Soul of Stars

by Ashley Poston

  “I . . . I didn’t . . . ,” Ana whispered.

  He felt the HIVE shift then, pulsing, raging, and suddenly he shoved Ana out of the way. The next thing he knew, a hand grabbed his face—and red eyes sparked to life in the dark, illuminating Mellifare’s twisted snarl. The electricity she had expended had cracked her skin, making chunks of it flake off. She did not look the least bit human anymore, the shadows clinging to her like an extravagant robe.

  Lightning bolts leaped across his skin, leaving blossoms of black burn marks, sinking beneath his wires. His memory core in his chest flashed so hot he thought it would boil out of his skin—and there was a pop.

  His eyes darkened.

  Mellifare picked him up and launched him into the pews with enough force to snap them in half.

  Ana

  There was a loud crash. His name tore from her throat in a wail—but he didn’t respond. The light in his eyes flickered for a moment—moonlit—and then was gone.

  She gritted her teeth, anger pulsing in her stomach, and tore the steel dagger out of her boot. All she could see were the red pinpricks of Mellifare’s eyes. Ana slashed her across the middle, but Mellifare backstepped, and then again. Ana took the offensive, remembering what Siege had taught her.

  Don’t let them stop, darling, don’t let them think, she heard her captain say.

  Rage and regret pulsed through her in equal measure, and she blindly jabbed into the darkness. She caught glimpses of Mellifare only when she came too close, and then the darkness swallowed her up again. Ana cursed, making herself stop, and listened for footsteps, but her heart beat so loud she could barely hear anything at all—

  This was useless. She was useless in the dark.

  “I’ll barter with you!” Ana cried desperately, and with her other hand she curled it around the heart in her pocket and brought it out. “Release the Metals in the HIVE, and I’ll give you your heart.”

  Out of the corner of her eyes, she watched Mellifare’s electric footfalls come to a stop a few feet away from her, eyes bright. “Liar.”

  “It’s here and you can have it. Just release the Metals in the HIVE first.”

  “And give up my only power source for when you refuse to give me my heart?” Mellifare laughed. “Ana, I am not that gullible. I will just take it once I kill you.”

  Ana curled her shaking fingers around the heart.

  She was afraid of dying—of ending like a sigh in the universe, inconsequential, a blink in time. She wanted to be more than a blink—she wanted eons with that boy of metal and moonlight. And she couldn’t have it.

  She just wanted more time.

  With Di, with Robb, with Jax—with Siege. Her captain.

  But time flowed in a river going one way, and she was on it for only a short while, while this monster had sailed the river for countless centuries, killing and taking and devouring worlds, and that she could not let happen anymore.

  Because she did not want her friends—her home—to die.

  But she didn’t want the Metals in the HIVE to die either. She couldn’t save both, but she couldn’t choose one over the other. She wasn’t a Metal, she had never been part of the HIVE, and yet she had the power to damn them all. She had a choice that wasn’t a choice at all.

  Destroy the heart . . .

  Or let the Great Dark win. Let the Metals exist in the HIVE.

  She now understood why it had won so many times over the course of its existence. Because it never had anything to lose, and Ana had everything. Di and Jax and Robb and Elara and Xu—dying so that she could succeed. And so she had to choose. There was no one else left to.

  Her captain had not raised her to take the easy road.

  “Fine,” she said, her voice trembling, curling her fingers tightly around the heart as it pulsed against her palm. “Then you’ll have to pry it from my corpse.”

  “That,” Mellifare purred, “can be arranged.”

  She appeared in the darkness, sliding between the shafts of light that speared through from the broken windows above, and stalked toward Ana, electricity curling in her hands.

  Jax

  “Get to the door!” he cried, deflecting a lightsword as it came down on him and slamming his foot into the Messier’s middle. It was infinitely harder to disable them without outright killing them. For every one Messier they took out, two more crawled out of the city to take its place. They were all converging, gathering, trying to fight their way into the shrine. Just as soon as Jax had decided to go for the door, what felt like every Messier in Nevaeh came to stop them. They poured out of the streets like ants, and in the middle of them danced Viera and Lenda.

