Mary

The automatic doors swished open, and I shoved the tablet back into the drawer and spun around, pretending to lean against the counter. I’d never been good at hiding a guilty face. I prayed my face wasn’t too obvious now, but Ms. Robes barely seemed to notice as she leaned in, her long ponytail falling over her shoulder. “Get in here, Bloody Brainy Mary.”

I walked away from the drawer, hopefully casually, and followed her into the adjoining room where they’d taken Oren. It was another whitewashed concrete suite with a modified extractor in the middle, ringed by a shell of clinical curtains and medical tool carts. The extractor’s headset clamped around Oren’s skull, wires coiling from his temples into the rest of the lumpish machinery, and a flock of holo displays hovering above him. Ms. Robes’ two attendants stood over him, flicking through the holo displays. Off to the side, the slick-haired man in a button-down stood and watched them like a marble statue, his expression a very hollow kind of neutral. Once again, something itched at me when I looked at him, like there was something I was missing.

Ms. Robes snapped her fingers at me, pointing to the holo displays. “Look at this.”

Her attendants in gray scrubs made room for me to stand beside her, and I was reminded eerily of the practicums I took in University, where we clustered around a live inspiration extraction while the professor explained the process and quizzed us on the relationship between brain functions and the artistic experience. Refining inspiration extraction as a process and as a science requires understanding how the brain experiences beauty and emotion. However, looking at these displays, I thought the Heartless were more concerned with memory than anything else. Half of the displays were live feeds of the activity within portions of Oren’s brain — the amygdala, the hippocampus, the neocortex. Others were highly detailed maps of his entire brain, with different colored filters distinguishing elaborate nets of neurons layered over one another. While Ms. Robes’s gaze bored into me, I scrambled to make sense of it all.

“What’s… what’s the problem?” I asked, glancing down to Oren’s face. His eyes were half-closed, jittering beneath the lids as if he were dreaming, and his chin hung slack. So far, it looked like they were just scanning his brain, but what else were they prepared to do?

“The problem is this.” Ms. Robes pulled several of the holo displays together, overlapping all the multicolored maps of Oren’s brain. The nets twisted over each other like a sponge, but some places were thinner than others, leaving dead space. “What’s in there, and how do we get to it?”

“Why… How should I know?”

Her head snapped toward me. “You learned with different technology. You grew up with resources I didn’t. So you know different things about extraction. How do I get that without liquidating the rest of his brain?”

My eyes darted over the graphs and models. “I… I, uh…”

Ms. Robes sighed, shoulders slumping. “You’re useless. Back off until we’re done.”

She waved me away, and I didn’t respond at first. Maybe if I came up with a smart answer, she would let me stay, and I could protect Oren from whatever else she wanted to do to him. But then a hand clamped onto my shoulder and dragged me back. I staggered into the slick-haired man, who pulled me to the corner with him and stood there, silently, his fingers digging into my collarbone. I twisted up to get a look at him, but his eyes never left the extractor. From this close, I spotted a thin line on his forehead—a scar from chip implantation— but didn’t have the time to think much about that.

“Boot her up,” Ms. Robes said, and one of her attendants threw a switch. The extractor chugged to life, lights and indicators sparkling to life across all the chunky machinery that hadn’t needed power yet. She selected a thin, steel rod and inserted it into a knob on the extractor, holding the end like a conductor’s baton. “We’ll drain out the merchandise again and hunt around the blank space.”

“The merchandise?” I said.

“The mapped content,” she droned, guiding a cursor on a brain-map with the steel rod. “Don’t want to lose any assets. Keep watching, this will be educational. Once you’re familiar with our system, maybe you’ll be more useful.”

She was going to drain his brain. Everything that made Oren himself would be sucked out, stored in a canister until she decided to put it into someone’s head.

“Please, don’t!” I said, but sounded pathetic even to myself.

Ms. Robes scoffed. “Little-lamb Mary. Did Mary have the little lamb, or was she the little lamb? I was never sure. Either way, she’s associated with infantilization.”

One of the attendants inserted an empty canister into the extractor, and I tried not to panic. Unsuccessfully.

“Please, I know you don’t have any reason to care, but he’s been missed for so long!” I said. “He has a brother, and a… And a really, really cool lady named Ava who's been missing him for so long. Those memories are important!”

On my shoulder, I felt the slick-haired man’s fingers loosen slightly.

I had to do something. Even if it was stupid and changed nothing and might only get me in trouble, I knew that if I just stood there, I would regret it forever.

I wrenched my shoulder out of his grip and bolted toward the nearest medical cart, grabbing a steel-cased defibrillator. Ms. Robes’s back was to me, still focused on the display over Oren’s head.

“Important… indisputably…” she mumbled. She glanced my direction just as I whacked the defibrillator into the side of her head.

