After my hair dries, I let it down and shake it out, studying my reflection in the window. Now that I see it, the purple is actually sort of cool.
“Stacia …” Pol turns slightly, not quite meeting my eyes. “Did you mean what you said back on the caravel? About … never trusting me again?”
I draw my knees to my chest and hug them. “Pol, I … don’t know. Look, this is all nuts. Right now, all I can think about is getting Clio out of the Committee’s hands.”
“You’ve always looked out for her, ever since we were little,” he murmurs. “Stacia and Clio, the Twins, your dad called you. As bonded as the moons of Amethyne.”
I nod. “I’m the only person she has.”
“No,” he says, and he reaches out to grip my hand. “She has me too.”
I look down at his fingers, stained purple from the dye. My hand briefly tightens around his, but then I pull away, inhaling deeply.
“Look at us,” I say, trying to lighten my voice. “Not much of a rescue squad, are we?”
“Nonsense. All we have to do is steal a spaceship, join up with a hidden resistance army, battle our way to the center of the galaxy, retake the throne, and somehow not die in the process.” He shrugs. “We’re Afka’s wrestling champion and top mechanic. This will be a piece of seaweed cake.”
I make a face and brush crumbs from my lap. “I’ll settle for just saving Clio and getting as far away from the rest of it as possible.”
His lips part like he’s about to say something more, but then he sighs and falls silent.
We lie back as darkness falls, nestled in the musty cushions. One of the lamps is pricked with tiny holes, so it casts soft beads of light across the ceiling, like a net of stars. I turn off all the others but leave that one on. Pol nods off first, and I listen to him breathing beside me. When he sleeps, some of the worry drains from his face, but there’s still a crease between his eyes. I stare at it, reminded of the tattooed outcasts in the market. Impulsively, I reach out and softly touch the line, and Pol’s face scrunches reflexively. When he relaxes again, the crease is still there.
As I drowse off, I try hard to think about Clio, and how we’re going to get off this planet, and not how warm Pol’s fingers were in my hair.
The next day, we scour the market barges, searching for a transmitter so Pol can try to contact the Loyalists. While he digs through a scrapper’s junk pile, I slip to the stall next door, where a female eeda is selling passage credits.
“Anything to Alexandrine?” I ask her softly so Pol doesn’t hear through the thin stall partition.
She’s smoking a long pipe; when she pulls it from her lips, the smoke releases through gills in her neck. “Sure, if you got a thousand credits.”
“A thousand—” I swallow hard. “What about Amethyne?”
“See for yourself,” she says, sliding a tablet toward me. I press the option for Amethyne. Every departing vessel comes up as canceled.
“The Purple Planet’s gone full revolt,” she says. “Crazy Loyalists and those savage vityazes, blowing each other up. Bleedin’ shame too. There’s gonna be a wine shortage now.”
“Surely someone is going there?”
She shrugs. “Committee’s put up a blockade. No one in or out. Can’t even transmit a message to the planet. Fools have got themselves into stormy water now. Dunno what they were thinking, kidnapping the princess.”
“She wasn’t kidnapped. And the direktor himself said she isn’t the princess.”
The eeda shrugs. “Makes no difference to me. Leonovs, Committee, they’re all the same. Alexandrine thugs looking down on us adapted folk, always busting down doors and making up charges.”
Groaning in frustration, I turn away—only to bump into the next customer.
I stumble as the man reaches out to steady me.
“Get off!” I snap, pulling away.
“Pardon me, I didn’t mean to offend.”
The stranger’s voice is deep and polite. I blink, looking closer, but there’s not much to see. He’s got a gray hood pulled over his face so most of his features are cast in shadow. All I can make out is that he’s younger than his voice implies. He holds a wooden staff in one hand, which makes me think he might be an offworlder too, given how little wood I’ve seen on this planet.
“If you want passage,” I say, “better look elsewhere. This place is a rip-off.”
“Hey!” The eeda glares at me, jabbing her pipe in the air.
