Dahlen shrugged at her, with not the least bit of sympathy.
As Rhee seethed, the Fisherman made a clucking sound. “The Vodheads can’t be trusted—the freaky potions they drink do something to their brains,” he said. Vodhead was a slur, one Rhee knew but had never heard anyone actually use. “How’d you end up in the company of a madman like him?”
“Same way I ended up in the company of a bully like you.” Rhee shifted in her seat as she eyed the creature. “The universe just has a way of bringing unlikely people together.”
The Fisherman squinted at her, sizing her up. “The bully, the madman, and the empress,” he said, stretching his mouth out into a smile that took up all the space on his pointy chin. “I like the sound of that. Now let’s get down to business!” He held up his free hand so that the octoerces wrapped a single tentacle around his palm. “It’s going to sucker itself to your face and bring the blood up to the surface in a random pattern,” he continued. His eyes narrowed in pain as the octoerces squeezed around his wrist and fingers. After a few seconds he yanked its head away and the whole thing loosened, leaving a series of faint, red circles. “Like this, but much darker. You’ll need five minutes, though.” The Fisherman reached into a drawer and pulled out a white rag. He tossed it to her. “Might want to put this in your mouth,” he said. He must’ve seen the confused look on her face. “So that you don’t bite your tongue off. Hurts, this one does.”
Rhee numbly put the rag in her mouth. It smelled fresh and was newly starched, seeming at odds with the dank place. Rhee’s breathing became shallow. She willed herself to stay calm. There wasn’t even her cube to distract her, some peaceful memory, some sensory program she could employ.
Just five minutes. She’d killed a man in less than five minutes.
The creature came closer and closer until she could feel its sticky tentacles exploring the left side of her face. You will not scream, she told herself—but she did want to scream. She wanted to run, too, but it was too late.
Then the slick, strange thing attached itself to her with a sucking sound, and pain exploded in her head. Stars burst in her eyes, though she wondered if they were blood vessels. It felt like it was slurping up her brain to the surface of her skull; she couldn’t think clearly. She could feel it suck on her eyeballs, too, through the flimsy flesh of her eyelids.
The Fisherman gave his hand to her then, strong, dry, scaly—but at the very least, familiar. “Just a little longer . . .” he said, in a surprisingly gentle voice. “Be strong.”
A tentacle fell across her neck, and she saw Veyron choking, gasping on his own blood . . . Her cry was muffled in her throat. She couldn’t breathe.
Then the Fisherman’s voice reached her, so quiet at first it seemed to be coming from inside her blood, from the murmurings of her own pain.
“The Outer Belt is home to many things that science says should not exist,” he whispered. “Strange creatures. Magic creatures. They shouldn’t be alive and yet they are, they stay alive, simply because their will to live is so strong. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Princess?”
She did. His hand in hers, the pain, the clouds of color. It all made sense, it all resolved into a single message she knew by heart: She would find Seotra and make him pay.
She tried to focus on her revenge, on how it would feel to sink the knife into him. But instead, she called up not her deep hatred but the moment with Julian in the dojo when they’d been inches apart—the feelings she didn’t know how to define, and the almost kiss they’d shared.
Starbursts continued behind her eyes. Pain sang through her veins. She should not have survived. Twice, she should not have survived. But she had.
• • •
Rhee wrapped her robes around her tightly as they walked toward the Crystal Monument, where the mourning ceremony would take place. She could see the vapor of her breath. The icy air on Tinoppa exhilarated her; on Nau Fruma Rhee had only ever felt the sun burn her skin or watched as the heat made things in the distance appear blurry and strange. But there was something certain about the crisp weather here, like time had been frozen and she, only she, would be responsible for setting it in motion again.
“The Revolutionary Boys star Alyosha Myraz is still at large,” said Nero on the public holo screen. It cut to footage of Aly scowling, then to the Eliedio exploding. The image always made her flinch. How many people had been on board the royal cruiser? How many crew members did the Eliedio require? She had never thought to ask, and now she regretted it. “The Kalusians have upped the reward to five hundred thousand credits.” Nero put his hand over his heart. He looked exhausted from the around-the-clock coverage.
