Content warning: suicide ideation, torture

The call for Regan to operate on Entente citizens from the Elders’ latest raid inevitably caught her off-guard—she was the implant installation facility’s specialist in removing preexisting brain hardware before the new implant went in, and preexisting hardware was rare. Those who had it were mostly military personnel; the Elders targeted civilians. But apparently four subjects were arriving for her in a matter of minutes.

The news froze her, mind skittering from desperate hope to hopeless desperation and back again. Four more chances to succeed, four more chances to fail. If she could keep even one out of the Elders’ full control, if that one could successfully sabotage the Elders’ facility, would that balance all Regan’s failures before?

Jaclyn and another Recruit guided the captured citizens in two by two, still loopy and stumbling from the gas on the transport. There was barely room for all of them in the tiny processing room—strange as it was to apply that designation to the space. The Elders, as far as Regan could generalize from this facility, loved the fractal delicacy of filigree, found here on bosses at the center of ceiling vaulting and fretwork along the arches of false windows along the walls. All molded from resin, of course, not stone, but with the same texture and warm sand color.

No doubt the whole room—if not the whole facility—had been grown using some highly technical, low-labor process, as was the Elders’ specialty. When the Elders first attacked an Entente planet in their so-called Crusade, the united council had scoffed; the Elders might have the edge in tech, but Entente planets absolutely swamped them in numbers. What could a single planet, underpopulated with a formerly isolationist culture of genetically bottlenecked humans, do against dozens of Entente planets?

Quite a lot, given loyalty implants. Install them liberally in captured prisoners and you gained yourself an underclass of laborers for your own planet and soldiers and occupiers for conquered planets who were incapable of rebellion. Even better, the Elders sent the newly loyal Recruits to occupy their birth planets, forcing any who resisted to attack Recruits they recognized. Thus was an empire born. Regan had no source of untainted news, but she couldn’t imagine many Entente planets remained free by now.

But dwelling on the stakes too deeply would freeze her again. Neither should she think of her past failures. Each surgery was a clean slate. Her plan could work, even if it hadn’t yet. She herself was proof of that, maintaining her thoughts of resistance despite her own loyalty implant. Her undetected preexisting seizure control hardware had saved her, and these citizens’ preexisting hardware could save them. If she could pretend to remove it without getting caught.

But to get that far, she needed calm and the steady hands her implant should have forced on her. Standard procedure. But four with prior hardware in one raid was far from standard. Her job existed because raids picked up people with hardware every so often—search and rescue personnel, for example, or military intelligence, trying to slip someone through in the guise of a civilian. She assumed that was who these people were, but four at once? They must be some kind of specialized team, perhaps pulled together from the best and brightest of the remaining planets? She could only hope.

Two chairs, molded like carved wood, as well as her workstation chair, made three for the captives to be pressed down into. Regan stole the visitor’s chair to drag into line with the others to make up four. Her Elder supervisor, Valor, could observe the surgeries while standing if he wished to observe them today.

Regan shouldn’t kid herself, though. Of course, Valor would want to watch such an unusual group. Every Recruit who worked in this facility knew how Valor liked to watch. How he liked to savor each time someone’s eyes widened in fear, each time they gasped in pain.

A necessary evil, the emotional impulse she assigned to her own implant murmured at the back of her mind. Valor’s sadism was more than outweighed by his brilliance in extending the implants’ effects beyond what anyone had thought possible. That emotional impulse was muted, partially blocked by the hardware she’d arrived with, but ever-present nonetheless. With luck, these people’s military hardware would be able to block the implants even more effectively.

If she could make sure they kept it.

Falling into routine, simply multiplied by four, Jaclyn snipped back hair from the new Recruits’ necks—they’d only lose it anyway, soon enough, as the Elders like Recruits’ hair short and functional—and disinfected their skin, and Regan walked down the line and hit them with the paralytic drugs.

Then the necessary pause, but Regan could see in Jaclyn’s restiveness an objection growing steadily, taking shape. Jaclyn brushed at a hair on one man’s shoulder so small as to be invisible, or perhaps imaginary, and thrust her thick black curls behind her ears even though they fell back again on the next breath. Regan pulled on gloves, collected the implants, assembled her tray of tools on the small cart, all with measured deliberation, in hopes Jaclyn would decide she should escape now her part was over.

“Hurry up.” Jaclyn finally found relative stillness in speech, arm held wide to where Regan would stand to work behind the new Recruits. “If you don’t hurry they’ll become fully aware under the paralysis while you’re working. That’s cruel.”

But Regan needed them aware, able to listen to the information she needed to slip them if this was to work. And she could never reveal that to Jaclyn, because Jaclyn’s implant was functioning perfectly. Her objection proved it, in fact—loyalty implants warped Recruit’s beliefs, they didn’t dictate them, so Jaclyn’s insistence on a small kindness in the midst of a wholly horrific process showed her mind was grinding the edges of the Elders’ propaganda.

“It’s better if they understand what’s happening,” Regan said because she had to say something. It definitely wasn’t better, but it was their only chance. Regan approached the man at the end of the line and tipped up his chin to check his eyes. They found her, but couldn’t focus.

“Regan—” The way Jaclyn cut off informed Regan without turning that Valor was behind her, lounging in the doorway back to the Elders’ offices. No one liked to draw too much of his attention, so Jaclyn ducked her head and slipped out the door she’d come in.

No one liked to draw Valor’s attention except Regan, who had to. She risked a casual glance towards him. The impeccably groomed lines of his gray hair clashed with his unlined face, as was the case for most Elders, the founder effect of their planet in action. Regan had even seen Elders with reverse roots, as if those who hadn’t inherited the premature white or gray had bleached their hair. Valor was probably older than many at the facility, however, because he had lines beginning at the corner of his mouth where he liked to tuck his deep, disquieting smiles of satisfaction when he watched.

Time, then, for the show.

“Now.” Regan clapped her hands, paced a few steps to settle Valor firmly into her peripheral vision as she addressed the new Recruits. “This is important. You’ve all been selected to join the Elders’ Crusade. You’ll receive implants to give you guidance in your new purpose. Unfortunately, it seems you were so foolish as to think you could escape that purpose by coming in with brain hardware in hopes it would protect you. But such hardware is always connected. That’s how we find it. Connected to your superiors, to each other.”

Valor smirked at “foolish.” She’d thought he might. All part and parcel of the show, the self she projected to perform it. While beneath the projection, a little more of her real self crumbled away each time that smile grew.

A necessary sacrifice. If she succeeded, she could flee Valor, grasp after her shreds of self before they were entirely gone. If she succeeded, she and all the others would be free of the Elders’ control. Eventually.

“Your hardware will be removed, of course,” she told the new Recruits. “It won’t hurt for long. I’m quite good at my job.”

