286 YEARS AGO

  You don’t want to kill any children today. Or any other day, for that matter.

  But as your team pulls into the district’s preschool's front gates, a disturbing number of people have swarmed the perimeter, indicating that enough time has passed since the initial distress call. You fear that the children inside may no longer be human.

  The throng parts as you and your team tread toward the scene, noting the shiny badge that bears your chest. The Captain, they mutter. He’s here to take them away. That’s a hopeful thought, you think. The crowd, you come to realize as you reach the front, is full of restless parents, crying behind their facemasks and begging your first-responding soldiers to lay down their rifles.

  “My boy is healthy,” a mother cries—a Non-carrier, based on her mask. Your officer catches her before she can reach you. “He’s no monster!”

  Not yet. Despite your best interest, it’s the foremost truth at the front of everyone’s mind. It’s only a matter of time before he is. And that’s your responsibility to determine which ones are and which ones are salvageable for exile.

  Before you march through the door with your hand-picked squad of men, Carriers, healthy, abled men, and hopefully sound of mind enough to not let their fear trigger their finger before their best judgment, the front doors creak open.

  All frightful eyes and hasty guns swing to the entrance, where a boy, no older than five, takes a step out. You immediately notice his pair of glowing green eyes. An Infectant.

  Before half his body is out the door, you command your soldiers to stand down, and to the boy, “Stay right where you are.”

  Nobody moves from your orders. Even the sick boy stills, halfway out the door. He listens; you take that as a good sign. Except for the mother, who tried to grab you earlier, she shouts for her son, Danvo.

  A handful of men seize her before she can slip past.

  “Go inside,” she cries. “They’re going to shoot you!”

  “No one here moves!” You reaffirm your order. Precipitation builds on your back and your scalp under your captain’s cap. “No one will be shooting anyone!”

  The boy remains between the doors. “I don’t want to get anyone sick,” he cries in his fervent and high voice. “I can’t go back in.”

  His reasoning pains you. If Danvo had, in any way, greeted his teachers and classmates, chances are, they would have been plagued with the same unfortunate fate. So standing out here won’t make a difference now. But you remain hopeful since he’s still communicating. Voice clear and coherent as a human can be.

  “Then stay where you are,” you reply.

  Danvo listens.

  You scan the rest of him from afar, no blood, no scratches, no suggestions that any violence occurred. Good. This is better than most days.

  You turn your attention back to the mother who is sinking to the ground in defeat. You reason with her, what will you accomplish by storming the gates? And assure her that in the early stages of Bonucleus, his survival rates are high.

  But the mother still weeps in grievance. “But he won’t be with his mother,” she whines. “He’s too young to go. Take me, too. I want to go with him.”

  “How can you say such a thing?” you reply. “You see your son? I’m sure he wants nothing more than to be in his mother’s arms. But you see him standing there? He doesn’t want you or anyone to be sick. How can you deny him the last of his humanity? His last wishes?”

  With the last line, the young mother sobs, unashamed of her raucousness, but ultimately remains on the ground, accepting her circumstance as they all eventually do.

  Back at your job, you interrogate Danvo and inquire about the situation inside. When you have heard it all and gathered enough information, you thank the boy, praise him for being so cooperative despite his difficulties, and stand. You brace yourself for the crowd’s reaction, their phones recording the scene, news stations have also arrived, reporting live, but you are firm on your decision and call the Transport line.

  When their trucks arrive, so do some of the protestors from every stance. Some believe exile is too harsh and that they should be kept in a facility close to where their family members can frequently visit. Others believe exile is too dangerous, and no Infectant should be spared, not even children. You make sure none of them get in the way of the Transport team.

  “Captain Lavoran,” the Captain of the Transport squad greets you. You give her the details of what you’ve been told, accounting for the total number of people inside.

  “All forty-two of them,” you conclude, solemnly. “Transfer to the Void, effective immediately.”

  The crowd boos. You keep your chin high despite their protest. It’s government policy, and you enforce it. Not just because it’s your job, but you believe it’s the most humane thing to do besides killing the sick. Like surrendering an ill pet to the wild in hopes they find salvation there. Especially when there isn’t a cure for Bonucleus. There hasn’t been one for decades since the first Outbreak. No more devastation, no more deaths, not when most of them are harmless in the early stages.

