by Eva Delaney
“Then you should have come back sooner, you ass!”
“I thought you didn’t want to see me.”
“I didn’t at first.” Ursa broke off their hug. Polaris dropped his arms from her slowly.
He missed her all this time and I never knew.
“I didn’t want to see you at first,” Ursa said. “But damn it, Aris, you’re family. You’re blood. I didn’t even know how to find you after you vanished.”
“You left,” I said to Polaris. He had left his family like Orion had left me.
Polaris looked away from all of us.
“He had to,” Ursa said, “but I thought he’d be back once the storm calmed down.”
“Polaris, what’s going on?” I whispered.
“You tell us first,” Major said. “Why are you here now after all these years?” He stood and put an arm around Ursa’s waist. She leaned into him.
I wished I had that kind of support right now. I glanced at Antares and then away.
“I’m with The Uprising,” Polaris said to them. “I have been for eight years, working out of their main base. I can’t fix what I did here, but I thought…maybe I could do something to stop the Supremacy.”
Ursa nodded as though none of that was surprising. Polaris always seemed out of place in The Uprising, but she acted like his joining was natural.
“Why are you back now?” she said.
“My friends and I are tracking a spy who uncovered key intel that could cripple the Supremacy.” Polaris turned to Antares. “He says you’re his contact.”
“Scorpion,” Ursa said.
“Woods Witch,” he said.
“What is going on? How do you know each other?” I said.
“Scorpion is my codename,” Antares said. “Woods Witch is hers. It’s the only name I’ve ever known her by.”
“Major and I have been trading intel to The Uprising for years,” Ursa said. “Sometimes we deal with independent agents like Scorpion.”
“Why would you work with a Supremacy bounty hunter?” I demanded.
“We’re alive because of him,” Ursa said.
That brought me up short. “The fuck?”
“The Supremacy has been hunting us for years,” Major said. “Scorpion was the first to find us, and he told them we were dead. It threw them off our trails for a little while.”
My gaze found Antares. He stared back with his usual impassive expression.
“I knew he was good,” Polaris said cheerfully.
“Why the fuck don’t you tell us these things?” I said through clenched teeth. “We would trust you.”
“I’ve saved and killed a lot of people,” Antares said. “Do you want me to write you a list?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Figure out your drama later,” Ursa cut in. “We have a spy to save. I’ll pull up what I have.” She turned to the table and its tangle of computers and tree roots.
Chapter 27
“How does this work, Ursa?” I said.
Her hands trailed along the branches on the table. “I’ve worked on this for years.” Her voice took on a note of awe, so similar to the way Po spoke about ships and computers.
“It’s a virus—not a computer one, a true one. I released it into the trees years ago. It cuts, re-arranges, and changes select pieces of DNA. It’s giving the trees new genes that they would never have on their own.”
I whistled under my breath. That was impressive enough on its own.
“The trees grow eyes,” Major said, excitedly.
“They do what now?” I said.
Polaris smiled from ear to ear. “You’re a genius.”
“I know,” Ursa said. “There are two parts to a visual system. The eye that absorbs light and the brain that processes and analyzes that light to create pictures. Thanks to my virus, the trees have the former, but not the latter. Their eyes absorb light and transmit it along basic neural networks to processors here.” She touched computers that were tangled among branches and leaves on her desk. “The computers then process the light into images.”
“Cybernetic spy trees,” I said, amazed.
“The queen, the Supremacy, and the mobs can’t access them, unlike the rest of the cameras and info on Etrea.”
“Holy fuck, that’s smart,” I said. “But something is bothering me. If you’ve been trading info to The Uprising, why didn’t they know Winters was here? Why did we need Antares for that?”
“Nobody in The Uprising asked us to look for a spy,” Ursa said. “We didn’t know about her until Scorpion contacted us.”
I eyed Ursa and Major. “Something here is wrong.”
“The request to look for Winters might have been intercepted or lost,” Major said. “Comms with The Uprising are irregular because they have to be smuggled in on ships. We can’t use ansibles.”
“Or someone in The Uprising is fucking shit up,” Antares said.
I glared at him, my fists clenching.
He shrugged. “Somebody helped frame you and Orion. They could have interfered here too. Castor buys off Uprising leaders all the time.”
My heart sank. He was right. The organization I had spent my entire life fighting for might not be on my side.
I hated the thought and tried to pretend it wasn’t them who destroyed Orion’s life. But they had. Maybe they were destroying Winters’ life too.
“Either way, we have no other leads,” Antares said. “I can do the bounty hunter thing, but I won’t get far if the Supremacy is tracking us.”
I sighed and dragged a hand over my face. I had a bad feeling about all of this, about everything in this room, and about this whole damned mission.
“It’ll take a little while to run the analytics,” Ursa said. “Take a seat.”
I nodded and turned to Polaris, who looked away from me.
“I don’t know anything about anyone on my crew or if I can trust them,” I told him. “What the hell is going on here? Why didn’t you say we were traveling to your home world?”
Polaris heaved a heavy sigh and dropped onto one of the battered couches.
