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  Across the port, a Defense officer aims at Tariq and fires. I whip up my own R-One and take a shot. The two blasts of opalite collide and explode mid-air. The leftover powder falls like snow, and everyone scrambles to avoid it. Once heated, opalite burns like acid.

  Tariq claps me on the back. “Thank heavens for your infallible aim.”

  “Duck, you idiot.” I yank him to the ground behind a cargo crate as the officer fires another shot. It whizzes over our heads. I fire blindly over the crate. A pained grunt tells me the shot has found a mark. “This is ridiculous. You shouldn’t be out here. You’re not trained for this level of combat.”

  “And you are?” Tariq asks. He pops his head up and another blast ruffles his hair. He ducks down again with a yelp. “You’re right. Raiding cruisers is way easier. I can’t even get a shot off. Those fuckers are too quick.”

  I pop up, take out the officer whose laser is focused on us, and shove Tariq. “Move to that next crate. I’ll cover you.”

  He scrambles toward the spot, gasping when he trips over a fallen crew member. I keep my eyes trained on the officers across the way and refuse to check which pirates didn’t make it past the port exit. At this rate, Saint Rita will have to recruit new crew members to run The Impossible as smoothly as before. We’ve already lost too many.

  Tariq slides to safety behind the crate. I duck as another blast comes my way and shoot down three more officers before joining him.

  “How do you do that?” he gasps, mouth agape.

  “Practice,” I reply. “Again. Keep your gun up. Remember what I taught you. Steady breath, steady shot. If they’re moving, fire where they’re going to be, not where they are. Move!”

  We dart to the next crate. This time, Tariq gets a few shots off. The first two miss, but the third one lands on an officer’s leg and blows him off his feet. Tariq whoops, but before he has time to really celebrate, I order him along. We scurry up the dock with the other pirates who’ve made it this far, pushing the Defense officers into the building behind them.

  The Intelligence building looms. It gleams white as Proioxis’s two suns glance off its opposite sides. Though IA mostly recruits Defense officers from Proioxis—whereas they recruit Intelligence from Palioxis—the Intelligence building here is still large enough to present a threat to our crew. Not to mention, it’s defended from the first floor all the way up to the tenth.

  As the doors slide open, my stomach leaps into my throat. For a moment, I’m ten years old again. As a child, I spent hours upon hours here after school when my mother was too busy to watch me and my father was too exhausted to parent his own children. I half-expect to see my mother, hand on her hip as she waits to scold me on the light-blue carpet in front of the Welcome Desk. When I left Proioxis, she was already the Head of Intelligence. Was she upstairs giving orders to her subordinates on how best to defend the building?

  Fast as light speed, I throw an opalite grenade through the doors right before they close. The entire port shudders as it goes off, blasting the doors and half the lobby to smithereens. Defense officers lay in pieces. The crew cheers, and Tariq claps me on the back as we advance into the building. We have a clear path now, but red lights flash at us from every direction.

  “Regroup!” I shout, and the pirates form a quick huddle around me. We’re at least twenty bodies short already. “See those red lights?” I say. “That means the building’s on lockdown. Every door is inaccessible. You need to blow them or reprogram them.”

  “How?” Faye—a girl who works in the kitchens and looks abnormal with a gun in her hands—asks me. “We’re short on opalite grenades, and who knows how to reprogram the doors?”

  “I do.” I point to the closest doorway. “Go pry the cover off that control panel.”

  Faye gives me a doubtful look but strolls across the room anyway. She struggles with the panel, yanking in all the wrong places.

  “There’s a sweet spot along the top right edge,” I instruct. “Use your fingernail.”

  She digs into the panel where I said to and pops the cover right off. “Now what?” she asks, excited.

  “The doors run off of four data disks,” I explain. “Two in the panel on this side, and two on the opposite side. We’re going to trick the disks into thinking someone’s unlocked the door from the other side. See the override function?”

  Faye checks. “Got it. It’s asking for a code.”

  I rattle off a numerical sequence from memory. Faye struggles to type it in, so I repeat the numbers slowly. All the while, I keep an eye and ear out. We’re wasting too much time. In a few minutes, Defense will call in reinforcements, and then we’re all screwed. Faye hits the enter button.

