Blood of a Thousand Stars Page 8

  “You’re a phenomenal actor,” Rhee said coolly.

  “It’s why people like me.” He straightened up, a wry smile on his face. His nose was large, with a strong line to it—it looked disgustingly perfect on his face, as if every other feature had been placed there just to frame it. He’d always made her nervous, how immaculately handsome he was, but now something seemed odd about his face—a twitch in his lip, a squint of his left eye she had never noticed before. His energy was off.

  “I don’t like you,” Lahna said casually, breaking the silence. Rhee almost laughed. That, at least, got a frown from Nero. He was probably not used to being around people who spoke the truth so easily. The guard with the eyepatch shifted just slightly behind Nero, the stunner on his belt in full view. He and Dahlen were locked in a staring contest.

  A grimace passed over Nero’s features as if he’d smelled something foul. “For the love of the ancestors, lighten up, Yendit!” he yelled back to his guard. “Same goes for all of you, especially the Empress.” His gaze wandered from Rhee’s head to her toes. “You wear your resentment in the line of your jaw, in your posture.”

  “You’d have me look more agreeable?”

  “The scowling doesn’t suit your delicate features.” Nero smirked. “You’re the Rose of the Galaxy. Think of the support you could’ve garnered early on if you only smiled a bit more.”

  Rhee read the subtext. If all she was was a collection of delicate features and rose petals, then surely her job was to wear a pleasant expression and put people at ease. As if her face didn’t belong to her, wasn’t linked to the emotions she felt—the grief and turmoil swirling inside her.

  She hated this man, how he did vile things and dedicated his entire existence to gaining more power—to what end? She hated even more how he could cover up his wickedness with a superficial smile and a well-cut suit.

  She smiled now, squeezing the coin tightly between her thumb and the knuckle of her index finger. “I suppose I was too busy imagining all the painful ways I could kill you.”

  It was true, in a way. She had cultivated her mind and her fighting technique for ultimate vengeance all these years, though she’d been seeking vengeance on the wrong man. Until now.

  “But I still found time in my busy schedule of envisioning your death to win the public over.” He was so poised. He’d spent years in front of the media, and it showed. Sitting before him, Rhee could feel her inexperience. “You really ought to consider your image more,” he continued. “Wouldn’t want everyone assuming you’re just a daddy’s girl, here to extend his soft policies. You’ll appear weak, just as he did.”

  “If his policies seemed weak to anyone, it’s to the weak-minded—the ones who believe violence and war are the only answers,” Rhee fired back. “You wouldn’t happen to know anyone who fits that description?”

  She leaned forward, an elbow on either knee, trying to take up as much space as possible—a thing she’d seen men do often. But for all her bravado, sweat gathered on the back of her neck. That specific phrase he’d used set off alarms all over her body. Daddy’s girl.

  “In fact, I do.” Nero leaned forward too. “Only about half the galaxy.”

  Daddy’s girl. She couldn’t focus, or properly exchange barbs with this pathetic excuse for a man—truly, her only pleasure in sitting across from him. Daddy’s girl. Daddy’s girl. Daddy’s girl. It repeated in her head. It was the exact same thing the man had whispered at her when she faced the crowd in front of the palace, on her arrival in Sibu. The protester certainly hadn’t been the first to call her that—nor would he be the last. Still, the timing of it put her on edge.

  “Won’t you finally explain why you instigated those attacks on the Empress’s procession yesterday?” Dahlen had grown tired of listening.

  “Me?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “As if I would stoop so low. As if I needed to.” He actually seemed offended by the suggestion—was it possible he was telling the truth? “I didn’t sully your homecoming, my dear. History did. You did. Those who’ve opposed Ta’an rule for years aren’t going to just flip. I invited you here so that we could perhaps strike a deal, like civilized people. Find a way in which we work together to fulfill our mutual obligations. After all, two minds are better than one, Empress.”

  “She’d never work with you,” Dahlen said. He spoke the words Rhee herself wished were true.

