Dyndra Starlin has failed her mission.

  And she was so close to succeeding too!

  Cassandra Soryu was right in her grasp. She was dancing with her, holding her, and then she let it slip that she was with the Republic, and it was all over in an instant.

  Just like that, Dyndra had let down not just her troop and not just President Soryu, but the entire Republic of humanity as a whole.

  “Mr. Kaga,” Cassandra had shouted, “You let a red one in here!”

  A red one. Dyndra ponders the bel as her head rests against the damp stone of her cell—if you can call a cramped borderline storage closet a cell—is that bel of red all that she is to Cassandra? All that the Republic is? What exactly happened between her and her Mother to prompt such a reaction?

  Then there’s the matter of what she did with that violin. The only thing that Dyndra has ever seen like that was what happened back at the council chamber a week ago. Although it probably has been more than a week now…

  Still, how was Cassandra able to do all that?

  The girl’s an enigma, Dyndra thinks.

  She yawns and stretches as best she can in the small quarters. The action catches the attention of the pale blob sitting at the end of the small crack in the wall.

  Dyndra can barely make out the figure through what little morning light has crept into her cell. When she was brought here, she thought she had heard someone or something rummaging around behind the wall.

  She hadn’t gotten a good look at it before, but she now sees that the figure is almost certainly a man, one with an awful lot of scars. As he stands, her eyes narrow on one particur scar at the center of his chest, a round one.

  A hole.

  Consciousness transfer? Dyndra has only seen two other people who have done it, that being that Smith fellow and Cassandra’s own Father Tendo.

  She didn’t want to question why Tendo did it. Who is she to question the husband of the President of the Republic of humanity after all? But she figured that Smith was a common criminal or assassin who made use of their Machinist powers in their work. It would make sense for a person that ruthless to have their consciousness transferred.

  Dyndra recalls that Consciousness transfer itself was outwed years ago. She can’t remember if it was before the war or in the first years of it, but either way, the Martian Council had ruled those devices and the horrific process involved with them illegal for a multitude of equally valid reasons.

  Corrupt leaders prolonging their lives by transferring into younger bodies, the minds of old soldiers being put into younger ones, prisoners being tortured by being pced in mangled bodies…

  Dyndra had to fight back her disgust when she read over the accounts in her academy days, and there was gossip that one of her cssmates fainted during that rather visceral part of the curriculum.

  Still, there were those who protested the outright ban of consciousness transfer. Some wanted it to simply be reguted, for reasons as various and as passionate as the reasons many wanted it banned.

  Dyndra never could wrap her head around such a thing. Why would someone want a body different from the one they were born in? She probably should keep her opinions on the topic to herself if she hopes to make an ally out of the man in the cell next to her.

  She’s running awfully low on people she can trust at the moment, but she may be able to talk a fellow prisoner onto her side, and that’s guaranteed to be valuable.

  “Hey.” She whispers, “How long have you been in here?”

  The man tilts his head. Lumbering over to the crack in the wall, Dyndra can now see that, in addition to already having many scars, the man has plenty of room for more of them.

  Good a brawler, she thinks with a smile. He may be able to help me fight my way out if it comes to that.

  The man peers his eye through the crack. He looks over Dyndra, examining her before speaking. “A week, perhaps longer. How did you get in here?”

  “Me?” Dyndra finds the question and its tone odd, but it does reveal something. The owners of this nightclub don’t typically take prisoners; she and whoever this man is must be special cases.

  “I was sent to extract a valuable person from this pnet. Last night, someone gave me a note saying they were being kept here.” Dyndra second-guesses the beginning of that st sentence. It has to be day by now, right?

  “So, your extraction didn’t go as pnned?”

  “I’m still working on it,” Dyndra does her best to state it confidently, but how can she and her troops get Cassandra out if she doesn’t want to go anywhere with the Republic?

  “Who gave you the note?” The man asks in a stern yet hopeful voice that catches her off guard.

  “Why is that what you're interested in?”

  “Because I have a feeling I may know them.” The man pleads.

  Dyndra has been wondering how that little girl knew Cassandra and how she knew she was in the Mori-Keeper, but how does this man know Cassandra and the girl?

