There was an unmistakable tone of sadness in her voice. “I’m glad you didn’t have to give up being a captain to help me,” I said.
“Being a captain of a Confederation ship means it was my duty to help you,” she told me. “Everyone else may forget what we’re doing here, but I won’t.”
She gave me another hug, and I said good-bye to her and Urch, and they headed out. Then we were just standing there, recovering, and no one had anything to say.
“I’m going back to my room,” I announced.
“I want to talk to you alone,” Tamret said. “Come to my room.”
• • •
When we got to her room, Tamret said, “Hold on. I’ve worked out a system so Thiel won’t disturb us.” She then proceeded to affix a note to the door that read Stay out, or I’ll punch you in your stupid face. Nice system.
Once we were alone, I felt it all catch up to me. My legs grew wobbly, and I sat down on Tamret’s bed and put my head in my hands. All along I had been aware of the stakes, but now I felt how close I had come to losing everything—my life, my mother, my world. It could have gone either way, all too easily. At this moment, I thought, I might be on board a Phandic ship, bracing myself to suffer torments and punishments I could only guess at. Or, if I was lucky, I’d be spirited off with Captain Qwlessl, who would have sacrificed her career to save my life. Even in that best-case scenario my mother and my planet lost out, and I would probably never see Tamret again.
“I almost lost everything,” I said.
“But we had a plan, didn’t we?” she said, her eyes wide. “We were going to escape together. Right?”
“Tamret,” I began, and I knew uncertainty was written all over my face.
She pushed my shoulder. “You lied to me? You wouldn’t want me to go with you?”
“They want to kill me,” I told her. “I couldn’t ask you to die or be imprisoned or be tortured. I couldn’t ask you to give up everything, including your world’s chance to join the Confederation, just so you could die on the run with me.”
“That’s my decision,” she said. “And nothing would have happened to me. The point is that you have to do what I tell you to do because as long as you’re with me, nothing is going to happen to you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. I told you. I can do anything.”
I felt my muscles tense with frustration. “You say that, but saying it won’t save you.”
She rolled her eyes at my evident stupidity. “I saved you today.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her.
She stood up, took in a long breath, and began to pace around the room. “Zeke, that hearing was not going to go your way. Everyone could see it was a big joke, which was why I decided I needed to sort of keep an eye on things.”
Now I was standing too. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You hacked into the system?”
“Calm down,” she said. “I did what I had to do. I saw the vote before anyone else. And then I changed it.”
I sat down again, terror replacing my irritation with Tamret. “What was the vote? What was it really?”
She turned away. “Zeke.”
“All of them?”
She nodded. “It was unanimous against you.”
“They’re going to find out,” I said. “Tamret, they are going to catch you.”
“I know how to cover my tracks.” She came over and sat next to me. “They may eventually figure out the final count was hacked, especially if they talk to each other about how they voted, but they won’t be able to trace it back to me.”
I looked at her. “You really can do anything.”
She grinned. “I keep telling you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I wish you wouldn’t put yourself in danger, but thank you.”
“I will always help you, Zeke. You have to believe that. But I also need you to be honest with me about your plans. Can you do that?”
“Yes.” It was all I could manage. Her fierce loyalty was almost more than I could bear.
“Do you believe you’ll be safer if you tell me everything?” she asked.
“I think I’ll either be a whole lot safer,” I said, “or in a whole lot more danger.”
She thought about that for a moment. “That sounds about right.”
• • •
About a week after the hearing Steve, Tamret and I were walking through the commons when I was approached by a humanoid with onyx-black skin and an explosion of brilliantly white hair, all of which made her look like a drow.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” she said, full of bubbly enthusiasm. “You’re Zeke Reynolds.”
“Beat it,” Tamret said. This was pretty much how she addressed most beings who came up to me, especially the female ones.
The girl turned to her and was about to say something when a collective gasp filled the space. I looked around. Everyone, for as far as the eye could see, was now turned toward their nearest video monitor or looking at a video feed on a data bracelet. We were about twenty feet from a projected public holographic screen, but people stood in the way. Steve and I muscled our way forward, and I pulled Tamret along by her hand.
When I got close enough to see, I felt a wave of nausea sweep over me. I suddenly grew cold. Tamret must have sensed it, because she wrapped her arms around me before looking at the screen. When she saw what was there, her arms went limp.
The screens were tuned to different news outputs, but they were all showing the same thing. It was shaky footage of a battle in space between a single, small Confederation ship and three massive Phandic saucers like the one I’d destroyed. The text at the bottom of the screen identified the images as having been picked up from Phandic media broadcasts. They identified the ship as the Dependable.
