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  “This isn’t what I wanted,” I say. “I never meant for them to hurt her.”

  Claudia sniffs and pushes our mother’s hair away from her face. “This is war, Ophelia. People care not for the comfort of their enemies.”

  “All I wanted was the antidote,” I tell her. “Not this. It makes us just as monstrous as them for bringing her here.”

  Our mother moans and rolls over. “For the love of the galaxy,” she says, her voice no more than a hoarse whisper. “Shut up, the two of you.”

  “I have to go anyway,” Claudia says, wiping her eyes. She locks Gertrude’s cell, but before she leaves, she whispers to me. “See what you can get out of her. I can’t take much more of this.”

  “Neither can I,” I reply. “Tell the council to get me out of this cell.”

  “Hang tight, Ophelia.”

  She leaves without a promise to free me. Once again, my mind turns to the heartlessness of Veritas’s current actions. Is no group truly good? Do we all have to resort to the horrors of torture and betrayal to win a war? I lay on my stomach and watch as my mother sleeps off the pain of her mistreatment. I’ve never seen her like this before—so helpless and hurt—but it doesn’t give me peace of mind like I thought her capture would. When she wakes up, I offer her my water canteen through the bars.

  “Is it poisoned?” she croaks, swiping it out of my hands and taking a sip before I answer. “My own daughters trying to kill me. How the tables have turned.”

  “Tell me how to make the antidote, and I’ll guarantee your release,” I offer.

  Gertrude laughs, cold and high-pitched. “Oh, please. You don’t have any pull here. You’re behind bars too, kiddo. Besides, I have a contingency plan.”

  “What’s that?” I ask with a bitter taste on my tongue. “I already tried the bars on the window. It’s a no-go.”

  “No, I don’t need to squeeze through a window,” she replies. “You idiots never searched me for a tracker.”

  As if in response to her words, the entire roof of the jail gets blown off with a bright indigo blast. I roll under my cot as the place caves in. Stone and patchwork rain down, clattering on top of the metal bed. Fighter jets roar overhead, and I catch sight of the pattern on their bellies. They’re official IA speeders, ones that haven’t been painted over with the Veritas insignia. As the debris clears, teams of Defense officers descend from a transport jet, fully equipped with battle gear. One of them aims a grenade launcher at the side of the jail as he descends, right at the opposite side of my cell.

  I scream and dive toward the far end of the cell, dragging the cot with me. I manage to turn the cot on its side, a sad little barrier between me and the grenade launcher. The officer pulls the trigger, and the grenade explodes, taking out the entire wall of mine and my mother’s cells. I cower behind the cot as they enter through the dust.

  It isn’t until the first officer is practically on top of me that I notice what’s wrong with them. They aren’t human. Like the team that attacked me and Claudia at the old house, they’ve already been injected with the serum. I stare into insect-like eyes set in a human face, frozen in place by the anomaly.

  “Bring her with us,” my mother instructs. Unlike me, she was prepared for the break-in, and she’s entirely unfazed by the jail’s destruction. “She’s my favorite experiment.”

  Rage rises within me as the half-alien, half-human officer reaches down to pick me off the floor. As her scaly fingers enclose around my arm, my instinctive Defense lessons kick in. I draw my head back then bring it forward with as much force as I possibly can, head-butting the officer in the soft spot on her forehead that isn’t covered in scales. She stumbles away, dropping her gun. I lunge for the weapon.

  “Get her!” my mother screams.

  The army surges forward. I duck behind my makeshift bunker and fire the enemy blaster for all I’m worth. No shot goes wasted. Even with one eye, I’m still one of the best marksmen in the galaxy. The frontline of my mother’s half-alien army goes down, but when I pull the trigger to take out the next wave, the gun comes up empty.

  “Shit,” I say, checking the loading compartment. “No refills.”

  An officer takes advantage of my distraction, firing a shot into the corner of the cell. The opalite bullet ricochets off the stone wall and lodges in my arm. The opalite burns like hell. I pluck the bullet out of my skin. It’s still intact, and the heated opalite is still active. I load the bloody ballistic into my blaster.

