Empress of a Thousand Skies

by Rhoda Belleza

  “You called them yourself,” Tai Reyanna snapped. “Or did you imagine that you could burn half the library without anyone remarking on it?” Rhee’s heart felt as if it might jump straight out of her chest—the footsteps were closer now, and if they were caught here, with the remains of Seotra . . . “If your god exists, I hope your punishment is slow and vengeful.”

  Rhee took a step backward. Panic welled inside of her. “I can’t be caught,” she said.

  “No, Rhee, you’re safe now.” Tai Reyanna’s voice was gentler this time. “Your guard is coming.”

  “Veyron was part of my guard, and he betrayed me,” Rhee said. “I must go.”

  Tai Reyanna caught her arm. “Go? With this murderer?”

  “She has no other choice,” Dahlen said. “I can better serve her than you can.”

  Both were true: He was a murderer, and she had no choice.

  If Seotra hadn’t been responsible for her family’s deaths, her would-be assassin was still out in the universe, roaming free.

  Tai Reyanna pulled Rhee into a fierce hug, whispering an old blessing into her hair. “May the ancestors be with you.”

  Rhee bowed her head and let the blessing wash over her; she felt the warmth of a thousand perfectly sunny days on her skin. Tai Reyanna pulled away.

  “There’s a secret passageway there,” she continued. “Behind the second column. It leads underground and out near the ruins. You’ll be in darkness, but there is only one path. Follow it.”

  It had been Tai Reyanna watching over her the whole time she was in Nau Fruma. She’d taken that time for granted. “I’ll come back for you,” Rhee said.

  “You can’t. It won’t be safe,” Dahlen interjected from behind her.

  Rhee ripped the hem of her tunic, and a long scrap of it came free. “I’ll have to tie your hands. They can’t think you had anything to do with what happened here,” she said. Rhee’s fingers were shaking as she wound the fabric around the Tai’s wrists. Her adviser’s hands were limp. She looked at Rhee as if she’d never seen her before.

  Maybe she hadn’t—not the real Rhee.

  “Princess,” Dahlen said from behind them. “We’re out of time.” His voice made her insides curdle now. He had robbed her of her one chance to know the truth. He was a murderer. You’ll be changed, he’d said. Dahlen knew this more than anyone, because he was too far gone.

  “I’m sorry,” Rhee said. “For everything.”

  Tai Reyanna leaned in and put her mouth close to her ear. “I will be loyal to you until the day I die.”

  Dahlen grabbed Rhee’s arm and pulled her into the tunnel entrance. Rhee feared it would be the last she ever saw of the Tai: the woman who had been like family to her, crouched at the remains of a dead Regent. What’s worse: She feared her Tai’s words were an omen, a prophecy.

  “Ma’tan sarili,” Rhee pledged over her shoulder. Honor, bravery, loyalty.

  “I hope you mean it, child,” Tai Reyanna called out as Rhee walked into the darkness.

  TWELVE

  ALYOSHA

  ALY watched through the monitors as Derkatz receded in the distance. They’d easily slid past the first customs checkpoint and would soon be in Portiis, where they would meet Vin’s contact. So close. Alyosha finally felt like he could breathe.

  Literally.

  “Oxygen levels have already improved by twelve percent,” Pavel announced. “The specimen is a shangdi variety indigenous to the western hemisphere of Fontis. Very unusual, known to bloom during the monsoon season.”

  “Oh yeah?” Aly said distractedly. Pavel was particularly chipper; he’d stayed back and updated all his software. But Aly wasn’t in the mood for chipper.

  He eyed the hammer on Vin’s hip for a second, then leaned forward in his chair. He watched Vin plot the coordinates—they’d been hopscotching their way toward the outer planet of Portiis. If they flew in a straight line it would take three days, tops—but it was hard to tell which routes were being patrolled at any given time. It was safer to stay in random orbits. Fly around, blend with the intergalactic traffic, get lost in the shuffle, which would add another ten days at least.

