Empress of a Thousand Skies

by Rhoda Belleza

  Aly tried to catch Kara’s eye. But she was transfixed by the woman, or her drawing, or both.

  “And this is my hometown of Anheles,” the woman said, shifting her drawing to the side to reveal another paper underneath. Another wobbly drawing of a triangle. “The canals here freeze over in the winter, but it’s so beautiful to sit and drink tarnitana tea.”

  “May I?” Kara asked the woman, and feigned a closer look.

  Fine. He’d let Kara deal with the crazies while he and Pavel found a way off this thing—before they went too deep into Bazorl Quadrant and ended up a million astro units away.

  At the end of the car was a locked metal door. He pressed his face to the window, but could make out nothing but darkness.

  “P, take a look?” The droid extended his camera attachment two feet above him and angled it against the window, giving a decent impression of a human hand splayed against the glass. A flash went off and made Aly wince.

  “It’s a cargo bay.” Pavel might have learned to lie, but he hadn’t learned to whisper, and Aly shushed him hard. “There are two crafts. Series Aero and Gency.”

  The Aero was a mini freighter, probably for dropping off and picking up medical supplies. The other was a Gency ambulance, which meant it had good lines and lots of speed. A perfect getaway vehicle.

  “Aly!” Kara whisper-shouted to him. She was still standing by the crazy lady and her stack of weird drawings. He thought the goal was to make an exit, not a friend.

  He turned to tell her to hurry up, but when he saw the look on her face, the words died in his throat. All her color was gone. She looked horrified.

  No. She looked terrified.

  “Work on the door,” he told Pavel, which seemed to have the most rudimentary security system of all: an ancient lock-and-key mechanism.

  “I-I know her,” Kara whispered after he’d rushed back to her side. “That’s Mia Montenegro. She was at the G-1K, like my mom.”

  The woman was still babbling happily. “This one is a drawing of the sunset. Earlier today. So many brilliant colors.”

  “Look.” Kara’s voice cracked. She pointed at the woman’s neck, and as he looked, nausea rolled like darkness into his throat.

  There, in the place where her cube would’ve been, was a terrible wound, an ugly, gaping hole that seemed to have been sutured by burning. The charred skin was visible, and beneath it, a web of scar tissue in an exact triangle.

  He felt like ice was creeping into his veins. He looked around at the other people in their baggy green gowns. He realized the man playing the instrument was in fact just strumming the same two chords again and again. They acted like they’d been lobotomized.

  “I know all of them,” Kara whispered. Her eyes were like two gashes in her face. “They’re all scientists—that’s Isaac Renaldioe, a biologist from Nau Fruma . . .” She bit her lip so hard he thought she’d draw blood.

  “I’ve opened the door!” Pavel announced, so loudly Aly expected alarms to sound. But none did.

  “Come on,” Aly said, and went to take Kara’s hand. But she yanked it away.

  “We can’t just . . . leave them,” Kara said.

  Aly looked at her and realized she was serious. “Kara, there’s no way,” he said gently. There were dozens of patients.

  Still, she didn’t move, and Aly fought a building desperation. The word evil kept drilling through his mind. He wanted out of here, as soon as possible. Could he leave Kara behind? He knew he couldn’t. Not only was she his way into the safe house, but she was probably the only person left in the world who didn’t think he was a murderer. He’d already lost Vin . . .

  He reached for her hand again; she didn’t pull away, but her hand was listless, flimsy.

  “Look, we can help them better if we find your mom,” he said, though he had no idea if this was true. “Kara?”

  To his relief, she nodded, and shifted her grip to thread her fingers through his. He had her. They would leave together.

  The cargo bay was dark, but Pavel lit the way down the ramp and up into the craft. Aly felt a thousand times better when they were strapped in and Pavel managed easily to override the security prompts.

  “All right,” he said a little too loudly to fill the silence. “Let’s get the hell out of here, huh?” He peeled off his fake bandages, amazed by how good it felt to be back in the command seat. This was his home, now: running through the vast reaches of the universe. Maybe he’d been born to be a refugee.

