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  Finally I found the nerve to face the black box Dr. Roop had given me. I took off the lid and saw that the box contained two pieces of paper—one small and one large—and a black cylinder, like the one that they used to inject nanites.

  The small paper contained a series of blocky hieroglyphs, all straight lines and right angles, printed by hand with a thick red ink. I shook my head and squeezed my eyes shut. What was the point of giving me a note to read when I was not going to be able to read it? Still, the script was beautiful, and it was a message from my friend, even if I could not read it.

  I opened my eyes to look at it again, but this time the sharp script was gone. It had changed, in those few seconds, to English. I didn’t know how, but for the moment I didn’t care. It said, This was in Tamret’s room, addressed to you. Your friend, Klhkkkloplkkkuiv Roop.

  One last message from Tamret. I held the paper in my hands for a long time, fearing what it might say, savoring the thought of one more communication from her, and dreading the knowledge that it would be the last. Most of all, I feared I would be unable to read it. Finally, I summoned my courage, and I unfolded it and saw that my translator was still working.

  Zeke,

  If you are reading this, things have gone badly, and I am sorry for that. I wanted, more than anything else, for us to be together, but if you are looking at these words, then it means we won’t be. If you need what the box contains, then your planet has not made its way into the Confederation. If I am not giving it to you myself, it means that I am dead or gone against my will.

  You probably never noticed that the locket your mother gave you disappeared one night. I needed the genetic information in her hair to hack into the medical database and make what is inside this injector—the nanites that will repair her cells and cure her disease. It was so easy to do, it’s shameful they did not offer to do it themselves, but they have their rules. I have mine.

  I did not tell you I was doing it because I care so much for you, and I want you to care for me—for who I am, not because I did something for you. Maybe that makes me selfish, since I could give this to you anytime and ease your mind. I am sorry for that, and I hope you will forgive me.

  I’m crying as I write this. It’s crazy, I know. Nothing bad has happened. Maybe nothing bad will happen, but I’ve seen too much to believe that. If you ever read these words, and I pray by the [coalition of revenge deities] you don’t, please know how much you have meant to me. If I am dead, my ghost will haunt you, and if you even look at another girl, I will make you miserable, and I will torment that girl until she throws herself off the nearest cliff.

  Tamret

  I was crying now, and I was not trying to hide the tears, nor did they fill me with shame. I was crying because of what they had done to Tamret. They had taken her fearlessness and made her afraid. They had taken her unbreakable spirit, and they had broken it. Tamret was the most daring and dauntless being I had ever known, and they had condemned her to prison and torture and perhaps death, and the vastness of space made me powerless to prevent it. Yet she had found a way to cross that distance and give to me the thing I’d been seeking most when I left the Earth.

  I sat there like that, tears running onto my lap, my shirt, not bothering to wipe them, and then I remembered what Urch had done. I turned over the box and looked at the bottom. There, in its papery softness, Urch’s predator’s fingernail had carved nine simple words: It was fun. We should do it again. Soon.

  Something escaped from my throat. Not laughter, but something grimly like it. I studied the words until they became like an icon, like a symbol of all I had been and so desperately wanted to be again. Urch’s words were not a promise, and they were not a plan, but they were a cause for hope where there had been none before. My friends, the friends I had always longed for, had not forgotten me. That was reason enough to take comfort, but there was something else, too. I read the words. They had neutralized my nanites, and my translator had vanished, but now it was back. Was that why Dr. Roop had insisted on injecting me himself? Had he switched cylinders? Had he hinted at some plan? Was that what he had wanted me to remember?

  I didn’t care how it had happened, only that it had. I understood these messages, written in scripts I could not have imagined in languages I could not comprehend. I could feel that my strength and agility and hearing and sight and all the rest were no more than when I had first come to the station, but I could still translate. Maybe other skills would return. Maybe I could somehow unlock them. Maybe I could go back to leveling up once I got home. Perhaps I was not as powerless as they had intended to leave me.

  I looked out the viewscreen again, and the great ringed planet was now itself a tiny disc against an endless canvas of blinking stars and swirling gases. I kept my eye on it until it was nothing but a memory, and I continued looking as if somehow I could have one last glimpse of the place from which I had been exiled. I was not ready to let it go. Not yet.

  Then came a recorded announcement—in words I could understand—telling me to prepare to exit normal space. This was soon followed by that familiar disorientation, and up became down and in became out and I was flying and falling and spinning, but it was only an instant before the sensation was gone. The window, too, was gone, and my eyes fell upon the blank wall of my cabin, bland and gray and meaningless. The ship had begun to tunnel through space, and though I could feel no movement, I knew we sped past stars and planets and across the infinite emptiness between them. We had ripped a hole in the fabric of the universe, and we tumbled down its great and impossible slide, racing toward a world that once, not so very long ago, had been the place I called home.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  * * *

  DAVID LISS is, himself, a proud science fiction geek. When not acting like a total fanboy, he’s generally working on his books, stories, and comics. Liss has written eight bestselling novels for adults, most recently The Day of Atonement, and is the author of numerous comics, including Mystery Men, Sherlock Holmes: Moriarty Lives, and Angelica Tomorrow.

  VISIT US AT

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  authors.simonandschuster.com/David-Liss

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2015 by David Liss

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2015 by Derek Stenning

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  Jacket design by Lizzy Bromley

  Interior design by Hilary Zarycky

  The text for this book is se
t in New Caledonia.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Randoms / David Liss.—First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: “A twelve-year-old boy is chosen to join a four-person applicant team to work toward membership in the Confederation of United Planets, and stumbles across conspiracies resembling science fiction he’s been a fan of his entire life”—Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4814-1779-2 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4814-1781-5 (eBook)

  [1. Science fiction. 2. Conspiracies—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.1.L57Ran 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014026966