She stumbled against the extractor and slid down the side, grappling ineffectively at it to stop herself. I heard the slick-haired man rushing up behind me, and one of the attendants grabbed my arm, and I swung back blindly and felt the defibrillator slam into something. One of the attendants wrestled with me, trying to take the defibrillator from me. To the side, I saw the slick-haired man reeling from the blow I’d landed on his face. He grasped for the curtain and ripped it partly down with him, rings popping from the rod above us, and his head struck the corner of a medical cart. I saw a red line of blood spring to his skin from the impact, the curtains flopping across him...

And then the lights flickered out.

Silas

I opened my eyes to chaos. I was lying on my back, my head halfway inside a silvery helmet contraption, much like the one I’d just...left? For lack of a better word; the machine was strikingly similar to Ava’s highbeam machine back on the Sojourner.

From my reclined position, I surveyed a scene of destruction and struggle. At the center of it all: Mary, holding a defibrillator, a wild look in her eyes, flailing at the attendants in gray scrubs who scrambled for her weapon, trying to subdue my desperate crewmate. The lights flickered wildly, no doubt a result of the powersurge projecting my consciousness through the extractor. How was Mary already here? I had expected to have to search the facility for her holding cell. But there was no time to ponder such irrelevancies; my assistant needed my help.

I leapt from my chair, detaching the headset, ripping off nodes taped all over, grinning as my new body responded with youthful vitality. Well, not as much of it as I’d hoped (judging by the pale and somewhat out-of-shape limbs, it was almost middle-aged). I’d mentally assumed I’d have a chance to examine my body in more detail, to get used to the proportions of my new appendages and calibrate my motions. But there was no time for details.

I charged the largest of the two attendants, flooring him with the world's greatest glancing right-hook. As my fist made contact with his cheekbone, I felt a shift in my mind. Decades old reflexes snapped into motion, and years of military training overtook my body. It’d been a long time since my nervous, old body had been able to express it, but my mind remembered what it was like during the Great Scourge, a hundred pounds of equipment and armor strapped to my body, a loyal soldier, mediocre killing machine. My old instincts returned and I flattened another attendant, knocking him down next to some guy in the corner, half-buried under a downed curtain rod.

“The heck did you do to that guy?” I asked, afraid to know the answer. I turned to see Mary headlocked by an angry lady in purple scrubs. Mary stared up at me with wide eyes. The Heartless lady scowled at me, pressing a scalpel to Mary’s neck.

“Oren!” Mary gasped.

I made a step forward, then stopped, confused. Oren? Where was Oren? I looked around, but it was just me, three unconscious attendants, Mary, and this stern, yet rather unhinged lady in scrubs.

In my moment of distraction, the woman leapt into action, kicking Mary toward me and darting for the door. I stepped forward to catch Mary as she stumbled, shaken and bleeding from where the scalpel nicked her. When I looked back up, the stern woman stood outside the glass door. It slid shut, the deadbolts sliding into place with an audible click.

Suddenly the lights switched red and a slow, warbling siren erupted from the PA system. The stern woman stood up straighter, surprised, concerned. Was that alarm not for the disturbance Mary and I were causing? Her eyes darted to the man lying next to me under the curtains. She pressed hard on the intercom button on the wall and said something I could not hear through the glass. Then, with one last scowl, she turned and fled down the hallway.

“We need to go,” Mary gasped, her voice shot through with adrenaline. “If we’re going to go, we need to go now.”

“Agreed,” I said. My voice felt weird, but not just because of the new body. It felt thinner, my vision felt thinner, silvery…

“Where did you learn to fight like that, Oren? Did you and Kal learn in the Belt races?”

I looked down at Mary’s face, as if through a frosted window. “I’m not Oren,” I said. “It’s me, Silas.”

“What?”

“There’s no time, and...well...I’m not sure I understand it myself.” My voice petered out, getting thinner, muffled. “I think the connection is breaking, you gotta—” The connection disintegrated further with every syllable.

With a jolt and the sudden sensation of blustering wind, I found myself back on the Sojourner, watching through the silvery visor of the brain projector. Sage stood at the hidden door to the old armory, loading up a handgun. Outside, I could hear gunfire, muffled explosions, the sound of Kal yelling.

“Sage…!” I whispered.

She looked up, startled, her eyes flicking past me to the computer terminal.

“I think I need to be patched through again, the connection...”

Sage scowled but scrambled back to the computer. The rushing sensation flooded my body.

Mary

Oren—Silas?—stumbled, nearly tripping over one of the attendants on the floor. Which he’d knocked out with a very professional-looking punch. I guess I knew Oren and Kal had lived rough when he was younger, but the Oren I’d spent time with recently didn’t seem… that proactive.

Oh no, what if the machine broke his brain? What if something about his memory had fragmented and now his identity was mixed up and—

I shook my head and slapped my palms against my cheeks. This wasn’t the time to panic! Now matter what state his mind was in, I was still going to get him out of here and back to Ava and the others!

“Mary?” Oren mumbled, holding his head in his hands. He seemed a lot less steady than he had a second ago.

