Soul of Stars

by Ashley Poston

  And he did not care.

  Robb

  The moment both Elara’s and Robb’s skysailers landed in the Dossier’s cargo bay, the ship fired its solar thrusters and left. Robb barely gave the hull time to repressurize before he forced open the windshield. Lenda was in the gunnery beneath the stairs, fending off the schooners as the Dossier dipped and rolled, trying to get away from them.

  Viera vaulted out of the skysailer, securing the ship with large steel cords, and went to the other skysailer to help Xu.

  “Talle!” Robb shouted frantically. “Talle!”

  Jax lay in the backseat, his eyes half open and his lips blue, and Ana had a fast and firm grip on his coat even though he wouldn’t float away. Frost clung to his undone hair and iced over the buttons of his coat. He looked paler than death, his breath coming in short, staccato gasps.

  “Where’s Talle?” he cried.

  Siege said through the intercom, her voice echoing over the booming sound of firefight and the whine of the thrusters outside, “She can’t come down there.”

  “But—” He swallowed his words and pursed his lips together. Okay. Okay. He was not going to let Jax die on his watch. Not if he could help it. He tucked his hands under Jax’s arms and said to Ana, “Help me get him to the medical ward—but just don’t touch his skin.”

  Ana gave him a baffled look. “He’s dying, Robb—”

  “Please.”

  “Fine.” She helped lift him out of the backseat, across the cargo bay, and into the medical ward. They lifted him onto a gurney, and he pressed his thumb over the outside of Jax’s coat, into the corner of his elbow. He still had a pulse, but it was faint.

  He’s not dead, he told himself. He’s not dead.

  The next few minutes were a blur. The ship tilted as the Dossier evaded the schooners, and the loose things in the cargo bay rolled and slid from one side to the other. The skysailers were tied down tight enough that they just groaned in their steel harnesses. An emergency wail let out in the solar core, and Viera quickly ducked into the engine room to fix it. The nuts and bolts in the walls rattled as a missile exploded too close to the ship, and the lights flickered.

  Robb didn’t understand—Jax wasn’t bleeding, he wasn’t missing any limbs. He’d been out in space for only maybe five seconds. He knew boys from the Academy who’d accidentally spaced themselves for longer and walked away laughing.

  But then why was Jax—why was he—

  He’s not dying, he told himself. He’s not.

  The hum of the solar core reverberated through the hull as the ship tilted back and dodged another onslaught of artillery fire. Everything in the ship shifted, sliding backward with the force of gravity. Robb’s metal arm shot out and quickly caught Jax before he rolled off the gurney. Jax’s head lolled to the side, his eyes almost open, gloriously plum-colored, like colliding red giants, staring past him, so far past he didn’t see anything.

  Fearfully, Robb held the back of his metal hand just above Jax’s mouth.

  But there was no breath to fog up the polished silver plating.

  “I don’t think he’s breathing,” he said aloud, but he didn’t quite register his own words until Ana dove into one of the cabinets and took out an antiquated life support system—he’d seen them used before in practice, and in the Academy he’d taken a class on basic medicine, but this system was older than either of them. One centimeter off, and the life support would kill Jax instead of save his life.

  He just stared at it, his mind blank.

  “Robb,” Ana snapped, and it jerked him out of his stupor. She shoved the life support disk into his hands. “Either you do it, or I will.”

  Either you take the gamble, or I will.

  His fingers curled around the disk. “Help me open up his shirt.”

  With a steel dagger Ana produced from her boot, they cut Jax’s coat and favorite silken shirt open, exposing his bare chest. There was an old starburst of a scar on his neck from where Robb had taken off the voxcollar at the palace, and a few other marks across his arms and torso. How did Jax get the one on his right arm? Or the slash down his left side? They belonged to stories he didn’t know—stories he would never know if he did this wrong.

