Neron Skies: A Space Fantasy Romance (The Neron Rising Saga Book 2)

by Keary Taylor

  When I open my eyes, it’s there. The energy. The light.

  A small electrical storm of Neron floats around my hand. It’s wild and untamed. It bucks and threatens to dissipate. But I hold it there, staring at the miracle of what I’ve just done.

  I’ve called Neron. I’m holding it here with my will.

  The moisture in my eyes breaks, and a single tear slips down my face.

  I suck in a quivering breath, and the Neron dissipates.

  I’m not a Nero.

  I am no one.

  I am nothing.

  The ceiling is so close. I raise my arm up and place my palm flat against it. The surface is cool but not cold. It’s amazing, that just on the other side of all this metal and insulation is the vastness of space.

  I’d die if I could somehow just melt through the frame of the ship. I’d be a frozen corpse in a matter of seconds.

  I’m the first to head to bed. We’ve just finished eating our meal together, one of the space frozen meals from Stippe. Zayne managed to talk Reena into playing a hologame with him that he bought on the planet. My father played, too.

  I’m not myself. Ever since we left Korpillion, I feel this weight on me. I feel like I’m on this self-destructive path. There’s a war going on inside of me. More than one, actually. There’s hate and confusion and joy and denial.

  I know I’ve pulled away from everyone. I know Dad and Zayne know I’m different.

  Maybe they just assume it’s the weight of seeing all those miners die on Korpillion.

  But that’s only a small fraction of it.

  The door to the bunkroom opens and I’ve lived with the man my entire life, so I know the sounds of my dad’s feet. He makes his way across the small space and climbs up to his bunk—the top one across from mine.

  I tilt my head to the side so I can look at him.

  He looks at me with those gray eyes of his. He props his head up in his hand, his elbow dug into the pad of his bed. There’s a serious look on his face, but he always looks serious. Serious and tired.

  “Are you alright?” he asks. My father’s voice is comforting. It’s deep and rattling. His voice sounds rugged. But calming.

  I can’t find an answer immediately. I bite the inside of my cheek and give a shrug.

  “I may not be the most nurturing or hands-on father,” he says. His eyes bore into me, like he’s trying to read my soul. “But I’ve noticed how unhappy you became. Starting about a solar ago. And then you seemed a little different just before you and Zayne split up.”

  I can tell where this is going, and surprisingly, I’m okay with it. I need to confess, to tell him what has happened.

  “Is that when you started getting involved with the weapons?” he asks.

  I roll onto my side, mirroring his position. I nod.

  “It was about a lunar before we broke up,” I say. My eyes fall to the blanket beneath me. I draw little patterns into it, and I realize they look like Neron arcs. “When you broke your arm. We needed the money, and I’d just been experimenting.”

  I expect him to protest, to tell me I shouldn’t have risked so much to help him. But he stays silent, and I’m grateful for that.

  “And for the first time, I felt…awake,” I say. My eyes rise up to meet his. He stares at me with this open expression. My father is a quiet man. He observes. He absorbs. “I felt like I’d broken out of this rut I’d been in my whole life. And I was good at it. I loved building the things I made.”

  “And people were willing to buy them,” Torin says.

  I nod. “I was saving up,” I say. “People were willing to pay a lot of money. And I didn’t ask questions so I didn’t have to feel guilty about whatever they were going to use them for. Maybe that makes me a bad person. But it’s the way it was.”

  “What were you saving up for?” my father asks, ignoring the serious statement I just made, the one I’ve been thinking about non-stop since my conversation with Valen, before I even knew his name.

  I shrug. “A new life? I don’t know. But then Reena told me Dominion was going to be coming through in four solars. And then I was saving up to get us off Korpillion. I quit my job a few weeks before we left the planet. I was working on Neron weapons full-time.”

  My father swallows once, and I see his jaw harden. Now he knows. He knows just how much I’ve been hiding from him.

