Soul of Stars

by Ashley Poston

  Ana could not do that.

  But then Di looked up at her, his red eyes wide and filled with agony. “Please—please help.”

  It’s not him, the rational part of her head whispered, and she knew it wasn’t really him . . . but he was really hurting.

  That wasn’t a ruse.

  “You are making him hurt,” said Mellifare, and the edges of her words were sharp with impatience. “He is screaming in pain and it is your fault—”

  “Okay, fine!” She gave in, her words like lead on her tongue. Her mind raced—even if she didn’t put the crown into the door, Mellifare would.

  But if Ana unlocked the door first, she would be the first in. The first to the heart. The first to—to—

  Talle’s grenade sat in the pocket opposite the one with Di’s memory core. Lenda had given it to her. Said it packed more of a punch. It wasn’t much, but these ruins were ancient and crumbling, and if she couldn’t destroy the heart—she could bury it.

  “Then take the crown and put it into the door, and perhaps I will stop.” The monster’s eyes flashed red as her smile widened, and she offered the crown to her. “After all, the Goddess should open up her own tomb.”

  She thinks I’m the Goddess, Ana realized as she took the crown from the ground at her feet, curling her fingers around the prongs. But the real Goddess was out there, somewhere. Maybe she was coming to save Ana. Maybe she had given up a thousand years ago.

  Maybe she knew there was no stopping Mellifare, so she didn’t even try, and left Ana to fill shoes that were impossibly big.

  And Ana had failed.

  She stepped up to the tomb’s door, her grip so tight on the crown, the prongs left indentations in her palms.

  Di screamed on the ground, curling into himself.

  The crown fit perfectly into the groove, and she twisted it to the right. There was a thunk, and the dozens of turning tumblers began to shift and click, rotating into place like cogs in some of the ancient clock towers on Eros. As it revolved, she began to recognize the sharp lines and circles, the connecting dots and the strange angles.

  It was a map of the Iron Kingdom, and the crown was the sun.

  What have I just done?

  When the last tumbler fell into place, the door popped open with a sigh.

  And Di stopped screaming. He untangled his fingers from his hair, his hands shaking, and glanced up to her. And for the first time since he had been HIVE’d, Ana thought she saw something familiar in his face, only for a moment, before it disappeared and he rose to his feet.

  Mellifare was smiling so wide, her eyes shone. “Now that was not hard, was it?”

  “Why are you toying with me?” Ana asked, her voice shaking. “Why don’t you just kill me?”

  “Oh, because I will enjoy turning you into a Metal all the more. You saw inside my dreadnoughts, did you not? It is so poetic—to trap the Goddess in an android. I could kill you twice then, and bring you back, and kill you again, and again, and again. It will be exquisite.”

  She fisted her trembling hands. But I’m not the Goddess—I don’t have another life to try to stop you.

  Talle’s grenade was growing heavy in her coat.

  “I think the worst part of all this,” Mellifare went on, hands placed neatly behind her back as she came up beside her and looked down into the darkness of the tomb, “is that you still think you have a chance to win. Under all that skin and bone, somewhere in that fleshy heart of yours, you think you can still stop me.” Her voice lowered. “You could not even stop me from taking the Metal you loved.”

  But a part of Di was still with her, tucked deep in her pocket, small and square. Love didn’t have to be a big thing. It just had to be present, and she carried him wherever she went, and it gave her all the hope she needed.

  There is a 97.3 percent chance that you are about to make a terrible decision, she heard his voice in her head. Yeah, he would say something like that. Terrible decision or not, it was the only plan she had.

  And she had to try.

  So she shoved the ancient doors wide and ran down the steps, into darkness.

  Emperor

  “After her,” Mellifare ordered.

  Obeying, he followed the Empress into the tomb and descended the steps. The tomb was much deeper than he’d thought. Mellifare followed, humming happily under her breath. He felt her, a soft and subtle pulse of song. His functions still felt jittery from the pain. Mellifare had summoned it without warning, and it left a strange, ringing sound in his ears. He could remember little else.

