ACROSS STARS AND BLOOD (The Malaki Series Book 1)

by L. A. MARIE

  “What are you doing up?” my father asked, and I spun around. He looked angry and I was suddenly scared.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Don’t give me excuses, boy,” my father said. “Go back to sleep. "

  “I’m scared of the dark,” I said.

  “Then you’re no son of mine. Did I raise you to be a coward?”

  I shook my head. But I was still scared of the dark.

  “What are you waiting for? Off with you!”

  I swallowed hard and hesitated. It was a moment too long. My father grabbed me, pulled me over his lap, and hit me so hard my butt cheeks burned. Tears stung my eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I cried.

  “Are you crying?” my father asked. “Stop it!”

  I couldn’t. The more I tried, the harder it was to stop crying.

  My father hit me again. And again. With every hit, I cried harder. And with every hit, he told me to stop.

  “I want mother,” I cried out.

  That pulled my father up short. He yanked me upright, his hands gripping my arms so tightly it hurt.

  “She’s not coming back, Thane. Do you hear me? Stop wanting her.”

  I nodded. My cheeks were stained with tears, but I wasn’t crying anymore. I’d swallowed the sobs, pushed them down somewhere far, far away.

  “Get back to bed!” my father yelled, shoving me away.

  I ran to my room, through the dark house, with only the light of the moon to light the passageway, making the darkness almost bearable.

  Chapter Four

  Emori

  It started as just a cough. I didn’t think anything of it at first. We all cough. The heating in our house isn’t great, I can’t always afford it. And we were cleaning all day yesterday. Dust is a bitch.

  But today, her cough was worse. Much worse.

  “What’s going on with you?” I asked, zoning in on her.

  “It’s nothing, Emori,” Naira said, pushing me away. When I tried to feel her temperature, she slapped my hand away.

  “You’re defensive,” I said.

  “Because you’re paranoid.”

  She shook her head. “I know people die of terrible diseases these days, but the flu is still a thing, and it’s nothing to be worried about.”

  “You don’t have the flu,” I said. I didn’t know how I knew; I just did. I had seen our parents get sick. I had watched them die. And it had started like this. Not quite, obviously. The symptoms were different. But something had been wrong, and suddenly, it had killed them off. We’d hardly had a chance to say goodbye.

  “I’m calling Lena,” I said.

  “Don’t,” Naira begged. “She’s worse than you are.”

  “We care about you.”

  Lena was the Navajo doctor. She still healed the old Navajo way, even though she used modern medicine, too. Because if they don’t believe, she always said, my magic won’t work for them. And then you give them pills that are made in the factories, by the people they do believe in.

  She had tried to save my parents, but she couldn’t. She had watched us lose everything that meant something to us.

  Lena also happened to be our neighbor. And she could help. I needed her to see Naira. I needed her to tell me that it wasn’t serious, that I was just imagining this new dreaded disease had already found us.

  Naira was upset about it, but I called Lena and she was here in less than ten minutes.

  Lena was old. Older than time, it seemed. Her skin was weathered with sun and wrinkled, and she wore traditional Navajo clothes. A woven skirt she’d probably made herself. A deerskin poncho and moccasins. Her gray hair was tied back. But her sharp eyes missed nothing, and she moved swiftly despite her age.

  “Let me see,” she said.

  “Lena,” Naira said respectfully. “I’m okay, you didn’t have to come.”

  Lena ignored Naira and pressed her hand against Naira’s head. She frowned and looked at me before she closed her eyes. After a moment, she shook her head.

  “You are warm.”

  “Flu and fevers go hand in hand—” she started coughing, cutting off her own sentence, and her cough had gotten worse since I had heard it first. It was a deep cough now, so deep it sounded like it roared from the middle of her chest. After coughing for some time, Naira was pale and out of breath.

  “You’re sick,” Lena said.

  “It’s just a cold,” Naira offered weakly, but we all knew the truth, now. It was getting worse by the second, almost.

  “Is it…?” I was too scared to ask if it was really that disease.

  “It is,” Lena said with a nod.

  “You don’t know that” Naira protested. But she lay back on the couch where she had been most of the day and closed her eyes. Dread twisted my stomach and made me feel sick.

  Lena walked to the door. She shook her head sadly. “I would offer my help, but after losing your parents… I’ve lost faith.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Please, it couldn’t be helped. Thank you for coming.”

  “Get help, Emori,” Lena said urgently. She gripped my wrists with her bony hands and looked me in the eyes. It felt like she was staring into my soul.

  “I will,” I whispered.

  Lena nodded, patted me on the head, and left our house to go back to her own. Her shoulders were hunched when she walked away, and I wished she didn’t bear the guilt of my parents’ death. It hadn’t been her fault.

  When I walked into the house again, my feet felt heavy. I walked to Naira, lifted her head gently. She shifted so that I could sit and she lay with her head on my lap.

  “We can do something about this,” I said.

  Naira opened her eyes. “Like what?”

  “There’s new tech on the market.”

  Naira frowned. “The black market.”

  “It won’t be for long. They’re testing it, it’s in the beta stages. But it can heal anything. Including unknown diseases.”

