Empress of a Thousand Skies

by Rhoda Belleza

  TWENTY-ONE

  RHIANNON

  RHEE felt as if she’d been catapulted out of her body, as if she were hovering somewhere in deep space, her lungs seizing—not here, with her feet firmly planted on the temple floor of the order.

  “That’s impossible,” a voice that sounded like her voice was saying. “Josselyn died.”

  “We had to make a decision.” The Elder folded his hands on his lap. “Your sister was gravely injured, but survived,” he said. “She was taken to Fontis for life-threatening wounds. Seotra swore everyone to secrecy. It was important to protect the heir to the throne under any circumstance, and she was safer if the assassin believed she’d died.”

  It was the same reason Rhee had chosen to stay hidden after Nero tried to take her life too.

  “My sister,” Rhee repeated again, her mind a cloud—swollen with rain and rage and lightning. She had imagined Josselyn’s death as if she’d been there alongside her when the craft exploded and tore apart in the air. The outside seeping in. Their breath snatched away. It would’ve been painless, Rhee had imagined. It would’ve been sound and fury and then just a dark, quiet end.

  Memories assaulted her. She couldn’t think straight. All Rhee could see was their hair, playfully bound together in one long braid so they sat like conjoined twins for nearly an hour. Changing her clothes to match Joss, only for Joss to change them again—a cycle of clothes and crying and copycatting that made Rhee furious. The way Joss loved sensaberries. The way she let Rhee share her bed during a thunderstorm. All along, Josselyn had been alive. It wasn’t fair. This whole time they’d been apart.

  “She was the only survivor, but when she stabilized she was sent away to a secret location. I never knew it. Seotra coordinated all of it. I had contact with her handler once or twice.”

  “Her handler?”

  “You both had one. Yours, unfortunately, was convinced to work for the other side.”

  “Veyron.” Her voice cracked; she could barely say his name out loud. The Elder nodded. “So where is she? Where are Josselyn and her handler now?”

  “Unfortunately, we lost contact with her about a month ago. We have some reason to believe the handler is being detained in a prison camp.”

  “When were you going to tell me?” she asked.

  “Perhaps never.” The Elder said it so casually Rhee felt as if she’d been struck. “She had no memory herself of what had happened, and as far as the public was concerned, you were the Crown Princess.”

  “But I’m not,” she said, realizing that she was no longer the empress. Was she sad? Had she truly wanted the throne? There were those who were loyal to her, but their support was scattered, and those who doubted her ability to rule were countless.

  The only thing she knew for certain was that she still wanted revenge. That gave her strength. It was her coil, her tether. Anger swept through her like a current. “Joss is my sister,” Rhee said. “She’s not just some—some toy.” Then something occurred to her, and her insides soured. “Did Dahlen know?” Rhee asked. The Elder paused, as if considering how to answer. “Did he?” she demanded again.

  “It’s not as simple as yes or no. There are things he knows, and things he doesn’t know that he knows . . .”

  “What does that even mean?” She was shouting without meaning to. “How could you just . . . hide her all these years? How could you lose her?” Rage burned through her like a fire. “You and your holy order. You pretend to be a keeper of the universe’s secrets. But you’re just as horrible as all the rest of them—horrible and selfish—”

  The Elder’s face didn’t change. “If the Princess won’t watch her tongue . . .”

  “You’ll what?” She knew she was being reckless but she didn’t care. “You’ll kill me? And Fontis and Kalu will go to war again, and half the planets in the galaxy will be blasted into nonexistence?”

  Only the swift rustling of arrows recalled to her that the archers were watching. In an instant, their bows were all pointed in her direction again.

  Then the cracking of wood echoed throughout the monastery, and glass came shattering down. Tasinn swarmed the monastery, exploding ancient relics, dropping the archers where they stood. They wore tactical gear of lightweight armor, and a gas bomb made her eyes and throat burn. In the struggle that ensued, the Tasinn threw monks against the altars—destroying statues, scattering offerings. She couldn’t even hear herself think; the sound of coughing and choking was unbearable.

