Blood of a Thousand Stars

by Rhoda Belleza

  Rhee might have come off as moody and unpolished on holos, eager to avoid interviews, generally unlikeable, just as Nero had implied. Fine. But she cared about things that mattered. She didn’t want the war to continue. Too many people had died in vain.

  Nero had doubled down. Not only did the UniForce remain in Nau Fruma, but now there had been three fresh attacks on neutral territories across the galaxy. Everything was spinning headlong into chaos and violence, and she could not sit back and let it happen.

  She had to stop it, but she didn’t know how. Not with the people of Kalu demanding retribution for what they saw as an attack on neutral ground. Not with Fontis arming for retaliation.

  It was a massive undertaking, and she simply couldn’t do it alone. She needed Nero’s endorsement. She needed those who followed him to follow her too. And Nero had already agreed to meet with the United Planets and lay out the terms for a cease-fire, which seemed remarkable to her—a huge sign of progress.

  But now Dahlen was avoiding her, and she needed his help to include the Fontisians. Showing the galaxy that Fontisians wanted peace too was important.

  Dahlen had turned the east wing of the palace into makeshift barracks, where he slept with dozens of other Fontisian fighters. But the palace was enormous—the summer palace on Nau Fruma was hardly a tenth the size of this one—and around every corner, a piece of her past opened up. She’d slowly been rediscovering pieces of her childhood, new and old blending together in her consciousness as she managed the organic memories that floated up to the surface, immersive, almost suffocating.

  “Empress.”

  Rhee jumped. She spun around on the cool marble floor to face Lahna. Today, she wore her hair in the style of an ancient Fontisian warrior: half up in a dozen braids, intricately coiled and tucked.

  “I’d rather you not sneak up on me,” Rhee said testily. She didn’t like how she felt in Lahna’s presence—nervous, as if Lahna was evaluating her.

  “I’d rather not come to fetch you. But we don’t all get what we want.” She put her hands on her narrow hips.

  “I’m not a thing to be fetched,” Rhee said—an immediate, knee-jerk reaction when in truth she was relieved. This was Dahlen’s way of summoning her, which meant he was talking to her again. “He just expects me to come at his command?”

  “He expects nothing,” Lahna said. “We’re leaving as soon as he gathers his things. I thought you’d want to say goodbye.”

  “Wait, what?” Rhee’s heart started pattering hard in her chest. She thought for a second she’d misheard. “What do you mean, leaving?”

  “He can’t answer if you haven’t asked.”

  Rhee’s confusion and anger were kinetic; the faster she moved the more intensely she felt them. Lahna led her to the barracks, where she saw Dahlen’s things packed neatly beside him as he sharpened his blade on a whetstone. His blond hair, shoulder-length, fell in an arc, obscuring his face from her. Rhee’s stomach sank. Dahlen had no flair for drama. He’d packed. He really was planning to leave.

  “You can’t do this,” she blurted out. She wished she could think up some eloquent insult, or a dressing-down that would humiliate him into reconsidering, but all she could think was: This can’t be goodbye.

  She felt her heart cracking open. “Look,” she said, striving to control her voice, “I know you don’t approve of working with Nero.”

  “I don’t approve?” He crouched over the whetstone but would not look up. “As if I could approve a union so insidious. As if you’d be willing to listen.”

  “You’re the one who’s not willing to listen!”

  He looked up. His eyes felt like fire on her skin. She stared back, holding his gaze, but it was hard to breathe, hard to swallow. “This is not a mere disagreement,” he said. “This is a fundamental rift.”

  He held the blade up to the light, examined it, and, seemingly satisfied, sheathed it. “That man is an abomination.”

  How could he not see? She had to entertain Nero’s proposition—otherwise she might as well declare an all-out war against him and risk alienating his supporters further, alienating those whom he had pressed under his thumb—alienating everyone.

