“The dark blue one who killed Leah is gone. He’s got to be the most dangerous or they wouldn’t have sent him in first! We won’t get a better chance!”

“We’re gonna escape.” I leaned in, just in case. “We’re definitely going to get away from them, the first chance we get. I mean, we have to, they’re looking for a reason to kill us—”

Quint made a kind of funny noise in her throat.

“—though we should be safe for the moment,” I added hastily. “But we can’t just make a break for it when we don’t have a chance of escaping. We need a way out first.”

Benny spoke. “I have a way out.”

“What way out?”

In answer, Benny lifted his arm, his handbrace shining dimly against his skin. His homemade handbrace, which hid a very rudimentary projectile weapon in the wristband, just a single shot.

The Red Minister hadn’t noticed it when he’d patted Benny down, because it was one-of-a-kind.

I followed Benny’s gaze across the room to Number One.

CHAPTER TEN:

Rot and Bone

One’s back was to us, and even Red was looking away, down the hall. Benny’s fingers slid over the catch on the brace that would expose the trigger—

A dark blue light glimmered in the left-hand door. I knocked Benny’s arm down before the Indigo Minister could see. “We’re going to get out of this without anyone dying,” I warned him, low, his face inches from mine. “Follow my lead.”

Deep violet light flashed out behind me, some complicated message. The Indigo Minister had returned. The other hallways were glowing, too, as the rest of them came back. Our window for idiocy had closed.

“Mr. Wren,” said One, when the flashing of lights had ceased. “Walk with me.” Then she set off into the left-hand hall, her collar-light glowing dark.

The Ministers were watching us again.

I followed her without a word.

Faster-than-light travel and artificial gravity were two effects of the same technology, invented by a cavalier inventor somewhere in the star system known, at the time, as Terra Nova. At the time, Terra Nova had been ruled by the Ministers, the way Maria Nova was now. The story goes that after news of the invention became public, academics and engineers and investors all flocked to the lab, where they found machines propped up with discarded wrenches and held together by twist-ties. Only the insulating properties of an undergrad’s scarf, used to hold together two pieces of crucial machinery, had prevented a collision between opposing types of matter that would have produced an explosion powerful enough to destroy half the tiny moon the inventor had been based on.

Once the lab had been hastily disarmed, production of the new technology began in the then-Terra Nova system. In less than a decade, the Terra Novans were able to zip around the local segment of the galaxy, planting the seeds that would become the outer colonies, and hurrying to their Sister System, Maria Nova, to share the good news of their new technology. Both Systems were one government, back then, under control of the Ministers. They thought nothing of sharing technology between.