Blood of a Thousand Stars

by Rhoda Belleza

  The evidence was there, and she couldn’t deny that she was here too for DNA meds. It was a last-ditch effort to prevent anyone from seeing the way her true features—Josselyn’s features—had begun to emerge. It wasn’t just her eyes anymore. Even her tan cheeks were broadening, the shape of her mouth changing, filling in. She was almost recognizable as Rhiannon’s sister, and she could only imagine how the resemblance would increase if she didn’t take something soon.

  Not only was she on the run, but Kara was becoming someone she didn’t know.

  Thankfully, all the cabinets were stocked with a supply of “warper” pills that were given to patients to manipulate their DNA and speed up their healing. They’d have to do for now.

  Just as she’d hoped, she looked into an empty operation room. But right when she moved to push the double doors open, she heard a frenzy of beeping.

  “CODE RED!” A droid rolled past her into the operating room, its robotic voice blurting out the same message on repeat as a nurse wheeled a patient past her. Blood had soaked through her WFC fatigues.

  Nicola, the head doctor, was on the nurse’s heels. “What’s going on?” Kara asked, chasing after her.

  “She woke up and tried to gouge out her own cube.”

  “What?” Nausea hit her, and Kara’s skin prickled.

  “What are you doing in here?” Nicola started to ask, but the patient began to shout in Wraetan.

  “You idiot!” The girl thrashed. She had a bloodied towel to her neck, and a medic standing over her applied pressure. It should’ve been disturbing, the blood and the tendons and the violence of it. But this was Kara’s world now.

  “I have no idea why she did it,” the medic, Russev, was saying to anyone who would listen. “She’s acting like a feral cat.”

  The girl hissed, “Take it out. Take it—” The Wraetan words got lost in a gruesome gurgle.

  “Need a translator in here!”

  Kara pushed past Nicola, attacked by a mist of sterilizers as soon as she crossed the threshold. She came to the girl’s side, elbowing out a nearby nurse. She caught a glance at the metal ID tag on the girl’s wrist. It said her name was Issa.

  Issa kept yelling even while Nicola and two other medics moved her braids back and worked to stanch the flow of blood from her neck that had already drenched the table. When she started to choke, Nicola plunged two fingers into the ragged hole in her skin while Russev tried to repair the damage with silicone thread. “It updated! They’ll come for me. I have to disable it . . .”

  “Who’s coming for you?” Kara asked her in Wraetan. “What update?” She realized her own hands were shaking; she didn’t know how to steady them. Issa pulled her head away, and Nicola cursed as she lost her grip and blood spattered her protective mask.

  “We’re going to inject a numbing serum,” Russev said, holding a needle. “And then restart the cube. Tell her if she would just stay still . . .”

  “No!” the girl yelled in Wraetan. The word for cube was nearly identical in most languages—a Kalusian loan. She grabbed Kara’s hand, blinking in shock. “Don’t resuscitate it! They’ll track it!”

  Kara’s eye started to throb again. She thought of Nero tracking her, tracking all of them. She remembered how he’d framed Aly, and how he’d removed the cubes of all those patients on the zeppelin.

  “She’s scared,” Kara translated to Russev. “She doesn’t want you to.”

  “We’ll risk infection if we leave it as is. There are antibodies that activate when neural connectivity is operational. She’s lost too much blood already.” Kara looked down and saw it was dripping off the gurney and pooling on the floor. She felt sick. Dizzy. What was it like when Lydia had used the overwriter on her?

  Issa was fading fast. “Let me die. We’re all as good as dead otherwise,” she responded. The words slurred together.

  “What the hell is she saying?” Nicola demanded.

  Kara fought through the nausea creeping up on her, the edges of her vision going fuzzy, the heaviness of her head. She didn’t know what was right. Save the girl, or heed her warning?

  “Stop,” she blurted out, her eyes never leaving the WFC girl’s. She might have been paranoid, confused—how could they be tracked with their cubes off?—but then again, she might be right.

