Starfall

by Melissa Landers

  When the conversation began winding down, he traced a finger through the warm sand between their beach towels and told her, “Thank you for this. I almost forgot what it felt like to have fun.”

  She watched him for a long moment, then settled a hand on top of his. “It sounds like you need a change.”

  “I think I do.”

  “So what’s holding you back? I can tell there’s something.”

  More like someone. But he didn’t want to think about her.

  “I know we just met,” Shanna told him, “but I’m a pretty good judge of character. I know you have a lot to offer, and I think we’d make a great team.”

  He nodded. Gage was right. The two of them would be unstoppable.

  “I also think we have a connection.” She turned toward him, propping herself on one elbow to bring her face closer to his. “I’m not imagining that, am I?”

  Kane’s pulse hitched at her nearness. He found himself angling his body toward hers. “No, it’s not your imagination.”

  The air between them seemed to thicken.

  Time slowed down.

  Neither of them moved or breathed until he reached out and took her cheek in one hand. He didn’t know what had prompted him to do it—he barely knew this girl. Maybe he was caught up in the moment, or maybe some small part of him wanted to get back at Cassia for hurting him. Either way, Shanna didn’t tell him no. She didn’t reject him or recite a list of reasons why they couldn’t be together. There was no regret in her eyes, only encouragement. And when her gaze dipped to his mouth, he knew what she wanted him to do. More important, he knew that whatever happened next, she wouldn’t call it a “slipup.”

  So he went for it. He kissed her.

  The moment their lips met, he released a sigh as a thrill passed through him. Her mouth was soft and warm, and she knew how to use it. But when he angled his face to deepen the kiss, his gut twisted, and not in a good way. She tasted wrong. She smelled too sweet. He could feel his body rejecting her.

  He forced himself to keep going, hoping the kiss would eventually feel right if he gave it a chance. But a few beats later, he knew deep down that he’d made a mistake. He had just decided to pull away when the door behind them banged open, and they flinched apart, bumping each other’s faces.

  Kane glanced at the doorway to find Doran and Solara staring at him. His breath caught, and he had to remind himself he hadn’t done anything wrong. He and Cassia weren’t a couple; this wasn’t cheating.

  But one look at their pale faces and he knew that wasn’t the problem.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said as his body tensed.

  “It’s Renny,” Solara told him in a hollow voice.

  “What happened?”

  “He just radioed from the Banshee. He’s hurt pretty badly and…”

  “And?”

  “Cassia’s gone. The Daeva took her.”

  Kane didn’t remember standing up, and he didn’t remember running across the sand or leaving the beach simulator. But the next thing he knew, he was within arm’s reach of the compound air-lock, trying to claw his way half-naked toward the shuttle docking station while Doran and Gage wrestled him to the floor.

  “Let me go,” he growled, shaking them off. As he pushed onto all fours, he realized he needed a suit and an oxygen helmet to make it aboveground, and he began looking around for the set he’d worn earlier.

  Solara ran in front of him, blocking his path to the air-lock. “Kane, you have to stay here. The Daeva are still hunting you. Renny lied and told them you’re on New Haven, but they have a team watching the Banshee in case you come back. If they catch you, it means Cassia gave herself up for nothing. She wouldn’t want that. You need to slow down and think about this. One of us has to go instead of you.”

  Kane snatched a suit from the wall. “Get out of my way.”

  “No, this is suicide,” Doran said. “You’re staying here until we know it’s safe. Then we’ll do whatever it takes to find Cassia—I promise.”

  “I’m not asking for your permission. Get out of my way.”

  “And I’m not asking for yours. You’re staying put.”

  For a charged moment, they stared each other down. Then Doran grabbed Kane’s wrists and tried twisting his arms behind his back. Kane was stronger. With one downward jerk, he freed himself and delivered a right hook to the nearest jaw. His knuckles collided with bone, but he felt no pain, only panic. Nothing mattered except finding Cassia. He never should’ve left her alone. While he was here, tangled up on the sand with another girl, she was scared and suffering, and that knowledge drove him to the brink of delirium.

  She needed him. He had to go to her.

  He barely managed one step before Doran and Gage ganged up on him again. They each took one of his arms and dragged him backward while he thrashed like an animal. Then Solara advanced on him, pulling a small button from her pocket.

  Except it wasn’t a button. It was a handheld stunner.

  “No!”

  “I don’t want to do this,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Kane.”

  He lurched back, desperate to get away from her. He couldn’t let the stunner touch his skin. Once it did, it would flood his system with enough neuro-inhibitors to knock him out cold, and even after he woke up, his memory wouldn’t return for a full day. The Daeva would be in the next sector by then. He’d never catch them in time.

  “Please don’t! I’ll stand down, I swear!”

  But Solara didn’t listen. She slapped the device against his bare chest, and at once, he felt a rush of drugs careening through his nervous system, deadening his muscles until his head hung limp and his body went slack.

  He had just enough strength to whisper, “She needs me,” before his eyes slammed shut and darkness swallowed him.

