Last of Her Name

by Jessica Khoury

  But I’m not alone. I’m not the only one in danger.

  “Get away, Clio,” I whisper.

  She shakes her head. “You wouldn’t leave me.”

  “Clio, go.” Whatever’s about to happen, I can’t let her get mixed up in it.

  Her hand locks around my wrist. She looks at me, eyes blazing, and whispers, “No.”

  I push her, hard. She stumbles away, eyes widening with shock.

  “Get away from me!” I shout at her, as tears burn hot in my eyes. “Get as far away from me as you can! I don’t want you here!”

  She slips away, face pale, as the vityazes close in on me. I have nowhere to run. No escape, no weapon. I lose sight of Clio altogether. I hope she finds my parents, that they can keep her safe.

  “You, girl,” Volkov says. “Come here. Don’t be afraid. I will not harm you.”

  He’s going to kill me.

  Whatever the direktor says, I don’t believe him. He’s going to kill me and I’ll never get the chance to explain the truth. That I’m not what they think I am. I can’t possibly be. I’m so terribly ordinary. Just Stacia Androva, just a vintner’s daughter, an apprentice mechanic, a nobody. I could explain that to them, I could make them understand, if I could just find my voice. But I can barely see straight; the room closes in around me. I feel myself shrinking, vision shrinking to a point. This is all wrong, wrong, wrong.

  “Alexei!”

  My mom’s voice rings across the room. I stiffen, then whirl to see her pushing her way forward. Dad is behind her, eyes intent on the direktor.

  Alexei. She called him Alexei, his first name.

  “Elena?” says the direktor, his eyes widening a little. Then, for the first time, I see a glint of real emotion touch his gaze: fury. “You …”

  He knows my parents.

  The room tilts around me, and then my mom shouts: “Stacia! Run!”

  She grabs the vityaze’s gun from his belt and shoots, aiming for Alexei Volkov, but the vityaze throws himself in the way, taking the energy bolt meant for the direktor. He drops, and my mom curses, firing again, but Volkov is already moving behind a wall of his own men; the shot goes wide.

  The hall erupts into chaos; I lose sight of my parents as the sound of gunfire erupts, the vityazes shooting into the crowd. Volkov shouts, his words lost in the noise. Everyone is screaming, bodies are colliding. The crowd of parents crashes into the wall of vityazes. Hands reach for daughters, trying to pull them to safety, only to be ripped apart by searing bolts from the vityaze guns. A terrible smell fills my nose, and I realize with a sickening twist that it’s the smell of burnt flesh.

  For a moment I cannot move, shock immobilizing my every atom. But then someone bumps into me—a vityaze, reeling from a punch thrown by someone’s dad—and I burst into motion, my hands closing around his staff. We’re nose to nose. I can see through his red helmet to his green eyes, which are wide and surprised. He’s younger than I’d have thought. He twists the staff hard, but all the climbing and running I do in the hills behind Afka have made me strong, and I wrench the other way, almost getting the staff free—

  Then the wall behind Volkov explodes.

  I’m thrown off my feet, landing hard on my back as the glass dome overhead shatters. Instinctively I curl up, hands over my head as glass and plaster crash all around. Smoke and dust fill my lungs, and I gasp for breath, ears ringing, stars dancing in my eyes. Dimly, over the high note singing in my skull, I can hear screams, but I’m too disoriented to tell whose voices they are. And the air is too thick with smoke to see anything at all. Someone stumbles past me, little more than a vague, sobbing shadow.

  What happened?

  Are we under attack?

  Feeling a wave of heat from my left, I turn to see flames spreading along the far wall. Choking on the smoke, I search for something to grab on to amid the rubble.

  My hands lands on something soft and warm.

  I look down, and bile rushes up my throat. I jerk my hand away and fall back.

  It’s a face, belonging to a body sheathed in red armor. Green eyes stare up at me through a helmet that’s been half blown apart. A shard of it is lodged in the young vityaze’s cheek, but he doesn’t feel the pain.

  He doesn’t feel anything, and he never will again.

