Blood of a Thousand Stars

by Rhoda Belleza

  And then when he was older, how he’d clawed his way into entertainment when it was truly political ambitions he’d had—and how he’d merged them. He’d cultivated a following, killed a family, and made up his own title: “Ambassador to the Regent.” They’d fallen for it. UniForce listened. He’d willed his new self into existence.

  And then the first diplomatic trip he’d taken, to the G-1K summit, of all places, despite the tensions of the Great War—or because of them, since he’d visited with Seotra, the old man who’d tried to extend the Ta’an policies. He’d first learned of the overwriter tech there, had become obsessed with it.

  Deeper and deeper. Dimly she was aware of people shouting, but she ignored them, left them behind, left them with the person she had once been. She was Nero now. She plunged further down, through the unarchived memories . . . the resounding screams of the many scientists he’d Ravaged . . . the smell of blood, the clatter of medical gurneys down long, feebly lit hallways . . .

  The last was buried deepest of all, past so many layers of memory that Kara felt her truest self had left her body, her soul hovering just above the surface. She opened her eyes and looked down at her hands, expecting to see her coverlet, but instead saw the tiled floor of the Elder’s stateroom. Wrong. She was seeing a memory—she couldn’t be here. But she was, and she watched again as she—no, Nero—scorched the Elder’s cube.

  Again, the Elder told Kara-as-Nero: You’ll never have the full power of the overwriter because you don’t have the heart . . .

  Stop, she thought, and the Elder froze in place; she’d paused the cube’s playback.

  She needed out. She swam up through the tides of memories, trying to find herself again. Where was she? Who was she? She could hear voices calling Kara’s name . . .

  No. She was Kara. Not Nero.

  Her lungs were bursting. She felt as if she were really drowning.

  Kara. Kara. Kara.

  I’m Kara.

  Gasping, she felt for his cube in her neck and powered it off. She burst free of Nero’s consciousness. The relief was physical, immediate. It was like a sudden wind, sweeping away the terrible, festering mold of Nero’s thinking.

  “Kara? Are you all right? Are you all right?”

  Was she all right? She didn’t know. She didn’t understand what she’d just seen.

  Unless . . .

  Her heart rate ticked up a notch as an idea began to form.

  Unless . . .

  Could the overwriter itself have a heart?

  It was a living microorganism, after all, wasn’t it? She remembered what Diac had told her when they were in captivity together: Our memories, our thoughts, our ideas—these flower, wither, die, and regenerate. But the spark of life is buried deeper. It can be accessed only by the heart. At the time, she thought he’d been trying to tell her about Lydia, about her love for Kara. But he’d been talking about the overwriter.

  The overwriter could be destroyed, but its life was buried deeper.

  It could be accessed only by the heart.

  And the Fontisians had, for years, been sworn protectors of the overwriter.

  Kara spun toward Dahlen. “Dahlen,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “How did you get the scar on your chest?”

  Issa, Julian, Aly, and Rhiannon stared at her.

  Dahlen frowned. “The Elders told me only that the problem was in my erzel.”

  Kara closed her eyes. It meant heart, and it meant root. She knew, then. “You can stop this.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “It’s you,” she said again, and placed one hand on his chest. “You carry a piece of the overwriter in your heart.” Her voice was hoarse; her head felt like it was on fire. “If we want to destroy the overwriter . . .”

  “If we want to destroy the overwriter, then what?” Rhee demanded.

  Kara looked from her sister to Dahlen. “You’ll have to die.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  RHIANNON

  RHEE slammed her sister against the door. She could barely think; her mind was in a fog. “What did you say?”

  “That I’ll have to die,” Dahlen said slowly, as if calculating something in his head. “My heart for the overwriter.”

  “That’s not happening,” Rhee insisted. The boy, Alyosha, tugged on her elbow, but Rhee shook him off. “She’s lying. You’re a liar!” She felt like she was drowning. “I won’t let you kill him.”

  “Stay away from Kara!” a robotic voice said behind her. Then a shock of electricity ran up her arm.

