“Yeah. At least.”
I clambered to my feet and promptly sat right back down on a stone block. Dream-makers. I kept blinking my eyes. Hate them already.
“Did you see what you needed to see?” Sylpha cut straight to the point.
“I don’t know,” I countered. “Did I?”
She knelt before me. She knew I was bleary, but she didn’t care. While watching me wobble and shiver, she gave me her icy blue stare.
“We’re not killing stars, Joff Armstrong,” she declared.
“I…I know,” I managed. “I see that now.”
“Your Abid, your government or whatever they are, they sent you to kill the wrong planet.”
I knew that, too.
“We’ve asked Earth for help more times than we can remember.” A tiny hint of emotion welled in her eyes. “But the answer is always the same: ‘Sorry, we don’t help traitors. We don’t help cowards. The Exodus settlements are dead to us.’ And so it has been since my foremothers came here. We thought we’d make a home in this place, a new life, and for a while we did. But we should’ve known. We should’ve paid attention. The civilization that lived on Ebes long ago didn’t dry up or flee to the stars. They were exterminated. A beautiful culture, artistic and wise, annihilated.”
“The Strigoi,” I exhaled.
“Indeed.” She rose up before me. She looked taller and more powerful than ever, and yet somehow vulnerable.
“What now?” I said.
“I don’t know how you killed the one who followed you.” She gazed into the darkness of the grotto. “Luck, maybe. Or maybe your suit’s weapon resembles sunshine enough to break their bodies. In the three-hundred years since the Strigoi reprogrammed Ebes’ skies to burn, we’ve killed three. Just three. And they’ve killed…well…you see how many of us are left. We used to number close to a hundred-thousand.”
Wait, I thought.
Sunshine?
Reprogrammed the skies?
I blinked hard. My focus returned. My head hurt, but not enough to slow me.
“They made the S.R.’s,” I said. “Abid said you were making them. But it’s the Strigoi, isn’t it?”
“Correct.” She looked almost offended. “We tried replicating their technology. We probed their planet. We spied on them. We learned a few small things. We know what they want and why they want it. But it’s not enough. It’s too little…too late. We sent scouts to the fallen Strigoi ship just yesterday, but they stayed out too long. The Strigs came for them at sunset. The ship and my men are gone.”
I snapped my eyes shut. “Sunshine,” I said, “it kills them? It’s why their planet is divided into two halves? Their world is tidally locked. It doesn’t rotate. They live on the night half—”
“…and harvest energy from the day half,” she finished for me.
“They figured out you were here,” I said. “They sent string reprogrammers to Ebes. They burned it.”
“It took only one,” she said. “One S.R. to kill us.”
“If they can kill stars, planets are easy.” I felt my breath leave me.
She took my arm and helped me to my feet. I didn’t want to go. I needed to sit on the stone and think. I needed to dwell in the darkness and solve everything.
For the first time since I’d climbed into the Sabre, I felt lost.
When Death had no Name
I awoke with only a thin blanket between me and the cold, hard stone.
I sat up in the monolith’s heart. The hollow stone cylinder vaulted far above, rising into the deep, dark nothingness. The pale lights were dimmer than before, and the silence more profound than anything I’d ever known outside of my dreams.
The only relieving part was: the blue membranes were still shut over the monolith’s doors. It meant the men and women who were angry at me for killing two of their number weren’t inside with me. Sylpha Frost hadn’t killed me.
I wasn’t dead.
Not yet.
I staggered to a table and sank onto a stool. The Vezda suit was piled exactly where I’d peeled it off; Sylpha hadn’t touched it. It seemed strange to me that despite the dire threat of the Strigoi, no one in the underworld appeared motivated to do anything about it. I thought I’d be dead. I expected to see the Exodus people gathering for a last-ditch attack on their enemy.
But there was nothing.
