The subway tunnel was a concrete throat, choked with the dust of forty years and the lingering scent of ozone. Jessica—known only as Jess to the sister who clung to her—sat against a rusted support beam, her telepathy expanded in a thin, vibrating web around them. Every drip of water, every scuttle of a rat, felt like a hammer blow to her nerves.
In the dim glow of a single chemical light, Sofia sat cross-legged, the emerald sweater now streaked with soot and grease. She was picking at the loose threads of the sleeves, her face pale in the artificial light.
The City of Dust"We can't stay in the ruins," Jess whispered, her voice a low rasp. "The bounty... I felt it in the Hub. It's too high. Three million Perl for you, Sofia. Half a million for me. Every scavenger from here to the coast is going to be looking for a girl in a green sweater and her sister."
Sofia looked up, her eyes wide with a dawning, terrible realization. "That's enough to buy a whole farm, isn't it? Like Mira's?"
"It's enough to buy a hundred farms," Jess said, her jaw tightening. "That's why we're going to Armeston. It's a hard travel, Sof. We'll have to cross the Salt Flats and the Iron Bridge. But in a city of ten million starving souls, two sisters can disappear."
"I'm scared," Sofia whispered, reaching out to touch her sister's soot-stained hand.
"I know," Jess murmured, pulling her close. "But I'm here. I'm always here."
The Sudden SilenceThe fatigue was a physical weight, pressing down on their eyelids. They huddled together in a small alcove behind a collapsed ticket booth. Jess tucked the heavy emerald wool around Sofia's legs, her mind finally beginning to drift toward a shallow, defensive sleep.
She didn't hear the footsteps. Whoever they were, they didn't move like bounty hunters. There was no mechanical hum of scanners, no chatter of greedy voices. There was only a cold, disciplined silence.
The attack was a blur of shadows.
One moment, Jess was closing her eyes; the next, a thick, chemically-soaked rag was pressed violently over her mouth and nose. She surged upward, her telepathy lashing out in a blind, psychic scream, but she hit a wall of mental static. These weren't civilians; they were wearing neural-dampeners.
"Jess—!" Sofia's muffled cry was cut short as a second figure pinned her down, a rag clamped over her face. Sofia's small hands flailed against the emerald wool, her eyes wide with a terrifying, drug-induced sleep.
The Iron Will of TalisaA heavy, combat-booted foot stepped into the light. A woman stepped forward, her face scarred by a jagged line across her cheek and her hair shorn close to her scalp. She wore the tactical gear of the High Resistance, a red gear symbol pinned to her chest.
This was Talisa, the commander of the local cell.
"Check their pockets," Talisa commanded, her voice like grinding stones. "Wane doesn't put a three-million-Perl bounty on children unless they are her most precious assets—or her most dangerous spies. Find the tracker."
Kael, the boy from the park, stepped forward. He looked down at them, his face hardened by a new, bitter suspicion. "They're too perfect, Talisa. The story of the 'runaway sisters' is exactly what the Citadel would want us to believe so we'd take them into our base. It's a Trojan Horse."
Jess tried to scream, to tell them that they were running from Wane, but the fumes hit her brain like a lead curtain. The world tilted, the concrete floor rising up to meet her.
"Bag them," Talisa ordered, unmoved by Sofia's small, limp form in the green sweater. She looked at Jess with eyes that had long ago traded empathy for survival. "If they're spies, we'll peel the truth out of them. If they're bait, we use them to lure Wane into the open. Either way, they aren't sisters anymore. They're property of the Rebellion."
The last thing Jess saw before the blackness took her was Talisa's cold, revolutionary fire—a gaze that saw her and Sofia not as children, but as variables in a war they never asked to fight.