“Rhee.” Julian put his hand on her shoulder. Lahna appeared on her other side, yet Rhee couldn’t tear her eyes away from the murderer before her.
“There would be nothing noble about this kill,” Lahna said. “He’s unconscious.”
Rhee trembled, her index finger pressing down on the trigger, playing with the resistance of it.
“Guys, we gotta move,” Jeth said again. “If we manage to get out of here alive there are bigger fish to fry!”
Her mind clouded over with thoughts of Nero—he was the bigger fish—and she had let him live. But she wouldn’t make that same mistake again.
Rhee lowered the harpoon gun. She’d face Yendit once more. She had a feeling. But Nero was the prize now . . .
Part Four:
THE CROWNED
“In the long, illustrious rule of the Ta’an Dynasty, what is often forgotten is their tumultuous ascent to power twelve generations prior—and the bloody attempt to keep it in the year 928.”
—Excerpt from The Iron Star, Updated Edition: A History of the Ta’an Dynasty
TWENTY-THREE
KARA
KARA couldn’t sleep in the chambers that once belonged to her parents. It should’ve been comforting; it should’ve felt like home. Instead she felt encased in a deathbed, the room a shrine to the life she was supposed to have lived. For the past two days—ever since Nero had installed her back at the palace in Sibu—she had followed a woman through the dimly familiar rooms as though visiting a foreign land, or as though she were a ghost visiting a former life. And the guards had watched on.
Given the many fine layers of her formal silk robes, and the elaborately arranged scarf that covered her hair, Kara figured the woman was a Tai. They were a sect of teachers and caretakers, Kara knew, and the woman gave off the proper air of someone who moved slowly and acted deliberately. She spoke in a monotone as she pointed out artifacts in the palace, a droning history lesson with no love or passion behind any of it. There was something familiar about her, as if Kara had known her before—and maybe she had, and maybe it was the case that she knew Rhiannon too—but there was no way to ask her now. As was obvious from the glassiness of her eyes and eerie dreaminess of her movements, she was clearly under the influence of the overwriter.
Kara silently thanked Diac, for what felt like the millionth time, for that neuroblocker. Her mind still felt clear—Nero might have the overwriter, but he’d not gotten inside her head. At least not yet.
Still. Everything about the palace felt foreign, and she craved to speak with someone who had their own thoughts and ideas—not a vessel for Nero’s twisted game.
Mostly, she mourned her sister. Rhiannon was dead; she had to be. In the last moments of their lives, the ambassadors of the United Planets had sent out frantic messages, begging for help—Empress Rhee was in trouble, they were all in trouble, the Tasinn had turned.
Dead, dead, all of them dead. A horrific massacre.
Nero’s doing, obviously. He had used the overwriter to control the Tasinn, turning them into a deadly army.
And now Nero expected her to do a broadcast later that evening, one in which she pinned the massacre on Rhiannon. After all, the Tasinn were her guards. And her body hadn’t turned up among the corpses, or so he claimed. But Kara knew the truth. Rhee had been a casualty to Nero’s ambition.
She knew too that Nero was watching her through the guards that followed her. But not through her own cube—since she’d taken the neuroblocker. She had no idea how long its effects would last, though.
She had no allies, no one to speak to—she was alone again. Issa had been taken as a prisoner down to the cellars, where she was heavily guarded.
Kara needed to break her out, and get as far away from the palace as possible. But then what? Would there be people on the outside whose cubes had been updated, who could be under Nero’s influence at any moment?
There had to be some sort of weak point in the palace security, a way to exit the walls without being seen. And there had to be holes in Nero’s overall plan, contingencies that he went to great lengths to cover. If only she could read his mind, wrench open his thoughts and shuffle through them as casually as he had ingested the overwriter.