  They’re not monsters.

  The gates open, and the Transport team marches in. You turn your attention away for a moment to breathe, and the mother slips from the corners of your eye. She runs through the gates and heads for Danvo before you can grab her. Unbeknownst to the transport team, they don’t see her coming, nor do they understand why a Non-carrier woman in a mask is running toward them unless she is also infected or mad.

  One of them shoots her in the head.

  The fire pierces your ears, rousing a disapproval from the probing crowd. Everything is caught on camera. You barely have time to react or command them to hold their fire. Now there’s a dead woman on the ground. Her son is yards away, staring at her lifeless body. No tears. No shout. No idea how he’ll respond.

  Danvo’s eyes, brightly green, now lowered and darkened in another color. Yellow? You hope. It’s the best case in this situation that he won’t grow claws or collect his mother’s caress and sew them onto his own body. That he won’t demolish you and everyone in the vicinity.

  “Hold your fire,” you command, but pull out your own gun.

  Your hands shake, and your finger is heavy on the trigger, the crosshair on the boy’s head. Maybe he won’t change, you assure yourself. It’s still early. I can still save him.

  But as Danvo lifts his head back up, his eyes glow red. Alarmingly red. The ones they teach you as your first lesson. When you see red, what do you do? You run. You flee, and you hope those red eyes do not catch you a second time. The same red eyes that annihilated over eighty percent of the globe twenty years ago, before humanity found a way to suspend the obliteration.

  You must kill Danvo to prevent the second wave.

  But when you stare into the boy’s eyes, you see fear. Was it his or your own? And how many times have you seen the same fear in those red eyes? You look at him whole, and he’s just a boy. How can you hurt him?

  This is your job, your responsibility, you remind yourself. You swore an oath to protect the people in this city. So now you must make your final decision: Man or monster, where do your bullets draw the line?

  PART 1

  Chapter 1- Ticking Bomb

  PRESENT DAY

  Another second ticks down at the bottom of my screen. There are precisely 400 seconds left to reach the end room to stop the bomb before it blows the six of us up.

  No pressure.

  The last three Mutants trample on our tail. Their stumpy feet were clumsy and swaying in the narrow hall, all contesting to be in the lead, and never dropping their gnarly yellow eyes from us. We fire beams of neon. They sear through the thick, decaying meat, but it’s not enough to stop them completely.

  “Aim for the head,” one of the girls calls, as if it’s not apparent. But the sharpshooter isn’t in our squad today.

  My hands shake, warm against the heated handle of the ray gun, half covered in blood and the other half dripping with neon fluids discharged from the weapon. I spray down the last of my vials even though it’s precisely what we’ve been taught not to do. Fire a single shot at a time for best accuracy. But my fingers never seem to listen in dire situations like this one.

  Out of all the things in the world I’m skilled at, surprisingly, handling a gun isn’t one of them.

  “I’m on my last vial,” I announce as I take a step back from the group to reload. Hopefully, they deal with the Mutants better.

  “Maybe you’ll have some left if you’d stop pissing yourself,” says another one.

  None of the five turns from the bunch. We dress the same in our charcoal suits and velm over our heads. But I don’t need to lock my screen onto her head for her name to pop up. Raven.

  Of course, it’s her.

  In this circumstance, I’ll let this one go.

  For now.

  I part from the group first to round the corner into the last corridor. The heavy bodies thud on my flank, and the girls sigh a breath of relief. Mutants down. Unfortunately, they're the least of our problems.

  Before we all proceed down the road, I stop them midway.

  “The tiles,” I point out. The bright light from the top of my velm reflects off the smooth, clean surface of the ground before us. Too clean, unlike the dirty ones that've been walked and dusted over the years. As if someone laid down a new set. “Pressure plates.”

  The other five spread out beside me to inspect it to find the same conclusion. The plates are spread ten feet long, from wall to wall, leaving no room for us to tiptoe through the sides. Whether only a handful or only a single tile triggers the detonator, we’re taught to treat each one as a possible threat. So no gambling here.

  “We need to disable it,” Viper says.

  “Here.” Raven taps her boots on a metal frame on the ground. She crouches and opens the lid, revealing a jumble of cords mashed into the wirebox.

