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surprise. At close range, Lucas blew a hole clean through his armored torso and blasted off a piece of the stone railing behind them. As the man sank to the ground, Lucas saw what was ahead of him. His heart stopped.
    The figure was clutching Asha with one arm while holding a snub pistol to her skull with the other. Lucas froze. The man gestured with the gun in silence. Slowly, Lucas let his rifle barrel drift toward the ground as the man’s pistol retrained itself on Asha. She wasn’t moving, and her skin and dress were a mess of black burns. But Lucas saw her chest rise and fall under the man’s metal arm.
    Lucas had dropped his gun far enough for the invader, and in a single moment he activated the blue jets on his back and fired the pistol. Lucas instinctively raised his rifle, which deflected the initial shot while the next two whizzed by his head and into the ground as the man soared into the sky at an incredible speed. Dropping the now superheated gun, Lucas ran to the railing. The blue lights of the jets were still visible as the pair of them kept rising into the cloudless night. Lucas looked down at the dead man, but his jet mechanism had been mangled by Lucas’s shot, and Lucas quickly deduced that he couldn’t somehow appropriate it to give chase. When he turned back to the sky, the lights were gone.
    She was gone.
    Lucas’s forgotten pain returned all at once, and he collapsed to the ground, unconscious.
    His vision was blurry when he woke. He could see lights and shapes, but couldn’t make out what they formed. Lucas’s head rolled from side to side and the shapes changed, but became no clearer. He was lying down, he thought, and tried to raise his arms but found it like trying to push through tar. A fuzzy blotch that must have been his hand waved in front of him.
    “He’s awake,” a voice said.
    Had he been captured too?
    “Dial it back a bit then.”
    Pain. He winced and his muscles tightened.
    “Not that much.”
    Relief, and his vision began to return. A man and a woman were standing over him clad in long silver coats. It was the woman who spoke.
    “His injuries aren’t severe. The vertebrae will heal. The burns are minor.”
    “Special case though,” the man said.
    “I know.”
    As his vision continued to return, Lucas saw the woman had short brown hair, dark green eyes, and severe cheekbones. The man was out of his field of vision now.
    “Get him up, they want to talk to him. Keep him at 20 percent though.”
    Lucas felt pain return to his spine, but his mind became less cloudy. The woman unhooked several wires from his torso. He managed to sit up, though his back was angry with him for it.
    “Over there,” she said. “They’re waiting.”
    Lucas looked over and saw that the room they were in was dark except for a brightly lit holotable in the middle. Figures were huddled around it and sifting through various displays that flew up from the surface.
    Lucas stood up from the stretcher, which was immediately wheeled away into the darkness by the pair of attendants, a bevy of mobile machines along with it.
    Walking was rough for the first few steps, but became easier as he found his footing through numb legs. He drew closer to the table and understood where he was. And where he was not.
    He hadn’t been captured like Asha; the appearance of Tannon, Maston, and Alpha confirmed that. The other men and women around the table he didn’t recognize, but some were in military fatigues while others wore the suits of public officials.
    Another attendant in a silver coat was applying something to Tannon’s back. His uniform was scorched and his chin was dripping blood onto the shimmering surface of the table, but he appeared to be without mortal injuries. Maston looked similarly ragged. His once prim and proper appearance was transformed into a torn-up mess of ash and blood.
    Across the table, Alpha was the first to spot him.
    “Lucas,” he said as the blue hologram on his translator collar