I heard one of the blue membranes pucker. Sylpha came striding in with a decanter of water and a plate of food. I wasn’t sure how they produced enough sustenance to feed the hundreds of people in the underworld. I would’ve asked, but I had more important questions.
“Why didn’t you leave?” I asked Sylpha as she laid a plate of food before me.
“Pardon?” She looked tired.
“I mean…there’s nothing here anymore,” I said. “I know Earth won’t have you, but what about the other Exodus settlements? Why not contact them to rescue you?”
She pulled up a stool of her own and sat across from me. The cold blue of her eyes was hidden by lank strands of her hair. She was beautiful, yet so, so weary.
“No ships,” she said. “You saw what the Strigoi did to this place. You saw Ebes burning. Do you think they spared our ships? No. They didn’t. They lanced every one of them from orbit. One shot each from their skeleton ships. That’s all it took.”
I ate slowly, but Sylpha swallowed up every bite of dry, hard bread as if it were her last.
“Besides,” she continued with her mouth full, “there’s no place to go. There aren’t any other settlements left that we know of. In every corner of this part of the galaxy, the Strigoi outpost has wiped out all life. Not just intelligent life. All life. And it’ll only get worse.”
I gulped down a chunk of bread. It hurt my throat going down.
The stars, I realized. When I looked to the sky as a kid…it was the Strigoi killing them.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why?” she scoffed. “Everyone wants to know why. Because they can, that’s why. I had a little girl ask me why just as I went to fetch your breakfast. You want to know? You want to understand how evil works? It’s like this: the Strigoi want to find wretched little planets like the one you saw, soak up the starlight to fuel their death machines, and wipe out every other star within a few dozen light years. If the universe has no light, they’ll be immortal. No other life form will ever rise against them.”
She’s dead serious, I thought.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I argued. “Why, if they’ve found one perfect planet to live on, do they need to destroy everything else?”
“One perfect planet?” She glared at me. “One? Don’t be stupid. They’ve got thousands of planets out there. They’ve been at this game for eons. Some of the data we took off the ones we killed tells us they’ve snuffed entire galaxies before. They’re just new here, that’s all. Give them some time.”
I couldn’t eat anymore. I pushed my plate away. I wasn’t even sure I believed her. It sounded ludicrous.
“Abid didn’t mention any of this,” I exhaled. “He couldn’t have known.”
“Oh he knew,” Sylpha said after chugging her water. “Of course he knew. He just doesn’t care. He’s blinded by his vengeance. He wishes his great great-grandparents had been whisked away with the Exodus. He hates us. He’s earthbound, and he knows he’s a dead man. The Strigoi will find him. It’s only a matter of time.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. It was the closest I’d come to being angry since meeting her.
“Well…he’s got a right to be angry at you,” I said. “Wendall Wight. Lukas Mosk. They’re thieves and murderers. And Ebes has been supporting them the whole time.”
She closed her eyes and sucked in a deep breath through her nose. “Wendall Wight, you say? You’ve got to be kidding. The only thing Wendall Wight ever murdered in his life was his career. When they found out he was sympathetic to us, they crushed him. They framed him.”
“No. That’s a lie.” I felt the heat smold
ering in my neck. “I was there the night he tried to plant bombs on my farm. I hit him on the head with an iron rod. If not for me, he’d have killed my entire family.”
She looked hard at me, considered what I said, then rolled her eyes as far back into her head as any woman in history ever had.
“You’re so young,” she said. “Here we are, hundreds of light years away from Earth, and every person in this settlement knows more about Wendall Wight and Lukas Mosk than you ever will. Both of them are heroes. The things they’ve done, the material they worked to send us…it very well might’ve saved all of humanity.”
“I—” I felt sick with what I’d done. “I don’t—”
“I’ll forgive you your ignorance,” she interrupted. “But know this, you’ve lived a lie. I don’t know what Abid hoped to accomplish by sending you here to kill us. He’s got a sick sense of humor. I suppose that’s just like him to send a little boy crusading across the stars to punish us, the family Frost.”