  “You think I don’t know that? I’m not so stupid or so young that I can’t see through his plan. But this is politics. I’m empress of the Kalusian territories, public enemy number one in the eyes of every other government. Kalu’s loyalty is slowly being stolen by that very abomination you speak of—a holovision star with a pretty face, of all people. And Joss is somewhere out there, hidden away, when her real life is here waiting for her . . .” Rhee’s throat seized at the thought of her older sister. “Besides, it’s a temporary alliance.”

  “You can’t ‘temporarily’ corrupt your soul.”

  “I don’t have any other choice, and you know it!” Her anger flared. “You’re being stubborn for the sake of it! You self-righteous, fanatical—”

  “Watch yourself, Empress,” Lahna said. “Don’t say something you’ll regret.”

  Rhee took a deep breath, restarted. Lahna was right. “Dahlen, we want the same thing: peace. Too many lives are being risked . . .”

  He let out a hollow laugh that surprised her, chilled her even. It might have been the first time she’d heard him laugh. “Lives must be risked in the name of what’s right. We must determine to take the more difficult path, if it is the righteous one.”

  “Don’t throw your scripture in my face. You’re just like everyone else. You don’t think I’m capable of knowing what’s best for my people. You follow your Elder on faith, yet he keeps you in the dark.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “What are we actually talking about?”

  Rhee bit her lip. “Your Elder—he told me as much. ‘There are things you know, and things you don’t know you know . . .’” She still didn’t understand what Elder Escov had meant when he spoke those words back in Erawae, but now, the words seemed alive with meaning.

  “You’ve misunderstood.” Dahlen’s blond hair fell across his eyes again, and he pushed it behind one of his pointy ears. “Those words are a meditation on faith and trust in the word of Vodhan.”

  She’d never seen him wear his irritation so plainly, and it made her feel all the more humiliated—some empress she was, simpering and begging. She could barely stand herself.

  “Your faith,” Rhee said. “Your blind faith. It keeps you trapped, so bound in this idea of right and wrong that you can’t even look up and see the world for what it is.”

  “Could we not say the same thing about your brand of faith?” he said. “What is your ma’tan sarili, Empress?” Like most in the galaxy, Dahlen knew it was an everyday greeting—but he knew, too, the intimacy of it, its deeper meaning, the pledge to be your highest self.

  Honor. Bravery. Loyalty.

  Had she betrayed these very ideals?

  Dahlen looked at her, and Rhee found her answer in the disappointed look in his eyes. He shouldered his belongings.

  “You’re wrong to leave.”

  “I was wrong to hold you to your highest self,” he said, as he made his way toward the door.

  She suppressed a shiver at his words. The hope—and disappointment—in them left her shaken. She wanted to be the leader he spoke of, the leader he imagined. But she wasn’t. Not yet, anyway.

  “Go, then!” she called. “I don’t need you. I need a partner who will help me end this mess of a war, not a fanatic whose scripture is so far up his ass he can’t see the reality. The reality is that we need to be strategic.”

  “With respect, Empress,” Dahlen said spinning around, “Nero isn’t just going to acquiesce. You think he’s willing to pull troops out of these territories without some big trade-off that benefits him? There’s no coming to his senses or rising to the occasion. He’s toxic. His promises are a trap, and I thought you would do better than be
lieve him.”

  “What if I told you he was after some sort of powerful cube tech?” She shifted her weight between her feet. “He said as much on Houl. That he was seeking a tech he wanted to change and alter a person’s memories.”

  “Even if that’s true, aligning yourself with him will not get you closer to the truth.”

  “Ancestors. Listen to yourself! Isn’t this all because he turned on your cube?” she fired back. She was desperate now. Without him, she had no allies outside of the palace. Nero had made sure of it. “Because your precious vow to the order was broken? There are more important things than your faith,” she reminded him. “There are lives at stake, and I fear we will lose more every day that we hesitate.” She was trying, so hard, to strike out. To find the thing that would make him react. Make him stay.

  And yet still, Dahlen gave her a look that was so icy it nearly froze her lungs. “You think I don’t feel fear?” he asked. “Because I, too, fear—for Kalu, and for all of us.” His voice stabbed into her, nearly taking her down, but his face was impassive again, its sharp profile cutting a jagged silhouette.

