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“I can’t. Lucas is right.”

“You’re listening to Buttons now?”

“His name isn’t Buttons, and I trust him. I can feel him, Ro. You told me to.”

Ro’s mouth tightens into a scowl. He doesn’t like the idea of me poking around in Lucas Amare’s mind, that much is clear. I ignore him.

I try again. “You have to believe me. We can trust him.”

“You don’t know anything, Dol. We don’t know how he works, what he can do. Maybe those marks are fake. Maybe he’s controlling you with some kind of Embassy endorphins—they have every scientist in the Hole working on one Classified weapon or another.”

“Your new Grass Rebellion friends tell you that?” He’s angry, but now I’m angry too.

“Maybe. But either way, he’s been sent here to bring us in—he already admitted that much himself.”

The Embassy Choppers are so loud now, he has to shout. Even then, I can barely hear him. I pull on the gun with both hands.

“Let go, Ro.”

“Don’t,
Doloria de la Cruz
. Please.”

“Let go,
Furo Costas
. Please.”

I’m begging you. That’s what his eyes say, even if he’s too proud to ever use the words himself. I’m begging him too, with every tug on the gun barrel.

Lucas watches us. “I give you my word. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“Shut up, Buttons.” Ro is panicking, which is dangerous.

I put my other hand on his wrist. “We can do this. We have to. We don’t have a choice.”

Now I see the ropes falling into the water, all around us. Sympas are about to drop from the sky, along with the rain.

Then I say the words Ro doesn’t want to hear most of all. “We have to trust him. We have nowhere else to go.”

“Give me the gun, Ro.” Lucas is shouting now. He holds out his hands. I feel Lucas reaching toward Ro. I feel the warmth unfolding, the rush of his influence.

Lucas is intoxicating.

Ro’s fingers flex on the grip. Dazed, he takes a step backward, trying to brace himself. But I already know it’s no use.

Ro lets go. I stumble from the weight of the gun, almost knocking Lucas over. I press the gun into his hands and step away, just as the cave fills with Sympas.

Armed and masked.

Now the tracking dots are on our foreheads, dancing between our eyes.

“Took you long enough. Bring them in, boys. I’m beat. Stubborn Grass. Had to hold them here all afternoon.” Lucas lurches out from the rocks, splashing through the water. He stops, steadying himself. “One thing. I don’t want anybody talking to them without my permission.” He shoots Ro a meaningful look. You don’t have to read minds to know what he’s saying.
Shut the hell up.

Then it’s my turn.

“And careful with the girl. She needs medical attention. They both do. Send them straight up to Doc when we land.”

Lucas speaks with authority, more than his years, more than he has. The Sympas salute as he passes. Only I know he barely has the strength to hold his gun.

“Mr. Amare.” An angry-looking man in a heavily decorated military coat stands next to Lucas.

I recognize the wings on his jacket, and the bile rises in my throat.

He was there, in the chapel. He is one of the Sympas who killed the Padre. Their leader.

I swallow. I try to get my breath, but it feels like there isn’t enough oxygen in the air.

I watch him speak. The words are civil but the tone is
not. Lucas reddens, and I realize the words were meant to remind him he is not a Sympa soldier at all. He only wants to be.

Lucas nods. “Colonel.”

The man’s eyes move over him, taking in the blood on Lucas’s face. The wet clothes. The swaying weakness in his body, how he’s not standing quite right.

The Colonel’s head is completely bald, and a jagged scar interrupts the sheen of his skin. As if someone has taken a knife and sliced halfway around the top of his head, as if he were a jack-o’-lantern.

His coat has a strange collar, like a priest’s. I see in a glance that he has nothing to do with any church, on any planet.

He doesn’t acknowledge us, though I know he feels me staring at him. I tentatively reach out for him in my mind, but I feel a shock of cold, like I have been repelled by freezing water.

He fingers the buttonless edge of Lucas’s jacket. Lucas says nothing. Then, slowly, the Colonel raises his eyes to me. They are the color of dirty ice.

I shiver and stop trying to see behind them.

Lucas and the Jack-o’-Lantern Man turn back to the waiting command Chopper, sleek and silver and emblazoned with letters and numbers that somehow spell out wealth and importance. The Chopper is deceptively small
for something worth more than a year of wages for everyone in the Hole combined.

As they climb in, I notice a slender girl standing next to the Chopper. She wears the same uniformed coat as Lucas, but her hair is silver and severe, with a slash of bangs cropped against her forehead. It’s possible that I wouldn’t have seen her at all in the crowd of Sympas that surround the Chopper.

I do, though, not because of how she looks, which is striking enough, but because of the way her eyes track Lucas.

Like a predator locked on her prey. A king snake, maybe, or a rattler.

I close my eyes. I can’t sense my way through to her, not in the chaos and the noise of the scene.

In a second the opportunity is gone. The girl falls into step behind Lucas and the Colonel, and they rise into the clouds with a few flashing twists of blades, without so much as a look goodbye.

I glance over at Ro, next to me, as they cuff him. He resists, but a Sympa guard kicks the back of his legs, and he falls awkwardly to the ground. Another Sympa yanks him up with a threatening scowl. “You want a fight, boy?” The others laugh. Ro is seething, looking at me accusingly. I hold his eyes, pleading. He turns and shakes his head, climbing onto the transport. He is miserable, his eyes dark
and wet. I try to remember if this is the first time I have ever seen him cry.

I think it is.

I hope I’m not wrong to trust Lucas and let them take us. I hope Ro’s not right.

Out here in the rain, as I board the transport, I can’t feel anything but scared.

The following is a reprint of a recovered page, thick, homemade paper, thought to be torn from an anti-Embassy propaganda tract titled
Icon Children Exist!
Most likely hand-published by a fanatical cult or Grass Rebellion faction.

