Blood of a Thousand Stars

by Rhoda Belleza

  Aly turned, just in time to see a UniForce soldier grabbing Pavel and attempting to power him down.

  Aly didn’t think. He lunged.

  Muscles he didn’t know existed screamed as the man brought his scanner down on Aly’s shoulder and shoved him backward onto the ground before he had a chance to fight back.

  “Don’t move.” The guy had a stunner drawn now, aimed right at Aly’s chest. He loomed over him, and Aly thought he looked like one of the prison guards. Perhaps he was.

  “Excuse me,” Pavel said, polite, more than the guy deserved. His eyelights were still blinking like crazy. “There is no need for such roughhousing . . .”

  In response, the soldier swung his foot and kicked Pavel over. The robot tipped sideways into the dirt, eyes flickering red as his attachments flailed. When Aly moved to help, the soldier struck him once in the ribs with the butt of his scanner.

  “I said: Don’t. Move.”

  Even when he pulled it back, Aly could still feel where the blow had landed.

  Aly curled in on himself and tried to breathe through the pain. Half his face was in the dirt. His eyes had adjusted by now, and he could see this piece of taejis. Aly wanted to charge him. To rip his goddamned throat out. But the stunner was pointed right at him.

  And that’s when he saw it.

  Her.

  All he could see was an arm, a hand, a body pinned beneath a fallen pillar. A bag. Her bag.

  “Kara!” he screamed again, trying to pull himself up, but the UniForce soldier shoved him right back down. Aly felt his strength flooding out of him in a wave of terror. She wasn’t moving. It couldn’t be her. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t Kara.

  No. It wasn’t her.

  Aly crawled toward her. Only twenty feet from where they’d just been standing.

  The soldier went after him, booted him back down into the rubble. Dust from the rubble flew everywhere, blinding Aly.

  “Get the fuck off me,” Aly shouted, rotating and swiping at the guy, feeling the stunner shoot him in the arm, which numbed him for a second. Where was Pavel? He’d lost track of him for now. But still he swiveled, dragged himself in the direction of the rubble pile, the backpack, the girl’s body, the arm . . .

  It wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. Kara was alive somewhere. She was not this limp arm, this broken thing.

  But when he got closer, he gasped, choking on burning-hot dust. The prayer beads were clutched in her hand, tangled in her fingers.

  “Pavel, tell me it’s not her.”

  The droid righted himself as his eyelights flickered in and out. He stuck a thin attachment that looked like a thermometer into the ground. “I detect traces of her DNA . . .”

  There was a blur of motion and sound, a screaming ripping through him, ripping through time and space, so that his scream, his pain, existed everywhere at once. Aly yelled Kara’s name as he clawed at the pile of rubble on top of her.

  “Put your hands on the ground where I can see them,” a soldier said from behind. He pressed the cool metal of the stunner down hard on the side of Aly’s head so that it bit into his temple. Aly lifted his hands; there was no coming back from a stun in the head. He had seen it in the Wray—guys fried after a run-in with the UniForce. Crazy outbursts. Disorientation. Anger they just couldn’t get a lockdown on.

  “Don’t move,” the soldier said, pulling one of Aly’s hands down behind his back. His eyes were still locked on Kara’s hand underneath a ton of concrete. He made himself pliable as the soldier grabbed his other hand, about to join them behind his back. If he timed it just right he could spin around. The guy was probably wearing the same kind of holster Aly used to wear when he’d been part of the UniForce. It came equipped with a standard-issue blade . . . could he get to it in time?

  “Perhaps I can assist,” Pavel said just as the soldier tried to join Aly’s hands. “He was processed in the camp just two days ago, and he was held—”

  The soldier moved his stunner off Aly’s head and shocked Pavel. A blue web of electricity crawled up his body. His eyes flickered then went out. Aly knew he couldn’t feel pain, not in the same way a human could, but it sure as hell looked painful.