  Mellifare took out a flashlight and shook it. The warm yellow light illuminated the steps that led down to a small and cramped room. There were no decorations of great battles, unlike the grander tombs they’d destroyed—as though whoever was buried here was meant to be forgotten. Ancient dust and cobwebs hung from the corners, draping across the walls like curtains. There was no coffin. It was empty of everything.

  He had the fleeting thought that he had been here before, led by a brown-skinned girl with fiery wires in her hair, hoping they would find the—

  He blinked, and the thought vanished.

  “Oh, Anaaaa,” Mellifare called, “have you found the bottom yet?”

  Mellifare’s light crept across the walls and found her at the far end of the tomb.

  “Memory cores,” the golden-eyed girl began, her voice strangely calm. “They’re designed after your heart, aren’t they?”

  “I taught Lord Rasovant how to build them,” replied Mellifare, “to trap souls in them, so that I could harvest their light without my heart.”

  “And the people inside the cores? Those souls?” Ana asked.

  “They are easy enough to overwrite, as you well know.”

  He winced as she said that, a spark of pain in the back of his head—and a memory of the Iron Palace, grabbing a small worker bot out of the air and pushing a command into it—a little of himself—the voice now lodged in the back of his head. That same can opener that had attacked him on the dreadnought.

  The one that had made him glitch.

  Mellifare raised the glowlight to illuminate the girl. Eagerness thrummed in her song, infectious and loud.

  The girl stood facing the wall, staring down at a hunched-over skeletal figure, knees once drawn to its chest. The white bone and cloth had decomposed so thoroughly it was almost dust. The person had died pressing something against their chest.

  The heart—

  But it was gone.

  All that was left was the faintest outline—a square the size of a plum—in the decomposing leather of the corpse’s skin.

  When Mellifare realized, the song twisted like an errant wind into a harsh, discordant cry. He winced against it.

  “Where is it?” Mellifare hissed, rushing up to the skeleton, shoving the girl aside. She picked at the bones, defiling them, as the skeleton crumbled, skin turning to dust. The rest of the bones lost their shape and fell into a pile with an exhausted tremble. She whirled around to the girl. “WHERE IS IT?”

  The girl stood her ground. In the glow of Mellifare’s light, her eyes looked liquid. “It isn’t here,” she said calmly.

  “WHERE IS IT?” Mellifare roared, and took her by the front of her coat.

  “I don’t know,” the girl replied. “But it’s not here. It seems the Goddess beat you to it.”

  “The Goddess?” Mellifare’s voice crackled and quaked.

  He winced again against the song. It was screeching now, angry and desperate.

  “Oh, I didn’t tell you? I’m not the Goddess, Mellifare. As you said, I couldn’t even save the Metal I love.”

  I promise, a memory whispered in a small, dark lab, a ruined Metal on the ground beside him, pleading with this girl with golden eyes. I will leave if you let me save you—

  He jerked his head to the side and zeroed out the errant glitch.

  “The Goddess must’ve already come,” said the girl, “and you’re too late—”

  Mellifar
e snarled, and he felt the death threat in the song, wanting to snap the girl’s neck. To leave her body here to rot in this forgotten ruin—

  Do not, he thought. Do not kill her—

  But why did it matter?

  The voice in his head was screaming, scratching against his skull.

  And the next thing he knew, he had lunged toward Mellifare and caught her wrist to stop her. And they both froze. What—what had he just done? In horror, he wanted to let go. He needed to let go, but his hand would not cooperate.

  The voice—it wailed in his head, so much louder than the song now.

  Mellifare gave him a dangerous look. “Let go of me, brother.”

  “I—I—I cannot,” he replied, and his hand holding Mellifare’s shook in terror.

  Her eyes narrowed.

  Suddenly, a spike of pain drove through his skull like a javelin, hurling through his programs, grabbing his ligaments like puppet strings, and his hand dropped hers. He could not stop himself. He could only watch as his body shoved the Empress against the far wall and pressed his lower arm against her throat, pinning her with his weight.