  The life support system was a disk about a hand’s width long. It was dusty and the edges were rusted, and he hoped it still worked. He tried to remember what to do from his medical class, but honestly he just took it to get an easy grade. It had not been easy—and neither was this. Every second gone was another second Jax was lost. He sucked in a breath through his teeth, trying to calm down, placed the circular piece on Jax’s sternum, hopefully above where his lungs were, and pressed the button in the center of it. A brilliant white light fed out from the center, rushing across the thin lines between the disk’s plating, and it gave a sharp hiss. Needles punctured Jax’s chest with a horrible snap, and his body twitched in response.

  The system whirled, and suddenly Jax gasped, his back arching off the gurney, hands curling into fists, and fell back again. The life support clicked again, and he inhaled, then exhaled.

  Inhaled. Exhaled.

  A soft, steady beep filled the medical ward.

  Jax’s heartbeat.

  He was alive.

  Robb slowly sank to his knees beside the gurney. A bead of sweat curved down the side of his face, and he wiped it away with a shaking hand.

  Ana fell back into one of the chairs. “Goddess” was all she said.

  He felt about the same.

  When the blood had stopped rushing to his ears, he realized everything was quiet. The firefight was done, and that could only mean the Dossier had escaped the schooners.

  The intercom crackled and Siege’s voice came through. “Report—how’s Jax?”

  Finding his legs, he pushed himself off the floor, stumbled around the gurney to the intercom, and pressed the button to feed him through. “Captain, we had to put him on life support. He—he stopped breathing and . . .”

  And the longer he is on life support, the less likely he’ll ever be off it again. And we don’t even know why he stopped breathing.

  But it seemed like the captain already knew what he didn’t say.

  “Aye. Lenda, take the helm. I’m coming down,” the captain said, and ended the connection.

  If it weren’t for the wall, Robb wasn’t very sure he would still be standing. This felt too much like his mother’s death, and his father’s.

  He was powerless to stop any of them.

  The captain appeared at the top of the stairs a moment later and surveyed the cargo bay. Elara and Xu were sitting in front of the skysailers, Viera in the doorway to the engine room. Things had been tossed around and knocked over, supplies scattered like confetti. Her hair simmered orange-red, accented by her brown skin. Talle came out of the doorway behind her, following as Siege shrugged out of her red murdercoat and hung it on the end of the stair railing.

  Robb met Siege in the doorway to the medical ward. “He stopped breathing and we don’t know why and Ana and I tried to—I had to—the life support was . . .” His shoulders hitched as a sob escaped his throat.

  “Oh, darling.” The captain sighed and brought him into a hug.

  He buried his face into her shoulder and tried to keep himself together, and he felt like he was the only one unraveling. “H-he’s . . . he’s not . . .”

  But he couldn’t get the words out.

  So Ana spoke for him. “We don’t know why he stopped breathing—it doesn’t make sense. He’s perfectly fine, but . . . he just stopped breathing. I think—I think he needs a doctor.”

  Talle shook her head. “There isn’t a hospital that’ll serve us.”

  “Xourix?”

  Siege sighed. “We just got word it was raided last night. By Messiers.”

  Ana gave a start. “And everyone in Xourix?”

  “Arrested or HIVE’d.”

  “Oh,” she said softly.

  Xourix had been one of the four remaining sanctua
ries Siege and her fleet had erected over the last six months. It’d been the largest and the most secure. For Messiers to go all the way to the edge of the kingdom . . .

  Without Xourix, the captain was right: there wasn’t a hospital that would serve them. They’d almost gotten arrested at a bar in the slums of a city; there was no way they would be able to waltz into a medical facility.

  In the silence Jax’s life support pinged again, and again.

  A breath in, a breath out, keeping his heart beating, his blood flowing. There was a light sheen of sweat over his pale skin, as though it had lost its shimmer, accented only by the rush of bruises coming to the surface.

  Someone coughed softly.

  Everyone startled at the sound. It was Elara. Robb had forgotten she was there. She shifted her weight on her feet, Xu beside her. “I know I’m new here—but why not take him home?”

  Home?

  The word made his heart lurch.

  It was the one place Jax never talked about, the one subject that was off-limits, that would make a cold look flicker into his eyes and bring a swift change of subject. Home was not a good place—that much Robb knew.