  “Better than nothing,” I mutter, firing at the officer who shot me.

  The used bullet finds its target in the torso of the opposing Defense officer. It’s not a kill shot, but the bullet finds a soft, fleshy area unprotected by the officer’s scaly skin. I hurry to find something else to defend myself with, expecting the officer to shoot again. Instead, he falls to his knees, clutching the wound in his torso. The other officers halt behind him, uneasy.

  “What are you doing?” my mother yells. “Subdue her!”

  The Defense team moves forward, but the officer on the ground lets out a bloodcurdling scream. Time seems to halt as the Defense team forgets their order to watch their comrade suffer. The officer’s skin bubbles, swelling until the green scales detach and fall off his body. He writhes on the ground, yelling his head off, as his alien features disappear. At the end of a long minute, he goes limp and breathless. When he finally looks up, his face is raw, pink, and entirely human.

  “Retreat!” my mother roars. She leaps from her cell, over the fallen Defense officer, and joins her half-alien army outside the jail. “Board your ships, soldiers! Do not allow my daughter a gun!”

  Veritas rebels finally reach the jail, but there aren’t enough of them to stop the mutant officers from freeing my mother. Vega and Claudia are among the troops, firing their blasters at the IA officers as they ascend to their ships. My mother reaches the safety of a speeder and disappears. The shields of the IA ships absorb the blasts from the Veritas guns, and the fleet shoots off into the atmosphere, leaving nothing but a wreck and their one officer behind.

  “Wait!” I demand as one of Halley’s soldiers attempts to subdue me. I wrestle out of his grasp. “You’re not gonna want to lock me up again.”

  Halley pushes through to the front of her troops. “Why the hell not? You let our one and only source go.”

  “Because I know how to stop my mother’s army.”

  9

  “He’s human again, isn’t he?”

  I’m in the med bay with Doctor Nova, Vega, Claudia, and Halley, who stands at attention near the door, looking sullen about her new assignment to supervise us. The officer I shot with the bloody, used opalite bullet lies on one of the examination tables. He’s still unconscious, but there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with him aside from the wound in his abdomen.

  Nova rubs the bags beneath her eyes. We’ve been awake since the attack in the early hours of the morning, keeping watch over the enemy officer. Nova’s been studying his blood beneath a microscope for the past hour.

  “It would appear so,” Nova replies. “There’s no trace of alien DNA in his bloodwork. It’s like his body rejected it on his own, but that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Yes, it does,” I say. “Doctor Nova, my mother has been experimenting on me since I was a toddler. I suspect I’ve been injected with multiple versions of the Revellae serum, but I never changed or morphed.”

  “So you’re immune,” Nova says. “What does that have to do with our Defense officer here? If he showed an immunity to the Revellae DNA, he wouldn’t have morphed either.”

  “I shot him with an opalite bullet covered in my blood,” I tell her. “What if my blood acted as the antidote?”

  Nova rests her forehead in her hands. “I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t think a few drops of your blood would circulate through his body so quickly. There must have been some kind of accelerant, something your blood reacted with to reverse the serum’s effects.”

  “Th
e opalite,” I answer.

  “What of it?”

  “You know how quickly it circulates through the body’s system,” I remind her. “Opalite is unpredictable and highly reactive. The substance itself varies in power and effect based on where it was created in the galaxy. Opalite that forms in higher heat has more dangerous properties. Do you still have the bullet you pulled out of his torso?”

  Nova raises a metal container. “It’s in here. I’ll have someone qualified come and dispose of it.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  I snatch the container from her and pop off the lid. The opalite bullet is warped and flattened now. The mineral has gone dark. Unheated, the indigo glow isn’t as prominent. I pluck the ruined bullet out of the container with my bare fingers.

  “Don’t!” Nova says. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

  “I’m already half-dead,” I remind her. “And this is what I do.”

  I set the opalite on Nova’s work desk and crush it beneath the container, reducing the bullet to an electric blue powder. The dust from the power stirs in the air. Nova, Claudia, and Vega immediately begin to cough. I sprinkle the mineral into a slide, slip it beneath the microscope lens, and take a look.