  Mellifare patiently began to back up the stairs as the song tore through his head, telling him to crush her windpipe. The bones of the Goddess rattled on the ground, crumbling under his heel.

  The girl gasped for breath, her eyes wide.

  There is a grenade in her coat, Mellifare told him, and his hand did as she commanded and reached into her sage coat pocket. He found the grenade and brought it out, and he was helpless as his thumb brushed the pin.

  Mellifare turned back for a moment from the middle of the stairs. “Brother, if you want to be hers, why not die with her?”

  Die—

  The word rang in his ears.

  Die.

  The girl gave him a frightened look. His hand shook, his thumb prying off the pin.

  He was—

  That was his—

  “She’s wrong,” she whispered, and she stopped trying to claw away his arm and put a hand on his cheek. Her touch was soft and warm and—and she—she smiled. At him. Even though she was frightened. “You were mine, and I was yours. I was always yours, Di.”

  Di.

  Mellifare made his thumb pluck the grenade pin out. And the glitch in his head screamed—

  I AM, it roared. I AM.

  A voice that sounded—it sounded like—

  Like him.

  Electricity curled across his body, lashing up from the floor like vines. His hair levitated with static, the buttons on his intricate midnight cloak sparking. The song crackled, digging its claws deeper. It hurt—everything hurt so much. The song wailed, and the voice inside his head screamed, and between every red thread of code and angry integer, suddenly—there she was, this girl with golden eyes and a scar of constellations and a voice that was soft and sure—

  There she was like the dawn.

  With a cry, he grabbed ahold of himself, rebelling against the song, and tossed the grenade behind him.

  Toward the stairs.

  Toward Mellifare.

  Then he pulled the girl against his body as the grenade exploded in a sharp hiss of white light.

  The shock wave filled the tomb. Stone and shrapnel bit into his back. He clamped down on his tongue to keep himself from screaming as a sharp piece of rock jabbed into his shoulder. A loud crack split the ceiling above them. In surprise, he glanced up. The sandstone heaved—and dropped.

  Suddenly, he felt hands on his chest, and the girl pushed him out of the way. A rush of stone and sand came tumbling down, and then there was silence.

  And nothing more.

  Ana

  She came to with a gasp.

  Everything was dark, and her tongue tasted like sandpaper. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was or what had happened—until her blurry vision slowly sharpened and she stared down at the body of Di beneath her. She had pushed him out of the way and must’ve fallen on top of him when the ceiling collapsed. Slowly, as if expecting to find something broken, she sat up; pebbles and debris sloughed off her back. She blinked wearily, rubbing the grit out of her eyes as she coughed. She tasted blood in the back of her mouth, and everything hurt—but especially her ribs. She sucked in another breath, and her side spiked with pain.

  Yeah, definitely her ribs.

  But that also meant she was alive—for the moment.

  The tomb had caved in on itself, but most of the ceiling had somehow missed them. When she looked up, she saw the stained-glass windows of the shrine and tree branches breaking through the holes in the roof. Orange evening light streaked through the settling dust. Her gaze drifted down to Di beneath her. He wasn’t moving.

  She touched his cheek. “Di?”

  His eyes finally looked robotic, the optics in his pupils reminding her of antique camera lenses. He had saved her from the blast, and she didn’t know why.

  “Di, wake up,” she pleaded, shaking his shoulders, but his gaze stared beyond her, and his face didn’t move, but in the still of the settling ruins she heard the whir of electricity through his wires.

  He was offline, but not dead.

  And she hated that she was afraid he’d wake up. That she’d have to fight him again.

  Mellifare was nowhere to be found. Had she escaped? Or was she still somewhere in the rubble? Ana hoped the latter, but she doubted the Great Dark could be killed so easily.

  A rumble startled her, and the far wall shifted precariously. She needed to leave before the rest of the tomb caved in, or she’d be trapped here like the Goddess had been.