A pause for effect, a pause for more of the effects of the gas to dissipate, a pause for Regan to hope they were listening. Please. Four pairs of eyes were on her now, those from the man on the end boring into her with what she hoped was concentration, not rage. She didn’t want them so angry they didn’t think about what she was really saying. She wondered, not for the first time, what impression she made on them: willowy, black hair so fine the hack job of an institutional haircut turned her into a dandelion. Presumably not very easy to take seriously.

“You’re an artist, Regan. Wasted on regular implant surgeries.” Valor swept a hand to the room’s current unwilling occupants. “I’m proud of you.”

Now Regan needed to stall even longer, scrabble after the certainty that this was necessary she’d used to ground herself. What was she becoming? Valor couldn’t have devised a better torture for her if he’d turned his considerable sadism to the effort. Proud of you.

No, she had an ordered row of tasks before her. Perform them one by one, and then the job would be done. She wheeled the cart with her tools to the angry man first. She pressed with her right fingers into the muscle, down the cords of the neck and between them, seeking the existing chip. Hard to find with scans except for those elusive connections they maintained, but relatively easy to feel the old-fashioned way if you knew what you were looking for. Having found it, she marked it with her first left two fingers, leaving that touch in place as she reached for her tools.

She leaned in close to murmur in the man’s ear just before she cut, though she made sure Valor heard her too, to give him no reason for suspicion. “You’ll want to scream when I pull this out, but the drugs won’t let you, I’m afraid. I’ve always imagined having hardware removed must be something like having half your senses ripped away, though the simple muscular pain will be a factor as well. And of course any connections to your friends, your home, will be completely severed. Don’t try to remain stoic, I urge you. It’s not healthy, and I’m sure your friends will understand.”

A careful cut, dipping in her forceps before the blood did more than ooze. “Now,” she told him, as she silently urged him with everything she had. Play along. If he valued a free civilization, play along.

He remained silent, no change in the simmering of the hate she felt almost rolling from his skin across the narrow space that separated them. So the broken Entente chip she held with her pinkie and ring fingers nestled against her left palm remained where it was, and it was the real one she yanked out and dropped bloody into the tray’s waiting compartment.

He grunted then, guttural and half-choking in his savage fight against the muscles that wouldn’t let him scream. She smeared glue on the incision, pressed the sides briefly together. Now for the new implant. That went into the center of the cup between corded muscle at the nape, point driven in and opening up into rays that splayed outward to make it nearly impossible to dig out without specialized tools. Not that Recruits ever wanted to try, but the Elders were careful. This time his grunt grew to something like a moan, drawing out until it broke in pitch.

One failure, three more chances for success. Regan turned away to change her gloves, leaving him to the implant’s tender mercies. But rather than smoothing with newly gifted calm, the man’s breathing stuttered and increased in pace. One hand still bloody-gloved, Regan stepped to his front, found dawning madness in his eyes. One that couldn’t take the implant. She hadn’t had any of those for a long time. She’d thought the military hardware selected against the tendency, in fact. More fool her.

She fumbled the injector from her tray, clenched her teeth against shaking. Perhaps to lose your will was worse than death, but she had to believe in the chance of deprogramming or go mad herself, and real death removed that chance. She hadn’t anticipated this depth of failure, hadn’t prepared herself for it. She looked at Valor, as if there was any doubt what she needed to do, with the man’s hyperventilation now bringing a froth of saliva to his lips.

He nodded, which meant she had no choice but to apply the injector to the side of the man’s neck. She pressed the dead man’s forehead back so he would slump into the chair, not off it. “It becomes a part of you. You can’t fight that, or you tear yourself apart,” she told the others. Begged them, rather.

A woman was next in line. Her hair was richly brown, red in the highlights to nearly black in the lowlights, long sides Jaclyn hadn’t cut falling in front of her shoulders. New gloves, dummy chip tucked away, Regan leaned over her next. “You don’t have to die,” she said. She mustn’t sound so worried, that wasn’t the kind of show Valor liked, but she couldn’t help the anxiety leaking into her voice. Three chances left. “Let me do my job, and don’t be afraid to cry out.”

This woman whined when Regan cut, which she didn’t allow to give her hope. When Regan’s forceps touched her skin, millimeters—which in this situation, might as well have been kilometers—from the chip, the woman grunted. She didn’t attain quite the guttural note the first man had, but it was enough.

She’d understood.

Regan bathed the dummy chip in the woman’s blood and dropped it with an unmistakable clatter on the tray. Then the Elders’ implant was pressed into place, and she smoothed more glue over the original cut and said everything she’d never had a chance to say to anyone before. Her other failures might not have died, but they hardly needed the warning about how to act, given that the implant had controlled them exactly as it was supposed to. “There. Now you’ll feel calm, now you’ll feel purpose. Just listen to that feeling, all right? Give everything time to settle in.”

And the other two, another man and another woman, took her cues as well. Regan could hardly keep from laughing with the heady exultation of it. Even the first failure seemed to have a purpose, because she’d never thought to have more than one dummy chip, and the first man’s gave her another chip to palm while at least one stayed bloodily in view.

Then her part was over, her last task to press the button to summon the escorts to take the three to their next stage of recruitment. She left them in their chairs for the paralytic drugs to wear off as she stacked her instruments to be taken for sterilization. Valor offered her a brief nod—proud of her, but even the nausea that surrounded that thought wasn’t enough to entirely banish her celebration—and wandered off, giving her the moment she needed, her last task in her own plan, rather than the Elders’.

“Meet me just before bed,” she said, finally able to be low-voiced in truth rather than for the show. “The small common room between the mess and the gym should be empty around then. I’ll explain everything.” She stepped back from the three new Recruits, still silent, but also still alive, Entente hardware intact.