  The second medic huffed, “We can’t stop, she’ll—”

  “The patient said she has seizures,” Kara lied, taking her eyes off the girl to lock them with Nicola’s. She remembered vaguely that Lydia had researched the cube’s effects on people with epileptic conditions. “She said you need to know. If you resuscitate the cube now, it could trigger a fatal seizure.”

  Nicola and the other two medics exchanged a look.

  One of them muttered, “She might not be able to handle the neuroelectricity . . .”

  Finally, Nicola nodded. “We have to disable it then.”

  “You mean break it?” one of the attendees said, his eyes glassy. “It could kill her!”

  “It might,” Nicola said. “But we know she’ll die for certain if she has a seizure. She won’t survive with the cube in place as is.”

  What had Kara done?

  The medic gave in. He took a pair of delicate pliers to Issa’s neck and simply snapped her cube in two. It was much cruder than Kara had thought it would be.

  “That’s it then?” Kara asked softly.

  “That’s it. The cube will never be functional again—just a useless scrap of biotech lodged in her neck,” the medic said, shaking his head as he cleaned the wound.

  Issa’s eyes fluttered closed, and Kara wondered if she would die now, and whether it would be her fault—another life added to the list of her losses.

  But the Wraetan girl did not die.

  Her wound had been sewn up but she’d been hideously bruised, the stitches showing shiny and black against her dark skin. She was one of those girls who looked pretty when they slept; her high, angled cheekbones looked dramatic, and she had a natural pout to her lips.

  Kara curled up in a chair pulled up next to Issa’s cot as the girl lay unconscious, and waited for her to wake up. Sitting in the darkness, she stayed very still as the pulsing in her head quieted, the pain aching up her arms and legs dulled. She was lost in her own fog of grief and shock. Issa’s surgery reminded her of her own procedure. Lydia had overwritten her memories. Her past, the Josselyn of her, was as good as gone. Whiteness closed in on her vision, like the foam of a wave crashing over her.

  Sometimes it felt like losing the memories from her other life was nothing compared to being lied to. Kara had thought Lydia was her mother. When she’d spent all those late nights in the lab, when she’d come home absentminded, absorbed in her work, when Kara had to figure out dinner for herself without so much as a call—Kara thought that maybe she’d fallen short somehow. That if she had turned out different, Lydia would be more maternal. Available, like other moms were.

  And if there wasn’t that to think about, there was everything else right here and right now. Alyosha had left her. She was flat out of meds and using a piss-poor substitute of warpers that would only get her so far. Ralire—and whatever waited for her there—still felt an impossible distance away. It was like there was this great abyss between the life she had lived so far and the life she should have lived—and the sister she should have known, who was now, at this very moment, sitting on the throne of Kalu. Kara had nothing. Nothing but an unconscious stranger, this WFC soldier who had risked her own life to make sure they were okay.

  Hours passed. She drifted in and out of sleep, thinking of Luris. Wading into water so cold her feet would go numb. Smooth, slippery stones under her feet. A dense forest that she could disappear into, and the salt, weighing down the air, hovering in the fog. In Luris, there would be no running, no training, no worrying about her next move or her face changing. Kara could practically feel the
cold air, the need to fold her arms over her chest as it slipped through the wool of her sweater. She looked down and found something in the moss—her coin, her family coin. And suddenly it didn’t feel so safe or remote, and the sound of the birds chirping and the ocean roaring in the distance stopped. That old life would follow her everywhere . . .

  Then she heard a cough.

  Kara opened her eyes to see Issa staring up at the ceiling. The rusty coin was in the palm of Kara’s hand. When Issa coughed again, Kara pocketed it and went to her side.

  “Are you okay?” It was a lame thing to say, but she couldn’t think of anything better.

  Issa’s eyes got big. All she said was “Is it dead?”

