Stargazers

by Bella Forrest

  Bashrik made a show of looking at the door. “We’re very glad of your help, Nisha, but we need to move fast on this ingredient grab.”

  “Yeah, with the queens and guards wandering around, we don’t exactly have time on our side,” I added. “If anyone finds us, our plans will be ruined. The queens are determined to have the elixir for themselves. If they know we’re trying to reverse its power, they’ll destroy us.”

  Lauren nodded. “They’ll end up with an immortal army of their own, and you know what that means. A truly endless cycle of war. The fighting will never stop because nobody will ever die, and all the innocents will end up caught in the crossfire.”

  Nisha furrowed her brow. “That is a fate worse than death. I won’t allow it. I have some smoke bombs and night-vision goggles that you can use, to make it easier to steal whatever you need from the alchemy lab. The main one is just down the hall from here.” Reaching under her bed, she pulled out a dusty box and flipped the lid, revealing the promised equipment.

  “Where did you get all of this?” I gaped at her.

  “Contacts, Riley… all the contacts.”

  I reached for a pair of night-vision goggles and put them on, strapping a few smoke bombs to my waist. “Will you come with us?”

  “Naturally. You’re going to need a bit of brawn, and I know where the lab is. I can keep watch by the door while you slip in, keep any stragglers distracted.”

  “Here, take these and put them on,” I said, handing around the box of goggles. “And take a couple of smoke bombs each. We’re going to need them to hide our faces. Once we’ve got what we need, we can make our way back to the courtyard where we started. Does everyone know their way back? Harko?”

  Bashrik grumbled. “How many more times do I have to tell you? I designed this palace. I know it like the back of my hand. I can lead us all there.”

  “Still, it’ll help if we all know the way. And we have Ronad in our ears still, right?”

  “Still here,” Ronad chirped. “Really trying not to get worried about you all, over here.”

  I smiled. “We’re fine. You make sure we get to the courtyard safely. Oh, and I might need you to tell us where the ingredients are. As soon as those smoke bombs go off, we’ll be going into the lab pretty much blind.”

  “Copy that. You have five ingredients to fetch. I’ll guide you through the lab once you’re inside.”

  “Thanks, Ronad.”

  “No problem. Still trying not to get super worried.”

  Harko took the proffered goggles from the box and put them on, handing a second pair to Bashrik. Both of them looked ridiculous. However, combined with his tight rubber suit, Bashrik was hysterical. Despite the severity of the situation, a laugh bubbled up my throat. I had a feeling I didn’t look much better, but I wasn’t about to say so.

  “Not a word,” Bashrik warned, before turning on his tail and moving out into the hallway like a dime-store superhero, his fabric wings flapping behind him.

  “Well, I reckons I look right fetchin’,” Stone said, chuckling. “Might dangle me smoke bombs from me belt like this.” He turned to Lauren, doing an amusing little dance, the smoke bombs jiggling in the most unfortunate place… which was presumably the point.

  “Stone!” Lauren chided, though she couldn’t hide her grin.

  “Told ye me bollocks were made o’ steel.” He tapped them, making Nisha howl with laughter.

  “I like you,” she said.

  Stone smirked. “Aye, well, yer a fine lass, but I’m taken. Even if I weren’t, ye’d get me all in a worry that I might never walk again. Ye’d throw a lad like me ‘round like a rag doll.”

  “I’ve never heard any complaints.” She snickered.

  “I bet ye haven’t.”

  “We should probably follow Bashrik before he hides in a cupboard somewhere,” I suggested, moving out into the hallway to join him. The others followed a moment later, Stone still dangling his smoke bombs in front of the crotch of his flight suit.

  “What’s yer plan again?” he asked, pulling his goggles down.

  Lauren was the first to answer. “We have to make it look like Ezra and Aurelius have been here. We need to trick the queens into believing that the rebels have tried to sabotage the lab. We use the smoke bombs to get in and out. Hopefully, they won’t even realize anything is missing.”

  “Can we come back for the humans?” I turned to Nisha, my gaze drifting to the shadowed grate in the cell door.

