The Defiant

“One? You up yet?” It’s Three’s voice.

“Yeah,” I groaned, sitting up and pressing the back of my hand to my forehead.

“Guys, she’s awake!” Three called to Two, and they immediately began speaking at the same time.

“What do you remember?”

“Is it painful?”

“Are you okay?”

“One person at a time,” I yelled over the cacophony. They shut up.

“First things first. What happened? Where’d you go? What did they do to you?”

“I don’t know where we went. I was blindfolded. They brought me to a doctor’s room, with a target painted on the wall and a ridiculously chipper man in a labcoat,” I said laboriously. “Didn’t you guys go too?”

“Yeah,” Two said. “Three and I had the same thing happen to us. We just wanted to make sure our stories match up.”

“What about Four?”

“She fell asleep earlier, and we don’t want to wake her up,” Three jumped back in.

“Who’s out now?”

“They’ve got Seven right now. Five is still out of it. He went after you,” Two said.

“How long was I... You know.”

“Completely nuts? For about an hour or so. You were yelling and stuff. Who’s Georges?”

“My family’s driver. We were in a hover accident. I got sliced with a piece of glass. That’s where the scar came from. They couldn’t rescue me in time to use the Seamer on it,” I answered, stroking the offending scar, a feature which had tormented me for two months. Now its question was answered.

“Ouch. I’m sorry, One,” Two told me.

“I knew Seven, before. We were...we were friends. Her name was Kate,” I said quietly.

“That’s why you remembered her,” Two realized.

“Yeah. We lived in Hartford, in Connecticut. Eight was right.” If Eight was right about that, what else was she right about?

“What’s your name?” Three asked, almost kindly.

“Eliana. Eliana Landen. The people who almost adopted me had already named me when my mom backed out of the deal, so they convinced her to keep my name.” Eliana. The name of a different girl, from a different life. I was One now.

“Amka Begaye.” Three spoke without inflection, like she was numb to the things she was saying, reciting the skeleton of her life story. “I lived on an Inuit reserve, at least I did until I was fifteen, when I ran away to become an actress. My dad came to New York to find me, but I hid from him, and now…” she trailed off, her voice thick.

Two took up his own story, “I was Ethan Gallagher. I lived in Calgary, Canada, with my parents and my little sister, Lucy. The Aerzhu took them when they…when they found me.”

We fell quiet for a moment, absorbing the information.

“They took my mom, and my neighbor Mattie, and Seven,” I said. I still couldn’t think of her as Kate.

“If they kidnapped Seven to get you to do what they wanted, why was she placed on the Defiant with us?” asked Three.

“I’m not sure. Maybe after they kidnapped her, they released that she would be a good fit to be Countess Valentina. I mean, she looks like her, and she’s got medical training and knows her way around a garden. She’d be perfect.”

“But if they didn’t know about Seven before, and this whole plan has been planned for years. Who did Seven replace?” Two asked.

“Some lucky girl who gets to keep her family close, all because I knew Seven.”

“Hey, if the Aerzhu have had this mission planned for years, how did they know the passenger would be there right then?” Three pointed out.

“It must have been planned,” I said, realizing as I spoke. “They must have set up a drop with Milonakis. They needed to find a way to transport him back from god-knows-where in time for the Century Celebration. They dropped him off with a contact on an inconspicuous planet and sent some unknown people to ferry him back to Earth, so that no one would suspect he was coming back. And they were willing to ruin our lives, just for this glorified taxi ride. And please, let’s just call him Halliday, not ‘the passenger.’ We all know it’s him. Who else would the Aerzhu go to such lengths to transport other than their leader?”

“I think you’re right,” Two agreed, and I think he would have said more, but at that moment, the guards returned, carrying Seven between them like a limp doll.

The fury that had been slowly building inside me all day exploded as they dropped her into her cell like she was so much garbage.

“Who do you think you are? You can’t treat us like this! We are people, god damnit, not pawns in your sick game! We have rights—you can’t just hold us here and torture us! I demand to speak with your leader! Or are you too scared? Of me, a sixteen-year-old girl?”

Usually insulting a man’s bravery works to prod him in the direction you want him to go, but the guards simply ignored me and hauled Six out of his cell.

I continued to scream at them until they were gone, around the corner, Six walking peacefully between them, though he was the same size. I may have used a few choice cuss words, as well. Maybe the memory return had amplified my affinity for swearing.

“Seven? Are you all right?” I asked. I heard a low groan and a shifting sound, like she’d rolled over on the ground where they’d dumped her, but she didn’t respond.

I slumped back onto my cot. Two and Three continued their conversation, but I crammed my hands over my ears and tried to block out their voices. The memories were harder to deny.

I must have fallen asleep at some point, because I woke up to the sound of my cell door grinding open, and Seven’s voice, calling my name.

The same two guards who’d been harassing us all day forced their way into my cell. I jumped to my feet immediately, prepared to fight. I connected a punch to one’s face and a vicious kick to the shin of the other, but they barely flinched and picked me up by my arms, carrying me between them, kicking and screaming, with my feet hanging above the floor like a life-size marionette.

“What the hell? Where are you taking me?” They ignored me, of course.

When we reached the plain metal door at the end of the hall again, the bigger one held me still while the other blindfolded me again.

