Smith leaps across the console, landing atop Nadeden’s unconscious body.

  He wrestles the controls from her limp hands but struggles to guide the ship.

  The symbiotic brain and skin powering it are fighting back somehow. The owners in the tight cargo hold must have made the ship aware it’s being stolen somehow, or perhaps this is just some safety feature.

  Smith isn’t concerned with why the ship won’t obey him, but is very concerned with the fact that it isn’t, and the terrifying consequences of what could happen if it continues to defy him. His thin fingers swipe helplessly on the levers before he slams his fists into them.

  “Work!”

  The ship refuses.

  Smith moves off Nadeden, grasping her shoulders. Desperately attempting to shake her awake.

  “Nadeden!” He shouts.

  A loud thump echoes throughout the hull.

  Smith peers out the window.

  The ship is in the planet’s orbit now and riding up against another vessel.

  Soon, the two ships will be grinding on each other.

  They will collide, smash into each other, and break apart in the dark of space, leaving the surrounding vessels to slam into the bodies of the drifting passengers as they make planetfall.

  Smith yanks on the controls again.

  They struggle but muster up the strength to pull on the levers as hard as this frail body allows them to.

  The ship seems to writhe in agony as it is forced to move at the command. Smith guides it carefully toward the planet, breathing a deep sigh of relief before stepping away from the controls.

  Now he just has to worry about resuscitating Nadeden and landing the ship.

  If only he knew how to do those things, and if only he knew about the Division Bioship now following them.

  Confetti poured down from the rafters of the coliseum, blanketing the performing orchestra in an explosion of color.

  The music and paper flooded onto the streets of Rome, now brimming with warm, jumping crowds partaking in celebration.

  The Grogrung drawn parade floats overtook the rest of the street, along with a multitude of marching bands competing with the coliseum’s orchestra for the ears of the crowd.

  At the center of it all, the Division plaza laid in wait, untarnished by the celebration.

  The city was a pressure cooker of ingredients boiling over a fire, impossible to extinguish.

  The entire thing was ready to burst.

  The Warbound pushed aside any fans that recognized them, putting in no effort whatsoever to blend in or halt their march for even an instant. They reached the plaza purely by clawing their way to it.

  The guards at the doors held out their spears.

  Shanna and Orson unsheathed their swords.

  Davon unholstered his daggers.

  “Emperor Magnus says no one is to enter during the celebra-” the men were dead before they finished speaking.

  Gerry kicked down the doors. “You four aren’t supposed to be here!”

  Gerry ignored the words, keeping his stride toward the stairs as the Warbound dispatched the guards.

  The group worked their way up each floor one at a time, only sheathing their weapons once they were greeted by the mounds of corpses left by Nadeden.

  “She was here,” Gerry stated within the Emperor’s empty office.

  The hulking throne of a chair rested slightly away from the desk, like someone had simply forgotten to push it back into place after leaving in a hurry. Davon stood in a puddle of blood where someone was held against their will. “Should we check the top balcony?” he asked Gerry, who paced at the window with Shanna.

  “Hey,” Orson grabbed the attention of the others, pointing outside, “What’s that thing on the Emperor’s parade float?”

  “Nadeden?”

  Smith stands over her as she awakens, still in the driver’s seat.

  “What happened?” She tiredly moans both from exhaustion and from the confusion of waking up.

  “I need you to help me land this thing!” Nadeden’s eye widens at the shock of Smith’s request. The situation jolts her to attention.

  Smith moves away from her as she grips the controls.

  She searches for a button to deploy the landing gear and curses in frustration when she can’t find it. She then spots the surrounding ships entering the planet’s atmosphere alongside them.

  She’s going to have to make this look natural.

  Nadeden rips out the controls, sliding her arm into the mush of the ship’s brain. She tugs on it until she can feel its blood on her fingers.

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  The landing gear deploys.

  The ship violently swings down to the spaceport.

  It narrowly misses the launchpad, which looks over the city like a hunter peering down a deadly cliff.

  Nadeden removes her arm from the brain, collapsing onto the floor with an intense exhale. “I hate flying.”

  Smith struggles to stand, having been thrown by the ship’s intense motion as it landed.

  “Are you alright?” Nadeden asks through her own pain.

  “I’m perfectly fine.” Smith lies.

  He reaches down to help Nadeden up when a sudden knock comes from the door.

  “Please step outside the vehicular organism.” An authoritative voice booms outside.

  Nadeden recalls the Bioship she spotted and begins to move as fast as she can in her injured state. She ties her bandana around her head and drapes the cloth over her face, then bundles what little hair she has into a ponytail between the knots of fabric.

  She coughs, whispering to Smith, “Listen to me, if they find out who I am, I’m dead, and if they find out you had your consciousness transferred, as I’m sure you’ve learned from the Martian incident, you're also dead. So if they ask who we are, you tell them that I’m your blind Mother and you’re my son who acts as my eyes. We still say we came for medical treatment, maybe we even ask about it, but-”

  Another series of rapid knocks strikes the door.

  “If you don’t open the door in the next twenty seconds, it will be breached; failure to comply will result in your arrest.”

