landing dock where the RS Dynasty is resting. Razor ushers us out, then has us stand at attention. Only June falls out of line, stopping beside Razor and facing off to one side of the street. I watch her discreetly.

A second later, another soldier melts from the crowd and nods at Razor, then at June, who straightens her shoulders, joins up behind the soldier, and disappears back into the street crowd. Out of sight, just like that. I exhale, hollowed out by her sudden absence.

I won’t see her again until the whole thing’s over. If it all goes well. Don’t think like that. It will go well.

We head inside with the tides of other soldiers filing into and out of the Pharaoh. The interior is huge; beyond the main entrance, the ceiling stretches all the way up to the top of the pyramid and ends with the base of the RS Dynasty, where I can see tiny figures boarding through a maze of ramps and walkways. Rows of barrack doors line each level of the pyramid’s sides. Long marquees of text run across each wall with a never-ending onslaught of departure and arrival times. Diagonal elevators run along each of the pyramid’s four main edges.

Here, Razor leaves us behind. One second he’s walking ahead, and the next he takes an abrupt turn through the crowds and melts in with the sea of uniforms. Kaede continues walking without hesitation, but slows enough so we’re side by side. I can barely see her lips move, but her voice echoes with razor-sharp clarity from my earpiece.

“Razor will board the Dynasty with the other officers, but we can’t go in with the soldiers or we’ll get ID’d. So sneaking in is our next best option—”

My eyes go up to the airship’s base, skimming across the nooks and crannies lining its sides. I think back on the time when I broke into a grounded airship and stole two bags’ worth of canned food. Or the time I sank a smaller airship in Los Angeles’s lake by flooding its engines. For both cases, there was one easy way of getting in undetected. “The garbage chutes,” I murmur back through my own mike.

Kaede gives me a quick, approving grin. “Spoken like a true Runner.”

We make our way through the crowds until we reach an elevator terminal at one of the pyramid’s corners. Here we blend in with the small group clustered in front of the elevator door. Kaede clicks her mike off to make small talk with me, and I’m careful not to make eye contact with the other soldiers. So many of them are younger than I’d imagined, even close to my age, and several already have permanent injuries—metal limbs like my own, a missing ear, a hand covered with burn scars. I glance up again at the Dynasty, this time long enough to note all the garbage chute openings along the side of the hull. If we’re going to shimmy our way up into this airship, we’re going to have to do it fast.

Soon the elevator comes. We take the nauseating ride up the diagonal side of the pyramid, then wait at the top while everyone else files out. We exit last. As the others scatter to either side of the top hall leading toward the airship’s entrance ramps, Kaede turns to me.

“One more flight for us,” she says, nodding toward a narrower set of stairs at the end of the hall that lead up to the pyramid’s inside ceiling. I study it quietly. She’s right. These stairs go right up into the ceiling (and probably lead up to the roof), and all along this ceiling are mazes of metal scaffolding and crisscrossing support beams. From here, the docked airship’s back side casts a shadow across the ceiling that swathes this part of it in darkness. If we can leap off the middle of this last flight of stairs and climb up into that mess of metal beams, we can make our way over to the airship undetected in the shadows and climb up the dark side of the hull. Plus, the air vents are noisy this close up. That, along with the noise and bustle of the base, should mask any sounds we make.

Here’s hoping my new leg holds up. I stomp down on it twice to test it. It doesn’t hurt, but there’s a little pressure where my flesh meets the metal, like it hasn’t completely fused yet. Still, I can’t help smiling. “This’ll be fun, yeah?” I say. I’m almost back in my element, at least for a moment, back where I’m at my best.

We make our way up into the shadowy stairs, and then each of us takes the short leap up into the scaffolding and climbs into the beams. Kaede’s first. She struggles a little with her bandaged arm, but manages to get a good grip after some shuffling. Then it’s my turn. I swing effortlessly up into the beams and weave my body into the shadows. Leg’s good so far. Kaede watches me approvingly.

“Feeling mighty fine,” I whisper.

“I can see that.”

We travel in silence. My pendant slips out of my shirt a couple of times and I have to tuck it back in. Sometimes I look down or toward the airship; the floor of the landing base is packed with cadets of all ranks, and now that most of the Dynasty’s previous crew have rotated out of the ship, the new ones are starting to form long lines at the entrance ramps. I watch as each one passes through a quick inspection, ID check, and body scan. Far below us, more cadets are accumulating near the elevator doors.

Suddenly I pause.

“What’s the problem?” Kaede snaps.

I hold up a finger. My eyes are fixed on the ground, frozen on a familiar figure who’s cutting his way through the crowd.

Thomas.

This trot’s tracked us all the way from Los Angeles. He stops now and then to question what seem like random soldiers. With him is a dog so white, it stands out like a beacon from this height. I rub my eyes to make sure I’m not hallucinating. Yep, he’s still there. He continues to weave his way through the crowd, one hand on the gun at his waist, the other holding the leash to that enormous white shepherd. A small line of soldiers follows him. My limbs turn numb for an instant, and suddenly all I see is Thomas lifting his gun and pointing it at my mother, Thomas beating me to a pulp in a Batalla Hall interrogation room. My vision swims in red.