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“You sent me the key,” I said. “You let me escape.”

“Had to empty the hangar bay too,” she said. “Not easy to do, mind you, even during the night watch.”

“Why?”

“Have you forgotten our duel?” she asked. “You can lower the gun, Spensa. It doesn’t have the juice to punch through the ops station’s shield.”

The alarms were still blaring. I glanced at the ships. Were they a way out?

“You get to go first,” Brade said to me. “Pick a ship. They’re unlocked. Head on out, and I’ll follow.”

“Why are you doing this?” I demanded. “Back on Starsight, you were all too eager to work against me. Now you let me go?”

“We needed you to be our scapegoat then,” Brade said.“Thanks for that, by the way. The footage we took of you being a ‘scary human’ helped Winzik persuade entire planets to overlook his military coup.” She spun a handgun on the desk table, displaying absolutely atrocious muzzle control. “They’re so docile. A lot about the Superiority will need to change if they want to hold on to all they’ve achieved.”

She looked at me, and seemed to sense my hesitance. I hadn’t run for a ship. I didn’t like this; it smelled off.

“They don’t deserve it,” she said to me. “This empire they’ve built. The diones, the tenasi, the varvax? They were just the ones who figured out cytonics first; then they were the first to be able to isolate and control the slugs. They think it’s their grand philosophy that made them dominant, when in reality it was mere luck.”

“I don’t get you, Brade,” I said, stepping closer. “Why do youfollow him? Why do you want to duel me? Why do you do anything you do?”

“For kicks,” she said.

I almost believed it. If her simple motivation was to do what seemed fun at the time, that would explain letting me go. It would explain a lot. But there were easier ways to have fun. She had committed to flying with me at Starsight, keeping up her persona even when it was difficult.

Whatever her reasons, this was her game. If I was going to escape, I’d need to play by her rules at first, until I found a way to break them.

“Are you just going to stand there?” she asked. “Soon this place will be swarming with troops. But if you’re out there with me, Winzik will be slower to act. I’ve got a message typed up saying I caught you escaping and am giving chase. He’ll still send others to help, but knowing I’m chasing you should calm him a little. Buy us time for a real fight. Your choice though. Do you want to stand here and be caught?”

I went running for one of the ships, fully aware that I was dancing to her tune. But maybe she would actually fly out and duel me.Maybe she really did want to know which of us was better. In that case, I had an opportunity to escape. A far better one than I had locked in that cell.

I located a sleek interceptor model I knew had a familiar control scheme and threw myself into the cockpit, still expecting some kind of last-minute trap. Nothing stopped me as I raised the ship up on its acclivity ring, then boosted straight out the bay doors through the shield and into the vacuum of space.

Brade followed moments later in her own ship. Scud, we were really going to do this. I still couldn’t hyperjump, with the drugs in my system, but I’d picked a good time to try my escape. I usually got a dose about an hour after shift change, so I figured my powers should start returning shortly.

I had a chance, a real one. I just had to beat Brade, then eludecapture for long enough to hyperjump. As Brade dove for me, unloading with her destructors, my instincts kicked in. I still didn’t know for sure why she was doing this.

But I knew, sure as the stars themselves, that she was going to regret toying with me.

27

I boosted away from Brade on overburn, but focused primarily on defensive flying. I needed the lay of this region before I got serious.

We’d left a newer-looking space station, flat and rectangular with bays along the sides. It looked a little like a…well, a giant space harmonica. The sort our pathleader had played back in my nomadic childhood. My monitors labeled this station “Brez Observation Platform.”

My monitor picked out smaller structures in the distance—hundreds of them. Mines, maybe? They did seem to be arrayed in a pattern, creating a large field around the region. There were kilometers between each one, but viewing this as a battlefield, I could see an intentionality to the way they were placed.

In the area closest to me was a lot of space junk, drifting far more haphazardly. The main showpiece, though, was an old space platform—much, much larger than Brez, the station where I’d been captive. The behemoth floated a short distance away, by starship terms.

This was Evensong, my proximity monitor said: an ancient platform that resembled Starsight. It looked mostly derelict, though its surface was encrusted with hundreds, maybe thousands ofskyscrapers. No lights came from any of them, but somewhere on that platform would be the hub where all the commslugs were housed.

I punched my ship in that direction to get a closer look, while Brade swept outward. Evensong seemed to have a bubble of air around it like Starsight, but my proximity monitor didn’t warn of a shield. Vast swaths of brown ground marked dead gardens. The buildings hadn’t corroded—modern metals resisted that, no matter how long they sat—but I saw broken windows. Streets that seemed to have been stripped of metal for use elsewhere.

A part of me found it incredible. The platforms around Detritus had remained functional for hundreds of years without intervention. What had happened here to make this place so derelict?

“It was a human installation once,” Brade said over my comm.

I hesitated. She hadn’t pressed her attack. I felt an urgency to be on with the contest, before Winzik found out what we were doing. At the same time, if Brade was willing to talk, maybe I could get some information out of her?