  The Tasinn were worse than the droids that were made just for the purpose of destruction. They had hearts and minds and chose not to use them.

  The Elder grabbed her hand and tried to run, but a stunner sent him flying forward, and Rhee let go of his hand out of reflex. Just a second too late. The electricity had passed through their hands and traveled up her arm. Then she felt two pricks in her back. An excruciating pain shot up her spine, a fire seizing all her muscles. All the order fell in the same way. The Tasinn had come prepared to use any means necessary.

  “Princess,” one of the Tasinn said. He came toward her, smiling. There was a patch over his left eye. “I can’t thank you enough for your help today.”

  She was coughing too hard to reply. The gas had done something. It felt like there was glass in her lungs.

  He squatted down and touched her cheek with long, oily fingers. “You were very brave, coming here on your own,” he said. “Very brave, and very useful. We’ve been trying to find a way to get in past the Fontisian archers for a week now. It seems we should just have sent a princess to do our work.”

  Something had reached into her soul and tugged, made her unravel inside. Everything good in her life had been destroyed: Was it all her fault? The archers who had followed her inside had left the hillside vulnerable to attack.

  The Tasinn had raided the monastery because of her—because she’d come, seeking answers. That organic memory bubbled up from deep within: that little girl in a new palace, sobbing away until there were no tears left, like a piece of dried fruit left out in the sun.

  Rhee was shoved into the front of a small craft, surrounded by Tasinn with cruel faces that all seemed identical to her. Still, they seemed almost afraid to touch her. Through the window she saw a Fontisian girl get shoved and herded into the back of a craft—the same blonde one she’d watched in the courtyard. Rhee caught her eye, and the girl glared at her, made her feel like she’d tipped into a long fall.

  Her thoughts quickly went back to Dahlen. Dahlen, who’d been by her side since the moment he’d saved her life—not that she’d ever admitted this to him, but he had saved her life. Rhee had never thanked him. Instead she left him at the mercy of the Tasinn, only proving that she was the spoiled girl he’d insinuated she was.

  “Nero wants to see you,” the Tasinn with the eye patch said.

  As the hatch closed, she took in a deep breath, forcing down the noise rising in her throat—part sob, part battle cry. She was going to face the man who wanted her dead.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ALYOSHA

  HE’D imagined it would go down differently. Sure, Aly figured he’d get taken in, be debriefed and whatnot—but instead the UniForce had manhandled Aly all the way here. He hadn’t seen what happened to Kara when they took him; he didn’t know where she was or if she was safe. Now he was locked away in a room barely bigger than the shack he and his dad had shared. All four walls made up of LED screens that played a twenty-four-hour DroneVision news channel that drowned out his thoughts, made him feel more crazy than he already was.

  He’d been forced to watch dozens of “experts” paraded in front of the camera, each one a little puppet with Nero pulling the strings—just like Jeth had said. Each of them testified that Aly’s cube playback had been forged, pointed to inconsistencies, minor technicalities that supposedly proved the footage had been manipulated with help from Fontisian scientists. They said t
he Fontisians had gotten hold of a dangerous technology suppressed and supposedly discarded after the G-1K summit: the overwriter. It was technology that allowed not just Ravaging but rewriting of old memories.

  There had been rumors of this for years, though. Like there were rumors that Josselyn was alive, like there were rumors the government was hacking data from individual cubes without permission.

  Aly couldn’t write off any of it as conspiracy theories anymore.

  He scratched the spot on his arm where the warden had injected him with . . . what? He wasn’t sure. He noticed then that his knuckles were bloody from all the times he’d punched at the walls. It turned out these plasma screens were self-repairing. Every time he thought he’d shattered one, it would smooth out again—like a ripple in the water. When he closed his eyes, invisible soldiers cranked the volume to blasting.

  He’d seen the segment on loop, counting 277 until the screens went dark and the outline of a door appeared in the static of the feed. When it opened, Kara walked through.