She’d succeeded. Her part was nearly finished, while some of her self was still left.

~~~

Regan arrived far too early to the common room and had to force herself to at least stare out the room’s false window to keep herself from pacing. She wasn’t even sure if this team’s goal was sabotage or reconnaissance, but whatever the first step was, rescue would follow, right? Here in the common room, the false windows were stained “glass,” geometric patterns of saturated tones amidst the soaring lines of vaulting worthy of any cathedral on Old Earth, from the Stone Age or whatever it was called. Every room in the facility was as beautiful as this one, even the sleeping quarters for the recruitment staff and the dorms for the Recruits waiting to be shipped off. Regan rested a hand on the sandy faux stone of the window frame, imagined dragging her fingertips along it, degrading it to gray with layers of touch. But of course, the coating on the resin shed dust and finger oils with ease, leaving the Elders’ impassive beauty untouched.

Still restless, Regan switched the room’s screen to a view of the outdoors and stood before that instead. At this time of night, the sky was not so different than the snow, one studded with stars, one shaded with places where the light caught on the curve of hidden terrain. She’d always wondered if the Elders had chosen the frozen, polar location for their facility back before they’d known their implants would be such a roaring success, because there was certainly no need to meteorologically deter escape now.

Regan jumped and twisted at the sound of the door opening behind her. There they were. She barely waited for the team to close the door before she started babbling. “I don’t know what your mission is—and you probably shouldn’t tell me, I suppose, but anything I can tell you about the facility, I’m happy to—”

Hsst! Regan couldn’t tell which of the team made the preemptory, slightly panicked sound; perhaps it had come from all three.

It was only when they frowned at the corners of the ceiling she finally realized they expected surveillance. “No one’s watching or listening. Why bother? Everyone’s loyalty is assured.”

Painful silence for a moment. Regan decided to start again. This must be a lot to take in even for people with military intelligence training. She’d had months to come to terms with her situation before she’d even set her plan in motion. “I’m Regan.” She gestured to one of the room’s conversation arcs of couches. Regan chose one and the three Recruits pressed together in a space meant for two people. The intimacy, thigh smashed into thigh, spoke of a comfort offered and accepted that left Regan feeling chilly in her loneliness.

“Vulpes,” said the woman in the middle finally, her red hair still rather attractive even now so short. Her call sign, not her real name, Regan assumed. She tipped a hand to either side, speaking names on the others’ behalf. Lutra was the other woman, stockier, squared-jawed, with straw-colored hair. Meles was the man, his hair the same as it had been, tiny black curls close to the skin.

“It was Martes you killed,” Lutra snapped, then subsided back into the cushion, breaking her angle from that of the other two. She winced as her implant must have been jarred into tender, healing muscles.

“I—” Didn’t kill him, Regan wanted to say. But of course she had, just not by choice. Then again, could she really claim that? Her implant was partially blocked. She’d chosen to seek training in performing the surgeries. She’d chosen to play to Valor. “I’m sorry. It was my failure. But I accept it because it got all of you here, and now all of you can do something.” That tumbled out too fast. Her guilt wasn’t important. The success of the team’s mission was.

“Call me Tamara,” the middle woman said, like a gift, after a moment of silent deliberation. Perhaps it was another assumed name, a strategy to inspire confidence in civilians. Regan appreciated it nonetheless. The others declined to follow Tamara’s example. Regan wondered if she was the leader, or just de facto spokesperson, for this team.

“And who are you, really?” Lutra said, crossing her arms. Or perhaps hugging herself and pretending otherwise. “Why don’t you have an implant? Are you one of them?”

“I’m from an Entente planet, same as you. Of course, I have an implant.” Regan’s guilt soured easily into anger, but she shoved that down. She needed to do a better job of explaining. “You can feel it, if you want.” She tipped her head down, watched obliquely as Tamara stood and diffidently touched the tiny button of metal above the skin at the nape of her neck. “I came in with medical hardware to control seizures. Self-contained, so they didn’t find it. That buffered me from the loyalty implant.”

“Buffered? How do you mean?” Tamara retreated to rejoin the others, linking hands this time. Lutra straightened to lean back against her shoulder.

Well, shit. Did Entente intelligence know anything about the implants? But how would they? Everyone they’d sent had died or been successfully recruited. Regan grimaced. “Before I was captured, hearing about it on the news, I assumed people were being…piloted, almost, by washes of pleasure or pain chemicals. But it’s more than that. They fuck with your chemistry to make you believe in what they tell you, make it your highest moral code, so each action you take is in support of that higher purpose. That’s why nearly the first thing they do is give the Recruits that big propaganda speech.”

Tamara nodded, acknowledging their recent experience with it.

“So then the implant makes you want to follow any commands after that. It still feels like free will, it’s just free will skewed toward their goals. You’ll find with the buffering hardware—or at least I do—the difference is you can tell it’s external. Usually.” Oh, the world of quiet, hopeless terror summarized by that last word. What if Regan’s self-control was eroding? What if she was tired and not evaluating her choices clearly enough? She had enough to fill the small hours of a thousand nights.

“We were supposed to be immune.” Tamara’s admission earned her hard looks from her teammates, as if she wasn’t supposed to be revealing that much. “The Elders avoid capturing soldiers; we thought it was because the implants wouldn’t take…”

Regan gave a bark of a laugh without humor. “They can install implants in anyone’s head—that’s what I’m here for—it’s just a waste of resources to go to the trouble with soldiers at scale. Much easier to conveyor-belt civilians through—shove in the implant, on to the next.”

“You sure know a lot. Are you sure you’re not one of them? Sent to entrap us?” Now Lutra surged forward into Regan’s face. Her slash of a smile seemed to indicate the question was an insult, not a serious suspicion, leaving Regan with no idea how to respond. What was Lutra’s problem?

“Were you under the impression this was going to be easy, Lutra?” Tamara turned to her, her tone gaining a snap of its own. “Because it certainly seems to me that you’re letting your fear lead you into stupid mistakes like insulting the woman who saved you.”

“And let Martes die.” Meles finally dropped into the conversation, surprising them all into silence in his wake.

Regan jerked her hands open over her knees, then drew them back when she couldn’t quite figure out how she’d meant to complete the gesture. Being angry with Lutra had felt good, but she couldn’t sustain it in the face of that truth. She shouldn’t offer excuses, but they were all she had. “When someone can’t take the implant, if you don’t do something, they only suffer longer before the end. Their mind breaks, and there’s no putting it back together.”

“You didn’t have to pull his Entente hardware in the first place.” Meles was implacable, words absolutely unyielding. And Regan noticed that Tamara said nothing in her defense this time.

“I did.” Regan clenched her hands. “Because he wasn’t playing along and that meant he probably hadn’t understood my message. I couldn’t risk it; he might keep an active connection or something even worse.” She didn’t give Meles time to reply this time. “Long before they got me, before they realized about preexisting hardware, they picked up a retired soldier. He was buffered, so when he realized what they were doing to his friends and neighbors picked up in the same raid, he immediately attacked one of the Elders. And those friends and neighbors took him out. After that, the Elders figured out how to detect active hardware connections. I couldn’t risk that your colleague…”

Or maybe she could have. Maybe she should have. He was military intelligence, after all. He had to know better than that. She’d preserved few choices under the implant, and it seemed she was making them wrong. She thought to open her hands, but they were shaking badly, so she kept them clenched tight. Keep going. Make it all worth something. “I’m glad you three figured it out.”

Tamara slanted an opaque look in Meles’s direction. “Only because I warned them before I shut the connection down. We might as well start asking why I didn’t figure it out soon enough to tell Martes as well.”

“Yeah, she’s a noble hero.” Lutra shoved to her feet, lifted hands to the back of her neck, jerked them down, and started pacing. “A real hero would have replaced the real implants with dummies so we don’t have to worry about them exploding inside our heads or whatever if we don’t dig them out fast enough when we blow this joint.”

“I know I’m not a hero. I’m the sacrifice to get the heroes into the castle.” A dark laugh cut Regan’s throat on the way up. “And the implants don’t blow up. They do receive a location-based signal that you lose if you go too far, or if the Elders cut it off manually. Imagine what would happen if there were a solar flare and the signal went down by mistake. They could blow up half the Crusade as well as whatever facility they were in. No, when the signal is lost, the implants just make you want to kill yourself. That’s preventable, if you catch it fast enough.” Assuming, of course, the reason for the signal being cut off wasn’t that Valor had gotten bored and decided to “check to see if the system was still in good working order.”

That thought led to a couple of memories among the full-sensory pits that studded her mind, ready to swallow her up as she relived every detail. Regan spoke quickly to forestall them. “Anyway.” She stood. “I’ll leave you to it. There’s no real curfew, but you’ll get side-eyed from anyone who happens to pass through from about this point onward, because being sleep-deprived the next day harms the glorious purpose. You might want to regather in an unused section of the dorm. Good luck.”

“Regan, wait.” Tamara rose and caught her wrist. “We’re going to need your help.”

“Ha!” Lutra’s lip curled toward a sneer, emphasizing her scoff. “We don’t need anything from that cold-blooded coward. Which really ought to be an oxymoron, but here we are.”

Regan looked down at the touch on her wrist. Her part was supposed to be done now. The risk, the fear, the failures. And wasn’t that a pretty cowardly thought? “She’s not wrong. I’m just a civilian. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You know more than us.” Tamara didn’t shoot Lutra a look, but Regan figured all of them in the room felt it anyway. “Leaving aside anything else, I had no idea it would be—this caustic little voice of doubt at the back of my mind…”

“That voice keeps you alive,” Regan offered. “Sometimes it helps me to think of it that way. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know what you’re supposed to pretend to be like.” She tried to tug away. Tamara might think she wanted Regan’s help, but Lutra was right. “Look, all I want to do now is to find someone to spend the night with before it gets too late.”

“You have a good friend or two among the Elders?” Lutra sneered.

Regan rounded on Lutra. Enough. She’d never claimed to be a hero. Why couldn’t they just let her fade into the background with her guilt? “No, I’d rather bathe in raw sewage than let an Elder touch me. Just because Recruits have been hijacked in political matters doesn’t mean they’re not consenting adults when it comes to personal ones.” Regan finally cut herself off when she realized it wasn’t Lutra she was angry at, it was herself. “Let go, please,” she asked Tamara.

Tamara did, pulling her hands respectfully back. “We’re here to download the implant specs.” The other two gave a wordless protest and Tamara spoke right over them. “Do you know where they might be kept?”

Regan supposed she actually could help with that. She stepped over to the screen and switched it to a map of the complex. “They manufacture them somewhere else, but they all get checked before installation here. Near where the surgeries are done, both the straightforward ones and the specialized ones I do.” Regan hovered her finger above each area. “That’s all biometric access-restricted unless you’re a tech assigned to one of the jobs there. You guys are supposed to be healing up, listening to propaganda, and then getting shipped off to training.” Even as she said it, she realized the implications, but she pressed her lips together and made Tamara say it.

“Can you get us in, then?”

No more heckling from Lutra, just silence as Regan wrestled with herself. She’d come this far, hadn’t she? Just one more risk to take before she was done. “Find me at breakfast tomorrow. I’ll let you know when and where to meet, as by then I’ll know what the schedule is for the day.” Then she made good her escape, before Tamara could thank her and make it even more obvious that Lutra wasn’t going to. Cold-blooded coward.

Had she been that underneath her act for Valor and the other Elders all along, or had she failed for too long, and become so, before she realized it?

