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“Never mind.” She laughed as though he’d just asked the stupidest question she’d ever heard.

Kieran looked around, considering his situation. They’d taken him to a small, nondescript room with a single buzzing fluorescent light overhead. Bare of furniture, the walls were lined with unlabeled cardboard boxes. He guessed they were in a storage room, and, judging from how far away the engines sounded, they were at about midship level.

He looked again at her project. She gently placed the little balloon, which was the size of the upper joint of his thumb, onto a small pile of identical balloons. There were about ten of them.

“You getting ready for something?” he asked fretfully.

“Anne Mather’s trial’s, today.” She chuckled. “These are a little gift.”

Today?
He’d been so worried about Waverly he’d forgotten that he was supposed to testify today at Anne Mather’s impeachment. Is that why Jared Carver had traded him for Waverly? So he couldn’t testify?

A shuffle sounded from the front of the room, which was obscured by stacks of boxes, and Jacob appeared, looking irritable and tired, carrying what looked like a fifty-pound flour sack over his shoulder. He dropped it on the floor with a thud and glanced at Kieran. “How long has he been awake?”

“Just a few minutes,” Ginny said.

Jacob crossed the small room to pick up a walkie-talkie and dialed through the channels, his ear to the speaker, smiling at what he heard. Kieran couldn’t make out any words, but he heard all kinds of different voices, both men and women, all of them sounding routinely officious. “They’re looking for you,” Jacob said. He put the walkie-talkie on top of a box. “I didn’t hear anything like this for that little bitch.”

“Anne Mather must like you,” Ginny said with a distrustful look at Kieran.

“I suppose,” Kieran said.

“That woman’s a serpent,” Ginny said.

“The serpent in the garden,” Jacob singsonged.

“She’ll wrap herself around your legs till you can’t walk no more.”

“And she’ll whisper in your ear, confuse you,” Jacob said, nodding.

“So you can’t listen to her,” Ginny said. “Because the more she tries to make you her friend, the more of an enemy she becomes.”

“I’m no friend of Anne Mather’s,” Kieran said. “She killed my father.”

“That so?” Ginny jerked her chin upward. “My father was gut shot on our way to the launch. He drove me in his jeep to the launch site, bleeding from a hole in his tummy. Got us on board, but the launch killed him.”

“Who shot him?” Kieran asked Ginny. He thought if he could make friends with them, they might have second thoughts about whatever they had planned.

“Someone who wanted his spot on this ship,” Ginny said. “Lots of people died like that.”

Jacob grunted in agreement.

Ginny tied off the last of the balloons from her pile, and Jacob rolled one between his thumb and forefinger. “No way he can swallow that. It’s too big.”

“What?” Kieran asked, but they ignored him.

“Sure he can,” Ginny said, nodding toward Kieran. “He’s a big kid.”

Jacob held up the small, tightly packed balloon. “Can you swallow that?”

“I’m not swallowing anything,” Kieran said, trying to control his growing panic, because he was beginning to suspect what those little bundles were.

“You love those little kiddies, don’t you?” Ginny snarled. “The ones from the Empyrean?”

Kieran’s body turned to ice.

“You might’ve figured out we’re not nice people,” she said through a rank grin, then looked at her husband and cocked her head at the large sack he’d brought in, which was still sitting by the door. “Jake.”

Jacob obediently heaved the sack across the floor and set it at Kieran’s feet.

“Show him what you brought, Jakey,” the little woman said.

Jacob untied the mouth of the bag and something spilled out.

No. Please don’t let it be …
Kieran closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see.

Serafina Mbewe lay facedown on the floor. Kieran recognized her immediately by the puffy pigtails over her ears, her coffee-colored skin, her skinny little girl legs and arms. She groaned and wriggled into a sitting position. Her eyes rolled in her head as she took in her surroundings. They’d tied her up, her arms bound behind her back, thick surgical tape over her mouth. She looked at Kieran, eyes wide with terror.

“If you hurt her…,” Kieran snarled, pulling against the rope that bound his own wrists. He wanted to kill them.

Ginny pressed her knife to Serafina’s cheek, just under her eye, and grinned at Kieran. Serafina’s body shook with spasms of terror, and a stain of urine spread over her pants.