“Hold on, we’re going to get out of here!” I rushed over to the sliding door Ms. Robes had locked, thinking that surely there must be a way to trick it open. A few seconds examination of the frozen switch, however, made it clear that I had zero idea how to jimmy open an automatic door.

“Mary, I think they did something…”

“It’s okay!” I squeaked, hunting around the room for something that might help me get the door open. “You thought you were Silas for a second, but that’s okay! We’ll figure out how to fix it.”

“I was moving, but my brain wasn’t… I wasn’t in charge of my…”

I grabbed the defibrillator again and hurried to the door.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Trying to open the door!” I reared back to try to smash the glass. If I could reach through to the outside control panel, then maybe I could get it open.

Silas

Bluish, fluorescent lights, pale concrete walls; I arrived back in Oren’s body just as he was trying to squeeze through an opening in the sliding glass doorway. Mary must have overridden the door manually. I felt Oren’s consciousness slip beneath as my own mind took control of his body once more, and I shuddered—trying not to think about the moral implications of temporary supplanting of consciousness. It was for the greater good—I had the blueprints for the Phantom’s Blade and knew all the possible vehicle hangars in order of vulnerability likelihood (having discussed contingencies with Ava). The room we’d just exited looked like a containment room, but with a lot of expensive machinery attached.

“I’m back,” I said. “Sojourner’s been getting your transmissions, or most of them anyway. They’re causing a distraction…”

Everytime I spoke, the connection between our minds thinned, frayed at the edges.

“Rendezvous compromised,” I tried. “Take, I mean, steal shuttle, escape.” I gestured frantically, trying to stay calm inside.

Mary grabbed my arm, pulling me past a monstrous extractor-like machine toward a set of doors. Her wrist, I noticed, was bleeding with several fresh scratches. “Why are you talking like that? Did they scramble your word processing?”

“Words!” I said, drawing my hand across my throat. “Connection.” I pointed at my forehead.

“Words are bad for connection?” Mary said.

I nodded enthusiastically.

“Connecting to what?” Mary pressed a button and stuck her head into a hallway. When we saw no one, she hurried down the hall, still dragging me behind her. “What’s my last name?” she whispered.

“Westley!” I said. The connection wobbled, then righted itself.

“I didn’t tell Oren that,” she mused. “Who do I room with on the Sojourner?”

“Sarge.”

“What was the first assignment you gave me as an assistant chronicler?”

“Poetry collection!”

She paused and studied my face with the same kind of focus she applied a particularly difficult restoration. “Silas?”

I nodded enthusiastically.

Shock made her face go slack. “Did they catch you and drain your brain? Did they put you in Oren’s head?”

“No...uh.” I struggled to think of how to summarize the boggling turn of events. “Ava has technology,” I said. I placed my hands over my head like a helmet, then pointed at Mary. “Mind projection, tight-beam.” My vision flickered, like a hangover headache throbbing with every syllable.

Mary blinked. “Didn’t study that in U. Okay.”

We took off running down the hallway. I followed, awkwardly at first as I regained control of my limbs.

Mary

Silas was in Oren’s head? Ava had more experimental tech she hadn’t told me about?

Now wasn’t the time. I’d worry about all of this later. For now, I just had to get Oren/Silas out of here.

The hallway Silas found was uncomfortably narrow, like a secret servant’s tunnel built into a mansion. It was just wide enough that Oren and I could have walked shoulder to shoulder. So far, my theory was holding up: this place was designed for minimal staff, and all the major processes happened automatically with the shuttle system. Ms. Robes could be anywhere by now. Where would she have gone, and why? Maybe to find out what was setting off the alarm. I didn’t remember seeing her trigger it, so something else might have. But if Silas was tight-beaming-brain-projecting-whatever-it-was into this place, then the Sojourner must be trying to take action, so maybe it was the rest of the crew who were setting off the alarm!

“Is the Sojourner trying to cause a distraction?” I panted to Silas/Oren.

He held out his hand and waffled it back and forth, which I guess meant ‘sort of’. Oren’s face was sweaty and pale, but the way he was moving now definitely seemed like Silas. His eyes darted about, his chin was tucked in, and he kept his elbows close to his sides. Oren had sometimes reminded me of a big dog who didn’t realize exactly how big he was, but Silas was more like a nervous cat, analyzing every move before he made it.

“Are they close?” I asked.

He waffled his hand again.

The hallway forked, and I slid to a stop. Oren’s body thumped into me from behind. Maybe Silas wasn’t used to piloting this much mass.

“Do you have any idea if there’s a hangar we can get to?” I asked.

He pressed a hand to my shoulder and pointed to the left, taking the lead, but then he winced and squeezed his temples.

“Silas?” I whispered.

His whole body shuddered, and then he blinked his eyes open in confusion. “Mary, how did we get out here? What did they do to my head?”

“Oren?”

He felt for the wall, trying to steady himself. “I keep blacking out and—”

“Silas is projecting himself into your head!”

