FeatherLite>>Menace: thanks for the heads up.
Two seconds later, a gold rocket races across the sky, perpendicular to the ships, and turns the Skysprinter into flaming parts.
“Ooh.” Sefina watches with me. “Was that—”
“Thruster, yeah.” I watch him in awe as he rockets away. “Never seen him burn so brightly before.”
“Poppy said it was because of Kelta. She did something to him.” Sefina shrugs. “Not like cybernetically. More of a side effect of bonding, I guess.”
I’m not sure that I want to find out what would happen to me if that’s the case.Can I become more of a beast than I already am?
“You know a lot about what’s going on for a human that hasn’t interacted with others much,” I say.
Sefina smirks and steadies the knife from her chest in her left hand, a gun in her right like a professional hunter. “I have to stay up to date on what’s going on if I’m to be any good as a guard. Poppy needed someone to talk to. We both got what we wanted. Now let’s scope out this bitch, get our shit, and leave this planet from hell behind.”
I post up beside her as we sneak through the forest with quiet steps, watching our surroundings for any signs of welvirs or otherwise. It’s reassuring to know she can see combatants in the dark as I can, but it also makes me curious. “Sefi, what do you see when you encounter a Solcrue?”
“They shimmer like welvirs but with a slight pulse of humans.” She twists and scans behind us before continuing again. “They are my most vibrant enemy.”
Her body bumps my back, and it catches my breath in my lungs. A shadow in the woods makes me reach back and find her wrist.
Sefina turns to look up at me, then tracks my gaze to what I’m looking at.
“Titan,” she whispers.
I try to ping my Brother but get no response. “Dark, no signal.”
Sefina digs through her bag and pulls out a set of binoculars. “It’s a trap.”
“How do you know?”
“Coilgun hole in his chest. No vines growing through him. It’s recent. By the way that the body is positioned, he wasn’t killed there. He was placed there.” Sefina packs her binoculars away. “I’m sorry, Menace. Looks like Craze was the unlucky soul.”
I squint at my Brother. His digibadge reads Craze. “But Craze fell during the jailbreak. I remember. I saw him. I heard him. Most of us did.”
Something isn’t right.
Sefina’s dark brows knit. She scans the forest around us and motions to a spot above the access shaft. “Let’s post there so we can watch for a short time and see if anyone comes out.”
We hike up to the cluster of rocks and slide back so we can peer down at the access while keeping our eyes on the surrounding trees.
“So what you’re telling me is someone made a replica of Craze?” Sefina asks.
I cringe at the thought. “I don’t know. But that Craze landed with Thruster. He never met up with any of us. Went DOI.”
“DOI?”
“Dark on Impact.” I glance over in the direction my Brother lies and want desperately to pick him up and carry him somewhere safe where I can look through his broken parts, determine if he’s really gone, and if he’s really Craze.
“If he was a real Titan named Craze—”
“Sefi, don’t say that.”
“Hear me out,” she whispers and taps her temple. “If that Craze was real, wouldn’t you have had two Craze codes appear in your coms before leaving Hyperion’s orbit? Wouldn’t one Craze sense the other? Wouldn’t you? Did you?”
I think back to the jailbreak. “I knew only of the Craze that fell on Hyperion. He was cut free by a Skysprinter rocket. I don’t know if he or the others survived. We are and always have been unique as any human and named as such. Two Crazes doesn’t make sense.”
“Isn’t it possible that someone saved parts of the plant or maybe an unfinished body and just finished it with whatever programming was left?”
