“I am sufficiently recovered,” says Nemo. “All I am lacking now—if my database is correct—is a thank you.”

  “Thank you, droid man, for saving my ass,” says Crow. “Can we go now?”

  The rain has stopped entirely, not that we need to worry now we’re back on the road. I can’t see anything through the trees above us. Their branches are tightly knit together, so closely bound, that the road only leads to more darkness.

  It’s a relief to be in a forest again. Even having grown up with trees few and far between, seeing them up and down and all around just feels right somehow.

  “You’re not glowing,” I say suddenly to Crow, the realization hitting me square in the face. No bright eerie glow from the invisible lines of her skin. There’s nothing but angry boils on her hard-calloused hands.

  “Nope, I guess not,” says Crow. She shrugs off the remains of her coat. The boils, thank the Sisters, seem limited only to her hands. And she’s letting curiosity take over from her anger. “I guess it has to be nighttime.”

  “Starlight,” says Nemo, gently inspecting the skin of her hands. “If those were traveler tattoos, it would be starlight that draws them out.”

  “So, you know what they are?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  Figures. While Nemo’s programming is doubtless excellent, droids do not elaborate unless asked. Crow crosses her arms, taking her hands away from him and glaring. “Then can ya tell me?”

  “Traveler tattoos,” he says. “For people who follow the stars so far away, they know the only time they will return home will be in a coffin. Their homecoming and their funeral are celebrated together, in equal measure.”

  “That’s gruesome,” I mutter. Tau lets out a low, sympathetic tone from my pocket. “When did you learn to do that?” I open my coat to ask him, but the bot doesn’t respond.

  “What do they mean?” Crow asks Nemo.

  “It’s a map to your home system,” he replies, “so that anyone who finds your body could get you home, even if they don’t share your language.”

  Crow stares at her hands and clutches them into fists, hissing as the boils stretch. She opens them only to wipe her sweaty palms on her thighs, tracing marks down to her knees as she sighs. “I’m not a corpse quite yet.”

  “Was my answer not satisfactory?” asks Nemo.

  “On the contrary. It was pretty fucking informative.”

  The air in the grove is heavy. Silent. I don’t know if it’s connected to the rain somehow, but it’s so humid it feels like it’s pressing down on me. Maybe it’s because I can’t see the sun through the trees.

  In that instant, it pounces.

  One moment, Crow was glaring at Nemo, bristling with frustration, and the next, I’m dangling in the air from a tree, trapped inside a net, the rope digging into the flesh of my arms. I don’t even have the chance to scream.

  My stomach churns as the net swings in small circles. There’s a lump on the back of my head, and it aches, fogging my mind. I peer into the jungle’s depth, seeing nothing in the darkness.

  I reach for the locket, hoping for some kind of sign, but it’s ice-cold. I don’t know what I expect—that it can somehow warn me of impending danger, as it seemed to when the storm was brewing earlier? But the dead piece of jewelry hangs limply around my neck, no more mystical than the tip of my little finger.

  As the net turns slowly, I catch sight of another body hanging from a tree. Blond hair sticks out through the woven contraption, the frail figure within still and silent.

  “What in the void? Nemo!” I stick out the toe of my boot to brace myself against the tree and stop the spinning. My gut is writhing.

  “Dora?”

  “Yeah, hey. Is Crow here, too?”

  The droid slowly wriggles around to face me. He’s no worse for wear, but his face is carved with worry.

  “I have not seen her. Are you injured?”

  “I don’t think so. What happened to us?”

  “We were abducted, though I surmise you guessed as much. By whom? No clue.”

  I groan in frustration. I have to stay focused, rational. Panic won’t get us anywhere, but it’s proving impossible to convince my body otherwise. Ropes and nets don’t have wires and gears. They can’t be tricked into helping me escape.

  My chest buzzes, sending a wave of relief washing through me. “Tau?”

  The bot chirps what could be either a confused jingle or a birthday song. It doesn’t sound much like he has any idea what’s happening either.