I could’ve killed her then. I wanted to. She’d just torn down my entire existence. She’d mocked my mother, my father, my upbringing, and all the things I’d known since being stripped away from my home.
For one breath, I hated her.
But I swallowed it back. It hurt, but I forced it down.
“You can’t prove this.” I pretended to be calm.
She glanced over her shoulder at the wreckage of machines and parts. She looked up into the vast empty darkness over our heads. I followed her gaze and somehow I understood.
She’s not lying.
“Besides,” she said, aware of my thoughts, “what makes you think I need to prove anything to you? You’re just a boy they sent to butcher me. Abid and his family have been doing it for centuries. You’re just the latest.”
I felt questions burn on my tongue.
She stood up and walked away.
For a long while, I sat there at the table. I considered the meaning of my life, the smallness of myself, and the truth of who I was. I’d always done what others wanted. I’d made the farm into what my father had dreamed. I’d let my questions go unasked when I saw my mother retreat into the silences she craved. I’d run from Aly. I’d skulked through the hallways of Abid’s fortress. I’d never so much as smiled at Tiana, the first beautiful woman I’d seen.
I’d done what everyone else wanted of me.
I was nothing.
“So why haven’t you killed me?” I called across the void at Sylpha.
She stopped in the monolith’s center. I didn’t know where she’d been walking to. But when she faced me again, all I could see in the pallid light was the blue of her pale, pale eyes.
“No need to kill you,” she said. “We’re already dead.”
* * *
She shut off the membranes between the monolith and the rest of the underworld.
I expected the Exodus people to rush in and tear me apart.
Instead I found myself wandering out into the caverns beyond, taking in all that had become of Sylpha’s people.
I missed Cal fiercely. But I didn’t dare go back to her, not yet. I knew what Sylpha and the others would think. They’d assume I would leap into the Vezda suit and burn them all away with my weapon. They’d try to stop me.
So instead I walked through the shadows in my dirty tunic, barefooted and chilly, into a world of stone and silence.
The Exodus people were out there. They looked at me, but never approached. I glimpsed children playing games with burned-out light sticks and pulse rifles whose batteries had died two-hundred years ago. Some of the youngest stopped to stare at me as I walked by. They wanted to run up and pummel me with questions, but they couldn’t.
They don’t speak my language.
Only Sylpha does.
The rest of them sound like Doctor Abid did when he thought I wasn’t listening.
I saw the elderly, too. I walked past their white canvas tents. They looked like ghosts, even paler than Sylpha, full of emotions I didn’t have names for. They weren’t sad or angry.
They were waiting.
To die, I assumed.
And I saw others. Young people, though not many in number, huddled in the shadows wearing scraps of black armor and dark cloth over parts of their faces. They were talking about me, I could tell, and yet they didn’t slip out of the darkness to kill me or beat me down with words I couldn’t understand.
Perhaps they were angry.
Or miserable.
Or helpless.
I didn’t blame them. They’d lived their entire lives in a realm I couldn’t and didn’t want to understand. If the Strigoi were real, I pitied those who’d survived Ebes being burned. Although I sensed pity was the last thing Sylpha’s people wanted from an outsider like me.
I must’ve walked for hours. The monolith was my compass, keeping me from getting lost, but otherwise I wandered the cavern without direction. They’d placed lights in the cavern floor, and even though most were near to dying, I was able to follow them. Groups of tents like villages sprang into my view between long stretches of shadow. Piles of Exodus technology: food caches, dead worker bots, small vehicles, and weapons, sat in quiet heaps on the stone.
In my mind, I gathered pieces of the truth.
When the Strigoi burned the planet, the survivors scavenged what they could and fled deep underground.
They’ve lived down here for centuries. Most have probably never seen Zeus or Hera.
Humans didn’t build this place. Ebes’ original inhabitants did.
But they’re dead, too. Somehow. Someway.
Abid, you bastard.
