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Copyright © 2017 Paper Lantern Lit LLC and Rhoda Belleza
Map by Diana Sousa
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Ebook ISBN: 9781101999127
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For Ate.
Everything I’ve achieved is because you believed I could.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Major Characters
Planets
Part One: The Betrayed One: Rhiannon
Two: Alyosha
Three: Rhiannon
Four: Alyosha
Five: Rhiannon
Six: Alyosha
Seven: Rhiannon
Eight: Alyosha
Part Two: The Marked Nine: Rhiannon
Ten: Alyosha
Eleven: Rhiannon
Twelve: Alyosha
Part Three: The Departed Thirteen: Rhiannon
Fourteen: Alyosha
Fifteen: Rhiannon
Sixteen: Alyosha
Seventeen: Rhiannon
Part Four: The Avenged Eighteen: Alyosha
Nineteen: Rhiannon
Twenty: Alyosha
Twenty-One: Rhiannon
Twenty-Two: Alyosha
Twenty-Three: Rhiannon
Twenty-Four: Alyosha
Twenty-Five: Rhiannon
Twenty-Six: Alyosha
Twenty-Seven: Rhiannon
Epilogue: Kara
Acknowledgments
MAJOR CHARACTERS
KALUSIAN
Rhiannon Ta’an:
Crown Princess, sole surviving heir to the ruling Ta’an dynasty
Vincent Limam:
UniForce soldier, DroneVision star of The Revolutionary Boys
Andrés Seotra:
Former adviser to the late Emperor Ta’an and current Crown Regent
Tai Simone
Governess to Crown Princess Rhiannon Reyanna:
Reyanna:
Nero Cimna:
Kalusian ambassador to the Crown Regent’s office
WRAETAN
Alyosha Myraz:
UniForce soldier, DroneVision star of The Revolutionary Boys
UNKNOWN
The Fisherman:
Outlaw in the galaxy’s Outer Belt
PLANETS
KALU:
Most populated planet in the galaxy and ancestral home of the ruling Ta’an dynasty
KALUSIAN TERRITORIES
Navrum:
Terraformed asteroid
Rhesto:
Larger moon of Kalu, the site of a nuclear plant before the Great War
Tinoppa:
Tiny asteroid equidistant from Kalu and Nau Fruma, home to the sacred crystals
Chram:
Dwarf planet allied to Kalu
FONTIS:
Largest planet in the galaxy
FONTISIAN TERRITORIES
Wraeta:
Decimated planet, destroyed by a Kalusian attack ten years ago during the Great War
NEUTRAL TERRITORIES
Nau Fruma:
Smaller moon of Kalu
Portiis:
Outlying planet
Erawae:
Domed city on an asteroid in the Bazorl Quadrant
Part One:
THE BETRAYED
“After a series of tragedies befell them, it was believed that the Ta’an family was cursed. This made the sole survivor of that legacy, the young Princess Rhiannon, even more precious in the eyes of the public. When a reporter dubbed her ‘the Rose of the Galaxy,’ the moniker stuck. She was seen as something delicate, a thing to be preserved and protected until she came of age to rule. But Rhiannon had other plans.”
—Excerpt from The Iron Star: A History of the Ta’an Dynasty
ONE
RHIANNON
RHEE tore a path through the bustling marketplace, kicking up dust that fell slowly in Nau Fruma’s low gravity. The foreign tourists coughed and complained as she passed, but Rhee ignored them, scanning the fairgrounds for Julian as she clutched his miniature telescope to her chest. She wasn’t accustomed to being in a crowd; so much of her life had been spent looking down at one from a balcony, urged to wave and smile and look as ladylike as possible. But now, among the people, there was a jostle and roughness to it that Rhee found thrilling.
It was the golden hour, and the sun dipped just below the horizon. Risking a quick glance behind her, Rhee spotted one of the Tasinn plowing through the ebb and flow of bodies, headed in her direction. His khaki fitted uniform and polished badges stood out amid the sea of vibrant linen robes. His skin was ashen and pale, unlike the men who’d grown up on this desert moon and knew the heat of the sun by its true distance—not through the refracted beams and domed cities on Kalu. From here she could see that his hand hovered above the stunner strapped to his belt.
The Tasinn were the royal guard—her royal guards, technically, but they felt like a relic of her father’s era, wholly separate from the life she’d led here on Nau Fruma. They were an elite group of fighters plucked from the ranks of UniForce soldiers and trained in personal security. This guard was one of many men sent to find her so she could return home to Kalu, to the planet of her birth.
