When Stars Burn Out (Europa Book 1)

by Anna Vera

  When

  stars

  burn

  out

  When

  stars

  burn

  out

  ANNA VERA

  WHEN STARS BURN OUT

  Copyright © 2015 by Anna Vera

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author.

  For information regarding permission, contact:

  AnnaVeraBooks@gmail.com

  ISBN-10: 0692564691

  ISBN-13: 978-0-692-56469-1

  Cover and Internal design by Najla Qamber Designs

  Edited by The Polished Pen / Max Dobson

  Proofread by Crenel Publishing

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  To the underdogs

  THiRTY YEARS

  EARLiER

  A dark sky opens to a flush of neon-green light.

  The light falls, slow and sweeping. It stains the rooftops and empty midnight roads of a small city sleeping soundly at the darkest shade of night.

  The podcraft arrives silently. Though the light should act as a beacon, the craft goes about its business invisibly, descending to land in a soft-spoken neighborhood in Snowflake, Arizona. The craft exhales a string of four people dressed in cloaks of solid black, their faces similarly uneasy.

  The neon-green light is fast to disappear as the craft returns to the sky. Darkness falls, a black net cradling Earth in arms of depthless shadow, leaving behind the four people—who clearly do not belong—at the center of a vacant street.

  Leading the group is a young man: lengthy, with almond eyes as pitch-black as the night sky, and lips perpetually taut. He stands at the base of a street lamp casting out a dim, orange haze alongside the others, all women.

  “We’re breaking protocol being here, Pavo.” The woman speaking holds up a chin, her dark eyes a perfect mirror to the man’s she is addressing—her brother. “A single report of us being here could ruin everything.”

  “Nobody will see us.” Pavo glares at another woman, one with a cascade of magenta-colored hair, standing rather severely at his sister’s side. “Will they, Io?”

  Io’s fingertip reaches her temple; all at once, her expression sharpens with supreme focus. When she looks up again, it’s with a blare of confidence.

  “Nobody for a five mile radius,” she confirms gleefully.

  “See, Onyx?” Pavo frowns at his sister. “Satisfied?”

  Onyx doesn’t reply, watching as Pavo goes off the road and approaches a small house. A light glows behind a set of pale, lacy curtains—artificial and flickering. Television.

  Somebody is awake.

  Pavo strolls up the sidewalk, leading the rest of the group to a front porch decorated with houseplants sporting mismatched pots and a single warped wooden chair.

  Checking with Io, he asks, “Do you have him restrained?”

  Io nods, fingertip still pressed to her temple.

  Without another word, he walks inside. The three women, only a few years younger than their leader, Pavo—who’s no older than thirty—enter the house, operating with robotic circumspect.

  Pavo walks into a dimly lit living room, the television at its center a sparkling smear of static. Before it is a man, so stationary he could be mistaken for dead, sitting upon a sofa straining under the bulk of his weight. Though he appears to be asleep, the man’s eyes are wide open, gaping as extensively as his mouth.

  Paralysis.

  Though the man’s aware of what’s going on—of the strange interlopers dressed in black cloaks, with peculiarly dark eyes, and a host of mysterious abilities—he isn’t able to move a muscle.

  Pavo snaps his fingers at Io. “Wake him.”

  Io’s eyes skirt to Pavo’s sister. Onyx gives her a quiet nod of approval. She walks closer, eyes locked on the man sitting squat in his drooping couch.

  “How awake would you prefer?” Io inquires.

  “Don’t give him complete control—that would defeat the purpose of this experiment.” A brief glance at the group’s fourth member, and he adds, “Get closer, Peridot. You’ve got to witness everything first-hand or not at all.”

  Peridot steps away from Onyx’s side, treading gingerly to the man on the couch. With her there, Pavo instructs Io to lift a little of her power, partially relinquishing her grip on the man’s ability to move—so he’s still controlled, but coherent.

  Immediately the man wilts, limbs heavy. A deathly huff of breath drags itself through his lips. The group tightens rank at the man’s periphery, and the closer they come to him, the more ferociously the man begins to sweat; a band glitters across his forehead, perched upon his upper lip, dripping from his temples.

  He glares at his uninvited visitors, unable to speak—or to scream, rather—as he’d like. The network of capillaries webbed over his face burst. His eyes flare wide with the signature panic of prey facing predator, and the corners of his sclera become colored by a hideous puce-hued bloodshot.

  He wheezes, a question loud in his eyes: Who are you?

  They know far better than to answer.

  1

  The office’s ventilation system whirs, pumping recycled air through an agonizingly small air duct overhead.

  I swat my hand, fanning myself. The cramped office smells like a sticky exhaled breath: hot and wet and disgusting. I try to keep my mind on Marathon’s cool, fresh air.

  Relax. You’ll be there soon enough, Eos.

  My mentor sits across from me, a desk dividing us. She scribbles letters in a language I don’t understand over a smooth slip of white paper. Her fingers—nimble, thin, and bony as the rest of her—grip her red-inked pen a little too vigorously.