  I stare at him blankly, then push myself to my feet and stumble through the chaos. Pressure expands in my chest, squeezing my heart and making my ribs ache. Is it from the explosion, or just rising panic? My parents are in here, somewhere. Clio is here. Alive? They have to be. They have to be—

  “Stacia!”

  Out of the smoke looms a tall figure in a gas mask. I’m still clutching the dead vityaze’s staff, and I punch a button on its rubber grip. White lightning sizzles along the rod.

  “Stay back!” I raise it, arms shaking.

  “Stacia, it’s me!” His hand raises the mask briefly.

  Pol.

  “Come with me!” he shouts, hooking an arm around me and helping me to my feet. We stumble over the vityaze’s body. I blink hard, trying to make sense of his appearance. The world spins around me the way it did that time I crashed one of the dories, driving too fast through the vineyard. It had rolled six times, with me bouncing around inside. I feel the same dizzying disorientation, breath suspended as I wait to see where I land, if I will live or die or find myself horribly injured. No space in my head to think beyond that. Every moment is a jumble, and my brain can’t keep up.

  “My parents and Clio—”

  “It’s you he wants, Stacia. They’ll be fine. We have to go!”

  “No!” I try to push him away, but a sudden flare of pain seizes my left leg and instead I end up gripping him just to stay upright. I can’t worry about that right now, though, not when I could be searching for my family. We pass more bodies, and not all of them are vityazes. In one horrible moment, I find myself staring into Ivora’s open eyes, but she isn’t staring back. I try again to pull away from Pol.

  “Stacia!” He only tightens his arm around me and I’m forced to turn and face him, his featureless mask smeared with—is that blood?

  “Pol, let go of me!” The pressure inside me is still growing. I feel like I’m going to explode any moment. I have find my parents, have to find Clio.

  “A war is about to break out,” he says. “And this is where it starts, Stacia. Here, in this room. And I have orders.”

  “Orders?” I shake my head. “No, Pol! I’m not leaving until I find them!”

  My hand tightens around the staff, but I know I won’t use it on him. He pulls me away, through the gaping hole where the explosion was centered. I don’t see any sign of Alexei Volkov.

  We plunge out of the town hall and into the street, which has erupted into chaos. The sky, now dark, is filled with smoke from a dozen fires. I blink at the scene, unable to believe this is Afka. The houses across the street are burning. People run every which way, screaming or shouting or begging for help. Pol passes by them all, dragging me along with him. With the pain in my leg, I have no choice but to follow. I can barely stand on my own, and it’s getting worse. He’s limping too, obviously still in pain from the beating he took.

  “Pol—” With a cry of pain, I stumble to my good knee and drop the staff. Letting go of him, I put a hand to my calf and find it covered in blood. Shrapnel is buried in the muscle. I stare at it, not accepting that the ugly, mangled flesh is my own. It looks like a bad makeup effect. But the pain feels real enough. Too real. I sway, nauseated. My head pulses and I freeze up, half expecting to wake up and find myself in bed, sweating and disoriented, but free of this nightmare.

  “Stacia! Snap out of it!”

  Pol lifts me in his arms with surprising ease, then takes off at a jog. I bounce against his chest, suppressing a whimper as each step sends a jolt of pain through me, excruciating reminders that the nightmare is real and there will be no waking up.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he pants. “It was supposed to b
e a distraction. No one was going to get hurt!”

  I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to make a plan. I have to go back. I can’t just leave Clio and my parents in that burning building. But my mind is squeezed with pain and confusion. I can’t even follow what direction Pol is taking me in. My town, which I thought I knew blindfolded, seems suddenly foreign, everything turned inside out. The smoke and flames and screams have turned Afka into a grotesque mockery of itself.

  Volkov’s face haunts me, a ghost I cannot shake. You … I keep seeing the dawning recognition in his eyes when he looked at my parents. It makes me sick.

