Mirror's Edge Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PART I: DESCENT

  ASCENT

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY

  DROP

  TERMINAL VELOCITY

  SPLASH

  RECOVERY ROOM

  EMERGENCY

  FACE

  COLD WATER

  SHUDDER

  PASSENGERS

  PART II: PALIMPSEST

  BEDLAM

  SHREVE CENTRAL

  STORM

  DENIAL OF ATTENTION

  SPLASH

  THE RAIN IS THE RAIN

  PART III: FUTURES

  PAST THE MACHINES

  HIKING WITH NEW FRIENDS

  CLIQUE

  LOST IN THE AIR

  WALKAROUND

  BABYSITTER

  WIND TUNNEL

  CARBON

  SAFETY CHECK

  HIEROGLYPHICS

  RADIOACTIVE

  FREY

  LOVE OF DUST

  KISS

  DELIVERY

  RIGGS

  PART IV: SHAME

  CAMMED

  HOME INVASION

  UPSTAIRS

  FIREWORKS

  ENEMY OF THE CITY

  CELLS

  ESCAPE

  OVERWHELM

  SENSEI

  SEANAN

  PART V: DEATH WISH

  SHUTTLE

  HARD LANDING

  DIEGO

  BORDERLINE

  REBEL ARMY

  BETRAYED

  SUCCESSION

  TOWER

  BEDROOM

  FALLEN

  FATHER

  DEAD-MAN’S SWITCH

  PALAFOX HEIR

  CITY OF PAZ

  DEAR LITTLE SISTER

  ALLIES

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  The black airship looms above our heads, blotting out the stars.

  Woven from filaments a thousand times thinner than human hair, the hundred-meter craft weighs almost nothing. Inside is hard vacuum—a profound emptiness with more lift than hydrogen. We dangle from the undercarriage, seven commandoes, watching the earth fall away below us.

  We’re thirty thousand meters up. Halfway to the drop height.

  Tonight I’m going home.

  The city of Shreve, where my father rules with force and lies, isn’t going to welcome us. So we’re floating to the top of the stratosphere, then falling like an unexpected rain.

  At this altitude, the weather is a rippled sheet of clouds spread out beneath my feet. The outline of the continent peeks through, framing the great wheel of a tropical storm in the Gulf. The tendrils of the Mississippi floodplain reflect the sky. The midwest glows softly, covered with a pale expanse of white weed, an engineered species that chokes out all other life.

  But the most headspinning sight is a bright sun hanging in a black sky. We’ve almost reached the fringe of space, the atmosphere a fragile band of blue hugging the curved horizon.

  From his position beside me, Col reaches out to grasp my shoulder. Our pressure suits are too stealthy for radios, but his voice is carried by touch.

  “Minus forty degrees!”

  Through the thick visor of his helmet, Col’s awestruck expression sends a tremor through me. The planes of his face are askew, his lips thinner, his eyes blue instead of brown. Part of my brain reacts uncertainly.

  Do I know you?

  The camo-surge was three weeks ago, a full-body operation to hide our identities from the surveillance dust of Shreve. My father’s city will be watching us every second. There was no choice but to remake ourselves.

  Col has a new voice, new fingerprints, a layer of synthetic skin that sheds fake DNA.

  I have all these things too. My face is not my own.

  Maybe it never was.

  It takes me a moment to see Col in there—the boundless smile, the way his hands move when he talks.

  The way he thinks.

  “Celsius or Fahrenheit?” I ask.

  “Both! Minus forty’s where the scales cross.” Col’s new eyes narrow. “I told you that already, didn’t I?”

  “You enjoyed telling me again,” I say. Fahrenheit is some oddball Rusty scale I’d never heard of before yesterday.

  “Very funny,” he says.

  I smile back at Col, trying to ignore the feeling that I’m watching a stranger impersonating him.

  “Either way,” he says, “minus forty is cold. If you took that suit off, you’d have frostbite in three minutes.”