He squinted at me. “He what?”

“Just keep going!” I pushed him further in the direction Silas had tried to go. “I think he knows how to get out of here!”

Silas

The connection wavered, hard. I opened my eyes in the secret room aboard the Sojourner. There was a familiar, cool weight in my hand and I realized I was holding one of Sage’s handguns. I had a faint, dreamlike memory of her pressing it against my palm. I was alone in the room, but a security monitor had been swivelled into my line of sight. In front of me I could see the whole Sojourner crew on CCTV camera—in cuffs, in the hallway. A dozen Heartless were being taken away on stretchers and a dozen more lay sprawled and motionless, clustered around the ship’s chokepoints.

A Heartless officer paced up and down the row of bound crewmembers. My friends looked ragged, yet proud, injured yet defiant. Sage and Kal were wounded, burns blackening their clothing where Heartless bolts had struck them. Ava looked on the verge of unconsciousness. The officer examined their zip-ties periodically. Time, not enough time, I thought. Only a matter of “when” before they discovered me, stowed away in Sarge’s hidden room.

Mary

Oren grunted and staggered into me, and I tried to catch him, but mostly ended up being sandwiched between him and the wall.

“Silas?” I mumbled, my voice muffled. “We’re further down that hall, and then we took a right.”

He jumped upright and headed back the way we’d come. I guess Oren and I took the wrong turn.

Alarms whining in the background, we made it through a few more slim passages before the hallway broadened and ended at another set of automatic glass doors, though this glass was only semi-transparent and looked vacuum-grade. Exactly the kind of glass that might be used for a door that opened to a space shuttle hangar. Through the foggy glass, we could see the fuzzy outlines of a few people moving around. Was Ms. Robes in there? Least of all, there might be several Heartless like the man with the mechanical jawbone who’d handled me and the other prisoners.

Beside me, Silas shook out Oren’s shoulders and cracked his knuckles.

Silas

Six pilots. All armed and armored in classic, sharp scarship style, all with their helmets under their arms. The hangar was cramped, barely room for three haulers. This particular room looked more like a storage warehouse, every corner stacked high with crates and storage modules.

I charged the group, as quietly as possible, weaving between box stacks. I wanted to surprise them if I could, frighten them if not. I skirted the group so that their leader had his back turned to me. They seemed to be in the midst of their flight brief, about to board their ships. As the squad leader reached up to place his helmet on his head, I leapt from hiding, locked my arm around the officer’s neck, snatching his pistol and gunning down two of the other pilots.

The other pilots’ blasters flashed and sputtered, and the struggling officer went limp. In a surge of energy, I took a page from the crazy gray-scrub lady and planted my food in his back, shoving him at the nearest pilot. With a thud, the surprised pilot stumbled backward and gratefully accepted a fiery bolt in the chest from my blaster.

Four down, two to go. I rounded a pile of crates and opened fire. The gun jammed, and rather than wrestle with it, I pivoted like a baseball shortstop and hurled the defunct weapon at a short, bald scarship pilot. The pistol struck him squarely between the eyes. His head snapped back and he fell to the ground, a dazed look on his face.

The sixth and final pilot let loose a series of shots, striking my—Oren’s— shoulder. A flame of pain erupted down my arm as Heartless extraction energy rolled through our nerves, but I gave it hardly a thought as I lunged to one side, tipping over a crate. Massive canisters rolled out onto the flight-deck. I picked one up, and turned to the pilot so he could see the words stenciled in block red letters across the curved steel.

EXPLOSIVE: HANDLE WITH CARE

The pilot may have been a heartless fool, but he was no idiot. His eyes widened and he turned, sprinting for the door. I followed, lunging with the gas canister over my shoulder.

I had to find some way to catch up to him, or he’d send up an intruder alarm, If the pilot made it to the command center, he could redirect the alarms to lock-down, and it might be impossible to override the hangar airlock. I saw him disappear through the doorway and suddenly heard Mary’s voice, followed by a gargled shout and a thud.

“CLEAR!”

I rounded the corner to see Mary holding the defibrillator over the pilot, who collapsed on the ground in front of her.

Mary

I bundled the defibrillator paddles into my arm and hurried after Silas, who was sliding open the door of a small shuttle that looked like a repurposed mining pod. “I’ll stay. Until escape.”

I climbed in after him, ducking through the small porthole. “I’ll need to fly it myself?”

He turned and gave me an odd look. It took me a few seconds to guess what he might be thinking.

“I know I piloted my own ship before, but… Well, you did meet me after I crashed.” I slid the porthole door shut after us and locked it in place, and the vacuum seal hissed into place. “Piloting away from Scarships is another whole matter!”

“Trouble on Sojourner.” Silas gripped the doorframe as he ducked into the cockpit, and I wondered if it was because he was about to switch back. “Oren pilots.”

Oh, of course! Oren was a racer before joining the Sojourner. If any of us would be good at piloting away from Scarships, it would be him.