  Viper joins her and picks out a few strands. “They’re all gray. Ahh, it’s going to be hard to identify which is which.”

  Another 100 seconds have passed. Roughly five minutes left standing between me and this feat.

  “Well,” I say, trying not to sound too annoyed, but my voice always betrays me, “This is your specialty, Vips.”

  The diffuser begins picking them out, finding most of them detached. Then the rest—still too many to identify—are plugged. Input and output, or whatever they’re called. I’m not good with this either.

  I wait patiently with an eye on our flank for more threats, but I doubt there’ll be more coming our way. The girls stretch out the time until we hit the last 100 seconds, where Viper finally falls on her ass, her gloved fingers visibly shaking, holding out two cables.

  “It’s one of these two,” she says.

  Fifty-fifty. Not good odds.

  “Why not cut both?” I ask.

  Raven grunts at my stupid question. “Yeah, why not cut them all to begin with and save us the effort?” She pulls out a switchblade from her pocket and says to Viper, “Choose one.”

  The air grows heavy in silence, and all I can hear are the seconds flying away.

  “I—I can’t.” The diffuser lowers her head and sobs.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” I blurt. “All these years in practice, but you can’t do shit when it comes to the real execution.”

  Raven stands and puts herself between us. Her chest puffed out, shoving me a step back. Sure, she could be intimidating if her eyeline didn’t stop under my nose. The shortest girl I’ve ever met. Short and fucking irritating.

  “She did her best,” she exclaims. “And what have you done except paint the walls with your shots?”

  Fuck it. We’re at the end of the line anyway. I pull out my gun and train the muzzle on the hard of her velm. The violet fluid sways inside the vial. “Maybe I’ll paint your brain with my last shot.”

  “Girls, please,” Viper groans, sniffing. “This isn’t helping.”

  I let out a grunt, then sheath my weapon and shove the tiny girl aside. “Drop the wires, it’s useless.”

  And this is where I come in: Find solutions to problems, anything to finish the job.

  The last door is almost in reach, so close I can practically turn the knob. The only thing between us is these tiles. I examine the cable box again. Too complex to solve, a risk I’m not willing to jeopardize. Because god knows whether these wires are really connected to the end room and not a fan somewhere, maybe the solution isn’t to disable the box, but rather to trigger the plates.

  Once the tiles erupt, then we can approach the end room. But tossing a rock wouldn’t do; The pressure requires a minimum weight to activate its trigger. It needs something heavier, meatier, fleshier. It needs one of us.

  It’s not an easy ask of anything, but I explain my theory to them anyway.

  “I don’t expect any of you to volunteer,” I say. “So take a few steps back.”

  The girls exchange uncertain glances before scooching behind me.

  “Wait,” I add, and grab Raven by the arm. “Not you.”

  I look her in the face, where her eyes should be behind her velm, before hurling her across the field of landmines.

  *

  When the drill is over, we return to the first-floor central intersection, the lobby. Lobby is a dressing statement; it’s the only place in this godforsaken mall spacious enough to store our evaluation equipment, and it gets enough natural light from the glass ceiling.

  The same disgusting place no longer bothers me as much as it did this morning—a two-story mall in the barren land of the Void. Actually, anywhere in the Void is atrocious. This prehistoric establishment is over two centuries old, with peeling walls one storm away from crumbling. Most storefront holds ancient handheld technologies that we’ve reduced to a single chip. Most of the dresses behind glass windows are eaten away by age and weathering. The fresco on the wall has faded away into blotchy stains. I’ve dusted off countless webs and ashy debris off my shoulder today to know which corridor to avoid.

  Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

  Cerena chose a terrible place for this drill.

  “Velms off, please,” she says to me when she glances my way while adjusting the projector. Her dark bob sways under her jaw.

  It’s an ugly haircut only someone like Cerena can pull off. Our instructor had a proper title once, Professor this and that. But after several failed marriages and swapping this and that within a handful of years. She became the hottest gossip in our academy, even among the teachers. So she made a policy to address her by her first name. So she’s just Cerena now and forever until a husband finally sticks. Or not.

  Under the dusty glass roof light, everyone furls their velms back onto their collar, their faces in full gloom, dark shadows under their eyes, no one is in a good mood, no one but me.

