Blood of a Thousand Stars

by Rhoda Belleza

  He was stronger than he’d been only a few months ago. She used to be able to best him in a fight.

  The thought occurred to her suddenly that maybe, all along, he’d let her win.

  Julian. Her Julian. Suddenly his face in the darkness seemed to solidify. The mouth grim that so often she had seen wide with sudden laughter. The nose she’d broken when they were seven years old, landing her first punch after he’d taunted her that she couldn’t.

  Rhee swung off him sideways, and the momentum rolled him off his balance. She grabbed the knife and pinned him beneath her. She brought the blade to his neck.

  They were panting. The moonlight cut in, and she saw how he had changed in just a few weeks’ time. His jaw had squared off in anger. His floppy blond hair was wet, clinging to his forehead.

  Rhee couldn’t help herself; she swept it away. And there was the blue in his irises. Electric. The color of the sky she’d dreamed about.

  Julian. Their friendship had saved her life. He was the only person who’d ever felt like an extension of herself. She never felt alone if Julian was there. In truth, he was the only one who could stand her. Now all she felt was the heat off his body, the hatred in his stare. He wanted her to die.

  No, he wanted to punish her.

  “What’s stopping you?” he said. The blade trembled in her hand. “Do it.”

  “Shut up,” she whispered. She remembered how he used to egg her on—called from ahead to make her swim faster or run harder. He expected her to be her best, to be his equal. Rhee thought of the summer she’d spent the afternoons trying to kick up into a handstand. How he’d been there rattling off facts so she might find her balance in distraction and ease.

  “This is your legacy, Rhiannon,” he said. The flatness of his voice stung more than any insult. “War. Death. Disloyalty. Wouldn’t the ancestors be proud?”

  “I said shut up.” When she’d been sent to Nau Fruma after her parents had died, he’d chased her out onto the dunes. When she screamed, so did he. They’d been so young, yelling until their throats were ragged, screaming at the injustice of it all. Tears poured from Rhee’s eyes. Sand stuck to her face and tangled her hair. And Julian did nothing but sit next to her, staring out toward the horizon. He didn’t say anything while she cried. He didn’t need to.

  In a sudden movement, she threw the knife across the floor.

  For a second, he stared at her. His eyes changed. The blue darkened. With a sudden roar of fury, he shoved her off him and dove for the knife. She kneeled there, numbly, quietly, even as he drove her backward.

  Her head hit the floor but she didn’t feel it. She didn’t want to feel anything. He straddled her, the blade to her neck. Rhee felt his weight on her, felt the muscles in his thighs tighten around her. He was shaking.

  “Why?” he asked. The cruelty had drained away, and he’d become that same little boy again, desperate to know. He grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. She saw the scar on the underside of his chin from when he’d fallen off the palace wall. She saw everything, all at once, the love turned to terror, the boy she’d betrayed.

  “How could you?” he repeated, and his voice broke. “How could you?” he said again.

  She blinked back tears. “I didn’t want to,” she said. The knife pressed into her neck, the cool metal, the sharp edge. He really would kill her. Rhee would let everyone down, but she wouldn’t blame him. “Believe me.”

  What else could she say to the boy on his knees, mourning the father he’d loved? Nothing would bring Veyron back, certainly not the truth. Nothing would bring any of them back. Her parents were dead, and she’d never found her sister. And didn’t Dahlen leave because she’d proven herself unworthy?

  “Drop it.”

  Lahna’s voice was quiet, calm, and deadly. Julian froze. Lahna was silhouetted in the doorway, with her loaded bow aimed straight at his head.

  “Lahna,” Rhee called out. “Don’t. He’s—” My friend. “He’s the son of Lancer Veyron and Marguerite Zolana.” She listed out his lineage, an old moon custom reserved for warriors before a fight. Her voice was raw, desperate. “You will not kill him. This is our fight.”

  Rhee didn’t know how Lahna might react, but she hadn’t expected she’d drop her bow to the ground and press her index fingers to either eye. Rhee knew it was a religious sign of respect, and a way for those who follow Vodhan to honor the dead.

  In one silent movement, Lahna kneeled.