  Panic hit her then—an ocean of it. Surely he was right about Nero. But the only way to secure peace was to work with him, even if it meant navigating a labyrinth of lies. Why couldn’t Dahlen see that?

  If she couldn’t keep the loyalty of her last friend, how could she earn it from her people? She would be lost without Dahlen. She’d ditched him on the zeppelin and yet he’d still found her again, still stood by her.

  But now she’d gone too far.

  She loathed to admit it, even in her most private thoughts, but it was true: She needed him. Precisely because he was so unbending. He was the moral compass she leaned on in this directionless world she’d woken up to.

  “I must follow my own path and you yours,” Dahlen said as he walked through the threshold. “I cannot do business with a demagogue.”

  “So that’s it?” Rhee asked, steadying her voice. She wished more than anything he would stomp and throw things, spit a colorful stream of Fontisian curses. Or that he would sulk, or cry, or grab her shoulders and shake her, or anything. She wished he’d show what he really felt—not just what his moral instincts were, but what he held in his heart. She needed to know that he didn’t hate her.

  In a short time, he had become the person whose opinion mattered most to her.

  He turned away from her without a word, and Lahna moved to follow him. Rhee didn’t know what impulse overtook her. She just couldn’t stand to see him go. Wouldn’t. She had to have one last word, one last glance, some sign that he cared, that he hadn’t completely given up on her. Without thinking, she pulled Veyron’s knife from the belt where it now sat always, even when she slept, nestled tight against her hip.

  “If you’re no longer my friend,” she gasped out, “that makes you my enemy.” It had come to this—threatening the boy who’d saved her life, with the tip of the knife Veyron had almost used to kill her. She could barely hold back her tears.

  “This is not the solution,” Dahlen said quietly. “My feud is not with you.” Hope flared in her again, for a brief second. “If I’m to stay by your side, you know what I require.”

  He was giving her an ultimatum. He wanted her to break her truce with Nero. Her heart fluttered. She could still undo this.

  But then she thought of why she’d done what she’d done. She thought of the series of bombings following what happened on Nau Fruma. She thought of Julian. She thought of Joss—out there somewhere in the galaxy, waiting for her, possibly in danger.

  She shook her head. Dahlen had to do what he felt was right—just as she had to do what she felt was right.

  He sighed, his eyes soft.

  “Don’t leave.” Rhee felt herself begging, even though she hadn’t lowered the knife. “You’re the one who brought me here. You fought for me.” You believed in me.

  “You were uncompromising then.” He said it as if it were a lifetime ago.

  “I was not yet in charge of an empire,” she said. But she knew it would do no good. “Where will you go? What will you do?”

  He tilted his head and stared down at her, as if he were already seeing her from far away. “Kill him, of course.”

  “They’ll blame me if you do.”

  “Already thinking about how it will look,” Dahlen said, with infinite sadness. He reached out and gently pushed the knife away. She let it drop. It clattered to the floor, and she felt everything in her fall with it. “You’ll make a fine politician yet.”

  She blinked hard, turning away so he wouldn’t see her cry.

  “You won’t be alone,” he said, gentler now. “Lahna will stay with you. The order will stay with you.”

  “Excuse me?” Lahna obviously hadn’t expected this.

  He didn’t answer. He merely lifted a hand in farewell, and then turned and slipped out of the room.

  Rhee willed herself not to run after him. But after a minute, she couldn’t stand it. She ran to the balcony.

  “You’re not to get close to any windows,” Lahna reminded her coldly.

  Rhee ignored the warning and stood out on the balcony, watching for a last glimpse of him.

  “Empress . . .” Lahna tried again.

  Rhee stood her ground, her chin up as she waited. Perhaps he would turn around and come back. He’d call up to tell her he couldn’t leave. That he cared. That he believed in her still.

  But then she heard the rattle of a gate from the east side of the palace and realized he’d never leave out the front door. There were other exits, a dozen.

