Impostors Read online

  But I’d somehow forgotten—since my father attacked House Palafox, Col and I haven’t been apart for longer than a few hours. It seems like years since then, a lifetime of running and fighting.

  If this war ends tonight, what do he and I have left?

  “We need to do your face,” Yandre says as the sun goes down.

  We both smile at the absurdity of this. But Rafi would never go on the feeds looking windblown and disheveled, especially not to declare herself the new leader of Shreve.

  Adorning my hands are three rings made of recycled iron, my father’s chosen symbol of wealth. My sneak suit has a stored image of Rafi’s favorite dress from the waist up.

  My hair will have to wait until after the battle. But we do my makeup atop the stolen hovercar in the dimming light, Yandre working with skilled hands to make me look my part.

  The imperious first daughter of Shreve.

  The battle starts on schedule.

  The hoverboards come in first—rebels attacking cargo trucks and greenhouses on the outskirts of Shreve. Like any one of a dozen nuisance raids they’ve mounted these last weeks.

  But this time when my father’s light, nimble hovercars respond, the rebels don’t scatter and retreat. They open up with Victorian plasma guns, sending a dozen burning wrecks to the ground.

  A low growl comes from Boss X as we watch the fight. His fur is twitching, his hands flexing with a wolfish need to join.

  “Soon,” I say.

  Slowly, like a giant waking up, the Shreve military responds.

  Two squadrons of heavy attack craft rise over the city. Their massive searchlights wink on, and a blue-tinged daylight spills across the valley.

  But instead of venturing out to take on the rebels, they open fire from a distance, safe from the plasma guns. A barrage of steel flechettes glitters across the valley, like sleet in the searchlights.

  I wince, seeing distant figures falling from their boards.

  “At least we know he’s not home,” Boss X murmurs, gazing at the edge of the city.

  I raise my field glasses. No extra squadrons have moved to protect my father’s tower.

  Victorian hovercars come forward, and the rebels shelter under their armor. The Shreve response looks sluggish to me—as if they’re pinging my father for guidance—but soon they take the bait.

  The heavy craft move out to engage the Victorian fleet.

  “Get ready,” Zura says.

  We clear the branches from the topside, stow our gear below, strap in for a crash landing. Beside me, Boss X looks uneasy, staring at his seat restraints like they’re strangling him.

  We wait, blind to the battle raging overhead—

  Until a coded ping comes from our high command.

  “Hold on,” Zura says as the lifting fans spin up.

  We fly low and hard toward my father’s tower, our car tipped at a crooked, wounded angle. The metal deck shudders under my feet as our belly armor cracks against treetops. We slew randomly from side to side.

  “Do we have to fly this badly?” Dr. Leyva asks Zura.

  “Afraid so,” she says, her hands tight on the flight stick. “The smoke pots malfunctioned. We don’t look like we’re on fire.”

  Boss X gives me a sidelong look. He points at his belt, studded with a selection of grenades and a spare pair of crash bracelets. “Topside?”

  I’m already unstrapping myself from the seat.

  I take the offered crash bracelets and slam them on my wrists. A smoke grenade goes into my pocket.

  “Frey,” Zura says. “Sit down.”

  I ignore her. Boss X is already climbing the ladder to the topside hatch.

  “I’m ordering you to sit down and strap in,” she says.

  “I’m not in your army.”

  Dr. Leyva speaks up. “If you get yourself killed, Frey, this has all been pointless.”

  “Same if we get shot down! We have to look like the real thing, or my father’s house defenses will—”

  Boss X opens the hatch above us, and a screaming wind whips my words away. I grab a rung of the ladder and pull myself up into the booming, floodlit night.

  I am steadfast.

  The wind is a cold gale across the topside.

  I twist my crash bracelets on, and their magnetics pull me down. They drag like lead weights on my wrists, clanking against the metal hull as I pull myself toward the right rear engine.

  Boss X is making his way forward, his eyes squinting against the wind, his fur pushed flat.