  “What are you doing?” Rhee asked.

  “Honoring the memory of a hero,” she said, bowing her head. “Lancer Veyron made great sacrifices for the resistance.”

  Rhee shook her head. No, she thought. It couldn’t be true. If Lancer was a hero, that meant—

  “Your father,” Lahna continued, speaking to Julian, “paid the ultimate price for his loyalty.”

  THIRTEEN

  ALYOSHA

  AS the WFC moved south, the rain on Uustral turned to snow. It had a fresh, metallic scent to it and a habit of landing everywhere—on Aly’s eyelashes, on his lips, and on the open field outside. Dahlen had recruited him on the satellite mission and now prepped him for the debriefing in the makeshift locker room—which was really just an insulated tent that barely kept them safe from the cold. For now.

  It had been five days since they raided the tower, and the WFC had spent almost every hour strategizing, repairing weapons, and, most important, attempting to analyze the equipment they’d stolen from the satellite control center. Aly could barely focus, what with all the yo-yoing between burning rage and the moments of a deep, quiet blue—and a feeling that his heart had been flooded with ice water. He’d always been so good at keeping it casual, cool, going with the flow—and now he caught himself glaring up at the sky, as if Vodhan were watching now, as if the creator himself had stood back to let the world burn.

  They had found sanctuary among the Uustralite army, which had recently come out and pledged allegiance to Fontis. This was all despite the fact that northern Uustral, where the satellite they had disabled was located, now claimed allegiance to Nero.

  No surprise there: Nero had been paying northern Uustral handsomely for the use of its massive satellite. But Dahlen’s hunch had proven correct. The sophisticated comms they’d torn out of the control center were actually a slightly outdated type of hard drive, meant to store information, not communicate it. Information was coming in via the satellite—information from all over the galaxy. The hard drives were encrypted and hard to crack, but the snippets the WFC intelligence team had extracted so far had a memory-like quality to them.

  A personal quality.

  The WFC had already long suspected Nero was spying on their cubes, even while they were off—but they never thought even he would stoop so low as to poach data from ordinary civilians, let alone civilians as widespread as that satellite could reach.

  And Aly thought he had problems? The entire galaxy was fracturing. His own puny life was at best a messy microcosm of the truth.

  In the end, everything always fell apart.

  Aly ran the tap and cupped his palms to make a bowl, collecting the freezing water in his hands. He brought it to his face and felt the cold shoot down his spine. He made his way over to the bench where they had thrown all their stuff, and shrugged into his shirt, buttoning it up. Distantly, he heard the tinny voice of a newscaster beaming off somebody’s handheld, replaying the same endlessly dissected news of Rhiannon and Nero’s diplomatic gambit. Aly wondered what Kara would think of Rhiannon’s new alliance with Nero.

  And then he remembered that Kara didn’t have an opinion and never would again. The grief was sudden and so deep it numbed his bones, and he fluttered his eyes closed.

  “You don’t look well,” Dahlen observed as he slipped into his own WFC-issued button-up. “Are you in pain?”

  A ray of sunshine, this one. Lots of the soldier
s messed around and blew off steam, but not Dahlen. Super cut and lean all around, whiter than a ghost, with blond eyebrows so light you sometimes couldn’t even tell they were there, Dahlen moved like he was slicing through the air, chasing demons off with that fierce face of his.

  But what tripped up Aly the most was a long, precise scar on the upper left side of his chest, like someone had tried to slash up his heart. The scar puckered in places from where it had been stitched. Aly didn’t even bother asking him for the story; this was a dude whose idea of bonding was assassination.

  He had, however, figured out where he recognized Dahlen from: holovision broadcasts of Empress Rhiannon’s return to Sibu. This was the Fontisian guard who’d picked Rhiannon up like a doll and tossed her over his shoulder in the midst of a street brawl outside the palace walls.

  Only now, the Empress was colluding with Nero, and Dahlen was no longer with her in Sibu but here, planning a kill.

  “I’m all right.” It was the first time he’d been with Dahlen alone since they’d headed south. He nodded to Dahlen’s chest. “I bet that hurt.”

