Most of the arcade has collapsed—though the wreck of the Daedalus is still a few kilometers away, the shock from its impact has leveled over half the buildings in the city this far out. A few storefronts are still intact, promising high-end shopping experiences that their battered, darkened interiors certainly can’t deliver. A jewelry store’s security grate has been smashed apart by a fallen column of marble; the fact that the dust and rubble on the floor have been undisturbed makes my skin prickle. Under normal circumstances, even in the upper city, this place would’ve been picked clean by looters.
The weight on my leg shifts, yanking me back to the present, and I remember Sanjana. I sit up, reaching out to ease my foot out from under her as she lets out a groan. Tarver bends over her, brushing her hair out of her face so he can scan it.
“You okay?” he asks, intent. “Sanjana?”
She groans again, as though protesting the need to reply, but then opens her eyes and struggles up onto her elbows so she can eye Tarver wearily. “You do keep saving my life, Captain.”
“It’s ‘Major’ now,” notes Jubilee, glancing up from her torn-up hand, which Flynn is inspecting in the unsteady light of the flare. “He got promoted after Patron.”
“Actually, it’s just ‘Tarver’ now,” corrects the ex-soldier, the grim line of his mouth finally easing into something almost like a smile. “And to be honest, I’m pretty sure you just saved our lives. How’d you do that?”
Sanjana grimaces as Tarver helps her up into a seated position, easing back to lean against a block of stone. “Electromagnetic pulse. I was pretty sure that the rift entities’ seemingly supernatural abilities are actually directly linked to the power differentials between their dimension and ours, and that their method of control is nothing more than an electrical interception of the signals firing in a person’s neural path…ways…” She trails off, eyes flicking from Tarver’s blank face, then across to Jubilee’s, then across what can be seen of the others in the dim light. “Huh. Wrong audience.”
“No, I get it.” My weariness is fading, making way for a spark of curiosity. I’ve got no idea who this woman is, beyond someone Sofia was trying to reach at LaRoux Industries, but whoever she is, she’s brilliant. “They’re hacking people’s brains, essentially.”
Sanjana’s lips twitch into a smile, eyes meeting mine. “Not really how I’d put it, but that’s more or less right.”
What she’s saying makes perfect sense—it fits with LaRoux’s little devices, explaining why the electromagnetic fields our shields produce would hide us from the whisper. And then I see something else, something more urgent, and I scramble to rip my vest open, and pull my kit out from inside it. “Oh, hell.”
Six sets of eyes swivel to me, and I point at Tarver, then Flynn. “We just fried them. I don’t know how quickly the whisper can find us, but it won’t need a husk to lay eyes on us anymore. Our minds are unprotected.”
Soft curses echo around me, horrified glances are exchanged, and then Tarver and Flynn are both scrambling to pull the palm pads from inside their vests, sliding them across to me. “Can you fix them?” Jubilee asks, pressing down on the folded bandage Flynn had been using to stop the bleeding on her hand. “Did the EMP fry your equipment, too?”
I hold up the bag. “It’s aluminized.”
I get the same blank stares Sanjana was on the end of a minute ago.
“Any techie worth their salt carries their gear in one of these, protects against static charges, magnetic fields—and EMPs.”
Sanjana slowly pulls a palm pad from a pocket sewn into her jumpsuit, pushing it across to me with her good hand. “I followed the specs you sent. Smart. How far do they project when they’re working?”
“Several feet,” I say, starting to unscrew the casings to get at their innards. “They might even turn the husks back, but I think it’d take minutes at best, and minutes up close with those guys is longer than we’ll ever have.”
In the silence that follows, I know everybody is thinking about what those several minutes would entail. Flynn breaks it by introducing himself, and then the rest of us, and Sofia stirs to hand Sanjana a water bottle and a granola bar.
Flynn’s brow is furrowed throughout the introductions, though, and I don’t blame him—this is physics beyond my understanding, and I didn’t grow up on a backwater swamp planet halfway across the galaxy. “So, Dr. Rao…you know how she’s doing this? Controlling people?”
Sanjana pauses, clearly reorganizing her thoughts, figuring out how to explain the concept. “Basically…our brains run on electricity, right? Biochemical electricity, of course, not like a battery, but…all the little impulses in our brains are electrical sparks that tell us what we’re seeing, tasting, hearing—and everything we do, all our muscle responses and movements, they’re responses to electrical signals too. I believe that the rift entity—”
“Rift—ow!” Jubilee starts to interrupt, then hisses as Flynn applies alcohol from their first-aid kit to the gash on her hand.
He glances up, lips twitching. “Crybaby.”
“Shut up.” But her lips seem to respond to his, twitching once, then twice, into a smile. Her eyes flicker back toward Sanjana. “I meant—rift entity? What’s that?”
“They’re…right, you wouldn’t know about that. You know how everyone’s…acting strange? The people out there, the ones who mobbed you?”
“The ones being controlled by the whisper, right.”
“By the…” Sanjana’s brows lift. “Whisper? That’s what you call them?”
“Lilac came up with the name,” Tarver interjects quietly. “She was the first person to know about them. They showed up like whispering voices in her mind when we were shipwrecked.”
Sanjana hesitates, sympathy in her gaze as her head turns back toward her old friend. Her hesitation lingers, as she clearly wants to ask him about Lilac—she might be fooling her father and the public, but Sanjana knows something’s not right. “Right. Well, then you know what they can do. Cause muscle spasms, pupil dilation, a taste people describe as metallic—”
“Tastes like blood,” mutters Jubilee as Flynn finishes wrapping medical tape around the pad against her palm.
“I’d describe it more like the sensation you get when you lick a battery, but I suppose that’s accurate. Under the right circumstances, they can even cause auditory and visual hallucinations—the whispers Lilac was hearing. And in the most extreme cases, they can control a person’s motor functions completely.”
“But what does this have to do with the EMP grenades?” Tarver’s voice is quick, carrying far more animation than before Sanjana’s arrival.
“Well…the whisper’s abilities all have to do with ‘hacking’ the electrical impulses in the brain. My theory was that a large enough electromagnetic pulse might interfere with that control long enough to sever the connection. I grabbed these from the lab when I got your text—I was working late, that’s the only reason I was even at LRI when the Daedalus went down. I couldn’t get you on the phone and knew you’d be walking straight into…well, that.” She tilts her head toward the opening of our makeshift cave, where moments before we’d been running for our lives.