Zenith

by Sasha Alsberg

It was how he’d come to be so good at following Kalee and her Spectre.

  How he’d come to notice the grace with which Androma Racella walked. And her hair—a soft shade of pale blond to others that was much more to him. In sunlight, it shifted to a white so bright, it reminded him of freshly fallen snow. In darkness, it took on a silver sheen the color of the moon.

  In the portrait before him, he’d painted her in two halves.

  One bright white beneath the shining sun, almost blue at the points where it hung in shadow. The other half of her, he’d painted a muted gray, Androma’s hair like liquid moonlight spilling across her shoulders, the perfect accent to her stormy eyes.

  He’d thought it a masterpiece. One of the best he’d ever done. And on that night, he’d been on his way out of his room, pride and a bottle of his father’s best Griss warming his chest, when he saw them leaving to take the transport for a joyride.

  * * *

  Valen closed his eyes and breathed deep.

  His chest ached, as if it were about to split down the middle.

  Tonight no shadows slipped by outside his doorway. No footsteps scampered along the cool marble floor, no hushed whispers or muted giggles bounded off the crisp white walls as the two girls rushed by, heading for Kalee’s room.

  He should have stopped them.

  He should have grabbed Kalee’s wrist and begged her not to go. Fallen to his knees like a child, or simply scooped her up and hauled her away while she screamed obscenities in his ear.

  The memories pulled him under again.

  * * *

  “Valen.”

  His mother’s voice, soft and broken, behind his closed door.

  “She... She’d want you there. You’re her brother, Valen.” A deep sigh, followed by the unmistakable sound of her sniffing back tears.

  He closed his eyes. He wouldn’t cry.

  If he cried, the chasm in his chest would open wide, and he’d fall, and he’d keep falling until he reached the end.

  His mother had always been strong. But tonight, she was like fractured glass. If he pressed too hard, she’d break. And then who would be there to pick up the pieces? Certainly not his father. General Cortas was busy giving press conferences and formal statements, and beneath his facade of cool, diplomatic calm was a belly full of liquor, downed from the cabinet in the back of his closet.

  The chasm in Valen’s chest began to open, the heat in his eyes threatening to turn into flames. He blinked once. Twice. He could hear the moment his mother gave up and left, and the room seemed to take on a sudden chill in her absence.

  So Valen sat and stared down at the portrait again, forcing himself to look, to see.

  He’d done an excellent job, so real in his brushstrokes that it almost seemed as if Androma Racella was staring up at him now.

  He didn’t want to do it.

  Gods, he didn’t want to at all.

  But tonight, Valen lifted his brush and uncapped a fresh set of colors ripe for creation.

  His paintbrush, clutched in his hand, nearly snapped in two. But with each stroke, he let the sorrow slip away and something harder and stronger took its place. When he was done, he realized he’d been wrong before.

  The old painting was child’s play. Now he’d finally created a masterpiece.

  He hung it up to dry and left the room, casting only one glance back over his shoulder.

  Androma Racella stared at him from the wall.

  Half of her, the moonlit side, he’d left untouched. But the other he’d taken his time with, her face coated in splatters of crimson, in shades of purple so dark they looked nearly black against her pale, smooth skin.

  Wet red paint trickled down her cheeks and slipped from the canvas onto the floor. A soft drip, drip, drip that reminded him not of tears, but of his sister’s blood.

  A masterpiece indeed, as if Andi had ripped off the mask she’d been wearing and revealed to the world her second self, the one she’d been hiding just beneath the surface for so long.

  With effort, Valen tore his eyes from the painting and closed the door.

  The hallway was empty, the sprawling estate whisper silent. Everyone had already gone, adorned in shades of muted Arcardian gray, to attend Kalee’s funeral.

  Androma Racella would not be in attendance. Instead, she was bound in chains, awaiting a trial she would not win. Thrown behind bars, stuck in some deep, impenetrable darkness that no color could thrive in—and no one, no matter how strong, could survive.

