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floating atop a Tremist body.
    Watching them kneel, Mason knew they weren’t men underneath. They were too graceful, slinking like wolves. The plates seemed forged and fitted for each individual Tremist. The slim suits of armor moved with ease, as if aided by delicate machinery underneath.
    â€œThe Tremist have—” the same voice said on the shipwide com, but was cut off.

    The five last year cadets watched as both Tremist raised long, elegant rifles to their shoulders and fired thin green lasers at some of the Egypt’s crew, who hid behind a huge tank hanging off the opposite catwalk. Mason could see the intense beams of light reflected in the nearest Tremist’s mirror-face. Captain Renner was there, along with two other crewmen, firing back with short bursts of condensed, spherical light from their photon cannons. The camera flared as the white and green light flew back and forth.
    Mason figured out what the Tremist were trying to do before everyone else; immediately he searched the screen for Susan.
    The lasers cut into the catwalk in front of the crew’s feet, slicing through the metal in a flurry of white sparks. They weren’t shooting at Captain Renner anymore, or the defenders who fought with her.
    The Tremist were shooting at the metal supports holding the structure up. The catwalk melted and buckled under the onslaught, and finally collapsed, falling ten levels to the bottom of the Egypt.

 
    Chapter Four
    Tom didn’t say anything, just stared at the screen where the catwalk used to be. The catwalk where his mom had been standing. It was impossible to survive the drop. The camera didn’t move; it just showed the now-empty space on the coolant level; it showed the Tremist glide past the damaged area like ghosts, until they disappeared from the screen.
    Tom had something in common with Mason now. A few seconds ago, he hadn’t. Mason was suddenly glad his parents died when they did, when he was young, before he could form the kind of memories that would last forever. Mason mostly had glimpses and sensations, a smell here or there, the feeling of his mother’s soft hands picking him up. The sound of his father’s laugh.
    It was 2792, eight years ago, when a lone Tremist ship entered Earth’s atmosphere and dropped a single bomb on the Earth Space Command headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. His parents were in the middle of giving a presentation to the admirals, trying to convince them it was possible to attain peace with the Tremist.
    The bomb vaporized everything inside its blast radius. The ground was turned into a sheet of glass.
    Mason had been four miles away, at primer school. The hair on his arms stood up as static electricity washed over the city. He didn’t know for another five minutes that a bomb had been dropped, didn’t know for another four hours that his parents were gone.
    At the time, Mason was two years shy of Academy I, but at age fourteen, Susan was already in her second year of Academy II. They let her take a shuttle from Mars to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Mason met her at the memorial service, seeing her for the first time in a year. Mason remembered her as looking older than she did now. She had bags under her eyes and her mouth never moved except to talk.
    The ceremony took place on the street, next to the land that once held the headquarters. The Tremist bomb hadn’t made a crater—instead it simply erased everything inside a circle the size of a few blocks. Where Mason stood, buildings were perfectly cross-sectioned, their walls sheered away, leaving them structurally intact until work crews could rebuild them. At the edge of the blast radius, he could see couches and tables and wirings and plumbing and insulation in the buildings. He could see a quarter mile away, where the glassy ground ended and the split-open buildings began again. His parents had died somewhere in there, broken down into their separate atoms.
    He