Blood of a Thousand Stars

by Rhoda Belleza

  Julian shrugged. “The timing is convenient, is all.”

  “Convenient? The galaxy is at war.” But she was distracted—they were interviewing Joss in the main foyer of the palace. It looked so perfect, or perfectly rehearsed—staged. Now that she thought of it, everything was too perfect.

  “You mention suffering,” the broadcaster said. “I assume you mean the recent massacre at the United Planets gathering?”

  Joss nodded her head, focusing on the broadcaster. “It was a terrible, unprecedented tragedy. And I had to step forward.”

  “To rule alongside your sister?”

  “No.” Then Joss looked right into the camera and said, “To rule in her place.”

  Lahna sucked in a quick breath, and Jeth paused the holo so Joss’s head was tilted to the side, her eyes—one brown, one hazel—locked on to Rhee.

  “No, replay it,” Julian said.

  “I think Rhee needs a minute,” Jeth said.

  “Replay it!” Julian insisted. When the Chram refused, Julian grabbed the handheld out of his hand and replayed it himself.

  Rhee had to suffer through her own sister publicly planning to usurp her. “To rule in her place,” she said once more. Julian replayed it, and replayed it . . .

  “If you’re being cruel—” Lahna argued.

  “That’s the girl who broke into the dojo!” Julian suddenly cried out. “She looks different, but I recognize her voice. I thought you’d sent her,” he said to Rhee, “because she had your coin. Or one just like it.”

  Rhee pulled her own coin out. Julian took it and held it up to the sun. “It was like this, but all rusted over. It’s the same girl. Rhee, she intercepted a message meant for my father. Which means she’s either working with the resistance . . .”

  “Or working to destroy it,” Jeth chimed in. “Guys, I got another whammy: I think this was the girl traveling with Alyosha.”

  “The soldier accused of my murder? The one you claimed was innocent?” Rhee asked. It seemed impossible, her own sister circling in this same orbit of soldiers and refugees and loyalists—when Rhee herself had just discovered she was alive. “Keep playing it, all the way through,” Rhee said.

  “I have reason to believe, as much as it pains me to say it,” Joss continued, “that the royal Tasinn were conducting that attack at the command of”—she blinked here—“the younger princess, my sister, Rhiannon Ta’an. If the intelligence is correct, I am ashamed, both for myself and my family’s legacy.”

  Jeth cursed.

  Rhee felt as if she had taken a blow directly to the chest.

  Joss had pinned the entire massacre on her.

  It made sense. That was the horrible thing. As far as she knew, no one on Kalu had any awareness of Nero’s access to technology that could control the Tasinn from afar. And they are—were—her royal army, after all. She felt a flush of mortification that she hadn’t seen it sooner—how she’d been set up.

  Could Joss really believe that Rhee would be capable of such a thing? Had Nero managed to convince her of it? Or was she working with him?

  Joss looked directly out from the feed. She might really have been standing only a few feet away, fixing Rhee in place with her glare. “I would like to take the opportunity to tell you, Rhiannon, wherever you are, that I intend to seek justice for the victims of this terrible massacre. The person to blame must be held accountable.” Her expression could have been cut from stone. The only sign she gave of discomfort was in the way she toyed with a ring on her left hand. But her voice was profoundly calm.

  “Then you publicly denounce your sister?”

  “I do,” Josselyn said. She looked directly into the camera. “Rhiannon, if you have survived, surrender now—or never return. We must all determine to take the more difficult path, because it’s the right one.”

  Rhee felt tears sting her eyes. She blinked, once, twice, trying to clear her head, trying to think. Honor. Bravery. Loyalty.

  “I have another announcement to share soon that will bring much-needed hope to the galaxy,” Josselyn continued, still fiddling with the ring on her left hand, turning it over and over.

  And then Rhee saw it. The sign, the clue, the message.

  Dahlen’s ring.

  Dahlen and Josselyn were together. It was a sign. A new spasm of desperate hope sparked inside Rhee’s chest. And now, she understood the hidden meaning running like a current beneath her sister’s words.