  Aly used the opportunity to break free and spin around. He leapt up and kicked the soldier on instinct—brought the heel of his foot as hard as he could across the side of the guy’s knee. It bent exactly the way it wasn’t supposed to, and he cried out in pain as he went down. Aly jumped up and the world flipped. They’d switched places now. The soldier fumbled for the stunner, but Aly kicked it out of his hand, then drove his foot between the soldier’s ribs. That was payback for earlier—and for Pavel.

  He kicked again. More payback. He was enjoying this: seeing a man struggle and wearing the very uniform he’d been so proud to put on himself. Suddenly it wasn’t a stranger Aly was kicking, attacking, with everything he had in him. It was himself on the floor, that stupid kid from the Wray who ran away from home and joined the UniForce, too weak to be himself, thinking the only way to belong was to blend in. Everything Aly had done brought him here, to this moment—and he wanted to destroy himself, the UniForce, the memory of everyone who had died because of him or in spite of him. All the memories. All the horrors. All the unfairness. Everything.

  But most of all, he wanted to destroy Kara—not the actual Kara, never her, but the thought of her. He knew if he turned his head just slightly he’d catch an image of those prayer beads . . .

  Aly did it. He looked. The grief wailed away, condensed until there was nothing left but fury. Now he could hardly see through the rage that surged through and around him.

  He looked back at the soldier on the ground and landed the heel of his boot square on the guy’s face. Didn’t matter whose military you fought for, because all these chortois were the same, boots on the ground in neutral territory—kick—just to terrorize people, to fuck with them just to make themselves feel big. Kick. They invaded everything, even in the name of peace. Nothing would be the same after this war they’d started all over again.

  Blood got on Aly’s boot. The solider lifted his hand, silently asking for mercy. Aly drew his leg back to kick again.

  “Alyosha!” Pavel said—he’d righted himself for the second time, but something about the droid’s movements was off. He wobbled, and his robotic voice came out distant, like he was calling him via holo from another planet. “Enough.”

  Nothing would ever be enough. But Aly nodded just the same, and stopped like P had told him to. He moved from one body to the other, and kneeled before Kara. He tried again to dig her out, pawing at slabs of concrete, sweat mingling with tears, running down his face so he could taste the salt in his mouth.

  An organic memory assaulted him: throwing rocks into the shallow river basin when he heard Ma and Alina had died. The current would sweep the rocks away, around the bend and out of sight. He couldn’t hold on to anything.

  Another craft landed, then. Aly felt it in the vibrations of the air, in the odd electric silence, in the vividness of the craft’s beams. It wasn’t a cargo craft. It was Ashbuli class. An attack craft.

  He turned to Pavel, but the droid was frozen in place, his eyelights dark. He’d been fried. Aly strained to see in the craft’s beams, lighting the dusty darkness and muting everything into one haze.

  There, before his eyes, a bunch of soldiers streamed out of the Ashbuli—Wraetan soldiers who were part of the WFC—fanning out in a second wave. He thought of the uprisings he’d been told of as a kid. These were heroes. But they’d come too late. Too late to save him or anything he cared about.

  A soldier approached slowly. “Are you okay?” she asked in Wraetan. Her hands gripped her stunner firmly, but she pointed it to the ground, away from him. When Aly shook his head, she said: “When the UniForce manages a second wave, they’ll raze this place to the ground.”

  Fire. It was a common enough U
niForce tactic if a territory was too far gone. It killed enemy combatants, but it killed any of their own remaining survivors as well, so their tech couldn’t be used against them—and so they’d have no way of giving up sensitive intel.

  Aly looked one more time at Kara’s limp hand. The Kalusian didn’t bury their dead—they burned them.

  “It’s not safe here,” the soldier told him. “If you come with us you’ll be granted refugee status.”

  Aly laughed. Pain spiked up his lungs. “Been there, done that,” he said. “I’m not going to be your refugee. I’ll be your next recruit.”

  SEVEN

  RHIANNON

  RHEE’S anger was like a raging forest fire. She didn’t dare extinguish it, but instead imagined it shrinking smaller and smaller, compressing into a tight sphere that she could fit into the palm of her hand and hide away—for now. She’d need to call upon that anger later. It brought her purpose and clarity that propelled her forward in times when she needed the motivation most. But this was the time for diplomacy and strategy. She didn’t just need to win the battle; she needed to win the war.

