The Defiant
Chapter Forty Three

We arrived at Sorhna on February 3, Earth Time. While in orbit, we made our plans.

The main headquarters of the Oliane department were located in the center of Kiamenoa, the Sorhnan capital city. We had decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea to tote the passenger down Main Street, so we would arrive the next morning, parking our shuttle in the nearest spaceport. We’d go up to the Oliane building and request to speak with Three’s contact. Cassian had apparently assured her that we would be guaranteed an audience if we told the security guards his name and why we’d come.

All we had to do then was convince Hanna Elmer, the contact, that we had who they were looking for. After that, they would surely take care of it, and perhaps as a favor for our hard work we could request they find a way to get our memories back, and also grant some civil rights to the Sedha.

It was an idealistic and childish plan, but it was the best we had.

We killed our last day aboard the Defiant separately. I spent the remainder of the day in the training room, working off my extra energy. Six joined me, beating the stuffing out of the punching bag, but I didn’t see any of the others all day.

I hadn’t gone to see Eight or Five at all during our journey to Sorhna, and the others had taken food down to them so I wouldn’t have to. Eight’s betrayal I could deal with. She’d never liked me anyway.

But Five… I’d always felt he was a decent guy (despite what he’d done to me), and I really couldn’t believe he would do that to us.

Three had gone down to talk to Eight the day after we’d gotten access to the ship back, but Eight refused to talk, so we’d gotten no more information.

I still couldn’t shake the feeling that she was hiding something. She seemed too smug to have been defeated. We kept someone on guard at all times, but I could relax. I was on edge and jumpy all the time. The night before our Sorhna mission, I hardly slept at all.

We woke that morning and dressed, then gathered tensely on the bridge. We all carried weapons. No one had really insisted on it, but after the fiasco on Cebos, I think we all felt a bit safer having something with which to defend ourselves if the need arose.

I carried a sharp steel dagger in my boot, and a small pistol tucked into a gun belt that wrapped around my hips. The others were similarly adorned. Four clutched a photograph we’d taken of the passenger, to reassure Ms. Elmer that we weren’t lying about having him in custody.

Even though we’d lost two of the comms when Four and Five had been held captive on Cebos, it worked out perfectly for each of us to get one, now that Eight and Five weren’t coming.

I was reluctant to leave Eight alone on the ship, but no one wanted to be left behind at this critical stage of the mission, and Four assured me that Eight couldn’t possibly escape or sabotage the ship in any way.

I did my best not to think about it as we boarded our shuttle and took it down to the Kiamenoa space port, which was only a few blocks from the Oliane department. No one spoke. Three was fiddling with her hair behind me. Two’s knee bounced.

I watched out the window as we descended into the atmosphere.

Sorhna was an oddly patchwork planet. Circles of green grass, clean orderly streets, and tall, shiny, state-of-the-art skyscrapers marked the big cities. The countryside around them was brown and gray, full of run-down shacks and misery. The camps the Sedha had been forced into, no doubt. We flew low over the planet, and I saw a village with crooked dirt roads. A painfully thin Sedha child ran down a muddy road. The sad little towns stopped abruptly at a huge metal wall that bisected the land, and the world on the other side was green and silver, gorgeous landscaping and perfectly maintained streets. And it was full of humans.

I felt sick and looked away from the windows. How could humanity, a race that had experienced so much cruelty and suffering in its past at its own hands, treat another species like this? And on their own home world, to boot. It was shameful.

Four landed the shuttle in a bay of the fanciest spaceport I’d ever seen. It was huge, every inch of it polished to a sheen, worked in shimmery silver metal and crystal-clear glass.

I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

The Kiamenoa spaceport was bustling, full of humans in business dress, rushing to and fro. Busy, busy, busy. In a rush to get somewhere they didn’t really need to be.

The six of us walked in as tight a clump as we could, well aware that we didn’t belong here. It was a relief when we finally reached the doors and burst out into the clean, cool air.

I could see why humans liked it here so much. Sorhna was a gorgeous planet, with blue skies and oceans and green plant life like Earth. Even better, the air was clean, not infected with the choking smog that hung over big cities on Earth. We’d found a whole new planet to destroy, and the people who already lived there were being forced to help us do it.

On the way to the Oliane building, we passed through a beautifully maintained park, with Earth flora that must have been shipped here. Of course, the businesspeople who lunched here probably couldn’t stand the idea of being near foreign plants, I thought with disgust. I smiled at the Sedha gardener who was trimming the branches of a forsythia bush. He looked away.

“This is disturbing,” Four echoed my thoughts under her breath. “Don’t they know this isn’t their planet?”

We watched a tall man in a suit snarl nastily at the Sedha gardener as he passed by. The Sedha bowed to him.

“God, it’s practically slavery,” I heard Seven mutter in front of me. Six agreed.

Not a moment too soon, we reached the address on the paper Cassian had given Three. It was a tall building, just like all its neighbors on this side of the wall, and plated in chrome and steel and glass, hundreds of reflective windows peering down at us like some horrible many-eyed creature.

We entered through the double doors at the bottom into a breezy lobby. The floors were shiny parquet in an elaborate pattern, covered in lush persian rugs. The walls were lined with chaise benches and hung with stylish art. I began to worry that we weren’t doing the right thing. This didn’t look like the poor but determined government agency building I had been picturing.