  He knew it was a hallucination, or maybe a hologram. She was too calm, too clean, too graceful. That smile. That’s always how they mentioned the Fontisian saints. Isn’t this when they appeared too? At your darkest hours? Ready to take you to your eternal home?

  Aly scrambled toward the corner, pressing himself hard against the plasma. He tried to flip that switch inside himself, when he’d crawl into the corner of his mind and block it all out. Every time his dad had called him all those names, every time those Fontisian preachers had told him he’d burn in hell, every time someone had said he was smart for a Wraetan—he flipped the switch, and an invisible armor went up over his dark skin. Leave me alone. I’m innocent, he repeated to himself. I did nothing wrong.

  But the switch was choirtoing broken.

  “It’s me, Aly. Stop! Shhhhh. It’s me, Kara.” She grabbed his wrists. He tried pushing her away but he felt sluggish, like all his limbs belonged to someone else. “What’s wrong with him?” Her hands felt cold. They felt real. But he knew they couldn’t be real. He didn’t even know if he was real anymore.

  A woman had entered behind her, so skinny she seemed to be made entirely of muscle. She had light skin and hair, tiny wrinkles at the edges of her green eyes. “He’s been drugged,” she said.

  “Help me,” Kara said to her. Desperate. Begging. He’d never expected to hear her speak in that kind of tone.

  The woman leaned down and pushed Aly’s head against the wall, gripping him by his hair. With her free hand she pulled out a syringe and uncapped it with her mouth.

  “No.” He tried to free himself, but his body felt like it was filled with lead. Then the woman stuck the syringe into his neck and he felt a sudden release, like pressure let out of a balloon.

  “That should reduce the effects. Now get up, Aly,” she said. “We’re saving your life.”

  I’m the guy who’s going to save your sorry ass, Vincent had said. Everyone had seen him say it now in Aly’s playback. But not a single person in the galaxy believed Aly.

  He tried to shake himself out of this gods-awful nightmare. Bits of darkness still clung to his mind, but he felt them cracking, peeling, falling away like old paint.

  “We’re going home, Aly,” Kara urged. Easy for you to say, Aly thought. He had the Wray Town, but it was only ever a place he’d lived once—and he was never going back. He didn’t have a home.

  “What’s going on? Where are we?” he asked. He turned to the older woman. “Who are you?”

  It was Kara who answered. “We’re on Houl. This is my mom, Lydia. Can you believe it? She’s been here all this time—she came and found me and broke me out.”

  Aly felt his eyebrows raise halfway up his forehead. Would’ve gone back all the way if it were anatomically possible. He was an expert at being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and here was Kara’s mom, in the right place at the right time. A little too right.

  Kara told him he’d been there only a few hours—but that was impossible. He was sure it had been weeks.

  “It’s the drugs,” Kara’s mom said. “They manipulate the temporal experience. You’ll be dizzy too.”

  “‘Temporal experience’?” Aly still didn’t understand, and when Kara helped him up, he doubted his own legs.

  “Lean on me,” Kara said.

  We’re on Houl.

  What did he know about Houl? It was a planet on the Outer Belt. The atmosphere was unforgiving, and discarded parts had developed AI. The surface itself was covered with eel-like creatures that produced electromagnetic fields. Terrifying. Basically the perfect place to put a prison if you didn’t want anyone to escape. And he had a feeling it was Kalu’s.

  It was starting to come back now. Jeth had told him about a secret prison; Kara had told him about a place for experiments . . . He looked over her shoulder, at the door behind them, at the dead screens that had for hours been playing the same news. All those experts had said he was guilty. Was he guilty? The only thing that anchored him to any version of reality was Kara. But was she even real? Her eyes kept changing color. But she couldn’t be a hologram—she was supporting his weight.

  “Your eyes . . .” he said. But he was too afraid to say the rest. What was happening to him?

  “Come on, Aly,” Kara said. “We gotta move.”

