Darken the Stars

by Amy A. Bartol

  Kyon keeps walking forward. His arms spread wide again. I cringe as he aims at the so-called diplomats on either side of the line of men in front of him. They react, scrambling to take cover as they pull out concealed weapons of their own, but there isn’t anywhere for them to hide here in the open; having selected this spot for their ambush, it has now turned on them. Kyon’s rapid-fire precision shots are unavoidable. The assembled men fall bleeding to the ground, each shot in the head by Kyon until every single one of them is dead in a pool of his own blood—all of them except for Em Sam.

  When Kyon reaches him, Em Sam is on his knees. Kyon holds both barrels of his guns to the ambassador’s forehead. “Did I get them all?” Kyon asks Em Sam.

  The ambassador doesn’t speak; he just closes his eyes and fervently nods his head. Sweat slides down the side of his face and a little bit of drool falls from his mouth.

  I hurry to Kyon’s side and lay my hand on his arm. “Kyon. You got them. There were only four who were charged with killing us. The rest were just backup,” I murmur in a placating tone.

  He continues to stare at Em Sam. He lifts the harbinger in his left hand, waving it negligently around at the dead bodies on the ground. “They were all complicit. Especially him.” Kyon presses the barrel of the harbinger in his right hand harder into Em Sam’s forehead, making the ambassador wince and whimper.

  “They said I had to,” Em Sam whines. “They said you wouldn’t kill me if you lived.”

  Kyon squats down in front of Em Sam, leaning closer to his ear. “They don’t know what I’ll do, Sam,” he says in a conspiratorial way. “They can’t see the future.” Kyon pulls back and smiles into Em Sam’s eyes before, boom! The gun in Kyon’s hand goes off, blowing a hole in Em Sam’s forehead.

  I jump in response to the noise. The shot jerks Em Sam back and he falls with his eyes wide open staring up at the sky. I should be used to this by now, but I’m not. I can only stand there looking down at Sam, shaking at the knees. “You didn’t have to kill him,” I say in a voice that doesn’t sound like mine.

  “Yes, I did,” he replies. He wraps his arm around my shoulder and pulls me to his side. “Brother Excelsior will know that you read the future, because I killed the snipers, but he’ll also know that I won’t allow you to be tested without them paying a price for it.”

  He shoves one of his harbingers back in his holster. Turning us around, he walks me back to the hawk-shaped ship. Entering it, he tells Chandrum, “You can get out here. I will have your ship returned to you.”

  “I will stay with you. You need my help,” Chandrum replies. “I didn’t know he would test her like this—he has been keeping me out of their circle when there is talk of you or Kricket,” he says. “The Brotherhood knows we’re friends as well as Brothers. Do you plan to go back the Sea of Stars now?” He’s worried. It’s like he’s our handler or something.

  “No,” Kyon replies, showing no emotion. “Kricket and I will remain in Urbenoster. I have plans to show her around her new city.” He says that like I own the place or something. “I plan to introduce her to her people.”

  “Her people?” Chandrum asks, looking startled.

  “The citizens of Urbenoster,” Kyon says this like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

  “But . . . she’s a priestess. The Brotherhood doesn’t allow them to mingle with common citizens.” Chandrum smiles like Kyon just said something completely ridiculous. “She should be with her own kind—with her sister Nezra. They’ve made a place for her at Freming House—for both of you. I understand that now that you’ve bonded to her, you won’t want to be apart from her, but you have to compromise. You know that the Brothers have rights to her gifts as well.”

  “No one has any rights to her but me. I tracked her. I found her. I fought for her. I claimed her. If it were not for me, she’d be dead to us. Those same Brothers who think they have a claim to her were also the ones who planned to assassinate her while she was in Rafe. When they did that, they forfeited any rights to her. Kricket and I won’t be staying at Freming House. We’ll be staying at my estate in Urbenoster. Should any of the Brothers want to meet her, they’ll have to do so at my leisure and only with my permission.”

  “You know that you will always have my loyalty,” Chandrum lies.