  The Tin Soldier had been modified from the inside out, practically gutted so that it barely looked like the pod Alyosha knew. That was the point—to be unrecognizable. And Aly had made a few adjustments of his own, in secret. He typed in a ten-digit code on his side of the console. “So you gonna apologize?” Aly asked finally as their pod slowed to a halt.

  “For what?” Vin wouldn’t look at him. “What the hell did you just do?” He jabbed the keys of the console. Still, they hung motionless, suspended in space.

  “For getting us into that mess back there.” He leaned back again, enjoying himself. For once, he was in the right.

  “You got us into this mess,” Vin countered evenly.

  “How do you figure? You knocked my mask off.”

  Vin still wouldn’t look at him as he tried punching in code after code to unfreeze the console. “Fine, Aly. Everything is my fault. You’re always right.” He slammed the dash with a fist: “Now unlock the nav system!”

  “Say it like you mean it.”

  Vincent suddenly unclipped and lunged—but Aly blocked him with his free hand and held him at arm’s length. Vin’s legs started to lift up in the air, and he floated nearly upside down. “Unlock it,” he said. “We don’t have time for your bullshit.”

  “Look who’s talking.” Aly unstrapped, and they both floated up toward the ceiling—but he levered off the walls, kicking away from Vin. It had started as a joke, kind of, but he could feel his anger bubbling up from all the hidden places. “My face is plastered on every telepod across the entire known universe. I’ve been framed for murder, and all you’ve done is give me taejis.”

  “Stop playing the victim.” Vin’s blue eyes were as big and intense as ever. “This is war, Aly. Massive-scale, insane, galactic war. So maybe instead of sucking your thumb and feeling sorry for yourself, you should stop and ask yourself: Why?”

  “Gentlemen, please.” Pavel stretched out two claw attachments and tugged at their pant sleeves, trying to wrestle them back into their seats. They both kicked out of his grip, and Pavel gave off an engine whirl that sounded like a sigh.

  “Why did they frame you?” Vin’s voice had dropped. “I’m the spy. I’m the one who sent out the hail.”

  Something thick and sticky was working its way through Aly’s brain. The silence stretched out around them as if it, too, were free of gravity, and diffusing through the ship.

  “Because I’m Wraetan,” he said finally. It would always come back to his nation, his second-citizen status. He remembered what Vin had said earlier. If you weren’t always trying to get people to like you . . . Was that true? Probably. He was mostly just trying to get people to like Wraetans. To show everyone that Wraetans were more than the rabid guerrilla fighters they’d seen on the holos during the Great War. But he was trying to show the Wraetans, too, what they could be, what he wanted them to be. “It was easy for the public to swallow. They want to get back at us for allying with Fontis . . .”

  “Yeah, all of that.” Vin looked at him. “You were convenient. You were the perfect spur-of-the-moment scapegoat to stoke the flames of war. But you were a diversion. The question is: What were they trying to hide?” The fire had seemed to drain out of him. He gripped his way to the dash and looked out into the darkness. “They needed to distract the public from rumors that the Princess is still alive.”

  “You know?” Aly asked. He hadn’t told him about the braid he found in the escape pod.

  “We suspected as much.” He leaned back like he was trying to get a better look at Aly, trying to take him all in. “How long have you known?”

  “Since I found the dead Nau Fruman in the royal escape pod . . .”

  “Wait.” Vin stared at him. �
��What escape pod?”

  Aly told him, finally, about catching up to the royal escape pod, and the dead man with a braid coiled on his chest.

  Vin just stared. “You’re talking about Princess Rhiannon?”

  “No, the other assassinated princess,” Aly said, but when he saw Vin’s face, he knew to drop the sarcasm.

  “Holy taejis. Do you know what this means?” Vin asked. “You knew this whole time, and you didn’t say anything?”

  “Don’t try to lecture me about keeping secrets,” Aly said. Vin made a face. “And anyway, who the hell are you talking about?”