I squeezed into the space behind the pilot’s chair as Silas adjusted it to Oren’s frame. Booting up the engine, we coasted through the airlock seal, its stretchy pink plasma washing over the windshield and snapping out of view as we passed into clear voidspace. The stars were clear and bright, and the black vacuum between them seemed peaceful to me. There was nothing but the sound of the thrumming engine and the minute creaks of the steering joystick as Silas adjusted our trajectory.

A reddish haze colored part of the shuttle’s hood, and I wormed around Silas to peer through the corner of the windshield, trying to see behind us. The joystick creaked as Silas briefly angled the shuttle so that I could see.

The base which I assumed we had come from was relatively small, about the size of one of the original Earth moon colonies. It was on a moon, too, but much smaller than the first Earth’s moon. A red dawn crawled across its pitted surface, and as we rose away from it, the spacescape behind it came into clearer view.

I saw the shattered suns, two red giants with blindingly brilliant cracks webbing across their surface, and in between them was what I initially assumed to be a gap in the stars. But as we flew, and the edge of one of the suns shifted behind it in orbit, I saw the outline of a sphere of the darkest darkness I’d ever seen. The black hole that had shattered the suns. Wisps of scarlet solar flares licked from the suns’ surfaces and bled toward the black hole like watercolor paint coiling in a glass, and spiraling waves of asteroids, dwarf planets, and space junk moved in an inevitable glacier progression towards the black hole, culminating in a glittering ruby accretion disk that warped around the black hole’s gravity well. That Scarship base, along with everything else they’d built here, would someday be dragged into that, too.

Buttons clicked on the dashboard monitor as Silas entered coordinates. “Wait for signal. Heartless on Sojourner. Good luck.”

He shivered like a chill had just run down his spine, and then he frantically glanced around the cockpit. “Mary? What... We’re in space now!”

“Oren!” I said, squeezing back to the entrance of the cockpit. “Silas is back at the Sojourner, because I think there are Heartless aboard, so we have to get to it and wait for their signal! I think Silas wants us to stay away in case they can’t beat the Heartless, so we need you to fly us to those coordinates!”

He stared at the coordinates on the screen, then scratched through his beard. “Right.” His hands hovered over the controls, wafting back and forth as if he was trying to find something. He swiveled toward me. “Why am I the one who needs to fly?”

“Because… you know how to fly well?”

“Oh.” He studied the controls for a few seconds longer, then turned back to me. “Do I? Are we sure? Are we just… assuming that I do?”

“You grew up racing in the Asteroid Rally!”

“I… what?”

“The Asteroid Rally? With Kal?”

He stared at the wall. “I don’t remember that.”

“Did they… did they take those memories?”

“You’re sure I did that?”

“Yes!”

“Then I guess they must’ve.” He rose from the pilot’s chair, though he had to hunch so he wouldn’t hit his head on the ceiling. “You should fly. You can, can’t you?”

“Yes, but…”

He paused where he was. “I can try, but unless the old muscle memory kicks in, maybe I don’t know everything I need to know. But you know there’s nothing missing from your head.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay.”

Silas

The Sojourner was a complete mess. I opened my eyes and ripped off the silver helmet. Smoke and sparks filled the air of Sarge’s secret lab, a gaping hole in the hidden door before me. I slid from the chair and shuffled over to the hole, peering into the old armory and holding the handgun tight with both hands.

I glanced over my shoulder at the CCTV, but it was on the fritz. Careful not to knock anything off the shelf, I pushed the door open. The hinges squeaked softly. I switched the safety off my blaster and stepped out into the armory. I had to hope that the crew had not been taken aboard the scarship yet. I looked around the room for inspiration, literally and figuratively. If I was gonna win this fight, I’d need all my wits about me, especially back in my old body.

As the plan formed in my mind, I began grabbing supplies. First I disconnected one of the mist-machines hooked up to the plant shelves. I cranked the hydraulic supplier up to 11. When I overrode the timed “watering” schedule, the array of hoses which normally sprayed a controlled mist over the plants, would now become the world’s most overpowered fog machine filling the entire armory with fog. Next, I reached into the plant wells and redirected the IR sensors and imaging scopes to point out toward the armory instead of down at the plants. Then I took an info cable and hooked up the automated plant-monitor, through the hole in the hidden door, into the chair room and up to the Monitor that had previously shown CCTV. The cable almost didn’t reach between the two rooms, but I made it work. Next, I pulled up the camera’s driver software on the monitor.

After a few adjustments to the code, the monitor now showed a color-schemed thermo-image of the old armory. Perfect. I slid the monitor till it was right next to the smoldering hole in the door.

Now it was time to bait these Heartless scum.