The stranger gives a half smile. “Actually, I have a ship of my own. I was thinking of registering it here, in case anyone might be looking for passage.”
My eyebrows rise a fraction. “Oh? Where you headed?”
“Alexandrine.”
“Really? I was just—” I cut short when I spot a pair of local Green Knight peacekeepers strolling our way. The sight of those uniforms is so achingly familiar, reminding me of all my friends on the force back home. But these knights are no friends of mine.
“Something wrong?” asks the stranger.
“No, nothing …” I turn around, hiding my face in case the knights look this way.
The eeda notices my evasive behavior and narrows her eyes. Panicking, I slip away before she can put two and two together, hoping my violet hair is enough to fool her. The stranger calls out, but his voice is lost in the noise of the street.
I spot a man walking with a pole across his shoulders. Wriggling eels hanging along its length create a useful curtain. I duck in front of him, letting him shield me from the knights until I can dart into the junk shop where Pol is still digging through piles of parts.
“Nothing,” Pol growls when I tug at him. “Not a single blazing—”
“We’ve got trouble,” I say.
“Maybe if we got aboard a ship, even just a fishing trawler with an old radio. We could—”
“Pol!”
I drag him out of the stall just as the knights at the fare booth look our way. The eeda is leaning across her counter, pointing right at me.
Pol curses.
We break into a run, pelting along the barge and leaping to the first quay we see, which crooks across the water to an aquaculture farm. We bust through glass doors into a massive floating greenhouse, past startled botanists bent above rows of plants.
“Sorry!” I shout over my shoulder as we trample over their soil beds. They curse at us, then make way for the knights. We break through the back door and onto another quay, this one taking us into a residential area. Rusty metal apartments are stacked five and six blocks high, their walls seeming to dance where wind turbines spin, drawing power from the air. The creaking, whirring sound fills our ears as we run. Children shriek and laugh as we fly past, jeering at the knights.
My lungs burn from the salt air, but Pol pulls me relentlessly onward. His hat has flown off; his horns glint in the sunlight. This quay seems endless, leaving us exposed for too long. We have no choice but to keep running. I can only hope that their guns aren’t set to kill.
We finally reach the next platform—a junkyard, by the look of it, with scrap metal in heaping mounds all around us. Pol turns the first corner, but we only find ourselves in a dead end.
“Back, back!” he shouts, and we spin, only to see it’s too late. The knights have us pinned.
Pol draws his gun. “Don’t come any closer!” he warns.
“Stacia Androva! Appollo Androsthenes! You are wanted on charges of terrorism, murder, and illegally entering Sapphine. Come quietly, and you’ll have a chance at trial. Resist, and we’ll bring in your bodies.”
Pol and I stand shoulder to shoulder, completely out of options. His free hand finds mine and squeezes it.
Never in a million light-years would I have thought I’d die in some stinking Sapphine junkyard with Pol Androsthenes. It’s so ludicrous that I find myself, absurdly, wanting to laugh. But fear twists in me like a cold eel.
He glances at me. “Stay here.”
“What—”
He raises his
gun and fires while running headlong at the pack of knights and yelling at the top of his lungs. They shoot back, a barrage of Prismic energy rays slicing the air. I duck behind a rusty generator for cover, and when I look up again, the gunfire has stopped—thanks to Pol.
He’s in their midst, ducking and grabbing, twisting and kicking. I’ve trained with Pol and his dad most of my life, learning self-defense techniques, but I’ve never seen him like this. He’s unstoppable. He knocks a knight’s gun away, then pulls the man’s arm, using him as a shield to take the pulse from another weapon. Then he drops the unconscious peacekeeper and lunges at the shooter, while managing to kick the legs out from another. The knights shout to cease fire so they don’t hit more of their own, and I spot one activating the comm on his helmet to call for backup.
I sprint for him.
“—suspects in Gamma Sector, Karn’s Junk Barge—” He cuts short when the blade of my hand chops his throat. Choking, he drops to his knees, and with my good leg, I plant a roundhouse kick to his temple, laying him out cold.
