Inherit the Stars

by Tessa Elwood

  “On his skidcycle,” I say, which feels true even if it’s wrong. I don’t think he has fuel rations enough.

  Lady Westlet sinks back into her chair. “You quarreled.”

  “What?” The Lord throws up his hands. “Quarreled? Our little lovebirds? Impossible!”

  “Arron,” the Lady says with a sigh.

  “They are the love story of the century, they couldn’t possibly quarrel. She drugged her sister so they could live happily ever after. A sister who, no doubt, is full-blooded Fane.” He rounds on me, the lines near his mouth etched deep. “Did you know? Did you?”

  I press into the chair so hard it presses back. “I have Dad’s hands.”

  He tips his head to the ceiling, “God forgive my misconception. She has her father’s hands.”

  “That is enough.” The Lady rises in a whirlwind of arms and skirts. “The girl obviously had no idea, and if you bothered looking at her face instead of screaming into it, you wouldn’t need to ask.”

  “They’ll petition for her blood signature, you know that.”

  “No,” I say. “No tests. Dad said.”

  Their stares scrape bone.

  “Forgive me,” says Lord Westlet, “but when did he say?”

  “I called him from your office,” I tell the carpet. “The border techs patched me through. He said he’d handle it.”

  “That was his entire comment? He’d handle it?” He presses splayed fingers to both temples. “Still think she’s Fane?”

  “Yes.” I bound from the chair, place my palm flat against my chest. “I don’t care what you or Genevieve or anybody else says, because I know who I am. I know.”

  The Westlets share a glance, an entire conversation.

  “Oh, Asa,” says the Lady. Not a contradiction or agreement or even hope—just, “Asa.”

  LORD GALTON’S FACE FILLS EAGLE’S DIGISLATE. I HOLD it up beside my head in the bathroom mirror. A close-up wasn’t as hard to find as I expected. Amazing how accessible everything is when your House isn’t in lockdown.

  He doesn’t have my forehead. His eyes are lighter, jaw stronger, neck wider. We’re less alike in pictures. If my hair wasn’t so short, I wouldn’t have noticed a resemblance. Not unless I was looking. I might have noticed in a holorecord.

  Dad probably has a holorecord.

  My bedroom door thumps, but it’s locked tight. Genevieve will have to break it down to get in.

  Maybe I should push the bed in front of it.

  More thumps.

  “Go away,” I yell. If she wants temperance, she can go pound on Lady Westlet’s door.

  “It’s me.” Brusk and entirely Eagle. “Just me.”

  I reinvent speed—cross the room, deactivate the lock, and throw open the door. “Why?”

  Eagle looks like he hasn’t slept since yesterday. Or the year before. Jacket dusty, boots encrusted in mud.

  As if that’s an excuse. I step back into my room and slam the door.

  Or try to. He catches it.

  “Go away,” I say, “or better yet, get out.”

  He winces. “I heard. What happened.”

  “I’m sure you did.” I push and push, but his arm’s solid rock. “I’m sure everyone in the whole universe knows by now.”

  His shoulders wedge between the frame and there’s no point pushing anything. I fling the door wide. Eagle stumbles, but keeps his feet instead of falling over.

  “I waited for you.” Harsh as Dad, my dad, my real dad.

  Eagle goes still.

  “I waited and waited and then I went to breakfast, by myself, alone.”

  His eyes close and seconds burn. “I’m sorry.”

  “And that makes it better?”

  “No.” Unhesitant, eyes open. “No.”

  I hug my arms. “Why didn’t you tell me who Cousin Evie was? Who she was married to?”

  “Mother said to leave it. That you were upset and I shouldn’t make it worse.”

  “Did I say leave it? Me? She doesn’t get to decide! Not her or Genevieve or even Dad, I don’t care. You don’t get to tell me who I am or who my people are because I know who they are and they’re mine. I have people.”

  “Yes. You do.” Like it was never in doubt. He takes a step. “Asa—”

  “Where were you?”

  “The south flats. I ran out of uleum.”

  So he did take his skidcycle.

  “If you weren’t going to breakfast, you should have said.”

