Empress of a Thousand Skies

by Rhoda Belleza

  “We think it is likely he was reporting to a larger terrorist organization, yes,” Nero said, nodding his head.

  “And his hostage? Vincent, from The Revolutionary Boys?”

  “No word yet. We’ve been in touch with his family . . .”

  “Any idea where the fugitive has gone?” someone interrupted.

  “We’ve got every UniForce cruiser from here to the Outer Belt looking for him, and a bounty on his head that will make his captor rich for life. We’re confident we’ll find him.”

  A Toncdel whose camera was built right into the hardware of his exoskeleton spoke up next. “Have you determined how he fled the scene? I have an anonymous source that says a royal escape pod is unaccounted for.”

  She straightened up. She’d assumed that the royal escape pod had been lost to the dark folds of the universe. Otherwise, someone would have found Veyron’s body, and her braid. Someone would know she’d made it out alive. And the question had in fact caused a stir: Everyone was whispering, muttering, straining to catch a glimpse of the reporter.

  “I’m afraid that’s untrue,” Nero said, and Rhee felt all the air go out of her chest. “All the pods were accounted for. The pods were used to ferry off the only survivors, an evacuation effort I and Regent Seotra were involved in.”

  Nero was lying. Not all the pods were accounted for . . .

  The icy feeling spread to her head and built pressure behind her eyes. Tai Reyanna had said that Veyron must have planted an explosive device in case his attempt on Rhee’s life failed. But how had they known to evacuate even before the initial blast?

  Dahlen’s ring burned a hole in her pocket; it gave her an uneasy feeling, as if its ability to capture energy meant it would capture the attention of others too. The world went mute as she looked around the room, really looked, for the first time. The press conference claimed itself haphazard and slapdash, but it had obviously been set up well in advance. Nero had never intended to sway the Kalusian allies. He’d shown up in a military-looking uniform, with every intention to position himself as a leader. One who could rule an entire planet.

  The kindness he’d shown, the rousing speeches he’d given . . . it was all an act, made more convincing by his good looks and those intense blue eyes she’d once thought of as soulful. Suddenly Rhee understood. It had been all for the cameras. Truly, it was Nero all along, not Seotra, who’d arranged to have her family killed—who’d tried to kill her. He’d plotted in the shadows and pressed for her early coronation so he could have her assassinated.

  Rhee remembered what Nero had said after her family died, his words of consolation that had stayed with her for so many years.

  The ancestors saw it was an honorable death, and through them we ensure a new, worthy leader will rise. He’d been speaking of himself.

  It was Nero: the man who stood at the podium not ten feet away, the most powerful man in Kalu, who wanted to take their planet to war, who wanted her dead.

  As if the realization were a literal bolt of lightning that struck at Rhee’s feet, Nero turned and looked directly at her.

  SIXTEEN

  ALYOSHA

  THE name of the game was to not get caught. Aly’s only plan was to lie low, be inconspicuous, and maybe get to Rhesto in one piece. Kara—that was the girl’s name—had moved them through four cars with a security badge she’d swiped from who knows where. She acted like she’d grown up on a zeppelin, which, she told him after yanking him into a bathroom to avoid a patrolling Tasinn, she basically had.

  When he caught her eye in the mirror she quickly looked away. Her hair fell across her face, and when she blinked it got tangled in her eyelashes. How did that not drive her crazy?

  “I spent a lot of time on zeppelin freighters like these,” she said. She made a face in the mirror and tried to finger comb her tangled hair. It was no use trying to make it do anything else—it was too far gone—but he wasn’t going to tell her that. Under the door he saw Pavel discreetly send a narrow attachment with a tiny camera at the end, and Aly nudged it back with the toe of his boot. “Kalu labs rent out space on zeppelins like this all the time, for experiments they can’t get the government to approve. Since it travels between quadrants, then it isn’t in violation of any one territory’s laws. My mom’s a scientist, remember? She used to work the Kalu–Navrum line that did four-day loops. She did neurobiology stuff and even helped develop cube-to-cube interaction.”