  “Dead?” she asked, then realized that Issa was talking about her cube. A shiver ran over Kara’s arms, all the way to the base of her neck. Everyone knew that a cube needed an organic counterpart to function—to live, as Issa had implied—but she’d never thought of it as a living thing. It creeped her out a little, but she answered: “Yeah, it’s out. Dead.”

  “Someone’s been hacking them. Cubes.” Issa spoke in a hoarse voice, like it hurt to talk. “Even when they’re off. It’s why I needed it to die.” Her eyes were glazed over, and Kara looked at her IV feed. She’d been given a healthy dose of painkillers.

  “How?” Kara asked. “How are they hacking them?” The other staff might have advised Kara not to engage—Issa sounded dazed, high—but Kara felt the gravity in her words. Because she knew what Issa said was possible. After everything she’d learned of Nero, of her mother, of their biological experiments with the cube, Issa didn’t surprise her at all. She’d been paranoid enough herself to keep her own cube off even before entering the Frontline Physicians craft, where it was required to stay offline. You weren’t supposed to be in danger so long as it was turned off.

  Issa shook her head. Beads of sweat formed on her temples. She looked like she was in a fever dream. “The update.”

  Kara went cold; she thought of what she’d learned from Pavel’s overwriter research. The overwriter could be used on the public if their cubes were available via the same network at the same time . . .

  She rummaged for a small towel in a nearby cabinet and took deep breaths so she could stop trembling. Once she felt composed, she turned and held it to Issa’s face as her wild eyes skittered around the room.

  “What about the update?” Kara asked. She felt a seed of guilt, pressing the girl for information while she was half-conscious. But it was bigger than her. It was bigger than all of them.

  “Dangerous,” Issa said, then shuddered. “Our job on Nau Fruma was supposed to be quick and easy. Minimal casualties. I’m a medic—it’s not like soldiering is my specialty or anything. We were just supposed to drop an em-bomb, evacuate the camps, and get the hell out. But I pushed forward—I didn’t follow rank.” She looked up at the ceiling. Kara was losing her again. The update. The update.

  “What are you saying?” Kara was desperate to keep her talking.

  “That I’m the reason half my unit is dead . . .” Issa laughed, and her face, so stern and so wild at turns, was now lit up with a flash of vulnerability. “There was someone I wanted to kill.”

  Kara sucked in a breath, bitter and sharp in her lungs.

  Issa closed her eyes. “You think I’m evil?”

  “No. Not at all,” Kara said honestly. “War is about everyone trying to settle a score.” They fell into a silence. But Kara couldn’t let it end there, when it was so clear Issa wanted to keep talking, to be absolved. She took Issa’s face in her hands and angled her gently so now they were eye-to-eye.

  “What about the update?” Kara urged again softly. She felt like a predator, pumping this girl for information. But she craved the truth—any version of it she could get. She wanted to turn everything and everyone inside out. Because she thought she’d known Aly, and he’d left. She thought she’d known Lydia, but she’d lied. And she thought she knew herself—but every memory, every aspect of her identity she thought to be true was diametrically opposed to the princess she actually was. The only thing she had left was this overwriter.

  “The update . . . it’s supposed to prime people for something. Make their cubes more easily hackable. It’s why we dropped the em-bomb. To stop the updates. And if I kept my cube in, I was afraid they would see . . . everything. The only way to be sure was to gouge it out.”

  “But you wouldn’t have survived.” Kara thought of the people on the zeppelin, vacant, drawing triangles over and over again. “Or if you did, it wouldn’t have been a life worth living.”

  “I know that. I wasn’t thinking straight. But at the time a Ravaging felt safer than compromising everyone here . . .” Kara’s skin prickled at the mention of a Ravaging. It’s what Aly had called it. It had been hinted at in Vodhan’s teachings.

  “But you came, and instead they broke it,” Issa said. “Here I am.” She looked down at her hands like she had just realized: Here she was. Her face crumpled like she might cry. “You made them do that for me. I’m alive because of you . . .”