  “A little girl gave it to me,” She tells the man, before adding the detail that had briefly won over Cassandra, “She had white hair.”

  The man goes quiet as he rises and backs away from the crack in the wall.

  “You know her?” Dyndra asks after a long silence.

  “Yes,” The man kneels back down to the crack, “She’s my sister.”

  Really? Dyndra thinks. The only resembnce is the blue eyes and sickly pale skin that’s as white as paper, but I suppose if you had your consciousness transferred…

  “Did she say anything to you?”

  Dyndra’s shocked back to her senses. “No,” she sighs, “She seemed like she didn’t want to talk, and the note implied she was being watched by that Ryomen fellow’s hawks.”“She still might be,” the man mutters, turning away from the crack as Dyndra leans forward to ask, “You and your sister have names?”

  “Anvil!” A far-off voice answers for her. The rapid footsteps race down the hall until reaching the cramped cells. Then comes the sound of palms spping across knees to rest for but a brief moment before rising as the voice attached gasps for breath. “Do you have enough blood to summon something for me?”

  “What do you—”

  “Summon?” Dyndra creeps up to the wall that the voice is coming from, a voice she’s already guessed the owner of. “Summon what, Cassandra?”

  “No,” Cassandra sternly bites, “I’m not talking to you.”

  “Why not? I told you I have troops here! They’re probably on their way right now to get us out of here!”

  “Or they’re all dead by now.”

  Dyndra freezes at Cassandra’s comment, recalling part of what Tendo said back on Tethaseele, We’ll all be dead before dawn.

  “Can you do it, Anvil?” She hears Cassandra creep closer to the door as she speaks.

  Anvil huffs, “I’ve been trying since I got in here, but I haven’t been able to break myself out. The cell has its own metal, no doubt summoned by that Lungoza. The furthest I’ve gotten is making a crack in one of the walls, which led me to meeting Miss…”

  “Starlin,” Dyndra smiles at Anvil, who looks at her through the crack again, “Dyndra Starlin.”

  “Don’t get all friendly with her, she’s Republic.” The words hurt even more this time, and Dyndra leaps to defend herself. “I’m also the best shot you have at getting out of this pce! Your Mother personally ordered me to bring you back to her. The woman cares for you! What is it that you have against the Republic anyway?”

  Cassandra clenches her fists even tighter than when she was with Ryomen. Just like a few moments ago, rage and disgust fre through her body. The seething anger cws its way up her neck and to her teeth as she grinds them.

  “You think Vanessa cares for me?” She nearly ughs. Nearly. What she says next is a complete, snarling, horrid contrast to ughter.

  “Vanessa Soryu is a woman who cares about nothing but power. She went out of her way to control me and made my life nothing but torture for years. I watched as she made my Father afraid of even his own shadow. I watched as she lied and schemed to keep her power. I watched as she turned the Republic’s ‘democracy’ into anything but! I watched and watched and kept fucking watching because watching was all I could do. The woman made me and everyone around her powerless because she thinks she’s the only one who deserves power. The only one worthy of it. When I was younger, every time I looked at the Republic fg and saw that white phoenix against a sea of red, I saw nothing but an ugly bird watching my every move in an ocean of blood that could one day be mine if I so much as said one bad thing about my supposed ‘Mother.”

  Cassandra presses against Dyndra’s cell, uttering in a hushed, cruel, frigid, cutting tone, “That is what I have against your precious Republic, Ms. Dyndra Starlin.”

  The air contorts around the harsh voice, shaping into a bde that slices the hidden locks of both cells. The doors crack open but an inch. Still, it is enough for Dyndra to slip free with a smile on her face. “Funny, you seem to hate me, but can remember my name that you just heard a second ago, even after that whole word sad. I’d say that counts as progress.”

  Cassandra grinds her teeth again. She’s worse than Adamus!

  Anvil steps out of his cell next. The metal door swings against the ancient stone with a thud. He stretches his wide, muscur arms and scratches his chest with a sigh, “So what now?”