* * *
I should’ve known.
I should’ve guessed the Strigoi would find their fallen warrior and chase me into the underworld.
And they did.
I was still out there wandering the underworld darkness when I heard the screams. The sounds echoed in the shadows, shaking the stone beneath my feet.
They followed me.
My fault. All mine.
I ran. In the great darkness, the only constant was Sylpha’s monolith, its massive bottom ringed with sad white lights. I sprinted for it, and yet it felt so far away.
As I ran, I watched.
To my right, streaks of shadow carved up the cavern. In the grand doorway I’d first entered, explosions of light and dark tore the stone apart. I was too far away to see what had invaded, but I knew. I remembered the Strigoi attacking me, and I remembered its weapons, the lances of black light it had used to burn away my cover, the tiny orbs it had peppered the ground with, each one blossoming into deadly dark fires.
There were more than one Strigoi in the cavern. I could tell by the number of screams.
Faster, I made myself run.
Faster, or this is the end.
I neared the monolith. My lungs burned and my bare feet hurt. The awful sounds of slaughter closed in on me. I saw one tent village burning, and though I didn’t want to, I glimpsed the smoking bodies of the people who’d emerged from their flimsy homes only to die.
I think I wet myself. I wasn’t sure.
I swallowed a single breath of hope. The monolith’s blue membrane doors were still off. I bolted, leaped over tables, and crashed through small mountains of scrap metal and broken machines. Blood streamed down my left leg. I didn’t care. I needed only one thing in the world.
The Vezda suit.
I saw two young women dart into the monolith. They were fleeing the Strigoi, but they stopped long enough to watch me slide my arms and legs into the suit. I saw the horror in their eyes, and I realized they were the same age as me.
They’re orphans. I’m a farmer, I thought.
We’re too young for this.
I heard someone shouting. I slid the Vezda’s helmet over my head, hearing it hiss as it sealed to the rest of the armor.
“Joff! Jofffffffffff!” The screams rattled me.
That’s when I remembered Callista.
“We should l
eave.” She must’ve sensed me flexing my finger against the arm-cannon’s trigger. “Slip behind the fighting. Go back to the entrance.”
“No.” I ran for the door closest to the sounds of dying people.
“Joff, we can survive this,” she shouted in my ear. “We race them to the Sabre. We get back to the Ring.”
“We don’t know the way out of here,” I said. “Besides, we’re not here to escape. We’re here to save Earth, remember?”
She went silent. I knew she was angry at me for making her spend two days in hiding. I knew she hated my foolishness. If I hadn’t wandered out and seen the people in their shanty villages, I might’ve listened to her and fled.
But it was my fault the Strigoi had come.
And I was the only one who could fight them.
I hunkered in a doorway, caught my breath, and jumped out into the cavern. I floated thirty meters in the air, high above the gathering smoke, and I saw what I needed to see.
Three Strigoi.
A hundred dead people already.
Kill them, Joff.
Kill them.
The closest Strigoi stood in the heart of what had been a village of tents. The rifle in its hands smoked. I saw its four white eyes, its smiling black skull, and I felt the awful impression it was gloating over how many it had killed. The two little boys who I’d seen playing an hour ago lay dead on the ground, their skeletons smoldering. The old woman who’d made a sour face at me as I passed was sprawled out behind her killer, naked and burning.
The monster didn’t see me until I jumped high into the darkness and landed feet-first on its shoulders.
We tumbled together on the ground. Where we struck the ground, the stone cracked. Scrambling, the monster fired wild shots at me, but I’d gotten to my feet faster, and as I circled the fiend I rained golden shots of light into its carapace. The first few glanced off and ricocheted into the shadows.
But one, just one little shot, hit the nightmare in its jawbone. A tube ruptured on its neck, spraying oil everywhere, catching fire from my next three shots. The fire roiled in the Strigoi’s face.
Its pain wasn’t from the heat.
Darkness Between the Stars Page 19