I watched as the Phandic ships surrounded the Dependable and opened fire. The Dependable’s shields held, but it did not fire back as it tried to retreat, to force its way out of the confrontation. The Phandic ships kept firing, but all the Dependable did was evade. Why wasn’t the captain firing back? There was nowhere for her to go. She zipped and doubled back and broke hard to port, then starboard. I could imagine Captain Qwlessl on the bridge, issuing orders, that intense look in her massive eyes as she tried to reason her way out of the impossible. Maybe she didn’t fire because she knew it would do no good against the Phandic ships. Maybe after everything that had happened, she wanted to show them that the Confederation did not automatically turn to violence.
Whatever her reasons, they did not help her. Two more Phandic ships emerged from tunnel apertures and blocked the Dependable’s path. Then the Phandic ships unleashed the missiles. I didn’t have to count them, or even read the text on the screen, to know how many were fired. There were ten. And then a flash of light, and the Dependable was gone.
The screen was now showing images of the Dependable’s crew. I watched as the familiar faces flashed on the screen. My friend Urch. Ystip the gamer. Captain Qwlessl. All of them dead because they had defended me, because I had refused to stand and face the punishment the Phandic Empire was so desperate to unleash.
“We need to go, mate,” Steve was saying, pulling on me.
I snapped out of my sadness and saw that it was now me on some of the screens. They were talking about me. Trillions of beings, all over the Confederation, were looking at my picture and deciding that this either was or wasn’t all my fault. I had no idea which way the majority would swing, but this was one vote Tamret couldn’t hack.
I let Steve and Tamret pull me away. Steve was muttering, “This is really bad,” over and over again. Tamret was whispering to me, telling me she was so sorry about my friends. And then the drow girl was in front of us, and she was pointing. Maybe she was mad because Tamret had sent her packing, and maybe she was just an idiot whose opinion changed with the
wind, and maybe she was outraged that a Confederation ship, full of Confederation heroes, had been destroyed because I would not give the Phandic Empire what it wanted.
“It’s him!” she shouted. “It’s Ezekiel Reynolds! He’s the one who caused all of this!”
I let Steve and Tamret pull me along, but I felt all their eyes on me, I felt their hate, the hundreds of beings on the commons, the thousands on the ships, and from across the stars the millions and millions and millions who now blamed me for everything bad that had happened that day and everything bad that was to come.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
* * *
Steve and Tamret stayed with me for a long time, but eventually I sent them away. I wanted to be alone. I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, while Charles lay on his own bed, holding his data bracelet in both hands and reading news updates. Every once in a while he would tell me about some latest development or opinion, but I didn’t want to hear it. My friends were dead because my enemies wanted to hurt me. If I had turned myself in, they would be alive and I would be dead. There were no should-haves, no mistakes I’d made that I wished I could undo, but I felt miserable and furious and helpless.
I heard Charles say, “Everyone thinks the Confederation has no choice but to declare open war.”
“And you think it’s my fault?”
“It’s human nature—or sentient nature, I suppose,” he said. “People want someone to blame. That doesn’t make it your fault.”
“Do you think I should have turned myself in to the Phandic Empire?”
“You could have. But the Phandic Empire might have chosen not to kill the Ganari and attack the Dependable. They did those things. Not you.”
I grunted. I appreciated the pep talk, but I wasn’t in the mood for it, and I was still not ready to let him off the hook for his weeks of being unpleasant.
A few hours later there was a knock at our door. Charles answered and saw Tamret and Hluh standing outside. Tamret pushed past him and came into the room. “Get out,” she said to Charles. “I need to talk to Zeke.”
“This is my room,” he said.
“Fine. Let’s go, Zeke. We need Steve anyhow.”
We got Steve, and then Tamret led us all into the classroom, which was empty now. We took seats facing one another, and I waited to hear what she had to say. My heart was pounding. I knew it wasn’t going to be good news.
“We’ve learned something,” Hluh said. “Something huge. Tamret did some amazing work.”
“It was your idea,” Tamret told her. “I would have had no idea where to look if you hadn’t suggested it.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, trying to shake off the grief long enough to concentrate. “Are you two actually friends for real?”
Tamret stared at me. “Is that a problem?”
I held up my hands in surrender. “No, but I officially give up trying to understand anything about anyone.”
“Smart move,” Tamret said. “So, Hluh had the idea of looking into how we were selected. We knew the randoms weren’t random, but we still didn’t know how we were chosen.”
“I’m not really in the mood for this right now,” I said.
“This isn’t about moods,” Hluh said. “It’s important.”
“Please listen, Zeke,” Tamret said, her voice now gentle.
“It occurred to me that maybe not everyone on the selection committee was necessarily involved,” Hluh said. “Maybe some of them thought you were random, and some were behind the intentional selection. I thought if I could trace the choices to a being or beings, it would tell me something.”
“That is clever,” Steve agreed. “And what did you find out?”
“Of the four randoms, three names were changed after the selection committee went missing. Three out of four of you weren’t even approved by the selection committee.”
“Wait,” I said. “So which one of us was originally part of the list?” Then I understood. “It was the Ganari, wasn’t it? That’s why the shuttle was destroyed.”
“Wrong again,” said Hluh. “It was you.”