This time, my feet weren’t on the floor, but I heard the guards’ footsteps and felt the air as we passed over the squeaky material, up the stairs, out into a hot, humid day, and back into a building floored in something hard and echoey, probably marble. We went up a few flights of stairs.

They deposited me in a room and whipped the blindfold off, disappearing through the door and locking it behind them. I spun around and banged fruitlessly on said door, an offensively expensive-looking mahogany affair. After I had established that the door was not about to permit me to pass, I abandoned the effort and began exploring my new prison.

It was considerably nicer than my last one (not that’s saying much). It also appeared to be an office, with an enormous shining wooden desk sitting toward the back wall, a fancy TechSwivel chair, latest model, pushed in behind it. The right wall was covered with floor-to-ceiling cabinets, all locked. The left wall held a bookshelf and two armchairs sitting catty-corner, a small table between them. A glass globe stood by the door, and a huge window over the desk looked out onto a view of the river and some buildings.

I approached the window and looked out. The sun was a red-hot ball in the sky, hovering above the earth like a gun’s laser target, glittering off a river and baking the ground and buildings. I considered breaking the window and jumping through, but a three-story fall would probably shatter my leg bones, and I would most likely be caught anyway. Besides, I would put money on the likelihood that the glass was bulletproof.

I perused the bookcase (full of reference books and history books from every planet and country I’d ever heard of, and a few I hadn’t), then wandered over to the glass globe.

Finding Sunchon, Korea, in the East Asian Coalition with one index finger, I sought out Hartford, Connecticut, with the other. Half a world away. Eight and I could hardly have grown up further from each other unless we’d been on different planets.

Remembering Three’s and Two’s stories, I found Calgary in Canada and Alaska and Ireland for Four. England for Five, and that was where I had to stop, not knowing where Six was from. He’d been in his cell when the guards had removed me from mine. He was probably still suffering from the Madness.

The door clicked and swung open, admitted a person, then swung shut before I could react, but didn’t lock, which meant I could escape. I seized the base of the heavy globe, which could probably cave in a skull if swung hard enough, and held it like a baseball bat. I widened my stance, strengthening my balance, and prepared to strike as a cool, familiar voice began to speak. The passenger’s.

“Miss Landen, I ask that you please put that down. Not only would I like to avoid being brained, but that globe is also rather expensive. So if you would please—”

“Why would I do what you say?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at Halliday, who was apparently the owner of the office. I barely recognized him, now dressed well and cleaned up, but his irritatingly calm, slightly accented voice was very familiar.

“Because I assure you, if you kill me, you and your friends will not leave this compound alive. And you will want answers to your multitude of questions, yes?”

I reluctantly set down the globe and crossed my arms defiantly over my chest.

“What do you want, Halliday?”

“Ah, so you have figured out who I am. I did hope you would. It is proof that I chose my champions well. And I believe the question is, what do you want, Miss Landen? You were the one who demanded to see me, were you not?”

“Don’t call me that,” I said, gritting my teeth. Halliday smirked, amused, and sat behind his desk, which was covered with neatly arranged office supplies and electronic devices.

“My champion, or your name?”

“Neither.”

“As you wish. So, what would you like to know?”

Hundreds of questions rolled through my mind, questions I’d asked myself every waking second since escaping the pod two months ago, but eventually I only choked out one word:

“Why?”

“Why? Why you? Why now? You’ll have to be more specific about what you wish to know.”

“Just tell me everything.”

“A very broad topic. I suppose I will start with ‘why you.’ Firstly, as your sister has probably informed you…”

“Not my sister,” I muttered, but Halliday continued as if he hadn’t heard me. I sank down into one of the chairs in the corner.

“You, specifically, were selected for the simple reason that you and Miss Ka are identical, so you two could be an ideal choice for the princesses. But I assume you are also curious about your friends. I cannot reveal the proprietary screening process of my organization, you understand, but I can tell you that you were all chosen specifically for your skills, and consideration was given to how your personalities would mesh.”

“You didn’t do a great job, did you?”

“To answer the ‘why now’ question, this mission has been in the works for several years. The whole thing was orchestrated to help me return unobtrusively from Dolessia, a lovely planet a few months away, where I was…well, that, you don’t need to know. Anyway, I was able to secure myself passage to Cebos on a freight ship, but I had no way to return to Earth without attracting notice, so I had to find a way to get back. And you were my answer, you and your crew.”

“Are there no easier ways to travel than kidnapping seven children, wiping their memories, and forcing them on a trip halfway across the galaxy?”

“We needed unknowns. People with clean slates. Who could successfully infiltrate the Prime Minister’s ball. And we were willing to do whatever was necessary to make that happen.”

“Including kidnapping our families?” I asked, injecting as much venom into my voice as I could.

“Yes, unfortunately. And as to their demises, there was nothing I could do about it—you did disobey your orders.”

“Demise? What the hell does that mean?” I demanded, surging to my feet. “You killed them?!”

“Well, there are casualties in every war, you know.”

“Casualties?! Are you insane? These are our families you’re talking about, you evil son of a—”

“Watch that language. I control whether or not you leave this compound.”

I raised my fist, barely restraining myself from hitting him. At the last second, I turned on my heel and strode away from the desk, angry tears blurring my vision.

On my way out, I kicked the glass globe over and heard it shatter just before I slammed the door.