  “Put a mask on,” I order the other women.

  Nova passes surgical masks to Claudia and Vega. They pull them on without complaint then edge closer to me to watch what I’m doing, but Halley remains stubbornly by the door, her nose covered in her sleeve. I let Nova take the microscope.

  “Look at the structure of it,” I tell her as she peers into the eyepiece. “It’s highly unstable. Powerful stuff.”

  Claudia takes a turn to look and nudges the slide into place. A speck of opalite dust gets on her finger. She roars in pain, knocking the microscope off the table as she scrambles away. I tackle Vega and Nova out of the way as the opalite slide hits the floor and shatters. The resulting explosion blows Nova’s work desk to bits. When the dust settles, Claudia is still writhing on the ground, clutching her finger.

  I grab a bottle of Purifiers, pop the top, and shove two of the charcoal-colored pills into Claudia’s mouth. “Swallow, Cloud.”

  She forces the pills down and calms herself. I rub comforting circles against her back before checking the state of her finger. The opalite has eaten clean through the first few layers of skin. Her print is totally gone.

  “No one touch the mess,” I order as Nova approaches her catastrophe of a desk. “I’ll clean it up. The opalite doesn’t affect me like it does the rest of you.”

  “Why not?” Vega asks.

  “Because it’s already in her system,” Halley answers, surprising me. “Looks like our girl’s got a resistance to opalite poisoning as well as alien DNA. You sure you aren’t some kind of super human, Holmes?”

  “I don’t know what I am.” I wrap a bandage around Claudia’s finger. “I’ve never seen opalite react like that before. If we could bind this opalite with my blood, we could make a weapon to take out the half-Revellae armies.”

  “Fat chance,” Claudia says. “I’m not letting you bleed yourself dry for this war, O.”

  “We wouldn’t need much,” Nova interjects. She pulls on a pair of highly-protective gloves and prods through her mess of a desk. “A few vials should do it. This opalite is so reactive, it shouldn’t need much of a catalyst to work the way we want it to.”

  “Who’s going to engineer the antidote if no one can touch it?” Vega says. “Ophelia’s not a doctor or a scientist.”

  “I can guide Ophelia through the process,” Nova offers.

  “Aren’t you all forgetting something?” Claudia drawls. “We don’t have any more of this magical opalite. How do we make the antidote without it?”

  “She’s right,” I add. “I’ve never seen opalite like this. I don’t even know where IA would’ve gotten it.”

  “I do,” Halley chimes in. “Veritas has been monitoring opalite mining processes for years. We know exactly who’s mining, selling, and trading. Recently, there’s only been two ships working the asteroid belts around the outer planets, an IA official miner and one other. My guess is this ‘magical’ opalite comes from out there.”

  “What other ship goes out there?” I ask, intrigued. “No one ever flies out to those belts. It’s too dangerous.”

  Halley gives me a shit-eating grin. “Saint Rita doesn’t think so.”

  “I can’t believe she’s still alive,” I express to Vega at dinner later. I shovel today’s meal—some kind of wild game and a plate of mashed tubers—into my mouth at warp speed. “I thought The Impossible went down when IA captured me.”

  “So did I,” Vega says. “Can you slow down? You’re making me sick. Why are you eating so quickly anyway?”

  “I want to meet with the council as soon as possible,” I tell her. “Halley said she’d convene them for an after-dinner meeting. I want to talk to them about forming an alliance with Saint Rita.”

  Vega snorts, spraying mashed tubers across the table. “Are you kidding me? Fee, what makes you think either party is going to be okay with that?”

  “Both parties hate IA and my mother,” I remind her. “Why not join forces to defeat them?”

  She pushes her plate away. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “I’m not saying it’s going to be easy,” I tell her. “But we have to try.”

  Across the room, Halley stands up from her seat, cleans her tray, and heads out of the mess hall. I elbow Vega to get up.

  “Let’s move,” I say. “It’s go time.”

