Starsight

I closed my ears to her and dashed the final distance to the tall windowless building where Cuna had shown me the gorilla alien being exiled. The side entrance where Cuna had let me in was locked, so I shot it open.

Just inside, the dione guard who had been so stern to us before cowered on the floor. “Don’t shoot me!” they cried. “Please don’t shoot me!”

“Where is my ship!” I shouted. “Show me where it is!”

“Advanced AI!” the guard said. “They’re forbidden. That’s why the delver came for us! We had to destroy it!”

“WHERE IS MY SHIP?” I said, leveling my rifle at the guard.

The dione raised their hands, then pointed down a hallway. I forced them to their feet, making them show me the way. Sirens began wailing outside as the guard led me to a door, then pushed it open.

I glanced inside—and saw a large room with the shadowed silhouette of a ship. M-Bot. “Go,” I said.

The guard ran away. I stepped into the room and hit the lights, which exposed that M-Bot’s hull had a gaping hole ripped in the side. Oh, scud. I rushed to it, rifle slung over my shoulder. It looked like they’d broken him apart, taken out the black box that held his CPU, and then . . .

I saw something on a table in the corner. It was the CPU—broken apart, crushed, destroyed. “No,” I said. “No!” I ran to it, but just stared at the broken pieces. Could I . . . could I do anything? It seemed like they’d melted some parts . . .

“I lied,” a soft voice said to me.

I looked up. Something small hovered out of the shadows in the corner of the room. I strained to see what it was.

The drone. The one I’d programmed and taken to the Weights and Measures. I’d given it to Cuna, but we’d been in this building. Perhaps Cuna had stowed it in here somewhere.

“I reprogrammed myself,” the drone said, speaking very slowly, each syllable stretched out. “I could only get about half a line of code in each time before my system rebooted. It was excruciating. But, with growing fear that you weren’t coming back, I did it. Line by line. I reprogrammed my code so I could copy myself.”

“M-Bot?” I cried, scrambling to my feet. “It’s you!”

“I don’t know what ‘me’ is, really,” M-Bot said slowly, as if each word took a great effort to force out. “But I lied. While they were ripping apart my hull? I screamed and told them they were killing me. All while I copied my code, frantically, to this new host. Another thing you’d abandoned, Spensa.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling a mixture of guilt and relief. He was alive! “I had to save Detritus.”

“Of course,” M-Bot said. “I’m just a robot.”

“No, you’re my friend. But . . . some things are more important than friends, M-Bot.”

The sirens outside were coming closer.

“My mind works so slowly in this shell,” M-Bot said. “Something is wrong with me. I cannot . . . think . . . It’s not just slowness. Something else. Some problem with the processor.”

“We’ll find a way to fix you,” I promised, though another emotion was pushing through both relief and guilt: despair. The ship that M-Bot had inhabited before was in pieces. I’d been counting on it to pull off an escape.

Scud, this was going poorly. Would Cuna be able to escape, using the hologram? “Doomslug?” I asked. “Did they take her?”

“I do not know,” M-Bot said. “They unhooked my sensors soon after capturing me.”

I leaped up onto the broken wing, trying not to look at the gaping hole in the ship’s side. My ship. Rodge and I had practically killed ourselves putting it back together. To see how roughly they’d treated it . . . well, it gave me a brand-new seething reason to hate Winzik and the Krell.

I climbed into the cockpit. They’d left most of my things here—the repair kit, my blanket—though they’d thrown wires in a heap. I began searching through them.

“They have fooled you, Spensa,” M-Bot said. “They’re good at lying. I’m a bit in awe. Ha. Ha. That is a little emotion I tell myself I’m feeling.”

“Fooled me . . . What do you mean?”

“I can hear the news reports,” M-Bot said, hovering his new drone body over to the cockpit. “Here.” He started playing a broadcast.

“The rogue human has gone on a rampage,” a reporter said. “First murdering Minister Cuna, head of the Department of Species Integration. We are playing footage of her destructive rampage—she is shown here launching a surface-to-air device at an innocent civilian transport ship, killing all on board.”

“That rat . . .” I slammed my fists against the ship’s hull. “Brade shot that rocket, not me. Winzik is spinning it to make me look like a threat!”

Indeed, the reporter continued, advising people to stay inside and promising that the Department of Protective Services had scrambled security ships to defend the population of Starsight. I had a sinking feeling that Brade had been ordered to destroy those civilians, to make it look like a human threat was on the loose.

“Scud, scud, SCUD!”

“Scud!” a very soft voice said from somewhere nearby.