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  “That’s your first warning, dipshit,” she says, nodding toward the green gas as it wafts away. “Or I guess it’s my first warning since you jacked my gloves.”

  She holds her hand out expectantly. I peel her gloves off and give them to her. A red welt encircles each of my wrists from where the fabric tried to cut off my circulation. Claudia throws my gloves at me, smacking me in the face with them.

  “You’re an idiot, you know that?” She yanks her gloves on and examines them for damage. “I knew as soon as you promised me you wouldn’t, you’d try to pull this dumb bullshit tonight.”

  I wave the last of the gas away from my face. “What was that stuff? Do I need to be worried?”

  “It’s harmless,” she replies. “It just smells awful. It’s mainly a scare tactic. What were you thinking, Ophelia? You saw what happened to Earl a few weeks ago when he betrayed Veritas.”

  “I’m not betraying them,” I tell her. “I’m helping. I didn’t think the gloves would register my actions as traitorous.”

  “You should automatically assume that any action not sanctioned by the council or a superior officer will trigger a reaction from your gloves,” Claudia warns. “You should’ve come to me first.”

  I blink at her in surprise as she climbs into the navigator’s seat. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  7

  Claudia pulls up the Monitor on her gloves and programs a set of coordinates into it. She works so quickly, I can’t get a good look at what she’s doing.

  “You know how to fly one of these things, right?” she says, brow furrowed in concentration as she continues to work with her gloves.

  “I’ve never piloted a Nebula before, but I know the gist,” I reply. “It works the same way as a Wasp, except better. Are we really doing this?”

  “We sure are,” she says. “I wasn’t going to say it in front of the council, but I think you’re right. Quell and the others don’t know our parents like we do. Laertes can croak for all I care, but I won’t let Dad suffer anymore. Mom doesn’t deserve a second chance, but if we offer her amnesty in return for her brain, she might give in. She’s a coward.”

  “There’s only one problem here, Cloud,” I remind her. “The council said no, and the gloves already tried to stop me from piloting this aircraft. We’re both going to be worm food if we try again.”

  Claudia finishes her task on the Monitor. Then she takes my hand and rests my index finger on the print reader. I flinch, but the movement doesn’t trigger a reaction from the gloves. Instead, the Starshriek powers up. The speeder is so quiet, I don’t hear the engines, but the control lights up in technicolor.

  “Wow,” I breathe, admiring the brightly-colored panel. “This is a dream come true.”

  “Yeah, just don’t crash it.” Claudia buckles the straps around her flight jacket and pats my knee. “Let’s get going, little sister. We’ve got parents to kidnap.”

  Piloting the Nebula Starshriek is like cutting through butter with a steak knife. The ship is nearly silent as I lift it from the airfield and send it skyward. Claudia leans back in her seat as we zip toward Adrestia’s atmosphere. I glance at the navigation panel.

  “You programmed Proioxis as our destination,” I say. “I thought we’d be going to Harmonia.”

  “There’s no possible way we could land on Harmonia,” Claudia replies. “Ever since we wreaked havoc at the Academy, IA upped security tenfold. We passed by on a mission a few days ago. The whole planet is crawling with Revellae. I guess not even the wealthy are safe.”

  “Don’t you think Mom and Dad are still there though?”

  “No, I don’t,” she says. “I don’t think Mom is stupid enough to stay put where we left her. My guess is she went to the family safehouse, but we’ll check our old apartment on Proioxis first just in case.”

  “The family safehouse?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t know about it?”

  “No. We have one?”

  Claudia squints through the glass as I navigate the Starshriek through the dense fog of the disorientation shield around Adrestia. Then we finally pass into outer space. My heart swells in my chest at the sight of the expansive map of stars. Out here—where nothing is really still—is where I feel most at home.

  “Mom had a back-up plan from day one,” Claudia says. “She knew IA’s plan from the beginning. She knew the Revellae would return to Pavo eventually, and when they did, she didn’t want to have anything to do with them unless they were dead on her observation table. She convinced Dad to build a safehouse with their savings. She told him it was in case of emergencies. We hid there once before.”