  Dahlen shrugged. “I can’t say the recovery was too pleasant.”

  Aly turned away and slipped into his fatigues with a bounce. “Some sort of freaky initiation into the order?” He tried to make it sound casual.

  “I’m no longer part of the order,” Dahlen answered plainly. Aly thought for a second a flicker of pain passed over his face, but it was gone so fast he wasn’t sure.

  Dahlen turned on his heel to exit the tent. Aly followed him, half-amused, half-annoyed by Dahlen’s seeming resistance to any kind of conversation that wasn’t tactical.

  “I thought those vows were for life,” Aly said. The cold air hit him hard, especially at his elbow—which had been healed at the camp’s medcenter with a handheld stem cell gun. Pain shot up the bone in this weather, but Aly tried his best not to react.

  “They are,” Dahlen said as they fell into step, walking side by side to the outpost of war tents. “Unless one of the commandments has been violated.”

  Aly raised an eyebrow. “You don’t look like the rule-breaking type.” Aly didn’t know much about the order’s vows, but figured there was one for chastity. There usually was. “Was it a girl?” He thought of the Empress.

  “Don’t be absurd,” he said, in a way that sounded bored. “We’re not friends. There is no need to share.”

  Aly guessed what Dahlen said was true: Just because they were going to assassinate Nero together didn’t mean they were friends. Aly doubted whether Dahlen had ever had any. Not like Aly had any friends left either. He thought of Vin, and the hammer he’d laid on his grave on Naidoz. Of Jeth, wherever he was. Of Kara, and how sometimes she’d curl up into a ball and rest her chin on her knees. The way their hands clasped through the chain-link fence. The way her body lay limp, buried in rubble, consumed by a pointless war.

  Aly pushed the organic memories way down deep, as far as they could go. But the rest of his past brimmed up around them.

  Alina, Mom, Dad: gone. He remembered sometimes how he’d see Alina around the Wray.

  “What’s good, little brother?” she’d yell from across the way, always checking in, mostly to embarrass him. But he missed it. He missed someone looking out for him.

  Aly blinked away those thoughts of home too. He took in the landscape outside. Crisp and clear. Kara would’ve loved it. Would’ve said something about its cleansing nature, how it makes the whole world look pure and true . . .

  “I’ve decided I hate snow,” Aly said aloud. He was a minute away from icing over and cracking apart in his WFC fatigues. Meanwhile Dahlen wore a light black T-shirt, dark veins popping out of his pale arms and crazy tattoos along his neck on display like the cold couldn’t touch him. Aly wondered if it was true—he’d heard all kinds of crazy taejis about members of the order and their mythic strength and powers. It was a little hard to swallow, the more he thought about it: how the order, essentially an ancient organization founded on notions of worship and peace, formed and funded a resistance group like the WFC. Sure, the WFC had once been dedicated to peaceful operations, but they’d become freedom fighters, emphasis on fighters. A bunch of stoic Vodheads behind the galaxy’s fiercest vigilante group.

  But Aly had given up on the idea that there was a hard difference between right and wrong or between justice and suffering. One couldn’t exist, really, without the other. He knew that. Nothing should surprise him anymore. And still it did.

  “You can’t dislike the snow,” Dahlen replied. Typical. Fontisians and their double negatives. “It’s a necessary function of nature. It drains off the mountaintops and feeds into the valleys so they’ll be provided with water.”

  Aly stared at the guy—a real utilitarian. Not a poetic bone in his body. They might have prayed to the same god, but the Order of the Light folks had a literal interpretation of everything.

  Well, Aly could do that too.

  “Here’s what I think of snow,” he replied. He reached down, scooped up a handful, let it melt against his skin. “You touch it and it’s gone.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Pavel was waiting for Aly just outside of the military outpost: dozens of scattered tents arranged in a traditional nautilus pattern. Pavel had been delivered from repairs only two days ago, and Aly still felt a huge swell of gratitude to see his little cylindrical body glowing there in the snow.

  “It’s thirty-seven degrees Celsius below the humanoid body temperature.”

  “You’re sounding kind of happy about it.”