~~~

On the way to her room, Regan gave in and bumped her fingertips along the wall, false column to false column, skipping over doorways. The resin showed no mark. All the women she had arrangements with along this hallway had their doors shut already. She could have stopped by the dorm for the new Recruits, but the team would be there. Instead, she left her own door open as she readied for bed in a faint hope someone might come to her. If she had started earlier, it would have been easy—nearly everyone here was unattached. The only reason people paired off among the recruited facility staff was laziness; dedication to the Elders’ cause left no room for love, nor even real emotional intimacy, which left most of them only with physical impulses—to sex, yes, but also to human touch.

Regan supposed she couldn’t claim she had any room left for emotional intimacy either, not in her projection of happily implanted Recruit, and not below it.

She heated a cup of tea, but rather than being able to relax, she found herself sitting at her small table, staring down into the liquid as steam wreathed upward and tears slid downward. Other people were around; she couldn’t afford to be loud, couldn’t afford to be messy, but couldn’t keep them from escaping either. Martes. In her memory, his last ragged breaths echoed, then only silence. And again, the life going out of his eyes. At her hand.

Someone knocked on the doorframe. Regan jerked the bottom knuckle of her thumb beneath each eye, a familiar, quick repair, took a deep breath, then turned to find it was Jaclyn who stood there. They spent nights together, perhaps more of them than with anyone else, but Regan wouldn’t have expected Jaclyn after their earlier disagreement.

“Are you sure?” Regan asked, then winced. That sounded even more foolish out loud than it had in her head.

But Jaclyn laughed, diffidence in her expression easing into pleasurable anticipation. “You’re so…thorough, I can’t stay away. Besides, you put up with Valor every day. I shouldn’t make it harder on you.” She held her hands open, low by her hips, and Regan laced fingers with Jaclyn as she kissed her, a foundation for her lift onto tiptoes. They only broke apart long enough for Regan to nudge the door closed.

The thought came to Regan as she drifted toward sleep afterward: couldn’t she allow her emotions space now? Get the team their access and then she could tell Valor to reassign her and cling to the comfort of the nights until rescue for deprogramming arrived. She traced the skin of Jaclyn’s side down and then swooped up to her hip.

Jaclyn murmured appreciation of the caress, but not sleepily, and Regan finally noticed her muscles were still tight. “What’s wrong?” Please, nothing about cruelty.

“Just thinking.” A beat of silence that stretched long. “You don’t enjoy what you have to do, do you?”

Regan wondered if Jaclyn had told herself it had all been in the name of duty before coming here, and now the reassurance was wearing off. At least this she could be honest about, a small gift to them both. “I hate it more than I have words for, Jaclyn.”

And why shouldn’t she continue? Plant a seed, so that the implant’s influence on Jaclyn’s mind might wear away just that little bit more. “Is it necessary, do you think? Really necessary?”

“I know it’s hard work, but we’re saving people.” Jaclyn turned over to face her, relaxation coming now she was solidly in the implant’s loving arms. She pressed a peck to Regan’s lips, but having started, Regan couldn’t stop.

“Are we? The Elders started this war. And now they force people to fight their own families; how can they claim the moral high ground?”

“Regan!” Jaclyn raised herself on an elbow, frowning. “How can you say that? The Entente planets are the ones fighting. Fighting against their own best interests like human beings so often do. The Elders only use violence because Entente citizens don’t understand anything else. If they’d only surrender, this could all stop.”

“If they’d only surrender,” Regan repeated hopelessly and bit her lower lip until she was sure no tears would slip free, now that someone was watching. No, there was no deeper comfort to be found among the Recruits, and she’d best not look for it.