How many people in The Uprising were secretly working with our enemy? Was Po once of them? Why did they let him work in mission control in the heart of The Uprising if he had a shady past? “Why does your own sister think you’re working for the Supremacy bitch that rules this place?” I snapped.
He lifted his head to meet my glare. “I’ll tell you everything.”
Everything I never knew about Polaris. I feared what it might be. Would it change how I saw my sweet man? But I needed to know if he was who I thought he was.
“Ursa thought I was working for Asherah because…well, I did once. I was in love with her.”
My mouth fell open. “What the fuck, Po? She’s a tyrant who’s hunting your own sister.”
“She wasn’t when I met her,” he said. “If not for me, she wouldn’t be.”
My blood ran cold. “What did you do?”
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you,” he said softly. “You’ll mistrust me like you do Antares.”
“Yeah, it sounds like it,” I said.
Polaris frowned and stared down at his hands, twisting them in his lap. “I guess I can’t hide anymore. When I was sick as a child, I couldn’t go out to play, so I never made any friends besides Ursa. When I recovered and could finally hang out with people my age, Asherah was my first friend. She was charming, outgoing, and beautiful—and she was the only girl who noticed the quiet nerdy boy.”
My breath caught in my throat. Back on the Firebrand, he had said he liked me for the same trait: Because I paid attention to him. He loved me for the same wrong reason that he had loved her.
“We were happy, or at least, I thought we were. She was bright and cheerful and friendly with everyone in a way I didn’t know how to be. With her, others suddenly noticed me and thought I was cool too. Then, she had a plan.” His voice turned cold and I shuddered, dreading his next words.
“Warring Supremacy noble families and mafias had always ruled Etrea. Information and blackmail are their key weapons. Asherah thought if we discovered enough dirt on the ruling families, we could force them to accept new leadership. She said we could overthrow Supremacy and mafia rule for the first time in hundreds of years. Etreans could determine our own lives again.”
My heart pounded like booted feet. “You believed her.”
“We talked about it all the time. Youthful hope, you know…we thought we could change the world, really change it, on our own. I believed we could. When she came up with her plan for overthrowing the families…I joined.”
“The cameras,” I said. “You hacked them.”
He smiled sadly. “You always were quick, Cal. Ursa saw through Asherah. She said I shouldn’t help her, but I believed in my heart that Asherah would save Etrea. I believed to my core that she loved me and I loved her. I was wrong.”
Polaris stopped and stared down at the lines on his palms.
“I created a program to hack any camera. Asherah used it to blackmail the local Supremacy nobles into naming her their overlord. She didn’t overthrow the Supremacy. She never intended to. She….” he stopped; his lips trembled. “She betrayed me. She made Supremacy rule stronger than ever.”
I stared at Polaris. I wanted to deny that any of this was true, but I knew he wouldn’t lie. Withhold info, like he had been doing for years, but not lie.
I had always believed he was the sweet innocent one.
The one person in the galaxy, in my seedy life, who was pure.
But he wasn’t. He had betrayed everything good and just—and only bothered to tell me after he won me over with his cuteness.
I clutched my arms to my chest and half turned from him. The woman who killed people on television: He had put her on those palace steps.
“Then she came after me because I knew her secret, and she came after Ursa to get to me,” Polaris said.
I closed my eyes against his words, against the terrible truth that he had put his family in danger.
“Ursa went into hiding. I did too, but I knew she would be safer if I left. Asherah wanted me, not her. I didn’t think Ursa would want me around after my mistake, so I never came back.”
I tried to swallow the lump in my throat but couldn’t. It remained lodged there, stopping all words, making it hard to breathe.
Polaris had helped the Supremacy cement its rule.
He had betrayed everyone and everything he stood for. Everything I stood for.
“I joined The Uprising, hoping I could make things better in some small way,” he said. His mouth quirked. “But I was never a hero, not really. So, I fixed ships and monitored scanners instead.”
He sniffed and wiped the back of his hand across his eyes. “Until you came along. But…” He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. You see the thing is, it’s not that I trusted Asherah, it’s that I trusted myself. I followed her because I loved her with my very blood. I’m always wrong about these things.”
Wrong about love; it was the same thing he had said to me after he kissed me. He also said he liked me for a similar reason as he had loved the queen. He had been kind and sweet and made me care for him. Then, he ripped that away, claiming I was the same fucking mistake that had led him to betray everything that mattered.
I wanted to throw it all at him, scream, and cry, and unleash my rage.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t let him know how deeply this hurt. It would give him power over me. I clenched my fists at my sides and glared sidelong at him. He stared down at his hands and didn’t look at me.
My arms shook with the effort of holding in my rage. I didn’t trust myself to answer him, so I spun on my heel and marched away.
The room was small, and there wasn’t anywhere to go.
“Firebrand?” Antares said, his voice worried.
I didn’t answer, and I stomped through the first door I came to without asking. I paced the small bedroom, fists clenched. This wasn’t fair, this wasn’t right. I trusted Polaris, but he wasn’t the man I thought he was.