  “Rhiannon, is it going to be a habit to let a Fontisian speak for the crown?” Nero shook his head. He’d parted his thick, dark-blond hair to the side—the new style in the capital.

  Rhee ignored the question. She had her own agenda, and she’d indulge this as long as she could stomach it. “What’s in it for me, if I agree to work with a liar such as yourself?”

  But Nero cut her off before she could continue. “I’m not a liar, Empress. I’ve merely embellished.”

  “You made the public believe in fictional threats, just so they’d take your side in this war. You tip them in your favor more and more each day!” Rhee felt Dahlen staring at her openly now, but she wouldn’t meet his eye. She turned over the terrible truth of her situation: He was in control of her image. UniForce was loyal to him. There were spies in the palace. Her throat closed as if he were strangling her, like he’d strangled her legitimacy. Her ability to rule.

  “Tell me exactly what’s fictional about a dying planet? About a lack of resources? And about having to share those precious resources with people who aren’t even from here!” His northern accent came out as he’d made his last point. All the carefully constructed imagery he’d created fell away. He was worked up. His hair had fallen in front of his face.

  “Ancestors,” Rhee cursed. “You believe in this drivel.”

  Veins bulged in his neck, and Rhee caught a glimpse of a dark spot, triangle shaped, just behind his ear. It unsettled her—this imperfection on a man always so perfectly groomed. “Is it really too much to ask you to see this perspective?”

  “Yes, when the perspective is a bigoted one,” she said.

  “I can’t help it that this appeals to them,” he said, gesturing to his face. “Twelve generations of the same stuff and people start to think it’s unfair. You Ta’ans being born into your power . . .”

  “Enough.” Rhee stood up, and Yendit moved forward, prompting Lahna to stand in defense. Nero wasn’t wrong—she had been born into power, and for so long she’d seen it as a given. A right. But how could she address any unfairness or injustice under the thumb of a madman?

  Rhee desperately wanted to spar, to address this the only way she ever knew how. She wasn’t cut out for diplomacy. But through her teeth she asked: “What is it you actually want from me?”

  Nero frowned and ran his fingers through his hair. “It hasn’t even occurred to you that I could possibly want to help you, has it?”

  “No,” she said. “It hasn’t. You’re a compulsive liar and a sociopath.”

  “Fine.” He threw his hands up in the air. “Look, there’s still a large population that wants a Ta’an to rule. Loyalists and all that,” he said with a wave. “Rather than an agonizing political struggle, or a power play where you try to convince my second-wavers to jump ship and I try to convince your supporters to switch over, let’s just combine forces.”

  It was ridiculous that he’d even think she’d fall for it. He opposed everything the Ta’an dynasty had stood for all these generations. Honor, bravery, loyalty. Everything she stood for. And she would never forget his talk of “whispering into cubes” as he stood over Dahlen’s unconscious body.

  This was so obviously a trap, she could’ve laughed. Nero wanted to keep her close so he could keep an eye on her, prevent her from finding out the truth about him and exposing it. He wanted to control her, manipulate her, get under her skin like he had with everyone else in the damn galaxy.

  There was no better way to find out the truth than from
the inside. He wanted to keep her close.

  But who’s to say she wouldn’t be the one keeping an eye on him, controlling him, finding ways to undermine his rule?

  “Let’s say I agree . . . then what?” The question gave the room the feeling of a pressurization chamber—it crushed her where she sat. Behind her, Dahlen and Lahna said nothing, but she could feel the anger and tension in them.

  He leaned back, intolerably smug. “I gain access to the palace, to you. Just the occasional briefing or so. A DroneVision spot, perhaps. And you’ll get the Tasinn back, at least for your appearances. In exchange, you might find that people will start answering your comms, Empress.”

  She wondered how long it would take the Tasinn to kill her if she moved to strike Nero. “I expect that this arrangement would include pulling the UniForce troops out of Nau Fruma?”

  “Effective immediately.”

  “And our ultimate goal would be to move toward peace?”

  “I think it would move us in a mutually beneficial direction,” Nero replied.

  After a pause, Rhee said: “I’ll consider it.”