  Kara said nothing. She had turned away from him, and she was trembling like it was negative degrees.

  “Hey.” He reached out and put a hand on her thigh, then pulled away—scared it’d been too much. “Are you okay?”

  “Don’t you get it?” she said in a small voice. “Do you know what that was? Do you know what they’re doing to those people?” Kara turned at last to look at him, and her eyes were dark and wet. “Someone is mining their cubes. Pirating them.”

  “That’s impossible,” Aly said automatically. The pod gave a sickening lurch as they jerked away from the main ship, but his stomach didn’t settle, and the vertigo didn’t go away. Stealing cubes . . . taking them by force . . . The idea went through him like a fire, turning everything inside to ash. It was the singular law across the universe: Cubes were protected. They contained people’s impressions, memories, thoughts, dreams. You could transfer things cube-to-cube, easy. But hacking into someone else’s cube, even stealing the hardware after they died, was indecent, evil—like a violent, twisted kind of murder. In any culture on any planet, everyone was in agreement. That was the whole point of the G-1K summits, to make sure that the laws were standard across the universe. And to make sure there was some moral standard too.

  Aly was suddenly furious at Kara.

  “How could you say that? How could you even think that?” He was practically shouting, even as he was choking on the truth of what he’d seen: those vacant-eyed people, the horrible wound on the Optsirh’s neck, freshly scarred over. It couldn’t be true, it just couldn’t be. “That would be . . .”

  “Ravaging.” Kara finished his sentence. He hadn’t wanted to say it. He shuddered. It was a violation of all living things. Ravaging was a myth—at least, he’d always thought it was. A trump card that parents would whip out when they wanted their kids back in line—if you’d been bad, a man would come to Ravage your head in the middle of the night. You’d forget everything you ever knew, and you’d never form a new memory again. Stuck in a mind loop. An eternal hell.

  They talked about it in church too. The Ravaging. They said it was when you were wicked, and Vodhan sent the wind down to lift your soul away, to save you from yourself . . .

  “It’s impossible,” Aly repeated lamely.

  Kara wiped the bottoms of her eyes, even though he hadn’t seen her shed a tear, and sat up straighter—hands folded in her lap, blue-gray eyes straight ahead. “Right,” she said, “impossible.”

  SEVENTEEN

  RHIANNON

  PEOPLE always said that time flowed, fled, sped by. Or that it slowed, stopped, and stretched.

  They never talked about how time could grip and strangle. How everything good could fall away in your life and bring you to a fixed point, standing face-to-face with the man who’d killed your family.

  Nero had stared back at her with a look of perplexity, as if on the verge of some grander realization. And he had been.

  Time showed mercy too. Rhee had been pinned to a spot in time and space, breathless—and in the next instant, a ripple in the audience had swept the murderer’s gaze away and allowed her to escape.

  A boy with his face bandaged, and a girl with familiar eyes she could barely tear herself away from. Rhee and the boy had shared a look; something had passed between them she couldn’t name. She knew only that he had a secret, just like her.

  Nero had locked eyes wi
th Rhee for a split second, and she wasn’t sure if she’d been recognized. The interruption had bought Rhee just enough time to slip away.

  Now she strapped into an escape pod and braced herself, placing her palms on the metal right in front of her face. She squeezed her eyes tightly, not knowing where to go—only that she needed to escape. Her finger hovered above the touchscreen, over the command that said DEPLOY. She pressed it.

  The pod jettisoned off the first-class side of the zeppelin with a force so strong that her elbows gave in. She slammed into the casing, and the bitter taste of blood flooded her mouth. The seat belt hadn’t been fitted for someone her size.

  Blind and willful . . .

  She’d been wrong, over and over again. First about Veyron, then about Seotra and now Nero. Rhee had actually thought he was kind—that he was loyal to her and her family’s legacy. He’d only been biding his time, plotting her death for nine years as he earned the trust of the public. She’d been front and center as he reinvented himself, and no longer was Nero the charming ambassador to the regent’s office—he was the new leader, spewing hate on a government platform that he now controlled.