A memory surfaced, rippling through her grief like a rock striking the water—and it wasn’t at all the one she would have expected. She’d said much the same thing to Pavel back on Nau Fruma, before Aly had left her. That she’d open up his head and rearrange him. What had Pavel told her in response? Something about cube-to-cube transfers . . .
She couldn’t get inside Nero’s head—but maybe she could put Nero’s head inside hers.
Nero wouldn’t let his cube die, and where else would he store it if not in a host? Diac had told her the overwriter itself could be preserved in a living thing, a tree. The same could be said for the cube. As for Nero’s cube . . . he had probably stored it in the very root system that had housed the overwriter. And her best bet was the palace greenhouse, though she had no idea where to find it.
Listen, Kara told herself. Use your mind.
She had no delusions she would get her memories back, not when she needed them, and definitely not in the high-definition form of cube memories. But Kara thought, hoped, that there was some memory buried deep inside her muscles, inside her mind. Lydia had used the overwriter on her and still, she’d kept some things: her sense of direction, her basic knowledge of how to do the everyday things. If those were intact, maybe her body’s memory of her former home was too.
Kara grabbed a paperweight from her father’s desk—a heavy model of Kalu—and stepped into the hall. It would make a clumsy weapon if she got caught. She would have to count on her memory to do the rest. Maybe, if a guard stopped her, a clever lie.
But the coast was eerily clear, as if the guards had suddenly been called away. She sent up a quick thank you to Vodhan, Aly’s god, before she could push the urge away. Trying not to think of Aly, Kara moved through the shadows of the palace, her feet padded by the thick rugs, down one floor. She skirted the edges of the kitchen in case a guard passed. They didn’t; Kara caught a glimpse of only one through the threshold as she crouched low and pressed herself against the counter. Then he disappeared down another hall, away from her, and she made her move.
She slipped into a musty pantry with empty shelves and a broken light. There were no windows. But there was another door. She opened it.
Here she was: damp dark steps descending into a cellar.
Kara paused, wondering when they would notice she was gone, or if they already knew. But did it matter? If there was any chance of stopping Nero, the time was now.
Down in the cellars she could sense the expanse of a whole world below that she would’ve explored when she was young. Kara stood in the dark and listened. There was a steady sound of quiet dripping, comforting if it weren’t for the echo, or the dozens of palace guards ready to be deployed at Nero’s behest—to find her, to brainwash her too, to strip away her humanity and her free will.
That was not the way it would end. Kara would make her own choices.
She listened. She knew there was a way out if she could just reason through it. What did she know about greenhouses? That they needed glass paneling for sunlight, insulation for the heat. It meant she would need to travel in the direction of the backyard, to the south. What else? That there would be a water source. Plants needed water.
The leak. She went toward it and found moss on the ground and walls that grew thicker the deeper she went in one direction. The deeper she moved in, away from the pantry, the darker it got—so black she couldn’t see her own hands. She guided herself through the forks in the cellar by touch. It was wet and soft, and it reminded her of the moss that grew in patches in Luris, on slick stones deep in the forest, the further you moved from the shore.
When the moss thinned out on the walls of the cellar, Kara backt
racked.
There wasn’t much time, but she plunged forward. Right. Left. Right. Right and then a quick left. There was light, and she felt a sliver of joy until she got scared again, wondering whether she’d only made a huge circle. But she found more light and more, until she looked up and saw the outline of a door. Scrambling up the worn stairs, she cracked open the door and saw grass. To the left was the greenhouse. Kara was steps away from being outside.
Outside, she flinched at the sunshine—so much horror had happened, she almost expected the world to have vanished. The garden path was overgrown now, crowded with untrimmed greenery. A memory burst into her mind then, or if not a memory, an impression of one: the sweet smell of roses. Somewhere deep down, Kara had carried that with her, and even more—how the petals felt soft between her fingers, and the sadness she felt when they would eventually wilt and fall away with the slightest breeze. She knew it was some sort of organic memory, a remnant of her life before, and suddenly, she felt angry that they would only ever come back to her half-formed.