  “I meant to be back. I didn’t check the gauge.” His hands dig deep into his pockets. “I scared you.”

  “Scared me? You weren’t even there!”

  “Last night.” Tense as his taut arms. “I’m sorry.”

  I rub my chest, the tight charred mess of it. “I wasn’t scared.”

  “Yes, you were. You were talking like you do when—”

  “Eagle.” If one more person tells me who I am and how I feel, I will raze the world in screams. “I wasn’t scared.”

  Shadows swallow his parted lips, but he doesn’t argue. Only holds out his hand. “You trust me?”

  “To tell me what’s going on?”

  “To get you out,” he says, palm catching the dim light. “The Galtons want your signature. Tomorrow. They’ve already asked Mekenna for her lab and told half the Electorate you’re their blood.”

  My heart slips out of beat.

  I clasp his hand. “They can’t. Dad said I can’t be tested.”

  “I know.” Eagle steps so close his boots almost brush my toes. “Until Galton can prove it, the blood bond holds. We hold. With Fane. So we disappear.”

  “What?” I pull back, search his face, but he’s serious. “Where?”

  “The independents.”

  “But there are none left! Galton—”

  “Didn’t get them all. There are a few.”

  But that’s not right, because Dad didn’t say any had survived. Just like he didn’t say Galton had a new Lord.

  “For how long?” I ask. “When do we come back?”

  Eagle looks at his feet. Or maybe at our clasped hands.

  Oh.

  The treaty holds as long as I’m not tested. We don’t come back.

  I don’t come back.

  “Okay.” I slide my hand away. “Okay. I’ll have to take your flightwing, but I’m sure your dad will—”

  “I’m coming with you,” he says, as if I missed that part.

  I shake my head. “If I can’t be tested, then that’s forever. Forever, forever, Eagle. You didn’t break anything, your blood is fine. You’ll stay with your home and family, and I’ll—”

  “We’re forever.” He resnatches my hand, weaves our fingers. “That’s how this works. If you can lose Wren, I can lose Reggie. Trust me. Now pack up, we need to be gone in an hour.”

  FUEL

  MIRROR GIRL IS WHITE BLONDE. I’M NOT SURE I like her. She looks too much like the woman at the breakfast table. The bathroom lights of Eagle’s flightwing drain her color away until she’s a sea-ghost. At least she’s a ghost who doesn’t look like Asa.

  That’s something.

  I reach under the counter’s edge and tip the foldout vanity back into the wall. The room is a cross between a shower stall and a jewel box, and unless all the pullouts are tucked away, the door won’t open. Outside, the main room isn’t much bigger. It’s currently a kitchen, with a yellow countertop and stacked food heater. But with those folded back, the room could be an office or a bedroom. There’s likely a fold-down bed somewhere. Probably just one.

  With legs and sheets and Eagle.

  He sits at the yellow fold-down table, one hand spinning through a 3-D holomap. The other rests on the tabletop, biotech fingers twitching as he spreads them out and curls them in. Open, closed. Open.

  He said we’re forever.

  Of course we’re forever, we’re the treaty. That’s what he meant.

  I think that’s what he meant.

  “Do you know Evelyn Tres
s?” I ask.

  He looks up, map freezing as he fixates on my head. The whole blonde mess of it. “Elona’s cousin? Why?”

  “Is she nice?”

  “Not particularly,” he says, almost a question. “Reggie likes her.”

  “Oh. Good.” I sink into the chair opposite his.

  Eagle shakes out his fingers. Asks a slow, “Why?”

  “I thought she was Elona’s Evie. She came up on the feeds.” I nod at his hand. “Does it hurt?”

  “It’s fine.” He restarts the holomap. Tiny planets float over the table in a three-color overlay. Brown, silver, purple. Fane, Westlet, Galton.

  Fane arcs in a half-moon along the edge closest to Eagle, the smallest of the three with two systems and twenty-six planets.

  Next, Westlet weaves around us over a much greater expanse. Fifty-eight planets. Beyond, larger than us both combined, Galton eats everything. One hundred nine planets covering most of the table.