  Rhee plummeted into space, cocooned by a metal coffin that sliced through the air. Everything was vibrating. The temperature was rising. She pictured the pod cracking like an egg, disposing of her like a runny yolk into the unforgiving darkness of the universe.

  She wanted to cry—from fear, from anger, from her own stupidity. Rhee had sought Nero out. The very man who’d tried to have her killed, who’d killed her family. He’d orchestrated his own rise. He was the “new, worthy leader.” Not Rhee. All her fantasies of revenge, the way she’d sharpened herself into a tool to best take down Seotra—all that effort had been misdirected, wasted, too little, too late.

  Seotra. She’d been so certain; all signs had pointed to him. That fight with her father, the prescient threats, how he’d come off so cold and so proud. Nero had capitalized on their rift and positioned himself as favorable in supporting her early coronation . . .

  Regent Seotra had trusted that there would be time to tell Rhee. He had taken for granted how naïve and stupid she’d been, how desperate she was to avenge her family and show the ancestors that she was worthy of their name. She’d refused to speak to him. Thought him rigid and unlikable and petty. And she’d brought Dahlen to Seotra’s doorstep. She hadn’t killed him, but she might as well have. He wouldn’t have come face-to-face with the Fontisian if it weren’t for her own foolish theories.

  She was adrift, alone—for the very first time. There was nowhere to go, nowhere safe in the universe. If Nero knew Rhee was alive—and he’d be watching carefully—contacting Tai Reyanna would be impossible.

  And Dahlen? He’d murdered a man to avenge his own family, and she understood that more than she cared to admit. He’d saved her, again and again. But he couldn’t save her now.

  Nowhere to go. Nowhere to go. An entire universe of stars and planets, and not a single one that would hold her.

  There was Julian. He couldn’t possibly know that she was responsible for his father’s death. But she knew. Could she ever face him again after what she’d done? She didn’t think so. Besides, he wouldn’t be able to help her.

  Only when the automated system kicked on and gave time, speed, distance, and direction did Rhee realize something else: It was after midnight on the seventh night, after the seventh new moon of the year.

  She was alone, friendless, and supposedly dead.

  It was her sixteenth birthday.

  Rhee began to cry, just as she had that night she got lost playing hide-and-seek in the cellars. She knew there was another exit, but in the darkness, full of fear, she couldn’t remember how to make her way through the maze of slick corridors. When Josselyn came, Rhee’d been blinded by the torchlight, blinking away her tears.

  Rhee had never forgotten the way Josselyn had looked at her.

  “Get up,” she’d said simply, and Rhee had scrambled to her feet, relieved and ashamed all at once. But Josselyn wouldn’t point her in the right direction. “Which way, left or right?” she asked instead.

  When she started to say she didn’t know, Joss took Rhee’s hand and brought it to her own neck. She pressed down Rhee’s finger to turn her cube off, and it was like a whole universe rushed in to replace it: water dripping, the smell of wet, the fur of moss growing on the walls.

  “Listen. Use your mind,” Joss said.

  Rhee had stood in the dark, still sniffling, and listened and thought. In the echoes she had begun to hear water running down from somewhere—faulty pipes, surely, the sound of leaking water. She went toward it. As she did, she touched the pattern of moss on the walls and found it thicker and more colorful in places, pigmented, because it was closer to the light. She had begun to make choices. Left, right, left. Josselyn had said nothing, never corrected her, just followed silently with the torch. They’d been down there for hours. Finally, Rhee found a set of worn stairs that led to one of the palace’s pantries, and she had burst out into the light, exhilarated, exhausted.

  Josselyn hadn’t congratulated her. She had merely said, “Good.” And then she’d bent down and taken Rhee’s shoulders. “There’s always a way in, always a way out. You just have to listen.”