Rhee had been six when she left, just after her entire family had died in a crash—“an accident,” the authorities called it, a tragedy Rhee had supposedly been lucky to avoid. But she knew better. There were two things for certain: that her family had been murdered, and that she was supposed to have died at their side.
A homemade firework screeched into the darkening sky, its high-pitched fury petering out into a low whistle. It exploded in the distance. She wondered if her family’s ending had been that instantaneous and merciful.
Rhee slipped the telescope in her pocket and pulled her hood lower to hide her mismatched eyes, one brown and one hazel. She tucked back her jet-black braid and cut left between two rows of tents, squeezing past two laughing men. Dodging a tall woman carrying a cage, she flinched when the white bird inside flapped its wings—then felt silly.
“
Stay at the ready,” Veyron had always said as he’d held up two calloused hands for her to box and kick. She’d cycle through combos until all she could hear was her heartbeat drumming in her ears. In the dojo she wasn’t a girl or a princess. She was simply a series of intentions: dodge, strike, block, kill.
Kill.
Now her stomach felt twisted, like the cactus trunks she and Julian would find when they snuck past the palace walls. The smell of smoke and charred meat from a nearby market stall nearly made her gag. A Derkatzian girl with yellow eyes sat perched on a stool, fanning herself with one hand and holding out a root vegetable with the other. “Grown from real soil,” she called to those who passed.
Everyone was out: travelers and dealers from the fringes of the universe, local families, wealthy tourists. Tonight marked the eve of the Kamreial meteor shower, which came every 149 years. “Once in a lifetime,” the holos had said. “Never to be seen again.”
Which was precisely why the Crown Regent had arranged this night for Rhiannon to travel back to the capital of Sibu. The beloved Rose of the Galaxy, returning to Kalu in a shower of stars. It was all image and spin: a big fat lie wrapped up in a pretty bow. There was no love lost between Rhee and the Regent Seotra, who’d taken control of the throne until Rhee came of age. He’d been her father’s childhood friend, and a decorated war hero before he’d entered politics to become one of the Emperor’s closest advisers.
Until Regent Seotra had betrayed her family.
The Ta’an was an old bloodline. The throne had been in her family for twelve generations, and you could trace the Ta’an back nearly three centuries. They were among the first settlers in the east. The dark soil of Kalu was part of Rhee’s skin, the ocean in her veins, the roots of the trees her own. She’d spent weeks replaying her memories of her childhood in the capital, so that when she finally returned, it would feel like home.
Seotra had rallied the support to send Rhee to Nau Fruma in the first place. “For her safety,” he’d claimed. And while it was a politically neutral moon according to the Urnew Treaty, it also kept Rhee as far as possible from her true birthright—the throne. It was a power move to remain Crown Regent and block her ascension to power. Seotra was worried.
As he should be. Rhee would see to it that he pay for what he’d done to her family. She’d trained for years for the very moment when she would end his reign, and his life.
She only wished she could kill him more than once.
“Honor, bravery, loyalty,” she whispered.
Rhee looked back toward the palace where she had spent most of her childhood. It was high up on the hill, just a short distance from the town, though it felt like a world away—a prison meant to keep her from the real world, and her destiny. It had once been the second home of her family. To the east of it she could just make out the throat of an old volcano, isolated, rising up from the flat desert plains around it. Crown’s Rock. Tai Reyanna, Rhee’s longtime governess, had remarked on how fitting it was for Rhee to be so close to a crown.
“Eweg nich!” boomed a deep voice, and she was nearly knocked off her feet by a Modrussel. Its tentacle left a sticky residue on her clothing. Looking over her shoulder, she could only make out antennae protruding from a high-collared outfit, its clothes soaked with a slimelike secretion—as their temperatures ran high, Modrussels were known to sweat profusely.
She hurried on. A message came through her cube just as she reached the square, and Tai Reyanna’s call sign flashed across her vision. Rhee’s blood leapt.
The Tai was a sect of teachers and caretakers, and Simone Reyanna was a Tai of the highest order. She served the royal family and had been Rhee’s exclusive governess ever since her family died. Rhee wasn’t used to ignoring her calls. But she wasn’t used to running off in the first place.
Rhee knew what she had to do. Sucking in a deep breath, she brought her finger to the spot behind her right ear and pressed to power down. Immediately she felt dizzy, disoriented, like something essential had drained out of her. It was the security of being online, the comfort of never getting lost, the knowledge that every thought and experience would be recorded to play again and again.