Rhee had seen Nero with that same weary look on his face, just weeks after her family died. He’d been younger then and even more fresh-faced, without the tiny wrinkles across his forehead that he had now. It was her first interview since the accident—one she hadn’t wanted to give—but she had been urged by her advisers to restore the public’s faith. She’d felt numb as the cameras rotated around her. When Nero saw her face, he’d called them off. In private, he’d leaned over and squeezed her little shoulder. “The ancestors saw it was an honorable death,” he’d said. “Through them we ensure a new, worthy leader will rise.” Rhee remembered looking up at Nero, surprised and grateful. It had been the first time anyone had spoken to her like an adult.
“Don’t gape,” Dahlen said, pulling her from her memory as he nudged her along.
“I’ll finish what I started. Get ’em all.” Alyosha’s voice, amplified, boomed out over the space, as on the holo screen the Eliedio combusted into stardust.
The Revolutionary Boys star had been blamed for her murder, and Rhee had no idea why. She knew Seotra had opposed the measure to accept Wraetan refugees years ago, but would he really stoop so low as to frame the most high-profile Wraetan on DroneVision? Why was he so eager for war?
Rhee wondered how and why Seotra had chosen him. She’d seen his reality show—it was a little bit cheesy, which was exactly why she liked it. Vincent was the more popular star, with his blue eyes and easy smile, but she’d always preferred Aly, the black guy with the habit of shying away from the camera. She’d admired him for refusing to quit, too, after it came out he was Wraetan.
You’ve been blind, Veyron had said. Blind and willful.
“We haven’t discussed the plan should you fail,” Dahlen said.
“Your faith in me is heartwarming.” The plan was simple: She must get close enough to Seotra that she could sink Veyron’s blade deep into his heart. It was elegant, Rhee thought, that Seotra would die at a ceremony meant to mourn the princess he had tried to murder.
Dahlen was silent for a moment. “Hand me your knife.”
He produced a whetstone and wielded it lightly along the edge. She watched him impatiently. He moved with painstaking slowness, as if they had all the time in the world, as if there wouldn’t soon be a man on the other side of the knife.
Unexpectedly, he began to speak. “You can’t apply too much pressure to the blade,” he said. “You move the steel in the arc—one fluid motion, like so—so that the entire length of the edge sharpens equally. The angles must be precise.”
“It’ll work fine for my purposes either way,” Rhee said.
“A knife is not only for killing,” he replied. “A knife might be used a dozen different ways, all of them subtle, some of them unexpected. And you’ll be glad you planned ahead, worked all the angles, sharpened it to perfection . . .”
Dahlen was talking about the day she would become empress. Hadn’t Veyron said something similar—that Rhee needed to think, to plan?
“I was ready when Veyron came for me.” Rhee’s voice was without pride. It was laced instead with guilt, and anger, and the memory of the man’s blood-slicked hand reaching for hers as he died.
“It won’t be the same as it was with you
r trainer.” He remained focused on the blade. “Every death by your hand is different than the one that came before. You’ll be changed.”
“I’m counting on it.” She wanted to be changed. It was revenge that directed her focus and gave her purpose. The hole in her heart would finally be filled.
He held up the newly sharpened knife and examined its edge. The silence stretched. “Don’t say you weren’t warned,” he said eventually. “Every time it’s for the worst.”
He handed it back to her. In the reflection of the blade she saw the damage done by the octoerces: a plum-colored scar that covered half her face, and burst blood vessels that made her entire right eye red. It gave her speckled, hazel iris a dark brown color.
“Do you think of those moments?” she asked. “The moments that changed you?”
“The order does not encourage recall. It’s the reason we turn off our cubes, as part of our vows. Even our fellow Fontisians don’t seem to understand that memories cloud judgment. They make one . . . weak.”