  Fighting to keep herself together when all she wanted to do was unravel like a ball of yarn, she grabbed his arm and looped it over her shoulder, and with a sob she pulled him to his feet.

  As the dust settled across the ruins of the tomb, she climbed the stairs—until she saw that the door was blockaded. She was trapped. There was no way out.

  And no one knew she was trapped.

  Another rumble shook the tomb, and she tensed, waiting for the ceiling to cave in. Di hung limply at her side, and she held on to him all the more tightly. “I wish you were with me,” she whispered to him, who was not Di, who would never be Di again. “I was always so much braver with you.”

  What she really meant—what she wanted to say—was that she did not want to die, and she was afraid to.

  The blockade at the top of the stairs shifted, and she pressed her face into his hair, waiting for the tomb to cave—when a spear of light broke through the dark stones barricading the exit. The door crumbled open.

  In the light stood a shadow, her hair blazing the color of the sun, burning so bright it drove the shadows in the tomb away.

  “Darling,” the light said, “let’s get you out of there.”

  Hope welled in her chest like birds singing at dawn, and with renewed strength she pulled Di higher on her shoulder and climbed toward her captain.

  The moment she stumbled through the door, Siege took Di’s other arm and helped her drag him out of the ruins and down the shallow embankment to a meadow where the Dossier sat, thrusters humming, ready to fly. The cargo door lowered and Lenda rushed out. “Captain, Jax’s got two Messier ships incoming—” She paused at the sight of Di. “Is he . . .”

  “Offline,” Ana said.

  “But is he . . .”

  HIVE’d.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted.

  Lenda hestiated, but then she shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. What’s that sound?” She cocked her head and spun toward it.

  In the distant dusky sky, two silver streaks broke through the atmosphere, trailing white smoke behind them. They swirled down through the clouds, leaving pinholes for a moment before the clouds rippled.

  The captain turned toward the ships, too. She pursed her lips. “They’re here. Lenda, take Di,” she ordered, and Lenda did, letting the captain rush into the ship and hurry up the stairs.

  “Shit, he’s heavy,” Lenda muttered. “Are you ok
ay?”

  “Yeah. When you landed, was there anyone else here?” Ana asked as they hauled Di up the ramp and into the ship.

  Lenda shook her head. “No one.”

  Then where was Mellifare? Ana hadn’t seen her in the tomb, and even though Di had thrown the grenade back toward her—it couldn’t have been that easy.

  Once inside, the hull doors closed and the Dossier’s thrusters hummed as it picked up off the ground, the solar core in the engine room burning so brightly, the light leaked out from underneath the door. Lenda helped her lay Di down in the medical ward. The ship gave a shudder as it banked around—a little too sharply—and took off into the stormy sky.

  “Is she all right?” called a voice from the top of the stairs, and Viera took them down two at a time. “Lenda, did you get her?” The guard captain paused in the doorway to the medical ward, her eyes settling on Di. Her lips thinned. “Are you sure this is wise?”

  “I wasn’t going to leave him,” Ana replied, curling her fingers tightly around the midnight black of Di’s cloak. “I won’t leave anyone else behind—”

  The ship veered again.

  “But he is HIVE’d,” Viera argued, “and there is no way out of it.”

  Ana replied. “There is, though.”

  “Love will not save him,” she went on, and the words felt like a poker twisting her insides. “Love will not save anyone. It did not save me.”

  “I didn’t know you were alive, Viera. If I had—”

  “If you had, then what? I guess I should have been in love with you, then, to have have been noticed,” Viera snarled.

  The Dossier gave a shudder as an explosion rattled the screws in the old ship.

  Ana caught herself on the side of the gurney as the lights crashed to black and the red emergency neons dimmed on. Through the intercom, Jax cried, “Stations!”

  For a moment longer, Ana and Viera glared at each other, until Lenda put herself between them and said, “We can discuss the metalhead later—the Messiers are after us, and they won’t stop until we’re dead.”