  “One thing at a time, Riley,” Ronad warned in my ear. “You’re there for the ingredients. If we succeed in this mission, then we can free the humans when the war is over.”

  It pained me to leave them behind, but I understood how freeing the humans might draw unwanted attention to us. The rebels would never set the test subjects free. They would simply snatch what they wanted and kill the rest. Plus, how the hell were we supposed to get a large group of humans out of the labyrinth of tunnels without someone discovering us? It was an impossible task. We’d never get them out without being caught. The knowledge of that burned in my chest, fueling my fire toward succeeding in this mission.

  “I’ll come back for you,” I promised in a whisper, before trailing the others toward the lab. “I don’t know when, and I don’t know how, but I will free you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Nisha lifted a finger to her lips as we reached a crossroads between three of the subterranean passageways. Down the left-hand tunnel, she gestured at a set of double doors. A stringy-looking coldblood was coming down the passage from the opposite direction. He paused a moment, checking something on a device, before stepping through the double doors into the room beyond. He wore the emblem of the alchemists, a curved beaker tipping golden fluid.

  “Ronad?” I whispered.

  “I have a visual on the interior of the lab,” he replied. “I know where the goods are. Jareth is feeding me info, and I’ve hijacked a scanner satellite. I’ll have twenty minutes or so before I have to let it go, so nobody realizes I’m using it. Just follow my voice, and I will do what I can to lead you around the alchemists who are inside.”

  “How many?” Bashrik asked.

  “Eight.”

  “And there’s five o’ us. I’ve had worse odds, lemme tell ye,” Stone replied. He was right. Even if it came to blows, we weren’t terribly matched.

  “Nisha, you stay here and keep watch. Shout for us if anyone bad comes—like the queens, or anyone like that,” I said. “Shout ‘Defiance’ and we’ll know to get out.”

  She nodded. “I will. Best of luck to you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Once we’ve thrown the smoke bombs in,” Lauren said, “we should split into groups and keep to the sides of the lab. Riley, you and I can take one side, while Harko and Bashrik, you take the other. Stone, you can head up the center. I know you won’t be able to use your third eye in the smoke, but you might be able to freeze someone if they get too close.”

  “That’s me lass, always comin’ up with the smarts.”

  “Everyone agreed?” I asked.

  “Agreed,” they chorused back.

  “Then, goggles on. Let’s do this!”

  We approached the double doors, each of us taking a smoke bomb from the belts at our waists and wielding it nervously. Stone took the lead, kicking open the right-hand door with one almighty crack of his boot. Seizing the moment, we hurled the bombs in through the gap and let the door swing closed. A flurry of chaos erupted behind the door, the alchemists shouting to one another that they couldn’t find their way out.

  “What did you spill?” I heard one shout, as we opened the door again and slipped into the fogged-out room, our goggles kicking in. They allowed us visibility, even in the thick smoke.

  “I didn’t spill anything!” a second voice hollered.

  “Yorrek, was that you? What have we said about performing explosive experiments in the communal lab?” a third voice chimed in, making me freeze.

  Yor
rek? Surely, they didn’t mean the Yorrek—the one we’d drugged with Elysium and abandoned under a hedge? More than before, I was glad of the thick smoke, hiding us from view.

  “Switching to infrared,” Ronad whispered through the earpiece, pausing for a moment. “The arram root is in a box to your immediate right, Bashrik. And the vials of liquified daemon flower are on the table to your left, Harko.”

  In the shadowed darkness of the alchemy lab, a pale fog billowed green in front of my goggles, making everything look eerie, like we’d walked into the deepest depths of a ghost train. I was aware of Lauren behind me, and I could make out faint shapes moving in the smoke up ahead, but visibility was limited, even with the goggles. Something brushed my hand, and I had no idea whether it was Lauren or one of the startled alchemists. I couldn’t cry out to ask, in case it alerted the alchemists to our presence.

  “I think this may be something else, gentlemen,” Yorrek’s oh-so-familiar voice pierced the air.

  “What do you mean?” another alchemist asked.

  “I think we may be under attack!”

