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  Footsteps approached from the far left. Two sets, perhaps a guard rotation. I turned right, started down the alley and into a wide open square. There at the center stood a massive tree, the trunk as wide around as ten of me, jagged branches jutting over Beacon and skyward.

  Around it, the outpost bustled. More patchwork buildings with doors open to the day, a smith with a hammer clanging away at a dented piece of metal under the overhang of his shop. His, like the others, bore only a crudely drawn image on his signage: a diagonal hammer over an anvil.

  Beside, the gently swaying sign bearing a needle and a spool of thread. The clothworker. And beyond that, a drawing of a cornucopia. Some sort of farmer, or grocer, I guessed, though I wasn’t sure how they could farm anything if the world was as ravaged as Darcy had indicated.

  Next door, I glimpsed a glass house full of greenery. Hydroponics? The place was a weird juxtaposition of antiquated and new technologies, which I guessed made sense if you were the last human outpost after the fall of a nation.

  Whether by coincidence or intent, these trades had aligned themselves closely together. On the far side of the tree sat a large building with a peaked roof and no windows.

  And on the left, what appeared to be some sort of drinking place—colloquialisms training would call it a “pub,”—the windows looking in on tables and a wide swath of countertop.

  But I was most interested in the towers rising high at the four compass points of Beacon. They were connected by rows of scaffolding located beneath metal sheeting stacked as a sort of wall or barrier.

  Beyond that, the netting sloped down from a peak several hundred feet up, and the highest rows of the scaffolding opened into platforms.

  I watched a pair of guards circle the highest tier of the scaffolding, crossbows at their sides. They looked young—too young, barely beyond adolescence. Here was the city’s defense, their best protection against the silvers. Besides me, of course.

  How had they survived this long? The creatures I’d fought weren’t what these people could protect themselves against with this: thin netting, flimsy metal walls, these children with their bows and arrows and their lights.

  But maybe the people didn’t know that yet. Maybe the silvers were waiting, holding back until they could raze the whole of this town in one go.

  The largest and most imposing of Beacon’s towers sat eastward, narrow windows peppering three stories of cinderblock. That was my destination, what could only be the barracks.

  If Darcy had left five years ago for the facility and given up her identity in the process, she’d be a stranger here. And when strangers appeared, they’d be escorted to the powers-that-be for questioning, processing.

  In Beacon’s case, that was the guards.

  I found her outside, flanked by two men with the Electric Guild's tattoo—the ones she'd met in the control room. I stood in shadow, unseen, while they negotiated with the guards at the front; even in daylight I could affect a certain way of standing, a way of looking, that made me more or less invisible, just another person.

  Darcy met eyes with the tallest guard, and something passed between them. She shook her head so imperceptibly only that guard and I seemed to notice.

  He nodded, gestured her in.

  He and Darcy knew each other, had a history. And in confirmation, the fine hairs raised all the way up my spine.

  Within a minute, she disappeared into the tower, the two guards following behind. After descending sheer cavern rock, scaling the guard tower felt like a child’s work.

  I scoped the windows of the first floor, spotted Darcy escorted downstairs. Twenty minutes later, she passed back through the first floor on her way to the second story.

  Ahead of her walked one of the guardswomen, who, though shorter and blonder, bore an unmissable resemblance to my doctor.

  When I felt sure I was out of sight of any eyes, I pressed my way between the outer wall and the guard tower, shimmying up to the second floor.

  The windows up here were fewer and narrower, but it wasn’t long before I spotted the lantern’s light in one of the dark corner rooms.

  I stepped to the narrow wooden ledge running along the side of the tower, my back flush to the wall. Within a minute, I stood outside the room Darcy was led into, and I could hear her voice—and the voice of the woman she called Zara—speaking in a hush.

  Those voices held the same base notes—they worked from the same foundation. Zara...West. Zara was her sister. And she was one of the guards, a powerful one to boot.

