Chapter 3 — The Lab and the Threat

The lab was underground. You took a spiral staircase from the treehouse floor — long enough that by the time you reached the bottom you'd started to think you'd missed a landing. You hadn't. The staircase was just long.

It was packed, the lab. Every surface carried a purpose. Supercomputers along the east wall, molecular printers stacked on the central table, machines that built other machines along the south shelf, all of it retractable so Chrys could clear the room when he needed to think without obstacles. The walls were whitholium — a material he and his father had been developing before his father stopped being someone who could develop things. It looked like ordinary wall at a glance. At a second glance, it looked like a wall that was paying attention. It absorbed impact the way cloth absorbs water, silently, completely, without much evidence that anything had happened.

Will kept the lab clean and catalogued. Without Will the lab would have become uninhabitable inside two weeks. Possibly one.

Chrys was at the workbench with his arm inside something when they came down. He didn't look up. "Good morning," he said, to the room in general. "Sorry for the hour. I'll get to the point."

He extracted his arm. Looked at it. There was a scrape across the forearm that he hadn't had this morning, from something inside the contraption that had objected to his hand.

He set the contraption aside.

"Which Earth One creature is covered in dots?" he said. "Easy. A ladybug."

Amy, who had come down last and was still finishing her coffee, said: "Tigers also are."

"You probably mean leopards."

"Sorry." She smiled, guilty.

"Leopards went extinct approximately thirty millennia ago — not to worry." He leaned back in the chair, arms crossed. The smile faded in the careful way it did when he was shifting into something serious. "What we should worry about is that there are traces of them here. On this planet."

Amy almost dropped the coffee. "Hold on. Them?"

"Every other planet was cleared. But the source planet still has an active front — the government covers it. Ten professional gravirush players disappeared last week. Three arena champions before that. No DNA traces. No bodies." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Either they got greedy. Or they wanted to be noticed."

"To show they're still in control," Amy said.

"Yes." He looked at her for a moment. Then: "How's training going?"

"Good. A lot of running today." She leaned against the wall. "You should come out with us sometime."

"I usually train around midnight. It works out."

He straightened in the chair and looked at the ceiling. "Will — can you get everyone down here?"

"Broadcasting," Will said. The voice came from a speaker they'd never found. They'd looked. "Request complete."

"Thank you."

"Anytime."

Chrys looked toward the staircase, then at Amy. "They ate the burgers, didn't they."

"There were burgers," she confirmed.

"Good." He frowned at the floor, not at anything on it. "Eevi's jump this morning was earlier than I expected. That's a problem. She'll start registering."

"Could be they can't breach the layer," Akio said, appearing at the foot of the stairs and barely stopping before walking into a crate labeled fragile materials in red. He looked at the crate. Then at Chrys. Chrys waved him over. Akio came, grinning, and dropped into the yellow cushion chair he'd claimed for himself in the first week.

The others came down over the next few minutes. Marcus. Eevi briefly, then not there, then there again. Sam last, quiet.

"The Sword Alliance won't hold them long," Eevi said, when she reappeared. Her jacket still had the soil on the boot. Nobody mentioned it. "When they move, they'll move toward whatever's strongest in the region."

"Then we prepare," Marcus said.

"Yes." Chrys stood and crossed to the shelf at the back of the lab, where a plain box had been sitting for three weeks behind two other boxes. He carried it to the workbench and opened it. "These are why we won't need the mv3s anymore."

"Is that a serum?" Akio said.

"Kind of. Easier to show than–"

"Apologies," Will said. "We have guests. Twenty from the northeast, thirty from the south. Arrival in approximately two minutes. Lost Boys, based on the formation."

Chrys looked at the box. Put the lid back on. The shelf panel retracted and swallowed it.

"There goes my moment," he said.

They met the Lost Boys at the base of Big T.

Byron came first. Long golden curls. White jacket to the knee, pockets stuffed with whatever he'd picked up on his last raid. A candy bar next to what appeared to be a small explosive, neither in the right compartment. His green eyes moved across them the way a card player's eyes move across a table.

"Surrender calmly," he said, "and I won't waste time on scrawny little fools."

"No," Marcus said.

Byron sighed, the long sigh of a man who'd prepared for a different answer but wasn't surprised by this one. He undid the jacket buttons slowly. Underneath: black shirt, shoulder holster, and a .50 caliber pistol polished to the point where it seemed to want something from you.

