As the sun set, the Other Moon rose. When Jan was very young his mother had said that if the Other Moon and a full moon were both visible in the sky, bad luck would befall him. When he was a little older he’d had the wit to wonder just how anyone could know that and soon after he’d abandoned any belief in portents or omens. At least, he thought he had. Right now, the tale seemed all too plausible. The electric blue spark, as bright as any of the larger satellites, glared at Jan like a malevolent glint in some world-spanning eye.

‘Thing is, the Other Moon actually is bad news,’ said Christo conversationally, following behind. ‘In every story there are seeds of truth.’

‘How’s that?’ Jan said.

‘It’s where those above came from. They say one day that thing just lit up in the sky, though it might have been hidden up there for thousands of years. Then it opened up like a great mouth and out poured the Dyn.’

Jan shuddered slightly at that name, so rarely spoken among his people. Perhaps he wasn’t above superstition after all. The Other Moon seemed closer when he glanced back up; it still seemed wrong. It was too blue and too bright to be a star or a planet and always shadowed the true moon at a fixed angle, stalking it across the sky.

They continued onwards in silence for several minutes, passing the ruin Jan had hidden in a couple of days ago. Suddenly the jungle came to an abrupt halt. Jan put his hand out, motioning for Christo to stop.

‘What is it?’ whispered Christo, inching forwards to see for himself.

A swathe of devastation cut across the jungle ahead of them, dozens of metres wide, running in a near-straight line as far as they could see in either direction. The false plants had been uprooted, crushed and torched. Salt had been spread over them, causing those that might have moved into the clearing to retreat. Jan remembered that terrible, half-glimpsed machine uprooting trees. He paused at the edge of the track.

‘I saw a patrol near here on my way to the Conurbation,’ he said, turning to Christo. ‘They wore your insignia.’

‘Ah, of course. Arco’s laying a new road. I sought out people on the patrols that might be won over to the cause. Aurelie tells me the reservation is in this region and I thought it was our best hope. But they never found anything. Without access to an aircraft or satellites you could spend months searching this one miserable patch of jungle.’

Aurelie – Christo’s informant? Now didn’t seem like the time to ask. Satisfied that the path was clear, Jan ran for the cover of the opposite side. Christo followed.

‘Your people came very close,’ he said. ‘The crater’s not far now.’

They reached the rim an hour later, hunkering behind a rocky outcrop. The false jungle fell away before them, the crater opening up to give a vantage point from which they could see the concrete wall of the reservation roughly a mile away. A rough dirt track wound its way down the steep incline and towards the wall.

‘That’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? You going to tell me how this all fits into your plan?’ Jan said, gesturing at the wall.

‘In time, my friend.’ Christo passed him some binoculars. ‘They see in infrared,’ he offered.

The word meant nothing to Jan, but when he raised the binoculars he spotted tiny pinpricks of light moving along the wall.

‘I count nine guards on this stretch. Do you see the same?’

Jan nodded.

‘Less than I anticipated – we might just pull this off,’ Christo laughed, sounding relieved.

Jan was less assured. Christo drew something out of the heavy folds of his jacket, barely visible in the gloom. It looked like a bulky gun with a camera lens where the barrel should have been. He extended the stock, nestled it in the crook of his arm, pointed it at a bank of cloud overhead and pulled the trigger. Jan thought he saw a brief haze in the air, but aside from that nothing happened.

‘I lit up the cloud so Aurelie knows where we are,’ Christo said by way of explanation. ‘She’ll handle the extraction, I’m getting her out of there, then we’re gone. Easy in, easy out.’

‘The cloud didn’t shine,’ Jan said, feeling a little stupid.

‘No, not with a light our eyes can see,’ Christo tapped the camera-thing. ‘This projects a ray of refined light, bluer than blue. Some of it lights up that cloud, though we can’t see it and nor can anyone on the other side apart from our friend.’

‘How can she do that if the light’s invisible?’ The man didn’t seem to hear him, engrossed in adjusting the strange device.