  Aly was impressed. “So you’re some kind of genius like your mom, then?”

  “I wish,” she said to the mirror. She had this faraway look in her eyes, like she was actually seeing someone who’d disappeared from her reflection forever ago. “But I guess it got her in trouble, in the end. She was being watched by a bunch of different governments, all kinds of different planets . . .”

  “Is she . . . ?”

  Kara shook her head, so her bangs shook too. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not.” Their eyes met in the mirror again. He got a sense of weird déjà vu when he looked at her. Maybe it was just the fluorescent lighting threatening to give him a seizure. “A dozen scientists she worked with at the summit had been disappearing over the last six months, one by one. She knew it wasn’t coincidence. Someone was going after them.”

  “Who?”

  Kara shrugged. “I don’t know. But she left before they could take her. At least, I hope she did.”

  “Zuilie,” he exhaled.

  “That’s what I’m saying. I heard it’s always happened on the sly, ever since the Great War. People all over the galaxy rounded up, questioned about their involvement and their loyalties, all under the guise of preserving peace. But this is different . . .” Her face tightened. “It’s targeted. Every one of them was at the last G-1K summit. Taken one day, maybe stopped for a routine traffic violation or called in to renew a federal license, and then just . . . gone.”

  Immediately, he remembered the little boy on Derkatz. Snatch-yah uptu?

  Alyosha felt sick. This was what war was. It wasn’t even the bombs or the cruisers loaded with bombs. It was girls like Kara in a zeppelin bathroom, suddenly, maybe, orphaned. It was boys like him, twelve-year-olds, running after a truck, choking on the smell of dust. People always measured war in terms of the numbers dead. Maybe they should measure it in terms of the people left behind.

  “And your mom told you about the safe house on Rhesto before she ran?”

  “She’s gone on and on about it for years. A neurotechnologist from Derkatz turned up dead after the last summit. I never got details, but I got the feeling my mom was scared, like maybe it had been a deliberate attack.” Kara turned to face him. A strand of dark hair came loose, and she tucked it behind her ear. “She made me memorize coordinates, take self-defense classes. I know, like, six languages because she crammed them down my throat.” She looked down and started picking at her thumbnail. “I used to be ashamed of her. Thought she was a nutjob. A conspiracy theorist, you know? But when I came home that day, and our apartment was ransacked . . .”

  Aly thought of Vincent’s room on the Revolutionary, just before the robosoldier had come in and nearly split his skull open. Vincent had saved him. His best friend, messy as hell and a lazy choirtoi—but he was a spy, too, and he’d died trying to do the right thing. He’d died because Aly had picked that day of all days to start a fight. Now they’d never talk taejis, mess around. He was almost glad he was offline, so he wouldn’t call up the memory over and over to torture himself.

  “Hey.” Aly reached out to take her hand, not sure what made him do it. It was warm, and he felt that same jolt of electricity where their hands touched. After a split second, she pulled away. There was a confused look on her face, like she’d been woken up from a spell.

  “I’m fine. We should get moving.”

  Aly nodded, feeling stupid and embarrassed.

  She slipped out of her ja
cket . . . and started to take off her shirt.

  “What are you doing?” Aly asked, trying to turn away and cracking his elbow against the door.

  She wore a loose tank top underneath her long-sleeved shirt. The tank top had a tiny pocket on the chest that had zero use except to draw his eye to it. He looked down at his shoes, at the ceiling, anywhere but at the tiny pocket. Her face was even worse—she was smirking.

  “Calm down.” She began tearing her shirt into long strips of fabric, pulling out what looked like nail clippers to make the initial cuts. “See? Instant disguise.”

  “I don’t think this is going to work,” Aly said firmly, as she motioned for him to squat down. As she wrapped pieces of cloth around his head, Aly scrambled to distract himself, but the cloth was still warm and smelled like her.

  “Trust and believe, friend,” Kara said. Aly noticed Pavel trying to slide his camera under the door again, but he stomped on it—clamping it to the floor until Pavel eventually wiggled it back.