  Around us, the night sky flashes and burns—explosions, searchlights, damaged hovercars. A stray fléchette glances off the armor to my right, leaving a dent the size of a fist.

  The deck tips and shudders beneath me, Zura flying like a drunk woman.

  We skim a stand of tall trees, and our lifting fans hack their tops into wood chips and eye-stinging pine scent.

  When I can see again, Shreve sits in the distance. My father’s tower is alight, its usual complement of drones swirling around its summit. Most are armed, but some will have sensors, radar, scanners.

  This battle damage has to look real.

  I haul myself the last few meters. The engine roar grows louder, the hull vibrating, the fan sucking the air down into its blades like a hurricane.

  Trying to pull me in …

  I’m close enough. I pull the smoke grenade out and realize there’s nothing to attach it with.

  Except my crash bracelets.

  I pull one off, twist it to the highest setting. It clings to the vibrating engine casing, and the metal grenade clings to it in turn, immovable when I try to pry them loose.

  I pull the pin and crawl back a few meters, counting under my breath.

  The grenade flashes, its smoke pouring down into the lifting fan, then outward behind us in a spreading trail.

  I turn to Boss X. The front right engine is already spilling smoke, and he’s hauled himself to the rear of the car.

  He rises into a crouch, unsteady in the wind.

  “Ready to jump?” he calls.

  “Jump?”

  I stare wide-eyed at my father’s tower, looming ever closer. Zura is slowing us, readying to take the car skidding into the dirt. There isn’t time to get back inside and strap in.

  All we have is our crash bracelets—in fact, I’ve only got one.

  Boss X is wearing both his. The belt is gone from his waist, wrapped around the grenade, I guess.

  Then I remember the first time Naya let me take my pulse knife out of the training area.

  I showed off for Rafi, making the knife fly around our bedroom. She asked if it was strong enough to pick me up.

  Clinging with all the strength in my young hands, I let its magnetic lifters pull me to the ceiling of our bedroom while my sister laughed and threw pillows.

  A pulse knife can carry me.

  Of course, I probably weighed less then.

  I crawl to the rear of the hovercar, find a spot next to Boss X, and look down at the trees whipping past below.

  We’re still flying very fast.

  I pull my hood up over my head and face, switch the suit to light armor mode. It turns black, the nanos stiffening to hardened scales.

  Smoke wreathes around us, and sounds of battle shake the air. At the edge of my father’s estate, the treetops shooting past below turn to a blur of grass. The lifting fans switch over to silent magnetics.

  “On three,” X growls, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a beatific smile. “One, two …”

  We jump straight up, caught in the wind, the car zooming away ahead.

  Below us, my father’s perfectly manicured gardens are a riot of color in the floodlights. For a moment I’m in free fall, both hands wrapped around my buzzing knife …

  Then my left wrist snaps taut, the bracelet trying to slow me down. The knife roars to life, and it feels like my shoulders are being yanked from their sockets. My iron-ringed fingers twist painfully in the magnetic fields.

 
I fall, hit a row of hedges slantways, scraping across the tops of leaves and branches. The stiffened sneak suit is tougher than bare skin, but it still feels like being dragged across thorns and brambles.

  The hedges bring me to a gradual, thrashing halt. It takes a painful moment to pull myself from the ruined plants.

  Fifty meters farther on, Boss X is standing up, gingerly rubbing his wrists.

  He’s watching our Shreve hovercar.

  It crashes just as planned.

  The smoking right-side fans tip down into the gardens, sending up a spray of flowers and dirt. The car tries to slew sideways, but Zura holds it steady. The drag slows it until the fans snap off and careen away across the gardens, still smoking.

  The car goes into a spin, out of control now. But its magnetics keep it a few meters above the ground, a swirl of smoke and sparks.

  Finally it rear-ends into the base of the tower, tearing out a gaping chunk of the cargo bay wall.

  As the hatches pop open and Specials spill out, Boss X and I are already running toward the gap.