Text-scan translation follows.

“Dol, wake up. You drifted off.” I turn to see Lucas, his face framed by the water, rough on every side.

“Where’s Ro?” I turn to look for him, but all I can see is Lucas. His eyes, and broad swaths of sand and sea.

“He’s fine. It’s you I’m worried about.” He pushes up his sleeve and holds out his naked wrist. “I want you to feel better, Dol.” Four dots. Four blue dots.

The blood is gone now. So is his shirt.

Lucas puts his hands inside the bottom of my sweater, tugging at it. He looks at me, questioningly, before gently pulling it over my head. I shiver.

Lucas doesn’t seem to notice. He takes my cold, bare arm in his hands. Unties my binding and pulls it loose, letting it hang halfway off my arm, undone. Where his hand runs over my skin, I have goose bumps.

“Say something.” Now Lucas slips his fingers through mine. “I’ve been waiting for you, all this time. I know you feel it too.”

He begins to wrap the cloth around our arms. As he works the cloth, our elbows touch, then our forearms. Our wrists. He laces our fingers together, more tightly. His fingers dig into the back of my hand, inching closer…

Until I ball up my hand. Because I can’t let him do it.

There are only millimeters of air between our markings but it might as well be miles.

I can’t let go. I can’t do it to my best friend, the only person I have ever let feel how it is to be me.

And now it isn’t Lucas who is holding my hand, but Ro. And we’re back underneath the bluff again, in the cave. I can hear the waves, all around us.

Ro leans closer to me, looking at my mouth, and suddenly all I can taste is pomegranate—

I wake up staring at pomegranate seeds.

No.

They’re not pomegranate seeds. They’re ceiling tiles, with hundreds of tiny dots on them. And the waves aren’t waves. They don’t crash, they only hum. Evenly and endlessly.

Machines. It’s machine noise.

I close and open my eyes again. I don’t know where I am, at first. I know I’m not wearing my clothes. The
white cloth robe is thick and plush, and I think I am still dreaming. I want to sleep again, but I can’t. I am caught somewhere in between. My eyes are heavy-lidded and my body slow and thick.

I am so tired. A wave of nausea washes over me and my head pounds. Then I close my eyes and force myself to remember.

The Padre. The Tracks. The Merk. Ro. Lucas.

I open my eyes, blushing, remembering my dream. Remembering the feel of his fingers on my skin, the way his dirty gold hair hung in his eyes. Then I remember the rest, the part that isn’t a dream.

The Embassy Chopper. Santa Catalina Island. The Embassy.

The realization of where I am makes me sit up in my cot. Because I’m not at the Mission; I’m at the Embassy on Santa Catalina Island. Hours away from anywhere I’ve ever been before, and the heart of the Occupation, as far as the Hole is concerned. The Hole and everyone in and around it. I might as well have spent the night in the House of Lords itself.

I try to remember the details. In my mind, I trace my way from the Chopper to the room. The foggy ride to the island, holding back the urge to vomit from the turbulence. Santa Catalina coming into view through the low mist that hangs over the water. The Embassy walls rising up from the rocks, the windows rising higher above them.

What came after the rocks and the walls?

The docks, swarming with uniformed Sympas? The building-sized poster of the Ambassador in her crimson military jacket, the one she wears in all the pictures?

The doctors.
They must have shot me up with something, because that’s where the memories fade.

Ro’s gone. That’s the last thing I remember. Ro’s hand being twisted out of mine. I can’t feel him anywhere. They must have taken him away, to a different prison cell, or a different hospital room.

I look at my hands. Some sort of restraints—cuffs, I think—have left deep, red grooves, but I’m not cuffed now. And my binding—I’m not wearing it. I try not to panic, but I feel naked without it.

As I lie back against the soft pillow, I am almost certain this is not a prison. At least, not officially. The room is plain, military looking. A large gray rectangle. Rows of tall windows line one wall, with stripes of horizontal shades that keep me from seeing what is outside. Gray and white, gray and white. There don’t seem to be any other colors here—except for the beeping, flashing lights on the walls. Beyond that, there are places for many more cots—I count at least three, judging by the marks on the walls. But there is only one cot in the room, and I am in it.

Finally, I see my clothes are neatly folded in a pile on a chair. More of a relief, my worn leather chestpack sits next to it on the floor. It’s unsettling to see it lying
there, exposed, instead of hidden beneath my clothes as it normally is. The small pile is everything that belongs to me in the world.

Almost.

Someone has taken them off me. Someone has wrapped me in this robe. Someone has also tagged me like a troublemaking coyote: a wire clamps down on the tip of my middle finger. I wiggle it; the wire connects to a small machine that beeps pleasantly. Screens light up on the walls, all around me, like beating hearts encased in plastic skins. It only takes me a second to realize that these particular flashing lights—the white ones—correspond with the movements of my own wired finger.

The Embassy knows when I move so much as a finger.

I think of the string of lights that Ro got me for my birthday. How afraid the Padre was that we’d be seen.

How right he was to fear them.

I wag my fingers again, but when the wall lights up, I see something more troubling. Beneath the wire tag, my right wrist is covered with a bandage.

As I examine my arm, the machine hum grows louder—

“The Medics did not touch your marker, if that is what you are worried about. You seem worried.”

The voice comes from behind me. I whirl around in my cot, but there’s no one there.

“It was just a routine procedure. Standard Embassy protocol, DNA sampling. Everything went as expected.”

I scramble to stand up. The floor is cold on my feet.

“I am sorry. I did not mean to surprise you. I have been waiting for an appropriate time to introduce myself, as you were so busy with REM sleep.”