  “You’ve taken care of me my whole life, Dad,” I say. I fix my eyes on him, trying to show him that I have no regrets. “I’m an adult. I will take care of you, too.”

  It doesn’t take much. My father’s eyes redden. He bites the inside of his lower lip. He looks away from me, and doesn’t say anything for a long moment. He fixes his gaze on the ceiling, and I can sense the swarm of thoughts going through his head.

  “You were always such a curious child, Nova,” he says, still not looking at me. “You wanted to know how everything worked. And I knew, even back then, that the life I gave you would never be enough to satisfy you.”

  “Dad,” I say with a sigh, guilt rolling into my stomach. “I-”

  “You were always destined to live a life of more, Nova,” he says, cutting me off. He looks back at me now, his eyes glistening. “I hate that everything played out the way it has, but you were always meant for the stars. I hope you find yourself out here.”

  He looks at me for a moment longer, and I really just don’t have any words. So he rolls out of his bunk. He takes a step forward, and stretches up onto his toes. He presses a kiss to my forehead.

  “I love you always,” he says.

  “No matter what,” I complete the promise we’ve said to each other a thousand times.

  He offers me a little smile, and ducks back out of the bunkroom, dimming the light for me.

  I roll toward the wall, turning my back to the room. I pull a pillow over my head.

  I hope you find yourself out here.

  Dads are supposed to be smart and have wisdom. Mine has a lot of it.

  But I feel just the opposite out here. I feel like I’ve lost myself. I feel like I don’t know who I am. I feel like I no longer know what I’m made of.

  And I hate that.

  I’m a liar. I know that much about myself.

  I’m really good at it. Because even though I’m hiding out by myself here in the mechanical room, touching the Neron core of the ship, making it swirl and bend and move to my will, I’m still telling myself that I’m not a Nero.

  And I’m still not telling my father or Zayne about what happened on Korpillion. Not about my keeping those rocks from crushing me. Not about my run-in with the Nero, not about my connection with Valen and the lunars we’ve been talking.

  Yes, I am a liar. At least that much I still know about myself.

  “We’ve got an asteroid belt coming up.”

  I nearly jump out of my skin at Zayne’s voice behind me. I jerk my hands back from the Neron core and it instantly settles back into its soft-floating state.

  I whip around, trying not to look guilty, but Zayne is looking at his holotab, tracking what’s coming up in front of us.

  “You need to come strap in,” he says, and I’m thankful that it’s only now that he looks up at me. “It’s going to get bumpy.”

  “’K,” I say, and if he was paying attention, he’d hear how my voice is just a little too high-pitched.

  Looking guilty as void, I follow Zayne out onto the command deck.

  He heads straight for the copilot seat, buckling in. Dad and Reena are already strapped into the second row, so I take a seat by myself in the third.

  “Prepare for quick rotations, drops, and unexpected changes of direction,” the Frank states. His fingers are plugged into the controls. There’s a holographic monitor displayed in front of his face, but I know it’s for our benefit. Ahead, there are dozens of blinking red objects.

  Asteroids are scattered all in front of us, blocking our clear path to our destination.

  “I sure hope you have some evasive flyi
ng skills, bot,” Zayne says. He sits forward, his hands hovering over the co-pilot controls.

  I haven’t felt our speed until now. We’re constantly shooting through the galaxy, but now, at the first drop to avoid an asteroid, I feel it.

  Like an arrow being shot, except our direction changes and we drop and then roll.

  A yell escapes Dad’s throat, and Reena says something about being sick.

  I hold my own stomach as we suddenly shoot to the left and then immediately rise straight up.

  “How fast are those asteroids moving?” I yell, because there are all kinds of warning alarms sounding on the deck.

  “Half the speed we are,” Zayne says, frantically tapping at his holotab. “But they aren’t staying on an exact course. I think our slipstream is affecting them. They seem to be pulled to us.”

  “Great,” I mumble. “We’re moving targets for space rocks as big as our ship.”

  And as we dip, I get a glance of one of the asteroids, and it has to be twice the size of our ship.

