Sea of Stars (The Kricket Series Book 2)

by Amy A. Bartol

  Wayra gives a low laugh, “Is it as good as your someone-elsie virus? I truly enjoyed hacking the last drone’s navigation and taking over. It felt so right flying it down the throat of that death squad.”

  “I thought you’d like that. This one is a little different; we don’t get to navigate the drone, but when it gets called back to its deployment ship, they’ll wonder whahappened when it explodes upon docking.”

  The drone moves closer, searching everywhere for living creatures. Suddenly, it flashes its light right at me and holds it there. I gasp.

  Trey hugs me from behind. “I promise you that it can’t see you.”

  I want to turn and run; this thing is so freaking scary. It has two guns with multiple barrels on either side of its bat-shaped wings. One yellow-lighted camera eye swivels around while stark-white lights bleach everything it touches. The light shines directly at me, but the beam doesn’t penetrate the room.

  “The program I have in place will compensate for new data from the drone. It’ll incorporate the drone’s searchlights into the holographic image, while still projecting a desolate interior by adding the light elements.”

  I hold my breath. When the white light swings away from me, I let out a sigh and sag against Trey. His arm across my chest tightens. “It’s just running its protocols. It’s not intelligent, not like you,” he murmurs against my hair. The drone moves back through the courtyard.

  Trey holds up his wrist and speaks into his communicator. “Did you get the job done, Wayra?” he asks.

  “Yeah, it’s done. Whahappened is now a part of its nomenclature. When junior returns home to the mother ship, he’ll be a harassenger instead of a passenger, and then BOOM!”

  The drone slips out of the courtyard; it joins up with another hovering creeper. Their ghostly lights paint the street as they move on. My breath returns to normal until the other drone halts abruptly, flipping a uey. Its lights bear down on something moving in the darkness. The blood in my veins turns to frost.

  “It’s homing on something,” Trey murmurs into his communicator. “Wayra, do you have eyes on it, the second drone?”

  “Negative,” Wayra replies between his clenched teeth.

  “I’ve got eyes on ’em,” says Gibon, joining the conversation. “The ratwacker’s got someone.” From where I am, I witness a dark-haired couple crawl out from beneath an overturned hovercraft. My insides coil.

  Bathed in a light, the couple clings to one another while the drone hovers threateningly above them. The drone with Trey’s virus follows it, circling them menacingly. I cringe and pull away from Trey, going to the glass. My breath fogs it as I watch the drone project a holographic image in front of them. It’s me! I recognize my face, larger than life.

  “What’s it saying? Can anyone hear it?” Trey asks urgently.

  “It wants to know if they’ve seen Kricket. It says it will let them live if they give it information regarding her whereabouts,” Gibon says in a whisper. When the woman shakes her head, the drone reacts violently, turning a flamethrower on her. She instantly catches fire, and the intense heat melts her skin off her. The male beside her catches fire too. He lets go of her, draws a harbinger, and begins to fire on the drone. The companion drone executes him by pumping more than fifty consecutive rounds of bullets into his body in under twenty seconds, reducing him to nothing more than a pile of flaming flesh. The drones take another sweep of the area before they move on up the street once more and disappear from my line of sight.

  I rest my forehead on the glass, staring out at nothing in particular. Trey says, “Revoke transparency. Continue camouflage protocol five.” The window wall becomes opaque once more as smoke swirls between the glass panes, obscuring the outside world.

  I lift my forehead from the glass, looking behind me to Trey. “I need a weapon,” I say softly.

  “You’re safer without one,” Trey replies. “The Alameeda don’t want to kill you.”

  “Are you joking?” I ask him incredulously, turning around to face him. I lean against the smoky glass for support.

  “No. They want to own you. They won’t kill you unless you force them to.”

  “Maybe I want to decide my own fate should the need arise.”

  My response does not go over well with him. He grows angry. “You’re looking for an OTBD?” he asks in a very predatory way, watching me as if he can see inside my soul. Maybe he can; we traded souls not too long ago.

