Soul of Stars

by Ashley Poston

  “Shh,” she had shushed, hoping Redbeard hadn’t heard. “The captain trusts him, so we should, too. Stop being a worrier. You’ll get wrinkles.”

  Di blinked at her. “I am more likely to rust—I believe my components are freezing, it is so cold out here.”

  She laughed. “You can’t even feel the cold. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Metal Popsicle.”

  “No, but what will happen when all of this frost thaws?” he had asked. “The condensation will get into my hardware and I will short circuit and rust and you will need a new partner.”

  Grinning, with her hands shoved into her pockets for warmth, she bumped her shoulder against his. “Nah, I’d just fix you.”

  He had been wearing his favorite coat—sage-colored leather with fasteners up the side, his hood pulled over his head to help disguise that he was a Metal. She liked to remember him best like this. Moonlit eyes and a dent on his forehead from where she ran him over in a skysailer and a set to his mouth that was never argumentative—but also never approval. She liked to remember that moment on the frozen docks of the city-state Tavenktcha, if only to remember the way the evening light shone across the slats of his face and reflected off his frosted cheeks.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t want a new partner?” he had asked. “Someone else you could run over with a skysailer?”

  She gave a mock gasp. “You’re still on that? It was an accident! I thought it was in park!”

  “I believe that.”

  “That sounds like sarcasm.”

  “I am unable to convey sarcasm.”

  “That also sounds like sarcasm,” she had deadpanned.

  Redbeard, who had been walking a few paces in front of them, had belted out a laugh and glanced over his shoulder to both of them. His eyes were like black pinpricks, but he had the kind of face that wasn’t nearly as scary as it should have been, with the scar raking across his eyebrow. “Ye know, when Siege said she had a rogue Metal on her ship, I was a little worried. But ye ain’t too bad.”

  “I shall take that as a compliment,” Di had replied nobly.

  “Good. Maybe ye won’t be HIVE’d.”

  “Maybe? He won’t be,” she had argued.

  “And if he is?”

  “Then I’ll get him out.”

  “With love and sarcastic quips, eh?” the ex-con had asked, and unlike Di, she could hear the mockery that dripped across his words.

  It pissed her off enough to say, “Yes. With love—and especially sarcastic quips.” Then she looked away, pursing her lips, as the ex-con howled with laughter again, making her cheeks burn with fury.

  The next morning, Redbeard had tried to steal Siege’s lockbox and jettison off to the next city as soon as they landed in Neon City. Siege found him, of course, and returned with three of his golden teeth and a bloodied nose as payment.

  “We’re never doin’ that again,” she had groused, but now Redbeard captained one of Siege’s fleetships stationed out near Cerces, the Illumine. Last she’d heard, he had been trying to board and take down a dreadnought of his own—like Robb and Jax had done to save her.

  If Ana saw Redbeard again after all this was over, she wanted to tell him that he had been right—Metals could not be saved with love and sarcastic quips. Ana wasn’t even sure they could be saved at all, although she held on to that hope like a ship clinging to its mooring.

  She would get the heart. She would defeat the Great Dark. And she would bring Di back.

  She would.

  She had to.

  As the skysailer buzzed over the fir trees, she kept squinting down into the thicket for any sort of ruins. The console relayed a holographic map, but all she could see were trees and mountains and blue sky—

  And then the firs gave way to alabaster stone and felled pillars, and the ruins of what looked like a temple.

  An Iron Shrine. One she had never seen before. It was ancient, the way it fit into the foot of the mountains as if it’d been carved there. Through the hole in the roof, there was the barest glimpse of a white stone face both foreign and familiar.

  The Goddess.

  Ana set the skysailer down at the edge of the ruins. Everything was quiet.

  Good—she hoped it would stay that way.

  She grabbed her rucksack, looped it over her shoulder, and checked the ammo in her Metroid before holstering it under her arm and climbing the alabaster stairs toward the ruins.