  “We did?”

  She nods and leans her seat back to rest as the speeder settles into a flight path. “You were about two years old, so you probably don’t remember. One of Mom’s experiments went wrong, and she thought IA might come after her. She hid all of us at the safehouse until she was sure IA wouldn’t punish her.”

  “Did they?”

  “No, IA allowed her to get away with all sorts of illegal things,” she answers. “That’s what happens when your brain is the sole reason the government is still on top of things. Without Mom, IA would’ve collapsed a long time ago.”

  “And without Dad, Veritas would have found itself in ruins too.” I shake my head, unable to believe everything that’s happened. “Who would’ve known our family was so central to these dumb planetary wars?”

  “We are the Roses.”

  We bypass the landing port nearest to our old house on Proioxis, instead landing in our own backyard. The house we used to live in looks sad and unkempt now. The seasonal rains have warped the windowsills, turning them downward so the entire house frowns. The lawn is overrun with weeds, and Dad’s vintage gas car that came all the way from Earth is still parked in the drive.

  “Man, this place looks like a dump,” Claudia says as we climb out of the cockpit. We have to jump ten feet to the ground to get out. Claudia leaps and rolls without issue, but I haven’t done this since losing sight in one eye.

  “Give me a hand,” I tell Claudia, and when I leap, she positions herself to catch me. I land safely in her embrace, and she thumps me on the back.

  “Let’s get inside,” she says. “But be careful. Mom probably guessed that we’d come here too. If she did, she will have wired this place with traps galore.”

  My fingerprint unlocks the back door, and Claudia shudders as we go inside. I don’t blame her. This house doesn’t hold many good memories. The interior is all gray—my mother had a certain disdain for colors—and everything is coated with a layer of dust. The cleaning bot sits motionless in the corner, its outdated software unable to reboot without a human to prompt it.

  “It’s just like I remember,” I say. “Generic and cold. It’s like a robot decorated this place.”

  “More than likely.” Claudia picks up a picture frame. The screen flips through our old family photo album. “Dad’s hardly in any of these.”

  I look over her shoulder. In the rare instance my father does show up on the screen, he appears trapped in his own body. Stiff shoulders, slumped in his wheelchair, and his mouth slightly agape, as if he were attempting to smile and got stuck in a silent scream instead. My gaze shifts to my brother, the eldest of the Holmes children. I never noticed growing up how different he was from me and Claudia. In every photo, his skin has a sickly green tint to it.

  “Our lovely mutant brother,” I say. “What do you think he would’ve been like if Mom hadn’t injected him as a baby?”

  “Still annoying, I imagine,” Claudia says. “Come on. Let’s check the rest of the house and get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

  We sweep the house, starting on the first floor and working our way up. Chills crawl up my spine as we revisit our childhood bedroom, the one Claudia and I used to share. Claudia picks up a huge ratty teddy bear from the top bunk.

  “Don’t touch that,” I say. “It
’s probably full of mites.”

  “It used to be my favorite toy,” she replies. “When Mom and Dad would argue, I’d use it to cover my ears.”

  “Yeah, we had a really cozy childhood.”

  “Do you remember what it was like growing up here?” she asks, tossing the bear aside. “I swear I repressed my memories from age two to twenty.”

  “It was cold,” I recall. “Mom was always distant and distracted. The only time I ever saw her was right before bedtime. She left for work early and came home late. I don’t think I said more than two sentences to her at one time.”

  “Dad wasn’t much better back then,” Claudia says. “When did he stop talking to us?”

  “As soon as it was clear IA was going to recruit us,” I reply. “Back then, I didn’t understand why he went quiet. He never wanted us to join IA in the first place.”

  Claudia examines a corkboard mounted to the wall. Among several pictures of female athletes and airball players, her IA Academy medals of honor shimmer in the moonlight.