  The net presses tightly against my body. I have my foot jammed against the tree to stop the spinning as I fight to wriggle Tau out of my coat. He slips out of the net to sweet freedom.

  The dark forest is silent. If there were birds before, they don’t make a sound now. The bot hovers between me and the droid, glowing softly.

  “So, um, any idea how we get out of here?” I say, eyes fixed on Nemo. He doesn’t look worried at all, his face stoic as a statue. Still, he’s used to remaining motionless for years on end—life imprisoned in a net is closer to his default setting than the frenetic activity of our past day. “Do we even know where here is?”

  “We are approximately one-mile northeast of our initial position,” Nemo said, “according to my internal GPS. However, I am not quite sure how accurate it is after all these years.”

  “Not that far, then,” I shudder. We’re off the path, making us vulnerable to Eve, whether or not she’s working with whoever put us in these nets. And Crow has either been taken somewhere else or has outright abandoned us. Lovely.

  Eve will do anything to get her locket back and won’t stop at killing me. Now that she has an idea of where I am, I bet she’s sent her people after me—if she even has people? Maybe she’s hired someone to take me off the path, serve me up on a platter ripe for the Technowitch’s plucking. I clutch the cold locket tightly in my fist. It might just be a hunk of mysterious metal, but it’s all I have right now.

  Or maybe this has nothing to do with the locket at all: maybe someone knows who I am.

  “Might I suggest we call for help,” says Nemo, interrupting my terrible thoughts, “as I am unable to be of much assistance?”

  “But whoever took us will know we’re awake, won’t they?”

  “We are stuck, so we need to change the parameters of our situation. Either we get help, get ignored, or our captor comes back. Any which way, we will be more informed.”

  “Fine. CROW! Anyone! Help!” I scream, but the forest remains empty and silent. I squint into the darkness, but there’s no movement in the trees, no sounds to track. We’re completely and utterly alone.

  Tau nudges my shoulder and lets out a low, sad tune. It’s been a year since I last opened his casing and tweaked him, but all this time, his program has been learning and growing on its own. Can Tau feel empathy now? Is he as scared as I am?

  My net shakes as the branch that holds me trembles. Heavy footsteps approach. I shoot a terrified glance at Nemo, who stares, eyes wide in shock, at what emerges from the darkness and stands before us.

  At full height, the creature must be over three meters from the base of its giant furry paws to the top of its mane. Like the lions of First Earth, everything about it screams vicious ferocity. Every centimeter of it, face, muzzle, and body alike, is covered in a short gray fur. Its mane is thick, made up of stiff quills and tied back from its face with coarse rope. It wears body armor on its lower half, a utility belt strapped around its hairy waist, and a gun the size of a small tree is lashed on its back. Its feet are large, padded paws, bare despite the rest of the armor. Every muscle ripples as it breathes.

  But its face is the most terrifying thing of all. Human eyes stare out from lion flesh. A beast ripped right out of legend.

  An ocugry.

  Years ago, when the Sister Systems had yet to unify, the colonists of First Earth needed a way to keep the peace. Scientists brought the genetic material they needed from their home planet to recreate its biomes. A group of them manipulated the gene fragments to their own designs. Hence the ocugry, among others—hybrid beings made from Earth’s fiercest beasts and its strongest soldiers. Supposedly the best of the best.

  There had been a war, a terrible war, the only war since the Exodus that I knew of. In the aftermath, the ocugry gained their own independent world, and hybridization was banned. It was the same genetic war that made the use of clone batching techniques illegal.

  Two centuries later, the ocugry are mainly self-governed. They have a home planet, laws, schools. But they are still a military society and rent their soldiers out to the highest bidder. You can’t get a better army than that made of creatures bred for war, trained to fight until their last breath, their bodies weapons of controlled destruction. Though a single ocugry can take down an entire mob, they work—hunt—in packs, each pack enough to keep a rebellious colony under control.

  If one is here, there must be more. Odds are they’re working for someone powerful—like the Technowitch of Dusk.