  He pressed his back against Robb’s as four more Messiers advanced on them.

  “Are they ever going to let up?” Robb asked, brushing his arm across his forehead. He was breathless. “Do you have any bright ideas?”

  “I could kiss you again and maybe see if we get a break in the future?”

  “Do you really think that’ll help?”

  “No,” he said bitterly, hating he couldn’t lie, “but it’d sure help me feel better.”

  One of the Messiers attacked. Robb shoved his foot against its knee, and it buckled inward, before he drove a lightsword through its skull and kicked the android back into its friends. If Jax wasn’t so tired, he would have been incredibly turned on by how effortless Robb looked.

  “Now!” Robb cried.

  Siege, with an arm slung over Talle’s shoulder, rushed past them toward the stairs to the shrine. A Messier gave a running start but was knocked off its feet by a boomerang. The weapon swirled back, and Elara jumped to catch it a few feet away.

  Xu slammed their shoulder into the next Messier who came at them, blocking it from attacking as Siege and Talle hurried up the steps. Xu, one arm torn off, with a spear they had picked off an android’s corpse, stabbed the Messier through the shoulder and pinned it to the ground.

  The captain and Talle were almost to the door.

  At least one thing was going right.

  Robb wiped his forehead again with his sleeve. He glanced around the square and gave a start. “Lenda! Fend her off!”

  The woman in question achingly got to her feet. There was a deep red wound on her forehead that bled down into her eyes, but she wiped the blood away. Viera had escaped her, making a beeline for the shrine to stop the captain, and she quickly raced after her, grabbed her by the hair, and swung Viera away from the stairs.

  “Yes—they’re almost to the door!” Xu reported.

  “Don’t jinx them,” said Jax as he sliced through another Messier. He and Robb stuck close together, cutting down every Messier who came at them like they were an abundant weed patch encroaching upon the shrine.

  A Messier with a halberd came swinging—

  Mokuba blew a sizable chunk into its side with his antique Lancaster. The rebels and resistance swarmed around them, the noise so loud he could barely think. Robb grabbed the halberd out of the air, shoved it into the stomach of the next Messier, and launched himself in front and drove his lightsword down into a third body. Three more took its place.

  This was hopeless—

  For a second as he let his guard down, a Messier grabbed ahold of his ponytail and wrenched him backward.

  “Ma’alor!” Robb cried, too far away to save him.

  Another Messier raised its lightsword to slice him in half, but a bullet slammed into the side of the android’s skull. Robb tossed him his lightsword. Jax caught it and, with a brief moment of sorrow, sliced it across his hair. The smell of burned hair filled his nose as he stumbled forward, away from the Messier.

  Another bullet sliced through its shoulder, and it fell back.

  At the top of the stairs, holding only a smoking Metroid, was Siege as she leaned on Talle for support. She cocked her pistol again and put five more bullets into the Messiers coming up on Robb and Jax. They dropped like trees in the wood, sparking and hissing from bullet holes in their necks.

&n
bsp; She gave one last nod before she turned toward the large doors to the shrine with Talle and slipped inside, her tailcoats fluttering behind her like the last line of a story.

  “Ma’alor, are you okay?” Robb asked.

  “Yes,” he replied roughly, surprising himself with the truth. A knot formed in his throat. “Yes, I will be.”

  Ana

  Mellifare walked, slow and steady and patient, toward her.

  It was the first time Ana remembered being this afraid. At least, since she was very little. When the fire broke out in the palace, she had been scared for her life—but this was different. This was the sinking, settling sort of fear. The kind that nailed itself to her heart and told her that it would stay.

  Her captain told her it was okay to be afraid—that it just meant she had something she didn’t want to lose.

  But this was the kind of fear that told her that she would lose it, anyway.

  She wasn’t the Goddess. She didn’t have celestial powers. She couldn’t stop the Great Dark. She was just . . . she was . . .

  She was Ana of the Dossier.

  She was Siege’s daughter.

  That did not mean nothing. Her fingers gripped the terrible heart so tightly, her hand shook, and she pressed it against her stomach—against the scar she had survived. She had plenty of those now, each a story, each a part that made her stronger.

