Page 64 of The Brightness Between Us

I release the oars and find myself placing my hands underneath my upper arms, to make them look bigger. “You’re not going to activate your bracelet, right, without cloaking code in place? I don’t want your mother’s forces on top of us any sooner than they will be already.”

Ambrose raises an eyebrow. “I’m not an idiot. Appearances to the contrary. You’re actually sitting with one of the best programmers in the academy.”

“Good for you,” I say. “Now go. We’re out far enough.”

He activates his bracelet, brain-op’ing the projectingfeeds, reversed images spinning in the air before my eyes as he scrolls and scans. I look at the shore through the gaps in the backward text, watching reeds draping their green fronds over the brown water, ducks paddling in circles. Blips of audio come through in Fédération:Prosecution. Protection. Escalation. Devon Mujaba.

Many minutes go by. I listen to the water lapping the edges of the rowboat, the distant anxious bleats of Sheep. I watch the sun’s glint pass along the waves, broken by the ripples of water striders. I watch Ambrose take in the news. Finally the suspense is too much. “What? What’s going on?”

Ambrose shuts off his feed, looks at me with wide eyes. “Do you want to watch with me?”

I don’t like this indirectness. “Tell me what you’ve found, and I’ll tell you my response.”

His lip quirks. “The trial of Devon Mujaba. I tracked down a pure feed of it.”

A hawk wheels above. Sheep stands at the water’s edge, staring at us worriedly. Ambrose waits for me to respond.

I nod.

Ambrose holds out his bracelet. “It’s going to be in reverse for you, I’m not sure...”

I gesture to the space in front of me. “Come over here.”

The benches of the rowboat are too narrow to sit nextto each other, so Ambrose crouches and reverses, so that he’s squatting in front of me. He eases down to sit on the bottom of the rowboat, his shoulders between my thighs. The seat of his jumpsuit is instantly soaked with lake water. “Good?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.Good.

He calls up the trial on his bracelet, manipulating privacy filters to mask our location and bypass the official adulterated feeds to get to the bootleg.

The footage is grainy, single-recorder, unresolvable, but unmistakably a pure feed from the trial. It shows Devon Mujaba on the stand, no one else visible except the shoulder and half the face of the judge. Courtroom clamor in the background.

Devon’s wearing the plain purple-and-white stripes of a Fédération prisoner. With none of his stage makeup on, he looks less like a Heartspeak Boy and more like the hardened trekker who greeted me on the hillside outside of the Dimokratía cosmology academy: sunken-faced, resolute. Not the silly kitten he plays onstage.

“The trial was apparently four hours, so I can autojump to the most viewed parts, if you want,” Ambrose says.

I nod. Ambrose can’t see me, but either somehow senses the movement through my thighs or just decides on his own to leap ahead.

The judge is speaking. “... of using your access and influence in an attempt to spread propaganda about the joint mission to settle Planet Cusk, coercing the two spacefarers whose clones will settle that location to spread lies about the nature of the venture. Do you contest these charges?”

“I contest your characterization of them,” Devon says. “Nothing Ambrose Cusk said on that broadcast was a lie. But no, I’m not ashamed of what I did.”

“Then this trial need not go further than the evidence already placed into record. The court finds you guilty of the charges of espionage and actions against the state. Being uncontested—”

“I request to make a statement before I am sentenced,” Devon Mujaba says.

“That is your constitutional right.”

“This is where the illicit feed is key,” Ambrose says. “There’s no way that Cusk would have allowed a statement from him to be broadcast live.”

I hold up my hand to shush him. I want to hear what Devon says.

“—have done what I did for the overall good,” Devon says, in practiced tones. “This is the moment that humanity could remain contained to Earth, or spread beyond. The loss of Minerva Cusk’s mission to Titan was not afailure to many of us. It was an opportunity to rethink the blind expansion of humankind. Look at the evidence of this planet. Once we can settle exoplanets, we’ll expand exponentially, ruin broader parts of the universe. The decision to spread beyond home is the most important branching moment for humankind. It was not something to be done in secret, with only the highest levels of Dimokratía and Fédération and the Cusk Corporation knowing about it.”

“Thank you,” the judge says. “The court will now—”

“I’m not finished,” barks Devon Mujaba. “The live transmission from Ambrose Cusk did nothing to stop this launch. The ship is already well underway. But I do hope that it might change things on Earth before it’s too late. War is the best time for a revolution, while the powers that be are back on their heels. We can craft a more peaceful world from the ruins.”

“Thank you.”

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