  Then Crow strides up right behind it, arms crossed over her chest. And the creature starts sobbing, mewling like an injured kitten, its hands pressed against its eyes. It wipes its huge hairy hands across its face, eyelids squeezed shut, to stop the well of tears from streaming down.

  What the void?

  I press my face against the netting, straining for a closer look. I must be hallucinating: the creature from my nightmares is bawling like a baby.

  “Nice net work,” coos Crow, and the beast stifles a sob. She looks perfectly healthy, except for the bright red boils from the rain. “No, I mean it. I don’t think anyone could have strung up people as quickly as you did. You can stop crying, you know.”

  It only sobs harder. Crow cautiously reaches up to pet the creature’s hairy back. This only seems to make it sob, somehow, impossibly, louder.

  This is the beast Auntie and Uncle had warned me would tear me to shreds at the sight of my face?

  “Stop making a scene,” says Crow. “I’m sure both of your victims find you terrifying and were impressed by your show of force capturing them. Weren’t you, Dora, Nemo?”

  My eyes meet Crow’s, and her look isn’t helping make any more sense of the situation. Crow is expectant, apparently waiting for me to say something. She keeps shaking her head in the direction of the beast, the same way Auntie used to do when she wanted me or Uncle to pay attention to a cousin.

  “So, so terrified, you have no idea,” I say. “I thought I was going to die up here.”

  “You see? You made her think she was going to die. You are a powerful beast. I would offer to have you talk about what’s bothering you, but seeing as how you just kidnapped and almost killed my two closest allies, I don’t really have the patience for an emotional heart-to-heart.”

  The beast sniffles. “Just kill me now. Put me out of my misery. I am a failure.”

  “You want to die?” Crow asks. Of all the things, the beast nods. “Fine. I’ll kill you, just as soon as you bring Dora down, all right?”

  “You mean it?” The voice is soft, like runny honey. It has a rumble to it, like the beast is speaking with its stomach, from somewhere deep, deep inside. It sounds warm. It doesn’t fit at all with what I’d expected—something military, sharp and cruel.

  The thing is a mountain all to itself. I shiver as its massive hands, each larger than my torso, reach up to loosen the knots that hold up my net. It lowers me gently to the ground, depositing me in my net at the base of the tree.

  “What even was your plan?” says Crow. Now that the beast is no longer a sobbing mess, it’s beginning to look terribly intimidating and a lot more like the stories I’ve been told. “For us, I mean.”

  “I wasn’t planning on hurting them,” it mumbles, fumbling awkwardly with the knots still. I sit deathly still, in case a brisk move means death. “I was going to use them to barter my way off this hellish planet. But failing to capture humans is the ultimate show of cowardice.”

  “What’s that? Can’t even keep a girl hostage? Despicable, you coward. Despicable.”

  “Don’t taunt the thing!” I angle myself closer to the tree that holds Nemo. But the beast is cowering in the presence of Crow.

  “Why not? It needs to be ashamed of what it is. An ocugry that cannot fight.”

  I shoot her a look of terror. Crow only shrugs. The girl has a death wish.

  “I mean, it’s an educated guess,” she says. “It has no idea who or what we are. Target or civilian? Its HUD is obviously down. That’s how I managed to get the upper hand in the first place. He was a pushover. Tell me, ocugry, did I hit the nail on the head here?”

  It must feel awful inside Crow’s head. Knowing details of the ocugries’ creation and purpose, and not of her own life. Even I don’t know any of this about the beasts.

  “Yes,” it grunts, “and no. My HUD was damaged when we landed here. It was a pit stop, not an away mission, but we were ambushed with weaponry, the likes of which I’d never seen before. My pack must have got the reading I was dead.”

  “Your pack left without you.”

  “Their HUDs must have displayed me as KIA,” it says, “but as you see, I am very much still alive. Not that it matters. When one of my kind is disconnected, they may as well be dead. Death is preferable to life outside our unit.”

  “Why don’t you just, I don’t know, shoot up a flare or something?” I ask. It takes all my courage just to address the thing.