  “This is his home,” he said.

  Elara gave him a strange look, and then her eyes widened in surprise. “Oh. You . . . don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  The captain began to answer when the monotonous voice of Xu intervened. “If there is a place that can help the C’zar, it is his home. Zenteli.”

  C’zar.

  He—he knew that word.

  It was always said in passing. How many times had he heard it whispered at the Academy, or tossed around in Wicked Luck rings? The missing C’zar, who ran off and died at the hands of mercenaries. The last of the Solani royalty, chosen by a council of elders to lead their people.

  A C’zar.

  A prince.

  Jax.

  Ana

  Siege didn’t waste any time hailing Zenteli. It was as if she’d known this would happen eventually. She had a private line to the city’s port authority, which was odd because usually when the Dossier came calling, officers were sent to arrest them, not welcome them.

  The communication line crackled, and a voice patched itself through. “Aven’ta za mar Dossier.”

  It was the Old Language.

  Siege responded in kind. Ana didn’t realize Siege knew the Old Language—at least, Ana had never heard her speak it before. She thought only Ironbloods and Solani knew it.

  “We will have personnel on scene to take nan c’zar from you,” the man replied in the common tongue. “Be advised.”

  “Da’thoren,” Siege said, and Ana at least knew that to be thank you.

  Zenteli was on Iliad, which felt like a billion light-years away from where they were in Eros’s orbit, but was only about half a day’s flight by the calculation on the starshield. Siege brought a timer up in the corner of the shield, and it blinked in countdown to their destination. Ana quietly watched the counter from the communications console, her fingers digging into the plush armrest stuffing.

  So much time.

  Siege instructed Elara, who was sitting in one of the emergency foldout seats on the back wall of the cockpit, to erect another of the cloaking bugs she’d used to throw off the HIVE in Neon City, and again at the dreadnought. The codes were more complicated than any of the ones the Dossier used, and the less they got pinged by searching spacecrafts, the quicker they would arrive at Zenteli. Every second counted.

  But what if the life support . . .

  She swallowed thickly, her nails still digging into the armrests of the communications chair. Don’t think about it, she coached herself. It’ll be fine. He’ll be . . .

  Why couldn’t she convince herself?

  There was a soft knock on the cockpit doorway, and Xu poked their head in to say that Talle had made a stew, and the captain dismissed Elara to go grab some food.

  When they were gone, the captain asked, “Aren’t you going to eat, darling?”

  “I’m not very hungry.”

  Her captain turned in the pilot’s chair to face her and, as if reading her thoughts, said, “What happened to Jax wasn’t your fault.”

  Oh—oh, that made it so much worse. She just wanted her captain to scold her and tell her to do better next time, because at least then Ana would know that there would be. That Jax would . . . that this wasn’t . . .

  The captain just didn’t understand.

  “How can I stop the Great Dark, save the Metals from the HIVE—save Di, if I can’t even save my friends?” she asked. “It’s impossible—”

  “Don’t say that.” Siege leaned forward, across the console that separated the two chairs, and brushed her thumb across Ana’s scarred cheek to wipe away the tears. “I didn’t teach you to give up when things got hard, did I?”

  “Y-you didn’t see what was in that dreadnought, either. It was horrifying. I was trapped with the HIVE, and if it wasn’t for Robb and Jax cutting the power, I know they would’ve tortured me—he said he’d torture me.” He—Di, but not Di. Not her Di. “I was helpless. I don’t—I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how we can defeat that thing. We’ve been trying for six months and . . . shouldn’t the Goddess be able to save the people she loves?” Her eyes stung with tears. “If I’m the Goddess, shouldn’t I be able to . . .”

  She tried not to cry, really she did. But the last twenty-four hours finally caught up with her. The running, the capture, the dreadnought—and she couldn’t get the moment Jax was sucked into space out of her head, the way the glass glittered around him, the lightsword shining bright, the way that terrible XO had reached out to him as if it wanted to keep him. She couldn’t stop thinking about how cold he felt when she pulled him into the skysailer. How his lips were blue. How he had stopped breathing.

