Page 63 of Jace

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“Oh, sweet gods,” Susannah breathed.

“Beck,” Jace realized out loud. “That’s your family.”

26

Susannah

Susannah ran toward the massive machinery.

She had no idea what she was going to do once she got there, but it felt essential to put her hands on it, as if she could somehow prove to herself that it wasn’t real, that her parents’ greed and destruction couldn’t have reached her here, on this remote moon, so very far away.

But the closer she got, the more she knew it was as real as anything.

On the backside of the terraformer, looking as small as the lid of a bottle in the hand of a giant, was the operator’s perch.

Thankfully, it was currently positioned about five feet off the ground.

She scrambled up to it, one arm still cradling Zeke in his sling.

“What are you doing?” Zara hissed from below. “Get down from there.”

“I want to see how he has it programmed,” she whispered back. “I want to see if I can get it offline, so that it can’t do any harm.”

Jace was staring up at her now too, his eyes a furious, icy blue.

“Keep watch,” she asked, hoping that asking him to do his favorite job would be a good distraction.

She slid her palm along the sensor and a hologram popped up asking for a passcode.

She banked on Bard having left the factory settings in place, and entered the standard code.

The series of numbers was significant to her parents. It wasn’t their anniversary or the birthdate of either child. It was the date they had bulldozed the Cupid’s Archers house.

The hologram brightened and unfolded on either side, allowing her access to the stats and programming.

“The fastest way to ground this thing is to dump the fuel,” she whispered down. “It would take weeks for him to get a proper fuel shipment.”

“But what about the animals?” Zara called up to her. “And the soil?”

Of course. A spill like that would wreak almost as much havoc as the machine itself.

“Right,” Susannah said. “I’ll see if I can figure out the programming.”

She had taken next to no interest in her family’s business, but this thing was set up like a holo-tablet, simple enough that any schoolchild could take out a living forest.

After a few minutes’ work, she was rewarded with a blueprint pop-up. Before her eyes, the image changed and changed again.

She had to study it for a few minutes to realize it was all supposed to be one location.

And then she recognized the location.

“Stars,” she murmured, her blood running cold.

“What is it?” Zara asked.

Susannah opened her mouth and closed it again, unable to speak.

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