  “Wouldn’t I suffocate first?” There’s not much oxygen up here at the edge of darkness—hardly any atmosphere at all.

  “Probably.” Col sounds disappointed, like he had his heart set on freezing to death.

  But it’s toasty warm inside our suits, and we’re breathing almost pure oxygen to prevent decompression sickness on the way up. If any of us die tonight, it won’t be from cold or suffocation—it’ll be from hitting the ground too fast.

  Have I mentioned we aren’t wearing parachutes?

  Chutes would slow our descent too much, making us easy for ground defenses to spot. We have to flit into Shreve invisibly fast, taking the risk of crashing into a tree at forty meters per second.

  The risk is worth it, because my friend Boss X is in a cage down there.

  I’ve come to set him free, to shore up the alliance between the rebels and the free cities. To repay everything he’s done for me and Col—rescuing us from Shreve, allying with us against my father.

  But mostly I need to save X because I killed his love.

  Who was also my brother, Seanan, it turns out.

  X told me all this in the minutes before he was captured, my whole life thrown into chaos with a few words. Everything I thought I knew was wrong or backward.

  Wearing this strange face, this new skin, I’m here to set myself right again.

  The night before the jump, my sister tries to talk me out of it.

  “Don’t go back to him, Frey.”

  I shake my head. “This isn’t about our father. We’ll rescue X and get out.”

  “The last time you went to Shreve, he caught you.”

  “No one caught me.” My voice stays level. “I gave myself up to save Col.”

  Rafi sighs at this—she still doesn’t think much of my boyfriend—and keeps leading me into darkness.

  We’re in an ancient Rusty coal mine, the home base of her rebel crew. It’s a warren of passages gouged into the earth, lit with torches and the pale green luster of glowworms.

  She’s taking me down a tunnel, deeper into her mountain than I’ve been before. Our shadows jitter on the uneven floor. She speaks softly, but her words echo hard as stone.

  “Walking into the dust is giving yourself up, little sister.”

  Surveillance dust. The air in Shreve is full of machines, always watching and listening. Every breath you take contains hundreds of microscopic cameras, microphones, transmitters.

  “The dust won’t recognize me,” I say. “My new face went into the Shreve database last night.”

  Rafi turns to stare at me, the same way she has since I got the camo-surge. Like I’m a stranger—or a traitor.

  Like I’ve broken her heart.

  Since we were born, my twin sister and I have shared everything. Not just the same looks, also mannerisms, clothes, speech patterns. My father didn’t want his enemies to use his heir against him. So he made sure Rafi was born with a twin.

  A body double, a protector, a spare.

  But for the first time in my life, I look nothing like my sister—my flatter nose, my wrong-colored eyes. I’m a centimeter taller and walk differently.

  I’m not hers anymo
re.

  “This is temporary, Rafi,” I say.

  “Not really,” she says. “It’s changed you, changed us.”

  I try to argue with her, but no words come. When I look in the mirror now, there’s someone new in front of me. It’s bland Shreve surge, pretty in a boring way, but it’s a face that no one else in the world has—mine alone.

  She’s right. Seeing myself this way is changing me.

  “After the mission, we’ll be twins again,” I say.

  “We’re twins now,” she says, and walks away into the darkness.

  I follow.

  It isn’t fair—Rafi changed herself first.

  A few months ago, she stole my name and used it to take over a rebel crew. As Boss Frey, she dressed in leather, furs, and shiny stones dug from the abandoned shafts around us. She became an exaggerated version of me, the deadly sister.

  Of course, she also raised a rebel army against our father. The mission to rescue Boss X is based here in her lair, and we’re borrowing her best commando, Riggs.

  Even if she thinks our plan is logic-missing, Rafi can’t say no to helping me.

  As we descend, the darkness grows—I’d be blind without my infrared implants. Rafi is making her way by feel, her fingers brushing the rippled stone.

  “Where are we going?” I ask.

  “I’m giving you an early gift.”

  I’d almost forgotten. We turn seventeen in a week, our first birthday since we left Shreve.