Chapter 28
The bedroom door hissed open and Ursa strolled in, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Did you find Winters?” I said.
“The computers are analyzing data,” she said in a gruff tone and pressed a button to shut the door. She whirled on me. “Who are you really?”
“I’m the commander of this mission,” I said, drawing myself up to my full height.
“Then act like it rather than sulking in here because one of your crew members made a mistake years ago.”
“This is about more than a crew member. This—”
“That’s what I thought. You love my brother, or you’re pretending you do.”
Polaris was a friend—that was it. I glared at her. “That is no business of yours.”
“What did you do before this mission?” Ursa said. “Where are you from?”
I crossed my arms. “You don’t trust me.”
She shrugged.
“That means you don’t trust your brother despite playing nice. You lied to him.”
Ursa rolled her eyes. “I have never lied to Aris, but sometimes other people do.”
“If he learned from the past,” I said, “then why don’t you trust him now?” If not even his sister who welcomed him home believed in him, how could I?
But then, why I should trust her judgment? I didn’t know her. Fuck, I felt so lost. Polaris had been a steady light in my dim life and now…I didn’t know what he was.
“Aris was my best friend for the first sixteen years of my life,” Ursa said. “I’m glad he’s back.”
“He chose Asherah over you.”
“I’m trying to forgive,” Ursa said, her arms falling away from her chest and hanging defeated at her sides.
At that moment, I realized she was in the same position I was. We were both trying to reconcile sweet Polaris with his treachery. We were trying to value the good and look past the youthful mistake.
The past is not who you are now, Polaris had said. I understood why that mattered to him and why he saw beyond who I used to be when others couldn’t. It was why he was able to make friends with Antares when the rest of us struggled.
“You know, some rage is worth hanging onto because it drives you to change the world,” Ursa said. “Like my rage at the Supremacy for conscripting our father and shipping him god knows where to die for them. We were only children.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“That’s useful rage. That’s deserved rage. But some anger, it poisons you and eats you up inside. It doesn’t build anything. It just…rots.”
I knew the feeling; my own little heart had rotted for years from losing my parents, my sister, and then Orion. I was only now starting to heal. I guessed Ursa was struggling with the same. Maybe we all were, us children of war.
“I would rather not be angry at my brother anymore,” Ursa said. “It’s done nothing but make him scared to come home. Now, if he failed to learn and made that same mistake again….” She looked me over.
I bristled. “Well, you don’t need to worry. Polaris and I are just co-workers.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said dryly. “That’s why you’re sulking because he’s not perfect, and he’s trying not to cry because you’re angry with him.”
I opened my mouth to protest and stopped. Polaris had been my friend for years, and I was glad he was part of my life. Did I want to lose him over an old mistake?
“Nobody needs to be perfect,” I said, “but they need to avoid betraying everything I’ve worked for.”
“Aris betrayed everything he worked for too,” Ursa said. “He thought his plan with Asherah would free Etrea, not strengthen Supremacy rule. It’s taken me eight years to realize it, but he’ll never forgive himself. So maybe I should try to. Trust is a choice, after all, and I’m going to choose my brother over anger.”
I sighed, the fight going out of me at Ur
sa’s words. “But he left.”
“Leaving helped protect me. That shit head self-proclaimed queen wanted Polaris and not me. Still, it was easy to be angry and to hold on to that rage when he wasn’t here.”
Polaris left to save her as Orion had for me. I was getting tired of these men leaving to protect us when it would be better to fight together. But if I could learn to forgive Orion for that, couldn’t I learn to forgive Polaris?
If I didn’t, if I couldn’t…I’d lose him.
I sighed and marched past Ursa back into the main room. Polaris was where I had left him on one of the battered couches, his head bowed over his hands. I ignored a questioning glance from Antares and sat on the couch. Polaris looked up.
“All those people the queen kills, that's all my fault,” he whispered. “She can find them because I gave her the program. She can kill them because I gave her power.”
My heart ached for the pain in his soft voice. “What someone else does is not your fault. I'm trying to learn that too—that I’m not to blame for Castor or my parents or anyone else. You’re not to blame for her betrayal and cruelty.”
“It feels like I am.”
“Feelings aren’t always true.”
“I know,” he said, dropping his head.
I remembered his words about not being who he used to be. Orion and I weren’t the same, either.
I glanced at Antares across the room. Maybe we were all running from trauma and mistakes. Maybe we all deserved another chance.
It was a difficult thing to admit. I wasn’t used to giving chances to people who helped the Supremacy. But Polaris had been kind to me for years. He was so loyal and hardworking that it was hard to believe that he had ever done wrong.
And worse, I understood why he had made the mistake he had.
I took a deep shaky breath. “I fucked up like you did. I followed something that I believed to my core, but it was wrong and I hurt Orion because of it. So maybe we can learn together how to forgive ourselves. How to trust ourselves again.”
Polaris startled and sat up straight. He turned his face to me, and we were close enough that I could feel his breath. We were nose to nose, eye to eye.