  “I know it,” Kyon lies as well.

  “Should I bring Nezra to you to greet Kricket?”

  Kyon looks at me and I stiffen at the mention of my half sister’s name.

  “No. Not just yet. I think Kricket needs time to adjust to her new life before we try to make them play nice together.”

  Chandrum ventures to smile. “You know Nezra.”

  “I do,” he agrees.

  “I’ll leave you here then.” Chandrum nods then turns to me, smiling. “It’s been a great pleasure to greet you, Kricket. Congratulations on your Pairing to Kyon. It was an honor to have been a witness to it.”

  I want to kick him off his ship. I doubt he would lift a finger to help us if things go bad for us. My smile is as bright as his as I say, “Yes, such a pleasure to meet you, Chandrum. Please give my regards to my sweet sister Nezra.”

  Chandrum doesn’t know if I’m being serious or sarcastic. Kyon knows, though. He sees that I’m brittle beneath my smiling veneer. Chandrum turns away and disembarks from his aircraft.

  I raise a shaky hand to my forehead, rubbing it. “He’s not loyal to you, but you know that.”

  “Yes, I know it,” Kyon agrees. “I don’t blame him. He’s weak. He has always been weak.”

  “You’re sure that they don’t know that I can tell when they’re lying?”

  “Who would tell them?” Kyon asks. “The only other person from Alameeda who knew about your ability to decipher lies was Em Nark, but he blew up somewhere over Rafe territory before he had the chance to reveal it, and I don’t tell your secrets to anyone.”

  “How do they know that I can see the future, then?” I ask him.

  “They knew your mother. They were sure you would inherit her gene.”

  “Why are they so sure?” I know that neither my older half sister, Nezra, nor my younger sister, Astrid, seem to have the trait.

  “When your mother was very young, she was unguarded. She gave Excelsior her predictions without thought. She was a naïve child. She didn’t understand the ramifications of what she saw. When Arissa was asked if any of her own children would inherit her ability to see the future she said, ‘I will bequeath it to my strongest daughter.’”

  “How did you know she meant me?”

  “How could she not?” he replies. “You survived Earth alone. Come, do you want to learn how to fly Chandrum’s Hallafast? If you crash it, it won’t cost me a thing.”

  I drop my hand as I stare at Kyon. “Did you just make a joke? Now? After what just happened out there?” I point outside where corpses are littering the hoverpad.

  He smiles. “Too soon?”

  “Yes.”

  “You cannot feel bad for them. They were going to kill us.” He takes my hand, leading me toward the front of the Hallafast. He hands me into one of the two seats. Leaning over me, he presses a button that activates the seat belts. They crisscross my body. He selects a small marble from several on the console and hands it to me. “Put this in your ear,” he advises. He takes the seat next to mine.

  “Will it eat my brain?” I ask.

  He looks confused. “No.”

  “Mind control?” I ask.

  “I wish.”

  I place the marble in my ear, and a microphone grows out of the earpiece to hover near my mouth.

  He takes the seat next to mine. “I’m going to engage the manual controls.” He presses some buttons, and two joysticks emerge from the console, one for each of us. Each joystick has a rollerball on top. “This aircraft has more advanced controls, but this is how most of us learn how to fly. Once you get the basics down, we’ll move on.”

  “You can’t be serious? You’re going to teach me t
o fly? Now?”

  “Why not?”

  “You just killed some people,” I reply.

  “People who were going to kill us,” he corrects. He gestures to the console in front of us. “This should take your mind off of it.”

  Indicating the joystick in front of me, he says, “Pull back on the stick—we rise. Push forward on the stick—we dive.” Using his thumb, he spins the rollerball on the top of the stick. “This controls direction.” He points to two buttons on the grip of the stick. “These control speed. Acceleration is the top button, deceleration is the bottom one.”

  “So the bottom one is the brake?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I stop us in midair, will we fall?”

  “No. We’ll hover, but someone will probably crash into us and then we’ll all fall in a fiery ball of death.” I frown at him and he shrugs. “It’s true. Here, I’ll start us off.”