Rhee wondered what he could possibly mean. Memories were the foundations for people’s lives. Who would she be without her memories? Without the crystal clear moments with her family, preserved forever in her cube?
“What was it like? Growing up the way you did?”
“You’re not asking what it was like. You’re asking what made me this way.” Dahlen almost smiled; his mouth moved as if it had been touched by something bitter. “Erawae was a territory to which we did not belong. But there was no place for fear or sadness when Vodhan walked beside you. He knew every move, every intention of my heart.”
“How do you know he exists?” Rhee asked. “How can you be sure?”
“You do not doubt your ancestors. I do not doubt my god.” Rhee could tell by the way Dahlen’s eyes went cold that there would be no more conversation. “We should not delay any longer,” he said.
They gathered along the chain-link fence that surrounded the site: dozens of large, jagged crystals arranged in a semicircle atop a grass knoll. They were easily three times Dahlen’s height, some of them even taller—but all of them had a beautiful cloudy quality to them, and reflected the light in such a way that all the colors of the spectrum were trapped in the crystal formations. No one knew how they’d got here; early civilizations couldn’t have had the technology to move something so impossibly heavy. It was thought to be a religious site for an ancient species, perhaps one that had retreated to another planet.
Rhee saw the image of her own face projected above the crystals. Hundreds of people had gathered, possibly to mourn Rhiannon, possibly just because they hoped to tell future generations that they had been there. So many witnesses, she thought, as the gates swung open, and from here she could see the crowd surge. The smell of incense hung in the air.
She moved to join them, but Dahlen stopped her. “You won’t be dissuaded.”
He spoke flatly, but she knew it was a question. She shook her head.
Something moved behind his eyes, an expression gone too quickly for her to decipher. It was as if a sigh had moved through him in the form of a shadow. “Grip the knife in your hand and drive the blade up, here, into his kidney,” he said, taking her hand and pressing it against the spot just under his rib cage. His stomach was hard; he was breathing heavily. “He won’t survive. Do not wait to check.”
Rhee pulled back. Stunned. Confused. The same hand that was close to Dahlen’s vibrant body was about to take a man’s life.
A life for a life. For all the lives, of her mother and sister and father.
“Let’s go,” he said, then led her toward the entrance. The crowd made a path as it caught on that she was Marked, not knowing the disfigurement was on account of the octoerces. Some were polite in trying to conceal their horror, but others turned or shrank away from her. During the Great War, Fontis had dropped its biological weapon first, though Kalu retaliated—and the result was a mass die-off from radiation and cancer near all the drop sites. Those who survived were changed, and they passed the mutations down through their lineage. And their children, if they had children, would be Marked—scars, boils, health problems—each generation worse off than the last. They saw the ugliness of war when they saw her.
She didn’t miss the way they looked at Dahlen, and how their eyes lingered over his tattoos.
At the entrance, the stream of people narrowed, but she moved freely after the crowd gave her a wide berth. A Tasinn, his face wide and the shape of a mooncake, nodded at her to enter. Dahlen forked to the right, around to the other side of the wrought iron fence where the rest of the crowd stood. She was pushed forward by the force of people behind her, but she kept her eyes on Dahlen until he was swallowed by the masses.
Around her, people were chattering in languages she couldn’t understand. Now she was too hot; it was so crowded she could almost imagine that she was back on Nau Fruma pushing her way toward the marketplace. But the mood wasn’t happy or carefree. There was nothing to celebrate.
Instead of families and merchants, the crowd was made up of children, many younger than her, all of them pushing forward like a single living organism. Hundreds of people were weeping, and Rhee felt as moved as she was disturbed. Did they truly mourn her? Or were they here to partake in spectacle, to say they had been at the vigil for the Rose of the Galaxy?
These were her people—the ones she would serve, dedicate her life to, just like her father had—but she didn’t know them, didn’t know what they were thinking or what they feared. When this was all behind her, she would think of them, always. But not a moment sooner. Not until Andrés Seotra took his last breath.
