by Ali Cross
“You killed Cook.” I’m stalling, but my mind seeks desperately for purchase and is only coming up blank.
“Of course I didn’t kill her. Do you really think I would do such a thing?” He flicks his fingers down his red suit, tugs at the cuffs. A pleasant smell wafts off of him and despite myself I breathe in. He smiles knowingly.
“Who the blazes are you?”
“If you think back, you might remember. I am Galen. I knew you as a child—a beautiful little girl. Precocious too. So inquisitive. So intelligent. How much of that was the Gift, and how much your natural abilities?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t.” He doesn’t sound like he believes it. “Archibald’s been in touch with you, hasn’t he?” When my only response is a blank stare while I fight emotions I’ve never felt before, a flicker of doubt crosses his almost-human eyes and his permanent smile drops a millimeter or two.
“Interesting.”
He opens his mouth to say something else, but before he can get the words out, a blast shoots through my peripheral vision and slams into the Mind ship just outside the windows.
Galen pushes me aside and attacks the controls. At first his fingers fly around the buttons but then his body goes rigid and still. I walk around him, waving my hand in front of his face, but he doesn’t see me. His eyes are completely overrun with swirling, silver sparks. Unseeing. Unblinking.
The lights on the Mind’s ship flicker red and a shimmering shield materializes around it. The next blast rattles against the shield, and the shockwave crashes into us, making me stumble against Galen. When he grabs my upper arm, I nearly jump out of my skin. Between one blink and the next he’s returned to himself. His blue eyes are no longer blank, but as sharp and piercing as a knife.
“You’re going to get on the com and tell them you don’t need their help.”
“I don’t even know who they are! What are they doing here?”
He stares at me with an openly disbelieving expression. “You can’t truly be this ignorant.” And then he laughs. It starts out normal enough—a low chuckle. But as he grips my arm tighter, his laughter escalates to hysterical levels.
“The supposed savior of the human race and you know less than a single nanobot.”
I try to yank my arm from his grasp, but his fist is a vice, threatening to break my bone. Another blast hits the Mind ship and Galen releases my arm, but pins me against the console with his body. He lets go of my arm, but now he has me pinned against the console. “You have your mother’s features, you know. The mindless masses would have loved to worship and adore you.” He lowers his mouth to my neck, just below my ear. “Frankly, I’m surprised the guards didn’t kill you long ago—surely they’ve used you up. You’d never be accepted as queen now.”
My mind is numb. I can feel something in my veins urging me to think! To flee! To kill him! But the other part, the bigger part, feels every one of his words like a slug to my gut.
Galen presses painfully against me. He may be a creature of the most advanced technology, he may appear entirely human, but his body is harder than a man’s and his weight is crushing. “There was a time when I thought we would rule together—a perfect alliance between human and superior.” He runs his lips along my jaw. “But now you’re not even worthy to be the grit beneath my feet.”
I can feel power gathering within him, I know he’s about to lash out—but I’ve never backed down from a fight before. Except, it’s like I’m stuck in a loop and can’t find access to my limbs to give them commands. Galen is squeezing my arms against my chest. Squeezing and squeezing, making me gasp for breath.
And then his body goes rigid again, with a sharp crackle and pop in the air that makes the hair on my arms stand up. Galen’s fingers flex open and he arches his back away from me. I dash to the side, out of his way. There’s a man, my age, maybe a little older, standing in the doorway. In his hand he holds a gun unlike any I’ve seen the guards carry. He steps toward Galen while his gun emits threads of electricity into Galen’s back.
This isn’t my fight. I don’t know these . . . men. But I won’t let them get my people. I rush into the transport, falling to my knees and shouting down! And I lose sight of the battle unfolding in the command center.
A loud whoop whoop fills our pod as the pulsing lights flash red. We are moving. I access the ship’s data stream but the information is encrypted and I am unable to decipher it.
