When Stars Burn Out (Europa Book 1)

by Anna Vera

  Near the arena?

  Meaning the place where my work locker is located?

  “The false alarm is under investigation.” Jupiter’s words fade as I turn fast on my heel, ignoring Merope’s shouts at my back, and run toward the watery chaos.

  I feel like I’ve just been jabbed in the throat.

  The lockers.

  The alarm was pulled . . . by my locker!

  “Eos Europa!” Jupiter booms as I pass, his long-fingered hand snatching ahold of my elbow. “Where is it you’re going?”

  “The triggered alarm . . . was it in the locker room beside the arena’s entryway?” I ask quickly.

  “Yes, actually. The CORE notified us that it was.”

  I hold up the lanyard around my neck. My work keys, giving me access to Marathon, dangle suggestively before Jupiter’s dark and ominous eyes.

  “Sir,” I begin, not knowing at all where I’m going with this, but going for it nonetheless. “I—I just realized I’ve left the doors to the arena open. I planted crops this morning, and they are at risk of drowning if the area isn’t closed off from the showers.”

  Jupiter looks furious. “What?”

  “I’m sorry,” I beg. “Let me take care of it. I’ll be quick.”

  Jupiter studies me for a stretched second, his gaze as hot as coals pressed against flesh.

  “Be quick,” he barks eventually, and I launch myself into the dark hallway, icy water swallowing my ankles. The chaos from the assembly area fades, dying at my back as I trudge through the water pooling higher and higher, deeper with every level.

  Jupiter doesn’t know. Doesn’t know the alarm wasn’t falsely triggered, but intentionally triggered. He doesn’t know that just a day ago, a girl stared longingly at it for reasons I didn’t think twice about initially, but now understand.

  It was a back-up plan, the alarm. A last resort.

  Nova.

  6

  The water seeps into my shoes, leaving them soggy and squelching and startlingly cold. I ignore the feel of them, sprinting down the spiraling hallway that descends to the lower levels of the spaceship.

  Minutes later, I turn the corner and catch a glimpse of a redheaded figure jogging through the water, which now stands at nearly mid-shin. She swears viciously, her voice raw.

  Calypso.

  As though sensing my presence, she turns, darting a furtive glance over her shoulder. Our eyes meet—hers red and puffy from crying just moments ago. She must be going to the loading dock to deploy, stationed at the Ora’s lowest level.

  “The alarm has been turned off,” she tells me.

  I refrain from the urge to say, No shit, I have ears, given the loud pealing of it stopped like a heart nearly fifteen minutes ago.

  Instead, I ask something pertinent to me.

  “Shut off by whom?”

  “Pavo,” she says. Oh, is that so?

  “I’m going to close off Marathon. Has Pavo gone back to the loading dock, or is he still patrolling the area?” Calypso eyes me warily, so I add, “Maybe he’s already shut the doors for me.”

  Lie, lie. Lie some more.

  “He’s at the loading dock. We’re deploying now,” she says in a hasty, feverish tone. “I’m late.”

  “Right. Good luck,” I reply, but her back’s already turned on me as she stomps through still-standing water to the lowest level offered on the Ora: the loading dock.

  Okay. What now, Eos?

  To the lockers.

  I trudge onward, reflecting on how badly it would all end for us if the ship were actually on fire. Acknowledging the potential disaster a fire could cause, the ship has been equipped with top-of-the-line security and precautionary measures; the alarms and sprinklers in every room are just one of many radical safeguards in place to ensure a multi-billion dollar project doesn’t literally go up in flames.

  It doesn’t help that the Ora is like the Titanic in that there aren’t nearly as many podcraft necessary to take us all back to Earth if shit did hit the fan. They’re too expensive, podcraft, and can only carry seven people at a time—tops.

  Finally I reach the lockers, realizing abruptly that they’re all wide open, left ajar.

  I stand still, taking it all in. The chain of lights overhead sputter and buzz. Water rolls back and forth, receding like a tide over the gray linoleum flooring as our branch of the Ora tilts, readying to launch the podcraft with Pavo’s league.