  They didn’t want to be heard. That was, Darcy didn't want anyone overhearing what she was telling her sister. Anyone but me, that was—because she had already made me privy to most of what she was telling her sister.

  But not all. Not the way she talked about me, how she felt. What I meant to her.

  So I listened like I'd been cemented in place, my ear next to the window frame.

  Seven

  Friday, May 9, 2053

  11:35 a.m.

  Darcy

  Zara’s office was more of a closet with a single window.

  I knew pickings were slim in the guard tower, especially with how Beacon’s population had expanded. From the information I'd received at the facility, the population had expanded twice over—cresting two-thousand—from the time I'd left.

  Which was both a blessing and a problem. Beacon hadn’t been designed to accommodate more than 1,200.

  Zara opened the glass of a lantern on her desk, set a match to it. She blew the flame and replaced the top so that the small room bloomed with a pretty glow. Above it, her face sat lovely and angular, her blue eyes softened by the diffuse light.

  “Honey,” I said, touching my hand to her shoulder. I could feel hard muscle under that jacket.

  “I’m not anyone’s honey,” she said, stepping around to her side of the desk. She sat, the chair’s old springs creaking. “Since you seem to be in a rush, tell me the abridged version of your long story.”

  I stepped forward, sat in the chair opposite. This was my sister and not, and I had to start getting used to the person who sat before me. She wanted it clean and truthful, so I would give her that.

  “For the past five years, I've been a scientist in a facility—a cloning facility,” I began. She looked skeptical, but I told her everything exactly as it had happened, all the way down to him. To the man I had created, who right now was somewhere Beacon, that chip still in his neck.

  Early into my story, Zara had folded her arms, said nothing. She listened, her face impassive, as I told her all the important details. One thing hadn’t changed: my sister had always been hard to read.

  "Please," I finished. "I need access to the hospital. I need to operate on him as soon as possible. It's imperative."

  At the end, she whistled through her teeth. “So, sister. You've spent the past five years creating and killing super soldiers, messing with genetics, and now you've bucked the whole system and helped one escape. Then you lost track of him."

  “I—well...yes." I raised a point-making finger. "But I doubt he's lost track of me."

  "And you brought him here with a chip in his neck that, at the whim of one megalomaniac, could turn him rogue and make him kill everyone in Beacon."

  I closed my eyes. I was sounding like a truly terrible person. "We still have time to get the chip out. I just need the tools and access to the hospital."

  I heard the chair across from me scrape across the floor. The desk trembled as she stood.

  "Darcy." Zara's voice came from above me, and it had turned cold. Ice cold. "If you weren't my sister, I would send you to the hanging tree right now for doing this to us—bringing this danger here. All because some guy made you weak at the knees."

  I opened my eyes, a flare rising in my chest as I stared up at her. "You're my sister, and I love you. Whatever I feel for this man is secondary to my desire to keep you safe. And I believe he can keep you safe—you and everyone. That's why I helped him escape. That's why I n
eed him to survive. That's why I need access to the hospital."

  We stared at each other as we had as girls, daring the other one to look away. Beneath our love had always run a current of competing wills. Most times I had given in to hers, but this time, I wouldn't back down.

  Finally, she dropped back into her seat. "So you want me to help you dig this chip out of your clone lover’s neck,” she said, hands separating, palms up, “hide him somewhere in Beacon, and how does the rest go?”

  That was where my plan frayed. I knew what I should say, but I didn’t want to.

  I set my fingers to the bridge of my nose. “He’s designed to infiltrate silver territory, to bring back information and give us an edge on them. And he’s different than the others we've created. I think he’s the one we need. The one I’ve spent five years trying to bring into the world to deal with the silvers.”

  Zara’s throaty laugh filled the room. “Deal with them? Like—what? Five, ten of them?”

  I lowered my hand, leveled my eyes on her. “Five or ten million.”