“What is happening?” I ask the commander of our group. He surely knows the answer but he presses his lips together and closes his eyes. In a moment he has linked with the ship, resting while streaks of light swirl just beneath his skin.
Soon all my pod-mates have followed suit, entering rest-mode as is protocol when the lights are red.
But my mind is too disquieted to rest. There is too much at stake, too much I don’t know. Including how it is that we are in motion and yet I still feel Serantha near.
My leg bounces from pent-up energy as I watch a travel pod exit the Mind ship and dock with the Capital near the Com. It is only when the pod’s lights go dark that I allow my small ship to move out of the shadows and dock next to it.
I contact the pod’s interface and my heart leaps. This is the chance I took, the risk I made in guessing Galen’s actions. And I was right—his pride has driven him to the Capital to relish the entirety of the destruction he has brought on the human race.
Oh how I long to return the favor.
The ship is laid out much like my own Capital. I’m glad because I don’t want to take the chance that Galen might be alerted to my arrival. It is only two flights from where I stand to the Com, so I take the stairs and ascend as quickly as I can.
Before the door I take a moment to draw my weapon and charge it.
As soon as the lights around the grip flash green I push through the door and aim, unflinching, at the red-clad back before me.
Victory fills my veins and a sort of euphoria makes my vision soften around the edges. And so it is with surprise and confusion that I register another being in the room—a human. But she flees before I can question her and I’m not about to leave Galen now that he is within my grasp.
When the transport opens into the kitchen, the first thing I see is Minn’s back. She’s standing in front of the transport, straight and tall, her legs shoulder-width apart. In front of her, scattered around the room, men and women sit, casting wary glances at each other. Someone has cleaned up the blood on the floor and covered Cook’s body with a blanket.
I get to my feet and slowly step out of the transport.
“Sera,” Minn says, casting a sidelong glance at me. She’s holding a guard’s baton in her hand and it looks as easy in her grasp as ever it did in Gart’s. “What’s goin’ on?”
“I don’t know.” My whole world has turned upside down and I am not sure of anything. “There’s another ship. Another . . . person.”
“Elites? Andies?” a man asks from his position on an upturned crate.
I shake my head. “A man. Human.”
“What of the ones from last night?” Minn asks.
“One, the leader, is still here—fighting with the stranger.”
The man rises from the crate and tucks his thumbs into the waist band of his pants. “Then it’s of no concern to us. Why haven’t the andies moved us away from here? Out of danger?”
I look from him to the others. They are all standing now. They are watching me, some moving closer. But it’s not anger or fear I see in their eyes. It’s wonder. It’s hope.
Another man steps between me and the one who questioned me. “We figured it out,” he says. “We know who you are.”
A flicker of fear races over my heart, zipping through my veins. I don’t even know who I am.
“We’re sorry we didn’t figure it out sooner. But none o’ us had ever met the royals. None o’ us ever thought we’d ever see ’em—and certainly not flying from a garbage chute i
n the form of a dirty little girl who hardly talks at all.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My words are cold, ready for a fight. The man moves closer and nods briefly at Minn who has straightened, like she is prepared to fight him if he gets too close. To her, or to me, I’m not certain.
“Dillon.” Minn’s voice holds more warning than the charge she sends through the baton.
“Don’t worry, lass, I’m not gonna hurt her.” He kneels on the ground in front of me. “You might have forgotten who you are, but we remember. We only hope it’s not too late for you to forgive us. We’re sorry we didn’t take better care o’ you. We’re sorry we didn’t treat you better, that you frightened us. If we’d known . . .” He shakes his head, cursing himself. “We shoulda treated you like one o’ our own. We shoulda guessed.”
“Guessed what?” My voice is a whisper, a song on a breeze.
“That you are Princess Serantha.”
Murmurs rush through the crowd in a pulsating rhythm. He said we, but it’s clear not everyone has come to the same conclusion. A few drop to their knees, their chins to their chests. But others remain standing, clearly uncertain of Dillon’s proclamation.