  I’m Siege’s daughter, she repeated to herself as she reached for the Metroid under her arm, the fit of the pistol so familiar it calmed her nerves, and unholstered it. She knew what she had to do, and Goddess damn her forever for doing it. She spun out her barrel to check her ammunition. Five. She had five shots.

  Count your bullets, Siege had once said.

  She aimed at Mellifare’s left shoulder. “One.”

  She fired.

  The bullet clipped the girl’s right shoulder, but the impact made barely more than a punch.

  “If you kill me,” said Mellifare, “you kill all the Metals in the HIVE. All those innocent people dead—”

  “Two—three,” she counted.

  She fired again, slamming another two bullets into the exact same shoulder. Sparks hissed from Mellifare’s shoulder this time, and her arm fell limp, but her other fisted.

  “You will not kill them,” Mellifare hissed. “You are too soft.”

  The pistol in her hand began to shake.

  “Four,” Ana whispered.

  The bullet slammed into the left side of Mellifare’s chest, and the monster’s face crumpled into a feral snarl. “You missed.”

  She couldn’t again. She had to steady her aim, even as the knowledge shook her to the bone. If she killed Mellifare, the thousands of Metals in the HIVE would cease to exist. But if she did not kill Mellifare, then the kingdom would fall to ruin.

  “Why do you fight so much? Give up, Ana. Everyone you love—your captain, your lover, your friends and family—all of them,” Mellifare said, so close now Ana could see the cracks in her skin and the metal underneath.

  A shadow rose behind her, and Ana recognized the shape as surely as she did her own.

  “Your loved ones are are dead—”

  A bullet, straight and sure, pierced through her chest and came out the other side.

  “Five” came the voice of her captain, standing in the open doorway.

  Mellifare stumbled back, staring down at the hole in her chest. “You—you would kill me? You would kill everyone?”

  “The people I love are never really gone,” Ana said as the shadow’s pale hand grabbed Mellifare by the shoulder and spun her around.

  “And some come back,” added Di, his eyes flickering, flickering, fading, and pressed his palm against her forehead. “But not you.”

  Di

  The moment his fingers connected with her skin, he felt the energy inside her, crackling like lightning trapped in a bottle. It was the light from eons of souls she had absorbed, from countless worlds, and it was tainted; it was wrong.

  The stolen energy came to his fingertips like light through a dark tunnel, pouring through his fingers and up his arm. Crackles of electricity screamed across his skin as his programs flickered back to life, his synapses rebooted, his senses sharpened. It was like taking a breath after a year underwater.

  Do you have enough? Are you sated? he heard her whisper across his code.

  No, not nearly.

  Overflowing with her power, almost drunk with it, he sank into her code, burrowing inside like a worm, between the pointed talons and snapping red maw, into the gnarled root of her, this twisted and dark thing. He did not know if it was her soul or just her code—her malware—but it was corrupted all the same. And from her stemmed thousands upon thousands of threads in every direction, arcing across the kingdom, and with them he could see every Messier. Ones guarding airlocks on Nevaeh, others dragging rebels away on Iliad, and the ones newly changed and waiting in dreadnought holds.

  It was the HIVE, singing the song he had been a part of, that had not been a song at all, but thousands of voices screeching in agony.

  It reminded him of the white gurney in the hospital, the Plague eating up his hands, and a terrible and spiraling blackness that sucked in all hope and happiness and left him empty. When he was alive, he had been so afraid of death, Mellifare had looked like a goddess come to save him.

  He wished he had been braver.

  But if he had not become a Metal, he would never have met Ana, and a life with her—with Siege and Talle and Jax and the Dossier—was the best life he could have had.

  And it was a life worth fighting for.

  YOU ARE MINE OR YOU ARE NOTHING, the Great Dark screamed, but like it had torn through his code, he set upon it with a vengeance. And there was no firewall intricate enough to keep him out.

  YOU ARE MINE OR YOU ARE—

  One by one, he tore out the threads connected to the HIVE, severing them quicker and quicker, letting them go like balloons into the atmosphere, freeing them. D293. D849. D394. D091—so many numbers, once people, ones with names, and perhaps with a little help, they would be again.