  “Define OTBD.”

  “Out The Back Door. Death by suicide.”

  “That’s about right. I’m not looking to get caught again.”

  “You’re a survivor, that’s what you do.” Trey’s eyes burrow into mine. “I’m counting on you for that,” he says in a biting, clipped tone. His eyes look me over as if he’s seeing my battle wounds even though they’re covered.

  “Weapon,” I insist, holding out my hand to him.

  “No. Not for that. Never for that,” he retorts.

  “You want to see me with them again?” I ask with my hands on my hips.

  “No. I’m not looking to let you go.”

  “You might not have a choice.”

  “Why do you say that? Have you seen something I should know about?” he asks, like I’m hiding something from him.

  I point my thumb over my shoulder to the window at my back. “Yeah,” I scoff, “I just saw two people get killed over me.”

  “That’s war, Kricket. People die.”

  “They do,” I agree. “Badly. But some live. Maybe I don’t want to be one of them. Anyway, how am I supposed to defend myself without a weapon?”

  “You weren’t speaking of defense just now, you were looking for a way out, and I promise you that I’ll never give you one. I gave you the opportunity to leave; you didn’t take it. Now I can’t let you go.”

  “Why not? You’re okay with them torturing me?”

  “You made me love you!” he says harshly. “You’re not allowed to give up, do you understand? No surrender to death. Whatever happens, you have to survive it.”

  “But what if things get really, really bad?” I ask.

  “Then you fight, like you always do, and we’ll pick up the pieces of us later.”

  “We will?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says without a hint of doubt.

  I exhale a deep breath. “Okay.”

  “If you want to learn to defend yourself, then I’m definitely the person to help you do that. Everything is a weapon,” he says. As he nears me, he takes his shirt off. I don’t have a thought in my head for a second. He pushes the chairs out of our way so that we have room to move around. When he stops in front of me, he looks down at my face. “The problem you have is with your height. You’re short.”

  “I’m not short. You’re all freakishly tall,” I retort.

  He smiles and I lose the fight I had immediately. “If you were taller,” he amends, “I would advise you to go for the throat or the face. They’re both vulnerable, you can grab the larynx—” he mimes grabbing the front part of his throat “—or strike the cartilage here.” He demonstrates a fake chop to his own Adam’s apple. “This will gain you some time to get away, but not much.”

  I listen closely as he explains all the most vulnerable points on the body. He shows me how to exploit them in the most efficient ways, although it’s difficult to concentrate, because his body is ridiculous in its perfection. He really needs to put his shirt back on if he wants my full attention. When he demonstrates several ways I can take him down, my focus becomes razor-sharp. He lets me stalk him, as we practice different moves to incapacitate my enemies.

  After rehearsing a takedown move at least a hundred times, I finally manage to get Trey flat on his back. Breathing heavily, I pounce on his chest triumphantly. Straddling him, I ask, “Did you just let me beat you?”

  He hesitates.
“No,” he lies.

  “Ugh! Little white lies are beneath you, Trey. I need more practice.”

  “You’re doing fine. I’ve been fighting for a long time. I don’t know what kind of practice you can do now that will make up for that.”

  “I need an equalizer.”

  I see the reluctant agreement in Trey’s eyes. “Yes. You do. But it has to be one that your enemy can’t easily take from you and then use against you.” His words remind me of the incident in the Beezway with Kesek Alez, when he took the harbinger away from me like he was taking a toy from a child. “I have an idea,” he says.

  He sits up and lifts me up as he gets to his feet. Playfully, he tosses me on the bed before he moves toward a display console built into the far wall.

  There’s a menagerie of crystal figurines on the shelves. Some of the cut-glass images are of animals and some are Etharian forms—dancers and musicians. Trey touches a drawer and it slides open. He extracts a long, black lacquer box. Tucking it under his arm, he closes the drawer. Then he selects a few of the crystal figurines from the shelves and brings them back with him to the bed.

  Sitting cross-legged on the middle of the bed, I scoot over to make a little more room for him to join me. He does. Sitting cross-legged too, he sets the black lacquer box in front of me.