One of them steps forward. “You’re about as crazy as a starving fool.” He produces a knife from inside his drab uniform. “She’s been nothin’ but trouble ta us since she got here and now she’s gone and killed Cook. I say we end her. Send her to the stars.”
“She hasn’t been any trouble,” Minn says, moving closer to me so our arms touch. “How many o’ you have lost your women to the guards when they felt in the mood? How many daughters were soiled by them before Sera came?
“Mal,” she leans toward the one with the knife, “didn’t the guards do such damage to your own girl that she set herself free to the stars? Didn’t they never leave ’er be? So she was never in the kitchen, but in their beds, day and night?”
“You shut the blazes up, girl. You don’t go talkin’ about my dear one like that, hear me?” He brandishes his knife, but to my surprise, Minn sets her baton on the ground. Dillon picks it up, but it isn’t to cause harm to Minn—he stands and positions himself on my other side.
“Do you know how many of us have been taken to their beds?”
Mal swallows hard, his eyes flicking from Minn to Sher, who has her arms wrapped around Tam. I can’t tell what they think of all this, whether they believe I am the princess or not. Whether they know I’ve been protecting them or not. Because I have been. I don’t know why, but I have.
Minn places her hand on Mal’s arm. “None of us. Not one.”
“It’s because she likes it, that’s what. It’s because she’s prettier ’an any o’ you.” His eyes flick back to Sher. “No offense.”
“There’s a reason she’s prettier, you dolt,” Dillon growls.
“She doesn’t like it, Mal. She doesn’t even let them get close to her. But what she does do is unman them. They are afraid of her and because they’re afraid, they’ve left us alone.” Minn’s tone is soothing, and her words meant to disarm my detractors—but they leave me completely undone. Is this true? Does she really feel this way?
“They still come for my woman!” a man calls from the back.
“Yeah, well she does like it!” Dillon shouts. A ruckus starts out then, both women and men rushing against one another, curses, insults and jabs flying. My protector stands in front of me and backs up so I’m standing inside the transport again. I don’t know where to go though. I can’t go up—Galen and the stranger be there.
“Because of her, my Sher is still pure. It’s because of that Sera, that’s what. And I for one, thank her for it.” The woman’s voice is so quiet, I don’t know how it penetrates the noise in the room, but we all hear her. She makes her way through the crowd until she’s standing between Sher and Tam. She puts her arms around each of their waists.
“Sher is pure, and Tam too. When was the last time we’ve seen one of our young girls remain innocent so long? Did any of you take a woman to wife and find her innocent?”
Another murmur winds through the crowd.
“Maybe she’s kept our girls safe. And maybe that’s a good thing,” Mal finally concedes. “But she ain’t no princess. Look at her!”
Dillon doesn’t move out of the way though, so I’m sure no one can see me clearly. I feel suddenly worried about what they might see if they truly looked. What is a princess supposed to look like? Minn turns her dark eyes toward me and gasps. She rushes forward and pulls me out of the transport, pointing to my face. “Look!”
She takes my arm and pulls me around the room, pointing to my face, making sure everyone gets a good look at me. I finally have enough and pull my arm from her grasp, but she’s already won, she’s smiling with pride. “You all saw what Gart did to her two days ago. You can’t just explain it away like we did all those little things when she was just a girl. She’s not just a girl anymore. She’s our princess.” With a quieter voice she adds, “She’s the prophesied one. The evolved one.” She makes a point of getting as many people as possible to make eye contact with her. To acknowledge her words. “You saw it!” A few nod their heads, dropping their gazes to their feet. “She shouldn’t even be alive with the way he cut her. And she most certainly shouldn’t look like this!”
Of their own accord, my fingers find my cheek, my lip, searching for the bumpy scar. Now my skin as smooth on one side as it is on the other.
“She’s been healed. How many of you can do that?”
