Blood of a Thousand Stars Read online

  Aly pushed off the center console and launched himself into the fray. As he floated toward the tussle, he saw that Dahlen was smiling. The blood from his nose made its way into the spaces between his teeth, and it dribbled down his chin.

  Dahlen threw his head back to hit the guy behind him, then forward to head-butt the guy in front of him. Aly started throwing fists at whatever flesh he could make contact with. Even though Aly was UniForce-trained, the miners had more experience in zero grav; they’d come prepared.

  One of them tackled Aly and punched him across the face. It felt like a part of his brain exploded: Their gloves were enhanced with special magnets, iron-heavy. Aly brought an arm up to block his face, but the guy went for his ribs instead—and all Aly could do was knee and kick blindly as they settled on the floor.

  Another miner had pulled a knife on Dahlen, and they fumbled for control of it. The miner managed to pin Dahlen against one wall and drove the knife into his shoulder. Dahlen convulsed in pain.

  “No!” Aly yelled. He found a surge of strength and drove an elbow into his guy’s face, then kicked him straight in the nuts. That was the downside of magnetic boots: Rooted in place, the guy felt the impact all the way to his eyeballs, while Aly’s shot launched him in reaction straight across the craft toward Dahlen.

  The miner still clutched the knife, digging it into Dahlen’s shoulder. Dahlen’s knuckles were white and the veins in his neck bulged. He was shaking so hard, his teeth were rattling.

  But Aly realized it wasn’t out of fear or even pain. It was out of rage. Dahlen had the intense, focused kind of eyes that the real believers got in church when they were in ecstasy, when Vodhan called upon them, when they were driven by something bigger and more powerful and impossible to explain.

  Dahlen let out a scream as he pulled the knife out and lodged it into the other guy’s throat in one swift motion.

  Suddenly they heard the hiss of a door closing as the craft equalized, everyone—alive and dead—dropping to the floor with a thud. Gravity had been restored. When Aly looked up he saw it was Rahmal on the other side of the glass. He’d cut them off from the drilling vessel.

  “No!” Aly said, scrambling forward. He swayed on his feet as gravity planted him in place.

  “Let us through the airlock glass,” Dahlen growled. His injured arm hung limp. The wound was wet and shiny, and Aly didn’t know what kind of a mess those tendons must be in.

  “No,” Rahmal said, his voice shaking. “We’ve been compromised. They could be ready for you on the ground.”

  “Do not disobey me!” Dahlen yelled. The visor of his helmet was fogging up. Aly had never heard him sound angry before. “Open this door immediately.”

  “I have explicit directions from the Elder to make sure you come to no harm,” Rahmal repeated. “You have a higher purpose.”

  Dahlen slammed both hands into the glass. “If I can’t live with honor then I will die for it!”

  “Please,” Aly said to Rahmal, switching tactics. He closed his eyes and could see only Kara. “We’ll stay alive together.” He hadn’t realized until now how much Dahlen’s expulsion had made him reckless, mad. But he didn’t have time to play therapist. They’d need to release their craft soon or the extra weight would slow them down, and they’d all burn up into the atmosphere.

  Rahmal only shook his head, unyielding.

  “May I?” Pavel asked Aly politely, as he opened a side hatch and exposed an array of attachments—signal interceptors, wire cutters, surge amps—he might use for getting the air lock open again.

  “Do it,” Aly said.

  “There’s no use,” Rahmal said. “I’m sorry.” His hand hovered over the button that would send them spinning way off course.

  “Don’t!” Aly yelled.

  Too late. Rahmal smashed his hand against the button. The force of the separation threw Aly to the floor. When he righted himself, the planet was already spinning away.

  EIGHTEEN

  KARA

  SINCE the cease-fire had been announced, all kinds of crafts had been swarming just below the Wraetan atmosphere, navigating the enormous splinters of old planetary mass still swaying loosely in an electromagnetic net. Kara couldn’t ID them by sight—but she knew the traffic was made up largely of UniForce and Kalusian crafts.

