Liberty (6 page)

You know, because that’s not all
kinds
of awkward.

Still, you do what you have to in order to survive. I’m not sure why the universe kept trying to teach me that lesson, but it sure felt like we had entered dead-horse-kicking territory.

“What are you waiting for?” I whispered.

“You think the remains of your ship are stable?” he asked.

“Nope,” I replied.

I hadn’t thought about that as I was rifling around looking for stuff.

Oops.

“Neither do they,” said Berrett. “So when part of it explodes and a small piece of debris flies away, they’ll think nothing of it. We just need them to be close enough to landing that we can shoot above them without them seeing us.”

“Berrett?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“You’re weird. Now be quiet.”

“Wait, how are you going to make the ship ex—”

Before I could finish my sentence, Berrett tossed something behind us.

A tooth-rattling explosion erupted at the same instant Berrett ignited his rocket pack. We flew into the air, and as I looked back one last time to see the remains of my precious
Misfit,
I saw them.

At least thirty SUN carriers. For one crashed ship.

They knew.

B
ERRETT AND I LANDED IN THE SOFT, SPRINGY GRASS OF A
park just as the sun was beginning to set. Earth had a different smell than the colonies on Titan. The smell of Titan was newer, more ... chemical and plasticine and hi-I-was-recently-terraformed. Earth was different. Earth smelled old in a comfortable way. I wondered for a moment if some part of me remembered the smell of Earth.

Then other wonderings kicked in. Wonderings like how the flark did Berrett wind up with a military grade explosive? But first things first.

“Where are we?” I asked.

Berrett flipped his visor open. “Jersey. Let’s go sit for a minute and take a breather.”

I balked, my delight in his attractive eyes giving way to annoyance as I crossed my arms. “No.”

“No? What do you mean no?”

“I mean no! I have no idea who you really are or why you saved me or where in the system you managed to get your hands on that kind of explosive. And on top of all that, I can’t exactly stop for afternoon tea. You saw all those ships. They could have seen us. They could be tailing us right—”

“They aren’t. Besides, five minutes won’t make that much difference and I have a question for you. What does the Underground mean to you, exactly?”

I knew just enough about the Underground to not be very impressed. They created safe houses to sit around and talk about how they were going to stick it to the SUN, but I never heard about anything serious coming of it. In my mind, the Underground was just a bunch of adults who had allowed the SUN to screw up the System, content to sit around and whine, waiting to die off and hand the problems over to the next generation.

My
generation.

Still, Berrett was my only hope at the moment.

Time for some diplomacy.

I flopped down on the bench next to him. “It means you don’t agree with how the SUN is running things, and you’ll do anything short of, you know, actually stand up and fight them or do something to change your circumstances. Am I in the ballpark?”

A spark of anger flickered in Berrett’s eyes. “Not a fan?”

So much for diplomacy.

“I’m not a fan of anyone, okay? I’m just a cargo runner. I need to find a ship, get my crew back, and figure out how to deal with Eira the Psychopath.”

“Who?”

“Eira Ninge. She’s the horrible slag responsible for this flarking mess I’m in.”

“Wait,
the
Eira Ninge? The president of GSP, Eira Ninge?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes,
that
Eira. Turns out she’s a heartless nutbar, and she thinks I have something worth killing for. The real question here is, are you gonna help me or get in my way?”

Berrett stared at me. “Are you human?”

“How do I know you’re not one of the bad guys?”

“Because if I worked for the SUN, you’d be dead already. They don’t send in thirty cruisers to take prisoners.”

I nodded with no small amount of reluctance.

Berrett sighed. “Alright, look, I wasn’t supposed to tell you this, but the Underground sent me to find you. I’m one of their runners. I can get you what you need, but first, you wanna explain to me why exactly the System wants you so badly that they’d send thirty military cruisers in to pick up one girl?”

I cried out in disgust. “I am a seventeen-year-old starship captain, pilot first class, thank you very much, and—”

“And you’re just one girl. I fail to see the need to send in so many cruisers, unless you’re some kind of crazy wizard, which is out based on your total inability to fly.”

“Lost my broom.”

“There’s a joke in there, but you haven’t answered my question,” said Berrett.

“Give me one good reason why I should tell you anything.”

“Because I
can
help you, and outside of me and the Underground, you have no one you can trust.”

“You dropped me! And if I don’t know the first thing about you, how can I trust you?”

Berrett rolled his eyes. “The fact that I didn’t let you die should be a start.”

“Oh, you could have.” I eyed Berrett, and then started rifling through my emergency pack looking for water. “Why would the Underground want to help me? How did they even know about me? And what, exactly, is in it for you, Berrett?”

Berrett folded his arms and looked straight into my eyes. “Because you have apparently done something to threaten the System, and anyone who threatens them is a friend to me.”

There was something in his expression, in the honesty of his face that felt incredibly familiar. There was rage, a life of suffering ... a major loss. Something only another person who had been through the same sort of trauma would notice.

“Who did you lose?” I asked.

Berrett’s eyes hit the ground. “My dad. He was the best man I ever knew, and they shot him dead in the middle of the street.”

I clenched my throat and instinctively put my hand on his. He raised his gaze to meet mine.

