by F. T. Lukens
“Fourth door on the right.”
They didn’t hesitate.
With Sorcha giving them directions, they found their way through the labyrinth of the keep. Ren kept his hand on the comm, leading Beatrice, with Asher bringing up the rear. After one final turn, Ren stopped and recognized the corridor.
“You should be close,” Sorcha said. “Over.”
“Yeah, I recognize this place. I know the way from here. Over.” Ren had spent most of his captivity memorizing the way from the dungeon to the courtyard, and now it was coming to good use.
“Good, because…” She trailed off, and there was the sound of a scuffle before the transmission cut off.
Asher crowded next to Ren’s shoulder, staring into Ren’s palm where the device glowed. Ren willed Sorcha to speak, to come back, and when she did, her voice was hushed.
“Hurry. We’re about to be—” She stopped, breathless, and then yelled. “Jakob! No!”
Ren didn’t wait to hear any more. He ran.
Beatrice and Asher yelled after him, but he didn’t stop, skidding along the stone of the floor. He took a sharp turn and spied the arch that led to the courtyard. It glowed with sunlight, and Ren didn’t slow down, though a Corps soldier stood in silhouette in front of him.
Ren lowered his shoulder, fully prepared to barrel into him and take him down as he had with the troops who’d wanted to take his brother. A shot from behind him rendered his foolhardy idea moot, and the Corps member crumpled forward with a smoking hole in the back of his shoulder from a pulse gun.
Asher.
Ren rushed past the body, which was knocked out, not dead, not dead, not dead, because Ren couldn’t think about the consequences of that. He was too busy. His body worked, heart pounding, blood pumping, adrenaline rushing, joints and muscles and tendons stretching and contracting. His mind ran through scenarios, bleak and terrifying, and his star swelled, infusing him wholly. When he broke into the blindingly bright courtyard, he shouldn’t have been able to see, but his vision was blue, and his eyes blazed. As frightening as was the ring of Corps troops surrounding his friends, he was more so.
Every piece of tech in the courtyard sang to him—the weapons, the comms, the wires in the stone, the pirated pieces in their packs—everything was a part of him. The power tangled within him, and he pushed out. The feedback loops flowed through his body, then outward, and back. He was a nexus of blue threads, of star, of machine, of electricity.
The Corps had his friends. Ezzy, Jakob, Sorcha, and the rest of the group. Ezzy sat in the snow and clutched the beacon; her arms were wrapped around it, and its base sat between her knees. A trickle of red dripped from the corner of her mouth and splattered on her chin, and Ren’s gaze zeroed in on the line of blood, on the offense.
He burned.
“Let them go.” His voice reverberated through the comms and boomed from the beacon, and the captives clapped their hands over their ears. The Corpsmen visibly flinched, and Ren smiled, a grim manic pull of his mouth.
“Or what?” Corporal Zag stepped forward, unafraid, his pulse gun trained on Sorcha. Then he moved it to Jakob, then Ezzy. “Think you can stop a shot, star host? Are you willing to risk it? What about her?” He lifted it to point over Ren’s shoulder, where Beatrice stood behind him. “Or him?” He swung his arm, pointing the weapon at Asher.
As the Corporal taunted, Ren slowly tilted his head. With tactical clarity, he assessed and catalogued. Scattered along the ground were the remains of the tech from the packs the soldiers had upended, and lined in a haphazard row were the force-field points he and Jakob had removed from the stone. Each of the corpsmen held a weapon or had a comm on their uniform. His group of friends huddled together, and Jakob eyed Ren knowingly. Ren smirked. Jakob smiled in return.
Zag changed tactics and leveled his weapon at Ren. “Or maybe I’ll kill you. I might even get a medal for it.” He narrowed his eyes. “All I would need is one shot to wipe that smile off your face.”
Plan firmly in place, Ren gritted his teeth. “You’ll regret threatening my friends.”
Zag chuckled, his gun arm steady. “I don’t think so.” His finger twitched on the trigger.
Ren blinked.
Several things happened at once. The force fields engaged. All the weapons shorted. The comms blasted static. Zag shot. And the group of captives scattered.