The greenhouse rose up in the distance: a large glass building in the shape of a hexagon. Two guards paced the perimeter, and Kara hung back, ducking further into the shadows the mass of greenery afforded, until they had disappeared around the corner.
The coast was clear. She slipped into the open and darted to the greenhouse doors, praying she would find them open. Her heart did a weird little jig in her chest. The long silver handles felt cool to the touch, and they turned easily.
Holding her breath, she passed inside. The air was humid. What from the outside had looked like a beautiful and well-tended greenhouse on the inside was an expansive, riotous forest. The ceiling cut the light into prisms.
The greenhouse was terraced, and hanging gardens rose up to the sky, sending leaves the size of her open palm cascading toward the ground. She’d been here before; she was sure of it. It occurred to her Nero had allowed this to thrive. He liked beautiful things when they were manicured and polished, stripped of their rawness. Though he might have planned to store the overwriter here all along, and perhaps its more natural state was conducive to supporting it. She shuddered. Maybe he planned to grow it, as her mom had been growing it on Wraeta.
The paths through towers of vertical planters were tight and winding, and her arms were soon coated in sweat and humidity and the clinging pollen of plant life. She wound her way toward the center of the greenhouse, where, beside a cluster of cherry blossom trees that threw their arms up to the sky, a lone gray stump was squatting in a heap of gravel and dirt. It looked like the cross section of Wraeta.
It was a cross section of Wraeta.
Kara dropped her weapon and plunged her hands into the dirt. The loose shale and gravel bit at her nails, and she knew it must be mixing with her blood. It felt fitting. She pawed down past the roots, scrabbling frantically now, all too aware that someone might arrive and surprise her at any second.
Then Kara felt it: a piece of metal that she pinched between her fingers. It was Nero’s own cube deep in the root system, thriving, living, waiting to be reclaimed. Pain coursed through her at the thought of having the cube implanted. What would it do to her? What would he do to her?
It didn’t matter. She had no choice. There had to be something there, in his cube, that could help her find a way to undo him for good. There had to be a way.
If there wasn’t, all was lost.
She yanked the whole thing free. The cube was a dull piece of metal no bigger than her pinky finger, with exposed pink and white roots that, in the absence of something to nest into, began to wiggle as though alive. These, she knew, were the connective arteries that would join to her brain.
She slipped the cube into the folds of her duhatj, wiped her hands clean, and stood. Kara felt a shiver up her spine. The air pressure changed just slightly—she felt a draft that wasn’t there before. Leaves rustled in the breeze. Kara froze.
Someone had opened the door to the greenhouse.
Kara sidestepped into the cherry branches and dropped into a crouch again. She heard heavy boots—a Tasinn, it had to be—slowly drumming their way up the path. A droid was humming in the quiet too—likely a security model. It would tase her on sight.
Closer. Closer. Almost on top of her now . . .
Making a split-second decision, Kara hurtled into the open. She didn’t get a good look at him—he was tall and in uniform, and that’s all she had time to register. Then all at once, she took off at a sprint and slammed into him, keeping her head down. As he spun backward, she ran past him toward the exit. Somewhere in front of her, an android was beeping repetitively—it didn’t sound like a security bot, but she was hardly going to pivot to check it out—and she dodged down the path, careened through the narrow chasms of growth. She’d almost made it to the door when suddenly another guard stepped in front of her, flipping her neatly onto her back.
She rolled over before he could drop on top of her. But he pinned her legs. She pushed and kicked, desperate to get free. It couldn’t end here, with Nero’s cube in her pocket, when she was so close to what she needed—and what the galaxy needed.
“Kara,” the guard said, and in a surreal moment Kara thought she knew the voice. Then she realized she did know the voice.
“Aly?”
