Beacon 23: Part Five: Visitor Read Online Free Page B

and kill the indestructible. I am fury and fear and grief. I just want my arms around my love, my body to shield her, and those who wish her harm dead, dead, dead, dead.
    peace
    This word cannot penetrate.
    Peace
    I cannot hear it with the sight of Claire in pain.
    Peace.
    I will not have it.
    Please—
    And Claire lifts her gaze from the floor, and she sees me, and she smiles. There is a line of blood along the top of her teeth, and she smiles through the pain. “Hey,” she mouths. “I love you.”
    I flood her with love in return, and I see her flinch from the shock of it all. So much at once. Feelings without form. Thoughts without word. What I feel from Cricket when she nuzzles her head against my arm. What I feel from Cricket when she licks my cheek before I can stop her. “No lick,” I’ve said over and over. As futile as it would be for Claire to tell me, “No love.” How do you stop loving? You can’t. And the war passes through me. The rage dissipates. It’s gone. The Lords seem to relax.
    “Why haven’t they killed us?” Claire asks. Her voice is weak. Her hands are bound together in front of her, and I can see a fingernail that’s missing, blood in a trail down to her elbow, the fight she put up.
    I answer as the thoughts flow between the Lords and through me.
    “They want us to murder our own fleet,” I say, as startled as Claire to hear the words leave my lips, as we both hear them and process them at the same time. “We’ve been planning an invasion, and it’s passing through here, and they want me to wreck them across those rocks. They want me to turn off the lights in the GWB at twelve past the hour.”
    Claire shifts from knee to knee, her ankles bound, until she reaches me. The Lords don’t stop her. She leans her head against my chest, sags there, trembles a moment before collecting her thoughts.
    “Why don’t they just do it? What are they waiting for?”
    “ I have to do it,” I say. I think I understand what Scarlett wanted and what these Ryph want. Proof of the impossible. Of sheathed claws. To see if we have free will, are not just warring animals. I remember the paperbacks I read that were really written by my enemy. Scarlett said we were the invading aliens. And we are.
    “Don’t let them use me,” Claire whispers. “We’re already dead. Don’t you dare let them use me to get you to do this. If they’re scared of our fleet, then let them get what’s fucking coming to them.”
    I’m watching the Lords while Claire says this. They aren’t moving. They’re watching us. At least this is real, this conversation with Claire. The thoughts that come next feel just as real.
    “They want a trade,” I say. “But you aren’t part of the bargain.”
    “Fuck them,” Claire hisses.
    I stare at the Lords. They’re talking to me. I’m talking back. I tell them I understand, but that I don’t believe them. That I won’t do it. That they’ll have to kill us both. That none of this makes sense.
    remember
    I remember the day I failed to kill the hive. The day I won my medal. The day my belly was opened and I bled on alien soil. The day the Ryph pulled back and no one knows why.
    I remember holding Scarlett as she died in my arms. I remember feeling the life leave her body. She came to tell me all of this. She was the messenger. I can feel how much it cost these two Lords to make it here. What they’ve endured. Rebels on either side, factions who want to put an end to the cycle of violence, to the profits and votes that wars make. I feel a gap in understanding as great as that between my warthen and myself. Alien minds. Minds that know only to mistrust the different, to kill the other. Anything deemed other .
    “They’re serious,” I tell Claire. “Our fleet will pass through here today. I can feel it. The war is coming, and they want me to stop it. They want us to stop it. It has to be by our hands, don’t you see?”
    Claire pulls herself upright to sit by me. She