Chaos reigned.
Ren poured his power outward. The force field created a partial wall between the captives and the Corps. The comms shrieked. The pulse guns spat electricity, came alive in the hands of those who wielded them, and sparked and sputtered, shocking the Corpsmen with forks and tangles of electricity. They fell, writhing on the ground, even Zag. Ren vibrated with their screams, tasted the burn of skin and hair, but it wasn’t enough.
They had destroyed his home. They had made it so Ren could never return to what he was before. They had scared Ezzy, who was only a girl with a crush, who wanted to prove herself capable in a war zone when she should’ve been learning at school, playing in the woods, swimming in the lake, or blushing around boys. They had threatened them, frightened them, and they would burn, as Ren did, blaze in misery and despair, and thrash in pain until their veins blackened and peeled like wires, until their bones glowed like circuits.
The power flowed from him in a torrent, and he pushed it, and pushed it. He ensured those responsible were filled until they burst, until their souls were scorched out of them, until their humanity had crumbled to dust as his had.
“Ren!”
“Don’t touch him, Sorcha!”
“But he’s—”
“Ash, what do we do?”
“I can’t touch him. My shoulder—”
Ren heard a desperate sob. It broke into his concentration, traveled through the din of the static and the crackle of the air. He turned a bit, and it came again, harder, sharper.
Ezzy. She cried, and Ren pulled back. Why was she crying? He had saved her. He had saved the group. She didn’t need to be afraid.
He lowered his arms from out in front of him; his joints ached. He turned fully and took in the scene through clouded eyes, and the tendrils of power receded, fled back into his chest. Ren blinked, and the haze retreated.
Around him the soldiers lay in heaps—not dead, not dead, not dead—their weapons smoked, bodies twitched. The force field hummed, but the comms were silent. The air smelled like ozone and smoke.
And Ezzy cried.
Zag’s shot, the one meant for Ren, had gone wide. Beatrice lay in the snow, eyes open and unseeing, and Ezzy clutched at her coat with hands twisted in the fabric and sobbed.
“Ren?” Sorcha asked softly.
“We need to leave,” he croaked. “We need to run.”
“No!” Ezzy yelled. “We’re not leaving her. We’re not leaving her.”
A soldier stirred.
“Jakob,” Ren said.
Jakob nodded, his face pale, his mouth flattened in a grim line. He hauled Ezzy to her feet and pulled her away from Beatrice’s body. She fought him, but not hard; her sharp cries gave way to low, shuddering sobs. She covered her face with her hands and allowed Jakob to guide her away.
Someone groaned. Another soldier rolled to his back.
“Run,” Asher said, grabbing a shocked Sorcha by her shoulders. “Through the siege tunnel. Go!”
She moved, slowly at first, with her eyes wide and locked on Ren, but after another shove from Asher, she shook her head. The key to the heavy lock already in her hand, she beckoned her group, and they sprinted across the courtyard.
Ren followed on unsteady legs. His chest heaved. His hands shook. Asher covered them with his weapon out. It was an unnecessary precaution. With the entire regiment on the ground, their weapons sizzling and smoke curling in the crisp winter air, they were not a threat. Yet.
Ren had
guaranteed that.
“But what about the stuff? The whole reason we came?” Matt asked. He stuck close to Sorcha’s side and stared at Ren in awe, and fear, and admiration.
Sorcha pushed him into the siege tunnel. “Don’t worry about it.”
Ren licked his lips. “It’s garbage anyway. I destroyed it all.”
He waited for Beatrice’s groan, her snappy comeback, her cutting remark, her fire. There was only silence, a void where her voice should’ve been. Ren looked back and saw her body in the snow; her red hair was stark against the white. For a second, he agreed with Ezzy. They couldn’t leave her. They shouldn’t leave her. Why were they leaving her?
“Ren,” Asher said, his hand gentle on Ren’s shoulder. “We need to go.”
Ren nodded.
The sound of the metal grate closing behind them echoed in the small stone space, the same tunnel that he had escaped through forever ago. But this time, as he fled with Asher and Sorcha, he couldn’t pinpoint exactly whom he ran from, or whom he needed to run to.