  This Iron Shrine must be over a thousand years old, having fallen to time and memory, built when the Goddess still existed in flesh and bone. The downed pillars held sconces in the shape of the Goddess, her hands hooked to hold the flames. The Old Language was chiseled at the base of the fallen doors leading into the temple. The forest had slowly encroached for centuries, vines and roots upending the floor and crawling up the walls. Small white flowers bloomed between the flagstones like weeds, but she’d seen their star-shaped petals before, and she knew their sweet scent like a lullaby.

  They were moonlilies.

  Cautiously, she stepped into the shrine, tugging up the hood on the tattered cloak she’d bought on the freighter from Iliad. The afternoon light fell in strokes between the fallen slats of roof, painting golden bars across the autumn-leaf- and vine-covered ground. It was peaceful, and quiet—too quiet. There were no birds, no nature, no buzzing of insects. There was just air and sunlight and ancient marble, and slowly she drew her hand to her pistol.

  She didn’t trust this kind of silence, and she quickened her pace.

  Halfway into the shrine, she noticed writing on one of the walls. At first it looked like nothing—errant age marks—until she came closer. The drawings were faded and written in inky black charcoal. It was graffiti.

  MARI + SEL, one said.

  NICHOLII THE GREAT (although NICH was changed to DICK, which Ana thought was really classy).

  There were drawings—stick figures and tic-tac-toe games. A little farther down, there were scenes from landscapes she could see from the shrine—the forest in the distance, the valley beyond, and one of the broken Goddess statues just a few feet away. They were signed by M.V.

  Robb had said that students at the Academy a few miles away used to come here before the Plague. These drawings must have been the work of those students.

  She ran her hands along the words.

  If they were Ironbloods who went to the Academy twenty-something years ago, the last names had to have been families she knew.

  M.V. Mercer Valerio?

  And Nicholii—her father, the late Emperor Nicholii?

  DI’S A SPOILSPORT, another message read, although that had been crossed out three different times to DEVILISH ROGUE, SARCASTIC SMARTASS, HANDSOME BACHELOR. She grinned at that one.

  “These sound like jokes Jax and I’d make to you, Di,” she murmured to the memory core in her pocket, and closed her eyes to recite a prayer that Siege had used just a few months ago when they sent Riggs to rest.

  “To those who set sail into the night,” she whispered, and a part of it felt like she was saying it to her own Di, too. The one lost to the HIVE, and the fragment in her pocket, and the memories that still haunted her head. “May the stars keep you steady, and the iron keep you s—”

  A rock skittered across the uneven flagstones.

  Ana jerked to her feet and whirled around toward the entrance of the shrine, reaching for her pistol—

  And froze.

  A long shadow stretched into the shrine from the open doorway, lengthening in the waning afternoon light. Her throat began to tighten, each footfall making it harder to breathe, until she couldn’t at all, and the scar on her stomach burned with pain like it never had before. She quickly pressed her hand against it, feeling the knot of skin. She tried to breathe. To think. To run—Goddess, she had to run—

  Goddess help me, she prayed, even though she was certain the Moon Goddess no longer listened.

  And he stepped into the shrine.

  “You are trespassing.”


  It was a voice she knew, a voice that haunted her when she closed her eyes. He was in every good memory in her head, and he was in every nightmare.

  She couldn’t run.

  She could barely even move.

  The heart was here, and so was he, and whether she had unknowingly led him here or he had been lying in wait . . . it didn’t change the shape of his shadow. And a part of her was happy he was here—alive—

  At least she knew.

  He prowled down the aisle toward her, over crinkled fall leaves turned golden in the chill, and roots slowly upturning the flagstones, lined with broken benches. His steps were slow and methodical.

  She swallowed the knot in her throat.

  Don’t turn around, she told herself. Whatever you do, don’t turn around.

  Because this was not her dear friend. This was a monster, truly, the thing Di had been so afraid of becoming. And that gave her a little more courage, because he was not her Di. She had to repeat that.

  He was not hers, he was not hers—although it sounded wrong in her head. Hadn’t he said he was hers so very long ago?

  “Turn around,” he ordered.