  “Mom was so angry when I told her I wanted to go into Defense instead of Intelligence,” she says. “She wanted all three of us to become miniature versions of herself. She got what she wanted with Laertes, but I guess you and me were always destined to become disappointments.”

  “She bullied me,” I recall. “As soon as I got the letter from the Academy, she tried to convince me to join Intelligence. When I told her I’d decided on Defense, she slapped me across the face.”

  “She did?”

  “Yeah. Why do you think I was so ecstatic to get away from this house?”

  “Let’s get out of here,” she says. “It was stupid to think Mom would come here.”

  As we turn to leave the room, Claudia gives the corkboard a long look. With one hand, she sweeps the entire thing off the wall. The pictures scatter, and the medals clang together. One of them rolls away across the floor and disappears under the bottom bunk. For a second, everything is quiet. Then the house’s alarm system goes off.

  “Go, go, go!” Claudia shouts, shoving me out of the bedroom.

  The alarm sounds like a thousand screeching birds, the ear-splitting rhythm no doubt audible from down the block. As we take the stairs two at a time, the house activates its burglar defense. Trip wires spring up from out of nowhere, and a nozzle appears in each doorway.

  “Duck!” I yell, tackling Claudia as she passes through the back door. We tumble to the ground as the nozzle ejects a thick pink foam. Some of it lands on the back of my jacket, sizzling against the fabric. I shove Claudia into the backyard. We make a break for the speeder, using the handholds along the side of the aircraft to get back in the cockpit.

  “We gotta move,” Claudia warns as I press my finger to the reader and buckle myself in. “They’re coming.”

  As the Starshriek lifts into the air, I see them: an army of Defense agents marches toward the wailing Holmes house, but it’s not the number of officers that alarms me. Each and every one of the agents has been exposed to the serum. They’re half-Revellae, half-human. Green scales coat their necks and arms. They’ve grown one to two feet higher than normal for human beings. Some of them have protrusions coming from their backs, as if their bodies tried growing wings, but their human genetics were too strong to fully overthrow.

  “Enable the guns,” Claudia says.

  “What? We’re going to kill them?”

  “This is what we do, Ophelia,” she replies. “This is how we protect the galaxy. Enable the guns.”

  The Defense officers fire. The blasts hit the cockpit and ricochet off the speeder’s protective shield. I deploy the rocket launchers, and the cockpit glows with indigo light as the speeder heats its opalite ballistics. Far above the army, I angle the Starshriek at the half-breeds below.

  “Fire,” Claudia commands.

  The Starshriek bucks as I fire the launchers. It only takes the single hit to wipe out the entire squadron of Defense officers. The massive opalite rockets hit the ground and explode in a cloud of indigo dust and pink mist. I pull the Starshriek up and away before the rubble clears, and we shoot off across the sky. Claudia enters a location into the navigation system, and the map appears on my heads-up display.

  “That’s the safehouse?” I ask, correcting the speeder’s course to follow Claudia’s directions.

  “Sure is.”

  “It’s in the mountains.”

  “It’s like you said,” Claudia replies. “Mom was always so cold.”

  The Starshriek makes short work of a trip that would’ve been hours of ground travel. As we approach the snowy mountains, frost tickles the edges of the cockpit. White clouds obscure my line of vision, and it’s only the heads-up display that keeps me from running into the side of a rock face.

  “Here,” Claudia says, pointing to a long, narrow gap in the half-frozen tundra. “The entrance should be through there.”

  “I can’t get this thing through that tiny gap.”

  “It’s the only way in,” she says. “I have faith in you.”

  “Hold on then.”

  Claudia tightens the straps that keep her in the navigator’s seat as I angle the Starshriek at the gap in the mountains. Right before we hit the rocks, I jerk the joysticks to the left, turning the speeder perpendicular to the ground. The ship passes through the rocks sideways, and the wings don’t get a scratch on them. Claudia grins.

  “I hate to say it, but you always were the best pilot in the family,” she admits. “We’re on target. Mom’s ship is already here.”