  She laughed harder, but it was forced, like she was trying to sieve the sound through a tiny hole. “That’s probably the entire silver population.”

  “Yes."

  Her hands dropped to her lap. “And how will he do that when none of your other 8,000 could?”

  “He can turn into one of them, Zara, and maybe another creature. One far more powerful. Most importantly, he's got the judgment and the character that the others lacked. The others didn’t have emotion, but Blaze has…depth, humor, love.”

  The word hung in the air, infused, growing. It was the first time I’d thought it, and once it came from my mouth I knew it was true.

  It was too quick and it was ludicrous and it was completely true.

  Zara’s eyes narrowed. "What do you mean, he can turn into one of them?"

  "He can shift," I said. "In and out of silver form."

  Her hands slapped the table. "Are you fucking with me?"

  I shook my head very, very slowly, my face stone serious. "That's why he's called an infiltrator." I understood her fear—she'd spent her entire life fighting silvers, living surrounded by them, hiding from them—but she also didn't know Blaze. She didn't know how crucial his ability to shift was.

  It gave us an edge on the silvers. A weapon to fight back.

  "He's dangerous," she seethed.

  "To them. To the creatures outside the walls. Not to us."

  The blue eyes stared at me as though they could set me aflame. "Swear to me."

  I didn't blink. "I swear."

  She still breathed hard, but she relaxed just a hair. “And where is this magical guy—this Blaze?”

  I dropped back into the chair, my shoulders slumping. My eyes flicked to the window, where I glimpsed the metal wall surrounding the outpost.

  As a girl, I had been awed by it, enfolded in warm certainty that we’d be safe as long as we had the wall and the light. “Somewhere out there, probably listening to us right now.”

  Her form straightened. I saw the guard slipping back into her, the military training. “What if this Luther Ides has reprogrammed him already?"

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “If he had, you’d know it by now.”

  But that wasn't entirely true. Ides could reprogram him to lay low for a time, or return to the facility. How could I know for sure he wasn't compromised? That question was in Zara’s eyes. It was a fair one, and I couldn’t explain to her why I knew that Blaze was still himself.

  I just knew it like I knew she was my sister.

  "Please, Zara," I said. "This is maybe the most important thing I've ever done."

  In the room, the lantern flickered between us as though it had felt a breeze. But the window was shut, and the door closed. It cast a shifting shadow over her face.

  It put me in mind of a night when we had climbed Beacon's scaffolding together. I was thirteen, and she was eight, which made me a very, very bad influence. Climbing the scaffolding was strictly off-limits.

  From up there, above the wall, we'd stared through the netting and into the night. A full moon, and in that swaying light I had looked at my sister—trusting and full of admiration for me—and promised myself I would never do anything to break that trust.

  I had failed in that, but maybe I could mend what had been broken.

  Zara let a long, low sigh. "I can get you three hours. I can't promise anything beyond that."

  My gaze softened on her. "That's enough."

  "All right," she said, standing with both hands pressed to the table. "We'll go out the back, then."

  “Also,” I said, standing with her, “Aiden recognized me.”

  She grimaced. “Did he say anything?”

  “Nothing except a welcome back."

  “At least there’s that. I’ll talk to him, keep him quiet.”

  I hesitated before I spoke. “Is he…partnered?”

  She shook her head. “Hence the face I just made. You know how he is.”

  My eyebrows lifted. After five years? “He always was a big believer in tradition.”

  “Still is. He grieved you, Darcy, and he deserves to know as much as you can tell him. Eventually—once I get things sorted for you—you’re going to need to talk to him yourself.”

  I nodded. “I will."

  "All right," she said, her eyes dropping to my shoulder. "You look like hell. Before we go out there, let's get you a clean shirt and a better patch for that wound."

  Gratitude fizzed in my chest as I followed her out; my sister was alive.

  12:20 p.m.

  Blaze

  I watched through the window as the two women sparred. But not in the way I'd grown used to—not with hands and feet and blades. They battled with words, with their eyes, the energy between them rising and dipping, a strange kind of dance I hadn't witnessed before.