  We’ve spent forty-five minutes like this.

  A hot drip of sweat rolls down my spine, settling at the base of my back. I fidget in my seat.

  “Is there a . . . problem?” I finally ask.

  Onyx’s black eyes click up to mine—devoid and unreadable as outer space. Then they return to the slip of paper covered in a swath of red loops and swirls, hieroglyph-like symbols.

  Mentor’s Language.

  I stretch, cracking my knuckles. “Does everybody get a slip?”

  “No,” Onyx clarifies promptly. I’m shocked by her tone—it’s as unyieldingly sharp as a rose’s thorned bite, and though she’s prone to this breed of severity, today it feels . . . different.

  “Why am I—”

  “Shut up, let me write, and I’ll tell you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say, falling silent. I thrum my fingertips over the desk’s smooth surface, failing to stop fidgeting in a way that speaks to my nerves.

  Today is my final evaluation. If I pass, that means I’m ready to deploy to Earth as a soldier and fight the Muted—the vicious, bloodthirsty monsters infected by the plague. I’ve spent years of my life dreaming of the nights I’ll spend staring down the scope of a rifle, waiting for a Mute to come strolling into view . . .

  If only Onyx would hurry up with the paperwork.

  I chew a nail. “You nearly done?”

  “You don’t want me to be done, Eos Europa.”

  “And why wouldn’t I?”

  Onyx slams her pen down with a snap against the plastic surface of the desk. �
��What do you think this slip says, Eos?”

  She pushes the paper forward. There’s no way in hell I can decipher it. All I know is it sports a series of letters impossible to identify for those illiterate in the language, scrawled in red ink.

  “No. I don’t.” Though I continue to stare at it. “Is this part of the test or something? Finding a way to—”

  “I can’t pass you.”

  “You . . .” I trail off, her words sinking deeper. “What?”

  “I’m afraid you’ve failed your Final Exam.”

  “Which means . . . that I can’t deploy,” I add stupidly, feeling like I’ve been lanced through the chest with a blunt spear.

  It’s not possible. Nobody fails.

  Nobody.

  Onyx has the decency to look guilty, at least.

  “Why?” I gasp.

  “You know why, Eos.”

  “It’s not the skillset thing, is it?” I fan my palms out over the desk’s surface. The skillset thing—or not having an ability of the supernatural variety, thanks to my defective genetic coding—has been the bane of my existence for as long as I can remember.

  “I get my genetics aren’t ideal,” I say, “but I can still fight and shoot and wield a knife. I can still kill the Muted effectively, and is that not my Purpose?”

  Onyx casts me a truly pitying stare. “The Project authorized a single missed point on the exam, that is correct. They realize specimens, despite their design, aren’t all perfect.”

  “How many points did I miss, then?”

  Onyx opens a drawer, extracting a manila folder, and puts it gingerly on the desk. After she flips it open, I see it holds my test results, charted in a series of sporadically placed dots.

  I notice a few dots are way off. Outliers.

  Onyx taps the outliers. “You failed your Psych Eval.”

  Impossible.

  “I’m afraid you do not fulfill the requirements necessary to be deployed as a—”

  All of a sudden, I’m laughing. Maniacally.

  This is absurd.

  “So you’re saying I’m not psychologically sound?”

  “Not enough to be an adequate soldier.” Onyx refers to the chart beneath her index finger, providing a brusque explanation for each outlier. “You have an overinflated self-esteem,” she says, fingertip sliding to the next. “You’re overconfident in your own abilities. You possess delusions of grandeur. You’re bold to the point of being brash . . .”

  I yank the paper away from her, wrinkling it. For a tedious beat of silence, we stare each other down: her black eyes pinned to my muddy green ones.

  “Are you calling me a diagnosed narcissist?” I challenge.

  “This is your termination order,” she replies, apparently not intending to dignify my question with a response. “You’re not to become a soldier, but instead work as a groundskeeper—”

  “Groundskeeper!?” I whisper, nostrils flared.

  “If not that, you may work as a technician, keeping the cogs of our spaceship oiled.” Onyx stares unblinkingly. “Or, you may work in the kitchen preparing food.”

  The reality of my future wafts over me like stale air, and all I can do is stare with my jaw agape, feeling the color slowly drain from my face.

  “No,” is all I manage in the end. “No.”

  “You’ve missed two points; I cannot pass you.”

  “You are second-in-command,” I argue desperately. “Pull a few strings or something!”

  Onyx heaves a sigh, apparently bored. “There’s nothing else that I can do for you, Eos.”

  She begins packing the file, and in a jolt of panic I reach to take it away, to stop her—to stop this. Because as soon as it’s over, so are my chances at a life worth living. At a life fulfilling my one true Purpose.

  But as my hand springs forward, so does hers, catching my wrist inside her bony fingers. Instantly—as soon as we’re making skin-to-skin contact—the buzz of her skillset ability thrums from her grip in a wash of heat accompanied by a distinctive sound . . .