  Pol carries me through a patch of trees, away from the town center. Sharp branches bristling with rust-colored needles claw at us, but he wrenches free of them, stepping into a trimmed backyard. I blink, vaguely recognizing the large house ahead. Pol has shed his gas mask; I hadn’t even noticed. There’s an angry red scratch across his cheek, probably from the trees we crashed through, and an ugly bruise on his temple is evidence of the vityaze’s kicks. There must be a whole patchwork of bruises under his clothes.

  “The Kephts’ place?” I murmur. A wave of dizziness passes through me. I’ve lost a lot of blood, and my strength seems to be draining away with it.

  Pol goes to a door and enters a passcode, and it opens to a dark staircase going down to the cellar. “The Kephts are part of our cell. Or were part of it, before the mayor betrayed us. Doesn’t look like he told Volkov about this place yet, but we have to hurry. With any luck, the direktor died in the blast.”

  Why is he so calm? Why is he acting as if he’d expected all this to happen? He should be freaking out right now—like me. Instead, he’s collected and sensible, and that frightens me more than if he were running around screaming.

  The cellar is crammed with boxes and old furniture and smells weirdly of onions, but the center of the room is open. I stare, confused; the room is huge, much larger than the house above, and built like a war bunker. The cellar must expand beneath the Kephts’ yard.

  Pol clicks on a dim light and eases me onto a pile of folded canvas. He curses when he sees my leg.

  Tearing my pants up to my knee, he exposes the gash in my calf. I hiss, gripping a shelf and trying to focus on the cans of slinke jam stacked there, instead of the pain. I think of how Mrs. Kepht gave me one of those homemade jams last year on my birthday. I think of how she’s now lying dead in the town hall, shot by the direktor Eminent.

  “No shrapnel left in it, I think,” Pol says, dragging my attention back to the pain in my leg. “But you need a skin patch to close that up. And an antibiotic.”

  “Well, I don’t think we’re going to find any down here.” I grind my teeth together as the pain travels up my leg in fiery spikes.

  “You might be surprised,” he mutters. Then he rushes to pull a sheet off some sort of control panel across the room. It lights up, buttons and holos flickering in the shadows.

  “Pol, what is happening? Why are we down here?”

  “You weren’t supposed to get hurt,” he says softly. “No one was.”

  I remember something he said earlier, about the blast being a distraction. I was too out of it to understand at the time, but now horror turns my blood cold. “Pol—are you saying—did you do this? People died! And what about my parents? What about Clio? She could be—” Stars, I can’t finish the thought. It’s too horrible. I push up onto my good leg, wobbling a bit. “I’m going back.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “You don’t give me orders! Especially not after you nearly blew me up!”

  “We had to get you out of there. A minute more and Volkov might have shot you.”

  I shake my head. Volkov is the last person on my mind. Nothing matters, nothing makes sense, except going back to the town hall and looking for my parents and Clio. They could be bleeding out right now.

  “What’s your plan, anyway?” I shout. “You can’t just expect me to hide underground like a scared—”

  “We’re not staying underground.”

  He presses his hand against a pad on the control board, and suddenly the floor begins to rumble. The entire center of the room splits into receding panels, revealing a dark space below, while above, the ceiling—and the Kephts’ grassy lawn—also begins to peel apart. Clumps of dirt rain down, and with a hiss, vents below me release pale, cold mist. I press myself against the pile of canvas, eyes wide as before me a large object rises from under the floor. Blue spotlights flicker on, illuminating the shape.

  I gasp.

  It’s a G-Class caravel, slightly larger than a dory and the color of rust. Shaped like an almond, with retractable gliding wings and a diamantglass-sealed cockpit, the little ship is clearly several generations old, a now-obsolete model. How long has it been down there?

  “Stacia,” Pol says, “meet the Laika.”

  Why in the blazing stars did Pol never tell me the mayor had a secret spaceship under his house? A spaceship Pol apparently has clearance to access?

  It’s like I’ve awoken into some bizarre alternate world. The ship is just the latest in a sequence of impossible revelations, proof that when I thought things couldn’t get any stranger, the universe is still playing me for the fool.