Jaclyn seemed to take the words as agreement and settled herself back down. Regan rejoined the kiss, trying to find again the comfort of meaningless physical sensation. Jaclyn responded, and Regan curled fingers into her hair, to the back of her neck, encountered the hard metal nub of her implant.

Rather than immediately draw her hand away, Regan held her touch on it, tried to find catharsis in wallowing in the emotional pain of it, but it didn’t work. Jaclyn would never hear her. Could never hear her.

~~~

Regan opened the door to the implant testing lab for the team as narrowly as she could. They slipped through, Tamara first with a nod of thanks, and the other two with no acknowledgment of her existence. When they were inside, Regan shut the door quietly, and she was alone. Alone and exposed in an empty hallway while every other loyal Recruit was off at dinner. The impulse at the back of her mind told her to join them, to leave the team to their own chances now they were in, but she squashed it. She’d promised Tamara she’d warn them if someone came by. Promises were about all she had left, though they were usually promises to herself.

She pulled out her handheld and stared ostensibly at the screen while straining in her peripheral vision to detect movement. There was no one here to perform to, no reason her persona would have been here in the first place. How long would downloading the specs take? If they were caught, would the Elders reseat her implant or would they execute her?

Which should she hope they’d do?

Minutes stretched on, boredom making steady gains on panic. When she finally let her attention settle onto the handheld properly, footsteps made her jump. Valor. The worst possible person, of course.

“Were you waiting for me?” Valor asked as he slowed, came even with her. He smiled pleasantly, ran a hand through his gray hair, very much someone’s mild father as he occasionally felt like portraying.

Regan supposed she better have been waiting for him. That was a performance she could see all the way to the end, and she launched into it even as the core of her real self slowly died inside her. She planted herself firmly in front of the door so it would be blocked from opening. “I hoped I could talk to you—what you said about me being wasted on regular surgeries. What’s the next step? Would you be able to…” Say it. They were just words. “Teach me?”

“Regan, that’s excellent news! Every Recruit has a part to play, but not all of them have the same strengths. You—you could go far, even though you’re not an Elder. Would you like a position as my assistant? You could help directly with my experiments on the cutting edge of new implant research. It’s important to present subjects with both reward and punishment, but associating them with separate authority figures is more effective.” Valor gripped her shoulder, still paternal, but in the next breath, the gesture turned into a clasp of the back of her neck, apparently without him quite realizing. She imagined the hard point of her implant beneath her hair subliminally pleased him, but he didn’t release her, having assured himself of it. The gesture wasn’t sexual—Regan had never heard of him taking a lover—but more controlling at a deep, unconscious level. He couldn’t touch something without trying to control it.

And hurt it, eventually.

The door edged into her hip, then ceased its pressure immediately and silently returned to its original position. Even without the danger of Valor choosing to enter the room after she left, she couldn’t pull away now. He might turn on her for rejecting his offer, decide even that mild sign of free will meant her implant needed reseating. Regan was sorry now that she’d drawn the raw sewage metaphor for Lutra because she couldn’t think of anything else, not with Valor’s hand on her neck. But what if wading through sewage was the only way to escape? Wouldn’t she close her lips tight, wade in, and think of soap and bleach and scrubbing? “I’m nowhere near as brilliant as you, but given an opportunity to learn, I promise I won’t let you down.”

“That’s all I ask.” Valor squeezed her neck, once, then released her a breath later, a pause that was both short and completely endless. “I’ll talk to the others about the transfer. We should have it sorted out in a few days.” And with a nod, he was on his way, returning to his earlier ambling path down the hall.

When he was out of sight, Regan jerked the door open, making Tamara stumble a step out, off-balance. “Hurry up,” she snapped, even though it wasn’t their fault. Valor probably would have pushed her to accept the position eventually anyway.

The team’s hands were empty, no obvious data storage device to draw attention at least. Rather than making good their escape, they clustered around her like she was supposed to lead them somewhere else. “We’re going to steal one of the raiding transports,” Tamara explained. “We need you to let us into the hangar.”

Regan swallowed against rising nausea, intimately familiar from her first few weeks when she’d barely been able to keep down one meal a day. “I don’t have that clearance, but aren’t you lucky, a way for me to get it just opened up. But you have to promise me something first.”

Lutra bristled, predictably, but Tamara gestured her down. “What?” she said, calm as she held Regan’s gaze.

“I go with you.” She should have made it a condition from the very beginning, perhaps, but in her mind, she’d constructed a dream of how the arrival of someone with official training would mean a grand rescue sweeping down not long after. Maybe that was still possible, but Regan couldn’t make it that long. Selfish, to demand they save just one person, just her, out of all who deserved it here, but she couldn’t stay and be Valor’s assistant. She’d be alive, but none of her would be left to rescue.

Tamara nodded, no hesitation, and Regan drew in a shuddering breath. “I’ll talk to Valor in the morning, then, ask him to transfer me immediately. We should have our chance this time tomorrow. Will they notice the data have been downloaded before then?”

“They shouldn’t.” Meles grimaced, but forestalled Tamara’s reaction. “I know. If it can’t be done until then, it can’t be done until then.”

Tamara reached to touch Regan’s shoulder, perhaps in thanks or support. The shoulder Valor had touched. Regan knocked her hand away and strode off. She needed to get some food before dinner was completely over, if her stomach could take it.

~~~

Valor’s personal workroom had one key difference from the other rooms in the facility: there was only one chair, and it was bolted to the floor. The metal cuffs at the arms and legs were even more jarring, sharp utility against the elegant carvings. The Recruit seated there looked so young in his fear, eyes wide as he watched the current god of his whole world for any flicker of approval or disapproval, any explanation as to what he’d done wrong.

Regan doubted he had done anything. He was due to have his implant reseated, Valor had said, which was why he’d been volunteered for the experiment. And why was he due for reseating? Perhaps for no reason at all other than Valor had needed a victim. She dug her nails into the inside of her wrist above her glove, where she held her hands with manufactured casualness behind her, and observed.

Valor passed a small implant reader over the back of his neck, and the Recruit made a noise between a moan and a grunt, and stiffened in every muscle. “I’ve turned off his signal,” Valor explained, stepping back to join Regan in her observation before the Recruit. “so we can see how he’ll respond to orders while he’s being prevented from ending himself.”

The Recruit slammed against his cuffs first, bruising and finally breaking the skin, but finally, it became as clear to him as it was to Regan that he’d never kill himself that way. “Please,” he begged them both. “Please, for the love of mercy, kill me. Please.” His voice rose as he repeated himself in a desperate gabble.

“But you are useful still.” Valor’s voice was inflectionless. Was this not sufficiently entertaining for him yet? Regan’s stomach muscles jerked, trying to make her vomit, but she didn’t let them. Valor looked to her, and Regan knew now it was her turn.