  A high-pitched, vibratory peal.

  Onyx releases my hand. The sound dies, replaced by words as cold and barren as a winter night. “To qualify for fighting as a soldier, you must not only have a solid psychological standing, but also a solid physical standing.”

  A stamp appears; she presses it down on my file: Unfit.

  “You have neither,” she finishes, stuffing my manila folder file back in the drawer.

  “You can’t do this,” I decry. “You can’t fail me!”

  “I believe that I just have,” she replies, eyes dull as she nods at the slip resting at the center of the desk. There’s a blank space left at the bottom, waiting to be filled with my preferred career.

  Preferred career.

  What an absolute joke.

  The legs of my chair skid loudly over the linoleum flooring as I shoot to a standing position, barely succeeding to keep my lips dammed—holding back a slew of words I’d love to say, but know would later regret.

  “Thank you,” I croak angrily. “For nothing.”

  Onyx stands with just as much vigor as I have—the legs of her chair, too, skidding loudly.

  “You’re aware, I hope, of what awaits soldiers?”

  “Glory?” I answer, knowing full well she’s expecting a totally different response. “Honor? A legacy?”

  “Death,” she corrects coolly.

  “Death,” I say, treading to the office’s door, “awaits us all.”

  My mentor replies by way of strutting forward to meet me at the office’s exit, her lips taut as a clasp as she forces the slip into my hand and says, “Someday you’ll thank me for this.”

  Thank you for what, exactly?

  She straightens herself, readjusting her jacket as though in the effort of remaining dignified. “You will inform your league of your new Purpose. Tell only Cybele, Helios, and Merope. I’ll be the one to alert Apollo.”

  Onyx nudges me out of her office door with a swift jab to the side and adds, before I can outrun the cruel words she sends chasing after me, “They will deploy to Earth without you.”

  2

  When I’m back in my pod, I lean miserably against the sill of the room’s circular window, begging myself not to blackout.

  Kitchen aid. Groundskeeper.

  This can’t be happening.

  I can’t help but curse myself for a fool. Has anybody besides me failed their Psych Eval before? Am I really so insufferable as to endanger others?

  My fist collides with the window.

  I lift my eyes, peering through the pane of glass, which looks out on an outdoor arena: a large, city-sized greenhouse covered by a dome of thick glass. Everybody calls it Marathon.

  My first thought is of the arena’s fresh air.

  My second is of its always-at-your-disposal supply of guns.

  Ah, yes. Let’s shoot off some steam.

  Before I go, I give one final look to Earth—a smear of color in the distance, a blend of churning, textured clouds. It hangs in the black sky like a glittering ornament.

  Up close, though? It’s hideous.

  A place of rot and decay, where the living are less alive than those already dead. A place that is expiring. A big, bleeding black mark striking a line through what could’ve been.

  I’ve dreamed of defending Earth’s remains, defending the history going up in smoke. With a blood-slick knife in my palm and a halo of Mute corpses fanned out at my feet. With dawn rising up against a dying night. Hope restored and faith renewed and a life worth living—not just for me, but for everybody.

  Being a part of that, it’s all I’ve ever wanted.

  That honor. That glory.

  I cringe against a swelling chaos in my ears, a deafening rip in my reality, as my memories rise a
nd bob like an untethered buoy to the surface of my thoughts.

  Everything I’ve worked for is gone.

  Everything I’ve tried to become isn’t who I am.

  Everything is full of holes, stabbed porous by a red-inked pen gliding over the smooth surface of a slip of paper.

  Punching through my pod’s doorway, I slip back out into the halls of the Ora. Before I know it, I’ve weaved through the twisted innards of this bulky, metal spaceship and am standing before a pair of steel doors marking the entry to the arena.

  And I’ve yet to be spotted by anybody I know.

  Thank god.

  I press a hand to the door’s fingerprint identification pad and two steel, slab-like doors shoot open. A gust of fresh air. A hiss as they close at my back, as I enter a room sized similarly to that of a large walk-in closet—brushed steel, exhibiting racks and racks of all sorts of guns, ammunition, weapons . . .

  My instinct is to bypass all the shiny, new guns in favor of an old revolver called a Smith & Wesson. It was recovered years ago by a post-deploy specimen who brought it back by accident. While we were training—to time manual reloading—I’d picked it up and felt an instant connection.

  It fit my palms perfectly, and it had . . . character.

  We don’t use bullets, obviously. We use pellets, which still hurt like hell, but at least they aren’t dangerous. I load a few into my gun and head to the actual arena, taking in the acres and acres of gorgeous vegetation: harvested a generation ago, managed by controlled climates and excellent—

  Groundskeepers.

  I shake the title out of my mind just as I hear the hissing of opening doors at my back—and a beat later, a voice.

  “How did it go?”

  Merope Poplar, a member of my league.

  And also my best friend.

  She’s standing in a dirt-smudged uniform, her porcelain cheeks smeared in charcoal face paint. I notice the corner of her lip is cracked, bleeding.