  Until the injection finally stole her away.

  Valen took equal amounts of pain and comfort in this as he walked.

  They could throw Androma into the Pits of Tenebris for as long as they liked—even give her the death sentence—but it wouldn’t bring Kalee back.

  When he passed by his sister’s room, he caught the slightest hint of her summertime scent.

  It lingered like a distant breeze, quickly swept away when reality took its place.

  The chasm in him broken, Valen Cortas fell to his knees in Kalee’s doorway and wept.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  * * *

  ANDROMA

  ANDI WOKE TO pain lurching through her skull.

  She was lying on her back, staring up into the darkness. Or she could have been staring down, for all she could tell. There was no end to it—no glimmer of moonlight shimmering on the walls, no smudged outline of her feet sprawled out in front of her as she slowly sat upright.

  This wasn’t like the transport.

  There it had been black all around, but the too-hot heat of a ship’s working engine beneath her—a feeling that reminded her just enough of the Marauder—kept her calm. Calm enough to focus on the plan. The prize at the end of the Lunamere tunnel.

  This was something else entirely.

  This darkness felt as if it held a thousand watching eyes, a pressing sort of black that seemed to seep into her very soul, settling deep inside the marrow in her bones.

  She shivered, but she didn’t think it was entirely due to the cold.

  The ground beneath her was rough, made of stones that felt like blocks of ice. Andi ran her hands across it, pleased to discover that her shackles were gone. As she moved to push herself to her knees, however, her head seemed to wobble as if under the stupor of spiced Rigna.

  Or, Andi thought, as she raised her hands to her temples, feeling a lump where some Xen Pterran guard had punched her with his electric gauntlets, the stupor of whatever tranq they knocked me out with.

  This could have been her life—should have been her life. Locked away behind bars, awaiting the death penalty, the ghost of her best friend the only thing to keep her company.

  That familiar wave of fear spiked through her, and Andi wanted to reach for her swords, to slash and slice and tear apart that piece of herself as she tore apart the bodies of others. Death after death, to cover up Kalee’s. To give herself the kind of fate she deserved.

  But then a groan sounded out from beside her.

  You’re not alone, Andi remembered.

  “What the hell?” Dex rasped. “Andi?” Seconds passed, with the sound of his labored breathing seeming to echo against the cold stone walls. She could hear his hands as they groped against the floor, searching. She didn’t even flinch away as his fingertips scraped hers and he froze. “Please tell me this is Andi, and not some love-hungry Xen Pterran carriage slug named Stubby.”

  Despite herself, Andi laughed. The massive slugs were gruesome, oily beasts that tried to bed anything with a heartbeat. “It’s me,” Andi said. Then she pulled her hand away, immediately colder with the absence of his touch.

  “How long have we been out for?” Dex asked.

  “Hell if I know,” Andi said.

  Time seemed to have slipped away from them. Soyina had said they only had one hour.
/>   Hardly enough time to make their way out of their cell and find Valen, especially with shadows as thick as the obsidinite walls surrounding them.

  Andi reached down, feeling the varillium cuffs around her wrists with relief. For a moment, she feared they wouldn’t be there, that somehow the Lunamere guards had managed to break the impenetrable varillium—impossible as that may be without the right tools—or that Soyina had taken Dex’s Krevs and left them in here to rot together.

  A terrible turns of events that would have been.

  But there the cuffs were. Cold on her wrists, and with them, a surge of solid hope. Andi pressed the small button on the back of each cuff, and light flooded from them. A talisman to keep the shadows at bay.

  “The best gift you’ve ever received, Andi,” Dex said. “I wonder who gave them to you?”

  She remembered the day he had gifted them to her, and how many Krevs he’d saved up to pay for the cuffs to be designed and installed by a surgeon he had connections with on a tiny rogue moon near the center of Mirabel. The installation had been painful, but once the cuffs were in place, Andi felt nearly whole again. On the outside, at least. They were a gift she’d always be grateful for.