“There’s so much for you to do here. You don’t want to disappoint the Elders by leaving it undone, do you?” At first, the words felt like a release of pressure, something Regan could do to help, but she could see they weren’t going in.

“Kill me.” The Recruit was sobbing almost too hard to distinguish the words now.

“No.” Now, Valor smiled. “You are scum. You are too much trouble for us to kill. You can’t even do it yourself, can you? What a failure.” His tone before, Regan realized, had been his nod to pretending there was anything of an actual experiment in this torture session. Now he was letting himself have fun.

He circled the Recruit, each new sentence a knife, combined with the implant to flay away the man’s sanity. Regan lost track of time, floating in a hellish space beyond it that seemed as if it would never end. At some point, her handheld vibrated in her pocket, against her hip. She’d promised the team she’d be there to let them in soon. She couldn’t be late, lest they get caught loitering where they had no reason to be.

The Recruit was having trouble breathing now, a froth of saliva on his lips. Even as the familiarity of it grew claws to rip out Regan’s guts, Valor sighed. He smoothed his hair, a grimace of boredom paving his transition back to a pleasant, professional expression. “Too far, I’m afraid. Regan, would you?” He tipped his head to where the injector waited on the work table along one of the room’s walls.

And Regan walked over to it. Picked it up. Walked back, applied it to the Recruit’s neck. She waited for the corrosive wash of guilt, the shaking, but instead she found only relief. The last death, her last failure. Unless her last failure was instead to be the kind of monster who felt relief in killing. That thought was plenty corrosive, eating away at what she had left of herself.

At least now she could go. But Valor cleared his throat as she cleaned her hands. “We have one more reseating to do today. One of the staff here, I’m afraid. Jaclyn?”

Regan turned slowly to him. Her stomach was settled and her hands were steady because she couldn’t yet process the words beyond the floating sense of unreality swamping her whole body. “She needs reseating…?” Her handheld vibrated again. She needed to leave.

“It’s not the Recruit’s place to pick and choose our methods.” Valor shook his head in mock sadness.

When had Jaclyn’s objections to the hardware removal process gone beyond what was expected under the implant’s influence? Assuming Valor wasn’t simply using the objections as an excuse to keep his supply of victims flowing. But no matter how Regan tried not to think it, not to make the connection, it strangled her every breath with its strength: what if she’d caused this? Would someone with a perfectly functioning implant have reported Jaclyn long since? Had Regan unknowingly saved Jaclyn from a normal update to deliver her to torture before her death?

The moment Regan realized it, that seemed all too likely.

Her handheld vibrated. She needed to go.

But what if she stayed instead? Could she soften Valor’s torture? Pull Jaclyn through it?

No. No, it probably wouldn’t work, and no, she couldn’t stay to try. “No,” she repeated out loud without meaning to. “Please, I’ve been intimate with her. I understand it’s important, but I can’t—I can’t handle it yet, it’s too much too fast—”

The corners of Valor’s eyes creased with understanding, that for all Regan could see was entirely sincere. “You’re right. You’ve done very well so far. I’ll take care of this one myself.” He held out a hand in invitation, and Regan barely prevented herself from running as she escaped. Escaped the evidence of one last, crowning failure.

~~~

Stomach acid lingered in Regan’s mouth as she opened the hangar door and motioned the others through. With a wrench, she realized she was never coming back here, one way or another, so she spat right on the floor before entering behind the others and closing the door.

Tamara gave her a sharp look. “Are you all right?”

Regan ignored the question, no matter how much she wanted to wipe the look off Lutra’s face. That listen to that coward whine again look. If she made it real with words, she might break down completely, curl up on the floor and never get up again.

The raiding transports and refueling equipment lurked at intervals like a shadowy obstacle course of unexpected and confusing silhouettes. Meles strode to one like he knew what he was doing. Regan followed, tucking herself in close as he muttered to himself about manual controls in case of power loss, and finally made a door pop open by clanging around in access panels at the other end with a borrowed wrench. Tamara dragged it the rest of the way open with a grunt.

Like the young Recruit had grunted. But female, exactly as Jaclyn might have sounded. Might be sounding right now. What was happening? Was she begging? Please, kill me…

The others had disappeared inside the ship, leaving Regan in the doorway, the silence of the ship silhouettes before her. No reason she couldn’t go back now. Let the team leave without her—she could save Jaclyn. She couldn’t be dead yet; Valor wouldn’t have had time to have all his fun.

“What’s the holdup?” Lutra’s voice behind her.

Regan didn’t look back. “I have to save her.” She got one step, two, before a grip on her elbow jerked her to a stop.

“Like hell we’re leaving you here to be interrogated. You’ll have to leave your girlfriend or whoever behind.” Lutra tugged at her, and when Regan resisted, Lutra jerked her right off her feet, guiding her fall into the ship. When Regan was down, Lutra got ahold of the back of her jacket collar and literally dragged her in.

Maybe Regan hit her head as well as her elbow and both ankles during her jolting path far enough down the hallway for her feet to clear the doorway. Or maybe sheer desperation blacked her out for a moment, because her perceptions jumped. The next thing she knew, the door was shut and the vibration of the engines spun up through the back of her head and shoulder blades.

The sheer force of her sob curled her onto her side. Jaclyn would die, die in hopelessness and desperation, die because of Regan. And perhaps she’d only released tears in silent trickles for too long, because they wracked her body now with sawing breaths and snot.

Lutra jerked her to standing with a hand under her armpit. “Ugh. What a sloppy mess.” Regan scrubbed at her face, not caring what Lutra thought she looked like, but she needed to wrestle the tears under control at least enough to get some oxygen. She hugged herself, pulled away to lean against the bulkhead and tried to pull herself together. She needed to—to—something. A purpose.

Tamara was there when Regan looked up. She’d probably arrived in time to hear Lutra’s assessment. She took in Regan for herself, stepped up to Lutra to ask a soft question. Tamara listened to the answer, nodded. Then she decked Lutra.

“Keep your fucking mouth shut,” Tamara said with perfect calm as she stood over a gasping Lutra, only now gathering herself to press a hand to her jaw. “Or I’ll shut it for you again. Now go help Meles fly this damn ship.”

Lutra scrambled up, away. Regan straightened and…stayed where she was. She wasn’t sure what else to do, though she braced herself without thinking as they lifted off. “She wasn’t my girlfriend,” she told Tamara. The words spilled out like a compulsion. Finally, she could explain to someone, when it was far too late and she was already lost. “Maybe Valor won’t play so long he has to kill her; he already had me kill one Recruit today. Anyway, I didn’t love her. It was all physical between us. Maybe it could have been more, in other circumstances. Or maybe it was all just convenience.”

“Lutra was just being insulting… You really had to leave your lover behind to be tortured? Fuck.” Tamara drew the word out long under her breath. “I’m sorry.”

“Only the third death on my conscience this week,” Regan said and then she was laughing and had to hold herself up against the bulkhead again. She hadn’t been in one of these ships since she was captured, but the function of each space wasn’t hard to guess. This corridor was narrow here before opening out beyond, a sign of the internally airtight wall to the cargo space to their left so the gas mixture could be maintained at the correct ratio and none of the other personnel started feeling loopy. The space inside was padded so the Recruits wouldn’t be hurt when they passed out after being shut in.

“With the surgeries, at least there was still hope. People were still alive, still themselves, could still be rescued.” Regan stepped back as Tamara stepped toward her. So then they just stood, stalemate.

“That’s what we’re going to do. Send rescue and make sure they can be deprogrammed afterward.” Tamara blew out a breath, looked behind herself. “I have to go make sure we have a jump calculated by the time we get out to the threshold distance…”

“Wait.” A purpose occurred to Regan, great and blinding, and she seized it with both hands. “I need to remove your implant. Yours and the others. I’m an experienced surgeon—”

“You don’t have to convince me.” Tamara stepped up to where the corridor widened, waved her past. “What kind of facilities do you need?”

“I think these places have a medbay to treat any injuries sustained in the raid.” There couldn’t be too many doors to open in this place. Regan would find it, meld the skills of her real and projected selves into a single purpose.

For the last time.