  “What’s this?” I ask him, looking at the box curiously.

  “What you’re looking for.”

  I try to lift the lid, but it won’t open.

  “Oh, sorry. I forgot that it’s security locked.” Trey places his hand on the lid of the box. A blue light scans it. A decisive click sounds as the catch of the lid unlatches.

  “How come you can open it?”

  “I gave this to Charisma,” he says, like it’s no big deal.

  Instantly, I’m irrationally jealous. “Really,” I respond by snapping the lid closed again. “Maybe I shouldn’t be looking at it then.”

  Trey frowns. “I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. I gave these to Charisma as from one friend to another. She wouldn’t mind if you use them. She’d want you to be safe.”

  “Why do I get the feeling that you know very little about how women think?” I ask him.

  “I know Charisma very well. You, on the other hand, are often a mystery to me.”

  I don’t know whether to be offended, jealous, or flattered by that statement. As it turns out, I’m a little bit of all three.

  He places his hand on the lid again, letting the security program scan it. “You need this, so whether or not either of you likes the fact that you’re borrowing it doesn’t really matter that much to me.”

  When the lid unlatches once more, Trey opens it without preamble. Inside, the box is lined with lavender-colored satin. Resting in the center of the bed of satin are two silver cuffs. The jewelry is Gothic in design; each resembles the framework that holds panes of stained glass in a lavish church window, but without the colored glass itself.

  I raise my eyebrow at Trey. “If these are some kind of freaky, sexy restraints—”

  Trey’s shoulder nudges against mine as he chuckles softly, like I’m joking. “No,” he replies, before grinning and showing all his perfect teeth. “Sweet furroo, I love you. But, no, these are weapons, though I like where your mind is going—”

  I have no idea what sweet furroo means, but a part of me wants desperately to hear him say it again with the same sexy groan. Instead, I nudge my shoulder against his arm to stop him from whatever he’s about to say. “Just show me what you have here.”

  Lifting one of the cuffs from the box, I see it’s clearly made to fit a feminine forearm. I depress a small groove in the side of the cuff, and it opens with the spring of a hinge.

  “This is a sonic sayzer, Kricket,” Trey says. He lifts my wrist with his other hand and pushes back the silky material of my robe. Delicately, he clasps the cool metal device to my forearm. It’s heavier than I expected, weighing at least a pound. “It can kill things—”

  “—with sound,” we say together.

  Trey looks up at my face. “That’s right. How did you know that?”

  “Defense Minister Telek explained it to me when he was showing me Manus’s wounds. He had Manus in a tank in his office.”

  “Telek’s one sick Etharian,” Trey replies grimly. Looking back to my wrist, he adjusts the cuff so that it’s properly balanced before he closes it over my skin.

  “Well, the poison I gave him probably didn’t help with that either,” I reply.

  A small, reluctant smile forms on his lips. “You’re so intelligent. You probably don’t even need this weapon. You just need time to assess a situation to find the best solution.”

  “I’d feel better if I had something like this, though. So, how does it work?”

  Trey flips my hand over so that it’s palm up. He touches the metal column of the device, stroking the metal plate over my wrist. A lavender-colored beam of light shines on my open palm. The light projects a keypad on my hand. Trey begins entering codes to the prompts. After he enters the first series of numbers, letters, and symbols, the metal on my wrist warms and becomes malleable, shrinking to fit me like a snug sleeve. The metal takes on the feel of stiff fabric as it moves to just below my elbow. The cuff grows over the top of my hand, threading through the gap between my index finger and my middle finger, my middle finger and my ring finger, and again between my ring finger and my pinky.

  I turn my hand over several times, examining the fit and structure of the weapon I’m wearing, or is wearing me, depending upon how you look at it. “They’re going to love me at the Robotic Renaissance festival this year,” I say softly, admiring the arching metal design. It’s engraved with scrollwork that resembles Trey’s tattoo.