  “The uleum stations in SPAZ distance are here, here, and here.” Eagle’s finger moves between two Westlet planets and one from Fane. “Or here, in Galton. We’ll need three full recharges to make the closest independent. Or five for Erris, which is safer.”

  “Do we have five recharges?” Eagle took Reggie’s rations before we left, but still. Five.

  He shakes his head. “One.”

  “If we leave through home, we could get an ecoflux wing.”

  His left thumb rubs circles along his jumpy right palm. “We couldn’t refuel outside of Fane, and someone would tag the wing. If your dad covers for us, the Electorate will call him on it.”

  I reach through the map for Eagle’s biotech hand and pull it back across the table. Twist it thumb side down, and feel along the outer edge for the operations panel. Wren said our biotechnology is based on Westlet ideas—they developed it first—so Eagle’s hand shouldn’t be too different from Casser’s.

  Eagle goes absolutely still. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s jammed.” The panel controls are below the thumb instead of the wrist, but work the same way. His palm membrane protector fades from skin to circuits. Fat, disorganized circuits, shinier than Casser’s but apparently just as faulty.

  “You need an upgrade.” I poke through jammed connectors, straighten the dislodged bits. Leave the overstrange, complicated pieces alone. “This is old, older than Casser’s. I know Westlet has better tech than this.”

  “Won’t work with my chip.”

  “Your medichip?” The circuits look happy. I reactivate the skin membrane. Slide his hand back. “Why would that matter?”

  “It just does.” He slowly bends his fingers—one, two, all of them—in and out, fast and faster. They don’t glitch.

  “What about your ear?” I ask. “Is it hurting? Can you hear at all? You know, at Wren’s medicenter there’s a specialist who—”

  He reaches out, hand blanketing mine on the table, and looks. Just looks. Until my chest heaves at the weight of it.

  “I think you should go home,” I say.

  “No.” He lets go and zooms the map on the closest corner of Westlet. “There’s a ration base in the left quadrant. It’s dry, but Father keeps emergency backups. My print will get us through security, but they’ll know we’re there. We’ll have to be fast. In and out.”

  Casser kept emergency backups, too. Fourteen full tanks in case something happened to him and Wren “went off the deep end trying to fix it.” He never told her they existed. He never told anyone except me, and me only because Wren needed something from the sublevel datarecord storage and I stumbled upon him checking the stock.

  “What?” asks Eagle.

  The base fell, but even if people invaded the sublevels, they couldn’t access the tanks—the palm-print security lock tied only to Wren and Casser. And me with Wren’s security bypass, which requires my print to work. It’s safe now, the whole planet’s been dusted. Fully decontaminated and forever, irrevocably dead.

  “Asa?”

  Dad would know once we crossed the Fane border, but not where we went. And if we left fast enough, he wouldn’t be able to stop us. He could even use that to prove we weren’t in-House, if the Electorate asked where we were. If they even knew we crossed the border in the first place.

  Eagle’s fingers find mine. “Asa?”

  “I can get us fuel.”

  NO ONE HAILS US IN URNATH SPACE. NO FLIGHT coordinators ask for identity codes or destinations. The planet fills the viewshield, bold and bright amid white rings like nothing’s changed. We enter the atmosphere. Lower through berry-blue sky and fluff-candy clouds into—

  My eyes slam shut and stay shut as the flightwing dips and slows. Until motion stops, the engine dies, and my chest splits.

  Wake up. Wren’s hand on my shoulder, leaning down. We’re here.

  Except the fingers are too long to be Wren’s.

  You might as well open your eyes. I know you’re awake.

  Shadows curl along a public docking bay enclosed in pavement and grime, peppered with the abandoned husks of flightwings. Dead and broken.

  Wren couldn’t rebuild what the riots busted, but she always tried to keep the streets clean.

  “Is it as bad outside?”

  “Worse.”

  THE CITY USED TO SING. BEAUTIFUL OR ANGRY, HAPPY or scared, it always sang. Now it doesn’t even breathe.

  Towers crowd the sky in bony steel. The half-eaten thoroughfare stretches through a clutter of trash and street-hovers and buildings that didn’t survive the bombs. Cracks trickle underfoot, as if our steps break the street.