‘When this is done, Christo, am I free to go?’

‘Sure,’ Christo replied distractedly.

‘Free like I was back in the warehouse?’

Christo carefully set the device aside and turned to him.

‘If you want to go, you are free to do so. You guided me to the reservation and for that you have my gratitude. I won’t keep you here against your will – what good is a freedom fighter who isn’t free? But tell me, what will you do after you have left?’

‘I’d heard there were people fighting against Arco in Fifteen – I’m going to join them.’

‘You sought us out, right? We’re not what you expected.’

Jan laughed at that. It had come out more bitter than he’d intended, but Christo smiled.

‘Arco took my daughter from me,’ Jan said. ‘To this day I don’t know why, but I will make them pay.’

‘I don’t doubt it.’ Christo smiled again, but this time it didn’t reach his eyes. The naive young idealist that Jan had taken him for was gone. His voice grew harder, taking on the tones of a rehearsed speech.

‘It seems like everyone I ever knew died to fight Arco. Then the next generation dies avenging them and nothing ever changes. Nothing can ever change, not whilst the Dyn reign over all of us. They turn us on one another and nobody even thinks to challenge them because they’re beyond reach, because their power over us seems so overwhelming and we’re too busy just trying to survive from one day to the next.’

‘You’re saying it’s futile,’ said Jan, and in saying it aloud he knew it to be true. A wave of despair washed over him.

‘No, Jan.’ Christo placed a firm hand on his shoulder. ‘What I’m saying is vengeance can be a motivation, but it can never be a cause. Vengeance looks backwards, but we must be always looking forwards, to the future. I will never have children, I will never even know the joy you once knew. They sterilised me; a trial run, but one day it will begin en masse, though even Arco doesn’t know it. Quietly the Dyn will steal our future from us.’

Jan’s breath caught in his throat. He felt anger stir again, true anger, unlike any other feeling he had known since that fateful day when they had taken Eva. Jan had spent the last years resigned to his fate, but it was as if Christo’s words had suddenly snapped his thoughts out of that pattern.

‘My only future will be my legacy,’ Christo continued, still in that rehearsed tone. ‘I said we were revolutionaries, not rebels or insurrectionists, because we’re going to change everything. We’re going to cast the Dyn from the heavens, and with the strings cut their puppets in Arco will come crashing down with them. There will be no more glittering chain, no more imposed firmament. One day a child will be able to look up at the stars and know that nothing will be withheld from them.

‘So what do you say Jan?’ Christo asked, a fierce glint in his eyes. ‘Are you with us?’

‘I’m with you,’ Jan answered. There didn’t seem to be any alternative.

Christo grinned at him, then suddenly checked his watch, a flash of apprehension crossing his features. He passed Jan a second watch and the strange gun.

‘She should be in by now… In fifteen minutes I want you to shoot at the clouds again, just like I did. I’ll be back shortly after that.’ Christo scanned the wall with the binoculars one last time. ‘Stay low and be ready.’

‘How’re you getting over the wall?’

‘Oh, I’m not going over the wall,’ laughed Christo, inscrutable as ever.

Jan made to ask something else but Christo was already off, scrabbling down into the crater, not even deigning to follow the track. Within moments he was only visible through the binoculars, a rapidly shrinking blob of false colour. Jan settled into the undergrowth to wait, every sense heightened. He felt the slow worming of the false creepers beneath him, smelt their pungent, rotten tang and heard the soft clicking of alien fauna.

Jan felt his eyes drawn again to the Other Moon. It looked significantly more menacing than usual, though he still had his doubts about Christo’s story. It was too strange, too mythical. He would have enjoyed this once, to lie alone and stargaze. Eva had enjoyed it. Jan fidgeted restlessly, shifting his legs and snapping the few exploring tendrils that had risen up.