  As the twenty of us in this special class assemble in five rows of four, in the order of our ranking, which places me in the middle of the first row, I unhook the switch under my chin. The encasing unwraps my face from the top of my head, packing itself into the band on my collar. My nose wrinkles; the air is even more bitter without the velm’s filter. I’m not used to being so close to the ground, standing on solid, filthy dirt, sniffing the rot of earth with every breath. The sooner I leave this graveyard, the better.

  “Yikes,” I hear Bison say, stifling a giggle. The rest of the class chortles with him. He’s a large boy, the biggest one in the whole academy, as if they feed him ten bowls of rice each meal with a side of steroids. Masking the words with a cough, he mutters, “Ice Witch.”

  “Something you’d like to share with the class?” I blurt.

  He peeks out from the array, which is just one person between us, giving me a sweep from head to toe, then back to my head. He shakes his head in denial at first, then adds, “Nice hair.”

  My first instinct is to touch my bun at the back of my head, neatly assembled so it’s not disrupting my screen. Is it messy, or did a cobweb latch its way there? Then a blonde strand falls before me, jogging my memory—I bleached my hair the day before, completely erasing my natural dark hair.

  “Thanks, I know.” I spent the last of my paycheck on it. Sitting on the salon chair for the whole day to achieve this precise shade and tone.

  “Almost didn’t recognize you,” Bison continues. “You look like the Ice Witch.”

  I haven’t watched the new superhero franchise movie, nor do I have any interest in doing so.

  “Then I bet she’s hot, pretty, and smart,“ I scoff.

  “Ugh, no. You both have white hair. And she’s a bad guy. She froze the entire galaxy.”

  “I’m pretty sure most of the galaxy is already frozen by default,” I say. “And my hair’s not white. It’s frost blonde. Platinum, if you will.”

  “Yeah, yeah, all villains have white hair. So it suits you perfectly.” He jabs Raze next to him. “Doesn’t it?”

  Raze hardly acknowledges me despite standing two feet to my left. His gaze is fixated on the wide projector where Cerena was setting up, then he cut me a glance over his shoulder. The autumn colors of his eyes flash me, the most notable thing in the Lavoran bloodline. Honey, with a mix of forest green, then if you study closely, there’s a hint of red—all the colors of autumn in a single flash.

  They’re slightly hindered by his fatigued mahogany fringes today. Traces of sweat from a rigorous drill he clearly didn’t beat me to. He has a profile you’d take a second glance at, mesmerized by his sharp features that quickly melt with a faint smile. So I never see his ever-so charming face. Not directly, at least. In this light, his sweat-licked cheeks give a glow to his golden tan complexion, dearly beloved and kissed by the sun as much as everyone in the academy kisses his ass.

  And why wouldn’t they when he’s an heir to the Lotus group? An empire built on the world’s leading source of energy, lotic-fuels. A literal monopoly. He might as well own the school, if not the entire city of Van Sing, practically anything that involves energy use, even the liquid inside our vials.

  Attractiveness to the max, since the rest of the world thinks so. But in my eyes, he’s nothing but the boy I once used to know, and the boy from the family my father loathes.

  And that he’s contesting for my number-one prize, Valedictorian. He’s a competitor, sure, but he’s no competition.

  “I have no comment on her appearance,” Raze finally says.

  “Didn’t think so.” The conceited tone in my voice clearly irks him. But he doesn’t bite. No sucking of his tongue under his teeth, no furrow in his brow, no heavy breathing from his shoulders, giving nothing to the audience around us. But beneath his nonchalant expression, I know he’s fuming. I can almost feel his rage radiating in the close space between us.

  When Raven triggered the entire floor of bombs, I dashed straight into the room and hit the button, stopping the bomb with fifteen seconds left to spare. A green pass sign lights up on my screen, which means my team, out of all three, was the only one that completed the drill on time.

  My victory. My triumph.

  “Yeah, she’s a bad guy, alright,” Raven says, storming out of the makeshift locker room of what used to be a shoe store, Viper right behind her. Speak of the devil. It’s taken her half an hour to get the dust and soot off her body, and she still has dirt smeared across her face. Debris and ashy plaster on the ends of what she calls wolf-cut hair. “And a fucking piece of shit!”

  Her hands ball into a fist, ready to strike me. In some universe, I’d stay there and accept the consequences of my actions. But in this one, I brace myself with a defensive stance.