~~~

Tamara and Lutra’s removals were straightforward enough, then Lutra spelled Meles at the flight controls so he could have his done. Regan made the first cut, then paused as the deck vibrated beneath her feet. Fortunate that she did, because the next thing she knew, the ship bucked, maneuvering at the edge of tolerances, and her forearm slammed into the edge of the counter. Meles was better off, seated on a chair bolted to the floor, but he spat a curse that diminished to a low, wordless hiss. “Hurry.”

“I can’t!” Regan braced her hand with her jury-rigged tool to furl the implant’s spines against his neck, got a grip on the back of his chair, but while she was saved another bruise when the next swoop came, there was no way to wield the tool safely. All right. She had to break the task into chunks. Position. Furl the spines. Draw the implant out. She couldn’t predict the stable intervals, but with each step ready when one appeared, she got it done.

Meles barely let her glue the incision shut before he surged out of the chair towards flight control. Regan shucked her gloves and trailed behind, much slower. She didn’t understand how he could turn sideways movement into forwards, caroming off the walls of the hallway to take himself further ahead while she stumbled and could barely stay upright. “What are you trying to do to us?” he demanded from the doorway, then shoved Lutra out of the way and dropped back down into the pilot’s seat.

“This thing steers like a floating bathtub full of bricks and I was trying to stay ahead of our fucking pursuit while keeping debris in the way of their sensors, while not letting any of that shit hit us.” Lutra anchored herself with a grip on the seat’s back and stabbed a finger towards one of the screens. “They’re right fucking up our ass, completely ignoring the trail you left for them. How do they have a direct fix already?”

“The implants. They must be tracking them.” Regan looked down at her hands, imagining the bloody bits of metal cupped there, though she’d dumped each aside immediately, back in the medbay. Her turn to sprint. The trick was to catch at the walls, she realized, and push off with your next step. She only slammed onto hands and knees once.

In the medbay, she found nothing heavy enough for her purposes, so she used her boot and its heel against the deck. Staying down, kneeling, meant she didn’t get thrown around as much, and then it was only a matter of cupping her hand to make sure the implants didn’t skitter away. She crunched each with precision, one blow each, then grew worried and slammed her boot down and smeared until the metal shards of all three were thoroughly mixed together.

Couldn’t do that to her own, of course. She’d have to do this faster than she’d realized, that was all. Drag her boot back on, jerk herself standing with a grip on the counter, keep that grip on the counter to bend with the next twist of the ship, then bend back. She slammed open cupboard doors with her free hand, finding a rhythm as she had when removing Meles’ implant. Hold on, move to the next cupboard. Hold on, open it. Lighter items dumped out on her, but most things were well secured, probably a sign of how little this medbay was used. That meant no chance for supplies to have been used up.

Somewhere in here, they’d have the drugs she needed, she was sure of it.

Tamara arrived just as Regan closed her hand over the injector on a top shelf. “What are you doing?” They wrestled over it, deck stable but for a low, angry roar of overstressed engines, just when Regan desperately needed a tilt to help her. Tamara pinched Regan’s wrist somehow and her fingers spasmed open with the pain. Tamara retreated with the injector, anchored herself automatically with one hand on the counter, and read the label. Her lips whitened where she pressed them together. “You’re trying to kill yourself.”

“You have no right to stop me.” Regan swiped at the injector, stumbled with the next tilt, and missed it by kilometers. She was so close to an end, a chance to rest knowing she’d done what she needed to do and succeeded at it. So close to not feeling the pain of guilt and misery in her chest bad enough she might as well already be dying. Jaclyn. Martes. Others with unknown names. So many failures.

“You told us the implants do that. Don’t give in to it, Regan.” Tamara held the injector close to her core, where Regan knew she’d never be able to grab it, even if they’d been standing on stable ground. On the bucking deck, Tamara’s training told with each easy adjustment she made to stay upright with a single anchoring hand.

“Just because the implant is telling me to do it doesn’t mean I didn’t have the same idea separately.” Regan gave up and sank to her knees. She dug her fingertips into the metallic shape of the implant beneath her skin to the point of pain. It didn’t clear her mind, only fogged it further, but she had her new purpose to hang onto. “It’s either that or one of you digs it out, untrained, and I’ll die anyway. More…messily.” Ugh, what a sloppy mess. “It has to be destroyed somehow.”

Under Regan’s knees, the vibrations of the engines growled up to a scream and the lights browned out by the same measure. “Shit!” Tamara spat. They both held on in stillness for that moment of almost darkness, and then the lights snapped back on.

“Go,” Regan urged. “Help them fly.”

“You’re coming with me.” Tamara extended a hand down to Regan, kept herself there by rocking her weight to one foot and back as easy as an acrobat, through the next tilt. “I’m not leaving without you.”

If Regan didn’t want Tamara to waste time that might make a difference to her team’s escape, she needed to hurry up. She accepted the hand, rolling up with the tail of the next shudder to lend her momentum. She kept the injector in Tamara’s free hand firmly in her peripheral vision. Go along now, and sooner or later, it would be jarred free, or Tamara would have to set it down.

That might happen too late, though. It might be too late already. “And how are you going to get them to stop following us?”

“Look.” Tamara kept her hand and tugged her along the hall. “I’m not therapy-trained, I don’t know what you’re supposed to say to someone in this situation, but just no. Okay? No. I won’t let you. We’ll get away, we’ll get you home, someone will remove it properly, and then you’ll have help. You deserve a fucking medal, and I am going to keep you alive until you can accept it.”

The engines growled up and Regan pressed her hand to the bulkhead on one side while Tamara did the same on the other. “I’m no hero. The things I’ve done to get this far—”

“Heroes have to sacrifice—”

“Sacrifice themselves!” Regan screamed as the deck settled back flat. “They don’t sacrifice others!”