After a quarter of an hour Jan did as he’d been instructed, raising the weapon and firing its invisible beam into the clouds. Yet another five minutes passed and still nothing happened. He began to worry something had gone terribly wrong – how long should he wait? If Arco had caught Christo, it would not be long before they began to scour the surroundings for accomplices. He tried to push the thought from his mind.

Jan saw the explosion before he felt it. The wall was suddenly blown outwards, sending a gout of debris flying hundreds of metres. He had just enough time to press himself to the ground before the blast wave struck. Jan’s hands flew to his ears as the overpressure stabbed painfully, driving air from his lungs. His ears still ringing, Jan felt rather than heard it, like thunder in his chest. Rubble rained down on the jungle around him, larger fragments of shattered concrete thunking into the earth closer to the breach.

Through it, amidst the clearing dust and smoke, Jan glimpsed the alien vista beyond. A landscape not unlike the false jungle, but tamed. A false garden, lit by the eerie light of the Other Moon.

The shrill alarm brought him back to the now, bright searchlights reaching out into the night. From within the wall Jan was sure he could hear automatic gunfire and the drone of an engine. He crouched low, hardly daring to breathe.

Suddenly a rugged car emerged, spinning frantically and accelerating away, barely keeping to the track. As it closed he made out two figures within – Christo and Aurelie? Evidently there’d been a change of plan. Spotlights skittered after the vehicle and Jan could see figures around the breach, clambering over the rubble in pursuit. Further explosions detonated along the barrier’s length.

The vehicle wound its way up the incline and Jan started running to meet it. The car braked hard alongside him with a screech of stressed tyres. An indistinct shape was lashed down and covered with a tarpaulin in the flatbed. The thing twitched like a piece of broken machinery.

A wild-eyed, bloodied Christo leant out of the cab.

‘Get on the back. And hold on tight.’

‘Is that a -’ Jan started to say, jabbing his arm at the thrashing thing.

‘How could it be?’ Christo interrupted, winking at Jan. ‘Such a thing is surely impossible, so why bother to wonder? Take this, set it to a thousand nm, and cover us. Now get in – be quick or be dead!’

Jan did as he was told, clambering into the cab. He could only hope that the hostage would make their pursuers think twice before shooting at them. Christo threw the camera-gun straight at him. Jan caught it awkwardly and leant out of the cab’s rear window.

‘Is this a test?’ He shouted back as the driver, presumably Aurelie, gunned the engine. The jolt nearly knocked Jan over but he steadied, raising the weapon.

‘Everything is!’ Christo called back.

Jan shifted the weapon in his hand, turning the dial on one side until the glowing readout displayed ‘1000nm’. He held the flimsy stock up to his shoulder.

Dozens of Arco soldiers were swarming, like ants around a collapsed nest. They were cautious, checking for more buried explosives, but a few were already working their way into the crater.

It had been a long time since Jan had fired a real gun. That day, standing between Eva and a phalanx of Arco goons, he had failed as completely as any father could fail. They’d knocked him aside because he was too insignificant to even bother killing. His grip tightened on the trigger as he remembered. Jan lifted the camera-gun to his eye and aimed through the strange sight; a dot projected onto a glassy plate. He breathed in, smiled wolfishly and pulled the trigger.

Flames leapt up along the path he traced with the sight, burning bright and harsh. The weapon hummed almost inaudibly as a fan cycled air through its components but there was no recoil, although the movement of the vehicle made it hard to aim. He adjusted his stance and fired again. This time his aim was true, a receding guard collapsing in flames. He held the trigger down, feeling his own anger pouring into the weapon’s invisible beam. A moment later and the crater was lost amid deepening foliage. Jan relaxed back into the cab seat, lowering the gun.

‘Aurelie, this is Jan. Jan, Aurelie,’ Christo said over the roar of the engine. ‘She’s been my man on the inside, so to speak.’

Jan nodded blankly at Aurelie. Dressed in a spotless Arco uniform, she was quite still and apparently unfazed by his sudden intrusion. Her grey eyes darted up to meet his and he was compelled to look away. There was something strange behind that gaze.