been tortured?” Canis asked.
“That’s one way to put it,” Tray said. “But you’re missing one crucial point here, Canis. They’re still being tortured. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Except kill them,” Brigit said softly.
“No!” Canis whirled around on the bridge. “No! We’re not killing them! My sister is in there. I don’t know her, but I can feel her. I’m not killing her.”
“It’s the humane thing to do,” Brigit answered. “They will never recover from this.”
“I think that was the point,” Tray said. “The Akeelians either knew we were coming, or…” But he didn’t want to finish that thought.
“Or what?” Canis asked, unwilling to accept this half-truth as an answer.
“Or they did it on purpose,” Brigit finished for Tray.
“To what end?” Canis asked, his little-boy body shaking with anger now. “Why would they do this?”
“Because they don’t need them anymore, Canis,” Tray explained. “They’re done with them. Whatever plan they had for the girl minds is over now. And they didn’t want anyone else to get them.”
“The shuttles are back,” Brigit reported. “Should I ready the cannons to take out the minds?”
“No!” Canis yelled. “No! I’m not doing that. We came here to get them. So we’re going to get them!”
“And do what with them, Canis?” Tray asked.
“I don’t know!”
“They’re dangerous like this,” Brigit warned. “We can’t even spin them up in a virtual. They would go in as a mass of hundreds of insane minds. You wouldn’t be able to talk to them. And there would be no way to untangle your sister from the collective. This is…” She paused, looking for the right word.
But she didn’t have to. Tray found it for her. “This is evil, Canis. Pure evil. They need to be destroyed.”
“No!” the small boy insisted. “I won’t do it. I want a chance, at least. One chance. Just put me inside the ship’s virtual and let me go in alone to see for myself.”
Tray and Brigit took two whole seconds to discuss this request between themselves. Neither of them thought it was a good idea. But both of them were eager to leave this sector and head back to Harem Station. Tray was very late. And he had critical information about ALCOR that he needed to tell his brothers back home. He was sure Draden hadn’t gone home when he left Mighty Minions. No one had been able to report back to Harem on the state of Real ALCOR. Everyone was on their own little mission, and Tray couldn’t help but think that this was part of the Akeelian-Cygnian plan.
To what end though? He had no idea what they were up to.
The only thing he knew was that he and his brothers and ALCOR were not in the same place anymore. He wasn’t even sure they all had the same goals.
Maybe they were about to lose everything—fine. Sometimes that happened. He could deal with losing the war. He had a ship, and a partner, and they had an eternity to figure out what to do after that.
But he refused to accept this loss without a proper fight. And he could not fight if he wasn’t there.
“We’re leaving,” Tray said, making his first executive decision since becoming the Prison Princess.
Canis froze in place. Set his jaw and gritted his teeth. Then he looked up at the ceiling and made his own executive decision. “Not without the girls, we’re not. If you don’t want to pick them up and help us, then we’ll get off here. We’ll take the shuttles.”
“We can’t just drop you here,” Brigit objected. “There’s over two hundred of you. You won’t even fit on the shuttles.”
“Some of us will go into evacuation pods.”
“Don’t be stupid, Canis,” Tray huffed. “That’s not going to get you anywhere.”
“We’re getting off.”
“And you think the rest of the crew will follow you? There’s nothing you can do for these girls. Evacuating into this sector to remain behind with them is a death sentence.”
“Life is a death sentence,” Canis replied, no longer shaking with anger and defeat, his posture straight and his mind made up. “The only reason we’re born is to die. They separated us at birth. And maybe you don’t remember that feeling of loss anymore, Tray, but I do. And we’re not leaving our sisters behind.”
Neither Tray nor Brigit replied to this statement. But they did send a message out to each one of the crew to let them know what Canis was planning and what they thought of that. Tray expected outrage from