  “I made you the martyr of your dreams,” I retort, then scoff at the girls on my team. “Don’t give me that look. None of you had any problem when you assumed I was going to sacrifice myself for the team.”

  “Because you’ll be doing the world a favor by offing yourself,” Raven exclaims. Viper holds her back from stepping any closer into my vicinity, which would undoubtedly result in a fight of hair-pulling and face-smacking.

  “Yikes,” Bison says. “What did Qonni do this time?”

  My name always takes me aback in their mouth. Bison. Raven. Viper. Falcon. Everyone in the class is nothing but animal tagged. It’s the name tag that pops up on my screen every time I focus in their direction. Ever since the third year, the twenty of us have been stuck in the same classes and drills. I should know them all by heart. But outside of drills, I hardly associate with them, let alone exchange more than excuse me, move it. So I don’t remember their names, not their first anyway.

  They hate me, and I hate them. I can’t ask for a better relationship.

  “I simply won us the drill,” I reply.

  “Ladies, please,” Cerena hushes us. She adjusts her small-framed glasses, brushes down her pencil skirt, and orders Raven to take her spot next to me so we can begin the evaluation.

  After a threatening minute, the small girl begrudgingly stomps to her place beside me, and the projection begins playing our POV. Our velms has been recording the entire drill start to finish, so she can grade us accordingly based on our decisions, as if it were a real scenario.

  By the end of it all, Cerena deducts five points from my overall score.

  “You can’t be serious,” I argue. “That will bring me to even scores with him.”

  No one needs any specification to know I’m referring to Raze. This victory should’ve brought me to the top of the school rankings, the single determinant of who will be valedictorian. With the five-point deduction, we’ll be tied at first rank. Yet, again.

  “You’re lucky she only took five,” Raven spits. “She should’ve withdrawn your win.”

  I know in the deepest part of my chest, I can knock her out in a single punch. But she’s not my fight at this moment. The instructor is.

  “What rule did I break?” I ask.

  “The rules of decency,” Raven mutters under her breath. I ignore it.

  “You wasted more vials than anyone in class today,” Cerena replies. “I minus each ineffective vial you wasted on shooting nothing.”

  “We all miss sometimes!”

  “No points for shooting blanks,” Bison jeers, and the class chuckles.

  When the lobby quiets, Cerena continues, “Vials are pricey and in dire situations, hard to come by. I think this is a fair deduction based on your performance.”

  Fair, my ass. Cerena has always found a way to maximize my mistakes.

  “I will report this,” I say with an undertone of threat, one I made too many times over the past years to take any effect, but I will die on this hill.

  “Oh, lord. Do you have to do this every time?” Viper grumbles behind me. “It’s only five points.”

  “I will do this for half a point,” I say, and jab a finger at Raze. “Being tied with him means I have already lost.”

  The class groans. They heard this argument more times than they’ve heard the national assembly. Fuck them. None of them knows the dread that’s eating the insides of my walls for the last eight years. If I spent all this time and effort to come in second place, I’ll hang myself in the academy’s entrance on graduation for everyone to see.

  “You still have a good half of the school year before the board will vote on a valedictorian,” Cerena says. “That’s plenty of time for you to break the tie.”

  My eyes bulge out of my head. “I had seven years to do so, and look at where we are now. The same fucking place as we began. What is going to change in seven months?”

  “Perhaps, it’s not the change of time you need,” Raze starts, and the room drops silent when he speaks. “On the rare occasion of a tie between us, the board will choose the ideal valedictorian to represent the academy. So the assessment will come down to one's character. And luckily for you, there’s plenty of room for improvement.”

  I stare at him straight and enunciate every word, “Why don’t you choke on my dick?”

  “Vulgar as always,” he sighs, and returns his satisfied eyes to the projection board, knowing he’s struck a nerve.

  Look at him, acting all high and mighty, thinking swear words and curses are far below dropping from his lips.

  “That is not appropriate, Miss Yun,” Cerena chides. “I do not wish to deduct more points from you.”

  Sure.

  “The Valedictorian belongs to the one with the best academics,” I continued, back on the subject. “And I, alone, carry more intellect than all of you combine.”

  No one in the class denies it. As expected.

  “Unfortunately, that’s not how you’ll earn it,” Raze retorts.