  Cassia didn’t know how long the voyage lasted. Tracking time was impossible when every moment inside her filthy metal cage felt like an eternity. It didn’t help that there was no sunrise or sunset in space, only darkness. And without any live company in the cargo hold, she had no one to ask what day it was.

  The Daeva didn’t retrieve many breathing targets, so hers was the only cage on board the ship. On either side of her cell, coffins were stacked high and strapped to the floor, proof of a job well done for the contract holders. Cassia kept her eyes fixed in front of her and tried not to picture what remained of the people inside those caskets. It chilled her to think one of them might’ve been Kane.

  At least she’d spared him from that fate.

  She missed him so much it hurt. She’d lost count of the number of times she’d reached toward her throat to touch the Eturian prayer necklace he’d given her, only to find it wasn’t there. She should’ve kept it. She needed all the comfort she could get.

  There was no royal welcome waiting for her on Eturia. The title of princess meant nothing without the backing of her family’s military, which wouldn’t come riding to the rescue of a disgraced girl who’d broken her marriage contract and started a war. She’d be lucky if the Daeva bothered to hose her off before presenting her to Marius. After that, it would be a toss-up between execution and a chemical lobotomy—one of the many sadistic procedures his family had engineered.

  Either way, her life was over.

  The only bright side to her hopelessness was that it gave her a perverse sort of freedom. She had nothing to live for, so there was no reason to play nice. She’d learned which behaviors would make the Daeva sedate her. (Kicking the bars produced a noise they especially hated.) And because a punch to the face was worth the reward of passing her days in a dreamless coma, she kept kicking those bars.

  By the time the ship landed, her face was one throbbing bruise.

  On the morning of delivery, the Daeva hauled her out of the cage and shackled her wrists and ankles with lightweight restraints that delivered an electric shock if pulled too far apart. Her legs had grown frail from weeks of disuse, and her knees wobbled when the men dragged her into the blaz
ing light of day.

  She winced, blinded by the sun. Her boots met the crunch of dried grass, but she couldn’t see or hear anything to indicate where she’d landed. From somewhere in the distance, a crow gave an eerie caw, and then a light breeze stirred her hair, smelling faintly of smoke. Slowly, she blinked until her surroundings came into focus.

  It was obvious there’d been a fire here, which explained the charred scent in the air. Blackness covered the gently rolling hills, stretching all the way to the horizon. A few jagged tree trunks pushed up from the ground at awkward angles, like corpses rising from their graves. For miles around, there was only death.

  She didn’t recognize this place. Had they landed on the wrong planet?

  One of the men shoved her forward and pointed at a shuttle bearing the Durango crest, the house seal of Marius’s family. “Marius wants you to take a homecoming tour before your delivery.”

  The breath caught at the top of Cassia’s lungs. She jerked her gaze back to the landscape, this time picturing the hills covered in lavender wildflowers and graceful willows spilling leaves onto the breeze. She spun in a clumsy circle until her eyes found a lake in the distance, and then her vision flooded with tears. Because she did know this place, knew it by heart from the years she’d spent gazing at its likeness taped to her bedroom wall. She was standing on her royal ancestral land.

  Ravaged by the war she’d caused.

  “Move,” the man said, shoving her again.

  Cassia lumbered onto the shuttle and took a window seat, then watched as the devastation unfolded below. Nothing could have prepared her for what two years of battle had done to her city. Most of the streets were impassable, pockmarked by shock wave mortar, and the Rose Academy at the heart of the scholastic district was reduced to rubble. Fields were ruined and warehouses torched. Not even the hospital was spared. Half its roof had melted off, revealing heaps of twisted metal and piles of scorched beds that likely hadn’t been vacant during the attack.

  Her eyes couldn’t process the devastation. She wasn’t naive—she’d seen images of war on other planets—but weapons of mass destruction didn’t exist here. The four founding dynasties had agreed to that in the colony charter when they’d terraformed Eturia hundreds of years ago. Obedience to the charter was their most sacred tenet, and the Solar League was supposed to help enforce it. That was why colonies paid taxes. So why hadn’t the League stepped in?

  She continued scanning the city and noticed her family’s palace was still standing, though a portion of the east wing had crumbled, and the walls around the front entrance were defaced with symbols painted in red. Squinting, she was able to identify them as basic squares with an X marked through each one, but she didn’t know what they meant.

  As the shuttle jettisoned away from her family’s territory, she peered into the distance and noticed similar devastation in the neighboring kingdoms. Only the Durango lands seemed unaffected, which told her it was Marius’s family who’d betrayed the charter. That didn’t surprise her, but she couldn’t understand how they’d funded the war. Weapons didn’t come cheap, and the Durangos possessed the least amount of wealth. That was why they’d agreed to a marriage between Cassia and Marius in the first place.

  The question moved to the back of her mind as the shuttle touched down behind the Durango palace. She steeled herself, using both shirtsleeves to scrub the wetness from her eyes. Her enemies had already taken too much. She wouldn’t give them her tears, too. When she exited the shuttle, it was with her matted head raised to the sky.