  My locker is open. A few others are too. The clock at the opposite wall has stopped ticking. There is a stillness to the area that suggests a kind of dormant unrest. It raises the hair on my arms, tickles the nape of my neck like a cold, stale breath.

  I step in, breathing silently. Water drips, rolling off the lip of the locker cabinet and slipping in beads down white walls. For a few steady seconds, that’s all I hear. Drip, drip, drip.

  Then, BANG.

  I flinch, startled.

  The sound is from someplace around the corner, and after the echo of the original sound fades, there’s another.

  SPLASH.

  I lurch forward, peering into the lower level bathrooms.

  Debris falls from the ceiling in chunks; a solid square sheet of aluminum crashes into the water, leaving behind a black gap in the ceiling like a missing tooth.

  I inch closer, compelled by instinct.

  Why has only one sheet of the grid-like ceiling fallen?

  Air whistles out of the air duct overhead, but that isn’t the only thing I hear. A voice. A whisper.

  “Up here!”

  My eyes dart up, flitting immediately to the black hole in the ceiling. I see a face peering back at me, looking down from the small, square-shaped gap in the vent.

  “Nova,” I say breathily. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Get up here before they find you,” she urges, eyes nodding to the shower stall beneath her. If I climb it, it will hoist me just high enough to climb into the ceiling’s hole.

  I stare, abhorred. She really is crazy.

  “Hurry!” she orders, the timbre of her voice suggesting a genuine, underlying panic.

  The shower stall walls are slick with water, and I slip a few times in my effort to climb it. Finally, I grab ahold of the shower curtains, managing to scale up the wall’s side before ripping them off their rod altogether.

  Nova holds out a hand. “Here,” she says.

  I take her clammy palm and she heaves, dragging me up just far enough for me to use my own strength and elevate myself the rest of the way.

  The sheets of aluminum are a false, dropped ceiling. Higher up overhead is the real ceiling—so high it’s seemingly endless, as dark as the roof of a mouth.

  We scoot away from the edge, keeping ourselves hidden.

  I fix Nova with a critical glare. “Do you care to explain why you decided to disappear?”

  She gulps, refusing to reply for a few tedious seconds as she picks at a scab on her ankle. “I’ve been hiding from Pavo.”

  Hiding from Pavo?

  She’s lost it.

  I humor her. “Why are you hiding from Pavo?”

  Nova runs a tongue over her lip. “He’s trying to kill me.”

  I’m suddenly wildly aware of how truly suspicious we look together, hiding in the ceiling.

  “Turns out my skillset isn’t as irrelevant as they thought.”

  “What?” I badger, mouth dry.

  “My skillset ability enables me to see colors that don’t exist for other people, to see a broader scale. Harmless as it seems, it’s given me the ability to see things invisible to others.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Things like energy—solar, electrical.” Nova pauses for a few seconds, as though trying to decide if I’m worthy of being told any of this. Then she adds, “Souls.”
r />   “Souls,” I echo, trying not to sound as skeptical as I feel.

  “Souls emit energy. It’s called an aura.” Nova scoots a little closer to me, eyes lit up like matches. She traces a finger along the contour of my body. “And I can see them. They glow, like a rainbow sometimes, but other times they’re a solid color.”

  “What do the colors mean?”

  “The colors are indicative of mood—and one’s future.”

  I can’t stop glancing through the ceiling’s hole. If I’ve got the bad luck of Jupiter remembering I’m down here, he will be looking for me soon.

  Or if my luck is even worse, Pavo will stop by.

  “He’s trying to kill me,” Nova reiterates.

  “Yeah, you’ve mentioned that—why, though?”

  “Everyone has an aura,” she says so quietly I almost can’t hear her over the groan of the ship and the subsequent splash of rolling water. “Everybody except the mentors.”

  Nova tries grasping my hand, but I recoil away from her as fast as a cobra’s strike in reverse. “You’re not well, Nova.”

