Page 45 of The Brightness Between Us

“Ambrose,” Devon gasps beside me. “I can’t go!”

I whirl and face him, aghast. “What?”

He taps his onyx card against the reader, and it angrily bleats back. “I’m deactivated. You must be, too.”

The landkeepers push their way through the crowds, toward us. Only seconds remain.

I tap Minerva’s onyx card against the reader. The security gate opens. Only one person can go through at a time, or the whole system errors. I’ve seen it happen multiple times, mostly by privileged jerks trying to piggyback on their friends’ status.

“Devon, maybe you can try to enter with me—” I start to say. But I can’t finish the sentence, because the air has been forced out of my lungs by Devon Mujaba’s fists.

He’s shoved me. Into the elevator. I tumble through the security gate, fall to my knees as the gate begins to close.

“Read your body!” he shouts.

Read my body?What the hell does that mean? But I don’t have time to ask before I’m sealed into the soundproofed elevator car.

I press myself against the glass wall of the elevator,watching the receding arboretum. I remember my other counterfeit onyx, but it’s too late. Devon Mujaba turns to face the approaching landkeepers, hands up in surrender. I can see why: they have a warbot with them. Probably called up from the surface. They order Devon to the ground, and he gets to his knees and then lies flat. Arrested.

The arboretum and the satellite pass out of view.

I’m descending toward Earth.

The car speeds up after it joins the train of elevator cars heading down. From what I can see, every single earthward one is empty. Heading up, however: masses of people are jammed into each, the desperate expressions of people fleeing a planet at war.

I have a momentary fear that the landkeepers will tell their superiors about my location, will stop the elevators and return me to the satellite. But that would mean shutting down this whole apparatus, blocking the flood of refugees. Even though I’m a high-profile target, I can’t imagine they’d stop this exodus on my account.

I might be arrested on arrival, of course. But hopefully I can count on the war turmoil to have scrambled the authorities on the ground. Or perhaps my mother will have mercy—she already wanted me away from the dangerous surface, so it’s hard to imagine she’d have me imprisoned there. Though what do I actually know of my mother?

What’s going to happen to Devon Mujaba? Will theystart a neuroscan of him? If so, it will be a matter of time before they get all the information his brain holds. They’ll know just what we discussed, what he knows about the Dimokratía spacefarer.

Read your body.

I flip on the headlines to have as much situational awareness as possible on my arrival seventeen minutes from now. I listen to the news while I prepare to change clothes.

The silky material of my cream-colored wrap falls soundlessly to the elevator floor. I sit my naked ass on the velvet bench of the onyx car, whisking the jumpsuit from its folded square, unbuttoning the front so I can slip into the smooth technical material. It will be good for traveling in. Wish I’d stolen some underwear, too, though.

Read your body.

I look down at my naked body, backgrounded by the blue and green of the approaching Earth.

My feet, calves, thighs. Wait.

At first I think I have some kind of parasite, but then I realize I’m seeing a string of black text, neatly scripted along my inner thigh.

Someone has written on me. The only person who had access to do so without my knowing is Devon Mujaba, while I was passed out during our naked bender.

The writing is scripted by hand, not printed. I imaginehim leaning over my leg, diligently marking me while I slept.

I’m seeing a sequence of numbers, followed by two unfamiliar words.

I read my own leg, squinting as the numbers end near the crease where thigh meets hip. 56.808095, –5.085725.

Those are the numbers. They’re coordinates.

Below them is a name.

Kodiak Celius.

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