  YOU ARE MINE YOU ARE—

  He tore out the Great Dark’s memories of being Metal. Of the palace, of the kingdom, of all the people it had killed.

  YOU ARE MINE—

  Of the galaxies it had invaded. The Solani kingdom, among countless others. The eons of history it had devoured. The suffering, the bloodshed. He separated zeroes from ones, spreading through them as swiftly as ice across the windshield of the Dossier.

  YOU ARE—

  He tore the Great Dark asunder, until it was only—

  YOU—

  “They are free,” Di said, and tried not to think about what he had just done—taken eons’ worth of stolen light to free the Metals in the HIVE. The energy now hummed inside him, powering his wires, his core, his hardware, and he felt strange. Too full and empty all at once. It was a buzzing sort of feeling, his skin tingling with it.

  “You promised,” Mellifare whispered as she fell away from his touch, sinking down onto her knees. Her hair was burned at the ends. She held her broken chest and the memory core inside. “You . . . you promised me my . . .”

  “He couldn’t promise something that wasn’t his to give,” said Captain Siege as she came up to them, leaning heavily on Talle. Blood leaked from between her fingers as she held on to her wounded side.

  Mellifare drew her gaze up to the captain. “. . . Goddess?”

  “Siege,” she corrected.

  “It is so lonely in my head,” said the Great Dark. “I do not want to be . . . a-alo . . .” Her eyes gave one last brief flicker, and her head bowed; and in a great sigh of time, and space, and stardust . . .

  the Great Dark was gone.

  Ana

  “It’s done,” Ana heard her captain say, and her hair shifted to a yellowish white, like the heart of a candle. Her knees gave out, and she dropped to the ground. Her breath came out in short, sporadic gasps.

  “
Sunshine!” Talle gasped, falling to her knees beside her. “Di, hurry, there’s a medical bag in the skysailer—”

  “On it.” He spun on his heels and broke into a run out of the shrine, tripping on an overturned pew as he went, out of the open shrine doorway and into the square filled with Metals, slowly blinking back to themselves, and people holding their wounds.

  Ana’s gaze drifted down to the wound on her captain’s side, not quite understanding what she saw. Too much blood, too little time. It was everywhere, blending into her bloodred murder coat, painting up the side of her cream-colored blouse.

  “Starlight,” Siege sighed to her wife, “just let me . . .”

  “Stay with me,” Talle whispered. “I love you, sunshine.” She curled her fingers tightly around her wife’s shaking hands. Siege looked pale—pale in the way Ana had seen corpses look pale, and her captain wasn’t a corpse.

  Her captain was . . . she was . . .

  Ana sank to the ground beside her, hovering a hand over her bloody side. “You’ll be okay. You’ll be okay,” she repeated.

  Her captain smiled and, with her bloodied hand, cupped Ana’s cheek. “I am so, so proud of you.”

  Sorrow welled up in her so quickly, she couldn’t keep back the tears. “Don’t say stuff like that. Why didn’t you go get medical help when you could’ve?”

  “You came first.”

  She gritted her teeth. “Di’ll be back soon. You’ll be fine—”

  The captain rubbed Ana’s tears away with her thumb. “We’re all stories in the end, my darling,” she sighed, and with every word she grew quieter, each strand of her firelight hair darkening like stars in a dawning sky. “You and Talle are the best parts of mine.”

  “Shush—save your breath,” Talle scolded, her voice soft and trembling, but the captain only smiled sadly and took another painful breath.

  No, Ana thought, glancing out of the open door to Di, rushing across the square to the skysailers, a sinking feeling settling in her stomach. No, no, no, no—

  Her captain curled her bloody fingers into hers, and Ana looked back down to her, memorizing her face, the way her wild hair glowed and simmered like stoked coals, bathing her face in sunlight. She memorized her green eyes, her smirk, how her coat was ragged and patched yet had been cleaned and pressed with prestige. A hundred memories, a thousand moments she wished she had paid more attention to, a million seconds she had taken for granted.