“You need help, Dix, whether you like it or not. And I can help you. The Underground is much more than you realize.” He pulled a pocket-sized copy of
The Unauthorized History of the Third War
from inside his jacket. “Look familiar?”

“Well, sure, but even I thought that was a stupid one to use. The SUN could have figured it out by now.” I pulled a canteen from my pack and threw back a swig. The cool water flowed down my throat and hit my empty stomach with a thud. “I need a minute.”

I walked across the tall grass toward what must have been a playground a hundred years ago. I pushed the rusted chains of a swing and leaned against the poles of the set. Though I found Berrett’s stance on my dependency extremely obnoxious, he appeared to have some kind of point. And he
had
saved my life.

On top of which, much to my chagrin, I was momentarily dependent. I didn’t know Earth well enough to work my way around, and I couldn’t save my friends and find my freedom without some help. I would have to take a risk on someone, and good Samaritans weren’t exactly beating down my door.

I looked back toward the bench where Berrett sat, leaning forward and flipping through the small history book. My gut seemed to think he was safe, and I was done ignoring my gut. I walked slowly back to the bench, wondering how I was going to explain myself. It had been years since unfiltered truth had come out of my mouth.

“Well?” he asked.

Better to just rip the Band-Aid off.

“They want me because they want this.” I pulled on the chain around my neck until the vial fell into my hand, which was, weirdly, trembling.

I stared at the glass vial, sparkling in the last rays of daylight. The silver fluid swirled and rolled back and forth like oil in water. I let it fall against my chest, unclasped the chain from around my neck, and slid my mother’s wedding ring onto the chain. The ring clinked against the stopper of the glass vial. I held out the vial to Berrett. Mrs. Ford and Hobs were the only people in the world who knew what I wore around my neck, and I felt as vulnerable as a naked newborn as I watched Berrett stare at the silver liquid inside.

“What is it?”

“Eternigen.”

Berrett laughed. “You’re full of it. Eternigen isn’t real. It’s like the scientific equivalent of the fountain of youth. Wishful thinking.”

“No, the tooth fairy isn’t real. Eternigen, on the other hand, is.”

“Wait ... the tooth fairy isn’t real?” Berrett grinned at me as he took the vial out of my hands. “But you’re talking about defying the aging process, being able to fly into deep space, and that’s impossible. Besides, the SUN reports—”

“You don’t actually believe the reports? This is why I have to lie about who I am. The SUN knows I have this stuff, and up until very recently they thought I was dead. This vial is my ticket to deep space, freedom, a life away from the System. And now, apparently, Eira Ninge knows about it and isn’t afraid to kill for it. The carriers won’t find a body, so with any luck both the SUN and Eira will think I was obliterated in the crash.”

“Not likely. Even with no body there’d be DNA evidence their scanners would pick up. They’ll know you’re alive, Dix.”

I ran my hands through my hair.

He was right.

“I gotta get more Eternigen and get out of the System.”

“Why?” asked Berrett. “How’d you end up with that stuff anyway?”

I pressed my lips together, so used to lying by default that every word of truth took time to formulate. “I wound up with it because my aunt was the scientist who discovered it. Three days later, my family was in a terrible accident and I’m the only one who lived. I don’t remember much about my life before that. It’s all fuzzy. All I really know is that I want something more for my life. I want to find a new world, build a country where people are safe. I don’t want to spend my life sneaking around on eggshells. My best friend Hobs was working on replicating the formula so we’d have enough to get the whole crew out. He was getting close when—”

My brain went blank, as though a heavy fog had descended in my head. I closed my eyes as all my emotions extinguished, blown out like a candle. I saw the image of Hobs’s lopsided smile burned behind my eyelids. All the smells and sounds of the Académie on Venus flooded my memory and pushed out the scents of Earth.

I was transported back in time to the day before graduation, barely one year ago.

“You’re going to get caught before I get a chance to finish this, you know,” Hobs had said. “I’m finally at a point in my career where I can begin to attempt to break down what that stuff’s made of, and your brilliant plan is to run cargo while I do it? How many ways could this go wrong?”

“Only one, really,” I had replied. “We could die. Or we could earn some extra funds running cargo, which would pay for an on-ship lab. Come on, Hobs, you can’t resist the tantalizing possibility of your very own shiny lab.”

He had gone glossy-eyed as he had envisioned the possibility. I knew I had him. Just a few more entreaties, maybe a little pout ..

“You could get out from under the Einstein building, see the world,” I had said. “We graduate tomorrow, Hobs. What are your other options? Go work for the bad guys? Work for the System?” Hobs’s test scores had resulted in the SUN courting him since he entered the Académie, but I knew he wasn’t interested.

Hobs had put his arm around me and walked me around the Académie campus. “If it were anyone else but you ....”

“I know. That’s why I love you.” I had planted a kiss on his cheek, grabbed his hand, and laughed at him as his pale cheeks flushed. “Come on. Let’s go get our gear packed.”

“Dix? You okay?”

Berrett’s question snapped me back to the present.

“Yeah, I’m just ... hungry.”

Berrett laughed out loud.

“What?”

“That’s not what I was expecting you to say. So, you think that what happened to your parents was really an accident?”

My throat clamped down. “Take a wild guess.”