  “You mean fortunately for you,” I correct. “Because if your family didn’t own the school and pay the staff that grades us, you wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

  Cerena is unfazed by the accusation. After all, there’s no concrete evidence to support my claim, so I can spew whatever I want, and neither she nor the other staff will be charged.

  She clears her throat and continues back to her subject. “The landmines weren’t supposed to be triggered. I should’ve deducted more points, if not vetoed your win.”

  “They weren’t?” I ask to confirm. “You’re telling me I was supposed to choose a cord to cut from that mess?”

  We all turn our attention to the projector, at the box on the ground, with the worst cord management I’ve ever witnessed—none of the lessons had a topic on this.

  For a second, Cerena’s gaze falters, as if reconsidering her statement, then locks eyes with me. “Yes.”

  ***R***

  “Raze, get the door,” Bison says.

  “Yep,” I reply, and push open the double glass doors.

  The group of ten boys hauls out the three wagons of Mutant corpses piled atop one another. Their swollen bodies are already decaying. Sharp nails falling off their blue fingertips, their extra limbs shedding from their torsos, pus and organs spilling out from the sides. I retrieve them all back onto the cart as we make our way to the woods, where we bury them.

  We spend the next hour digging a hole wide and deep enough to give each test subject a proper burial. We read off their names before covering them with the earth. Bison likes to add a prayer that his grandmother always mumbles. May your service be recognized.

  Death or exile were the only options for the Infectants. But once the city has established a sturdy facility to keep them, signing your body away for science and research has become the popular choice, especially when your family is compensated.

  Once that’s done, we clean ourselves with the open fire hydrant at the corner of the block, hosing the dirt and blood off our fibersuits. We pass a single bar of brand-new soap that usually dissolves into a thin slab by the time it reaches the last person, and still, none of us will be wholly cleansed from the bodily horrors. There’ll still be some remnants of flesh we’ll find in the shower later at home when we return to the city.

  “Every month,” Falcon grumbles. “There's always something stuck under my nails.”

  “That’s why I keep them clipped,” Bison replies. “And for other things, if you catch my drift.”

  A few of us chuckle, but in the trenches of the Void, we’re not in the best mood for jokes.

  Minus the threats, the Void isn’t too bad. For one, the air is definitely fresher, with the winds blowing through the endless forests, without all the high-rises purging the sky. Green in every direction and not a hologram of ads in my face or a drune chasing after me. The ground feels solid, sturdy, with no harsh wind that’ll blow me off the Gaia.

  I’ll definitely miss this when I’m behind the North Bowen walls.

  Back inside, we’re waiting on the last person to finish cleaning duties before we can start refreshments and snacks, so my group of friends decides to explore the rest of the mall in the meantime. None of us has much of an appetite after scrubbing body matter off the wall and burying bodies anyway.

  Raven—Shivon—always finds metal keys, handheld cellular devices, and other small trinkets we can stuff in our pockets to smuggle across the border to bring back as souvenirs. Bison and Viper join her, and sometimes I do, too. Over the years, we’ve collected countless car keys, photograph devices, earbuds, a wall plug with an outlet our present time no longer has, all accumulated on my shelf.

  “A shot glass,” says Bison—Jurien Malkono. Heir to the Malkono Rails, famous for building the underground railroad that connects all four points of Bowen. Avoiding breaching the surface of no man’s land. Our families have made an immeasurable amount over the last two decades in the new age of Lotic-fuels.

  Viper—Geneviene—takes the vintage glass from his hand, a small chip on the edge, but otherwise functional. “Is there any more?”

  “Last one, and it’s mine.” He hovers the shot glass over her head before stuffing it into his pockets.

  We linger until we find nothing left but looted stores, shattered glass still sharp on the broken tile floors, and return to the lobby where they’ve built up enough appetite for a wafer cookie.

  Almost all twenty of us are here, everyone except Yun Qo Ni. She’s on the second floor, cleaning up the mess she detonated.

  “What’s taking her so long?” Bison groans.

  “She’s cleaning it by herself,” Viper answers.

  “Hah, fitting.” Raven folds her arms. “Someone should tell her to hurry it up. The sun’s setting.”

  Seeing as no one volunteers the next few seconds, I offer, since I also have my own traces to clean up.