  The Frank spins and dives, piloting the ship, avoiding the asteroids.

  Until just ahead, I see it, and Zayne sees it at the same time, too.

  Two asteroids collide, and they break into a dozen pieces.

  “Slag!” the word rips from Zayne’s lips. His arms dart out and his hands grip the controllers, ripping control from the Frank who is only relying on data that hasn’t updated yet.

  We immediately spiral down, spinning and spinning, so fast my vision blacks out for a second.

  And then I hear the thud. The crunch.

  “We hit something!” Dad yells as he grabs onto anything to balance himself as we keep falling and then roll to the side.

  “No slag!” Zayne screams. His eyes are wide and frantic and wild with excitement and terror.

  I can hear it. Just barely.

  A tiny whoosh of air. A sucking sound.

  “Are we losing air pressure?” Reena asks. She still sounds calm, but I detect a hysterical edge to it.

  “A little busy up here!” Zayne yells, and we suddenly barrel roll to the right.

  My eyes squeeze closed, trying to keep myself from throwing up. But all I can think about is where we collided with the asteroid and the sound of air escaping our ship.

  My senses reach out all on their own. I feel the walls of the ship. I feel the mechanics of it. I feel the absence of air outside.

  And there, toward the back end of the ship, I feel it.

  The puncture. The opening is small. It would take an hour for us to lose all our oxygen through it.

  But it’s there.

  My heart thumps fast, and my entire body feels hot.

  How could I ever get outside, into space, to fix it? I haven’t seen any oxygen suits on this ship. I haven’t seen any tether lines.

  But there, in the back of my brain, I feel a tug.

  Neron is in everything. In my blood, in the oxygen, in every bit of metal we build our ships out of.

  I tell my insides to calm. I take a slow breath. I can see the hole, even though I’m not outside, and I’m not next to where it was hit. But I can see it there.

  I can feel the Neron in the metal.

  My hand moves at my side just slightly.

  I feel the Neron. I tell it to move with the metal. I tell it to reform, to knit back together.

  And I see it. The blue glowing beneath the surface of the metal. I see the metal taking its shape again.

  I see it healing.

  And then, a scar, solid and firm, in the side of our ship. And the blue glow slowly dies as I release the Neron.

  Just as I open my eyes, the insanity ride through the asteroid belt dies. My insides jar as we level out and fly straight once more.

  Reena is staring at me, and I know she knows what I just did.

  She heard the air leaking.

  And now she doesn’t.

  “Whoo!” Zayne lets a shout out, raising his hands into the air, letting the Frank take over once more. “Made it through to the other side!”

  “Never,” Dad says, leaning over, keeping his head between his knees, “Never again.”

  Zayne lets out a joyful laugh, looking back at us all. “And air pressure is normal. I didn’t even run into anything.”

  I force a smile. “Well done,” I say. But really, I’m thinking about that hole I patched, outside, in space. While I’m sitting here inside.

  If I wasn’t…if I’m not what Valen says I am…we’d all be dead. In an hour, we’d be dead from lack of oxygen.

  We’d all be dead.

  An emotional wave of gratitude crashes through my chest, washing my stomach with a cold wave. I bite my lower lip, ignoring Zayne and my father reliving every moment of our defensive antics through space.

  We’re alive.

  I fixed the ship.

  All my life, the term Nero has had such a negative connotation because of how Dominion used theirs.

  But I just saved my family. I did something good.

  The thought washes through me, and I feel this sense of peace.

  Good.

  There is good.

  This galaxy is a complicated place, and I know Reena is right: there is no black and white.

  Maybe I’ll feel different again in an hour. Maybe I’ll feel lost again, tomorrow. But I feel like I just made a discovery.

  And there’s only one person I can talk to about it.

  But would he ever actually hear me?

  I stay up late that night. I hang out in the kitchen, stalling by doing the dishes, and finally Reena announces she’s heading to bed. Next is my father.