Kieran hated these people. He’d never hated anyone like this.

“It’s your decision,” Ginny said to him as she pricked at Serafina’s cheek with the blade. A bead of blood formed on the knife edge, and Serafina whimpered.

“I’ll do it!” Kieran screamed.

While Ginny held the knife to Serafina’s throat, Jacob put a balloon in Kieran’s mouth, then tilted some water at his lips. He tried to swallow but he gagged on it, so Jacob brought a jar of butter and rubbed each capsule with it before feeding it to Kieran. They went down a little easier then, but they landed in his stomach like boulders and sat there in a painful, immovable lump.

Next Ginny produced what looked like a transmitter of a type Kieran had never seen before. It had a blinking red light and an antenna. She held it up, squinting at him with her beady rodent eyes.

“This sends
and
receives. Can you guess what it’ll send to me?”

“My location.”

“And your
words,
” Ginny said. “Everything you say, to anyone, and what everyone says to you, I’ll hear it. Understand?”

Kieran nodded. He glanced down at Serafina, who was shivering and glassy-eyed.

“
And
it’s a receiver,” Ginny said.

“I’ll be able to hear you?” Kieran asked breathlessly.

“No. But the payload will,” Ginny said, pointing at his swelling stomach.

“So I’m a bomb? You made me swallow a bomb?” His voice rose in a shriek.

Without warning, she ripped a hunk of Serafina’s hair out of her head. The little girl cried out. Ginny held it up to Kieran’s face—a puff of curly black hair. Oh, he despised her. “Swallow it, or she’ll die bald.”

Jacob took the receiver from Ginny and placed it in Kieran’s mouth. It felt jagged and too big, but Ginny was winding another hank of Serafina’s hair around her finger, getting ready to pull. Frantically, Kieran gulped it down, ignoring the way it tore his throat as he swallowed and swallowed and swallowed. Jacob handed him another grav bag of water and Kieran drank, forcing the device down his esophagus until it finally scraped its way into his stomach. God it hurt.

“Okay, then. We’re ready,” Ginny said. “Get up.”

“What’s going to happen to her?” Kieran asked. Serafina was staring at him, her teeth chattering. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and hold her close, but tied up as he was, all he could do was mouth the words
I’m going to get you through this,
hoping she’d be able to read his lips. She stared at him, trembling.

“Stay here until it’s time,” Ginny said to her husband in a warning tone, ignoring Kieran’s question.

“Why? What’s
she
going to do?” Jacob said, tilting his head at the little girl. “She can’t walk, can’t move, can’t talk, can’t
hear
nothing.”

“I don’t want you going after that kid,” Ginny said, and the dark look she gave her husband made Kieran shudder. “Check the hall.”

Jacob opened the door a crack and peeked out. “All’s clear,” he said. He picked up a black jacket and threw it to Ginny, who caught it with one hand. She handed her knife to Jacob, who trained it on Kieran and Serafina while she slipped the jacket on and fitted the hood over her head. Next she picked up a pillow from her bedroll and stuffed it under her shirt so that she looked pregnant. To the surveillance cameras, she would look like half the women on board.

Ginny stood, waving her knife at Kieran to stand up, too.

“At Mather’s trial,” Ginny said, “you’re her chief witness, isn’t that right?”

Kieran gaped at her.

“We’d better get you there,” Ginny said as she tugged at the rope that bound his wrists. To Kieran’s surprise, he felt the rope loosen, and suddenly his hands were free. “Let’s go.”

“Let Serafina go first,” Kieran said as he massaged his wrists, which were deeply grooved by the rope.

Ginny laughed at him. “You’re funny.”

“I mean it. I’m not going anywhere until she’s free.”

“Get
going.
” Ginny pressed her knife into his ribs and he took half a step forward. “Or I’ll kill her in front of you.”

Kieran recognized the powerlessness of his situation. There was nothing he could do but look back at Serafina, who watched him go, stretching her neck after him, pleading silently not to be left alone.

“Wait here,” Ginny said to Kieran, as though she’d just remembered something. She went back to her husband, and the two of them stood over the cowering little girl, having a vicious whispered conversation. Kieran couldn’t make out the words; he could only look at Serafina, who watched the two adults talking over her, shivering with fear. Ginny spat a final command at her husband and handed him something that Kieran couldn’t see. Jacob sat down on a box, nudging at Serafina’s leg with his boot, pushing her body aside to make room for his feet, as though that sweet little girl were nothing more than a pile of garbage.