  I recognized Zara from the portrait in Darcy's office, but that image had only been the childhood likeness of the woman who sat across from Darcy. Here, in motion, she became human. Rigid, distrustful, methodical.

  She couldn't be more than eighteen or nineteen, but she had already developed faint lines between her eyebrows. The result of persistent anxiety.

  They were the same lines that sometimes appeared between Darcy's eyebrows.

  These two were undeniably siblings, girls who had grown up together and knew each other like the backs of their own hands. And in the small room, Darcy brought the kind of softness and entreaties I'd grown used to, and Zara responded with firmness and pain.

  Not just pain—fear. She'd been betrayed. She'd been left alone. She didn't want to be vulnerable to that kind of wounding again.

  But Zara acceded in the end. They stepped into the bathroom, their voices low and muffled so that even I couldn't hear them. And frankly, as I stood flush to the wall, I didn't want to.

  Some things deserved to be private.

  At one point, Darcy let a groan. That was almost surely to do with her arm, which still needed treatment, I thought, gritting my teeth.

  When they came out of the bathroom, Darcy had changed into a new shirt, her sling changed to fresh white cloth. They proceeded down the hall, descended the stairs with muted thumps.

  I dropped from my perch on the second story, stepped into the doorway as Darcy and her sister came out the back entrance of the guard tower.

  "Holy shit," Zara said on seeing me. She froze in place—except for the hand that slid to her crossbow.

  Darcy also stopped, but she recovered faster. "It's all right! It's him," she said, stepping between her sister and me. "This is the infiltrator."

  I extended a hand toward her. "Blaze," I said. "Or you can call me 8024, if you're ever feeling annoyed with me."

  Zara surveyed me with palpable distrust. She didn't take my hand. "He's human?" she said to Darcy, her eyes still on me.

  "As much as we are," Darcy said, her arm sliding around my waist. "Maybe more so."

  Zara's eye
s lowered to the badge at my waist. "How did you get that?"

  I lifted Ehren Lightsmith's badge, held it out to her. "I swiped it from one of the engineers. I just needed to get inside the city."

  She snatched it from me, and as she did, her wrist came exposed where her jacket ended. An angry rash ran red and jagged to her palm.

  Disease. I lifted my eyes to hers, and something passed between us. I knew her secret. She knew I knew her secret, because she jerked her hand away, her jacket's sleeve covering the evidence again.

  "All right, Blaze," she said, tucking the badge into her jacket. "You're new here, so you get one pass. This was it. I'm telling you now: if you ever do something like that again here in Beacon, I will personally bring you to the council."

  I barely suppressed my amusement; I sensed she wouldn't take it as well as Darcy. If only she knew the kinds of trials I'd already been through. Maybe someday she would.

  Instead, I nodded. "Yes, ma'am."

  She eyed me a beat longer before turning and leading us along the wall. "I'm taking you to the hospital. Once we get into the open, I'm going to be escorting you as the deputy captain. Don't speak."

  Darcy and I followed, her arm still around me for the few seconds we had out of view of the rest of the outpost. "And 8024," Zara added over her shoulder, "don't call me 'ma'am'—you're older than me."

  We crossed in silence under the massive tree at the center of Beacon. An empty noose swung from its thickest branch.

  Ahead, Zara walked with military precision, her body both formal and capable. And even though she hadn’t grown as tall as Darcy, her presence emanated large and intense around her. People’s eyes followed her, I noticed, as we passed through the center of the outpost.

  This woman hadn’t just lived through adolescence—she’d thrived. Despite losing her parents and her sister, and despite her illness. I sensed she was just as strong as Darcy, though in a different, hard-bitten way.

  She led us into the shadow of an alley, where a series of two-story buildings rose high on our right. Their windows bore curtains and the signs of residences, and I spotted a face peering down at us.