He raised it.

"We also have–"

"Them?" Eevi nodded past him.

Byron turned. Sienna and Celestine were forty meters away, running circles in the grass, completely unconcerned with the arrival of fifty armed men.

He stared.

"I don't want to know how you did that," he said. He turned back and raised the gun. "Playtime's over. You're surrounded."

"By an army led by someone who brought his entire army," Sam said, from somewhere to the left of where she'd been standing. She kicked a rock without looking. It caught Byron across the forehead — not hard, but precisely.

"It's on," he said, and fired.

The bullet left the barrel aimed at Amy.

Chrys had been watching Byron's hand since he raised the gun. Not the gun. The hand. The specific angle of the wrist before the trigger moved. He had been watching it for the two seconds it took Byron to decide, which was one second longer than he needed.

He moved.

His shoulder caught Amy's and she went sideways and down, controlled. She'd been moved before. She knew how to land — and the bullet passed through the space where she'd been standing and entered Chrys instead, at the left side, below the rib. He felt it arrive. Not immediately, the way people described pain. Slightly afterward, like the message had to travel a distance. He stood.

I've been shot.

The thought was almost administrative. He filed it. He assessed: blood, yes; breathing, intact; feet, bearing weight.

He stood.

"Come here, Byron." His voice came out steadier than it should have. "You're going to pay for that."

Byron looked at him with the complicated expression of someone who has been both frustrated and impressed by the same thing. "That bullet wasn't for you. It was for your friend." He raised the gun again. "But this one is."

Chrys watched it come. His body was too slow to move and he had already calculated this and made a decision about it before the trigger moved.

The bullet slowed.

It was not supposed to slow. Physics had not been consulted. He watched it happen and felt it happen and it was the strangest sensation — not the stopping of something external, but something in him reaching out without asking permission, the Hydrolysis Engine doing something he hadn't known it could do, something that felt less like power and more like refusal. The bullet decelerated. It stopped. It fell.

He started laughing.

He hadn't planned to laugh. The laugh arrived the way pain arrives: as a reaction, not a decision. He said "Didn't see that coming?" and his legs gave way and he went down hard, which he also hadn't planned, and from the ground the grove looked different, the Klak leaves against the sky from this angle, the light still doing its water-thing even now.

"Open fire," Byron said.

The last thing Chrys heard before Amy's heat moved through the grove like a second sunrise.

The Lost Boys left quickly after that.

Most of them. Forty-seven of them, in ones and twos, without looking back. Byron paused at the edge of the grove. He turned around. He looked at the eight of them standing in the grass, Chrys back on his feet, pressing his jacket against the wound with the calm of someone who had decided to deal with this in an hour.

"I'll come back when you're weak," Byron said, "and I'll take everything from you."

"Have a nice day," Chrys said.

One stayed.

He was standing apart from the others — or rather, he'd been standing apart and simply didn't move when the others moved. Gray shirt. Almost-black jeans with mud dried into the knees. Both ankles showing old blood. A bruise under one brow that looked recent. He stood up from the crouch he'd been in, testing his legs the way you do when you're not sure they'll work, and found that they did.

He looked at Chrys.

"Just Chrys," Chrys said. "Not sir."

"Right," the boy said.

"Will — clothes and a shower?"

"Already running," Will said.

"What's your name?" Sienna said. She'd come to stand next to Chrys without Chrys noticing, which was a thing she did sometimes that he'd stopped finding uncanny.

"Eon," the boy said.

"Where's your squad?"

A pause. Not long. He was used to answering this question.

"Gone," he said.

Sienna looked at him for a moment. She nodded.

"My allies are my friends," Chrys said, as they walked toward the shower cabins, klak wood, eight of them, Marcus had helped with the plumbing. "You didn't even get to do anything today. But find whoever sent them and ask their forgiveness anyway."

Eon was quiet.

"Right," he said, after a moment.

He meant it. Chrys could tell the difference.

The grove settled around them. The late-morning light came through the leaves at its usual angle. Someone in the kitchen had started making lunch. Marcus was already carrying Chrys's jacket, the one he'd pressed to the wound, with the careful purpose of a man who knew which problems he could solve.

It was going to be a long afternoon.

Chrys looked at the sky through the Klak branches, blue and green in its usual arrangement, and thought about the bullet that had slowed without being asked to.

That's new, he thought.

He filed it. He had things to tell everyone. There would be time.