  “Don’t wait too long to decide.” Nero smiled—a real, genuine, pearly smile of predatory satisfaction that made Rhee’s stomach turn. He paused, eyeing both of her guards again. She saw every muscle in Dahlen’s body stiffen out of the corner of her eye. His anger was practically vibrating off his body—she could feel it coming at her in hot waves—but she resisted turning around. “After all, I wouldn’t want something terrible to befall you, Empress.”

  She suddenly felt cold; she realized she’d balled her hands into fists unconsciously. He probably knew that her death now would be terrible press, even for him. But they both knew the truth: She was a target. The Empress was still far from untouchable, and Nero garnered more support with every day that passed. There were those who resented a young girl on the throne—one who had intentions of making decisions and challenging the existing order. The idea of her as Empress had been much more attractive when she was a withering rose on a far-flung moon, waiting to be plucked up and saved.

  She ushered Dahlen and Lahna quickly back toward the elevator. The daisies awakened suddenly, and hovered over them as they passed.

  “My next broadcast is in two days,” Nero said behind them. Rhee paused at the threshold of the doors. “I’d be obliged if you were my guest.”

  Dahlen glared out the window over the city. It was Lahna who grabbed her arm and led her inside the elevator.

  “Let’s not delay, Empress,” she said. “There’s still much to do.”

  Part Two:

  THE ABANDONED

  “The honorable transcend; you of pure hearts must shed all desires that do not serve your purpose.”

  —The Teachings of Vodhan

  EIGHT

  KARA

  THE Frontline Physicians medcraft was a piece of machinery so enormous and so ancient, Kara could barely believe the artificial grav still worked on board. It had blasted off from Nau Fruma two days ago, and Kara had been sure to be on it—putting as much distance as she could between her and the place where Aly had abandoned her.

  In another room, a DroneVision personality was reciting Rhiannon’s plummeting approval ratings. Again. Kara was thankful when someone turned it off. She wondered if the Empress would be better off if she hadn’t put a call out for Josselyn. The second-wavers were using that as an opportunity to call her coronation into question and undermine her rule.

  Now, Kara fished the cylinder she’d found in the Lancer’s dojo out of her pocket. It had nearly broken in the blast, and she’d had to dig it out from piles of rubble.

  It had become a habit, almost a reflex, to touch it, to handle it, to watch it unfold its holo. How many times had Kara projected its message, the one that had opened specifically for her? The coordinates led to Ralire—which was apparently where the overwriter was hidden. Kara was en route there now; the craft she’d chosen included a pit stop on the very dwarf planet to which she was headed, and now there was little she could do but wait.

  When Kara had woken on Nau Fruma, she realized she’d been thrown by the blast and landed behind a concrete wall—miraculously, shielded from further harm. When she clawed free of the rubble, she saw the marketplace had been destroyed. The ground, the debris, her clothes and skin—the gray was everywhere, and she felt it seeping into the folds of her own brain. Ash blotted out the sky, and she breathed it in, coughed it out. Choked on it like everyone else running past and around her. She’d been knocked out from the blast. Her clothes were in shreds, and the prayer beads Aly gave her were gone. Somewhere she’d lost her backpack too, which contained the last of her meds. She searched for Aly, mystified how they could have gotten so far apart in the fighting. In the distance, her eye caught someone who looked just like him, boarding a craft without her.

  Kara hadn’t even called out; she was so sure it wasn’t him, and that he wouldn’t leave her. But when she saw the blinking lights of the droid he had been dragging beside him, she knew for sure—and by then she couldn’t call out. Her throat had closed off, and she felt paralyzed with shock and humiliation. Aly had left her behind. Neither of them even looked back. Not once. Even though she’d risked everything to save him.

  At least there was no room for heartache on the Frontline Physicians ship—not hers, at least. It felt like Kara had heard every sound of suffering a human could make in these past two days. It made her forget her own headaches, the way her jaw hurt, the nightmares she had. The medfloor was nonstop triage, though her primary duty had been carrying food and blankets around, translating as needed. No one used their cubes here, Kara included. In some cases, people’s had been damaged, mangled underneath the skin. But Kara just felt paranoid, safer if it was off.