  She’d assumed she would end up in a jail cell, and she was right. But instead of taking the most direct route to the basement, the Daeva led her slowly along every corridor in the main house so the servants and visitors could see how the once-regal Cassia Adelaide Rose had been reduced to a stinking prisoner in bloodstained rags. Refusing to acknowledge any of them, she stared blankly in front of her as she made her way through the mansion and eventually down the staircase to the brig.

  She’d never had an occasion to visit a dungeon before, not even inside her own palace, but this was how she’d imagined one would look. Half a dozen long cells stretched opposite a security station, which was manned by two gray-uniformed guards. By habit, she made note of the weapons at their hips—an electric prod and a pulse pistol, each hanging on an unsecured holster loop. She estimated how quickly she could grab a weapon with her wrists bound, but as if sensing her awareness, both guards stood out of reach while they pulled aside the cell door of fiberglass bars.

  The cell was dim and cool, smelling slightly of mold, and the floor tilted on a decline that led to a round drainage grate near the back wall. She tried not to dwell on what fluids had once flowed there, but the burgundy-colored stains around the catch basin painted a vivid enough picture. The door slammed shut behind her, making her jump.

  “Unshackle the prisoner,” one guard told the Daeva, his voice thick with disgust for the bounty hunters. Among lawmen, the Daeva commanded fear, but never respect.

  Cassia stood flush with the bars, holding still while the Daeva who’d taken the most delight in abusing her reached through and unfastened her wrists and ankles.

  “I’m gonna miss this one,” he said while leering at her. “She has a nice scream. Wish I had the credits to buy her so I could hear more of it.”

  Each time his skin brushed hers, she had to clench her teeth to keep from flinching. His cuticles were crusted in her blood. The sight of his hands brought back a flood of memories the sedatives had dulled. When the Daeva slid the chains free and turned to leave, Cassia drew a furious breath.

  “You forgot something,” she said.

  The instant he glanced over his shoulder, she moved like lightning, jabbing her fist between the bars. Her knuckles connected with his nose, and a light crack sounded as his bones splintered beneath her hand. Before he could react, she darted out of his reach into the cell. She tripped over her own boots and landed hard on the concrete floor, but the fury in the man’s eyes was worth a bruised tailbone.

  He gripped the bars and rattled them in a violent clatter, sputtering curses through the blood flowing over his lips. One of the Durango guards prodded the Daeva with an electric wand and warned, “Any more damage to Marius’s prize and it’ll come out of your bounty. I suggest you see the clerk and then return to whatever hole you crawled out of.”

  The Daeva growled and snorted for a full minute, but he eventually gave up the fight and stalked out the door. Once the clatter of his footsteps faded up the stairs, the guard turned to his partner and issued an order. “Take an extra set of restraints to the maids and tell them to put down a vermin-resistant tarp before they begin.” He thumbed at Cassia. “God knows what kind of mutated lice she’s tracked in here.”

  The other man nodded and nervously scratched his scalp.

  As soon as he left the room, the first guard leaned against the wall and folded both arms, studying Cassia as if she were a riddle that needed solving.

  “You’ve changed,” he said. “For the better, I think.”

  He spoke as if they knew each other, which prompted her to examine him more closely. Now that she studied the contours of his face, he did seem familiar. He was in his early twenties, tall and slim with sandy hair and a crooked nose that indicated he’d broken it more than once. Something prickled at the edges of her memory, but she couldn’t place him.

  “You don’t remember me,” he said flatly, like he’d expected as much. “Let me help. I was the cadet charged with supervising your shopping trips in the city. You always gave me the slip, and then I had to pull extra detail as punishment for losing you.”

  The missing pieces connected, and she gave a small gasp of realization. He was one of her family’s soldiers wearing an enemy disguise. She would’ve recognized him sooner if he hadn’t changed, too. His gaze had grown hard and cold, as if the last two years had drained all the youth out of him. “Private Jordan?”

  “It’s General Jordan now.”<
br />
  “General? That’s a high rank for someone so young.”

  “Consider it a side effect of war,” he said, eyes narrowed. “Promotions come quickly when your superior officers are dead.”

  Cassia’s cheeks grew hot. Her first instinct was to hang her head, but she kept her gaze firmly fixed on his. “I didn’t want any of this to happen. I had to leave.”

  “I know. If you’d married into the Durango family, Marius would have killed your parents. And maybe you, too, once he secured the Rose title.”

  Her brows lifted. “Who told you?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “So is that why you’re here?” Her heart swelled with hope, filling her with the first real warmth she’d felt in ages. “To take me home? Do my parents believe me now?”

  Jordan watched her for a long moment before shaking his head. “You’re even more out of touch than I thought.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your parents are gone. They escaped off world months ago.”

  “Escaped? To bring back reinforcements?”

  He laughed without humor. “More like to save themselves. They turned tail and ran in the middle of the night. We haven’t heard a word from them since. As an added bonus, they emptied the coffers before they left. So I think you’ll agree that whether or not they believe you is irrelevant.”

  All that hope sank to the bottom of Cassia’s stomach and turned to ice. She couldn’t believe her parents had left the kingdom defenseless, especially after all the years they’d lectured her on the merits of duty to the throne. Her people must hate the Rose name now more than ever. She pushed past the ball of shame in her throat and asked, “What else have I missed?”