  Her shoulders gave a shake, and tears fell down her cheeks, and she didn’t want Jax to die. It would be another life scratched into her soul, added to the number of people who had already died for her.

  Barger. Wick. Riggs. Di. Jax.

  She wasn’t worth their lives. Even if she was the Goddess.

  No one was worth the life of someone else.

  Siege took her hands tightly. There were small pale scars across her captain’s fingers. She leaned forward and pressed her lips against Ana’s forehead in a soft kiss. “Go and get some rest, darling,” she said gently.

  Though Ana knew she probably wouldn’t get any sleep at all, she nodded anyway, unfurling her fingers from her captain’s, and left the cockpit. When she got into the crew’s quarters, she sank down into one of the chairs on the back wall.

  It was quiet there, at least.

  She dried her eyes, and waited. That was all there was to do.

  Ana had dozed off in the chair when Lenda knocked on the door. She jerked awake, scrambling to pull herself up in the chair. For a moment she was disoriented—was she still on the dreadnought? Had a Messier come to kill her? Turn her into a Metal?—until she recognized Lenda, dirty blond hair tucked back behind her ears, her blue eyes rimmed with exhaustion. She motioned behind her, toward the galley. “Food’s getting cold. Want some?”

  Ana shook her head. “Oh—no.” She still wasn’t hungry. “Go ahead.”

  “Good. I eat when I get worried and that entire pot of stew is calling my name,” she said, and began to leave—but then she hesitated in the doorway and turned back to Ana. “You know we’re with you, right? That all of us on this ship are with you. In defeating the HIVE and saving the kingdom. None of us blame you for Jax. He wouldn’t want you to blame you, either.”

  Ana looked away. “I appreciate that.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know.”

  Lenda frowned, knowing that Ana didn’t believe her, but then she just shook her head and left for the galley again.

  Ana checked the time. It had been only three hours since she’d dozed off. Nine more to go. Slowly, she stood, her muscles scream
ing, and peeled off her coat. She took out Di’s memory core before she put the coat in the dirty clothes basket in the corner of the room. She tried not to linger on Jax’s empty bunk, or on one of his favorite coats hung on the hook over his bed. She touched the soft velvet of the sleeve.

  “We’ll fix you,” she promised softly, not to the coat, but to Jax. “And then I’ll let you punch the Great Dark first when we find it—”

  “Ana?”

  She whirled around as Viera ducked into the crew’s quarters. She had taken a shower, her platinum hair pushed back against her head, the dirt and grime of the dreadnought scrubbed clean. There was a blanket and pillow tucked underneath her arm. “Talle said I could take one of the bunks, but I’m not sure . . .”

  “That one.” Ana pointed to Wick’s old bunk on the bottom, opposite hers. “There’s more room inside the pod than it looks.”

  The ex–guard captain put down her blanket and pillow on the mattress and leaned inside. “Oh, there are charging ports and everything.”

  “There isn’t much privacy on this ship, but we should be to Zenteli soon. Then you can find a ship to . . .” She hesitated, frowning. “Where’ll you go?”

  To that, Viera shrugged. She sat down gingerly on the edge of the bunk. “I am not quite sure. The kingdom thinks I am dead, yes?” When Ana nodded, she frowned. “Then my family does, too.”

  “Are you okay?”

  The woman blinked. The arrowhead-shaped markings under her gray eyes made her gaze sharp and narrow. She remembered that Wick had markings as well—splotches under his eyes. “Yes.”

  “I mean, after . . .” After the HIVE got you.

  “I am fine, Ana.”

  She didn’t think Viera was fine at all, but she didn’t want to push her. “You know, if you ever want to talk . . .”

  To that, Viera ran her fingers through her wet white-blond hair. “I thought you were dead these last six months, Ananke. I thought I had failed. I had never failed before.”

  Does she think her imprisonment was punishment? The thought horrified her, and she quickly leaned forward and said, “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know.”