  Andi sighed. “One of these days, Dextro Arez, I’m going to help you pull your head out of your own ass.”

  Andi turned away, then slowly rose to her feet, ignoring the shouts of pain from her fight-sore muscles. The cell had one gate, with obsidinite bars so thick that Andi instantly knew they’d have been screwed without Soyina’s help. The material was almost as strong as varillium. There was no way they would have been able to break out of here otherwise.

  She pressed her face against the cool bars, staring out into the black abyss beyond.

  No movement. No shadowed shapes milling about. Far off, she thought she could hear screams, or cackles of laughter. But the darkness had a way of playing tricks on one’s senses.

  “My head feels like it’s been cracked in two,” Dex whined.

  Andi rolled her eyes. “If you’re done complaining,” she said, remembering how much of a baby Dex could be when he had an ailment of any sort, “we need to get moving. We don’t know how much time has passed, and if we don’t make it to Soyina with Valen in under an hour, we’re not leaving this dump alive.”

  Dex rolled to his knees, cursing as he stretched out his muscles.

  “Voluntarily letting myself get beat into submission,” he said, “is not one of my prouder moments in life.”

  Andi raised a brow as she braided her hair back from her face, then flexed her muscles to test for any weak spots she hadn’t noticed earlier. “I wasn’t aware you had any moments to be proud of.”

  Dex hauled himself upright. “You’re the worst partner I’ve ever had, Androma Racella.”

  Andi stuck out her tongue at him, then reached out to test the cell gate. The handle turned, but the gate was heavy. She leaned against it, digging into the bars with her shoulder.

  The gate creaked and groaned in protest.

  “I’d say I agree with you on that point,” Andi whispered, stepping aside to make room for Dex as he joined her, “but I think Soyina takes the award on this one.”

  They pushed on the gate together. “Soyina has her charms,” Dex said through gritted teeth. “You have to admit it.”

  Andi seriously doubted that, but focused her attention on their escape.

  “This would be a good time to talk,” Dex said.

  Andi sighed. “We’re in the middle of a prison with the clock literally ticking down on our lives, and you want to talk now?”

  Their shoulders pressed up against each other as they worked at the gate. “I can’t seem to get you alone,” Dex said. “So, yes, while we’re trapped inside of a prison cell, it seems like the best option.”

  “We don’t owe each other a conversation,” Andi said. “We just have to finish this job, and the deal is done.”

  “There are two sides to the story we share, Androma.”

  Andi grimaced. “I don’t need to hear your excuses, Dextro. Now push.”

  “If we get out of here alive, promise me you’ll just hear me out?” Dex whispered. “I won’t ask again. We can talk about the past, and...end it for good.”

  “Things ended when you sold me out.”

  “Five minutes,” Dex said. “Please, Androma. Don’t make me beg.”

  She smiled then. That would be interesting.

  “Five minutes,” she said. “If we get this damned gate open and get Valen safely out of here.”

  With a final shove, the gate popped open. It swung outward with a horrible cry, then hung ajar, the light from Andi’s cuffs casting crooked shadows against the black wall just beyond, no more than a few arm’s lengths away. No guards came running. No prisoners shouted out from cells nearby.

  The darkness was strange and still, just begging them to step out of their cell and explore.

  Andi looked left, then right.

  Nothing but bars, as far as the light from her cuffs allowed her to see.

  For a moment, she and Dex simply stood there, staring out at the narrow hall, their boots frozen on the threshold of their cell.

  “Looks like I’m halfway to earning my five minutes. What’s the matter, Baroness?” Dex finally whispered. Andi could feel the warmth of his breath on her cheek. “Scared?”

  She feared a lot of things.

  Loneliness. Losing the lives of her crew or damaging her ship beyond repair.

  But not darkness. That was a part of her; the very thing that had allowed her to survive for this long.