  “Ow!” Rhee spun around to see a droid waist-high, blinking red eyelights. “Who’s Kara?”

  A loud thud came from the other side of the door, and they all swiveled. The knob shook furiously, and Josselyn grabbed for it—like she might somehow shake off the soldiers on the other side of the door. The hinges bulged when someone—or lots of someones—pushed it from the other side.

  Alyosha threw himself in front of the door. A bit of wood splintered away from the lock. “Grab anything you can get your hands on. It won’t stop them, but it will at least slow them down.”

  Lahna, Julian, and Joss obeyed him wordlessly. They scraped the bed and dresser across the room, shoving them against the door. They piled chairs, wicker baskets, items of little weight or consequence—they were like sand crabs, shoring up walls that would soon be washed away by the approaching tide.

  Rhee was aware on some level that she should help, but her bones were so heavy she felt like she’d been cemented to this very spot—opposite Dahlen, looking into his eyes.

  “A little help, please!” Alyosha was sweating. Behind the makeshift pile of furniture, the door began to crack. The droid handed him an ottoman, as if it would help.

  “Come on, little man, help me with a little something heavier,” Issa insisted as she tried to push a dresser across the floor herself. The droid circled around to her side and slid it with ease.

  “Why you?” Rhee demanded. He hadn’t said anything further, and his silence scared her. The pounding on the door intensified, and the tremor transferred over to her body and shook deep down; they must’ve brought reinforcements.

  “The origin of this tech Nero’s using,” Dahlen said, “I always knew the Fontisians had a hand in it. I just didn’t know it was inside my chest, that they’d fused it with my heart . . .”

  Ancestors, Rhee thought. It was strange, and cruel, and now she finally understood. “‘You just didn’t know what you knew,’” Rhee filled in, repeating the words the Elder had told her.

  “We can’t hold them off much longer,” Julian cried.

  Dahlen nodded. “The Elder told me, and yet I never understood what he meant. Even Rahmal tried to save my life, at the Elder’s orders.”

  Rhee’s eyes prickled with tears.

  “And why would you have to die? Why can’t we just find a surgeon?”

  “There’s no time, Rhee. And there’s no surgeon in the galaxy who could extract it and keep me alive.” Rhee’s body went numb as he talked. “It’s what saved my life in surgery—it has to be cut out. My life is intertwined with it now.” He nodded at Julian, and motioned for the knife in his belt. Veyron’s knife.

  Julian looked at Rhee.

  “No,” she told him.

  Julian’s face softened; he bit the inside of his cheek. Josselyn buried her head into Aly’s arm, while Lahna and Issa looked on. The door had started to give out, breaking at the hinges. The droid was spraying something across the opening, mending it, but it was only a stopgap—it wouldn’t hold.

  Julian was pushed forward, but he backed up against the door and redug his heels into the floor. “I’m sorry, Rhee.” He handed his knife to Dahlen.

  “No!” Rhee lunged for the knife. Dahlen grabbed just before she could, and held it high out of her reach. Still, Rhee clawed at him. When that
didn’t work she started to pound on his chest with closed fists. “I just got you back.” She felt tears welling up, but she wouldn’t cry. If she cried, she would be admitting this was real, that this nightmare would come true.

  Dahlen wrapped his arms around her and pressed her close. With her cheek to his chest, she saw her sister across the room. She’d just gotten Josselyn back too. Perhaps you could never have everything you wanted, but just this once she needed the people she loved to live.

  “You must accept it.” For once, he hadn’t spoken in negatives. She pushed him away and took a step back, taking in the scene. More pounding at the door. It produced a tiny splinter that would grow the length of the wood. Rhee felt she had that same crack inside her, like the sorrow might burst her open. Lahna was crying, tears streaking down her cheeks, mouth pursed like a wail was threatening to tear through her. Rhee was still in shock, disbelief. Her knees gave in and she fell to them, both her hands planted on the floor like she might find a trapdoor to open up into a new reality.