  He’d always been nervous around girls, but keeping to himself had been an all right strategy—without fail, Vin would bring some pretty girls back to base and talk Aly up. Vincent was the ladies’ man, saying charming things, laying on the compliments. Aly was cool enough by association.

  When Kara was finished, Aly stood up and squinted at his reflection. “Okay, this is definitely not going to work.” She’d wrapped cloth around his forehead and diagonally across his left eye and nose. “I look like a half-assed mummy.”

  “I should’ve bandaged your mouth too.” She smiled at him in the mirror. “Look, it’ll work because no one actually wants to look at a victim. Even if they do want to look, they’ll steal a glance. They’ve been taught it’s impolite to stare.”

  Aly wasn’t sure about her logic but really didn’t have any other options—she’d opened up a brand-new possibility for him, an out from his fugitive status, and a way to broadcast the truth. They just needed to survive long enough to get to Rhesto.

  They slipped out of the bathroom, and he and Pavel followed Kara as they moved through a series of passenger cars toward the front of the zeppelin. She either knew her way around or was picking a route at random. There was no hesitation as she turned one way or the other, doubled back, climbed up a flight of stairs and back down a different one.

  “We need to get to the cars with the labs in them,” she said over her shoulder. “We can hitch a ride on one of the vessels they use to transport supplies there.”

  The lower the numbered capsule, the more streamlined the zeppelin became—the prettier too. The hallways were quiet and flooded with a soft light. The seats were made not of patched synthetics but brushed velvet. Instead of dozens of passengers packed on bench seats, businessmen and businesswomen reclined in practically empty cabins.

  Aly had taken zeppelins sometimes on leave, always in one of the high-numbered capsules. They were cheap and slow and not even a little bit fancy. He’d park his butt in one of the worn seats while a rusty droid rammed his elbow with the drink cart. The air was always stale and it took forever to get anywhere, but he’d still give his right arm to be one of these folks. He’d take a lumpy chair so long as it reclined, and a packet of calories delivered right to his hand.

  There was no cruising now, no kicking back in one of the poky seats. They double-timed it down the aisle, without moving so fast they’d be suspicious. Kara’s stolen badge did the trick again and again.

  By some miracle they hadn’t run into any guards, but he remembered Nero had boarded the zeppelin at Navrum City. Probably the entire security team was guarding Nero’s next fart. Aly never thought he’d thank god to be anywhere near a politician—but it was working in their favor now.

  Or it was—until Kara swiped a door and they barreled through into a room packed with reporters. They were all facing a podium with none other than Nero standing behind it. And he looked pretty steamed. Everyone turned in their direction.

  Alyosha was paralyzed. He was the most wanted criminal in the universe, and only a few flimsy pieces of fabric separated him from a room full of people who wanted his head. Literally.

  “Oops,” Kara whispered under her breath. Aly felt the weight of at least one hundred sets of eyes on him—one hundred sets of eyes attached to one hundred souls who believed he’d murdered the last princess of the Ta’an dynasty. He tensed up, ready to run. But his eyes landed on a girl, Fontisian by the look of her clothes, whose face was half-covered by an oversized hood. He could see her mouth, though, and the quicksilver flash of relief as she sighed.

  An aide near the podium charged their way, and the girl lowered her hood and vanished into the crowd. The aide—public relations, you could somehow always tell—pushed them back out into the hallway. A big-ass Tasinn followed at her heels.

  “What in the hell are you doing? Who let you in? This is a private event.” Her voice had gotten so high she was practically screeching.

  “We were looking for the medical wing,” Kara said quickly. She’d shifted her accent seamlessly—now she sounded like she’d come straight from a high-society Kalusian country club. “The layout of this zeppelin is simply impossible to navigate! My apologies!”

  “Zuilie.” The girl’s yellow reptilian eyes flickered as she looked them up and down. “The patients are to be kept strictly quarantined,” she said, flinging a hand in Aly’s direction. Kara was right; the girl didn’t want to look at him. When their eyes met for a split second, her blue skin flushed.