  Crap, crap, crap, crap. I could hear the alchemists moving around, but I couldn’t make them out in the near distance. Were they headed for the door, or were they trying to creep up on us and take us unawares? It was terrifyingly hard to tell.

  “We can’t be!” a frightened voice exclaimed. “The queens promised we would be protected!”

  “Nobody can protect you, except yourself,” Yorrek replied. I could hear the bitterness in his voice. Evidently, he had a chip on his shoulder after our last attack, though he had no way of knowing that we were the ones responsible for this. An attack was an attack, I supposed, regardless of who the aggressor might be.

  “Frostfang essence, Lauren, in a bottle to your left. You’ll have to duck down—it’s in the top drawer,” Ronad whispered. “And there’s a vat of coldblood baseline blood to your left, Riley.”

  Turning to the left, I scanned what looked like a countertop for the vat. I found it, a moment later, tucked against the back wall, though it was way heavier and way more disgusting than I’d anticipated. I could feel something cold and wet dribbling down the side, covering my hands. The lid wasn’t on, so I was going to have to be extra careful getting it out of here.

  “Stone, the last ingredient is in the cupboard to your right,” Ronad warned. “Be careful and be quiet. There are several bags of precious stones that have been ground to dust. You need the one on the far left of the cupboard’s bottom shelf, okay?”

  I’d turned to leave the lab, knowing the vat would slow me down, when suddenly, a figure appeared in front of me. He had ghostly eyes, and skin tinged green, but I recognized him instantly.

  “Who are you? What foe are you? Rebels, come to steal our secrets?” Yorrek roared, his face twisting up in a mask of fury and confusion.

  “Yes, rebels,” I murmured, setting the vat to one side and lunging at the coldblood. I didn’t want to kill him, given how much we’d already put him through, but I needed to take him out so we could get out of here in one piece.

  We had enough to deal with, without Yorrek doing something stupid.

  The others hurried to my aid, appearing out of the smog to hurl themselves at Yorrek. The alchemist was surprisingly agile, contorting himself out of my grasp and slipping around me before I could lunge at him again. He was more prepared this time around, by the looks of it. Evidently, our last encounter had shaken him, prompting him to go everywhere with a weapon at his side. I discovered this as he raised a gun to my face, pointing the barrel squarely between my brows. He couldn’t have known it was pointed there, but I wasn’t willing to risk his aim. I ducked just before the gun went off, the bullet thudding through the doorway behind me.

  “Hey, what are you playing at?” Harko asked curtly, stepping between us and Yorrek. “There’s no need for violence. Whoever this guy is, just let him go on his way.”

  “Do you want to ruin everything?” Bashrik hissed, grabbing his brother’s hand and yanking him out of the way, gripping his arms behind his back to stop him from intervening further. A split second later, Yorrek let off another round of bullets, one grazing the top of my ear with a sharp sting. For a coldblood working in weapons manufacturing, with a penchant for dangerous things, I hadn’t expected Harko to be a pacifist. Nor had I expected him to get in our way.

  Cursing, I took a step back and lifted a knife from my bandolier. “You know that rebels leave no survivors,” I said, altering my voice.

  Beside me, Stone fumbled with the knot of his bandana. I hesitated with the knife, wondering if there might be another way, after all. If Stone could freeze Yorrek, we might be able to get out of here without hurting anyone. Nobody would know we’d been here—they would blame the rebels, and everything would be fine. And I really didn’t want to kill him. He wasn’t a bad guy. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “My aim might be off, but this won’t be,” Yorrek hissed.

  Everything that ensued thereafter happened in an inexplicable blur. The last thing I remembered was seeing Yorrek reaching for something on the countertop beside him. My gaze darted back up to his face, but it was too late. Yorrek grasped a vial and took out the stopper before hurling the contents in our direction. It splashed past me harmlessly, but the liquid hit Stone square in the eye with a hiss of flesh. It was the same acid Yorrek had used on Navan, though Stone wasn’t lucky enough to have evaded it.

