refusing to do anything without a plan—to see who he’s greeting. There are two girls standing there in blue-gray uniforms, the same color as the pants he seems to have acquired. One has flaming-red hair—orange, really, amazing dye job—cut in a sharp asymmetrical bob that swings around a chiseled chin just like his. She shares his full lips, too, his strong brows. Her uniform’s skirt is impressively short. She’s tall. And she’s gorgeous. Presumably, this is Scarlett.
The second girl has a narrow face, and a soaring phoenix tattooed right across her throat (ouch). Black hair, longer and spiked on top, shaved to fuzz down the sides with more tattoos underneath. I can tell she has dimples even without a smile, and I can tell that smile would be huge, but I have to deduce it all without seeing the real deal, because right now she looks like somebody killed her grandmother.
“Cat?” Tyler says to her. His voice is low, pleading.
“Ketchett tried to draft me,” Cat says. “And a bunch after that. I told them I already had an Alpha, he just couldn’t make it.”
“Told them, huh? Is Ketchett still breathing?”
“Yeah.” The girl smirks. “Next time you go to chapel, you might wanna say a prayer for his testicles, though.”
He exhales slowly and presses his palm against the glass, and she lifts hers to press it back in return.
The girl with the orange hair watches them. “I didn’t have to insist quite as hard,” she says, wry. “But I could hardly let you out there alone. You’d probably get yourself killed without me to talk our way out of trouble, baby brother.”
Tattoo girl pulls up her uniform sleeves, revealing more ink. “Speaking of getting yourself killed, you wanna tell us what you were doing Folding by yourself? Thinking with your other head again?”
Scarlett nods in agreement. “Rescuing damsels in distress is very twenty-second century, Ty.”
Say what?
Tyler holds up his hands, like What do you want from me? and the girls turn to look at me on my slab with curious eyes. Checking me out. Weighing me up.
“I like her hair,” Scarlett declares. Then as if remembering I’m an actual person, she speaks to me, louder, a little slower. “I like your hair.”
The second girl sniffs, obviously less impressed. “Did you tell her the bad news about her library books yet?”
“Cat!” the other two snap in chorus.
An adult voice cuts in before they can get any further. “Legionnaire Jones, your quarantine has cleared, you’re free to go.”
Ty looks across at me, and our eyes meet. He hesitates.
“Did you tell her the bad news?”
“You can call in the morning to find out when you can visit,” the voice says.
He nods reluctantly, stepping out of his holding pen as the door hisses open in front of him. With a last glance at me, the trio leaves the room, his voice fading out of hearing as he disappears from sight.
“Hey, can I get a shirt?”
My brain’s starting to assemble more facts now, agitation creeping in as the lethargy of cryo slips away.
Where am I? Who are these people? They’re in uniforms, is this some kind of military facility? If so, what am I doing here, and am I safe? I try to croak out a question, but I can’t make my voice work. And there’s no one to ask anyway.
And so I’m left alone in silence, every nerve throbbing in time with my heartbeat, my head swimming with half-asked questions, trying to wade my way free of the confusion I didn’t know came with cryo.
•••••
I don’t know how much time has gone by when I hear voices again. I’m in the middle of another strange dream thing, this one of a world thick with grasping green plants, blue snow drifting down from the sky, when—
“Aurora, can you hear me?”
With effort, I push away the image of the place I’ve never seen, and turn my head. I must have been dozing, because there’s a woman beside me in the same blue-gray uniform as everyone else.
She’s perfectly white. And I don’t mean I’m-half-Chinese-and-you’re-whiter-than-me white, I mean pure-as-the-driven-snow white. Impossibly white. Her eyes are a pale gray—the whole eye, not just the iris—and they’re way too big. Her bone-white hair is pulled back into a ponytail.
“I am Greater Clan Battle Leader Danil de Verra de Stoy.” She pauses, to let me digest that mouthful. “I am pleased to meet you, Aurora.”
Great Clan what now?
“Mmmm,” I agree, not game to risk a different kind of sound.