  Maybe I’m feeling pity for it after all—abandoned on a planet far from everything it’s ever known? Oddly relatable. But the calm I’m starting to feel in its presence is scaring me more than the beast is, and I tense back up. “Aren’t ocugry known for their stubbornness? Never giving up and so on?”

  “Easier to do when your HUD has instructions for you.” The beast towers over us, yet Crow stands tall by its side, chatting as if they’re old farming buddies.

  Then Crow starts… walking away. Tau drifts after her, then whirls to face me, emitting a low, sad beep.

  “You coming?” asks Crow, not turning back to check. “I didn’t go through all that just for you to sit back and admire my backside.”

  “Wait, we’re leaving? Just like that? What about Nemo?”

  “Well, yeah,” says Crow. “He’s just a droid who caught feelings. The only reason he wanted to see the Technomage at all—wanted being a stretch, here—is because we gave him the idea. We’re better off without him slowing us down.” She turns back to the beast. “Ocugry, keep the toaster, it’ll probably fetch you a pretty penny at market. Enough to get off this rock.”

  “Slowing us down?”

  “Why do you insist on repeating what I say? Yes, slowing us down. We don’t need him.”

  “He’s our friend,” I say.

  She raises a bushy eyebrow. “Is he really? Because he is an it and doesn’t give a shit about anything or anyone. Case in point, you both got captured.”

  “So, his programming’s a little glitchy, but that doesn’t mean he’s not useful. Since when does usefulness determine whether or not you let someone get kidnapped?”

  “I don’t know, since we’re on a quest?”

  “A what?”

  Crow rolls her eyes, still marching forward, pumping her arms like a sullen toddler. I turn around, forcing her to follow me back. “You know, a quest! I mean, it’s either that or a very long, purpose-driven hike. Have you ever read a fantasy book?”

  I haven’t since I was ten, after the princess had shown a sudden affinity for fantasy fiction. From then on it had all been tractor manuals, Tennyson textbooks, and Aunt’s secret stash of hard, futuristic sci-fi she keeps under her bed.

  “Do you want this Technomage to send you home, or not?”

  Crow stops. Our eyes meet with such intensity I have to look away, my stomach tying in anxious little knots.

  “Do you want to save your aunt and uncle and all those little cousins of yours, or the droid you met in a ditch, Dora? Because I don’t see a way we can do both.”

  “You realize said droid is right there?” I gesture at the tree, where Nemo hangs silently in his net. I’m sure he can hear us, but he’s not complaining. I’ll complain for him. “This is the rudest crap I’ve ever heard.”

  “I am not offended,” Nemo says. “I am incapable of taking offense.”

  “You hear that, Buttercup? The droid is incapable of taking offense.”

  The ocugry stomps its way between the clearing and us, blocking our way with its massive frame. It’s a wall of solid muscle. “Now would be a good time to kill me, please.”

  “Hey,” I say. “You tried to kidnap me. That’s not cool.”

  “Well, I failed, and you probably want revenge. Why don’t you drive the dagger through my heart?”

  It hands me a long-curved blade from its hip. Crow takes it instead, twirling the weapon with no obvious intention of stabbing it through the beast’s chest. Instead, she swings it high over her head and with a swift motion, slashes the rope that suspends Nemo from the tree. The droid crashes to the ground in a tangle of limbs and net, but doesn’t utter a peep.

  “You’re not going to kill me?” The beast’s voice is getting harsher now.

  “I’d rather not,” says Crow. “But I’ll still keep the droid, which may or may not have its uses.”

  “Wait what?” I turn to the ocugry. “You really want to die?”

  “I am a failure. I deserve to die.”

  Nemo stands, disentangling himself from the netting. He looks up at the beast, who is almost twice his height. “Hello there. My name is Nemo. You seem to be under some form of mental duress. Would you like me to play some soothing music?”

  The beast glares down at Nemo, then turns back slowly to face me, lending Tau the smallest of glances as the little bot flits around it.

  “Ah. My music library is corrupt. I’m sorry, I do not have any soothing music to play. I can sing, if you prefer?”

  The ocugry sighs. “Both your friends are free. May I request the sweet release of death now?”