  Vin hesitated. “Princess Josselyn,” he said, after a pause. Aly nearly laughed—would have laughed, if Vin didn’t look so serious. Sure, there were always rumors that she’d survived the crash—conspiracy theories, that kind of thing. You could find anything if you went deep enough on the holos. “I’ve been tracking her. When I was back in Sibu—”

  Aly could barely process what he was saying. “When were you in Sibu?”

  “During leave a few months back . . .”

  The last time they were all on leave, Alyosha went to Jethezar’s house. Vincent had said he was going to the coast to meet up with a fan. Aly figured he was off doing who knows what, with one of the thousands of girls who proposed to him on the holos or cried when he came on screen. For some reason this lie hit him harder than the others.

  “Can I believe anything you tell me?” Aly hated how he sounded, like a desperate younger brother shut out of a game.

  “You can believe this,” Vin said softly. “I think she’s alive. The United Planets thinks she’s alive. It’s even more important now that we find her.” Aly could see him chewing the inside of his mouth, like he did sometimes when he was thinking. “Listen, we have to risk taking the direct route to Portiis, even if there are patrols. We need to get there as fast as—”

  Just then a loud pop made the whole hull shudder. The craft tilted noticeably, and the metal shell around them groaned.

  “What the—?” But Aly knew right away what it was. Someone had locked on to the craft.

  “A grav beam?” Vin swam back down into his seat, kicking off the walls and strapping in. Aly did the same and unlocked the nav system from his screen.

  “It’s not a grav beam,” Aly said. The velocity was too slight. “It feels almost . . . magnetic.” As he said the last word he swung to the window. He had a visual on a body thirty astro units in the distance. What quadrant were they in again? Bazorl. Bazorl Quadrant. He scanned the nav stats and his blood went cold.

  “Choirtoi,” he swore. “We’re being pulled into Naidoz.”

  “Naidoz,” Vin repeated. He said it like a death sentence. He frantically began pressing buttons and pulling at the console. But Aly knew it was too late.

  Naidoz was another dwarf planet, with an enormous valley of magnetic lava that had cooled and hardened centuries ago. Equipment failed constantly and crashes were common because everyone was pulled into its magnetic field. Every pilot knew to avoid it. But they’d drifted—they’d stopped paying attention all because of a stupid fight that Aly had started.

  The pull got stronger, and they picked up speed as they were drawn helplessly toward the planet. It felt like the pod was made of glass, like it might shatter.

  “P!” Aly had to shout. “What are our chances of pulling out?”

  The droid’s lights went red and blinked blue again. “Our mass is too small and our thrust insufficient, even with recent upgrades.”

  Translation: No chance. We’re all screwed.

  A sudden jolt pushed them against the hull of the ship, and he could feel the g-force building. Everything was vibrating. He could hear them cutting through space—as loud as a bolt of thunder that never stopped. The shaking became intense and rattled its way into his brain. Metal seams shifted and flexed like tectonic plates.

  Lights flickered on and off, the console a staticky red until it was total darkness apart from the red glow from Pavel’s eyelights. Outside, pieces of the Tin Soldier detached and burned through the atmosphere alongside the main pod, a trail of red-orange fire behind them.

  “We have to make it to Portiis. We have to get to the United Planets!” Vin shouted. “But if one of us doesn’t make it . . .”

  “We’re going to make it!” Aly yelled. “We’ll get there!”

  A wing detached and darted away into the void. They barrel-rolled, end over end, so many times he lost count. He felt sick—an ocean in his stomach ready to come up and drown them all. It was just like how Vin used to turn the Revolutionary over for fun to mess with him, except this wasn’t for fun, and Vin wasn’t going to pull them out. They were going to die.

  “Look, Aly. I’m sorry for what I said. I meant to tell you—”

  But his voice was drowned out by an urgent mechanical beeping. The Tin Soldier, his old friend, was coming apart.

  Down they plunged, burning through atmosphere, hurtling toward the surface of the planet’s ocean.

  Faster. More pressure. He could barely breathe.

  Then, a thunderous boom. A violent jolt. Metal groaning. He grabbed for Vin. His best friend. The two of them going down, after all they’d been through.