  Growing up, Rafi was the only one who ever gave me presents. My father didn’t want to make a connection with his disposable daughter. My tutors knew better than to bond with me, and no one else had any idea I existed.

  A twinge of guilt goes through me. “Rafi, I didn’t get you anything.”

  She turns and takes my hand, squeezes it. “You’ll find me something good in Shreve, I’m sure.”

  Her smile glimmers in the dark, and then we’re walking again, the gentle slope carrying us down. The air grows cooler, wetter. The silence looms, huge and imperturbable, like the mountain around us.

  In this nothingness, Rafi asks, “Do you trust this spy of yours?”

  It takes me a split second to process—she isn’t supposed to know about our spy in Shreve, the deep secret that makes this whole mission possible.

  “What spy?” I ask. Too late.

  “The one you just admitted to having.” Rafi’s smile lingers in her words. “I wasn’t sure.”

  A sigh slips from me. For sixteen years, I deceived the whole world, but I can’t fool my own sister.

  It’s a logical enough guess. Hacking the Shreve database from the outside would be almost impossible.

  “Do you even know their name?” Rafi asks.

  “Not even Zura knows, and she’s the only one talking to them.” Their messages are deep-coded and anonymous. All we can be certain of is that the spy is high up enough in the Shreve government to create new citizens.

  “Why trust an enigma with your life, Frey?”

  At this point, my sister might as well know the rest. “Because Col and I already owe them our lives. When Boss X’s crew and the Victorians rescued us from Shreve, the spy helped.”

  Rafi frowns. “Back when I was with the Vics? No one told me.”

  “Me either, till we started planning this mission—and it has to stay secret. A rumor spreading through your crew while we’re in Shreve could get us all killed.”

  Rafi stops walking, reaching back for me again. “I would never endanger you, little sister.”

  Here in the darkness, where she can’t see my strange new face, her voice is tender. Like when we were littlies, sharing a bedroom every night.

  “I’m just worried about you,” she says. “This spy may hate Dad, but that doesn’t mean they’re on your side.”

  “There’s no other way to get into Shreve. And I can’t leave X there. He’s our only link to …”

  Rafi stays silent, daring me to finish the sentence.

  Our brother, the one I killed.

  “They loved each other,” I say. “Isn’t that enough reason to save X?”

  “Seanan’s dead,” Rafi says. “I don’t want to lose you too, just because you feel guilty.”

  I turn away from her, but there’s nothing to look at, even in my infrared. The stone walls are cold and black, carved centuries ago by long-dead Rusty digging machines. My sister lives in darkness, surrounded by the wounds of the past.

  I don’t know how I feel about killing my own brother, but guilt is too simple a word.

  We never even met Seanan. He was kidnapped before Rafi and I were born, raised by rebels to hate his own family. He came home in disguise when we were fifteen, planning to assassinate our father. But he picked the wrong day. Father was stuck on the other side of town, so Rafi stepped in for her first public speech.

  Nothing went as planned.

  Except me doing what I was born to do—protect my big sister.

  It’s logic-missing, feeling guilty for killing someone who was shooting at me and Rafi. But I don’t know how else to feel.

  I used to have rows of buttons on my arm that would give me any emotion I wanted. At the touch of a fingertip, Grief or Anguish would flow through my veins, strong enough to settle this tangle inside me. But I lost my feels in battle, and now all I can summon for my brother is a tightly wound cord of confusion.

  I’m certain of exactly one thing—Boss X is my friend and ally, and I can’t let him rot in a cell.

  “Are you jealous of X?” I ask softly. “Because he knew Seanan and we didn’t?”

  Rafi gives me an angry shake of her head. “Seanan mattered when there was a chance he was alive. Now he’s just a ghost of someone we never knew. All I have left is you.”

  That last word hangs heavy in the darkness. Like she needs me to say that she’s all that matters to me too.

  But that isn’t true. Not anymore.