  “What do I do, Joss?” Rhee whispered now. She closed her eyes. Her throat was the size of a fist: Her sister had said she would never be alone. But how could Rhee find her way without Josselyn there, without her torch? “Help me, please.”

  Listen. The word was the whisper of memory, and her sister’s face, still and pointed and bright, like that of a flame. But she couldn’t listen: Even with her cube off, she heard a clamor of memory, saw images pouring over her, threatening to overwhelm her. Seotra. Nero. Tai Reyanna, her eyes huge and full of grief.

  And then she heard. The memory came rebounding like an echo and shocked her into opening her eyes.

  Erawae. Dahlen had told her his order was there. She fumbled for Dahlen’s ring in her pocket, and only now did it occur to her: Could his ring grant her refuge? Would the order be sympathetic to her cause, if it was she who could truly stop a seemingly imminent war? She felt a pulse of hope so faint it made her second-guess her own heart. The feeling reminded her of the afternoons on Nau Fruma—fine moon dust floating in the air, each particle catching the sun so that she saw brief shimmers that didn’t seem real. But this was real. Erawae was real.

  Josselyn had told her to listen, and Rhee knew, of all people in the galaxy she could trust, alive or dead, that she could trust her sister.

  “Thank you, Joss,” she whispered, and set a course for Erawae.

  Part Four:

  THE AVENGED

  “It’s no secret that among our vast universe, the enormous array of religious and philosophical convictions may always lead to tension and even dispute. Nothing that we can say or do here will change that fact. But I stand before this council in good faith, not in an effort to change Fontis or to be changed, but to live in peace. Let us work together. Let us respect those differences and not seek to eradicate them. Let us put the fear and distrust behind us. Let us establish cube technology standards to facilitate cooperation and communication. Let us end the war, so that future generations can know peace.”

  —Emperor Ta’an, upon signing the Urnew Treaty

  EIGHTEEN

  ALYOSHA

  IF he’d thought Derkatz was the biggest pile of taejis in the universe, Rhesto was giving it a serious run for its money. Ten years after the bombing, and everything was still dead. Where Aly and Kara walked, branches cracked underfoot, and he didn’t see a single speck of green.

  Aly couldn’t stop thinking about water. They’d passed two streams they were too scared to drink from, worried about contamination—even though they’d managed to pop some super-duper radiation pills, full of some hard-to-pronounce antioxidants that would heal their bodie
s as they went.

  Still, Aly didn’t feel too hot. His lips were chapped. There was a film on his tongue; he didn’t think it would ever produce actual saliva again. Sweat dripped down his face, and not even big old eyebrows like his could keep it from stinging his eyes. He told himself he was too tired to care, but when Kara wasn’t looking, he wiped down his face with the sleeve of his shirt.

  They barely spoke as they walked, side by side when the rocky path allowed it. One foot in front of the other. That was all he’d let himself think when everything started to get too real in his head. Apart from Kara, there was all kinds of other stuff to worry about. Like the fact that he may or may not have seen the end result of a Ravaging—hollowed-out people who’d lost their souls, just like they’d described in the sermons. Their existence had a beginning and an end, and what was once a seed had grown and thrived and now withered on the vine, the roots rotted in the soil. Such was life. But he never imagined it would start with ladies babbling on about their sons and their favorite type of tea. And it sure as hell didn’t say anything about the end of them all happening in a lab.

  Kara said members of the G-1K summit were being taken—and Ravaged. Did someone want them to forget whatever they’d been working on? Or was someone trying to use their memories for another purpose? And who had that kind of power, to abduct these men and women from their homes, to Ravage them with impunity, to keep all of it secret?

  Was it the Regent? Had he disappeared to engineer some master plan, or was he already dead?

  As if that didn’t already take up enough head space, there was the fact that when you came right down to it, Aly had traveled to Rhesto because maybe Kara’s mom would be there, and maybe he’d be able to broadcast his cube playback to the universe so maybe he could avoid getting executed for a crime he didn’t commit.