Ava

My wrists burned, trying to wriggle from the steel zip ties. I could only imagine how red and bleeding they were. Sage lay in the fetal position, her hands bound behind her on the floor next to me, barely conscious and bleeding from her shoulder. They had not subdued her gently. The others were relatively uninjured, like me, stunned by scorching blasts but otherwise protected by their armor. Where was Silas? My mind flooded with intrusive visions of his gruesome demise. No doubt he was bleeding out in the propulsion center.

The stubborn old man wouldn’t have stood a chance. I cursed inwardly. All I wanted was my Oren back. Now I’d just brought further tragedy. I struggled against the weight of guilt, threatening to drag me spiraling into despair.

“EAT MUFFINS, YOU HEARTLESS TURDS!” screamed a voice from around the corner. I turned just in time to see Silas round the hallway, then stop like a deer in the headlights as seven chunky armored Heartless (cyborg-limbed, cobbled spare-parts, massive shredders attached to their backs) turned their submachine guns in his direction.

I swore under my breath. Glad to see he was somehow still kicking, horrified that I was about to watch the fool get himself mowed down.

Just as they opened fire, Silas darted out of sight with a surprising display of dexterity. The Heartless followed, two of them staying guard. They communicated silently and invisibly, or perhaps they were of one destructive mind.

As they disappeared around the corner, I heard a sharp hissing sound, smoke or steam or something pouring around the corner. The sharp staccato of gunfire echoed through the ship.

Mary

I double, triple, and quadruple checked the coordinates as we approached. So far, no scarships had been following us, but I’d seen blips on the monitor as inspiration energy spiked in other areas around the Shattered Suns. Whatever distraction the Sojourner had arranged, at least it was working for us. Somewhere behind me, Oren was lying on the floor, tossing one of the cheap canvas slippers the Heartless had given us over his head and catching it like a ball. He’d been doing that for several minutes.

“Do you think I’m missing a lot of my memories?” Oren asked.

A seam of asteroids drifted past, and I steered us partly into them so we’d have a bit of extra cover in case a scarship came by. “I don’t think so. Ms. Robes had a lot of your mind mapped.”

A tiny asteroid thunked against the windshield, bouncing off at an odd angle.

“Then again,” I added, “We don’t really know that all those maps were originally yours, just that they had been mapped at some point. And there was a lot she hadn’t mapped yet.”

He was quiet for a bit longer.

“Kal and Ava… have they been okay?”

I thought about it before answering. “I don’t think I’ve known them long enough to say for sure. I know Kal is angry because they lost you, and there’s tension between him and Ava. Kal’s a lot easier to read. I think Ava misses you, but she… she didn’t move on exactly, but she…”

“She carries on,” he supplied. “She’s good at that. She has to keep things moving for the benefit of the crew.”

“Yeah.”

“Is everyone else still there?”

“Sarge, Vedod, and Silas?”

“That’s them.” His slipper thunked against the ceiling, and he spluttered as it landed on his face. “I think I might be missing a few memories about them, but I know who they are.”

His scrubs rustled as he hopped to his feet, poking his head into the cockpit to see over my shoulder. “Are we close? Any idea if they’re okay?”

I checked the coordinates, double-checked them again. “I think we’re here.”

We surveyed the cool backness outside, but there was nothing. No Sojourner. Just some stray drifting asteroids and the Shattered Suns burning in the far distance.

“They’re coming.” Oren clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. I know they’ll be here.”

Silas

I picked off the first three Heartless like turkeys from my hiding spot back in Sarge’s secret lab, using the monitor to see the bright orange humanoid blobs through the fog as they pursued me into the old armory. My blaster bolts sent them flying, unconscious, against the far wall. I could only imagine their stunned expressions as they turned the corner, expecting a creaky old man and instead finding an impenetrable wall of blaster-ridden fog.

Unfortunately, the Heartless are not so thick headed as they are evil, and the other four troopers got wise and stayed out of the room. I could hear them muttering to each other, forming a plan to storm my holdout. I could only hope and pray that my excursion to the crew had not been pointless, that someone had gotten my gift.

Ava

The muffled blaster fire pulsed down the corridor, and my eyes began to well up with tears as visions of Silas mowed down by Heartless guns came to my mind. I quickly bit back the emotion; this was no time to break down.

I almost didn’t see Sage frowning at me. No, she was frowning past me, at something behind me. I wriggled around so I was staring the other way, at the wall. There was a scorched dent where one of Silas’s blaster-shots had struck the paneling. I almost cursed him for shooting so close to the crew, but then I saw what Sage was looking at—a thumb-sized chip of steel, embedded in the plastoid wall like a playing card into a watermelon rind. How had he launched the razor blade? Silas was a madman—I wouldn’t put it past him to somehow embed the blade inside the glassine blaster bolt.

I turned back to Sage, who nodded grimly and then slumped over, moaning in a dramatic display of agony. The heartless both turned towards her for a moment—but a moment was all I needed. I sidled towards the wall, my back to the steel chip, and slid the back of my head along the wall, knocking against the flat-side of the steel chip. It took a few careful nudges before it worked free from the plasteel and dropped down into my hands, bound behind my back. I curled my wrist, catching the blade in the palm of my hand and began quietly working the edge up and down against the zip tie, cutting my hand at the base of my thumb, but also etching into the zip cuffs. With one sharp wrenching of my arms, the zip ties snapped and I leapt into action.