  “No good,” she says.

  “Damn it. Of course they changed the codes.”

  “What now?” Faye asks.

  The crew looks at me expectantly. Somehow, I’ve become the leader of this excursion. The privilege—or curse, depending on your perspective—isn’t mine because of my position aboard The Impossible. It’s because I know Proioxis better than anybody else.

  “Give me a second.”

  I turn away from the crew and squeeze my eyes shut, picturing my mother at her command station upstairs. She’s probably watching the security feeds from her command station. The three lines between her eyebrows will have deepened, as they always do when she’s under stress. She’s probably examining the intruders for weak spots, dents in our armor. She’s probably zooming in on the familiar face giving orders to override the control panels. She’s probably altering the codes to something she thinks a band of pirates will never be able to figure out.

  “I got it,” I declare. “Type this in, Faye.”

  I give her a new sequence, and when she hits enter, the doors slide open to the staircase. The crew cheers, and I can’t help but grin. I stow the expression quickly. We don’t have time to celebrate the tiny triumph. I want to complete Saint Rita’s mission and get back to The Impossible as soon as we can.

  “Forget the lower levels,” I shout to the crew as they storm the staircase and head up. “Go to eight, nine, and ten! Security will be tighter, but that’s where the highest levels of tech are. Take what you can carry and destroy what you can’t. Don’t shoot anyone who isn’t shooting you!”

  The order is likely fruitless. After all, we’re pirates. We’re the type of people who thrive on violence and disorder, and a lot of the crew gets their jollies by inflicting pain. In this case, they have Saint Rita’s full permission to do whatever they want, and they’re going to take advantage of it.

  Tariq pauses at the bottom of the stairs. “You coming, O? Top floor, right?”

  “No. Let’s take eight.”

  He wrinkles his nose. “Why not ten? You’re the best fighter we’ve got. You could take out those Intelligence idiots in a second.”

  “They’re not idiots, and you’re not trained for this level of infiltration,” I snap. “Which is exactly why we’re not going up there. You could get us both killed. Eighth floor, Tariq. Now.”

  It’s a solid excuse to skip the top floor. I want to protect Tariq, but I also want to avoid running into my mother. No one will be able to access the top floor anyway. Security up there is so tight, an ant couldn’t get in. I could, but the crew doesn’t need to know that.

  We follow the crew up the stairs. At each floor, a squad of Defense officers attempts to ambush us, but there’s not enough space in the narrow stairwell for a fair fight. We pick them off one by one or toss opalite grenades to take them all out at once. The building shakes and shudders as we progress upward. Near the top floors, the pirates branch out to infiltrate each level. I drag Tariq to level eight.

  There’s a reason I chose this floor. Level eight is home to the IA newbies, Intelligence cadets fresh off of graduation. I do a visual sweep. Sixty cadets—twenty from each training experience level—hover over their monitors with panicked eyes as six Intelligence instructors bark defensive codes at them. One upper level
Intelligence leader oversees the chaos. I recognize the red-faced, rotund man as Caelum Powers. Long ago, he was such a close friend of my mother’s that I called him Uncle.

  “Head honcho?” Tariq asks, aiming his blaster at Caelum. “Bye bye.”

  I knock the blaster aside and his shot goes wide. The cadets go nuts, diving in every direction, when the window shatters. “What did I just say? Don’t shoot anyone who isn’t shooting you.”

  He tackles me to the floor as Caelum fires his pistol at us. Opalite crystals—the condensed, highly-processed material that takes more times to make than simple powder—ricochet off the wall behind us.

  “Now can I shoot him?” Tariq grumbles.

  He’s one of many with the same idea. Half the crew aims at Caelum, who deploys a laser shield and angles it to deflect the blasts back at the pirates. He dives in front of the cowering cadets, protecting as many as he can. One of the Intelligence instructors hits the emergency button near the main door, and the comms system emits a high-pitched tone. While everyone else covers their ears, momentarily incapacitated by their throbbing eardrums, I grit my teeth and keep moving. It’s not the first time I’ve heard that noise.