  Naira shook her head. “You know they won’t let us use that. The Malakus keep the good stuff to themselves. Even if it gets released, we can’t use it.”

  “I wasn’t planning on asking,” I said.

  Naira sat up, turning to look at me.

  “Emori, please. You can’t do that. That’s stealing. What if you get caught?”

  I sighed. “I steal all the time.”

  “Food,” Naira said. “What do they care about food? This is different. If you steal their tech and end up in jail…” Tears sprung to her eyes. “I don’t think I could bear it.”

  I touched her cheek to wipe away the tears that rolled over them, and her skin was blazing hot. I stood, wetting a cloth and bringing it back to the couch. When she lay on my lap again, I put the cloth on her forehead.

  “Promise me,” Naira said softly. “Promise you won’t do it.”

  I hated that she was making me promise. But if I was caught and thrown in jail, I wasn’t going to be able to help her, anyway. I just couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.

  “Okay,” I finally said. “We’ll figure out something. We can fix this. I’m not going to lose you, too.”

  Naira nodded and closed her eyes again. I ran my fingers through her hair. Her hair was lighter than mine. I had our mom’s raven hair. Naira’s was brown, like our father’s, but not as light as his. Her skin was lighter than mine, too. Almost as if I leaned toward our mother and she leaned toward our father.

  But we had a lot of both in us. Now that we had lost them, I looked for signs of who they were in who we were becoming all the time. We were all that was left of them.

  Naira fell asleep. For a long time, I listened to her rhythmic breathing. She coughed now and then, a low rumble in her chest. I hated hearing it, I hated that she was sick.

  She had asked me not to go after the tech. And I wouldn’t. For now. I had no idea what to do. How was I going to help her? If there was no cure for this disease, she was going to die. She was all I had left in this
world. A lot of my mom’s family had cut us off after she had married outside of her culture. And my dad’s family was in England. I’d never met them, I didn’t even know where I would start looking.

  It was just me and Naira. So far, we had survived. It had been us against the world, and we had gotten by.

  But if I lost her, I didn’t know how I would do it on my own. Physically, I would make it. But emotionally? Mentally?

  What I could do while I waited to see if Naira could beat this thing, was to see if the tech were real. It was only a rumor, after all. Maybe it didn’t even exist, and Naira had gotten worked up about my jail time for no reason.

  And I needed to find medicine. Even if it didn’t help, at least it would lessen the symptoms of what she felt right now. It would help her fight.

  When I looked down at my sister, her brows were knitted together. She was frowning in her sleep, worried, scared. She looked so young when she slept, so much younger than anyone should be when they went through everything we’d already been through.

  I wished I could have saved her, spared her all that heartache.

  But our life was what it was. We just had to deal with it. Tomorrow, I was going to head out to find out if the tech was real. And to find something that would pull her through, at least. And if neither of those worked, I would take the next step. Whatever that was. I wasn’t going to think about maybe breaking my promise to Naira. Promises were a big deal.

  But I could only keep promises to my sister when she was alive. And I needed her to stay that way. It didn’t matter if she was mad at me. I would break one of my core values, if it meant that she would stay alive.

  Still, it was just a guess at this point. I needed to figure out what was real. And until then, I would make sure that I could do for Naira whatever I could. And I would ask Lena to help again. She could pray over Naira, like she had my parents. She might have lost her faith, but I hadn’t lost mine. I needed Lena to be able to help.

  I couldn’t lose anyone else. Not again.

  Chapter Five

  Thane

  I had to start planning how to get the hell out of here. The days were dragging on, and I wasn’t going to let it turn into weeks, months, years. Some of the guys that were around me had been here for over a decade. No thanks, I wasn’t sticking around. They could rot in here for all I cared, but I had plans. I needed to get back home. Nolmilea was waiting.

  And I had things set up to make it happen. I needed to find my stash, I needed to get to my ship, and I needed to leave this hellhole they called Earth once and for all.

  “I’m curious,” Sten said. We sat on our bunks, doing fuck all, because that was all there was to do. The shit bucket was full and reeked. The guards had to come empty it at some point but it had been days and no one had bothered. Sten had pissed in the corner twice. I had done the same, we hadn’t had a choice. The bucket was kept for more important things. Shit didn’t evaporate.

  “About what?” I asked when the little twirp didn’t continue talking. I couldn’t decide if I liked the guy. Sometimes, it was nice to have someone around to talk to. He listened, too, which was a long-forgotten skill in the world I had grown up in. But sometimes he was an arrogant little fuck, talking big about himself, and it made me want to knock him down a peg or two, remind him that he wasn’t anything other than a bottom feeder.

  “Let’s say you do manage to get out of these cells without being seen, and no one stops you, and you make your way into the rec block. What then? That’s nothing but a square hole, if you think about it.”

  I pulled up my shoulders like I didn’t give a shit. “I’ll think of something when I get there.”

  “Really? You’re leaving this up to chance? Because chances are… you’re going to fall on your ass, and end up in the Shoe for so long you’ll forget what sunlight looks like.”