  “Nobody can know the mentors don’t have souls like us, that they are different in ways we can’t—”

  A noise disrupts her. Splashing. The undertones of a voice barely muttered. Every second it draws itself closer to us, and I can’t decide if I’m going to leap out of the gap in the ceiling and run for my life, or hold perfectly still and silent, and hide.

  But before I can do either, Nova hastily whispers, “I needed to tell somebody. Eos, your group deploys next. You’ve got to warn them that things are not as they seem—”

  “Shut up!” I hiss as the footsteps approach. She doesn’t.

  “. . . and now it’s up to you,” she cries, eyes so dark and full of tears, they look like pools of wet tar. Her skin is as dark as the shadows shrouding her, leaving me to focus mainly on the stark whites of her eyes. “Tell your league that when they get to Earth, they must abandon their Purpose and run.”

  This gets my full attention.

  “What?” I gasp. “What did you just say?”

  “When they get to Earth, they must betray the Project.”

  “But that would make them traitors,” I say, regurgitating the exact sentiments expressed by Calypso just hours ago.

  Nova shuffles backward in a way that causes a disturbing amount of noise.

  “Stop moving,” I hiss, not realizing what she’s doing until she’s already doing it—lifting the lip of another sheet of metal at her right side.

  “Who’s the real traitor?” she whispers, crying as her nails rip the sheet of metal out of place, sending it crashing into the shallow water below us. Two gaps in the ceiling now: the one leading to me and the one that’s a diversion. “Is it the liar, or the person being lied to?”

  I reach for her but am too late. She falls through the ceiling and back into the water just as I hear Pavo enter the bathrooms in a tirade of frantic splashing.

  The angle I’m sitting at positions me just perfectly. Through the gap at my side, I can see a mirror.

  And in the mirror, I can see Nova.

  Pavo slows his approach. I can practically hear his lips lift into a sinister smile. “Done playing hide-and-seek?”

  “Where’s my brother?” Nova asks.

  “Deployed. Halfway to Earth by now.”

  “Are you going to tell him the truth?” Nova’s voice is solid as steel and impressively strong. “Are you going to tell anybody what is really going on here? What the Ora really—”

  In a flash, Pavo is gripping Nova’s throat in his fist. I can see her feet swing, barely grazing the water below, as he lifts her up high and fixes her with a startling black gaze.

  The pair shift out of view. A second later, I hear a heavy thud against the water and am glad I didn’t fully see it—because somehow, somehow, I know it was Nova’s body that just fell.

  I hear Pavo’s footsteps splash off. When I can, I dip my gaze through the gap in the ceiling, my hair falling in a silver halo around my face.

  “Nova?” I whisper. The blood rushes to my face as I dangle upside down out of the hole. “Nova—are you okay?”

  Then I see her.

  Nova’s body lies motionlessly in the water, her eyes devoid and empty, and suddenly I find myself swallowing back an acidic influx of hot bile, failing to stay composed.

  I choke back a visceral scream.

  Pavo killed Nova, just as she’d said he would.

  i stumble, fingertips trailing over a railing running alongside the curved wall of the hallway.

  Everything is opaque, stained in gray shadow. I barely have the coherency needed to properly navigate myself through the ship’s twisted low-level innards.

  I feel like I’m wandering, looking at what’s ahead of me but not really seeing.

  My mind’s eye is locked on Nova’s limp and lifeless body.

  I stop walking.

  I don’t even know where I’m going.

  The hallway is so absurdly dark. The frigid water from the fire alarm sprinklers hasn’t even reached this deep, soaked up and swallowed by drains on its way down the spiraling hallway that circles the ship’s core.

  Where is Onyx?

  I haven’t spoken with her since the day she spent forty-five minutes writing up my termination order, but in the face of a friend’s death, it’s Onyx who I feel compelled to go to.

  I will tell her everything.

  Everything her brother has done. Everything I’ve—

  A voice. “Eos?”