  It had been three hours since Kara and Issa had landed, and they were losing the light. The growing darkness was entirely different than anything Kara had experienced on Sibu, or any other planet, for that matter—the absence of light on Wraeta felt thick, total, scary. She felt it around her ankles, curling in and around her chest, alive with dust and debris. She was afraid it would reach out to strike.

  Or maybe it was her future, hidden somewhere on this rock, that was slowly rising up, waiting to crash down on her.

  The occasional discarded sign of life—a half-melted doll, at one point—made her queasy. Before Wraeta had been bombed and its atmosphere turned lethal, the iron in its soil made the ground a fiery assortment of reds and oranges. “Like the sun set and melted itself right into the land,” Aly told her once. He had always said things exactly the way she wanted to hear them. She should’ve seen right through the promises, the charm, the smile. But that was Aly all along—the opportunist, the actor.

  Kara tried to imagine it as she walked across the cold, dead rock beneath her. It was one of the biggest intact pieces of Wraeta, and when she looked up at the dark sky she could see the remnants of the decimated planet, pieces of rock just like the one she stood on.

  Issa’s unit had dropped them on a nearby space station, and from there, Issa and Kara had been jettisoned via a pod—claiming they needed to recover a lost asset in orbit—after which Issa had steered them to the surface of Wraeta. With half their fuel, they landed on a barren stretch of torn-up rock a full day’s walk from the site of interest. The WFC couldn’t dedicate any extra soldiers to escort them. If they had known the real reason the girls had come to Wraeta, the WFC would have sent its entire army.

  The lie suited Kara’s purposes just fine. A two-person pod was hardly likely to attract radar attention from the UniForce—they might even be mistaken for pieces of the planet, breaking free of the electromagnetic cordon. Besides, she didn’t need more military, or anyone extra involved. She was going to find the overwriter and destroy every memory that had ever existed of Josselyn Ta’an. It was only a matter of time before someone else tried to kidnap her. Josselyn’s existence had already compromised Rhee’s reign, which made her vulnerable to Nero. Everything depended on this mission.

  To calm herself, Kara repeated: Etra, Rilirinas, Samba. The Wolf, the Guardian, the Matron . . . these were the star coordinates that would bring them to the lab, and to her mother’s old greenhouse. Kara was sure that they would find the overwriter there. By her calculations, only a matter of kilometers separated them from the site. Still, it was too far to walk before sunset; they would have to use Issa’s WFC-issued dome to set up camp for the night.

  The spacesuits they were wearing were about two sizes too big, which made them bulky and downright archaic, and ill-equipped apart from a simple readout of breathable oxygen and the position of the sun. Kara and Issa couldn’t even talk to one another; the suits were fitted with comm units so old they might have stopped working during the Great War. But they got the job done in every other way—they could move through an otherwise lethal atmosphere, and the suits cloaked their heat signature, so they couldn’t be tracked unless they were in visual range. The surface might be crawling with Nero’s soldiers, but at the very least they couldn’t be tracked from a distance.

  And anyway, Kara should be thankful. If the dust and debris on Wraeta didn’t kill you, the temperatures would. Even Issa couldn’t prepare for a climate that had changed this dramatically. The ground was iced over, slippery as a fish, and they had to worry about losing their footing and floating off into deep space.
And if you drifted off, the odds didn’t look good; you’d either die of starvation or a suit malfunction, whichever came first.

  Their only contingency plan was a harpoon gun Issa carried. If Issa lost her footing and started to float off, she could shoot the loaded arrow into the ground and tether herself to the surface with a rope just ten hands long. And if Kara floated away, Issa would still shoot the harpoon and grab for her. At least that was the plan. It depended on everything working like it was supposed to, and a whole lot of trust in Issa.

  I’m not going anywhere, she remembered Aly saying when they’d first got to Nau Fruma. She shook the thought away. Memories were like poison seeping into her skin, flowing into her heart.

  The past was venom. And Kara would get it out, she’d free herself and everyone else.