  I scowled at Sten and he pursed his lips a little. He talked a hell of a lot more freely than usual, but he was still scared of me. Good.

  The truth was, I wasn’t just going to leave it up to chance. I had been thinking about that for a long time. Sten was right, it was like a big hole. The buildings were above ground, of course, but it was a tunnel that stood upright, for all intents and purpose of discussion.

  A tunnel was round, though. It had no corners. But Rec Area had corners. And I could use corners. I was strong. My father had spared no expense when it came to my training, and I had learned a lot of things standard soldiers wouldn’t. Like how to use momentum and corners to scale a wall, for instance.

  I had never done something three stories high, though. I had done maybe one and a half easily. Two had worked, too. But three? There was no way I could keep my momentum going for that long without gravity taking its toll on me and dragging me back down.

  Not to mention the bullets that would sink into my skin because the guards would be shooting at me. Even if they knew I wouldn’t make the climb.

  No, I had to find another way to get out. I just didn’t know how. The only space outdoors was that Rec Area. The rest of it was all indoors, and the windows all conveniently turned to other buildings. None of them overlooked the outer yard. It was planned that way, of course.

  I tried to see the blueprints in my mind’s eye. I wished I had paid better attention to them. But I hadn’t figured I’d need to remember every inch of the damn place because I would be in here. I had thought even my dad had limits to what he would put me through.

  Well, I’d been wrong before.

  “I wish I could be sick again,” Sten said.

  “What?” The little shit sometimes made no sense at all.

  Sten shrugged, running his hand through his hair. It was short and cut terrible, as if something had tried to cut it by chewing it.

  “The sun falls on those beds at a different angle, you know? Makes you warm to the bone. I can’t remember when last I had that.”

  “When were you sick?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.

  “Just before you came, actually,” Sten said.

  “Where does the sun come from?”

  Sten looked at me like I was an idiot. “The other side.”

  Yeah, he was the idiot. But I knew what that meant. The infirmary had the windows out over the courtyard. Because if the guys were sick, they wouldn’t be strong enough to fight their way out. It was always like that. Fuck, why hadn’t I thought of this earlier? I just had to get there. But it had to be legit, I had to look really hurt. Otherwise they would just throw me back into the Shoe. But if I was too hurt, for real, I wasn’t going to be strong enough to get out.

  “You know what, Sten?” I asked.

  “What?” Sten asked, a little suspicious.

  “You’re not a bad kid.”

  He hesitated for a long time. “Was that a compliment?” he asked.

  I turned my back on him. Fucked if I was going to admit to it.

  I had to make a plan. I had to get to the infirmary, somehow. Could I fake being sick? I doubted they would let me go unless I had a fever. I had seen some of the guys on their death beds, practically, and they still weren’t taken.

  Broken bones? Maybe, but they couldn’t really be broken. Or broken skin. That might work. Stitches always got everyone worked up. And even if it was real, I could work around that kind of wound. Pain was just an afterthought. I’d suffered enough of it to know how to ignore it, as long as I could still use my body.

  That would be good idea. I could create a weapon of some kind and get into a fight. And be cut up in the process.

  Who would I fight? I wasn’t sure. Agai wanted my blood, maybe that would be a good start. But he wasn’t going to take it easy on me. Maybe that was exactly what I needed. What would I use to create a shank with? I needed something I could mould. Like a pen or cutlery. They didn’t let us eat with anything other than spoons, and metal was a bitch to work with. But I was sure I could figure something out. I just had to steal one of the spoons from the cafeteria without anyone noticing it was missing.


  They counted fucking everything in here, just to be sure.

  But I was sure I could make a plan. I wasn’t dumb, and I needed to get out of here. The longer I kept my bag in that dumpster, the more chances there were of someone finding it. A box with a lock was bound to attract attention sooner or later.

  It had attracted my attention, after all.

  “Are you going to tell me?” Sten asked into the silence. We hadn’t spoken for so long, I’d thought he’d fallen asleep. That was usually the only time he shut the hell up.

  “Tell you what?”

  “How you’re going to do it?”

  I started shaking my head to tell him no. It was none of his fucking business. But then I thought better of it. If I told him, he would tell someone else. Kid couldn’t keep his mouth shut to save his life. And if everyone knew, then it would make life harder for me. Guards would be doubled, everyone would be watched.

  Unless Sten shared the wrong information.

  “Have you ever heard of Flight of the Phoenix?” I asked.

  “Isn’t it Nenthemar, now?”

  “Not the city, you idiot,” I snapped. “The animal.”

  “Is it an animal?”

  I groaned. This guy was thick as shit sometimes.

  “It’s a bird that rises from the ashes.”

  “Oh,” Sten said, still not knowing. “I haven’t heard of it.”

  I wasn’t sure if he meant he hadn’t heard of the bird, or of the Flight of it, but whatever. I was making shit up as I went along, anyway.

  “It’s this maneuver they teach us in the military. But they don’t tell everyone. Just the elite.”

  Sten sat up and turned to face me, his face lighting up with curiosity. “When were you in the military?”

  I groaned. I hadn’t shared much of my life with him.