  The ambaka sank to his knees, clutching at the blistering mess of his third eye. His face contorted in a grimace of agony, his other eyes squeezed shut in case any of the liquid found its way in. I didn’t know much about the effects of acid, but I knew Yorrek’s was a nasty concoction. Stuck between the alchemist and my friend, I didn’t know what to do. For the first time since the space station, I felt completely helpless. I couldn’t do anything to fix Stone’s eye. And, with sudden horror, I realized the damage might be permanent.

  “NO!” Lauren howled in a fit of sudden rage.

  Grasping the staff from her back, she hurtled toward Yorrek, spinning the weapon so fast that the alchemist had no idea what kind of trouble he was in until the moment the staff cracked down on his head. He fell to the ground, unconscious, and Lauren stood over him, panting furiously. He was out cold and would never know what had happened to him. She had come out of nowhere. Now, she turned and sank to her knees beside Stone, holding his forearms as he writhed in pain, his hands covering his eye.

  We hurried to help, dragging Stone to his feet and helping him out into the hallway. Nisha was waiting, a worried look on her face. Seeing the state that Stone was in, she ran to him and scooped him into her arms like he was a child.

  “We need to go,” she urged. “The courtyard is too dangerous. I have a better idea.”

  “We’ll follow your lead,” I said, glancing at Stone.

  “This ain’t good,” he mumbled, over and over. Miraculously, he still had the sack of gem dust clutched to his chest. It reminded me to pick up the vat of blood and hold it securely, to stop any from spilling out.

  “You’re going to be okay, sweetheart, I promise you,” Lauren told him, gripping his hand as we hurried away from the lab. “I’m here, Stone. You’re going to be okay. We’re going to wash it out of your eye, and you’re going to be fine.”

  “Nah, my lovely, I think this’un has done me in good and proper.”

  She shook her head defiantly. “It hasn’t, Stone. You’ll heal. You’ll be fine. We just need to wash it out of your eye.”

  “Here, take this,” Harko said, stepping forward with a canteen of water from his belt.

  Lauren grasped at it in desperation. “Thank you. Nisha, can we stop for a moment?”

  “Don’t need to thank me,” he muttered, staring at the lab doors in shock.

  “Come on, babe, tilt your head back for me,” she urged Stone, using the brief pause. “Take your hand away from your eye and tilt your head back.”

  He did as
he was told. I couldn’t look at the mess that had once been an eye, the skin purple and puckered around it, swelling into blisters. The eyeball itself was covered in an inky substance that had infected almost the entire surface.

  “Are you going to tell me why you almost murdered an innocent bystander?” Harko asked coldly, as we broke into a run again, charging through the underground tunnels.

  “Harko, you have to understand, we’re trying to end this war for good by ridding the rebels of their immortality. If the queens find out we’ve been here, they might try and stop us from succeeding. True, it’s in their best interests to let us deal with the rebels, but they can’t let us make an anti-elixir because that throws a wrench in their plans, too.” Bashrik sighed. “Please, Brother, understand that we don’t want to kill anyone. We’re not murderers. We just want to end this war as peacefully as possible, by leveling the playing field again. If we don’t, the rebels will kill everyone who doesn’t agree with their way of thinking.”

  Harko visibly calmed, his face relaxing. “I guess that makes sense,” he said, after a pause. “Seems like you and your crazy bunch of weirdos are living life on a knife-edge. Got to admire that, my blood, got to admire that. And, Rask, that female is impressive, whatever she is! I’ve never seen anyone spin a staff so fast in all my days! And the way he just went down like a sack of gumshi fruit. Oosh!” Despite his moral misgivings over our behavior, it seemed as though the latest Idrax brother had gotten some kind of thrill out of the experience. I could almost see the adrenaline draining out of him.

  “I’m just glad none of this brought the queens running back,” I said.

  Bashrik nodded. “You can say that again.”

  I moved ahead to walk level with Stone, Lauren, and Nisha. “How is it feeling?” I asked.

  Stone blinked open his good eyes. “The cuddle’s grand, but I ain’t feelin’ too sharp about me eye.”

  “At least nothing happened to your sense of humor,” Lauren said softly, her hands stroking his. “You wouldn’t be the same without that.”