  Kara stayed right behind Issa, matching her step for step. They walked carefully, planting their feet so that the whole sole made contact with the surface—it was slow, and dangerous. It was worth it, though. She just wanted this feeling to go away—that she was useless in this world, that she was a shell of a person, chained to her past. What future could she serve, and what could she even offer Rhiannon if she were found?

  No responsibilities, no painful past, no prodigal empress to live up to. Kara could make it all go away, and she could be whole again. She could help Rhiannon by disappearing, giving her the title of empress uncontested. At least she would have done some good.

  When they crested the hill, they saw a small, white dome in the distance. UniForce soldiers had made a camp for the night. Kara froze. The suits cloaked them, but for how long? Issa made a fist, and Kara recognized it as a signal to stop and crouch down. She did, her heart hammering. Issa crouched down too and turned to Kara. Beneath the film on her visor her eyes were bright with excitement or fear—Kara couldn’t tell which.

  In the distance, the dome glinted in the light and looked like metal. The bomb had destroyed everything else—the dome had definitely been erected after the Great War. It was the first structure they’d seen since they started walking. There was something eerie about seeing the UniForce here, on this terribly wounded planet. It was like stumbling onto a vision not of the past but the future.

  Issa pulled out her handheld. The readout said they’d walked thirty kilometers from their landing spot, and judging by the constellations they had twice that to go before they reached the site of the lab, where Kara was sure the overwriter must still be concealed. They’d have to put distance between themselves and the UniForce encampment so they had a solid lead in the morning.

  They kept walking, slogging onward in their cumbersome and heavy suits, every step an agony of effort. Finally, long after the light from the UniForce camp had dwindled into nothing, Kara could go no further. They agreed to sleep four hours—long enough to recharge, but short enough they could be sure they would still outpace the UniForce if they too were on the move.

  Issa tapped the portable shelter. It was the size of her fist, but as it opened it domed around them, settling into the ground with a whoosh of wind that knocked Kara backward. The air pressurized, and the wrist consoles on both their suits beeped a weak green: 80 percent breathable oxygen for humanoid species.

  Kara figured they should be cautious, but Issa ripped her helmet off and gulped in a breath of air. A few seconds passed, and when it seemed sure Issa wouldn’t suffocate or implode, Kara fumbled for the heavy metal zipper that connected her helmet to her suit and pulled.

  The air was so cold it felt like frost lined her lungs with every inhale. She didn’t care. Kara took in a deep breath, and then another. It made her head light, but she felt more alert.

  “I’ve never seen one of these domes,” Kara said. It was pitch-black inside apart from their wrist readouts, but even in the dim green light she saw her breath fog. There was something familiar about it, an eerie sense that events were replaying themselves. It had happened more and more in the last few days.

  “They used them here when the dust started to collect in the atmosphere, before the evacuations happened,” Issa said. “Guess these structures never made their way to Kalu . . .”

  Issa’s tone was loaded. And why not? Kara felt terrible—she’d been so focused all this time on her own sense of loss that she hadn’t really had any room to think about Issa’s. She wondered what else Issa had seen that Kara had never even thought of before. She wondered what it would have been like to grow up here, back when it was different, when it was beautiful. She wanted to ask, but she didn’t even know where to begin.

  “No. They didn’t.” Kara sat down opposite Issa and crossed her legs on the floor, but said nothing. As loyal as Issa was, she didn’t seem the type to open up, and Kara suddenly realized how badly she wanted to know her—to understand her, to learn her secrets—this girl who had risked her life to protect the WFC back on the medcraft and the medcraft itself, who had tried again and again to protect Kara, even from herself. “Do you want to talk about it? The evacuation, I mean . . .”

  Issa sighed and leaned back, pressing her palms into the ground. She looked around. “I didn’t grow up on Wraeta.”

  Kara was surprised; she had just assumed Issa was from here.

  “My grandpa on my mother’s side immigrated to the northern hemisphere of Kalu when she was a little girl,” she explained. “I was born there, so I’m technically Kalusian.”