The two Heartless guards turned around too slowly. I kicked one in the knee, wrangling him in a chokehold and prying his blaster from him in one motion.

After a momentary struggle (and three blaster fires), the two henchmen were down, subdued by blaster burns and the enthusiastic Kal-and-Vedod-trademark body slams—and I had Sage free. Her left arm was badly wounded, but there was no time for a tourniquet, she shouldered a blaster and went off, following the sound of gunfire. I turned to Vedod and Kal. It was time to take back the ship.

Once I had them free, we ran to the propulsion center, careful to take the back route to avoid whatever situation was happening in Sage’s armory. We entered the room to a wall of blinking green lights. Bless Silas, he’d prepped everything exactly how I’d hoped. While we were busy getting our rear ends handed to us by the boarding party, a whole row of inspiration canisters had cooked themselves up to a feverish slag. A fermentation process. What once had been normal inspiration canisters from our most recent artifact (a crazy book of poetry from Earth 2, traded from the Centennial Hawk for a jar of antique scarabs) was now a row of “mystery” explosives, trademarked by our expert, Vedod. I handed them to him one at a time as he loaded them up into a detonator chain. We hoisted our blasters and made for the door.

Five brand new Heartless raiders were waiting for us in the hallway. By some lucky miracle, they only hit Kal in the torso, knocking him back into us, but otherwise leaving him winded yet unharmed. His chest-plate maintained its structural integrity admirably. As he fell back, I opened fire over his shoulder, sending the Heartless scrambling back for cover.

Kal cursed and let loose a handful of shots, taking down one of the fleeing.

“I’ll circle around,” Vedod said, ducking back into the propulsion center and making for the far door.

“Make for the airlock instead,” I said, pointing at the slag canisters. “We’ll draw them further out and pick them off. We have to disengage. Now.”

Vedod nodded grimly and disappeared around the corner. Kal scowled at me.

I shrugged and looked around. What in the world was taking Sarge and Silas so long? Kal was right, we could really use a hand here.

Silas

I’d made a grave error. The fog began pouring into the hidden room, condensing on the monitor and making me almost as blind as my assailants. In a few moments, as my accuracy dwindled, they would notice and become bolder invaders. I tried to clear the watery screen with the cuff of my sleeve, but my hands were shaking. A blaster bolt shot right past my arm, shearing a chunk from the plastoid wall just over my right shoulder. I answered fire towards the door, trying to keep track of the orange blobs on the screen. This was not going well anymore.

I ducked beneath the door as the blasterfire intensified, but then peeked over the edge as I realized the blasterfire was no longer focused on my direction, but going wild, as if the shooters were distracted or something.

Sage strode through the fog, yanking the door open and extending a hand to me. “Nice distraction,” she said.

“I see you got my present?”

“Difficult to ignore when your crewmate shoots razorblade at you.”

“Fair enough. Where are the others?”

“Still in hallway. Come on. We are late for rendezvous.”

An explosion rocked the ship. Sage turned, disappearing through the doorway. I went after her, only to be greeted by a smug looking Vedod, holding the airlock lever in the down position. Ava and Kal rounded the bend, looking haggard yet relieved to find us. From the window by the airlock, we watched as the boarding patrol scarship “disengaged” via one of Vedod’s explosive concoctions and came apart in the void. At first the explosion appeared normal, but as expected from an inspiration slag bomb, the unexpected happened. At first it seemed that the ship blurred, but it became clear that the blurring was simply the ship’s broken pieces spinning at an incredible rate. Then a flood of light burst from each affected segment. As each plume of fire quickly died to orange (fueled briefly by the oxygen on board), it seemed to suddenly slow down in time. Then, seamlessly, I realized that the plumes were not explosions but fiery-red trees, bristling with autumn leaves.

The remains of the scarship, now a small, dismembered forest, floated slowly away from the Sojourner off into the void, its many leaves frosting gray in the vacuum.

Mary

A blip of burning orange light briefly blocked out a cluster of stars in the distance. I blinked and squinted at it, but it was gone. “Oren. Oren, did you see that?”

He leaned over into my half of the cockpit, shoulder bumping against the back of my head. “No, what?”

“There was a… a weird thing over there. Like a tiny sun-explosion.”

“Okay?”

An incoming transmission bannered across the display, from the Sojourner’s wavelength. My heart skidded against my chest as I tapped frantically to open it.

“Sojourner to runaways,” Kal’s voice fizzed through the speakers. “We’re still alive, you alive?”

“Yes!” I cried, but forgot to hit the talk button at first. “Yes, yes, we’re alive and Oren is here!”

“Kal?” Oren cried, leaning even further on top of me as he tried to get closer to the monitor. I scrunched my head into my shoulders.