  Now she approached the Towers of the Long Now with Dahlen and Lahna on either side. The Towers were oppressive and extravagant all at once, the seemingly perfect home for Nero himself.

  “This is unwise,” Dahlen warned, though he’d made his stance clear before they’d left, again en route, and then once more as he stood beside her at the entrance to the towers. “Nero cannot be trusted to refrain from slaughtering you where you stand.”

  “True,” Rhee agreed as they walked. “But he could’ve killed me at any point. He knows it would be political suicide.”

  “Didn’t he use you as a target when he had the Tasinn release dozens of high-velocity arrows?” Lahna asked.

  “He was being showy,” Rhee said. “Sending a message in the most ostentatious way possible.”

  “Or the most dangerous way possible.” Lahna shrugged.

  “And did he not intend to kill you when we were on Houl?” Dahlen couldn’t even get halfway through his own sentence without his face twisting—in disgust or pain or both. In actuality, Nero had intended to kill both of them.

  “The rules of the game were different then. I’m here, on Kalu, with the universe as my witness.” She extended both arms as if to demonstrate the size and scope of the galaxy. “He can’t just make me disappear.”

  “And what’s to say the rules won’t change again?” Dahlen pointed out. “Nero twists the rules when it suits him.”

  “Don’t you think she knows that?” Lahna asked, before Rhee could answer. Lahna was even shorter than Rhee, which meant she was much shorter than Dahlen. But she managed to speak down to him. She was the only one who did. “If the invitation this morning was any indication, we’re walking into a death trap.”

  Rhiannon stared at her suspiciously. “Then why are you smiling?” she asked. Lahna’s features had the delicacy of a porcelain doll, so at odds with what Rhee had seen earlier—the intensity, and her skill with the blade.

  Lahna shrugged, and tossed her braid behind her as she took her short strides. “Because I want to see how we get out alive.”

  Rhee pressed her lips together, hoping her silence would end the whole conversation. Maybe Dahlen was right. Maybe it was insane to accept the invitation to meet with the man who’d killed Rhee’s family, the one who’d turned her faithful trainer against her and had tried to have her killed—but she needed a cease-fire. She needed him to pull the UniForce out of Nau Fruma and agree not to invade any neutral territories in the future.

  She stuck her hand in her pocket and sought out the familiar weight of the coin, turning it over and over again in her fingers, running her thumb along the groove that ran down its center. It may have been a mere souvenir, but Rhee saw it as so much more—a testament to her father’s diplomacy and his ability to bring territories together.

  Dahlen had assured her that aid had arrived on Nau Fruma; Frontline Physicians had cycled out new medics and took the injured away to safer locations nearby. She still didn’t know Julian’s status, whether he’d survived, where he was if he had. Tai Reyanna had tried reaching out, to no avail, which meant that his cube was off. And he hated turning his cube off.

  This was the know-it-all who had to look up every fact and figure, whose own cube sometimes couldn’t keep up with his curiosity—dozens of queries running at once, always something to see and learn. If his cube was off, was he okay?

  “Rhiannon,” Dahlen said just as they arrived at the base of the west tower. “Unless your sole purpose is to kill him immediately, I can’t imagine what you expect to gain.”

  The double doors of the elevator were closed, and the chrome reflected their image. It occurred to Rhee how strange a trio they made. And how the one boy she trusted with her life still stood by her side, would follow her up a tower to face the man who’d nearly ruined them.

  Once again, she thought of how Nero had forced Dahlen to turn on his cube and thus break his vow to the order. Something in him had changed, and she imagined his heart like a river stone—water seeping into its cracks, freezing with the change of season, fracturing it from the inside out. Nero had done this. And Rhee had to undo it.

  The double doors slid open, and three daisies fluttered out to meet them. Dahlen swatted at the DroneVision cameras and kept his head down while Lahna bared her teeth, which made the daisies skitter backward.

