“What’s next on your list?” Andy asked, still evidently unhappy with what I had said and Aquila’s reaction.

I looked at him, confusion etched onto my face.

“How do you know I have a list?”

“You always had a list when we had our meetings, I assumed you’d have prepared for this one too.”

He smiled as I reluctantly reached into my pocket and pulled out the screen Chal had given me. I switched it on and glanced down at it.

We’d discussed the first point, now I just had to bring up the next one, no matter how much I didn’t want to. I couldn’t just come out and say ‘things have gone to shit on the base, what can we do about it?’. I had to break it to him softer than that. Actually, I didn’t know that things were that bad on the base. All I knew was that it was now under the Council control and most of the tutors put there were Council supporters who carried stun sticks and wouldn’t let the kids talk at meals.

Okay, so I could assume that things had gone to shit but still, the idea of telling Andy was tough.

I chewed my lip as I thought before finally deciding on a good way to phrase it.

“Is there any way I can talk to someone on the base?”

Aquila’s eyes narrowed slightly.

“Why would you want to do that?” she demanded.

“It’s just… I made a promise to someone there, one of my students, that I’d keep an eye on him. You know, just to make sure everything is okay…”

I glanced at Andy, not wanting him to know how horrible things had gotten on there. I still had some hope that things could have been okay there. Maybe they would. Maybe the Council wouldn’t take out their anger on a bunch of kids who didn’t know any better. I was just grasping at straws now. I knew that was a lie. They’d done it to us after all.

“There are some ways to get around the Council’s detector,” Elliot said slowly.

I perked up, leaning forwards unconsciously in my chair.

“Do they have any comms systems or just their wrist monitor?” he asked.

I thought about it but came up blank.

“I don’t know.”

“Mmm…” His fingers steepled underneath his chin. “That might make things a little bit more difficult but there are still some ways to do it. Do they use any back channels or non-monitored sites?”

I winced at how clueless my answers sounded. I truly didn’t know anything about this kid. I’d worked with him for a couple of weeks before promising I’d find a way to help them.

“I don’t know.”

Elliot nodded briefly, seemingly accepting my terrible answers.

“We could put some feelers out. Maybe leave some cryptic messages on some boards that only the kid would understand?” he said as his hand absentmindedly typed on the screen in front of him.

“That could work. Establish communication, confirm identity, create a private comms link. Like we did with the Mostras,” Andy muttered, watching his typing.

I had no real idea what they were talking about, it sounded like a conversation between Cas, Peggy and Gem when they were trying to hack something. I wasn’t great at hacking. I was fine, probably better than a lot of people, but not great. Andy and Elliot’s mutter conversation continued to go straight over my head.

“Do you have any inside jokes or a way of identifying them and yourself? Maybe a message you want to relay?” Elliot asked me suddenly.

“Ummm…” I wracked my brain trying to think of what I could say.

I berated myself for not taking more time to get to know my students. I barely knew anything. I tried desperately to recall anything we’d spoken about. He’d said during testing that his brother wanted him to be a gunner but he wanted to be a flyer. That wasn’t good enough. Cas had said that he’d ping him on a secure line back when we thought we’d actually be able to escape. And we’d shown him how to use the hatches. We’d promised to see him again but it felt dumb to have promised that now.

I sighed frustratedly as I tried to get my brain back on task. I needed to send him a message. Something that he would understand but that wouldn’t sound suspicious to anyone else.

Something about him being a future flyer maybe? And something about this being the closest thing we could get to a ping on a secure line? I could maybe sign it off as his old tutor? It felt dumb but it was all I had to go on.

“Could you say ‘Hello future flyer…. Urmmm… Sending you the closest thing we could to a ping on a secure line… from your old tutor’?”

Elliot typed it out dutifully before looking back up at me but I stared back blankly. I had nothing more to say.

“You need to say something more. Something so that they can confirm their identity,” Elliot prompted.

Once more my mind was blank. How could he confirm his identity? What would he know that the Council wouldn’t?

It took a while but finally, it came to me.

The hatches.

“Can you add ‘take the path we showed you from outside the garage, take the third left, up a floor then right. What colour is the pipe?’”

Elliot looked at me with confusion but Andy’s lips turned up in a smile.

“Green,” he said, laughter in his voice.

I smiled. He was right. He knew the service corridors better than we did.

“You showed them how to use the hatches.”

It was a statement, not a question but still, I felt the need to answer it.

“Yeah, I thought the new tutors wouldn’t know about them and that the students might be a little safer using them…”

“Good decision.”

I smiled at him but the smile was bittersweet. I hated that it had come to this and I knew that Andy did too.

“Alright, message sent. Once they get back to us, we’ll be able to confirm their identity and we’ll have more eyes on the inside.”

“They’re a child, not a fighter.” Andy objected quietly, “They won’t be our eyes on the inside.”

“You were basically a child when this all started too,” Elliot pointed out.

“It’s not the same. How old is this kid?”

“He’s twelve. Maybe thirteen now.”

“That’s too young.”

“In a war, it’s always the children and women who suffer the most,” Aquila said, her gaze distant.

“And we will not add to that,” Andy insisted firmly.

Aquila’s eyes flickered to Andy before glancing down at the screen before Elliot.

“Alright. We won’t ask him to do anything that would put him at an increased risk.”

Andy didn’t reply and I got the feeling that they would continue this conversation later.

“Is there anything else on the list?” Elliot asked, bringing the attention back to me.

I tilted the screen away from them as I stared down at the words ‘Destroy the Council. Kill Harvey’.

“Mmmm… there was one more thing. It was about helping the fight against the Council but I guess I can’t really help with that until I’m a fighter, right?”

I’d phrased it as carefully as I could and tried to move the screen so that Elliot, who was sitting closest to me, couldn’t see but his smirk told me that he had seen it.

“Not directly, I guess, but you can help prepare supplies for deliveries and help clean and maintain the ships,” Aquila said thoughtfully.

I nodded. I’d always found cleaning the ships to be a therapeutic experience. There was something about repetitive motions with a clear goal in mind that soothed me. I knew that some crews preferred to leave the cleaning to the younger recruits but I didn’t. We argued that if you make the ship dirty then you should be the one to clean it. Also, I didn’t like anyone else fiddling with Frida. Early on, some crew had taken her out and had tried to fix some of the panels when they got back. It hadn’t gone well. One literally fell straight off as we tried to leave the atmosphere the next time we flew it and we had to make an emergency landing.

“We’d be happy to help with that. I know that Cas and Gem will be excited to be able to work on the ships again.”

The words slipped out of my mouth without thinking but as soon as I realised what I’d said, the memories hit me again. The image of Gem floating through space, half-dead, after the last time she’d worked on a ship assaulted my brain. My hands trembled and the sharp tang of blood stung my nose. The phantom cries of Cory begging her to live echoed in my ears and I forced myself to smile as Aquila’s lips moved but I couldn’t hear her over the noise in my head.

My hands dropped to my lap and I squeezed them into fists, my nails digging in hard to my skin. I could feel the small crescent moon shaped scabs with my fingertips from when I’d done this before but still, I dug my nails in deeper.

A gentle beeping from the door broke me out of my spiral and I looked up just in time to see my crew burst in. Their exuberance was evident just from the look on their faces. It pushed the panic out of my mind immediately.

Gem bounded further into the room her gaze scanning me quickly before landing on Andy’s face.

“Is it true? Is she alive?”