  All Kara had done was lie on the spot, out of instinct—a thing she was good at, a way to fill in the blanks for a history that had been wiped. But she felt wholly unprepared for crying. She’d seen Lydia cry only once. And that was right before she died, when she admitted she’d lied to Kara for as long as she could remember . . .

  “Don’t cry.” Kara forced her voice to sound light as she pulled the towel away and refolded it for no reason. She pressed it back to Issa’s head. Gently, she had to remind herself. “You’re safe now.”

  They fell into a silence after Kara whispered to her to say she had seizures if asked. Issa looked at her quizzically, but didn’t press her on it. She was probably delirious—and anyway, what more was there to say? Kara blotted and redressed her wound, and eventually, Issa fell back asleep.

  But she couldn’t get Issa’s story out of her head. Was the update linked to the overwriter? The timing seemed convenient. She thought of Lydia, then—the woman who had thought logically, critically, who always had the same refrain: There are no coincidences.

  The horror of it all, the scope and the trespass of it, finally sunk in. Kara knew she had to destroy the overwriter, that it was critical to get it before it fell into the wrong hands. But she couldn’t help but let her mind wander, wondering if such a thing could be used for good. And if it could free instead of enslave.

  What if she could use the overwriter to erase Josselyn Ta’an?

  She wondered, for the briefest of seconds, if Aly was right when he’d pretty much called her a coward. But how could she be Josselyn, when her heart and mind were empty of that identity? It used to make her jealous that there was only a void where everyone else could pull from a wealth of high-def memories; the best she could do was snatch at shadows of her old life.They were ominous, dark, quiet things that lurked in the back of her mind. They were intense sensations, like the remnants of a dream. And always that nightmare—or the memory?—of free-falling in the dark, plummeting down as she clawed at nothing, the wind stealing her voice.

  All that was left of Josselyn was in her biology, clamoring to etch itself onto her features. Kara touched her chin. DNA suppressants were temporary, and if they were hard to get now she couldn’t imagine what it would be like once the galaxy notched up to all-out war. She’d never be able to stop herself from changing back. Not for good. There would be no end to that constant fear that someone would see Josselyn Ta’an. She would always be on the run, living one long, drawn-out lie. She would never be free.

  Unless . . .

  Unless she could change everyone else so they didn’t remember her face at all. Erase Josselyn Ta’an permanently, from everyone’s minds, all at once.

  She recalled the official Kalusian memo addressed to her father, the last emperor, which Pavel had shown her while they were spying on the inter
nment camp: The memory of the Great War itself to be erased from the collective memory, for the good of the people and advancement of the galaxy . . .

  The Emperor had wanted to erase the Great War from memory, to heal the galaxy and the political divide the war had caused. As horrifying as that kind of power was, he’d had noble reasons. Hadn’t he?

  And then she remembered the last thing Aly had said to her—that if you didn’t want to live a lie, it was up to you to change the truth.

  The idea, the scale of it, made the room swim in front of her eyes. If Kara did use the overwriter, she would destroy it immediately afterward. The world didn’t needed Josselyn anyway. It had Rhiannon, who’d survived an assassination attempt and clawed her way back to the capital to take on an unruly opposition. It was likely her sister would be better off without her too, never mind that she’d asked Josselyn to return to Kalu.

  Rhiannon would be better off without some prodigal sister to challenge her legitimacy to the throne and undermine her in the eyes and hearts of the public.

  Josselyn Ta’an was as good as a ghost.

  And now Kara would soon have the means to make sure no one remembered her.

  NINE

  RHIANNON

  AS she made her way to Dahlen’s quarters, Rhee tried to swallow down the taste of ash. It was as if the two words she’d uttered had singed her tongue.

  I accept.

  She’d just officially agreed to ally with the man who’d killed her family, who represented everything she hated—his vanity, his tendency to suddenly care whenever he was in front of the camera. And the worse part was that he knew all along she’d say yes. She needed him. She also knew Dahlen would be furious, but he’d come to understand. He had to.