  She slowly reached into her ratty cloak and pressed her hand against the solid square in her coat pocket—Di’s memory core. She’d managed to hold on to it despite the dreadnought and the ark and the universe trying to pull him away from her. She took a deep breath and remembered that he was with her. And she wasn’t afraid.

  She wouldn’t be afraid.

  He clucked his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “I prefer looking into the faces of the people I kill—”

  “Did you always like to hear yourself talk?” she interrupted, quite unable to stop herself. “Or is it a new glitch?”

  She turned around—and wished she hadn’t.

  Her heart faltered.

  He looked just as she remembered, bloodred hair and fake Valerio-blue eyes. The wound she had given him still looked fresh on his cheek, stitched together with steely thread. He wore the Iron Crown atop his head and a black cloak that rippled as he came closer, a black jacket emblazoned with golden buttons and sunbursts stitched into the shoulders and sleeves, and black trousers. There was a great deal more gold and jewelry on him now, decorative cuffs on his ears and a thick choker rising up his long neck, a jeweled clasp keeping his cloak shut—he looked overwhelming. As though he didn’t even try to hide his power.

  No, that was not her Di at all.

  Even though he had the same sharp chin, and the same lips that curved perpetually downward, and the same thick red eyebrows, his eyelashes the color of oil. High cheekbones, and a narrow nose. The curve of his neck was the gentle slope she remembered pressing her lips against, once upon a time.

  But this—this was the monster who had tried to murder her.

  And yet . . .

  “Di,” she whispered, unable to stop herself.

  He recognized her and came to an abrupt halt. His eyebrows furrowed. “You.”

  Not that she thought he would call her by her name, but she missed it all the same.

  His face darkened. “You will not escape me this time.”

  Then he outstretched his hand.

  It happened so fast, she couldn’t even draw her weapon. A crackle of lightning surged from the comm-link on her cloak collar. She cried out, trying to wrench it away—and dropped her guard.

  He rushed toward her, so fast he was a blur.

  But just as he grabbed for her, he winced as if he’d been stabbed in the eye. He stumbled to the side and shoved the palms of his hands against his eyes. “Damn it,” he swore. “No—not again.”

  Run, she told herself.

  Run, Ana.

  So she did.

  Over an overturned pillar and around the broken head of the tallest Goddess statue, toward the back of the shrine where the tomb usually was. She ran through fractured glass on the ground and colored light from what remained of the stained-glass windows above her. Past the base of the fallen Goddess statue, around to the doorway to the inner shrine, where only the abbesses and priests of the Goddess were allowed to enter.

  The heart was here somewhere—in the Goddess’s tomb. Find the tomb, she told herself, trying to keep control of her panic. Find it and get the heart and—and run.

  The room was small and circular, with a pedestal in the center that used to hold a rusted water bowl that now sat knocked over beside it. Her skin crawled with the feeling that she wasn’t supposed to be here. The murals on the walls were once bright, but now the tiles were faded from years of sunlight through the missing side of the roof and the vegetation that had crept in. She could still make out most of the images, though—telling of the defeat of the Great Dark. There was the Solani’s ark, a living ship that had carried them across light-years to the Iron Kingdom, but the panels that told of the heart and what happened to it were cracked and broken, as if someone had purposefully destroyed them.

  She stumbled on a piece of loose tile, glancing back to see how close he was—not close at all. Was he even following? On the other side of the circular room was a strange and intricate lock that seemed to twist in on itself, so detailed it was impossible to open without a key. Something circular? With prongs?

  She glanced around—but there was nothing else here.

  This was the door to the tomb. She was sure of it.

  And with no way to open it, this was a dead end. She could use Talle’s grenade to blow it open—but then she would lead him inside, too.

  Her fingers curled into fists.

  She had unwittingly led the Great Dark directly to the Goddess’s tomb where its heart resided. Had this been its plan the entire time? Behind her, she heard footsteps come into the room. She reached for the Metroid in her underarm holster as she spun to face him.

  Count your bullets. Remember where they—

  Standing where Di should have been were two Messiers.