When I look up, fists still on guard, Pol is standing surrounded by the rest of the knights, all unconscious or groaning.
“Nice hit,” he says. “You all right?”
I nod, hiding the pain shooting through my wounded leg. He’s breathing hard, but he’s unhurt. Something warm and strange spreads through me as I look at Pol, standing there with his hair wild around his horns and his foot still pressing an unconscious knight to the ground. I realize—with a shock—that it’s a feeling of awe.
That little revelation, for some reason, leaves me deeply uncomfortable.
We hear shouts from farther in the junkyard.
More knights. Loads more.
Pol steps in front of me as I stoop to pick up one of the fallen guns. But then more peacekeepers appear from behind us, and in seconds, we’re surrounded. There must be two dozen of them, all screaming at us to drop to our knees.
I press against Pol, squeezing the weapon, bracing myself for the pulses that will knock us out.
But instead of the hiss of Prismic rays, I hear startled shouts.
Opening my eyes, I see the peacekeepers drop one by one. Their guns hit the metal floor plates with dull thuds, and the men follow, crashing to the ground and pressing into it as if an invisible heel were crushing them. They cry out in strangled voices, eyes wide and pained. But strangest of all is the distortion in the air around them, a pattern of transparent triangles that shimmer and shift with a sound like sizzling electricity. It’s as if I’m looking at the world through a kaleidoscope; air and quay and peacekeepers appear to warp and fragment, broken down into sharp planes and angles. I blink hard, but the illusion doesn’t clear.
Pol and I look up, bewildered, to see a hooded man stepping over the writhing knights, his staff raised before him, his gray robes brushing the ground. Through the distortion in the air, it takes me a moment to make out his face.
“You!” I shout.
The stranger from the fare stall approaches us slowly, and I can just see his two silver eyes glinting beneath his hood.
“Stay back!” Pol warns, raising his weapon again.
The man freezes, then slowly lowers his hood. The distorted illusions in the air vanish as he relaxes his grip on the staff.
He’s even younger than I first thought, no older than we are. His head is clean-shaven, his dark brown scalp traced with silver tattoos. Around his eyes, dark lines smear from his temples to the bridge of his nose, like he’s rubbed engine grease across his face. But as I watch, the lines begin to fade, until I almost think they were just a trick of shadow.
“What are you?” I whisper.
His eyes flicker over me. “You must come with me.”
“Not a chance, pal,” says Pol, raising his gun.
“There are more knights coming,” says the stranger. “I can’t fend them all off, but I can get you off this planet.”
He turns and walks away, cloak swirling, not even looking back.
“He’s a tensor,” Pol growls. “A gravity witch. You saw what he did to these guys.”
I glance at the peacekeepers, most of whom seem unconscious, but a few are still groaning and clutching their ribs.
“You mean these guys who were about to kill us? Pol, he saved our skins. I’ll take him over the knights, thank you.”
I dart after the stranger and hear Pol follow with a curse.
As I trail the cloaked boy through the market—he dodges the groups of guards as if he knows where they are before he sees them—I struggle to remember what I’ve heard of tensors. Not much. They always seemed more legend than reality, monks from the fringes of the galaxy who can manipulate gravity enough to crush a man into the size of an Amethyne grape. They make for good stories, but they aren’t supposed to show up in real life.
Then again, I’m not supposed to be on Sapphine, branded a terrorist and a princess, while my best friend is in the clutches of the most powerful man in the galaxy.
I guess my idea of normal is a bit obsolete these days.
The tensor leads us through the flotilla city, taking furtive routes to avoid the crowded markets and neighborhoods. He leads us to the docks where the eeda dropped us off yesterday.
“There,” he says, pointing to a ship. “Hurry, now. They’ll be onto us soon.”
“Stars above,” I sigh, melting with awe.
It’s a J-Class high-end clipper. I’ve never seen one before, except on holovision. Larger than our caravel, shaped like one of Sapphine’s graceful manta rays, it shines in shades of black and silver. Its name is engraved along the hull: Valentina.