  I intend to seek justice.

  The person to blame must be held accountable.

  And then, the last part—the very echo of Dahlen’s parting words: We must all determine to take the more difficult path, because it’s the right one.

  Josselyn and Dahlen were planning to kill Nero: It was their message to Rhee.

  It was their invitation to her.

  Joss bit her lip. And there was the Joss Rhee knew and remembered. That was her sister. The one who tortured and ignored her, but the same one who’d led her out of those cellars. Who’d taught her how to cartwheel and fold tiny paper airplanes that they’d throw off the balcony. She’d come back for her.

  Loyalty. It was part of her ma’tan sarili.

  “Nero put her up to this,” Rhee said to the group. “She’s trying to tell me so herself. She’s wearing Dahlen’s ring.”

  “You can’t be sure,” Lahna said. “This sister of yours was confirmed traveling with the very boy who was acussed of your murder, whose whereabouts are now unknown.” She and Jeth shared a look; hers was fierce, his uncertain. “And she made contact with Julian, took a valuable piece of intel meant for an important leader in the resistance.”

  “I can’t be sure,” Rhee agreed shakily. Her own first instinct had been suspicion. What other reason would bring Joss so close to her than the promise of the crown? They’d been interconnected all this time when Rhee was on the run for her life, and on the path to empress.

  But another set of reasons seemed just as likely: that her sister was scared, that she’d been to hell and back, that reclaiming her throne was the safest bet in a world that wanted her dead.

  “I can’t be sure,” Rhee repeated, “but isn’t that what faith is about? Finding clarity and conviction in a world that is muddied and uncertain?” She thought of Dahlen here, wishing he were by her side.

  Rhee didn’t care how innocent it sounded, how foolish. Every instinct in her braided together into something resolute and sure. She knew—it was different than when she’d known Seotra was her family’s murderer, so different that she hardly recognized the feeling. Trusting Joss felt like an omen, like she’d arrived to guide her, like Rhee might finally find her way. The feeling made her think of Dahlen again; it wasn’t dissimilar to how he’d described his faith.

  There was a silence. Rhee knew the others thought returning to Kalu now would be an act of suicide, but she couldn’t let them give up—not right now. She would need help, protection against Nero.

  She needed family.

  “So what do we do?” Julian asked finally. It was the same thing he’d asked when they’d gotten caught by the Tasinn on Nau Fruma. It gave her another surge of hope, and her hope gave her strength.

  “Josselyn told me I should never return to Kalu,” Rhee said. For the first time in what felt like ages, she grinned. “She should have remembered that I never listen to her when she’s bossing me around.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  KARA

  KARA and Aly were in a tunnel, squatting close, ready to do something big and important that would change the course of the war. But she could focus only on the nick of his eyebrow, the corner of his mouth that lifted up a little higher than the other. It felt like standing at the mouth of that tunnel was standing at the cusp of the rest of her life. Everything would change after this moment. Everything already had.

  Then the edges of the tunnel started dissolving
around her. It was urgent, in direct relation to something she’d done—like she was being punished for losing focus on what mattered. Aly took her hand to pull her out of the tunnel, and suddenly the world around them shifted. Kara felt a corset pinch her middle like a vise on her ribs, a new and terrible kind of torture. They were at the top of the thousand steps that led up to the Ta’an palace in Sibu. She looked down and saw the red silk of her dress, meters of it extending from her waistline, growing, churning, lifting her up like a buoyant sea. She and Aly were pulled apart in the red water; she regretted ever letting go of his hand.

  She tried to swim back to him, thrashing through silk, but it turned coarse. It scratched her, and cut her, until she bled the same color as the sea. She saw a craft on fire tear across the sky above them, shedding metal pieces. And her own face, her real one, the one she wore now, looking through the window right at her as it torpedoed into the sea.

  “No!” Kara tried to scream.