  “I’m eager to see what it does to your biochemistry. I’ve never had the opportunity to document your reaction firsthand to such an uninhabitable temperature!”

  “That’s some greeting, little man.” Aly nodded a hello just as Pavel opened up his hatch, extending an orange heat rod for Aly to warm his hands. Aly shook his head and huffed warm breath into his cupped palms instead. Since his return, Pavel had been tailing Aly to show off his new comfort features.

  “You didn’t program this one, did you?” Dahlen said when Pavel offered the heat rod to him.

  “Why?” Aly shot back. “Didn’t think I could?”

  “No, I didn’t,” the Fontisian said flatly. He held his palms up to the device, though he didn’t seem all that cold—just curious. “Not for a lack of intelligence but for a lack of charm. The droid seems a bit more . . . cheerful than I would have assigned to you.”

  Like this guy was one to talk.

  “Yeah?” Aly said. “This is one of my good days too.”

  With Pavel now rolling on his treads behind them, Aly and Dahlen entered the maze of tents, and people did their damnedest to scramble the hell out of their way as they walked side by side down the snowy path toward the largest tent in the center of camp. Aly didn’t know how to react; he only knew he had to front like he wasn’t freezing his butt off. And more important, like he knew what the hell the plan was.

  Aly pushed past Dahlen into the largest tent. Uustral-made—he still had to turn sideways to fit through the opening. The indigenous species of Uustral were built smaller, way smaller, all striated muscle with flat skulls. But what they lacked in height they made up for with bluntly shaped heads that housed some seriously complex brain cortexes. The Uustralites had developed tech way out of anyone’s league.

  Inside, they took seats around a small table surrounded by a handful of high-ranking WFC fighters, and Pavel stationed himself just behind Aly and to his right. Aly felt self-conscious, like he always did on The Revolutionary Boys when they would first start the filming. He never knew how to move, or what to do with his hands. Now, the Uustralite general nodded at them and began to speak. To Aly, it sounded like he was humming a tune underwater. The tent was outfitted with a translation net, fortunately, which caught the sonar of a voice and bounced it back to you in your native lan
guage.

  “Welcome,” he said to Dahlen and Aly. “We are gathered here to discuss Operation Scorched Eagle.”

  Aly tried to play off a snort like he was coughing. Pavel gave him a subtle bump on his leg. Aly willed his face into something neutral. Man, he’d forgotten how every military outfit had a flair for drama.

  But Dahlen had noticed and glared at him from the next seat over.

  “I’ve missed the humor,” Dahlen said. “Do you not care to explain?”

  He was getting sick of this guy’s backward way of talking, his stoicism, his blank slate of a face that never had expression apart from sour. “I mean, Operation Scorched Eagle? That’s the part where we drop down and kill Nero, right?”

  The Uurstral nodded. “Yes, of course,” he said, oblivious to how ridiculous and showy these code names were. “We’re going to drop you, Alyosha, down on the center of Verdal, where you’ll wait to be intercepted by the UniForce—”

  “Hold. On.” Aly stood up. His head hit the top of the tent, and he pushed it up above his head, annoyed. “What the hell are they talking about?”

  Dahlen looked him up and down, pushing the blond curtain of hair out of his face. “Is it not clear yet? You’re notorious, Alyosha.”

  “Thanks?”

  “The galaxy could never muster an all-out enthusiasm for you on the show. They liked you, but tepidly.”

  Didn’t Aly know it. Still, the reminder dug through him, nailed him in the ribs like a hard left hook. Vin had always been the loveable star of The Revolutionary Boys. At best Aly had been the quiet sidekick. But after he’d been outed as a Wraetan, Aly with his dark skin and his dark eyes became the volatile war refugee they watched—wondering when he’d go off like a bomb.

  “Okay, look, Dahlen. Because you don’t know much about much, let me break down social interaction for you,” Aly told him. Pavel slowly rolled between them, and had extended himself up to the tallest setting so that his top dome blocked their faces. He used to do the same thing when he and Vin were fighting. Aly elbowed him backward. “Literally every time you think about saying something,” he said to Dahlen, “keep your mouth closed, step back, and just don’t.”