  So I stop trying to make sense of anything. My mind shrinks away and slams the door, leaving my skull hollow. I blink at the ship, feeling wholly disconnected. Somewhere inside me, a plug has been pulled, and a wire is frayed and sparking.

  As I stare, my vision begins to fade. My head swims and my eyelids drag. At first I think he might have drugged me, but then I realize I’m losing too much blood from my leg. Hypovolemic shock, I think vaguely. My mom told me about it, after I gashed my head racing the dory through the vineyard. You have to think, Stacia, before you do these things! she’d lectured.

  Think, Stacia. Think …

  I try to call out to Pol, but I’m too weak. My vision begins to dim, and I raise a hand feebly, but he’s too focused on the controls to notice.

  “I have to get to Clio …” I whisper. “Please …”

  I slump over. The last thing I see is the hatch of the caravel slowly lowering open, and then I pass out.

  When I come to, I find myself strapped into a rickety seat with an array of buttons, levers, and holos in front of me. Numbers tick and needles sway over gauges. For the first few moments of consciousness, all the lights seem to wobble, like they’re underwater. The seat harness digs into my shoulders.

  Pol must have put me in the caravel.

  I fumble for the harness, dimly hearing him say my name. He’s to my left, also seated, hands on the controls.

  “Hey!” he says, glancing at me. “Easy. You passed out.”

  I groan and reach for my pants, pulling one side up to reveal the wound. Pol stuck a pain patch on my ankle, so everything up to my knee is completely numb. He also managed to wrap a bandage around my calf, neat and tight enough to make my mom proud.

  “I gave you a hemo supplement,” he says. “You lost a lot of blood, but you should be feeling better soon.”

  “Don’t launch,” I groan. “I have to get out of here. Have to—”

  I cut short as my eyes rise to the front window, and the view outside.

  Pol pauses on the controls to murmur, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  I’m too late.

  Amethyne is a violet pearl hovering above us, visible through the caravel’s glass roof. We’ve dropped away from the planet, a shining tear falling through space. From here, I can see the contours of its continents, the lines achingly familiar to me despite the fact I’ve only ever seen them on maps. Now, with my own eyes tracing the curves, it doesn’t seem real. Raising my hand, I pinch my home world between my thumb and forefinger, as if it were a jewel I could pluck from the sky.

  “No,” I whisper. “No no no no—”

  “We’re still not safe,” Pol says gruffly. “Union ships are already setting up a blockade, and three minutes ago someone took a scan of our ship. They’ve g
ot a tag on us now. We’ll have to detour, try to lose them in the noise of the central system, or they’ll follow us straight to the rendezvous point. How do you feel about seeing Sapphine?”

  He’s talking fast, trying to distract me from the fact that he’s prepping for warp.

  “Pol.” I feel tears in my eyes, sharp as acid. I’m still fighting through the fog of unconsciousness, still coming to grips with the fact I’m in a starship, floating in space. The curves of the caravel’s interior swim around me, surreal and undefined. “We have to go back. My parents and—and Clio. My best friend.”

  His hand tightens on the lever until his knuckles whiten. He draws a few breaths, and I stare at him intently, both to get his attention and to steady the nauseated tossing of my stomach.

  “You know this is wrong,” I say. “What about your father?”

  Pol shuts his eyes. He’s a wreck, with dirt and soot streaked across his face. His skin is mottled with purple bruises. There’s blood on his tunic—not his own, as far as I can tell. His dark curls are bound into an aeyla warrior’s knot at the back of his head, parting around his ivory horns, but several strands have pulled loose and are glued to the sweat on his brow. I notice then that he’s wearing a red scarf—his father’s. I’ve never seen Spiros without it. He must have given it to Pol during the chaos in Afka.

  Pol looks unraveled, inside and out. If I could just find the right words, I know I could sway him.

  “If the vityazes truly believe that I am some Leonov princess,” I say slowly, “they will kill them, Pol, for no reason other than their connection to me. Or worse, they’ll torture them, trying to find out where I am. But if I go back, if I just explain that this is all a mistake—”