  Kara opened her eyes with a gasp; her neck was still raw from the surgery, and muscles she hadn’t known existed ached all along her right neck and shoulder. Her head hurt, like a drill burrowing into her—and she was shaken by the disappointment she felt, knowing all along she’d hoped the procedure would end her headaches too. She’d have to live with it. Manage it, just like she’d always done. There was no miracle cure.

  Her vision was blurred, but she saw a figure move toward the bed. Issa. The girl leaned in, her braids just dusting Kara’s face.

  “Oh, how the tables have turned,” Issa said. The top two buttons of her camo shirt were undone, and the white shirt underneath was stretched around the neck. Even now she clutched her necklace of Vodhan.

  “How long was I out?” Kara asked, sitting up. Everything hurt, and she tried not to flinch. She could see herself reflected in the mirror: The spot on her neck where Issa had grafted Nero’s cube onto her own looked red and raw and angry. Tentatively, she reached out a hand to touch it; it seemed to be radiating a terrible kind of heat. She hadn’t turned it on yet—but it was insurance. Nero wouldn’t kill her, not if he wanted to preserve his own memories. Not if he didn’t want his cube to die with her.

  “Sixteen hours,” Issa said.

  Kara felt a spike of panic. “Sixteen?” She flung the sheets off her bed and slipped out, wobbly on her legs. “Did Rhiannon reach out? The coronation is in—”

  “Two hours,” Aly said, appearing in the doorway. “I wanted to wake you up, but doctor’s orders.” The sound of his voice made Kara’s heart drop to her stomach; it filled her with an indescribable joy and a deep, blue uncertainty.

  His grown-out hair looked like a soft black halo around his head. She thought of the day they’d first met, when she was still Kara. How they’d stood side by side in the tiny zeppelin bathroom in this same way. They’d talked through the mirror then, because she hadn’t been able to speak to him directly. It was like looking at the sun. Too bright. Too intense.

  What would happen if they succeeded at stopping Nero? What would happen if they didn’t?

  “How are you feeling?” Aly reached up as if to touch the new wound on her neck and then, as if thinking better of it, put a hand on her cheek instead.

  “I’m okay,” she said, gently detaching herself. Kara looked down at the onyx ring she realized she had worn in her sleep.

  “And to answer your question, no—Rhiannon hasn’t gotten hold of us,” Issa said.

  Had her sister understood the message from what Kara had worn on the holos for an audience of one? The ring belonged to Dahlen, and it was too big. It hung awkwardly on her thumb, and she twisted it now. It was more than pretty decoration, more than a symbol to communicate whose side she was on.

  This ring was also a weapon, and with it, she was going to destroy a common enemy. And wasn’t this bigger than all their other problems?

  Dahlen and Pavel weren’t far behind. The room felt suddenly crowded, hot. Two hours to plan. That was hardly any time at all.

  “You don’t look as terrible as I thought you would,” Dahlen said. At Kara’s look, Aly interjected.

  “What he was trying to say is that you look like you recovered from the surgery well,” Aly said. “I speak Dahlen, the language of romance . . .”

  “Dahlen was over my shoulder the whole surgery.” Issa sounded like she was somewhere between annoyed and glad. “The guy swears he’s an expert because he had heart surgery once.”

  “Doesn’t that make me more qualified than most?” He tugged aside his tunic, revealing a massive scar directly above his heart.

  “No, actually,” Pavel chimed in. “Given the nature of open-heart surgery, it’s likely you were anesthetized.”

  “All right, all right, everyone,” Aly said. “Empress, are you ready to go over the plan?”

  * * *

  • • •

  It was the first time in a long while she hadn’t snuck somewhere by the cover of night, timing her path to avoid guards. Now, as she arrived on the roof of the palace, down the row of Tasinn four deep, Kara focused on the details: the crowd rippling in the vast square below her—a soundless mass from here, but a seething, miserable swarm down below. The daisies were poised, ready to capture everything, ready to immortalize her misery, to record forever the agitation of the crowds. The ceremony wouldn’t start until Nero arrived.

  Kara, however, was more concerned with how it would end.