  Sure enough, a small transport ship is already parked on a flat outcrop within the mountainous cavern. Lights line the natural runway, making it easy to land the Starshriek next to the other ship. As I power down the speeder, I study the entrance to the safehouse through the cockpit glass.

  “Trust Mom to build some ridiculous bunker in the middle of a mountain,” I say. “It’s just like her.”

  Claudia unbuckles herself. “Are you ready for this?”

  “Not at all.”

  The cold hits us as soon as the cockpit opens. Shivering, I jump down from the speeder and slip on the icy rock below. Claudia catches me by the arm.

  “Careful,” she warns. “We don’t need injuries before we even get in there.”

  The safehouse entrance is a titanium door embedded in the rock face. The print reader lights up as we approach. With a look at Claudia, I press my palm to it.

  “Ophelia Holmes,” the reader chimes in a robotic voice. “DNA recognized. Permission granted.”

  The huge door slides out of place to reveal a dark hallway.

  “Claudia Holmes,” the robotic voice says as soon as Claudia’s feet touch the floor inside. “DNA recognized. Permission granted with restrictions.”

  “Of course,” Claudia grumbles. “Mom gives me restrictions.”

  A series of lights embedded in the hallway floor lead us to another door at the end of the hall. It opens without a print reading, and we step into a vast foyer. The safe house is tastefully decorated, quite unlike the house we just came from. The open floor plan allows us glimpses into the adjacent rooms. A large kitchen with state-of-the-art appliances decorates the left half of the house, while a decorative living room occupies the right side. A set of glass doors at the back of the house leads to an indoor swimming pool. Moonlight streams in and reflects off the water.

  “We’re in a mountain,” I say, wandering over to the glass doors and peering upward. “How’d Mom get natural lighting in here?”

  “Mirrors,” comes the answer from the elegant staircase.

  Claudia and I both pull our blasters from our belts, aiming them at our mother as she descends from the second floor in a silk night robe. She clicks her tongue disapprovingly.

  “No weapons in the house, ladies,” she scolds.

  I don’t lower my gun. “Where’s Dad?”

  “I’m here.”

  My father, Polonius, wheels himself into the foyer from another room. His
cheeks are plump and pink, and he’s put on some weight. He looks far healthier than when I left him on Harmonia several weeks ago.

  “My girls.” He beams, and tears spring to his eyes. “I’m happy to see you both alive and well.” He nods at our matching gloves. “You’ve both joined Veritas. I’m so proud.”

  Gertrude reaches the bottom of the stairs. I keep my gun on her at all times.

  “Dad, what’s going on?” Claudia asks. Like me, most of her attention is focused on our mother. “What are you doing here? Where’s Laertes?”

  “He’s resting,” Gertrude answers. “He’s had a long day. To answer your first question, we came here because we knew you’d come looking for us after the serum was administered. In fact, we were hoping you would.”

  “What?”

  “Girls,” Dad says. “Your mother was right all this time. I don’t know why it took me so long to see it. This serum is the future. Look at me! I’m living proof.”

  He stands up from his wheelchair and walks toward us, arms open as if to hug us. Claudia and I back away, and I reluctantly turn my gun on my father.

  “You can walk?” I ask. “Without discomfort?”

  “Thanks to your mother’s genius.”

  Gertrude lowers herself into a plush chair and crosses one leg over the other. “I administered a modified version of the serum to your father. The Revellae have self-healing abilities. The DNA Polonius received helped put his body back together.” She smiles at me, but the expression is cold and empty. “And you thought I didn’t care.”

  “What’s in it for you?” Claudia snarls. “What do you want from all this? Why brings us here?”

  “Because this is my family,” Gertrude says. “You are my daughters, and I am proud of your accomplishments. You’re both so smart. Admittedly, I hated that you both chose Defense over Intelligence, but how could I fault you when you did so well at the Academy? I was revered for my three children. People gossiped about the Holmes family at parties and events. Everyone wanted to be us. All I want is to go back to that.”