  Kyon skillfully lifts the Hallafast up from the ground with the grace of a blooming flower. Through the side window, I observe the silver wings of the ship ripple and spread out wider. We hover in the air. I look at Kyon who I find is watching me. He nods toward the stick in front of me.

  “What? Now?” I ask him in panic.

  “Yes. Now.”

  “What if I crash?”

  “Then I’ll be really angry with you.”

  “You’re not going to let us crash, right?” I ask.

  “I might let us crash. It’s not my Hallafast.” He’s telling the truth.

  “You’re so mean,” I say as I exhale.

  I grip the stick and press the top button. We jerk forward with neck-snapping force, which makes me grip the stick harder, which makes us rocket faster.

  “Ease off on the acceleration,” Kyon says calmly.

  I shift my finger to the bottom button and squeeze it hard. Both of our heads lurch forward and I hear loud crashes like plates shattering coming from the back of the airship. I shift my finger off the brake and gently accelerate once more. I swallow hard.

  “Chandrum is going to be mad at you,” Kyon teases me.

  “Good,” I reply.

  We’re heading straight for traffic—it’s moving from right to left in front of us. Beyond that, there’s a very tall building. “Ease into the flow,” Kyon instructs.

  “How?” I growl.

  “Use your thumb, slide the rollerball left and merge in between the other ships.”

  I use the pad of my thumb to roll the controller. We shift in the air, banking in the direction we need to go.

  “You’re going too slow. This isn’t a spix,” he admonishes.

  “You think?” I retort with a scowl.

  “Speed up,” he barks.

  I squeeze the top button—the ship goes faster, but my seat begins to shake. “Why is my seat rumbling?” I ask with wide eyes.

  “Because you’re dangerously close to that Terraglide next to you,” he says calmly. “Don’t worry about it. They’ll move.” I look to my right and see the oval airship next to us veer away. The seat stops rumbling. “Just follow the traffic. That’s right,” Kyon says. “How are you feeling?”

  “Sweaty,” I reply. He laughs.

  We fly around the city. I don’t see any of it except for the tail end of the aircraft that merge in and out in front of me. After a while, I relax enough to enjoy myself. I listen to Kyon explain how to merge into traffic above us and how to descend into traffic below us.

  “Have you had enough?” Kyon finally asks. I glance at him. He’s smiling.

  “Do they hire people to fly here?” I ask.

  “Are you looking for a job?” he chuckles.

  “This wouldn’t be a bad job. You take people where they need to be and if you do it right, everyone gets home safe.”

  “The job you just described would kill a person like you.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Courage is a value that you hold dear. Without danger, there is no courage. You live for danger.”

  “I can’t avoid danger. There’s a difference.”

  “No. You slap danger in the face and wait for it to react.”

  “So I should just start calling you danger?”

  “If you like,” he says.

  “I’ve had enough danger for one day.”

  “There is never enough danger,” he replies. He takes hold of the stick on the console in front of him. “Let go of your control.” When I do, he says, “Come here and sit on my lap. I want to show you how to program a route and a destination.”

  “Can you show me from here?” I ask reluctantly.

  “No,” he replies.

  I resist for a moment, but I really want to learn how to program a route. It’s a skill that can help me escape one day, and I’d be stupid to turn down the opportunity to learn. I disengage the seat belt and move to his side. Kyon reaches over and pulls me onto his lap. As he flies the Hallafast, he explains the way to input coordinates and determine the best possible route. The control panel is intricate, but I begin to understand it as I ask him questions. I relax against his chest. His deep voice is engaging. It’s confusing, this dance he’s doing with me—I’m his enemy, I’m his possession, I’m his lifeline to the future, I’m his slave, I’m his confidante, I’m his pupil.

  Once Kyon finishes his explanation, the route and destination are logged in. He switches the Hallafast to autopilot. The console in front of us retracts and the manual joysticks shift back and disappear into the dashboard. It leaves just readouts in front of us, but little else to distract me from the view. I try to stand, to move back to my seat, but Kyon’s arms wrap around me and hold me in place on his lap.