  Before the massacre, there had been small pockets of outrage on both sides, but now people had been marching, chanting, calling for justice. The Tasinn had been dispatched just to try to hold the crowds back from storming the palace gates.

  Yendit was waiting next to the officiant, wearing an enormous carnation of incongruous pink. His face was bruised and raw, and he wore a brace around his neck.

  “Rough night?” she asked.

  He ignored her.

  She breathed in the scent of his flower, imagining an actual flower blooming, crowding out the pain in her head. It was an old meditation technique Lydia had insisted that she learn.

  But it was no use. Her thoughts kept returning to the preparation for Rhee’s coronation, just weeks ago, before someone had attempted to take her sister’s life. It had been a showy affair, and they’d cut down a field of flowers to decorate the palace, lanterns all around the city. It never came to be.

  Kara thought too of her mother’s coronation—Kara had seen it replayed, an enormously showy affair with thousands in attendance and easily another billion tuning in across the galaxy. Kara’s mother had been made for such an event: porcelain skin against a red dress; lips painted in a bright, lovely pout; small wrists and small hands and a slender finger upon which to wear her ruby wedding ring. But in rewatching it a million times, it struck Kara how the Empress’s smile was a gracious one. She’d understood her role—to look and be benevolent.

  Did Kara have that in her? She balled her hand around the family coin now, wondering what Rhiannon would do, and if she’d gotten the message.

  “Are you cold?” Yendit said, smiling for the daisies as she stepped onto the dais beside him. It might appear they were enjoying each other’s company. Kara shook her head, even if she was cold. She’d worn a gray dress in a second-wave style. “Then uncross your arms and smile.”

  Kara did not want to be told what she should do with her face, but she kept it neutral for the daisies.

  “Ah.” Yendit straighted the front of his shirt as he looked at the speck growing on the horizon. “He’s arrived.”

  It was Nero’s craft, arriving just as the ceremony would begin—and no earlier. More dramatic optics, he had told Kara when he arranged for the coronation to take place.

  The wind flattened the small gathering on the palace roof and blew Kara backward several feet as the craft hovered. Slowly, it began to drop. From down below it looked like a vast insect getting ready to latch, and
it filled Kara with terror she was careful to hide. Aly, Dahlen, and Issa were waiting, concealed. She would not make a move until they did. Easy for them to say; they weren’t the ones out here baited in a dress, and all three had military training.

  A hatchback door slid open, and a staircase unrolled from the craft. Nero emerged, silhouetted by a shimmer of hot air. His smile was larger and more predatory than ever as he oozed gracefully down toward her.

  “I’m sorry for the delay.” Nero made a big show of turning his smile toward the daisies.

  “No you’re not.” Kara smiled and eased her hair out of her face as if she were carefree, among friends. A daisy was floating at the corner of her eye, but still out of earshot. “You were circling outside the atmosphere just to kill time.”

  Nero gave her a curious look she’d never seen before. It wasn’t amused. His eyes were dark; Kara imagined behind them were the shadows of other eyes, other memories, other souls. “You remind me of your sister.”

  Kara smiled—a real one this time.

  “It’s not a compliment,” he said.

  “Let’s begin,” the small Kalusian officiant said. She wore a flowy dress, held prayer sheets in one hand and beads in the other.

  Kara—or was it Josselyn now?—instinctively stood up straighter. Still no sign of Rhiannon.

  “You must move to the side,” the woman said to Nero. She gave him her best smile, but it looked forced, scared, at least until Nero strode away and stood by Yendit’s side. The second-in-command grinned at her, and she suppressed a shudder. Kara needed to not think about Nero, afraid of which dark ribbons of his memories might curl up and entangle her. The slight pressure in her neck from the surgery was reminder enough of the cube that Issa had buried in her flesh.

  Tensions were high. Kara felt it in the officiant’s slow, halting movements, the way she purposefully avoided Kara’s gaze.

  “You will endure,” the woman said to her.

  Kara wasn’t sure if she was talking about the ceremony itself or becoming empress.