Page 14 of Craze

“I saw the light in your eyes, Navi. You don’t have to tell me. But I was close enough to see it move.” She guides my head back and onto her shoulder. “Rest. We’re all tired after testing.”

But I don’t want to close my eyes. I don’t trust the guard not to come back for revenge. Or worse, bring Sevrin or Rochir with him. And I hate lying on the gritty floor made of woven metal. But Shavih knows augmentations and human limitations. She used to serve Solcrue officers on a mothership calledMarst, and she’s been at this a lot longer than most of us.

“Do you think they’ll come back for us?” someone asks.

“When they’re ready,” Shavih remarks. “But stars know when they’ll acquire the armada necessary to fend off the Solcrue.”

“Any chance they’ll take me, too?” Jeela asks.

“I don’t know,” Shavih replies. “I’m sorry.”

Jeela picks at a frayed wire in her leg. “It’s okay. I’d rather die a moral being than live a life of guilt and remorse.”

When I crack my eyes open to check on her, Jeela’s looking right at me. Her expression says she knows what I did. It doesn’t look like she resents me for it. She joined our group of pieced-together experiments a month after I did.

The memory of the falling Titans comes back to me.

I urgently get to my feet, despite Shavih’s protests. Blue light pulses throughout the ship from the ice shield I put up and theprograms that suddenly open in my vision with my movement. Through it all, I peer down at the moon we approach. Several clouds tarnish the surface. Targeting brackets open around them.

Scanning—

Titans are tough. They’ll make it, right?

I wonder if they can hear me at such a distance. Poppy could. My sisters would want to know I tried. They deserve to have someone fight for them.

Pellucid>>Local: Hello?

No one responds. I scan my small group of friends clustered together in the dirty cell and close my eyes.

Pellucid>>Local: Does anyone read me?

I try to reach out a few more times and wonder what it would be like to talk with my human sisters like Titans talk to each other. It would certainly make an escape plan easier.

The door opens again, and Sevrin storms in. He pushes the other women aside, grabs me by the throat, lifts me up, and slams me against the wall.

Switch off.The command is hesitant, but my vision clears. I’m not sure if it’s in time.

I choke under his scaly grip. My toes scrape the floor. But I am helpless under the strength of his augmented body.

My cellmates scatter and plaster themselves to the walls.

“How do you keep surviving?” Sevrin sneers.

I peer warily up at his green eyes, wondering what he’ll do to me if he figures it out. He bares rows of dark pointy teeth. A cheek twitches. Then he drops me.

“Put her in isolation. The dark cell.” Sevrin rips his baton from his belt and forces it into the guard’s hands.

Shavih and Jeela reach for me but lean back when the guard whips his new baton to life in warning. Then he snatches me up by the collar and drags me out of the cell.

My last look toward my friends is tarnished by Rochir’s frame, dressed in a spacesuit and decorated with his devilish grin. “I’m going to have fun punishing you.”

Cold dread prickles my spine.

Most of the Titans made it to freedom.

I watched them on the holovids as a child and witnessed their desperation as they fought to save civilians and their fellow soldiers—human and a Titan—how our kinds worked together to hold off the Solcrue. I know CSP turned. Titans may not trust humans. They may not come for us, but they will get revenge for their fallen. If they take out the Solcrue and all I get to do is watch as I die, I’ll still be grateful because the snakes will have lost. But I’m not ready to lie back without a fight.

You are going to regret hurting us one day.I roll to face Rochir as the guard stops outside my cell.“You may control my mind and my body, but never my soul—since you have no idea what one is.”

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