  Rhee didn’t see Dahlen exit her life. But she felt his absence immediately.

  She backed away from the balcony. Lahna closed the door behind her. For a moment, Rhee felt as if feelings were birds, winging frantically in her chest. Julian was gone. Josselyn was gone. Now Dahlen too.

  Would she always lose everyone who mattered?

  “I’m sorry,” Lahna said. Rhee turned away, realizing that Lahna had been watching her.

  “Did you love him?” Rhee asked. To fill the silence. To somehow feel closer to the boy who’d left.

  To pretend, maybe, that the question wasn’t one she had often asked herself.

  Lahna tilted her head. “I serve him.” She looked away, and Rhee saw her face soften for a brief, uncharacteristic moment. But she mastered it quickly. “Come. I’ll escort you back to your room.”

  There was nothing more to say, so they took the long way back to the emperor’s quarters without exchanging a word.

  She would be meeting with Nero again soon to make their announcement, and Rhee would have to be prepared. She would have to steel herself for what was to come.

  TEN

  ALYOSHA

  STANDING in the craft, packed in tight with a bunch of other fighters, Aly became a soldier again.

  But he wasn’t the buttoned-up, uniformed soldier that he used to be, standing in neat little lines. No “yes sir!” or “no sir!” or dropping to give the sarge fifty. He wasn’t the puppet soldier either, smiling for the cameras on the Revolutionary—that clueless kid with Vin by his side, cruising around as a poster boy for the UniForce while the world went to taejis around them.

  He became a Wraetan again too. Or at least he remembered he was. Spend too much time with only Kalusians and you’re liable to forget where you came from, bury every memory of the Wray deep enough so that you never have to recall them. But now that he was surrounded by Wraetans, he felt the tiniest fraction of ease. He heard the dialect he’d grown up speaking, saw it in the way they moved—the mannerisms of his ma and his dad—felt that hard, front-syllable accent reappear in the back of his throat when he talked. He let himself look like a Wraetan too, could see how his skin had gotten darker when he wasn’t running for shade every time he went outside. His fingers got tangled in his hair; it went cu
rly now that he wasn’t keeping it cropped short to the scalp every week—sometimes twice a week—just so the texture wouldn’t show.

  He felt like himself in his own skin, felt at home, in a way he’d been missing for so, so long.

  Kara had felt like home once too. He couldn’t have shared the feeling with her, but he could’ve showed her who he was, who he could be.

  But then he’d fucked it all up. And she’d died.

  He pushed the thought of her away; she was gone like everyone else he’d loved. Just two days ago he’d been holding Kara’s hand, and now here he was—part of the WFC’s newest batch of freedom fighters. What else was he going to do? Nothing and no one wanted him, and he felt the same about the world. The only thing he was hoping for was revenge. He’d go head-to-head with the UniForce. You didn’t get to use Aly and Vin and just get away with it.

  This felt better, felt right. The current mission was to take back a massive satellite on Uustral, traditionally a sanctuary planet. Tucked behind a vast medical complex, the satellite and broadcast tower had been used for decades to beam out information about new medical techniques and technologies to far reaches of the galaxy—it could touch all the way to the Outer Belt, where often medical understanding was closer to magical thinking—and also to communicate with medbays that did relief work across the entire system.

  That is, until the UniForce had assumed control of it, turning it into a machine to spew out war propaganda. The WFC was going to dismantle it—by any means necessary.

  They’d dropped into Uustral airspace now. He’d known a few Uustralite soldiers back in the UniForce, and he wondered now what they were up to. Was he dropping down on their homes right now, descending to light their southern hemisphere on fire?

  Distantly, Aly wondered about Jeth too. After he’d helped them broadcast Aly’s cube playback on Rhesto and taken them into custody, Aly hadn’t seen him again. He didn’t know what was up—whether Jeth was even alive. Pavel was practically fried. Aly had dropped him on the nearest WFC station for repairs, but he had no idea if he would make it. Vin was dead. Kara was dead.