Ginny poked Kieran in the back with her knife, pushing him out the door. Hating himself for leaving Serafina alone with that lunatic, Kieran walked down the corridor slowly, conscious only of the woman behind him and the knife she held. Ahead he could hear the surreal sounds of playing children, and laughter.

“Please,” he said as they approached a door. It hung ajar, and he could see a woman sitting on a stool at the head of a classroom holding up an illustrated edition of the Holy Book. Surrounded by two dozen little kids from the Empyrean, she told the story of Noah and the flood. That had always been Kieran’s favorite as a child because he imagined the Empyrean was like the Ark. The kids sat in a circle around her, rapt, their little faces lifted toward her. They were round and pudgy and dear to him, infinitely dear.

“See that basket?” Ginny said. She pushed up behind him; he could feel her hard little breasts pressing into his side, and his skin crawled. He saw a wicker basket full of fruit sitting on the teacher’s desk. “It’s full of explosives.”

“No!” he began, but she pushed the tip of her knife into his ribs, and he quieted.

“Your little friends will survive the day if you go to the trial, get to Anne Mather, and tell her you were never kidnapped. You just needed some time alone to think about your testimony, so you went to the forests. You didn’t even know they were looking for you. You get on that witness stand in front of everyone and these little ones will be okay.”

“You think using me to kill Anne Mather will get you what you want?” Kieran’s legs went weak and he almost fell down. Was this real? Was he going to die today?

“Anne Mather dead
is
what I want,” the little woman said.

“I could just run,” Kieran said.

“You wouldn’t get more than two steps before I kill everyone around you,
and
these little ones.”

Kieran looked into her eyes—eyes that showed no feeling, no compassion, and no concern for the future. There was no reasoning with her.

“The trial is in the corn granary,” she spat. “Get going.” She spun on her heel and jogged off without a glance back.

For long moments Kieran stood in the hallway outside the classroom listening to the sweet, soft little voices. He’d known each of them since their birth, and if anything happened to them, he’d never forgive himself. No. There was nothing to do but follow that hateful woman’s orders.

He could hardly feel his feet hit the floor as he walked along the corridors. With each turn, the sound of a large crowd grew, until finally he reached the entrance to the granaries, full of people waiting to be searched for weapons. He took his place in line, hoping his terror didn’t show on his face.

One of the guards searching people noticed him with a start. “What are you doing here?” he said to Kieran.

“I’m ready for my testimony,” Kieran said breathlessly. Not ten feet away two women were talking and laughing together. One was hugely pregnant, and the other held a tiny baby to her breast. If Ginny blew him up now, they’d all die.
It’s a nightmare. I’m in a nightmare.

The guard lifted a walkie-talkie to his lips and said, “Kieran Alden is at the door.”

A man’s deep voice sounded over the speaker. “I’ll be right there.”

The guard motioned Kieran over to the side to wait. Kieran leaned against the wall, concentrating on the cool metal against his back, surrounded by pregnant women and old men and tiny babies. They talked in whispers, speculating about the trial, sharing stories about their babies, comparing notes about births and pregnancies, men massaging the backs of their wives, women hooking arms with their husbands. None of them knew they stood next to a bomb.

And Felicity.

She was coming toward him, holding hands with her fiancé. Just as she lifted her gaze to his, Mather’s barrel-chested guard with the dove insignia on his shoulder stepped in front of Kieran. “How are you here?” the man asked him, one eye narrowed.

“I’ve been hanging out in the forests,” Kieran said. To his own ears he sounded like he was reciting from a script. “I needed to be alone to prepare for my testimony.”

“You had dozens of people searching,” the man said angrily. “We thought you’d been kidnapped!”

“I’m sorry,” Kieran mumbled.
There’s a bomb inside me,
Kieran wanted to tell him.
They made me swallow a bomb.

The man waved a sophisticated detection device over Kieran’s body and patted him down manually. Finally he lifted a walkie-talkie to his lips. “Pastor. He’s clean.”

“Bring him to me,” Mather said.