“Oren!” Kal’s voice crackled. “That… you… dish…”

“I think the Sojourner’s dish got damaged,” I said.

“...gonna kill this thing. Oren! Wave makes you sound like a middle-aged fart. You get old in scarship jail?”

“You finally get some hair on your chest?”

“‘Least I didn’t spend the last year getting flabby on heartless jail food.”

“He’s mad he always lost fights,” Oren explained.

“Give us about ten minutes,” Kal said. “Mary, stay back when you dock. I’m gonna deck this guy as soon as the door opens. Oh, you’re okay too, right?”

“Yes, I’m just very ready to get back. I don’t think I’ll mind rooming with Sarge now.”

“What’s wrong with… No, okay. But why not now?”

“There’s scarier stuff out there.”

“Ha! Don’t tell her that. She’ll get jealous.”

Silas

Thirty seconds from rendezvous. My stomach was a clenched knot of anxiety and anticipation. In moments we would be together again, a family once more. Mary, Oren, finally. At first I could distract myself with the practical affairs. Heartless bodies to jettison, wounds to tend to, small fires to put out. But now there was just the silent approach to Oren and Mary’s escape shuttle.

An indicator on the com-panel beeped. There was an incoming transmission from an encrypted source.

“That’s probably the Washburn and company, to let us know how the asteroid and ambush went,” I said to Ava standing next to me. “Put it on hold for a moment.”

The shuttle docked, the airlock pressurized with a loud hiss. The doors slid aside, and Mary and—

Our jaws dropped. Ava darted forward, yanking Mary away from the strange man looming behind her in the dim depths of the stolen Heartless shuttle.

Oren—the random bloke who was not Oren—faltered, pausing in the doorway, confusion and bewilderment on his face. Off to the side, Sage’s good hand came to rest on the grip of her pistol. I elbowed her and approached the man.

“Who the heck is—” Vedod said.

“Stay back Silas!” Ava shouted.

Mary clawed at Ava’s arm, evidently in pain from her iron grip. “What’s going on? It’s just Oren!”

Red-faced, Kal cocked his blaster and jabbed it toward the strange man. “Oren’s still in there, right? Get out of the way!”

The strange man shot a quick look behind him. “There’s… It’s just me, Kal!”

“Kal, put the gun down!” Mary cried.

“It’s me!” the man pleaded, raising his hands in the air. “Kal, why don’t—”

“Shut up!” Kal wedged the blaster in his shoulder, ready to fire.

“KAL!” Ava bellowed. Her voice rang throughout the airlock, and all fell into silence.

The man locked eyes with her, and the confusion and panic softened as tears rose in his eyes. “Ava.”

I watched as Ava swallowed, visibly restraining herself from whatever complex emotions she was experiencing. “I don’t understand.”

“Why don’t you recognize me?” the man said softly.

“Because you’re not Oren!” Kal exploded.

Sage snapped into motion, marching briskly across the room and twisting this imposter’s arms behind his back, cuffing them in place with the same zip cuffs she and the others had recently escaped from. “Get back in the shuttle.”

“Ava!” Mary finally pried her arm free from Ava, whose arm fell slack at her side.

The man who was not Oren glanced around at all of us, eyes wide and questioning. “It’s me! Ava, I don’t understand either, but—”

“Get. Back. In. Shuttle. Now.” Sarge’s blaster was raised now, steady and calm.

Ava looked on with placid despair, the weight of sadness and disappointment thick in her voice. “It’ll be fine, everyone just... Just... It’ll be okay, we just need to… figure out what’s going on…” She trailed off.

Perhaps it was because I had been inside Not Oren’s body mere hours ago. Perhaps it was his kind face, disfigured with disappointed confusion. Or perhaps it was his heavy-set shoulders suddenly shaking with the overwhelming emotion coursing through him, but I abruptly felt his sorrow, deep bafflement, and grief, thunderous to my bones as the airlock door closed, shutting him off from the crew.

All eyes turned to me.

Vedod found his voice first. “You never looked in a mirror, did you?”

“Ahem!” A voice behind us said. We turned, and the monitor had flickered to life with an encrypted transmission. It was a recorded transmission, not a live feed, indicating that the origin of this tight-beam was too far away to sustain real-time conversation.

The Heartless woman in purple scrubs, the same who attacked Mary, stood in front of the camera, like a politician about to address the nation. Her forehead had a bandage slapped across it, somewhat undercutting the smug intensity in her eyes.

“You have something I want,” she said. It took a moment to realize that I knew the man standing to her right. Even with the slicked back hair, and his emotionless expression, the keen angle of his mouth was unmistakable.

Ava laid a hand on my shoulder, whether to seek comfort or to steady herself, I couldn't tell.

“And I have something of yours…” the lady in scrubs said. She smirked, and the feed cut to darkness.

The End

The intrepid crew of the Sojourner will return in the Spring of 2022.