The red-haired receptionist at the desk at the back of the room gave us one dismissive glance and said,

“No visitors under eighteen.”

“Oh, no, we’re not visiting,” I said, and then prodded Three forward.

“We’re here to see Hanna Elmer. We have… something she needs. Tell her Cassian Hannigan sent us. She’ll know what it’s about,” Three said.

“I’ll ask Ms. Elmer if she knows what you’re talking about. Until then, you’ll have to wait outside,” the receptionist said boredly, picking at her nail and showing absolutely no intention of picking up the phone to call Ms. Elmer.

“Oh, but…” The receptionist cut me off with a raise of one stenciled brow and a glance at the discreet security guards waiting along the back wall. I backed down, and we left.

“Well,” said Three, affronted. “She was rude.”

“No visitors under eighteen,” Two mocked in a spot-on impression of the woman’s nasaly voice. We all laughed.

“What do we do if she doesn’t contact Elmer, though?” asked Six.

“I say we wait half an hour and if no one comes for us, we go in and ask again. We’ll just bug that receptionist until she lets us through,” I said determinedly.

Four, Two, Three, and Six sat down with their backs against the building, and I began to join them, but Seven stopped me.

“Can I talk to you about something?” she asked.

“Sure. Do you guys mind? We’ll just be gone a minute,” I told the rest. Three waved us off.

Seven led me down the street to the park we’d passed through earlier, where we sat on a cold concrete bench.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. Maybe this was why she’d been so weird lately.

“I just… Okay, I’ve been debating for a really long time about whether or not to tell you this, ever since the ball, practically, and I’d finally made up my mind to do it right before Five and Eight’s coup, and I couldn’t tell you then, obviously, and I would’ve told you after, but you were clearly upset about something and I didn’t want to give you one more thing to think about, and then I figured I wouldn’t tell you, but now I think I have to, but I don’t want you to think you have to do anything about it or…”

“Seven,” I interrupted. “Breathe.”

“I’m fine. I’m fine. Really, I am, and I don’t think I ought to tell you after all. We have enough on our plates as it is,” she said, twisting her hands in her lap.

“Seven, you can tell me. It’ll be fine.” I had to admit, I was curious as to what would make Seven act like this. She was always so unfazeable.

She nodded, and muttered something under her breath that sounded like “aye mung oo.”

“Sorry, what?”

She exhaled and brought her gaze up from where it had been resting on her hands.

“I love you.”

My heart stopped.

“What?” I gasped.

“I— I love you. I do. I’ve been realizing it for a while now, and I just thought you should know, but I don’t want to pressure you or make you do something you don’t want to do, or… I know you might not feel the same, and I’m prepared for that, but I just thought you should know.

“One, say something.”

“Seven, I—”

“There they are!” someone shouted, and I whipped around to see four huge men in black racing toward us. My reflexes dulled from Seven’s proclamation, I didn’t react for a second.

That second cost me. They reached us and grabbed Seven and I. I saw them force a bag over her head before my own world went dark.

They carried me for a long time, then I was deposited in a seat. My wrists and ankles were bound with twine. The bag was pulled from my head and a gag tied around my mouth.

I blinked at the sudden light that flooded my eyes. When I could see again, I looked around. I was in a small room. The walls and floor were plain metal, unadorned. There was no door that I could see, but I couldn’t turn my head around since I was tied to my chair, which appeared to be bolted to the floor.

The wall in front of me was entirely glass. The view looked down on Kiamenoa, the shiny buildings below me and the small wood ones surrounding them, from which I gathered that I was in one of the taller skyscrapers.

I heard the sound of a door opening behind me and strained to see, but of course I couldn’t move.

“Hello, One,” came a familiar voice that I couldn’t quite place. “What a cute little naming system you all came up with. How strange, to use numbers instead of giving yourselves names.

“You have been a bit naughty, haven’t you? It’s rather rude to betray your employer, isn’t it?”

I tried to speak, but all that came out through the gag was a muffled groan.

“Please don’t try to speak. I don’t understand anyway. Oh, forgive me. I have neglected to introduce myself.”

The intruder walked into my line of sight. It was Imelda, the woman from the video. She wore a dark suit and a smug grin.

“My name is Imelda Moritanius. I’m sure you remember me. I would shake your hand, but, you know…” She laughed. “Now, we don’t mean to be cruel, but we would like you to see something before we return you and your little crew to Earth. The restraints are really for your own safety.

“As you watch this, remember that this is compliments of the Aerzhu, and it’s all your fault.” Imelda said, leaning in close to my face and hissing the last part. She left the room, laughing cruelly.

I watched out the window, wondering what they possibly had to show me and knowing it probably wouldn’t be good.

I heard it before I saw it, a loud rushing noise that passed right over the building I was in. As it flew in front of the building, I caught a glimpse of its shining steel belly. An airplane.

It flew out over the wall that separated the humans from the Sedha. Once it was a distance away from the building, it began dropping small round objects from a hatch in the bottom.

Bombs.

I watched helplessly, unable to move or even speak, as huge, mushroom-shaped clouds billowed up from the Sedha village, carrying with them the screams of people as they were blasted into pieces or burned alive.

Tears dripped down my face and soaked into my gag as a hissing sound began from pipes above me.

The smoke reached the picture window just as I passed out, the acrid smell of knockout gas burning my nose.

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