  “You can have my hammer,” Aly told him.

  Or maybe he thought it?

  A wave of water slammed them backward. Then a current of white water poured in from the metal cracks and tore them apart.

  Part Three:

  THE DEPARTED

  “In the last G-1K summit, Kalusian neurobiologist Diac Zofim surprised the scientific world when she introduced what she called a reader. It could override security measures and read the contents of a person’s cube. Impressive enough, but think about this: For what purpose would you use it? What gave anyone the right to access someone’s cube without their express consent? It would be useful for interplanetary security, the supporters argued, but it sounded like a slippery slope to me. There were a lot of living rights activists who agreed, and it sparked a series of protests that would’ve been front and center, but they were overshadowed by the twin bombings of Rhesto and Wraeta. Eventually the tech was quietly deemed illegal, but they’d announced it at a time when the public had other things on their mind . . .”

  —Living rights activist and reporter, identity unknown Archives provided by the United Planets

  THIRTEEN

  RHIANNON

  RHEE and Josselyn had always fought for the window seat. They’d traveled often as a family, her father urging diplomacy, to take turns and to share. That didn’t always work. Josselyn and Rhee would pinch each other’s thighs and whisper insults, until finally—boiling with rage, screeching and hissing like vultures—the two would be separated, neither of them with the window seat to show for it.

  She hadn’t thought of that in ages. Not when there’d been so many good memories to replay, moments where it felt like they were a team. Rhee had willfully forgotten how lonely it was sometimes to have a sister. How sometimes, you could be sitting alone even if she was right next to you.

  After five days offline, the sense of liberation had rapidly worn off. Rhee had thought that without her cube, her mind would remain clear and focused—and that the temptation of revisiting memories would be removed. But all it did was open up a path for the more painful ones to surface—her last fight with Joss, the goodbye with Julian as comets burned overhead, Veyron’s tears as he tried to end her life . . .

  “You’re not still upset?” Dahlen asked her. It had been two days since parting ways with Tai Reyanna and traversing the dark tunnel that had allowed them to escape from Tinoppa, and these were the first words he had spoken to her.

  Rhee angled her body to the zeppelin window so as not to have to look at him. Every time she did, her eyes zeroed in on the ring he wore. She knew it was Fontisian technology—he’d explained that he’d pulled el
ectromagnetic currents from the air and focused them with his ring into heat energy—but Rhee swore instead that it was charged with hatred and vengeance and all the other dark feelings she knew too well.

  And what did it mean, that he no longer scared her? She understood him. He’d killed Seotra for the same reason Rhee had planned her own revenge for so many years. He’d lost people he loved on Seotra’s order, watched them die on his word. Rhee had been right about the bigger picture but wrong about the details. The man was a killer, certainly. But he hadn’t killed her family.

  He’d killed Dahlen’s.

  What made up Dahlen’s ma’tan sarili? She’d thought it was about following orders, about obeying the word of his god without question. But she wasn’t sure now, and it irked her—how interchangeable their anger was, their bloodlust. He’d killed Seotra after she’d pleaded for him not to, when he knew the man had invaluable information about the death of her family. Was this part of his plan all along?

  Rhee was the one who’d brought him there. She felt stupid and young, so singularly focused, unable to think ahead or see the bigger picture. She ached for her cube now, to replay that conversation with Veyron just before his death. Hadn’t he confirmed it was Seotra who had sent Veyron after Rhee? Or had she only assumed?

  You’ve been blind—blind and willful, he’d said.

  “I may have miscalculated your response,” Dahlen added in the wake of her silence, “but your consent to join me in Portiis is the right choice.”

  She turned to him and found his expression remorseless. By now Rhiannon spoke “Dahlen” fluently. He’d meant sorry and thanks for coming, in his own way. She disagreed though. It wasn’t the right choice. And while Dahlen believed she’d at last agreed to receive the protection of the United Planets in Portiis—or at least his order’s mysterious contact at the council—she had other plans. Dahlen had proved he cared only about his vengeance, that he’d put it above all else.