It’s easily the most beautiful machine I’ve ever seen in my life, and I wish there were time to stop and admire it properly. But there are more knights nearby, starting to give us suspicious looks.
A hatch opens in the belly of the clipper, extending a stairway for us. Pol races up first, disappearing inside. The tensor waits, holding out a hand to assist me up. As if I need assistance climbing a blazing little stairway, but I take it, anyway.
“Why are you helping us?” I ask.
He pauses, my hand still in his. His dark eyes bore into me, more black than silver now.
“Please forgive my lack of manners,” he says, his tone almost too polite. “I assure you, once we’re safely in warp, I’ll properly introduce myself.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He glances at the knights, who are talking into their comm patches and approaching the ship.
Looking back at me, the tensor says, “You and I have a common enemy. Alexei Volkov. I think we can help each other.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Are you a Loyalist?”
A dark look flashes in his eyes. “Stars, no. I’m more of an … independent.”
That works for me.
We hurry into the clipper and up a ladder inside, into a wide, sleek bridge. This room alone is twice the size of Pol’s caravel. The door shuts behinds us, and over the comm system, Sapphino security is ordering us to identify ourselves. The tensor ignores them.
Furnished with sofas, tables, holoscreens, and even a bar, the Valentina is the height of luxury after the clanking tin can that got us off Amethyne. Stairs lead up to a balcony where the ship’s controls glow and blink, beneath a curving dome of diamantglass.
“Welcome aboard,” says the tensor. “You can sit there—”
“Drop the act,” Pol says, raising his gun. “I want some answers.”
I groan. “Pol …”
“Who are you?” he demands, moving between me and the tensor. “What do you want with Stacia?”
I look at the boy over Pol’s shoulder. “My friend is a little overprotective. Please—”
The tensor raises a hand, and the air around Pol’s gun folds like paper. Behind the strange, broken geometic panes, Pol’s hand appears stretched in two dimensions. The sound is terrible—like scraping, jagged glass on stone—making my ears ring.
Pol’s gun
bends and crumples, the metal folding inward on itself. He drops it with a startled cry, and when the weapon hits the ground, it’s nothing more than a ball of steel no bigger than my fist.
We both look up at the stranger. The black lines have appeared around his eyes again, and his irises gleam silver.
“I’m sorry I had to do that,” he says softly, in his same cold, controlled tone. “And I’m sorry I must do this. Truly, I am. But you see, I’m in a somewhat desperate circumstance.”
Before Pol or I can move, he flexes his fingers, and we both hit the deck. I gasp as my body is pressed into the floor, gravity dragging at my every atom. I feel like I’m back in the caravel, suffocating. The weight on my lungs makes it impossible to draw more than the thinnest of breaths. My head swims and my vision blurs. The tensor’s power is terrifying. Unnatural.
And like a fool, I walked right into his trap.
“Let … her … go!” Pol demands, his voice strained.
The tensor keeps his hand out, pinning us down as he lifts himself into the air. His robes swirl as he settles onto the balcony overhead, where the control board curves along the window. In moments, he has the clipper powered up, and we pull away from the docks and angle for the upper atmo. I can feel the ground dropping away, but I’m still pressed hard into the floor, Pol sprawled beside me.
Then the tensor finally releases us. I flip over, gasping down a breath. Beside me, Pol coughs and raises himself on trembling arms.
The tensor collapses into the captain’s chair, panting. His hands press to his face, but he can’t fully hide the black lines that have spread around his eyes.
Pol pushes himself onto his hands and knees. “Witch,” he breathes.
The tensor turns his back to us, calling weakly, “You’ll want to strap in before we accelerate.”
Pol takes a step toward the stairs to the balcony, but the tensor only raises a finger to bring him to his knees. But I can see the effort is draining the boy. The use of his ability seems to exhaust him.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says, almost pleadingly. “You have to understand, I don’t have a choice.”
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