  “Nero’s army advances without him. He’s not alive to call them back. What if they never stop? There’s no time for this.”

  She felt the fire shoot through her veins as she glared up at him. “There’s no time to feel, Dahlen. Is that what you mean? Who do you think you are?” She looked for something to throw at him, anything to abate her sadness with anger. “You think you can come in here and threaten to kill yourself and I’m just supposed to—”

  “I’m not threatening to kill myself,” he cut in. He kneeled before her and flipped the knife around so the handle faced toward her.

  She scrambled back. “You can’t be serious.” She remembered what it had been like to kill Veyron. The heartbreak.

  “There’s no other way.” He looked at her as she pushed to her feet. He was nearly her height even as he knelt. “The peace of the galaxy depends on it.”

  “I won’t be a part of this. I can’t . . .” She’d already lost Veyron and the Fisherman. Not Dahlen too.

  A fist punched through the door. And then another. “By the tenets of Vodhan, he can’t take his own life,” Lahna said.

  “I don’t pray to Vodhan!” Rhee yelled. “What does your god matter to me? If you want to die a martyr, I won’t have a hand in it.”

  “It’s not wrong to die with honor,” Dahlen said quietly. “Besides, it’s the only way.”

  “It’s not worth it. I won’t kill you. I won’t.” Rhee waved her hand toward everyone else. “No one will do it,” she ordered, her voice wild and ragged. “I forbid it!”

  “He asked you, Rhee,” Julian said.

  She pivoted to face him. “Are you enjoying this?” It felt like venom spewing from her throat. “You’d love for me to take another life, to prove what you thought about me all along—that I’m a heartless, cruel, spoiled murderer. I won’t do it! And you,” she said, pointing to Lahna. “Stop crying!”

  “No one is judging you,” Julian said. “I don’t think you’re heartless. But people are dying all over the galaxy. We must end the war.”

  “One small sacrifice for the larger galaxy at war. Please, Rhiannon.” Dahlen bowed his head. This whole time, she had never once heard him say please. “The order teaches us that to die on the blade of a great warrior will ensure my eternity.”

  Rhee knew when Dahlen said eternity, he spoke of an afterlife that the Fontisians believed in. One of bliss, free of pain. Perhaps that’s why death didn’t seem so final to him.

  He reached out, and placed the knife in her hand. It was the first time his features had ever looked gentle. The knife handle was surprisingly warm, the leather wrapped around the hilt soft. How could something so soft be so deadly?

  “I don’t know how to be in this world without you in it,” she whispered. She knew how selfish that sounded, but it was the truth. Rhee closed her eyes. He’d led her to understand her very morality, and even when they were at odds she defined herself in opposition to him. In the few weeks she’d known him she’d learned more about war and belief and her larger place in the world than she had in the years before meeting him.

  “You’ll never have to know,” Dahlen said. Another belief of the Fontisians: in the circularity and unity of all things. That nothing dead was ever truly gone.

  She opened her eyes. He nodded. She kneeled in front of him.

  “Do you remember what I told you on Tinoppa?” He took her hand and pressed it to the spot below his rib cage. She felt the rise and fall of his breathing, of the life she would take from him.

  Rhee thought back, searching her organic memory—and when it surfaced she knew. There was a sharp, bitter taste at the back of her throat.

  “You taught me how to kill a man quickly with a blade,” she said. He had instructed her to drive the blade up into the kidney.

  He won’t survive, Dahlen had said.

  “You prepped for this all along.”

  “Vodhan did.”

  Rhee’s eyes welled. Her heart had turned to liquid. It fell to the bottom of her insides, coated everything with its tar.

  “Honor, loyalty, bravery,” she choked out. “And love.”

  Then she drove the knife up and into his heart. He gasped from the force of it, but kept his eyes on hers. When she hit the first real resistance, Dahlen’s features contorted into something she almost didn’t recognize. Rhee hesitated, then, in a quick draw of breath, jammed it in harder, in one solid death stroke.

  He was able to whisper one last thing. “I’m glad it was you.”