  One skytower rises over the others, dripping casing and wire. Remnants of white glossy steel peek through the rust. High walkways gape to nowhere.

  I stop and Eagle does, too.

  “That’s it,” I say. “Central Rise. The base entrance.”

  He cranes his head back, taking it in. “The tanks are here?”

  There’s something left? he doesn’t add.

  “The emergency supplies are underground,” I say.

  Climbing through the tower’s front window requires two hands. Even reinforced rivenglass can’t withstand a flightwing’s full-speed assault, and a wing’s blackened tail still protrudes from the building. I scramble up its creaking body, scrape through rust and grit to duck under the jagged glass. My foot catches on a ridge and the world tilts before Eagle clamps me back against his chest.

  “Careful.”

  Nothing about the main lobby of Central Rise is careful. The whole space is encapsulated in shredded tile and bloody smears. The once-white walls stand guard over pockets of crumpled bones. Clothed, corroded, snapped in odd angles. People bones.

  So many. So very many.

  We’re the only standing, living things in this entire broken world.

  “They didn’t claim the bodies?” Eagle asks.

  I shake my head and it’s hard, almost impossible to stop. “We had to get people out. Everything was contaminated and crazy and we didn’t have enough soldiers. It was more important to help the living.”

  Than to bury the dead.

  “We should get moving.” Harsh and tight.

  I nod.

  Ghosts whisper across the floor as we climb down the charred wing.

  EAGLE’S PENLIGHT PAINTS RIBBONS IN THE DARK. Room after room, stair after stair, face after decayed face. The bodies stop on sublevel 3.

  Emergency supplies are on sublevel 22.

  Twenty-two’s hall ends like the others, smooth except for the embedded screen that glows bright as always. Eagle wipes off its dust with his sleeve. “There’s power?”

  “It’s on a mini renewable solar-circuit.” I flatten my hand on the screen. It scans my print and blinks twice. Before the final access denied blink, I tap the override keypad and plug in Wren’s code. Denied switches to granted, and the wall slides away.

  Overhead fluorescents pop on, one after the other—a sequenced linear rhythm that blinds after so much dark. I squint
until the glare fades into white walls and tile and long metal shelves.

  Open crates lay sideways over tumbled boxes and scattered packing foam. Tiny digislate identity tags hang off shelves and lie busted on the floor. Everything raided and consumed.

  “God,” whispers Eagle.

  I walk through the parallel, picked-over shelves. Count them off. At the twenty-third row I turn right, into datarecord storage. The shelves are untouched here, stacked with neatly packed boxes. Historical backups, nonsensitive and unimportant. Nothing anyone would bother with. I drop to my knees at the third shelf from the end, beside the massive crates housed on the lowest rack.

  When I grab the closest crate’s handle, Eagle takes the other side and the crate slides to the floor. I pop the latch.

  Neat, even rows of datarecord circuit boards.

  I slide my fingers under the middle one. It lifts out along with the whole false circuit-covered top.

  Below lie three neatly packed metal canisters labeled ULEUM.

  “See?” I say. “Told you.”

  We have to carry them up.

  Fourteen canisters up twenty-two levels. Eagle digs out some packing cord, makes a harness, and carries two. I barely manage one. We make two trips, six canisters total. Climb and descend, climb and descend.

  And the dead watch.

  EAGLE CROUCHES BEFORE THE CANISTERS LINED along his wing’s hull and scans their labels with his digislate. Grease smears his forehead, and his pants are grimy. I soak in the afternoon sun, hug a coffee mug between aching fingers. My second cup.

  During quarantine, this would have been my sixth cup. Or my eighth. Casser would be blaring down the people-packed street that everyone would get fed today if they waited their turn. I’d be running circles in the main distribution tent, lining up ration packets and telling the soldiers which of the waiting families were due for what—a job Casser wasn’t thrilled with me having, but Wren overrode him. Everyone knew me. We were telling a story, and I was the next best thing to her or Dad. People needed to see a Daughter working on ground level. It showed solidarity. Gave hope.

  You’re evil! The girl had cried when her turn came, gaunt cheeks and stick arms. You think you’re better, but you’re not. You’re just evil and I hate you and I hope you die.