  “Do not struggle,” said one.

  The other followed, “For you will not esc—”

  Ana didn’t give it the chance. She raised her pistol, took aim, and fired. She didn’t think.

  She only counted the bullets.

  One. In the head.

  Then she aimed to take out the other one, but just as she did, a hand punched through it, grabbing its memory core, and ripped it out. The Messier gave a jerk, its eyes flickering, and slumped to the ground, revealing the Emperor behind it, the gentle pulse of a blue square memory core in his hand.

  “I am the only one who is allowed to kill you,” he purred, glaring up at her from beneath his thick eyelashes, and crushed the core. “No one else—gnnh!”

  He winced, and his blue eyes flickered red—as hot and bright as a flame—and his face slackened, lips untwisting from their snarl. His body unwound, and he righted himself and stood as still as a statue. His glassy gaze no longer stared at her but through her—

  As if she was suddenly not there at all.

  “Forgive my little pet,” said a honey-sweet voice that Ana recognized—the same voice that belonged to the girl who had helped her dress for a week, who laughed at her terrible jokes, who told her she would make a great Empress. “Sometimes I fear it would have been better if I had deleted his functioning facilities—but we both know he is more entertaining when he thinks.”

  Ana lifted her aim to Mellifare.

  The flaxen-haired young woman came into the circular room. She no longer wore a lady-in-waiting uniform, as she had at the palace, but trousers and a pristine white blouse with a ruby broach clasped to the high-neck collar. She was a Metal like Di—and Ana wondered when the Great Dark had assimilated her, and how long she had been stationed in the palace, lying in wait. Mellifare stepped over the ruined Metals and curled her arm around Di. Emotionlessly—like a puppet—he kissed her forehead, and Ana’s stomach twisted.

  “Don’t move,” Ana warned, “or I’ll kill you.”

  “And I’ll kill him,” She motioned to Di.

  An
a forced a laugh. “What’ll you do? Does the Great Dark really want you killing its Emperor?”

  Mellifare tilted her head. “Dear me, what do you think is the Great Dark?”

  “Some—something that stays hidden, controlling you and Di and the HIVE and—”

  Mellifare snapped her fingers.

  Ana winced—but nothing happened.

  Until Di gave a bloodcurdling scream and fell to his knees. The crown on his head clattered to the ground and rolled to a stop in front of her feet. She stood her ground, fighting the urge both to comfort him and run. He clutched his head, his fingers curling into his hair, pulling at it. “It hurts,” he sobbed. “It hurts.”

  Mellifare looked on with a growing smile.

  “Stop it!” Ana said. “What are you doing?!”

  “Simply tricking his pain receptors to feel like his entire body is on fire. I am sure you know that sort of pain. I gave you that sort of pain once.”

  Oh, she had been a fool.

  “You’re the Great Dark,” she whispered. “You set the fire. You killed my parents—my brothers.”

  “I did,” replied the young woman. “Too bad I didn’t kill you.”

  Ana stared in horror. She remembered that sort of burning pain, bubbling up like a fresh nightmare, the way it seared and boiled. How it seemed so deep in her bones that it felt like her soul was burning up, shriveling to ash and cinders. It was a feeling of a thousand knives raking across her skin, flaying it, drenching her thoughts in a single, unending scream.

  The pain traveled with her everywhere she went, the memory like ash in her mouth.

  “Now take the crown and open the door,” said Mellifare, and flourished her hand toward the tomb’s entrance. “You should do the honors. You did find it, after all.”

  A key hidden in plain sight, so heavily guarded that only one bloodline could even touch it. A circular disk with prongs.

  A crown.

  She gritted her teeth. “I’d rather die than open that door.”

  Mellifare tilted her head. “Very well.”

  Di screamed louder, pulling at his hair. He thrashed, his body rigid and trembling. The sound made her heart shudder. Her fingernails bit into the palms of her hands. She wouldn’t—she couldn’t. If that crown opened that door, then she would unleash the Great Dark into the world. Mellifare would get what she needed to kill this kingdom.