  This late, the loading bay is empty of workers. The cargo trucks and lifting drones sit silent, red in the running lights of our crashed hovercar.

  The entries to the rest of the house are secured. But Rafi and I have played hide-and-seek a hundred times here—I know what’s behind every door.

  “This way!” My pulse knife roars to life, flies at the largest roller door. With a shriek of tearing metal, a jagged hole opens up.

  We leap through, run across the carpeted lobby floor, and into the largest room in my father’s house. The ballroom, full of bare tables and an empty stage.

  This is where I saved my sister’s life a year ago. When not in use, it’s where the house security drones go to recharge.

  We catch them sleeping, not expecting attackers pouring from a fallen Shreve ship. The drones try to sputter to life, their weapons crash-charging like the hum of bees. But the Specials’ barrage guns open fire, cutting them to pieces.

  Boss X extends his pulse lance—like my knife, but two meters long—and chops the supports out from under the balcony. It crashes down onto a dozen waking drones.

  I pull the barrage gun from my belt and let my own fire spill wild, hitting the tables, the lights, the ornate ceiling. Some simple, angry part of me thrills to be laying waste to my childhood home.

  In seconds, the wreckage of fifty drones litters the ballroom floor. Another twenty or so will be on station throughout the house. Sirens are ringing now.

  I start for the stairs, but then I see him—Boss X, up on the stage.

  Yandre takes my shoulder. “Five seconds.”

  X slashes at the stage with his pulse lance. Sparks and sawdust fly, then he kneels and pulls free a jagged triangle of wood. He brings it to his lips.

  “The man X joined the rebels for,” Yandre says. “He died here.”

  My mind can’t grasp this.

  “It wasn’t an authorized mission,” Yandre says. “And he wasn’t trying to kill your sister.”

  I manage to nod. “My father was meant to give that speech.”

  I don’t tell them the rest. That I made the kill that day—and that it was the best day of my life.

  Boss X leaps down from the stage, the token piece of wood clutched in his hand.

  We charge up the emergency stairway, up toward the control room, toward my sister. Dr. Leyva and his techs take the lead now, spraying anti-dust nanos and scanning for traps.

  Boss X is behind us, sweeping his pulse lance across the landing below. It sends rubble crashing down on anyone who might be following. But it means there’s no way back now.

  I glance at Yandre.

  They shrug. “It’s a wolf thing. No retreats.”

  But it’s more than that. This is as personal to Boss X as it is to me.

  I bring the party to a halt on the stairwell, ten floors up. Just outside the control room and the medical center, and below my old bedroom.

  “There’ll be drones on this floor,” I say. “Or soldiers.”

  The Specials push me out of the way, set blast caps on the stairway door.

  The roar of the explosion echoes down the stairs.

  We charge out the gaping hole. Metal shards of the door are everywhere—

  But the med center is empty.

  Nothing but shiny furniture and equipment, and that giant picture window showing the battle outside in all its glory. Missiles crisscrossing the night, rings of plasma aflame, hovercars veering, burning, falling. Rebel antiaircraft spiderwebs stretch across the sky.

  For a moment I can’t breathe.

  All this destruction—for Victoria, for the planet, for the rule of law and normalcy.

  But also for me.

  I helped plan this battle, nudging flickering soldiers and machine-like toys across an airscreen table. Quoting Sun Tzu and Niccolò Machiavelli. Pouring out every second of training that my father subjected me to.

  His creature.

  He made me, and I made this spectacle before us.

  “Magnificent,” Dr. Leyva says softly. “But we’re losing.”

  It’s true. The army of Shreve has left the city almost defenseless, surging out across the farm belt against the rebels and Victorians. So many hovercars, drones, jump troops …

  Then I realize—the score of ships guarding this tower have joined the fray, tipping the balance. Once we invaded my father’s home, it left them with no reason to stay here.

  So they headed straight at Col.

  “No,” I murmur.

  “Focus,” Zura says. “Where’s the control room?”

  I point.