  I cross the room to Caelum’s desk, kicking one brave cadet in the rib cage when he tries to stand up to me. IA doesn’t teach basic defense to young Intelligence workers until it’s too late. Vice versa, Defense cadets don’t learn enough about Intelligence. It’s a fatal flaw in the way IA is sectored out. With my mother in Intelligence and my father retired from Defense, I learned the importance of both.

  At the desk, I override the facial recognition software and log in to Caelum’s profile. With a few clicks, I find the program initiatives for the new cadets. Whatever they’re learning is going to be the freshest source of IA intel. I drop the files onto a fresh data disk. Right as they finish downloading, Caelum fights past the crew members guarding me and raises his pistol. At the same time, I raise my R-One. He looks at the government-issued blaster, then at my face. His jaw goes slack.

  “Ophelia?”

  “Don’t make me shoot you, Uncle Caelum.”

  The shock gets the better of him as a crew member whacks Caelum’s temple with the butt end of a blaster. Caelum drops with a thud. I pick up his pistol and tuck it in my waistband then raid his pockets. He has opalite refills and another data disk on him. I take everything and check his pulse. Still thumping. Thank the galaxy.

  Someone pulls up the emergency button, and the incapacitation tone goes quiet. I put two fingers to my lips and let out a whistle just as ear-piercing.

  “Leave the cadets!” I order the crew. “We got what we need. Fall back to The Impossible!”

  The pirates blast any remaining equipment to put it out of commission and head for the stairwell. The cadets scramble out of the way, raising their hands in surrender as the pirates pass. Two of the instructors are either passed out or dead. I hope it’s the former rather than the latter. The other four trainers stand against the wall and let us pass. They don’t want to end up like their coworkers on the floor. I give a curt nod to them. The last one—a skinny man with a trimmed mustache—spits at me. It lands on my protective vest’s reflective orange accents.

  “Fucking pirate,” he hisses.

  “Better than being a robot.”

  I turn my back on him, thinking an Intelligence instructor—even a volatile one—won’t have the nerve to attack me from behind. I’m wrong. He wraps his arm around my neck and presses against my windpipe. Automatically, I flip him over my hip, step on his low back, and twist his arm out of its socket. He howls in pain as I take the kerchief out of his front pocket and use it to wipe his phlegm from my vest. Without a word, I follow Tariq into the stairwell.

  We have to fight our way down and out. Every Defense officer within the perimeter—as well as several armed civilians—has shown up to fight us off, but the crew has collected newer, stronger weapons from the fallen officers inside the Intelligence building and we make short work of those trying to deter us from returning to The Impossible. Opalite rains in every direction, filling the air with sparkling indigo smoke. The pirates clear the dock of opponents and open up a pathway to The Impossible. Saint Rita waits in the mouth of the bay doors, feet planted and arms crossed, surveying the chaos with a satisfied smirk. Everything—including the loss of some crew members—is going as she expected.

  The remaining Defense officers fall back as The Impossible’s thrusters fire up and the cannons on the front of the ship take aim at the Intelligence building. It takes a ton of opalite to fire the cannons, and we hardly ever load them, but the Defense team doesn’t know that. They order a retreat as soon as they see the violet glow light up inside the massive guns. The lack of officers allows us the freedom to return to the ship without much threat, but the pirates ahead stumble before they reach the bay doors. Saint Rita watches from her safe place as someone fires a blaster over and over again, sending crew members flying.

  I push myself to the front of the crowd, R-One at the ready. I expect to find a highly-skilled kamikaze Defense officer in the middle of it. Instead, I see the plucky expression of an Intelligence operator who’s stolen two R-Ones off of fallen officers and is firing them willy-nilly in every direction. The kickback should put her flat on her ass, but she’s set in her stance, the butt of the blasters hammering against her shoulders. When she turns in my direction, a gasp escapes my lips. I recognize her. Our eyes meet, and she stops firing.