  Trey doesn’t laugh; he only looks confused. “Any festivals you were planning to attend have probably been canceled, Kricket.”

  I nod, not wanting to explain. “You’re probably right. How does this work?” I ask instead.

  Trey rises from the bed and moves back to the display cabinet where he retrieved the sonic sayzer. He opens a different drawer and extracts a small, black conelike apparatus. He takes it and moves back toward the window wall at the far end of the room. Setting the conelike apparatus on the floor, he squats down and touches a few buttons. Light pours up from the machine on the floor, projecting holographic stars over the room in that area. “Dim lights,” Trey orders, and the room darkens, allowing us to see the galaxy of stars more clearly.

  From his pocket, he extracts a few of the crystal figurines and tosses them into the cone-shaped sea of stars. Instantly, the figurines float in the air as if they’ve entered zero gravity. It does something else to each one. The figurine shaped like a spix animates and rears up on its hind legs, pawing the sky like a wild mustang. The saer opens its saber-toothed mouth, stalking the other figurines and swiping its paws at them, but it never quite seems to actually touch any. The elegant couple in formal attire dance together. I recognize the moves as the dance that Tofer taught me to do for my debut swank with the Regent. Those memories scare me, so I clear my throat and ask, “What are these things called?”

  “Targets,” he replies with an evil grin.

  “You mean we’re going to shoot them?” I ask.

  “Oh, we’re going to destroy these targets,” he breathes like he’s been waiting for this day all of his life.

  I roll my eyes. “What are they really called?”

  Trey searches his mind. “Sacred Moments? Special Moments? Crystal Moments—Crystal Clear Moments!” he says, excited that he remembers their name. “They were really popular about seventy-five floans ago, before the war—the Terrible War—the war before this one,” he amends.

  “Really? You don’t seem to be a fan of them.”

  “I’m not. They annoy me. That’s why we’re going to use them for target practice.”<
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  “You can’t do that, Trey!” I say, “They’re not yours!”

  “They’re not going to make it through this war, one way or the other, Kricket. We might as well learn something from them before they’re destroyed,” he replies. “Charisma didn’t like most of them anyway. She only kept them because they were gifts from family. This one”—he points to the elegant couple—“was supposed to be us at her coming-out swank. She hated it. She thought it looked nothing like either of us.”

  While he goes back to the display cabinet for more figurines to murder, I walk closer to the dancing crystal couple. They’re perfectly matched as they spin in synchronization through the stars; the female holds her billowing crystal dress while the male’s capable arm at her back holds her frame close against his powerful chest. The crystal male figure bears a strong resemblance to Trey, although he’s much stronger and more muscly looking at present. The male bears more of a resemblance to Victus than Trey. I still hate it for what it represents—Trey and Charisma forever entwined in each other’s arms.

  When Trey returns, he tosses a mastodon into the mix. It raises its noble, crystal snout in a defiant posture. “A mastoff to represent her first trip to the Forest of O,” Trey says. He tosses an expensive-looking trift into the air; it catches in the zero gravity pool. “Gets her license.” The Stealth-like trift flies around the galaxy in twisting, fantastic maneuvers, avoiding the other crystals by centimeters. “Graduates from Robard’s Academy for Blushers,” he tosses a pointed-toed ballerina-looking dancer into the mix.

  “The school wasn’t really called Robard’s Academy for Blushers, was it?” I ask him with a smile.

  He shakes his head, grinning again. “It was Robard’s Academy for Accomplished Young Fays, which really is just code for ‘pampered blushers.’”

  I watch the ballerina-like figurine circle the rest in a hypnotic spinning motion. I like her. I relate to her solo dance—I used to always dance alone, just for me. “What was the spix for?” I ask, as she passes by it.

  Trey squints at the spix, watching it rear up again and paw the air. “Best in Show. Charisma trains spixes—breeds them for competition. She also rides them in tournaments. That’s why I bought her these sonic sayzers; she uses them to shoot targets while riding her competition spix through a course. The competition itself is called Biequine. She’s quite skilled at it too—a perfect shot.”