I felt my hands gripping the side of the chair, as if I might fall over. “Me?” How could it be me? Was it really true that of all the randoms, I was the only one who really was random? And why did that make me feel so weird? Did I need to be special? Ever since leaving Earth, I’d felt like I was at the center of everything, and now it looked like I wasn’t important at all. It was a stupid way to feel, but there it was.
“So, me and you,” Steve said, pointing at Tamret, “and that Ganari were all picked later. You said you know who did it?”
Tamret nodded. “Yeah, and this is the insane part. The being who hacked into the system and changed the names of the original randoms—it was Dr. Roop.”
• • •
I couldn’t keep up with all of this. “Dr. Roop is behind some kind of conspiracy?”
“It looks that way,” said Hluh. “Tell him the rest.”
“Dr. Roop picked the three of us. He’s the one who wanted three randoms with some kind of criminal experience. He tossed the other three, which means he made a deliberate decision to keep you, Zeke. And the crazy part is, I think he wanted us to find out. Actually, he wanted you to find out, Zeke.”
“What?” You can always count on me to ask the really insightful questions.
“I know it sounds crazy, but the password protecting the file, which I exposed when I cracked it, was an anagram of your name in Former letters.”
“Which means what?” I asked.
“It’s a message,” Hluh said. “From him to you. I think he’s saying that this information is a secret, but he doesn’t want it to be a secret to you.”
“If Dr. Roop wants us to know something, why doesn’t he come out and tell us?” Steve asked.
“I don’t know,” Tamret said.
“Maybe he can’t,” Hluh suggested. “Maybe he’s afraid he’s being monitored.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “We’ve had private conversations before.”
“Maybe he wants us to figure it out for ourselves,” Tamret said.
That made no sense. If there was important information we needed to have, he would tell us. Wouldn’t he? I wished I could make the pieces fit together, because I was suddenly feeling like the one being in authority on Confederation Central was no longer someone I could trust.
• • •
Dr. Roop canceled our classes for the next few days. As sad as I was about the death of Captain Qwlessl, I knew he must have been devastated. During those days I tried to keep earning points, but the hostile stares I received in the game room made me uncomfortable, and I lacked the concentration I needed for the flight sim. My heart wasn’t in it. Nayana said, perhaps self-servingly, that the crew of the Dependable would have wanted Earth to succeed, and I suspected she was right, but I was going to need some time.
There was a memorial service for the crew of the Dependable, and thousands of beings went. I wanted to go too, but Dr. Roop said I needed to stay away, and I knew he was right. If I was there, people would be so busy blaming me they would forget they were there to honor the beings who had died.
I found myself wishing I could talk to my mother. I don’t think I understood until then just how much Captain Qwlessl’s looking after me had allowed me to set aside my worries about my mom. Now the captain was gone, and my mother was impossibly far away, her condition a complete mystery to me. Maybe she had already started to deteriorate. Maybe she would be in a wheelchair, or worse, by the time I got home. I didn’t want to think about it, but it started to seem less and less likely we were going to be able to get Earth into the Confederation, and that meant that all the time I was leaving her on her own was for nothing.
Mostly I spent time with Steve and Tamret, or sat by myself, or even hung out with Charles. Now that Ms
. Price’s mandated freeze-out was over, Charles acted like he desperately wanted to be my friend. He tried to give me space, but he also made it clear that he was ready to talk to me if I wanted.
He started to grow on me during those days, about the things that made no sense to me: the Phandic need for revenge, the plots within the Confederation, all of it. I didn’t tell him about Dr. Roop—I wasn’t ready to go that far—but I wanted to hear what he thought of the rest. This stuff concerned him, too. Most of all, he was smart, and he might see something that I couldn’t.
“I just can’t figure it out,” I said, at night maybe five days after the Dependable was destroyed. “It’s like everyone is playing a deep game, and I can’t see it.”
Charles sat up quickly. “You’re right. You are precisely correct. That is exactly what is happening.”
“Okay,” I said, squinting as I tried to figure out why he was so excited about this. “I’m glad you agree. I guess.”
“I do agree. Get up. We need to go.”
“Go where?” I asked, not really caring.
“To the girls’ room. To see Nayana. We need her.”
“For what?”
“You have hit upon it exactly, Zeke. This is an elaborate game, a strategic game, and we can only see some of the board and some of the pieces. We need someone who can help us see the whole thing.”
Nayana. Chess. Maybe she could help, but I wasn’t quite ready to swallow my pride and ask. “I don’t know.”
“You can never have too many friends,” Charles said.
“You can if you don’t trust them.”
He shook his head. “Zeke, you saved our lives, and we treated you unforgivably. Please let us make amends. Please trust us.”
“Why should I?”
“If you don’t believe it’s because we want to do the right thing, then at least believe it is in our own best interests. The Phands now hate humans. They hate Earth. No one in the Confederation trusts us. We are in this together whether we wish it or not.”
I believed he meant that. I got out of bed.