  Smith’s heart pounds with terror as Nadeden pulls him closer, “You’ll need to do the talking, Smith. This isn’t like before. I can’t get us out of this. I can barely move, so you need to do what I say and nothing more, got it?”

  Smith is frozen by fear.

  “Ten seconds!” booms the voice from outside.

  “Trust me.” Nadeden commands.

  Smith is shaking.

  “Do you trust me?” Nadeden asks.

  Smith shakes his head.

  No.

  “It was a distraction!” Davon yelled over the music, rushing out toward Magnus’s parade float.

  The large crowd gathered in the street slowed his pace to a crawl.

  He shoved his way into the swarm, being lost in it with Gerry, Shanna, and Orson, who were divided by the rabid mass of warm bodies.

  “My Division!” Cried Emperor Magnus Ohavim to the adoration of everyone in the street. The shouts and clapping hands drove the Warbound further apart. Gerry couldn’t even see the tops of their heads as he dove deeper into the sea.

  “What a glorious day!” Magnus shouted, placing his hand atop the runes of the ancient stone container.

  “A day of victory, of triumph, and of course, of celebration!” The cheers of the crowd overtook Orson’s ears as he neared the float. He was trampled on by those hoping to be seen by the Emperor while drawing his sword. His weapon hit the ground with him.

  “Frax has been taken! After so many years of fighting, it has been taken, and soon the Republic will be taken by us as well!”

  A large man behind Shanna clapped at the words, along with thousands of others. However, it was this man in particular who spotted Shanna’s hand moving for her sword, “Weapon! She has a weapon!” He called out to the guards scattered in the crowd at the edge of the street. They ran to restrain her. She was tackled before she could explain herself.

  “Along with taking Frax, we have also taken this container here! Which holds within it the future of our people, the people of the Division! Yet there are those who wished to take our future from us!”

  Davon slammed through the flood of bodies, striking them down without a care. He was focused on one thing and one thing only.

  He didn’t care about Shanna, Orson, and, surprisingly, not even Gerry.

  His only concern at the moment was driving a dagger into Magnus’s heart before he could open the container.

  Davon pushed forward with all his might, only for a child to snag on his ponytail, “Hey!” The fan shouted, “The Warbound are here!”

  Magnus grinned as he heard the shout.

  Perfectly helpless, he thought as he stepped toward Nadeden and raised her chained body up to the crowd. “She wished to take our future! The Scorched Archer! We truly should have known better than to trust a former soldier of the weak, lowly Republic!”

  “That’s right. The Republic is weak.” Gerry scowled, “But they do have better knives.”

  He gripped the Emperor by the scalp, slitting his throat from behind him.

  The warm, formerly cheerful crowd suddenly grew silent as Magnus’s blood spurted from his neck onto Nadeden.

  Noticing that Magnus was still gasping for breath, Gerry tossed him onto the rough stone container with a strong, violent motion. He then continued these violent motions, while screaming with rage at the man who threatened to be god and who threatened the woman he loved.

  “Stop!” Nadeden pleaded, struggling to free herself. “Gerry, stop!”

  The crowd looked on in sheer, unbridled horror as Gerry gave in to the unrelenting bloodlust.

  “Stop!” Nadeden begged again.

  Her wrists writhed against the chains as she watched Gerry do this thing that she would give anything to do in his place.

  Some in the crowd averted their eyes.

  Some could not.

  “GELMIDAS!” Davon cried, stepping through a portal on the opposite side of the container.

  Gelmidas finally dropped the knife, pulling himself off the body, “Bless me, Gods. Install your force in me. Grant me power, deserving of the burden of a crown.” Gerry’s face was drenched in blood and tears. “And strike down those undeserving of it.”

  Gelmidas finished the prayer and turned to the people of the Division.

  His people.

  “The Emperor is dead. Long live the Emperor.”

  “You idiot Division troops aren’t supposed to be here yet! This is still a Republic planet until the union!”

  Nadeden takes her hands off Smith at the words outside that send a chill down her broken body.

  Her mind races. Union? Why would they suddenly do that?

  “Sorry, sir,” The Division troopers step away from the door. “We just noticed that this ship was flying recklessly.”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” The supervisor scolds with a biting raspy voice, “There are countless numbers of you lot arriving here day after day and causing nothing but trouble! All of you in my office right now! I’ll have your names and have you reported for attempting an unlawful arrest!”

  The troopers’ boots can be heard slamming on the concrete outside as they reluctantly follow the supervisor. Once the sound fades away, Nadeden and Smith step outside.

  “Sorry about that!” The Republic supervisor shouts from across the spaceport. He’s already so far from the pair that the two now appear as nothing more than ants on the horizon.

  “What was that about?” Smith gasps, allowing himself to finally rest. Nadeden, however, refuses to be so relieved.

  She is no longer just trembling because of the pain of her injuries.

  She is full of terror.

  Sheer unbridled terror.

  Terror that becomes rage.

  Boiling rage.

  “The Republic of humanity and the Division of humanity, together? You really did it, Gelmidas. You actually did it.”

  On the other side of the spaceport, a mural of Emperor Atheneum and President Soryu shaking hands is painted across the face of a monolithic bearing wall.

  The wedding is in two weeks.