In the distance, Rhee could see Seotra standing at the edge of the crystal formation, his face turned down as if he were deep in thought. Rhee could kill him just for the false grief on his face.
She was also, unexpectedly, overcome by a desperate wish to see Tai Reyanna. She was convinced that if she could just look the woman in the eyes, Rhee would know once and for all if her caretaker had betrayed her. But the crowd had begun to snake up the hill, and her view of Tai Reyanna was blocked. Before the vigil started, people had forced their way up to the crystal formation so Tai Reyanna could lay her hands on their heads, touching them for a brief moment as she mumbled a prayer.
Closer, closer, closer Rhee moved. Step by step. Person by person.
Fear began to beat a rhythm in her chest, and she kept wiping her hands on her tunic, terrified that when she grabbed for her knife, her palms would be too slick to hold it. As she approached, the crowd became less generous despite her mark and shoved back, though the look of disgust was plain on their faces. Rhee knew that even if it had been manufactured, she’d been marked in her own way: the last Ta’an, a bad omen of sorts, as if the family history of tragedy were contagious. She’d never felt more anonymous, or more alone. Instinctively she sought Dahlen out in the crowd. It was telling, the way he killed with confidence. It meant he’d had practice, and had done it many times before.
A wave of momentum traveled through the crowd and pushed her forward, knocking her to her knees. Something was wrong. Rhee had never been superstitious, but she knew immediately—the thought of one bad omen had triggered another. Suddenly she had to break free, to kill Seotra now—before it was too late.
Rhee plunged through the crowd, ignoring the children’s moans and complaints. The harder she pushed, the more ashamed she felt.
“Think you’re special?” someone growled in her ear as she passed.
Did she think she was special?
You think you have all the answers? Veyron had said.
Someone grabbed the back of her hood, another one her arm. She wrenched away from a boy with a shock of red hair, his face covered with plague scars.
“Wait your turn,” a little girl cried, but she couldn’t wait. Seotra had to die, now, before she lost her chance.
She w
as close now, a short sprint. She could see Seotra and the Tasinn guards behind him, hands ostentatiously resting on their holsters. He was smiling. That smile—it was the same smile that had moved across his face as he watched her parents’ craft embark.
It was a smile, wasn’t it? A smile of knowing, of triumph?
Not simply a look of relief because they were escaping? Now that she couldn’t call up the memory on her cube, she couldn’t be sure.
Time slowed. It was the final stretch. She pushed and shoved her way forward. Blood thundered in her ears, and it almost drowned out the children behind her, jeering, calling her names. So close now that she could almost, almost reach out a hand to touch him . . .
She froze.
At that second, Tai Reyanna, bending over a toddler to murmur a blessing to him, looked up and saw her. And Rhiannon nearly died. She nearly turned to liquid and melted into the ground, because she knew—she knew—that Tai Reyanna had seen right past the mark on her face, had seen and known exactly who she was.
Tai Reyanna’s mouth dropped open in surprise. Seotra, puzzled, began to turn in Rhee’s direction.
Now.
And then, just as she reached for her knife, a hood fell over her face, and two arms encircled her so tightly the air left her body in a rush. Rhee inhaled the raw fiber of wool as she opened her mouth to scream and found that there was no air in her lungs.
TEN
ALYOSHA
DERKATZ, Aly decided, was the armpit of the universe.
And after three days on the run from the UniForce and staying offline, hopscotching with Vin between the shadiest of intergalactic safe houses, he could say he was the definitive expert on the topic. Kalu had just declared martial law across all their planets and airspace—which meant that border restrictions were tighter than Regent Seotra’s you-know-what. Just getting out of the core territories had taken balls of steel.
When stopping to refuel, they’d stuck to sad little asteroids that didn’t bother scanning anyone coming or going.
Empress of a Thousand Skies Page 10