  “X is crew to me,” I say. “He’s family. Don’t you feel that way about your rebels?”

  “Of course.” Rafi drops my hand, turns, and starts walking again. “If Dad had one of mine in prison, I’d wreck the earth to save them. But I wouldn’t risk you, Frey. What you and I have comes before crew, before allies, before friends.”

  She says that last word sharply. I’ve met Rafi’s friends back in Shreve. Named after gods and goddesses, like Demeter and Sirius, they were wealthy and beautiful, their faces sculpted by the best cosmetic surgery money could buy. But they didn’t love my sister.

  None of them even knew her biggest secret—me.

  I grew up thinking that I was the isolated one, hidden away, trained to kill. But Rafi was our father’s protégé, taught from birth to charm, deceive, and manipulate everyone she met.

  When I left home, I found allies and crew, and fell in love with Col.

  When Rafi left home, she raised an army. They worship her, but that isn’t the same as love.

  I didn’t always understand the difference, because I was raised to love and worship my sister—my only friend, my purpose in life. Rafi’s love saved me from becoming the killing machine our father tried to make me, but I was still just a copy of her.

  Now I have Col, who’d only laugh if anyone tried to worship him. Who looks at me the exact same way, even if my face is new and strange. Who fights for me.

  If X and Seanan had what Col and I do, then I owe this mission to my brother.

  “We’re almost there,” Rafi says. “Cover your eyes.”

  I obey, and a wash of light fills the room.

  The tunnel has widened into some kind of maintenance area. Along the walls are stacks of rusted tools, and the old trolleys that once carried coal to the surface. The space is lit harshly by a tiny lamp Rafi’s taken from a hook.

  “Welcome to my armory,” she says.

  I blink. “Where are the weapons?”

  She walks across the room, the shadows swaying around her. She yanks a tarp from one of the trolleys, spilling dirt
across the floor.

  I follow and look inside.

  It’s a rebel crew’s dream—pulse bombs, mini attack drones, plasma rifles that could knock down a hovercar. Or a skyscraper.

  “Where’d all this come from?”

  “I’ve been collecting them.”

  “You used to collect shoes, Rafi. These are war machines!”

  She smiles. “The Rusties left weapons caches everywhere. Dad taught me where to look.”

  “But why do you need them? The free cities are going to handle Father. Since he tried to take over Paz, the whole world is against him!”

  “That’s what scares them,” Rafi says. “Dad’s in a corner. Do you think he’s above setting everything on fire? A little mutually assured destruction?”

  I take a step back from her.

  Mutually assured destruction was a Rusty term in the age of atomic warfare. It was a grim, simple concept—it’s better to kill everyone in the world than to die alone.

  “You think he has nukes?” I ask.

  “He’ll be ready with something,” she says. “Or, at least, the other cities will be too afraid to find out.”

  I shake my head, wanting to explain that Diego has already promised to end our father.

  But Rafi doesn’t know about the free cities’ plans for me.

  They don’t trust her to rule once he’s gone. And if I tell her they plan to put me in charge of Shreve, it will only confuse things between us. I don’t want my sister thinking that I’m plotting against her.

  There’s too much between us already.

  So I change the subject. “Thanks for the thought, Rafi. But I can’t take these weapons into Shreve. The dust would spot them in a second.”

  “Not this one.” She reaches in and pulls a velvet bag from the depths of the trolley. “Hold out your right hand.”

  I do. Rafi takes three rings from the bag and slips them onto my fingers. They’re a pale color that almost matches my new skin.

  “What are they?”

  “Smart plastic,” she says. “Make a fist with your thumb on the inside.”

  “That’s not how you make a fist.”

  “Exactly. So you won’t do it by accident.”

  I follow her instructions, and the plastic comes to life, squirming in my hand. A tendril pushes out of my fist, displacing my thumb to form …

  A knife.

  When I squeeze, it grows into a rapier, the blade thinning.

  We commandoes have lots of makeshift weapons hidden in our gear, but nothing as elegant as this.