  “Now, we get the fuck out of here.” Cassandra turns to march down the hall opposite the one she came. Anvil is eager to follow, yet Dyndra remains. “That seemed almost too easy,” She worryingly mutters, “shouldn’t there be guards? Some sort of signal that we’ve been freed? What about—”

  “Look!” Cassandra shouts, “Are you going to sit around and question things, or are you gonna help get me out of here like you were sent to—”

  The ground shakes.

  Then the walls shake and glow with light.

  A hawk cries out in the distance.

  “Run.” The trio take off into the dark at the whispered warning. The light chases after them. It infects the runes, the numbers on the walls, one after the other.

  One, zero, one, zero, one.

  Cassandra moves as fast as her legs can carry her, her heart pounding with every step and threatening to spill into her throat. Dyndra trails fast behind, overtaking Anvil’s heavy feet.

  Together, the three run further than they can possibly know. All the walls of numbers appear as nothing more than a threatening, amorphous blur in their vision as they run and run through the halls. The light becomes a horrific pursuer.

  With each step, it kills the dark more and more. With each step, it comes closer to them. With each step, it threatens to swallow everyone in the hall whole.

  Cassandra rounds a corner.

  Her feet stop dead in their tracks.

  Skidding along the stone, the soles of her extraneously elegant shoes seem to have failed to receive the order and catch on a crack in the rock.

  She falls.

  A wing flutters before her face, the same wing that made her stop.

  Her heart drops.

  Not him, not him, please gods don’t let it be him, don’t let it be Ryomen, don’t let it be the dwarf or the Lungoza or anyone, please gods not anyone, please don’t let it be anyone!

  Just get me out of here!

  Blood sptters across the wing.

  Someone catches Cassandra.

  Dyndra rounds the corner.

  “Jylon?”

  Her troop stands firm with their swords drawn.

  “You seem to have found yourself in quite a bit of trouble, General,” Jylon says as he helps Cassandra to her feet.

  “At least we got the girl,” Harper states with a smile, before poking the dead hawk with her sword, mumbling, “I had no idea how annoying it would be to fight a bird.”

  “What are you wearing?” Another one of her soldiers sneers at the sight of her tattered dress.

  “Business attire,” She jokes, hastily putting on her business tone, “I see five of you, where are the other fifteen? What was your entry point? We need to move to get Cassandra out of here immediat—”

  Anvil rounds the corner, the hole on his chest left by the consciousness transfer machine exposed for the universe to see.

  Dyndra’s troop raises their swords.

  “No, no!” She rushes to press the bdes down, “He’s with us! He’s with—”

  The light rounds the corner, catching up to everyone.

  For a moment, everything goes blue.

  Cassandra closes her eyes at the blinding fsh.

  She breaks from Jylon’s arms.

  Tears threaten to break from her shut eyelids as she stumbles away from the group with a brow full of sweat.

  “Zero.”

  When she opens her eyes, she finds herself in a sea of infinite darkness. The action of her eyes opening seems to repeat over and over again for an eternity as her breath catches, and that too seems to repeat forever and ever.

  A blue light sits on the bck horizon.

  It’s coming toward her.

  No, she thinks, please no more! No more! Just leave me alone! Leave me alone!

  “Leave me alone!”

  The light stops.

  “Cassandra?”

  That voice…

  “Adamus?”

  “Cassandra? What are you doing here?”

  Adamus wakes up before he can get an answer.

  Marqus stands over him, shaking his shoulders, his fingers firmly gripping them like cws.

  “Get up,” He mutters in that low, gravely voice of his.

  Adamus mumbles, “I’m up, I’m up.” He swats Marqus away and slowly stands, stumbling to the edge of the ship’s open hangar as he does so. He leans against the symbiotic frame. His eyes are oddly strained, and his mouth is as dry as bone. He wipes his brow. Sweat? Why did I wake up in a cold sweat?

  Adamus presses the back of his hand to his lips, feeling now as if he were going to vomit. He tries to recall something. Something he forgot?

  “Cassandra?”

  “Who?” The older man hovers over his shoulder.

  Adamus shakes his head, pushing whatever bile has built up in his uncannily dry mouth back down his throat. “No one. I just…” He stares off into the wide field of fungus on the pnet Leo chose to nd on, “I guess I had a bad dream…”