  I turn dazedly and see my league standing before me, all four of them dressed in similar, panicked expressions.

  Everybody except Apollo looks terrified.

  I realize Onyx isn’t with them.

  For some reason I address Apollo with my question instead of anybody else. “Where is Onyx?”

  Apollo’s brows pinch with intrigue. “Are you . . . okay?”

  “Tell me where I can find Onyx.”

  Apollo glances back at our—his—league, as though asking for permission to speak freely.

  I stare daggers. “Where is she, Apollo?”

  “She’s meeting us right now, at the loading dock.”

  “The loading dock?” I breathe, looking at Merope.

  She looks like she’s near tears, not because she’s deploying tonight and she’s afraid of leaving—but because Pavo’s league deployed just moments ago, and is already gone.

  Disappeared. Just like the others.

  I shove Apollo aside in order to get to her. “Pavo’s league?”

  Merope looks so haunted, she’s almost unrecognizable: eyes cut wide, lips pale. She looks like a ghost.

  “Thirty-four seconds after landing on Earth, they all began falling off radar. Just like the rumors,” she says distantly.

  I cast a glance at Cyb and Lios, each looking grave.

  Suddenly, I feel furious.

  “They have to call off your deployment,” I spit. “Unless they have a new game plan, they can’t expect for subsequent leagues to succeed when the others—”

  “Oh, we’ll succeed,” Apollo says slyly.

  I’m about to ask how that is, when a voice echoes through the hallway. My head snaps behind us, finding the source. Even from a distance, I know it’s Onyx.

  I sprint off and am turning the corner, just close enough to finally announce myself, when I’m arrested mid-step by the sight before me: Onyx’s eerie pitch-black eyes find mine, resting uneasily as her brother stands beside her, tight-lipped and angry.

  “I tried taking precautions,” he raves on, speaking in a loud whisper-shout, not noticing me at all. “But when Mind Scanning didn’t work on her, I realized—”

  Onyx raises a hand, halting his tangent.

  Pavo follows her line of vision,
finding me at last. “What are you doing here, Europa?”

  “That hardly matters, Brother. I’m sending her back.”

  “But, Onyx—” I start.

  “You’re no longer a league member,” she crows. “You need to leave this place immediately.”

  Onyx grips my upper arm and begins escorting me away when I’m held back by something, by another set of equally thin fingers and the buzzing feel of white noise.

  Pavo has ahold of my other arm.

  There is a very awkward beat of silence during which I’m the rope in a tug-of-war. The tension in the air is so dense it’s palpable, leaving everybody on edge.

  Onyx glares at him. “Release her,” she snarls.

  When Pavo speaks, it’s through a growl. “The Ora has lost the last five leagues to deploy—including my own, which was by far the strongest from our branch.”

  Onyx snorts. “That is debatable.”

  “My league was capable of manifesting fire, controlling the weather, and brainwashing. What skillsets, Sister, do your specimens have to offer?”

  I glance back at my league, disgusted by the fact that I’ve got to agree with Pavo. How could my league possibly be any better off than his?

  “Make your point, Brother,” Onyx replies dryly.

  “I’ve seen this girl fight in hand-to-hand combat against a male specimen twice her size, and win,” Pavo says passionately, his nostrils flared. “And why did she succeed? Because she had familiarized herself with her enemy. She was clever, resourceful, and had identified his weaknesses.”

  “She failed her exam!” Onyx brays. “It’s illegal to send her.”

  “I don’t give a damn if she’s failed her exam, or if she’s skillset-less, or if she’s a drooling invalid. She’s deploying with your league because she is smart and she can fight.”

  Pavo gives my arm a violent tug and Onyx loses her grip.

  Onyx looks like he’s just slapped her. “You’re mad.”

  “Sending Eos is an advantage we cannot—and absolutely will not—pass up, Sister. This glory is ours to be had, and I won’t allow a few petty rules to get in our way.”

  Pavo’s face contorts, forming a grimace that speaks to just how agonizing it would be for him to see another branch granted this precious opportunity.