“She’s an andie!” someone shouts from the back of the room.
“She’s too beautiful, you dimwit,” Dillon calls. A few people mutter in agreement.
“Then she’s one o’ them fancy ones—the ones that tried to use our girls last night.”
Dillon just shakes his head. “You’ve seen her bleed. All of you have seen her bleed! She’s bled for you! She’s been black and blue and cut all over stepping in and taking the abuse of that blasted Gart and his cronies.” Then he thinks of something else and points his baton at my eyes. “And look at her eyes! She’s no Elite.”
Dillon marches forward, pulling Minn behind him. She moves to my side and smiles. I am without words, without action. I’ve never considered anything like this. Never considered any one of them would stand for me. Never considered I was different from them in a way I could never have imagined.
Me, a princess? A queen?
“Princess?” It’s Dillon who’s speaking, but it’s not until he tugs on my wrist that I realize he’s addressing me. When I make eye contact with him, he kneels once more. And this time nearly three quarters of the people join him.
“Will you forgive us, lady?”
I am speechless.
I am no lady.
But can I forgive them?
Years of neglect, years of them letting me take the guards’ attentions, their abuse, if it meant saving one of them—shouldn’t I hate them? I search my feelings. Do I hate them? I don’t think I do.
I nod my head the barest amount and Dillon’s shoulders relax and Minn’s smile reaches her eyes.
“Lady, will you lead us?” The words have barely flown from Dillon’s mouth when the ship lurches and I’m thrown forward, falling onto Minn. We help each other up just in time for another blast.
And now the ship is crying out in pain. I feel her burning pain race through my veins, hear her cries for help. I must cry out, too, because Dillon is on his feet, his arms reaching to brace me. “My lady?”
I look around at all of them. It would be easiest to step back in the transport and just go somewhere else. Somewhere nothing is expected of me. Somewhere I don’t have to see the distrusting gazes of a quarter of these people. Fury beats off them in palpable waves and I’m sure they will kill me the first chance they get. Why should I help a people who have been nothing but awful to me?
Finally it’s Minn who convinces me. She’s been so kind. It might have only been the last thirty-six hours, but hers hav
e been the first kindnesses of my life—the first that I remember, anyway. And Tam and Sher. And now Dillon. How can I deny them?
I might not know everything Galen seemed to think I should, but I do know this ship. I can feel her reaching to me, demanding I help her. For her, then. And for these few. I will lead them.
A violent shockwave rocks our pod and several events occur at once: I am physically thrust from my station, the lights in the pod flash with a pattern between red and yellow; and orders from my unit leader enter with highest priority through my mind. We are under attack. We must be ready to respond without prejudice.
I feel the urgency, feel the weapons embedded in my arms powering up. I know my orders. Know that I have been reprogrammed to accept and follow my orders without thought. The desire to be a good soldier is strong.
But no directive is stronger than the purpose of my creation.
Nothing can overwrite my need to protect Sera.
Nothing can replace my love for her.
Satisfaction courses through my body, as electrifying as the volts shooting from my gun into Galen’s back. His shoulders arch and he jerks uncontrollably. The thrill of it is almost overwhelming.
“Your weapon will have—” Galen pauses as he forces his shoulders to square off, even though the electricity still pounds into him from my gun, “no lasting impact on me.” He turns, my charge still connected with his back, and faces me. His cheeks twitch with each volt, but his eyes are clear. He has the same sharp intelligence Natalya possessed—but there’s something else, an edge that makes him seem almost demonic. Maniacal.
Galen forces his lip into an upward curve that’s given a sinister look by the twitching in his face. “You are such an innocent, Nicolai. So completely unaware of the world around you. The ship. Its . . . people.”
There’s a deliberateness to his words that disturbs me. I’m tempted to glance around because I know he’s implying that I should have, that I was too focused on him to properly assess my surroundings. But I resist. I refuse to give him any kind of satisfaction.