  Only one hour—or less, depending on how long they’d been out for—and the silence would be shattered by blaring alarms, the frenzied tap of guard boots on stone floors, the click of bullets sliding into rifle chambers held by guards who would shoot not to disarm, but to kill.

  This is what she had trained her whole life for.

  The thrill of the moment had arrived.

  Without a word, Andi took a step forward, shedding the weakest parts of herself as she allowed the Bloody Baroness to take over.

  Dex followed, and together, they left their empty cell behind.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  * * *

  DEX

  NEVER AGAIN, DEX THOUGHT.

  Never again would he allow one of his clients to outsmart him and land him in a situation like the present one.

  Rescue missions.

  They were not his idea of fun.

  After this Dex would go to one of the warm moons of Adhira. He’d lie by the golden water’s edge with a beautiful, soft-skinned woman by his side, preferably one who spoke sweet nothings into his ears. One whose favorite type of makeup was rouged lips instead of blood-splattered cheeks. One who didn’t separate limbs from bodies, or stomp through piles of corpses in the middle of some dark, dank prison moon in the most miserable system in Mirabel.

  That woman stood beside Dex now in the darkness, brushing her purple-streaked hair back from her face. Splatters of red had mixed in with the other strands.

  Dex hadn’t even seen the guards appear from the black before Andi cursed and was on them, tackling the first so that his head slammed into the stones with a sickening crack.

  “Help me finish him!” she’d ordered, and by the time Dex stole the electric short-whip from the guard and shocked him into unconsciousness, Andi had stolen a key ring off the other’s belt loop. Her arm had coiled back like a spring, and then she’d stabbed the guard in the eye with the largest, longest key.

  “Godstars, Andi,” Dex said now as he leaned over to inspect the corpse.

  The key looked strangely at home in his eye socket, perfectly positioned in the center, as if Andi had placed it there with an artist’s flair. The river of blood was already slowing to a trickle, pooling in a small puddle on the sto
ne floor beside his gaping mouth.

  Dex shuddered, then looked back up at her. The light from her cuffs made her look like a ghost, pale and speckled with the proof of more deaths.

  “If you haven’t noticed,” Andi said, leaning down and plucking the guard’s whip from his belt, “we’re short on weapons and time. I don’t have a lot of options here, Dextro.”

  “You shoved a key through his eye,” Dex said. He looked down at the corpse again, then back at Andi.

  She ignored him, a skill she’d always possessed, and pressed a button on the whip. There was a crackle, and an arc of blue spiraled out, bathing the hall in flickering light. The drying blood on her face looked dark as oil as her eyes met his. “If I didn’t take care of him, he would have sounded the alarm. Then we would have been facing fifty guards instead of two. Those aren’t odds I’m willing to bet on today.”

  As Dex stared at her, he suddenly understood the bare truth.

  There was no remorse in her eyes for the kills. Not even a flicker. There was nothing but the promise of the mission pulling her forward.

  Once, Andi felt things to the point that they nearly broke her, and she’d allowed her feelings to control every action. She’d cared deeply for him, and he’d felt the same feelings resonating inside.

  For years he’d wondered if the rumors about her weren’t entirely correct. If maybe the Bloody Baroness was just a show, a persona Andi had created to keep herself and her crew safe. He figured that when the metal shields covered up the Marauder, she mourned with her crew for the lives lost, the dark things she’d had to do in order to get the job done.

  Dex had been wrong.

  The Bloody Baroness didn’t feel remorse for these kills, nor had she mourned for the members of Dex’s crew she’d taken out when he’d captured her.

  “It’s not just a reputation, is it?” Dex asked.

  Andi raised a brow at him.

  “The Bloody Baroness,” he said, stepping past the fallen guards, wondering about who they were, what they would have done with their lives had they not ended up in this pile at his feet. The Bloody Baroness was Andi, through and through, and probably had been since the day she stole his ship. Now she turned to the darkness, standing tall and strong as she stared ahead, not a hint of fear on her beautiful face.