If this was a fairytale, or a nightmare, or one of the old myths his mother used to tell him, he didn’t know who the villain was. But it wasn’t a story, it was his life. And replaying the last several minutes in his head like a vid, he couldn’t help but think, perhaps, the villain was him.
10
When the group reached the floater, they piled in, and it took a moment for Ren to realize that Beatrice had driven them there and they would need a new driver.
Sorcha took over. Ezzy continued sobbing. When Sorcha tried to power the engine, it did nothing, and Ren realized he’d have to fix the block he’d put on it. The thought of using his star made him sick. He pressed his lips together and accessed his power, tasting bile in his throat as he did. The engine roared to life.
Sorcha took a breath. “Where are we going? Where am I taking you?”
“I’m not going anywhere without you,” Jakob said. He had his arm around Ezzy, and he held his sister close to his side. “I’ve found you and I’m not letting you go.” He dropped a kiss to Ezzy’s hair. “Either of you.”
Sorcha gave him a soft, fond smile. Ren crossed his arms, clutched at his body, and hoped to hold himself together.
“Ren and I need a spaceport. We have to leave. There’s no question now,” Asher said.
“Why? Why can’t Ren stay with us?” Jakob demanded. “He belongs on Erden. We’ll protect him.”
Ren shuddered. “Because they won’t stop looking if they think I’m here,” Ren said, softly. “They’ll burn all of Erden to the ground searching. You’ll all be at risk.”
“Let them try. We’ll fight. We’ll keep you safe.”
“No, no, please. I can’t… I don’t want to be responsible for anyone else’s death.” Ren blinked; the image of Beatrice lifeless in the snow flashed in front of him.
Jakob’s gaze flickered between Ren and Asher. Ren saw sorrow, fear, and protest in the angry twist of his mouth and the glitter of his blue eyes.
But Sorcha nodded. “I can get you close to a port.” She paused. “Ren?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Yeah, that’s good. I’m good. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I couldn’t do the things everyone needed me to do.”
“It’s okay,” she squeezed his hand. “We’ve survived without you and we will continue to survive. You’ve brought Jakob back to me. You’ve given us a chance to unite the encampments, if not the tech. And we have a floater. That’s more than what we had.”
Ren nodded. The platitudes was an insufficient balm for the turmoil that swirled within him, but at least it soothed him for a moment.
Sorcha eased the floater out of the small hiding place on the edge of the woods. With part of the group piled in the front cab and the rest in the flat bed, Sorcha piloted slowly, carefully. She was unused to the controls, but grew more confident.
Ren lost track of time. It was an instant and an eternity when Sorcha eased the floater to a stop.
“We risk too much going farther,” she said. “The port is over the hill and down.”
“We know,” Asher said. He disembarked, stepping over Jakob and Ezzy and jumping down to the ground. Ren followed.
Jakob untangled from Ezzy’s grip and stepped out of the cab, hopping down into the leaves. “Ren,” he said. He toed the ground, leaving scuffs in the snow and dirt. “Thank you for helping me, for being my friend.”
Ren swallowed around a tight throat. “You, too.”
Jakob chuckled. “Who’d have thought I’d be best friends with the weird kid?”
Ren shrugged. “Who’d have thought I’d be best friends with the rich kid with the big mouth?” he said, mustering a smile.
Jakob laughed outright. “Come here, you weed.” He pulled Ren into a tight hug. Ren returned it heartily, holding on a fraction longer than necessary. Shared grief and a tinge of desperation were in the clutch of their arms.
“You be careful,” Jakob said, low. “And if things don’t work out with Asher, you can marry Ezzy and be my brother.”
“I don’t need to marry Ezzy to be your brother.”
“You’re absolutely right.” Jakob squeezed hard and then let go and stepped away.
Ren nodded toward the floater. “Take care of them.”
“I think Sorcha has that covered, but I’ll try not to hinder her too much.” Jakob climbed back into the floater and settled in the seat. He gave Asher a nod, then winked at Ren, gracing him with a final smirk.