  She looked down and turned her wrist console off so Kara could no longer see her face. Kara turned her own off too, and they were plunged into darkness. Like before, the dark felt alive. It made Kara uneasy—more than uneasy—but she got the feeling Issa wanted to remain unseen. “And?”

  “He tended a vegetable stand that turned into a grocery store that turned into all the vending machines of produce across every city on the planet,” Issa said.

  “Your family owned those?” Kara said, wrapping her arms across her chest as she shivered. There was one at the hyperloop station by her old module with Lydia, but it had looked old and rusted, and it was never stocked.

  “We didn’t own them. But my family’s company, their labor, was the reason those stayed stocked. My mom inherited the business and turned it into a massive transport operation. Partnerships with farms outside every major city. Every yield from every harvest was distributed. We were doing good. More than comfortable,” she said, like she was embarrassed. “But then the executive order happened.”

  Kara rocked herself—partly to keep warm, but partly because she was nervous. Of course she knew what happened, without Issa having to say it. It was leading up to the Great War—an evacuation order for all Wraetans on Kalusian soil. She combed her mind for an organic memory of it, though she realized she had none. Her own ignorance opened like a gulf between her and Issa.

  Issa continued. “Anyway, a man and a woman came to our house. He was a Kalusian in an oversize business suit, said he was from the bank. She was wearing army fatigues, and walked like something was stuck up her ass.” Kara heard Issa spit then. “He said that under Executive Order 23-41B, anyone of Wraetan or Fontisian descent would have their assets seized, and they’d have to be relocated to camps. ‘For our safety.’”

  “What a bullshit excuse,” Kara said. She’d heard that way too many times, in the defense of things done to her, things that were inexcusable. “You went?”

  She couldn’t know for sure because of the dark that enveloped them, but she felt Issa’s stare. Kara’s cheeks burned hot at the foolishness of her question. “We had no choice. They extradited us to Fontis, and I ended up in a Wray Town. Most of the other Wraetans hated everything I was about. Made fun of my Kalusian accent. Called me spoiled. Said I thought I was better than anyone, and that not even the Kalusians wanted me now.”

  “No one should have to go through that . . .” Kara trailed off. A breeze moved through the dirt, through her newly straightened hair.

  “There wasn’t anyon
e to talk to. It was miserable. And I wouldn’t have been there if it hadn’t been for that man from the bank. Years later, I’d found he’d seized our assets for himself. My family’s sweat and tears, and he took it away and ran the damn thing into the ground. I had fantasies of finding him, of making him pay . . .”

  “Wow,” Kara whispered. She was ashamed at how small her pain seemed next to Issa’s. She felt like they were standing on a ledge about to collapse out from under them. “Did you find him?” she asked.

  “In Nau Fruma, just before I met you. That same man was there. Our commander asked us to honor our oath: If anyone has taken from you or yours, justice shall be swift.”

  Issa had been at that same raid on the internment camp.

  “‘If anyone has taken from you or yours, justice shall be swift,’” Kara repeated. It seemed so sudden, so brash. But maybe that’s why Kara wasn’t a soldier. She couldn’t trust herself to make the right choice at the right time. “Did you out him?” She was afraid to hear the answer, afraid where the story of war and horror might bring them. But she needed to know.

  “I said no. I let him be.”

  Kara stared. “After what he’d done to you?” She could practically feel the way Issa shrugged.

  “What’s the difference now? His death would not give my family back what they’ve lost. It wouldn’t give me my purpose.”

  “Purpose,” Kara said. It seemed to give Issa comfort, but all Kara felt was a growing sense of dread. Like her own purpose—to free herself, to free Rhiannon, to make Josselyn disappear—was a false bottom, and she kept falling and falling. She didn’t know how to be Josselyn. What if she didn’t know how to be Kara, either, if she didn’t obliterate her entirely?

  “You know how pearls are made, in the oceans of Hesphion?” Issa didn’t wait for Kara to answer. “Little specks of dirt get caught inside an oyster, and the oyster closes in on the speck of dirt with lacquer, thinking it’s infected. And the lacquer grows and grows, until that thing, that little speck of dirt, becomes a pearl.”