ZAHRA

Level 5. A dead family huddled by the sealed hatch of an evacuation airlock, father and mother and infant child, without any sign of infection or injury.

Level 6. A man whose face had been torn to shreds, and the broken piece of metal he’d used still clutched in his mummified fingers. It was the rung of a ladder; he had wrenched it from the wall to rip his own flesh away.

We had left Henke’s corpse behind. My suit was stained with his blood: a spray across the faceplate of my helmet, long streaks across my arms and chest. Dag and Panya were convinced Ariana’s hysteria had been a ruse to give the others a chance to escape. Malachi offered no opinion.

I was not so sure. I did not think Bhattacharya had been feigning the fear in his voice when he said she was infected. I did not think she had been pretending panic. And, most of all, I did not think dismissing infection as a possibility would serve us. We had to be careful. Every prickle, every itch on my skin sent a spike of fear through me.

We were heading toward the ship’s bridge. It was, Malachi said, the only way to get control of the ship, to break through the command override that had locked all the systems. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We had planned for years, detailing every aspect of the mission, considering every possibility. It wasn’t fair. There was so much we hadn’t known.

Level 7. Two men dead in a gallery of windows looking out to the stars. One’s face was a mass of bruises and lacerations. He had been beaten to a pulp by the other man, whose hand still gripped his hair in a frozen fist. Dried blood and bits of bone and brain were splattered over the windows, the seating, the control panels, the abstract sculpture affixed to the center of the room.

Henke. Bao. Nico. Boudicca. I had failed them. The shuttle was gone. The hostages were gone. We had no control over this ship, Homestead was unprotected, SPEC was coming, and somewhere in the darkness was a girl with Henke’s gun. Maybe she was a SPEC agent. Maybe she had been lucky. Maybe she was infected by a rage-inducing virus. Whatever the case, I had failed. There was a sickly acid churn in my stomach. Fairness was for children and fools. I was not a child anymore, and I should have known better than to let the hostages make me a fool. I would not make that mistake twice.

Level 8, and I heard my mother’s voice.

I stopped with one hand on the wall. The beams of the headlamps behind me cast my shadow as a long, distorted thing, stretching into darkness.