  We follow Halley to the community hall but wait around the corner as the council files in one by one. Once everyone is accounted for, Vega and I head in last.

  “Good grief,” Quell says when he spots us. “Can’t we have one damn council meeting without one of the Holmes girls interrupting us?”

  “Ophelia is crucial to this war,” Halley tells him. “As is Doctor Nova.”

  Nova arrives right on time, showing no signs of haste despite her tardy entrance. “Sorry I’m late, everyone. Have we begun?”

  “What do you have to offer us?” Quell asks, focusing his attention on Nova rather than me. It’s like he respects the doctor more.

  It’s Halley that replies. “Ophelia has discovered a way to defeat IA’s mutant army. If we combine her blood with a certain type of powerful opalite, we can make weapons that will be effective against the mutations.”

  “Can you guarantee this?” Quell asks.

  “Yes,” I answer. “We witnessed a reversal of the mutation this morning during the escape at the jail.”

  “Where will you get this special opalite?” Magda questions. “We cannot spare our own resources for your experimentation.”

  “Saint Rita, the captain of The Impossible, has spent the last few months mining this opalite from the belts around the outer planets,” I tell them. “I already have a rapport with her. If you allow me, I can act as a liaison between the council and the captain. She is the pirate queen of this galaxy, and with her help, we can defeat IA once and for all.”

  The council erupts in loud chatter. Halley rolls her eyes and plants a hand on her hip. For once, she looks like the grumpy teenager that she is rather than a rebel war group leader. She lets the council deliberate before clapping her hands to redirect their intention.

  “I know it’s not the safest bet,” she calls over the remaining mutters. “But I feel this is one of our only chances to one-up IA. If Ophelia can negotiate a deal with Saint Rita, we can formulate an attack on Harmonia to end this. Ophelia, assuming you can convince the captain to give you what you need, how long will you require to synthesize our new weapons?”

  “I can process tons of opalite in a matter of hours, but I’m assuming working my DNA into the amount of ammunition we need will take some time.” I look at Doctor Nova for help. “Doc, do you have a general estimation?”

  “Let’s make it a week,” Nova replies. “To be safe.”

  “And if Saint Rita decide
s to blow us off the face of this planet instead?” Quell questions, his bushy mustache bristling.

  “She won’t,” I promise. “I was always her favorite, even when I pissed her off.”

  Quell leans forward in his chair to point his finger straight at my face. “You will go on your own. If you fail, we will not send a rescue team. We cannot afford to lose any more soldiers. These are my conditions. Do we have a consensus?”

  Almost every council member raises their hand. Halley raises hers last, throwing me an apologetic look as she does so.

  “It’s decided,” Quell says. “Holmes, you can take the Starshriek to Saint Rita’s position tonight, since you seem to enjoy piloting the aircraft so much. Meeting adjourned.”

  An hour later, I arrive at the airfield with a packed emergency bag and a bundle of nerves. Vega and Claudia escort me to the Starshriek, which I actually have legal access to this time around. Veritas has assigned me a flight jacket, the back of which proudly displays the Veritas insignia. It’s like they want Saint Rita to understand I belong to them now, not to her.

  Before I climb into the cockpit, Vega pulls me into a long hug. Claudia joins in, enclosing me from behind, and for the first time in a while, I feel completely safe. The world fades out as Vega’s citrusy aroma and Claudia’s vanilla one envelop me. I pull away after a minute.

  “We’re losing the light,” I say. “I should go.”

  “Be careful up there,” Claudia warns. “I know you survived Saint Rita before, but she’s probably pissed now.”

  “She’ll be okay,” Vega says. “She always is.”

  “Thanks for confidence booster.”

  I lift myself up the side of the speeder and settle into the cockpit. As the glass closes around me, shutting off the ambient noise on the ground, I give what’s left of my family a little wave. Claudia waves back, and Vega blows me a kiss. I power up the Starshriek with my fingerprint and take control of the joysticks. The speeder rumbles beneath me, ready to go, and I can’t help but grin. This is my favorite thing to do.