But it was freeing too. Nothing would be recorded, and nothing could be accessed either. At least not the specific memories she’d programmed to recall immediately and in full, memories that seemed to absorb her. With her cube down, the chatter of the crowd instantly shifted from her native Kalusian language to different dialects from across the solar system. She forgot that her translator had been connected to her cube, and now the foreign words, tongue clicks, whistles, and beeps shattered the air around her. Her great-ancestors had managed without cubes, and Rhee wondered how they could have possibly learned so many languages just by studying.
“They’re auctioning off droids too. Decommissioned models . . .” a boy ahead of her said. His Nauie caught her ear, a local accent with a singsong cadence.
Julian. He turned around even as she picked him out of the crowd. His blue eyes widened. They’d been the same height for as long as they’d known each other, until he shot up a couple of years ago. She had to look up into his eyes now, which annoyed her to no end—it was a competition she would never win.
“Shhhh!” she insisted just before he called out her name. “You have to power down your cube. Quickly,” she added, when it seemed like he might argue.
“You’re being paranoid,” he said. It was supposedly impossible to hack into someone’s cube, but there were rumors that Seotra and his lackeys monitored the citizens this way, by invading their memories and observations through their cubes, and Rhee couldn’t risk it. “Besides, my mom told me if you do it too much you’ll go mad.”
So they said. Most people went their whole lives without going offline, but there were entire communities—hundreds of thousands of people in the Outer Belt—that hadn’t had native cubes installed. And what were a few minutes here and there offline? Rhee wouldn’t say she liked the feeling, but she liked the discomfort of it. With every minute she managed to endure, she felt stronger.
“Just do it,” Rhee said.
“I hate the way it feels . . .” But Julian put his finger to his neck and made a face like he’d been pricked with a giant needle, and Rhee relaxed. “And what are you even doing here?”
“Well, ma’tan sarili to you too,” she said, muttering the Kalusian greeting under her breath. Had she wanted him to be pleased? Rhee wasn’t sure.
She shoved her hand deep into her pocket and felt the cool telescope in her palm. It belonged to Julian—it always would. They’d known each other ever since Andrés Seotra had banished her—or practically banished her—to Nau Fruma nine years ago when he became regent. “My flight’s been delayed,” she added. It wasn’t exactly a lie, since the craft wouldn’t leave without her.
He glanced behind him at the boys he’d been speaking to, then turned away from them again, nudging her farther into the crowd. There was a layer of dust on his skin and matting his dark blond hair. Veyron, his father, was part Wraetan—but Julian looked Nauie through and through; his great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side was one of the original settlers on Nau Fruma.
“You know the Eliedio is one of the safest crafts out there,” he said, reaching for his cube out of habit. “There’s only a two percent malfunction rate, and there’s never been any kind of accident that—”
“That’s not why I left,” she said, grabbing his hand so he wouldn’t power up. She dropped it quickly. Ever since their last spar, it felt strange when they touched. “I’m not scared, if that’s what you think.”
“Okay.” He tilted his head and squinted, a thing she’d seen him do a million times before. Rhee stiffened at the way he sized her up, the way he seemed so certain he was right. “I just thought, because of what happened to your family . . .”
“Come on,” she said, grabbing a handful of fabric at the ed
ge of his sleeve. “The Tasinn are looking for me.” Rhee led the way as they threaded through another row of vendors, glad that Julian couldn’t see her face. She didn’t want to talk about her family. Instead she quickly described how she’d slipped away, evaded a Tasinn, and ignored her Tai’s call.
She gripped Julian’s shirt like it was a lifeline. He was her best friend—her only friend, really—and he was the son of her trainer, Veyron, who’d taught them side by side the past nine years. Julian didn’t like being offline for even a moment. He had to know everything, always—and loved using his cube to pull up some memory in order to prove a point, or to prove Rhee wrong. It was maddening. But now she wondered if she’d miss it.
It was getting darker. Hundreds of sparklers burned brightly. Night was falling quickly, and the sense of urgency felt big and real in Rhee’s chest. The sun was a massive, burning star—leaving, just like she was. But she didn’t know if she’d ever be back. Not after what she had planned.
They passed a crowd that had formed around a small makeshift ring, watching as two scorpions circled each other in the center. More of the insects were trapped in glass jars, trying to crawl their way out. A skinny bookie with sharp elbows hollered the odds and took bets on the side.
“So how much longer do you have?” Julian asked. “When does the craft launch?”
An hour ago. “Keep walking,” she said over her shoulder by way of an answer.
“Zuilie,” Julian said in a huff. “Are you going to be this bossy when you’re empress?”
Empress of a Thousand Skies Page 1