  Since the drills are our own indoctrination, we’re responsible for setting them up beforehand and cleaning up afterwards. Each team sets up another team’s obstacles, and I was the one who set up the pressure plates, tiles, and wire box. It was a hassle to configure it all together—following the manual and putting each wire to the right one—so I can’t imagine getting rid of them is any easier.

  At the top of the stairs, I don’t recognize Qonni at first, not with her new hair color. And Bison’s right—she does look like the Ice Witch. Both are as pale as their hair with large black eyes, accompanied by those drawn-on eyebrows that make her appear angry all the time, which makes it worse since Qonni’s pouty lips are naturally curved downwards into a frown. Yet somehow all those features harmonize aesthetically on her face—exactly my thoughts on the Ice Witch.

  Except Qonni would make the movie villain seem like child’s play. Any room Qonni walks into would drop in temperature almost immediately. She’s the chill up your spine on a random hot summer day. And the forewarning gray clouds before a treacherous storm arrive. Forget freezing the galaxy, Qonni will burn the universe if she had the power.

  You never want to make eye contact with her, never stare into those magnetic black eyes that read your souls. Not because it’ll instigate a fight, no—she doesn’t do that anymore. But it still gives you the sense that she would, triggering your fight-or-flight response.

  I remember when they used to be full of wonders. Now they’re perpetually half-lidded, from years of glaring, scrutinizing, and condemning, insulting your entire being with a single glare.

  That’s the Yun Qo Ni everyone knows. Strayed so far from the bubbly girl I was first introduced to all those years ago. You’d think they’re two different people.

  Qonni wraps up her tenth bag, and there are still a few more piles of charred plaster and splintered planks to go. Since Cerena can’t allow a real bomb in the drill, triggering the plates would only set off balloons of soot, charcoal, and plaster-covered styrofoam from the ceiling.

  “Hey, Ice Witch.”

  She pauses her broom, and her frown deepens at me. “What do you want, loser?”

  I slip around her, over the mess, and accidentally knock her work-in-progress over, leading towards the end room where the button for the last bomb is. The bomb is still ticking. I can hear it from here. How she left it on for this long is beyond me.

  “Just wondering what the hold up was,” I reply. “Everyone’s waiting for you to finish so we can all eat.”

  “Then why don’t you pick up a broom and start sweeping?”

  “Huh. I’m suddenly not hungry anymore.”

  How wonderful to see Yun Haiko’s spoiled brat cleaning up messes she’d never dirty herself with back home. I’ll miss the Void for sure.

  I walk away before she can swat me with her broom. She’s spewing curses at my back. If there’s any soap left from the hydrant washing, I’d offer her mouth some.

  I step into the final room, where the plastic toy bomb is still beeping continuously, and behind it is the shelf where the booklet lies flat, right where I left it. The manual for setting up today’s drill, specifically arranging the wire box that Qonni’s team was supposed to diffuse. Which wires are plugged into each socket. The instructions state to plug in six cords before shutting the box.

  Six. But that’s not what Qonni saw.

  If Cerena suspected some foul play, she didn’t mention it. And I have a feeling she won’t.

  From Qonni’s oblivious expression, she hadn’t read the manual, nor did she know it existed. Good.

  It was supposed to doom her drill, but— My fingers curl around the thin manual, crushing the evidence. Somehow, she just finds a way. I had planned to stall her long enough for my team to rescue the hostage. But instead, someone shot the hostage—a plastic mannequin we found in a clothing store—during a failed negotiation.

  How disappointing. And the beeping on the bomb doesn’t help my irritation, so I press down on the button to stop the ticking.

  “Don’t say I’ve never done anything for you.”

  Qonni huffs. The toy continues to tick.

  “It’s broken, genius.”

  A crease forms between my brow. Holding the plastic toy up, I give it a shake. It’s the same garbage we’ve been using for drills all these years, now at the end of its life. But the closer I study it, the more it confuses me.

  The ticking isn’t coming from the toy.

  Then I stare down at the table where the toy had been placed and look directly under. An intricate device secured by multiple tapes blinks at me. Complex wires wrap around foreign metal parts, a timer in the center ticking down.

  A cold, unsettling stream drains my face as the realization sets in. This isn’t a makeshift explosive, but a very real and threatening bomb.