  But I get the entire kitchen cleaned as Zayne just lingers, trying to instigate a conversation.

  I think I respond, and hopefully I didn’t sound like an idiot, but my brain is leagues away.

  Eventually, he seems to get the message that I’m not in the mood to talk to him, and he finally says he’s going to bed.

  I stall longer. I go to the command deck and pretend to read a book, but really, I’m rehearsing the conversation in my mind. I wait an entire hour after Zayne goes to bed before I dare do anything.

  Through the silent ship, I slip back to the mechanical room. I close the door behind me.

  The Neron core glows. Just seeing it, I feel…lighter. I feel…better. Hopeful, even?

  I tuck myself back between two pieces of equipment, well out of view of the door. I lean my back against the metal wall and tuck my knees into my chest. I lay my staff on the floor next to me, and spin it in a circle with the tip of my finger.

  I’ve had it on me every moment I’m dressed since I left Korpillion.

  I know I’m safe here on the ship, there’s no one who is going to hurt me here. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to lay it down and leave it.

  I let my eyes slide closed, and I reach out. I feel. I take a walk through my mind, looking for that door.

  It isn’t hard to find. I go straight to it.

  Tentatively, I reach a hand out. I hesitate for a moment.

  It’s been weeks. Our conversation was strained last time we spoke.

  But these weeks of silence have been agony.

  I miss him.

  I miss Valen. I miss my friend.

  I push on that door.

  “Are you there?” I call out mentally, though alone in our ship, I’m still sitting perfectly still on the floor, my eyes closed.

  I sense a rustle, a pique of attention. Footsteps.

  I wait a solid minute. Two. I can feel him moving, as if walking down corridors, around corners, and then finally, a door closing.

  “Nova,” his voice echoes through my brain, clear as day.

  Hearing his voice, my throat tightens, and even though I’m not actually speaking the words out loud, it’s difficult to communicate for a moment.

  I squeeze my eyes closed. Because I remember that vision. Of him, of me. I remember how I felt, looking into his eyes.

  “Are you alrig
ht?” he asks when I don’t say anything.

  “I’m fine,” I manage. I actually nod, even though he can’t see it. “I just…” I take in a deep breath, pressing my knuckles into my mouth. “I don’t want to hear your voice this much.”

  There’s a long moment, and I can feel that familiar depth, that complexity that is Valen Nero.

  “I’ve missed you, Nova,” he says. And every bit of it sounds like a confession. His words come through soft and quiet.

  And they pull emotions from my chest, my eyes, my brain. My eyes are already closed, but I squeeze them tighter. I shake my head.

  “Everything is too complicated,” I say, confessing the words as they spill from my heart, to my brain, out my lips. “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what to think or feel or do.”

  I feel his presence. Solid—and I swear it’s real. And I crave it. I need more.

  I raise my hand to the side of my neck, remembering how it felt to have his hand there, both in the vision and in real life.

  “I need you, Valen.”

  The words come out, absolutely true and utterly terrifying.

  I feel him, hesitant, and…surprised. But there’s this hint of hope tied to him. And I haven’t felt that from him yet.

  “I need to see you,” I whisper.

  It’s an impossible request. It’s a selfish one. They’re words I never should have confessed out loud, because Valen is dangerous. He didn’t want to know where I was going. Him knowing puts everyone on this ship in danger. And I’m telling a dangerous murderer that I want to see him. That I need him.

  But I don’t regret the words.

  “Where are you?” I’m surprised when he says the words, and there’s a hint of urgency and…excitement in his voice.

  I shake my head. “Valen, I might want to see you, but it’s impossible. You’re with Cyrillius. I can’t risk you attracting him here.”

  “I’m done on Korpillion,” he says. His words are quick, excited. “Cyrillius will be here for at least another lunar. I was preparing to leave, anyway. He won’t question me leaving. I have my own personal transport ship.”

  “Every person in the galaxy knows The Black Arrow,” I say, shaking my head. “You’ll be followed or tracked.”