  Across the way, Faye raises her blaster and aims at the woman’s back. It’s a cheap shot that I can’t let her take. I fire, and the Intelligence woman flinches as the blast knocks Faye’s gun out of her hands. The crew rushes the woman, confiscates her R-Ones, then cock their weapons. Every gun is aimed at her.

  “Don’t!” I shout, shoving blasters aside. “If anyone touches her, I’ll have their head.”

  “She took out at least six of us,” a voice growls. It’s Soleil, the girl Saint Rita threatened to replace me with. She flips her platinum hair out of her eyes and nudges me in the ribs with her blaster. “Getting soft, Ophelia?”

  “We are not killers,” I say.

  The Intelligence woman scoffs. Soleil steps up to her.

  “Something to say?” Soleil asks, crushing the woman’s toes with her boots.

  The Intelligence officer doesn’t wince, but she doesn’t look at Soleil either. She stares straight at me. “Just kill me. You basically already have.”

  Her hazel eyes pierce mine, and it hurts more than getting an opalite blast to the head. Soleil and the rest of the crew shifts. If we don’t get out of here soon, the Defense officers will mount another attack. Still, I’m frozen in place until Saint Rita marches down the gangplank and into our midst.

  “What’s the holdup?” she demands.

  “O’s got a crush,” Soleil reports, shoulder-checking the Intelligence woman.

  Saint Rita scans the woman from top to bottom, taking in her short, tightly-curled hair, the mechanic glimmer in one of her eyes, and the sharp angle of her dark-skinned cheekbones.

  “Intelligence?” Saint Rita inquires.

  The woman nods.

  “Bring her aboard,” the captain orders.

  Panic floods my chest cavity and crushes my lungs. “Captain, what do we need with a single hostage?”

  Saint Rita circles around me and envelops me in a bizarre hug from behind. She flicks the safety off my R-One and forces me to aim it at the Intelligence woman.

  “Bring her aboard,” she whispers. “Or kill her. It’s your choice, Ophelia.”

  The crew waits with bated breath for my decision. I can’t move. Imprisonment aboard The Impossible is a fate worse than death for a dedicated IA agent, but I can’t bring myself to kill the woman. I lower the blaster.

  “Good,” Saint Rita says, letting go of me. “Proceed.”

  The crew understands Saint Rita means this tasks for me. Soleil hands me a pair of cuffs and smirks as I fit them around the Intelligence w
oman’s wrists. My fingers shake as I activate the lasers to prevent her from trying to escape. Mustering bravado, I square my shoulders and shove the Intelligence operator toward The Impossible. She stumbles forward. When we reach the bay doors, she makes one last half-hearted attempt to roll out of my grip. I use my body to force her inside. The pirates follow, the bay doors close, and Saint Rita takes the stage as The Impossible lifts off.

  “My friends,” the captain says, lifting her hands as if in praise. “We are triumphant.”

  Everyone cheers except me and the Intelligence operator. I lean in to whisper in her ear.

  “I’m sorry, Vega.”

  “I thought you were dead, Ophelia,” she whispers back. “This is worse.”

  3

  Usually, after a successful mission, we have a feast in the chow hall, but since today’s excursion didn’t include a rations raid, The Impossible’s crew has nothing to suck on but expired snack cakes, freeze-dried veggies, and salted jerky. My stomach is too delicate to handle anything other than water right now, but I grab a plate anyway and fill it up for the woman currently locked in my bunk. Tariq waves me down from our usual table in the chow hall, but Soleil is sitting next to him. I turn my back on them.

  “O, wait up!” Tariq catches me before I leave the chow hall. “Where are you going? Aren’t you coming to eat with us?”

  Across the way, Soleil glares at me with laser-like eyes.

  “Pass,” I say. “Be careful with her. She’s sharp.”

  Tariq glances over his shoulder. “Who, Soleil? She’s harmless. She’s got nothing on you.”

  “The captain seems to think otherwise.”

  He claps me on the shoulder. “I’ll handle it.”

  “Don’t you dare,” I say, shaking him off. “If you say anything, she’ll know I’m worried about it.”

  “Are you worried about it?”

  The wrinkle in his brow tells me he is.

  “I have to go.” I gesture with the plate. “The hostage won’t feed herself.”