“Don’t they?” Tamara’s expression grew very hard, directed inward. “Or maybe it’s another kind of sacrifice to lose part of yourself when you make the choice to sacrifice someone else.”

Flight control was in sight now, a few more steps with the deck holding still. “Promise me you’ll give me that when there’s no other choice,” Regan said, and Tamara refused to answer. The hypocrisy of it all made Regan let another hysterical laugh escape. “Then you’ll be that kind of hero.”

Tamara paused in the doorway, though the current stability was still holding. “I’m not that strong.” She offered Regan a dark, sharp smile, and waited pointedly for Regan to precede her inside.

The longer it stretched, the more the stable surface beneath her feet tightened Regan’s nerves. If they’d given up on trying to evade, it was too late, as she’d feared. She entered flight control, collapsed to sit with her back against the bulkhead farthest from the controls, drew up her knees, and dropped her forehead against them to wallow in her own misery. “What’s she doing here?” Lutra’s voice.

“Suicide watch.” Tamara’s. “Meles, what are our chances looking like?”

“We’re out of debris to dodge through and still short of the jump threshold. And we’ll be in their weapons range the same moment they come into ours. With only three people spread across both weapons and navigation, against their whole team…” Meles’ desperation transformed his measured words into a growl. “We’re just marking time until they catch us.”

Some quirk of his tone evoked Jaclyn in Regan’s mind. If they’d only surrender. “Mark time until they catch us,” she repeated. She jerked her head up to meet their gazes, which held annoyance and confusion both. “What if I hadn’t been here? What if you still had your implants and they were whispering at you? What if you couldn’t take it and stepped away from the controls, leaving us drifting? The Elders would roll right up, ready to take the ship back from the corpses, easy as pie.”

“That or blast us out of space from a safe distance.” Despite Meles’ objection, the speed of his calculations was visible in the dart of his eyes as he focused inward.

“They don’t have that many ships. They specialized in smaller technology; their manufacturing base for bigger stuff, built on captured Entente citizens, is still coming online. They’ll want to save it, if they possibly can. They’ll try to board.” Regan tightened her hands on her knees, willing them to agree. “And when they’re close enough to do that…”

“We blast them out of space instead.” Tamara nodded, movement short and tight.

Meles set the flight controls and pushed back to sit still, a contradiction of slouching and clenched hands. Lutra smoothed her hair, grimaced first at finding it too short, next at the tenderness of the incision on her neck. Marking time, but slowly, excruciatingly so, tension in the air strangling each of them as they waited.

Tamara watched the Elders’ ship on the screen with an intensity that suggested she was willing them to act as she hoped as much as Regan ever had. Her hand with the injector was loose by her side, unnoticed. Easy to reach up and pluck it away. The danger of Regan’s functioning implant was moot, but the blood on her hands remained.

Perhaps Tamara was right. Sometimes it took a hero to sacrifice others. Or perhaps a greater hero would remain, to seek out penance. Like two singers falling out of harmony, Regan’s emotions diverged, nauseated guilt and misery separating from that impulse to reach for the injector. The impulse that now seemed so clearly exterior, alien to her own thought processes.

On the screen, the ship was at the edge of what Regan read as weapons range. It came closer still, impossible to chart the change in distance by the size of the ship’s image on the camera’s viewscreen, but the icon on the plot screen edged along. Inside the range. Now they’d find out if the Elders had bought their ruse. Surely, the fact that the Elders could no longer ping the three smashed implants could be blamed on those implants being in dead bodies. Unless they’d sent some kind of signal indicating their own violent deaths. But why approach, then? Why not fire from a safe distance, as Meles had said?

Agonizing kilometer by kilometer. The Elders’ ship was still moving, not firing. They must believe their targets were all dead. They must. Regan supposed now it was all a matter of judgment. How close was too close for the Elders to evade, but not so close debris hit them as well? “Get ready,” Tamara directed, unnecessarily, as Meles was already hovering over the controls.

Tamara drew breath again, but he slammed his hand down without direction. The camera screen boiled with the explosion before whiting out, and the icon threw up red symbols, a whole cascade, but Regan could hardly believe it had worked until the patter of the farthest-flung debris shuddered the ship, through the bulkhead, against her back.

The team whooped as one, Lutra and Meles shoving to their feet to embrace.

Regan drew in a shuddering breath of her own. Home. Rescue. All the good things to think about, but so abstract. She couldn’t picture them, she found, with Jaclyn in her mind’s eye. Well, she’d simply hang on. From one minute to the next, and try not to think at all as tears slipped free, the silent, hidden kind once more. Her ears rang for a couple of seconds as Meles started a jump, then the non-noise settled out.

Lutra was crouching down before her, Regan realized. She turned her face away, though it wasn’t much of a strategy for keeping her weeping from being noticed and mocked once more. “I’m not going to kill myself. You don’t have to watch me every second until we get home.”

Lutra blew out a long breath. “I’m sorry I called you—well. What I did. Gallows humor is…not always appropriate, but it’s all I’ve got. I’m sorry.”

“Accepted,” Regan said, because she was clearly supposed to say something, and she had no wish to prolong the conversation. She’d thought the ship utilitarian in its smooth lines to chairs and consoles, but now she realized the filigree pattern was merely set beneath the surface in the floor, shimmery gold lines too deep for any defacing scratch from her fingernails to reach them.

“You know, we all had failsafes installed. That’s why Martes died without his implant. So he couldn’t be suborned and give the rest of us away.” When Regan checked her face, Lutra did seem sincere.

Regan shook her head after a moment. Entente intelligence didn’t have the ability to make that kind of failsafe, nor the knowledge that it might be needed. She was reasonably certain Tamara would have reached for that when trying to talk her down, had it been true. “I appreciate the lie,” she offered, meaning it, and thus wincing when she heard how it sounded. “I am both cold-blooded and a coward, you know.”

Lutra barked a laugh, connection sparked through gallows humor tenuous and quickly dissipating, but definitely there for those few seconds. “Aren’t we all, if we’re lucky. My name’s Natalie, by the way.” Tamara handed something down and Lutra offered it out.

A medication patch. Those had a much lower dose than an injector. Regan frowned at it. “I told you, I’m all right now. Well, not all right, but I’ll make it—” But then, that didn’t make sense. It was literally impossible to overdose on a medication patch.

“To make you sleep, that’s all.” Tamara crouched down too. “Since we’re a couple hours out. But it’s up to you.”

Regan shoved up her sleeve and offered her inner wrist out to Lutra as a more expedient method of getting it on as soon as possible, rather than fumbling at the wrappings in her current state. Everything would still be there when she got back, but she’d take the break that was offered. She leaned her head back as the ship around her, Elder-built and filigree-floored, fuzzed quietly gray.

___

Copyright 2024 R. Z. Held