  “Why is no one here?” Boss X says. His pulse lance buzzes in his hand.

  One of the techs raises an instrument. “There’s some kind of magnetic field building. Frey, is this room equipped with—”

  Her voice cuts off, and she crumples to one knee. Blood spurts from her throat and down her chest, setting off camo reactions in her suit.

  I flinch from a metal flash in the corner of my eye. Something shiny darts past, and a lock of my hair falls, cut clean off.

  Boss X cries out in pain. A shiny bone pin juts from his shoulder.

  Suddenly the air is full of metal—scissors, suturing needles, pins, every medical instrument in flight.

  I shut my eyes, knowing this room from endless training injuries, and grab a cushion from the surge table, wrap it around my head.

  Some deadly code in the walls is running pinpoint lifter magnets, sending every small piece of metal swirling through the air, thrusting at anything with body heat.

  A Special falls, something shiny protruding from his eye. I hear the buzz of Boss X’s pulse lance as he fends off flitting projectiles. Objects thunk into my cushion, stab at my hardened sneak suit, slice my hands.

  Sooner or later, one of them will find a vein.

  But then the barrage tapers off.

  I peer out.

  Yandre stands in the center of the room, their face bleeding, their jacket in ribbons of leather. They hold a crash bracelet high in the air, surrounded by a lacerating hurricane of metal.

  Of course. The bracelet’s magnet is much stronger than any pinpoint lifter, and has drawn all that flying metal toward itself. But the vortex around Yandre’s hand is closing, spinning quicker as it tightens, like water in a drain.

  Once it consumes the bracelet—and Yandre’s hand—the metal storm will break free again.

  I hurl my knife at the picture window. The reinforced glass resists for a moment, then webs, cracks, shatters. Glittering shards spill out into the night, letting in the roar of wind and battle thunder.

  Yandre takes slow, steady steps to the window, then drops the bracelet out.

  The storm of metal follows, spinning into the dark.

  I look around—one tech and two Specials dead. Boss X’s fur streaked with blood. Yandre’s arm streaming. Zura emerges unscathed from beneath a massage table.

  The cold,
ten-story wind sets everything rustling around us.

  Dr. Leyva goes to work, looking for medspray and bandages. When he turns to me, I wave him off. My hardened sneak suit saved me from the worst.

  And the battle is still raging outside.

  “The control room’s through that door,” I say to the surviving tech. “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  “Frey …” Zura warns me.

  I shake my head, taking a pair of grenades from Boss X’s belt. He only nods.

  I make for the stairs. The eleventh floor, where I used to sleep.

  Zura doesn’t try to stop me.

  The stairwell is dark, sirens echoing from all directions. But there’s movement below me. In night vision, I can see the two security drones drifting up on silent lifters.

  There’s no point in stealth anymore.

  My barrage gun fills the stairwell with sparks and smoke, leaving them in jittering pieces. I set a grenade on a slow timer and send it bouncing down.

  The door to the eleventh floor is secured, but the barrage gun shreds it off its hinges.

  I dive through the doorway, aiming and firing at a lone figure in the hall. But my gun sputters, its status light blinking red.

  I’m out of ammo.

  “Frey,” comes a familiar voice. “It’s good to see you.”

  I squint through the soft glow of emergency lights. She stands there, lean and poised and strong.

  Unarmed. Unworried by the likes of me.

  My trainer, Naya.

  I drop the empty barrage gun, raise my pulse knife.

  “Out of my way. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You’ve never hurt me, Frey.”

  “Trust me, it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

  Naya wears a familiar expression. That perfect focus, probing for weaknesses, judging me. For a moment, I’m a defenseless seven-year-old again.

  “Your stance has gotten sloppy,” she says.

  I glance down at my feet.

  She’s right. My weight’s too far back.

  “I’m out of practice. Not a lot of fistfights in real wars, turns out.”

  “We can remedy that.” She raises her hands, and I remember how beautiful I used to think she was—that blend of elegance, strength, and menace.