  “Let’s,” her mom agreed. Aly noticed that Kara didn’t look all that much like Lydia. Must take after her dad’s side . . .

  The hallway was a cylinder, not a right angle to be seen. It felt like they were inside a hard-boiled egg. It made walking almost impossible. Besides, he still felt numb and slow from whatever they’d given him, and he stumbled after almost every step.

  Lydia pulled out a handheld, and a dimensional blueprint projected into the air. He understood, through the fog in his brain, that the shimmering hologram must be an image of the prison. It looked like a black cube of sliding, interconnected pieces. And they were inside of it.

  Lydia nodded. “State of the art. Made on the backs of Houlis. The red marks show where the NX droids are stationed.” She pointed at the moving dots. It meant the holo was somehow online. That Kara’s mom’s holo was somehow online. “This is our exit.” Lydia brought her hand to the image and zoomed into the south quadrant, section 7E. Aly thought—no, he knew—that there were way too many red dots between here and there.

  “Pavel’s there, too,” Kara said, pointing to section 7E. Aly felt something tight in his chest melt away. He’d known the soldiers took P when they got arrested on Rhesto, and Aly had been scared they’d strip the little guy down and sell the pieces for scrap.

  Another tubular hallway intersected theirs, but they continued straight as Kara filled him in on the schematics of the prison—three columns and three rows made up of smaller cubes that moved separately, forever shifting, changing orientations. Each one ran on its own systems of plumbing, air, and artificial gravity.

  Aly felt himself coming back to clarity, desperate to piece together the information, clawing at it like those crazy feral cats in the Wray.

  “There have to be hundreds of configurations,” Aly said slowly, sliding the toggle bar on the hologram back and forth to watch the way the prison rotated.

  “It was designed that way, so that escape would be impossible,” Lydia said.

  “Is it?”

  When Lydia didn’t answer, Kara did. “We’ll see,” she said, with that same shrug she did—but it was less cynical, more hopeful than it was before. “It’s not operating at full capacity. There are about thirty combinations.”

  Still: The odds weren’t great.

  They arrived at a hatch that Lydia opened with the keypad. This seemed wrong—why did Lydia know the combination? How had they even accessed his cell in the first place? Where had she gotten the holographic map?

  Lydia disappeared, and they followed her through a transit
ional chamber between sections that worked like an air lock, with no climate control or gravity. He nearly froze his nipples off as he swam through the air toward the opposite door. Kara’s long braid trailed behind her like a tail. Through the window he could see a hallway ahead, same as the one behind them—and when Lydia breached the hatch, they fell through and got sucked sideways to the right. But it wasn’t sideways at all in this section. It was the floor. That’s why the hallway was shaped as a cylinder.

  Who’d designed this thing? He had to help Lydia up, following blindly. Aly noticed that she’d started limping after the last fall, but she was trying to play it off, power through it. Aly could tell, though. And by the way Kara kept reaching out to help her mom, he knew she could too.

  Lydia glanced at the map, where three red dots were converging. “Right. As fast as you can. Now.”

  They all quickly skirted around a corner, just missing a droid. There was a trick to evading them, a start-and-stop motion, a rhythm that felt wrong until it didn’t—same as the clutch on a pod. Except now they weren’t just cruising from point A to point B. They were running for their lives.

  Whatever Lydia had injected him with was finally kicking into high gear, and he started to realize that they were being tracked by the deadliest machines the UniForce had ever produced. He was sobering up quick.

  And that’s when he started really paying attention.

  “Are these jail cells?” Aly asked, pointing to the glass panes that lined either side of the corridor. Each cell was transparent from certain angles and completely dark from others, like the lens of a solar glass. Inside one of them he saw the silhouette of a woman—at least he thought it was a woman. She was hunched over and looked as if she might be crying.

  He wanted to shatter the glass, pull her up to her feet, and tell her to run—but where? He didn’t even know how they were getting out.

  “We have to keep moving, Aly,” Kara said.