TWENTY-FOUR
ALYOSHA
“I—I thought you were dead,” Aly said. He still half thought he was dreaming: the greenhouse, the humidity, the landscape of growth, Kara standing in front of him, alive, as beautiful as ever. “I saw you die . . .”
There was something more than the change in her eyes, her skin, her hair, the way she smelled. The essence of her had shifted, yet hadn’t changed in any vital way, shape, or form. It made it more obvious than ever: the awful, aching truth that he loved her. And that he’d left her.
“It wasn’t me,” she said.
Pavel rolled up slowly and pulled out a freshly cut rose from his chest compartment. “Did you know the rose variety found outside the palace is not a species indigenous to Kalu?”
That got her to smile a little bit, the corners of her mouth quivering. Aly realized it was the kind of smile you forced your face to make.
“Thanks, Pavel.” She took it from the droid and put it to her nose absently.
“Please.” Aly reached for her hands. His palms were slick with sweat. All he wanted was for her to look at him, to understand he didn’t know—that he did what he’d done for her. They were together now. “Please, Kara. Believe me. I—I swear, if I’d known I never would have left Nau Fruma. Ask Pavel . . .”
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said. But at least she didn’t pull away. Instead, she turned her eyes to Dahlen. “Who are you?” she asked.
“Dahlen,” he said simply. “And you?”
Kara hesitated. “Kara,” she said at the exact same time Aly said, “Princess Josselyn.”
“All of the above?” Pavel said. Dahlen raised his eyebrows.
“Now that the introductions are concluded, perhaps we can save the rest of the joyful reunion for after we kill Nero?”
“Not if you’re navigating,” Aly snapped back. “Pavel used your intel to track Nero to this exact spot. You said you had a line on Nero’s cube.”
Kara looked from Aly to Dahlen and back. “You’re here for Nero?”
“Isn’t that what he just said?” Dahlen said testily.
A real charmer.
Aly cut in before he could do any more damage. “We’re here to kill Nero. A few days ago, the WFC managed to tap Nero’s cube location. After years and years of firewall, Nero must have lifted permissions. So we tracked him.”
She looked between the two of them. “How many Tasinn did you kill?”
“Nine,” Dahlen said. “Every one we found. We weren’t able to remain undetected.” Kara stared at him. He didn’t seem to notice. “We tracked Nero her
e, to the greenhouse.” He looked around, as if expecting the man to materialize.
Kara took a deep breath. “You tracked his cube to this spot because his cube is at this spot.”
Now it was Aly’s turn to stare.
“Nero has the overwriter,” Kara said. “He had to swap out his cube for it. He’ll know soon. He may already know.”
“Know what?” Aly said. He could hardly keep track of what she was saying.
Kara shrugged, her mouth tilted up in that smirk she sometimes got when she figured something out before anyone else did. Thank Vodhan he recognized it, recognized something about her. But any relief he’d felt drained all the way out when she reached into her pocket, then held up her hand, opening it, and simply said:
“That I stole it.”
* * *
• • •
Aly had to jog to keep pace with Kara as they moved freely through the palace. Dahlen and Aly had cleared a path, and the Tasinn usually guarding the residential wing were in Vodhan’s hands now.
Left, right, left—Aly lost track of all the dizzying twists and turns the palace concealed, even as he struggled to make sense of what she told them: the message that brought her to Ralire, the conversation with Diac while they were imprisoned, and how Nero had beat her to the overwriter. His heart seized when she told them about the massacre at the United Planets meeting.
“Does it not worry you that Rhiannon is gone?” Dahlen asked.
Kara narrowed her eyes. “Of course it worries me.” Then she turned, testing a door with her weight, and, finding it open, hustling them down yet another flight of stairs. “She could be gone,” she said over her shoulder. Her voice had cracked. “Or she might have decided to run away . . .”
“No.” Dahlen’s voice was surprisingly forceful. “Not Rhee.” Aly raised an eyebrow at his use of her nickname.
Blood of a Thousand Stars Page 23