Ren’s heart squeezed. They were the last remnants of his home, and he didn’t know if he’d see them again. He took a stuttered breath. “Goodbye, Jakob.”
“None of that. I’ll see you later, Ren. I will.”
Ren forced a smile. “Okay. Later. Until then.”
Jakob grinned. He patted the side of the floater, and Sorcha pulled away. Ren watched them leave, streaking across the landscape, until they were a speck on the horizon.
Ren turned to see Asher disappearing into a nearby bunch of trees. Ren followed; standing in the middle of the road wasn’t such a great idea, especially now.
Asher stopped in a small space between the trees and let out a loud sigh. He kicked a pile of snow and dead leaves. His anger finally spilling out. He rubbed a hand over his eyes. “I’m listed as coggin’ AWOL. AWOL, Ren.”
Ren leaned on a tree. He was exhausted; the last hours were catching up to him as his adrenaline rush receded like the tide.
“I don’t know what that means, Ash.”
“Absent without leave! It means I’ve abandoned my post, my duty. I’m a deserter.”
Ren’s shoulders sagged. He rolled his head back against the bark. He was cold, and his breath hung in clouds. They should’ve stayed with Sorcha and Jakob, at least for the night; the sun now edged toward the horizon.
“Is that such a bad thing?” Ren’s head was fuzzy, and tiredness made his tongue loose.
The question went over as well as a lead balloon.
Asher moved quickly, suddenly looming in front of him. “What the stars does that mean? Of course it’s bad.”
“Are you sure? Or have you forgotten the part where the Corps left you on a planet by yourself for a year. Not to mention the fact that it’s obviously not the white tower of moral right you think it is.”
“You don’t get it. The Corps was everything I had. It was my family and my home. And now, I’m cast out, a fugitive. I can be arrested, captured, taken prisoner.”
Emboldened by his fatigue, Ren pushed off from the tree and stepped into Asher’s space. “Wow, I wonder how that feels?”
“It’s not the same thing, Ren. I’m not—”
“What? A star host? A threat?”
Asher clenched his jaw. His face flushed. His fingers curled into fists at his side.
Ren circled him, taunting, devastated yet
unafraid. “You’re not dangerous, like me?”
“Fine,” Asher faced him. He jabbed his finger in Ren’s chest. “You want to go there? You want to have that argument right now?”
“Sure,” Ren shot back. He knocked Asher’s hand away. His body shook with spent adrenaline, exhaustion, and grief. “Right now. Let’s talk about how the organization that you hold the most allegiance to is here and killing people. They killed Beatrice, and they would have killed you today, if given the chance.”
“Okay, then let’s talk about why they are here. They’re here because you stupid dusters can’t govern your own damn planet and spawned a lunatic like Vos. The drifts were attacked, and they have every right to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
“Really? That’s why you think they’re here? Because of Vos?”
“Why the stars else? It’s not like anyone wants to come to this backwater dirt sphere.”
Ren laughed. “Wow. And I thought I was kept in the dark. You couldn’t be more wrong.”
Asher crossed his arms. “So you know information I don’t? I thought we were done keeping secrets.”
Ren scoffed. “As if you’re not keeping secrets from me.”
“If I am, it’s for your own good.”
“You’re an ass. You’re an arrogant drifter jerk, and sometimes there are moments when you fool me, and I think: No, he’s not so bad. But then you say crap like that.”
“Oh, come off it, Ren. If you know something, say it, or keep your mouth shut.”
Ren shook, and not from the cold. “They’re here to hunt star hosts. Happy now? They’re here to find people like me and wipe us out because that has been their purpose from day one, and because I saved a drift. They are terrified there are more like me out there, that there are more like me here, in hiding.”
Asher rolled his eyes. “Whoever told you that was lying. Stars, you’re gullible.”
“My parents are liars now?”
“Yes. Or did they not lie to you for most of your life already?”
“They did. So what? The Phoenix Corps killed Beatrice in front of us. They chased us and they tried to kill a young girl because she had tech they wanted. You can’t deny that.”