  She knew of military-issued translation nets that you could cast around a room, but Frontline Physicians couldn’t afford anything like that—and it wasn’t like the military was going to donate one anytime soon. Droids could do literal translation of rudimentary language, but Kara could speak in a handful of languages—and have an actual meaningful dialogue. Lydia had insisted she learn them, and would do things like switch from Derkatzian and Wraetan mid-sentence just to see if Kara could keep up. In retrospect, it was hard to tell if Lydia had been relentless and exacting because she expected Kara would one day be a princess or a fugitive. And it was hard to tell if Kara was thankful for such a skill set or still pissed she’d been lied to, had her memory erased.

  Either way, there was something useful about that pain, a feeling she could channel when she translated for the patients. Kara was there to intercept all the words people used to describe pain and suffering, to parse through all the idioms and wade through the regional dialects and poetic expressions—to sharpen every description until the message was clear and concise. The medics couldn’t diagnose anything until they knew what hurt, and how, and with what frequency. So Kara let the patients tell her their stories, and passed on only what she needed to. The rest of it she absorbed, each narrative a drop in the ocean.

  Sure, hearing about trauma took its toll, but organic translation really did a number on her head. Without her cube on, Kara’s mind had to work double-time—and even when she pushed herself she could barely keep up. Plenty of times in the last few weeks she’d wondered about how different life was without her cube—harder, mostly. That absence of the cube computing away while you happily busied yourself with something else seemed foreign to her now. And at night she almost enjoyed the feeling that her brain had shattered in a dozen different places; there was a kind of mental exhaustion that kept her from holding on to any thought for too long. It was the perfect antidote when you were trying to forget you’d been lied to and abandoned.

  Probably everyone felt like that. The doctors were too busy dropping down into various war zones—mostly vulnerable Fontisian territories that were getting the crap bombed out of the
m by Kalu’s forces—to ask questions about why she was even there. The blowback from the conflict on Nau Fruma, which UniForce was blaming on Fontis even though it had been a resistance effort on the part of the WFC, overshadowed everything but survival. They were glad for the extra volunteers. They needed all the help they could get.

  In a cruel, practical way, the distractions were a kind of blessing. When she managed to push past the pulsing behind her eye, Kara’s mind kept turning over the info Pavel had found. That the overwriter could be used in targeted memory deletion on a mass scale, and Emperor Ta’an himself had signed off on the research. Was no one above corruption? Kara understood now more than ever how critical it was to get to the overwriter before Nero did.

  She was close. They were zooming in on Ralire, a dwarf planet and major pit stop before the epic dead space between here and Fontis. She’d learned that Ralire wasn’t neutral so much as entirely lawless—it was governed by the trade economy that burgeoned there, illegal and legal. Frontline was planning a touchdown soon to reload much-needed medical supplies. Kara rationalized that a re-up meant that it was the perfect time to swipe some meds that she’d need to keep her headaches manageable.

  She hit a narrow set of stairs that was more like a ladder—the angle was practically vertical—and crawled down as she gripped the cold metal banisters. It was so cramped, Kara couldn’t imagine anyone with a Fontisian or Wraetan build fitting their shoulders through. Kara was used to small spaces. She’d spent plenty of time in the air—killing time when she was stuck on zeppelins, on the Kalu–Navrum line, waiting for Lydia, who worked on one of those illegal traveling labs.

  The medbay was bustling with activity; it always was. Nurses and medics walked briskly, dodging one another with armfuls of supplies, careening gurneys through the tight quarters, and shouting out orders. She took advantage of the chaos and did her part to look busy, walking fast like she had somewhere to be. There were glass windows that looked into the operating rooms. Three in a row were occupied with patients and the flurry of medics and doctors treating them. As long as she found an empty one, she could pick the lock on the cabinet inside and raid it. Kara caught her reflection in the thick, smudgy glass of the window: her two-toned eyes, one a blazing green and the other hazel, a few dark freckles surfacing on her cheeks and nose . . .