  The ride was quiet, tense. The elevator was made of glass, and they could see the intricate machinery that pulled them up the seventy flights. Enormous gears. Ropes and pulleys. A delicate machine; a thousand different ways it could break. What she’d meant to tell Dahlen was that she was scared, and needed him—to trust her, to follow her, precisely because what they were doing was so outlandish. He was her anchor, keeping her from losing herself in the undertow of Nero’s deceptions.

  But now, as two daisies hovered above them, Dahlen wouldn’t meet her eye. Lahna seemed oblivious; she leaned forward with her forehead pressed against the glass as the city fell below them. They were rocketed upward. Rhee felt her stomach lurch. She took a deep breath in, trying to compose herself—to prepare herself to meet Nero face-to-face once more.

  When they arrived on the seventieth floor, the door slid open into a modern room. Expansive wooden floors bathed in light, with shiny furniture made up of hard angles and gleaming surfaces. Rhee channeled that ruler buried deep inside her, her legacy, and strode forward with Lahna at her heels. After a second’s hesitation, Dahlen followed them, and then the daisies.

  It was all glass inside, quiet fountains, sleek. How second wave, Tai Reyanna would’ve said. It was nothing like the palace, which still reflected the tastes of the dynasty—their long, rich history captured in carvings and porcelain and tapestries. Things crafted by hand, centuries ago, handed down and preserved so that the Ta’ans would know from where they had come. The old way. Her father’s way. What did stand out was a lush plant that lined the walls. Its vines extended to the ground, with leaves fanning out on either side—a waxy, deep green she hadn’t seen since Dahlen’s wooden ship. Lahna stood beside her and brought her hand to the leaf; a white residue came off and left fingerprints where her hand had been.

  They heard light footfalls from down the far corridor and turned. Always one for a dramatic entrance, Nero entered with his arms extended, flanked by a Tasinn at either side. A handful of daisies clustered around him. He likely went through the footage to ensure his best angles were broadcast, and nothing less.

  In a flash of recognition, Rhee realized the man on Nero’s left was the same guard, a patch over his left eye, who’d led her to the medical facility where they had drugged Dahlen and forced him to turn on his cube weeks before.

  Nero bowed so low Rhee thought he might fall. She willed her face to hide her disgust, and tried to shape it into an approximation of a smile. Pr
essing her lips together tightly, the corners came up, and her face felt stiff—like ice. It was the best she could do.

  “Empress,” he said, “safe at last.” His blue eyes widened, and his face wore a look of concern and relief. He’s much better at faking it than me, Rhee thought bitterly. He motioned to a couch, his arm moving languidly through the air. “Sit.”

  “I’d rather stand,” Rhee said just as Lahna collapsed onto the white couch and gave it a bounce.

  “Please,” Nero said, “I insist.”

  Rhee snuck a look at Dahlen, who stood behind the couch watchfully, his face neutral—though she knew he was monitoring everyone’s movements out of the corner of his eye. She obliged, and noted the couch was rather cushiony, despite its angular design. Then she chided herself for becoming so easily distracted, and her whole body went rigid, alert, determined to focus. Nero had invited her for a reason. He wanted something, and she heard Veyron’s voice, his wisdom, whispering from the dead. You need to be three steps ahead of your opponent, always, he’d said during their final battle, just before he tried to kill her. Just before he died.

  Dahlen cleared his throat loudly, pulling her out of her memory. Daisies zoomed in toward her, and she held perfectly still as he gave her a questioning look. She’d missed something.

  Nero eyed them warily. “I was just saying—marveling, really—over the fact that you survived after the Eliedio exploded . . .”

  That’s why she was here. To be interviewed, to tell her story—so it could be picked apart, so he could catch her in a lie and use it against her for all the galaxy to see.

  “Those two weeks on the run were difficult,” she said slowly, choosing each word carefully. “But it was surviving a barrage of arrows this morning that was the real feat.”

  Nero touched his finger to his cube, and the daisies went dead. Rhee tried not to show her alarm, though she’d had no idea his cube was capable of that. She thought again of his ambition to find the overwriter, and suppressed a chill.