  “Understood,” Kara said evenly. “It won’t happen again. They just needed to get his circulation going,” she said. Aly did his best not to move, react.

  “You’re not even close to the medwing,” the Tasinn said behind them. His eyes were narrow with suspicion.

  Kara hesitated a beat too long, but Pavel piped in just in time. “That is entirely my fault,” he said. “I led them out of the medwing. But my software must be outdated, and I lost the layout during the blackout.”

  Aly tried hard not to express surprise. Look at my little man, learning how to lie. He guessed there’d never been a reason to before.

  “Unbelievable.” The woman brought her hand to her face, her long fingers curling halfway around her head. “Okay, okay, what’s done is done.” She took a deep breath in and a long exhale out. Her eyes went cloudy as she checked her cube. “Take this hallway down until you hit a spiral set of stairs, up one flight and then two immediate lefts. There’ll be signs from there, and it looks like the patient bay is up top, lab on the bottom. You got that?”

  Pavel’s eyelights flashed blue.

  “Should I escort them, Fiona?” the Tasinn asked, and Aly’s heart stopped.

  “No, you idiot,” the girl said, in a tone of deep condescension. “Your mandate is to protect Nero, not play escort. And you”—she pointed to Pavel—“tell those choirtois to update your software.”

  That was that: They were free to go. Alyosha nearly lost it. He wanted to roll around on the floor laughing until it hurt, until his sides split and he cried. But he was still shaking.

  The woman and the guard both glared at them before turning and retreating into the conference room. They’d escaped an execution, practically, and gotten step-by-step directions to the place they wanted to go.

  They moved in silence. He knew they were all too scared to speak—like they might break a spell and everything would shatter. Finally, they got to a door that was made of a thick, shiny metal that looked different from all the others. Kara swiped her security card, and they pushed their way inside.

  They faced a long hallway lined with a row of shelves filled with scrubs neatly stacked and a wardrobe full of hanging lab coats. In the cabinets were boxes of latex gloves and hair caps. Kara ran her palm absently over them, as if she were petting an animal.

  Aly shouldered through a set of swinging double doors. He expected to find a lab, but the
capsule was flooded with light. It was made almost entirely of glass and reminded him, weirdly, of a tree house that he had played in when he was little. It was full of dark, scattered booths and benches.

  Here people sketched, wrote, rearranged puzzles, or played instruments. Some even slept, resting their heads on propped-up elbows—and in one case, their tentacles. All the passengers were dressed in the same green patient scrubs.

  A fragile man who looked to be in his seventies nodded to them as he strummed a small stringed instrument that reminded Aly of a vitola. Another man twisting a multicolored cube in his hands didn’t acknowledge them as they passed, and neither did a Yersian woman with matted fur who wrote down music notes furiously across a grid of paper. Even the man who had his head down, cradled in his arms, looked like he was having a fitful sleep, like his mind was working through an important problem.

  It was peaceful. Pretty, even.

  So why were all the hairs on Aly’s neck standing up?

  He turned around and looked through the glass, to the medical cars visible beneath them. “What is this place?” he asked in a whisper.

  It was the lab below them—a long one, at least five car lengths, with a narrow aisle down the middle. Men and women in identical white coats and green scrubs worked quietly along the high counters mounted on either wall. It seemed tense, like the pressure in the lab had been cranked up. Bent over petri dishes, peering through microscopes, the scientists were completely engrossed . . . Aly backed away from the glass. He knew that if one of them looked up, he was in trouble.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Kara told him. She sounded uneasy, and he knew she was feeling that same bad juju, a dark undercurrent humming beneath the vision of peacefulness. Then she turned back around and surveyed the room they were in. “This doesn’t look like any patient bay I’ve ever seen.”

  “You’re new,” an Optsirh woman said behind them, making Alyosha jump. When she blinked he could see her blue eyes under transparent eyelids. She was sketching a large triangle on a sheet of paper. “Come have a sit-down. Look at a drawing. This is my son.” She pointed to the empty space of her triangle. “He has the most beautiful eyes, doesn’t he?”