  He fell backward, but Rhee leaned in and caught him, pulled him forward as she crumpled to the floor. She cradled his head in her lap.

  If only she could undo everything, all of it, unfurl back in time before any of them were born. She’d right all the wrongs of her ancestors; she’d make sure this pure, impossible boy would live to be an old man. To spread his word. To live his truth. But that wasn’t how the world worked.

  “I’m sorry.” She ran her fingers through his white-blond hair. Dahlen blinked in response; his hand found hers.

  The wood cracked open as the guard kicked through the door. But her eyes never left his.

  She watched his face as his heart slowed, needing to honor the moment he was gone—to recognize what he’d given to the world. Soldiers were pushing their way into the room, the furniture knocked astray, while her friends tried their best to fight them back.

  The soldiers pushed their way through just as Rhee saw it, when a burst of intensity and knowing passed over Dahlen’s face. She wondered if it was his life passing before his eyes, like they said. Rhee had found it remarkable how many variations of gray his eyes transformed into; they were a different color every time. Now, they took on the shade of well-worn silver. Rare. Old. Having weathered the passage of time, and having seen the best and worst this world had to offer.

  Immediately, the soldiers collapsed to the floor in a heap. The attack had stopped, just as Dahlen’s heart had—and the world went still for just a moment, before the people outside began to wail and sob. They had been spared. It was the sound of great sadness and even greater relief.

  Alyosha kneeled beside her gently, as if he feared waking Dahlen. “Princess,” he said softly. He had the coins in his palms, hers and Josselyn’s. “There’s a ritual. To ensure his entry into Vodhan’s kingdom.”

  It seemed like he was asking something. Rhee didn’t understand, and she could barely see—her tears refracting the grief, making the whole scene feel even more surreal.

  “If you think he’d want it,” Rhee said, her voice breaking.

  Aly took apart the coins and placed one on each of Dahlen’s eyes, then backed away quickly. Rhee leaned in close and took in the sharp line of his jaw, the high cheekbones, the white-blond hair that turned darker sometimes, like it did now—matted across his forehead. He could’ve been sleeping if it weren’t for the
coins on his eyes. They were eerie but beautiful too.

  Rhee buried her face in his tattooed neck. It was still warm, and in the place where his pulse should beat was only a deep silence—like the farthest reaches of space, where she imagined Dahlen shooting across the darkness toward the honor he sought.

  TWENTY-NINE

  KARA

  IT had been a week since Kara and Rhiannon had destroyed the overwriter. A week of national mourning, of frantic peacemaking pacts, of quelling an anxious public.

  A week since Rhee had left for Fontis, to return Dahlen’s body to the soil with their coins—an act to tie their families together for eternity. She was due to return any minute. Her craft had just been spotted coming into orbit.

  A week since Kara had removed Nero’s cube grafted to her own, the madman’s thoughts purged from her mind.

  A week, and an eternity. The people were lost, in distress. They needed a leader. And Rhiannon needed a sister. What was it Issa had told Kara? This world needs you, Josselyn Ta’an.

  She had been so desperate to rid Josselyn from the hearts and minds of the public, never realizing until now that Josselyn was her heart, her mind. The fears, the hopes, the pain, and the headaches—all of it was hers, would always be hers. She could reconcile Josselyn and Kara, those two lives, that before and after, into a new future. She had purpose, and a family now.

  “Rhee’s home.” Tai Reyanna appeared in the doorway. “Pavel’s bringing her to her room.”

  Gathering the hem of her dress, Kara bowed, thanking the Tai. After the overwriter had released her, the Tai had launched into caretaker mode. In the week they’d been reacquainted, the woman already felt like family.

  She hurried past, and ran past Aly in the hallway, but not before she took his hand and squeezed. “She’s here!”

  She moved through the palace toward her sister’s quarters, feeling like she was in a strange kind of inverted fairy tale, where she was both the damsel in the high tower and the hero who had to rescue her. She was hours away now from her real coronation, and it was time. Time to truly recover what she’d lost: her throne, her sister.