  “We’re almost home,” he explains. “There.” He points to where the buildings fall away. In the middle of this elaborate metropolis, where the skyscrapers reach into the clouds, there’s a large chunk of dead air. It’s called dead air because the elaborate, sprawling estate buildings on the site below it are only about twenty stories high. On Ethar, where most of the land is annexed, being close to the ground level—to terra firma—is afforded only to the very wealthy. It is an extreme extravagance to have unoccupied airspace. To have this much of it is borderline vulgar.

  The city of Urbenoster is surrounded by mountains—a ring. The beautifully constructed skyscrapers wreathing the inside form another circle—a second ring. Kyon’s estate is in the middle of it all—a third ring—or the pupil of the eye, whichever way you want to look at it. A river cuts through the city from the mountains. It comes from a waterfall off a mountain peak. It flows directly to Kyon’s estate, then splits into two rivers that flow around the estate on either side and merge again on the far end. Thus, it acts as a wide moat separating the estate from the rest of the city.

  “All roads lead to Rome,” I murmur. “I don’t understand at all.”

  Kyon frowns. “What don’t you understand?”

  “You!” I cover my face with both my hands and rub it. “Who are you?”

  “You seem upset,” he observes. His cheek brushes the back of my hand. It feels a little like fine sandpaper.

  “I am upset,” I reply. I take my hands away from my face and glare at him. “No wonder you’re insane! This kind of wealth makes people crazy! I bet you never relax! I bet you’re always obsessing about something—how you can beat something, or do something, or kill something, or win something!”

  “Sometimes I sleep.”

  “I’m serious!” I growl. I try to get up off of his lap again, but he pulls me back down.

  “Don’t let this scare you. You’ll stay by my side until you adjust.”

  “Staying by your side doesn’t help that—at all—in fact, it exacerbates the problem.”

  “That wasn’t a request,” he says.

  We fly over the moat; the landscape is so stunning that it leaves me breathless. The grounds are laid out to resemble a flower, but not just any flower. I recognize the intricate pattern—the perfection of it.

  “Wha
t do you see?” Kyon asks.

  I study it. It’s not really a circle, it’s a hexagon composed of evenly spaced overlapping circles. Every tree line, hedgerow, and garden path conspires to form the flowerlike pattern with a symmetrical structure of the hexagon. “I see a Flower of Life.”

  Kyon exhales against my throat; it makes goose bumps rise on me. “What else do you see?” he whispers, his lips finding my pulse.

  My heart hammers in my chest. In the dead center of the Flower of Life pattern is a majestic palace of epic proportions. “Your house is a castle. It has thirteen round spires—it resembles a snowflake.

  “That is its two-dimensional shape. What else do you see?” he asks me.

  I see a few possible shapes: icosahedron, dodecahedron, octahedron, hexahedron, and star tetrahedron. “Your house is the shape of Metatron’s Cube—seventy-eight possible lines connecting the thirteen circular spires.”

  “I knew there was so much about you to like,” he murmurs.

  The structure is gorgeous, made from the gray stone that appears to be quarried from the mountains surrounding the city. The architecture is a mix of glass and stone walls with multiple roofs of slate. The height is only about twenty stories at its highest point, but it’s massive in breadth and depth. It makes the palace in the Isle of Skye look quaint.

  The Hallafast descends like a bird of prey to a hoverpad in the middle of an intricate garden. Topiary mazes continue the Flower of Life patterns over the lawns. We touch down in the middle of one; it shrouds the hawk-shaped airship from the house. I pull the earpiece from my ear, placing it on the console.

  Kyon allows me to rise from his lap as he places his earpiece back on the console. He stands too, looping his arm around my waist and holding me to him when I would’ve walked away. The feelings he provokes in me are confusing—fear and desire. I need to get away from him, but I can’t. I hold my breath and wait to see what he’ll do as his hand sweeps my hair away from my neck in a caress. “I’m going to miss having you all to myself.”