Our Dark Stars

by Audrey Grey

  As she wound her way through the hallway, a strange sound trickled from near the end, a melodic, haunting tune seeming to emanate from the metal walls. She ground her jaw and tried to walk away, toward her room, but the song drew her in the other direction. Something about the tune, the instrument, struck deep within her being. And she set off to find it.

  Chapter 17

  Will

  Usually Will could strum the keys of his hidden baby grand piano and release his concerns, but tonight worry clung to him like the perfumed scent of the girl from earlier. Despite the beauty of the song he played, despite the rapture of the crescendo, he couldn’t rid himself of the one thing that left him weak and marred.

  Human emotion.

  When he was a flesher, he was enslaved by feelings. Caught in a never-ending storm of rage and fear and sadness. Always reacting without thinking. Played by his emotions the same way he played these keys.

  Thinking on the past, he understood just how inferior he’d been. How savage.

  He pounded the ivories, yellowed and smoothed from use in a time before digital instruments reigned, taking pleasure in the way the repercussions throbbed inside his chest and vibrated the translucent glass walls of the room. Tiny stars winked from their black velvet canvas around him, reminding Will of the first time he discovered this hideaway.

  Even after his mistake and demotion, he could have chosen a better ship and more experienced crew. But he took one look at this viewing room and the baby grand piano, black as the darkest corners of space and fixed to the floor with foot-long metal clamps, and accepted the captain’s position.

  Other than the glass and the baby grand, the room was unexceptional—if not a couple hundred years behind the times. A dingy gold-and-green embroidered couch filled up the other half of the room, beside a tufted red rug that reminded him of an open sore and an old credenza stocked full of aged liqueurs from the previous inhabitant.

  Slowing the tempo, Will closed his eyes and released a long, fragmented breath. As a mock, he was supposed to be in control of his once human drives. When he felt them, as all mocks did, his programming would sort through the most rational reactions and respond accordingly. Then the feelings were supposed to go away.

  Except they hadn’t.

  Moving onto the next part of the song, he punished the keys and his fingers, willing the strange feeling of unquiet to dissipate. He blamed the flesher girl, of course. Ever since their encounter, he’d been questioning how he acted toward her, how he’d carried her as if she were nothing more than an object. Which wasn’t normal.

  And he’d thought about his mother tonight for the first time in years.

  A creaking noise echoed from the stairwell. He stopped playing and snapped open his eyes.

  As if conjured from his thoughts, the flesher girl stood at the top of the stairwell, looking as shocked to see him as he was to see her. She was frozen in place, her arms held out almost defensively. Her thick hair, more golden than red in this light, had been pulled back from her face into a messy knot, but clumps of it had already escaped the binding, framing her face in a gilded halo. A look of guilt puckered her lips and widened her eyes.

  Or maybe that was surprise, though he doubted it. Everything about her screamed she was up to no good.

  “What are you doing up here?” he asked. His voice came out soft, almost sleepy, but she flinched anyway. Then she smoothed down her top, adjusted the too-big belt looping around her waist, and marched her way over to him.

  “I heard a noise.” Her attention drifted to the stars as she spoke, the tension inside her shoulders and neck melting away as she took in the panoramic views. “Is that . . . the Varyx nebula?”

  He followed her gaze to the splash of violet-and-yellow gases in the distance. “Yes, with our intended route, this is the closest we’ll get to it.”

  “Oh.” Disappointment laced her voice, and she rocked back and forth on her heels. “Will you play some more?”

  Strangely, he found he wanted to. A part of him wanted to show off, to prove that mocks were more than just soulless machines. Not that she’d ever said otherwise, but he saw it in the way she looked at him and his crew.

  “I don’t play for anyone but myself.” He pulled his hands from the keys and pressed his palms to his thighs, hating his cowardice, but at the same time, relieved he had the strength to say no to her.

  She shrugged, her stare lingering on the keys. “Okay.”

  The silence seemed to amplify as neither of them spoke. His heart raced, so loud he was afraid she would hear it and know she had this effect on him. Whatever that was.

  A human effect he hadn’t felt since his change.

  She twisted to sit beside him, and his attention fell to the curve of her breasts beneath her shirt. He jerked his gaze away.

  Why was he even noticing, when Lux had been practically naked just last week and he’d hardly batted an eye?

  Somehow, the idea of real breasts—not the kind that came from a mold and were created from a perfect ratio of proportions—was different. They were a part of her. Something more intimate and personal.

  Real.

  His breath caught as she turned to him, her lips rougher than Lux’s, still chapped from time spent in the pod. The bottom lip was full and dimpled.

  Not a dimple, a tiny scar. Something never seen on another mock.

  An odd sensation pulsed in his belly, and a moment passed before he realized what that sensation was. Somehow he’d forgotten what the human emotion of arousal felt like. The burning desire to feel the press of someone else’s body. When he was a thirteen-year-old human boy, before his transformation, desire had been a constant force ruling his flesh, his mind. That emotion had made him stupid with need.

  He tried to swallow but found his throat too dry. Fever crept along his skin, his body taut. For a stupid second, he could think of nothing but capturing that scarred bottom lip between his teeth. His hands pulling her into him—

  “Captain?” she was saying, the offending, imperfect lip pushed out in annoyance.

  “Y—yes?”

  “Scoot over. If you won’t play, then I will.”

  Talia tried to hide her annoyance at the captain’s sour company as she sat beside him on the bench and began to play. She still hadn’t forgotten what he’d done to her earlier—but somehow, the sound of the keys echoing through the dark metal halls of the ship had brought on a truce. Or, at least, softened her need to murder him while he slept. Which was good considering the gun weighing down her pocket.

  Besides, he looked different. His usual irreverent, smug mask replaced by something darker. Something haunted . . . if mocks could be that complex.

  But he was once human. Maybe that’s what she saw when she first topped the stairs and spied him hunched over the piano as if it were a piece of driftwood and all the world around him a raging sea. Perhaps, up here, the last vestiges of his humanity still lingered inside. A shadow of the flesh-and-blood boy he once was.

  She felt him watching her as she played, no doubt frowning on her stiff fingers and poor technique. Her tutors claimed she would never make a good pianist. Or violinist. Oboist. She’d failed at all the instruments in epic fashion. Undisciplined, they’d said. Too loose. Not enough practice. No natural skill.

  All of it was true. Yet she didn’t care about any of that as she danced her fingers over the keys to her own song. After a few minutes, the tempo got lost and she trailed off.

  “What was that?” Will asked. He’d pushed himself as far back from her as possible so that half his butt was off the bench.

  “I don’t know. I made it up.” She shrugged. “Yours?”

  The question seemed to catch him off guard, the muscles beneath the smooth flesh of his jaw tensing as he hesitated. “My mother’s.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “Your mom wrote that? It’s beautiful.”

  Talking to a mock about moms seemed strange, but Talia had to remind herself he wasn’t born a mock.
So that meant he had a mother.

  He blinked and looked down at his hands. Perfect half-moons adorned his well-kept fingernails, and she found herself wondering if that was his human side or mock side. Were those long, adept fingers created in a lab, or did they come from one of his parents?

  “What happened to you?” she asked, curiosity overcoming her usual habit of not prying. “Leo told me you used to be . . . like me. Human.”

  An infinitesimal tremor rippled across his mask of indifference, so quick she could have made it up.

  “That was a long time ago.”

  Part of his hair had fallen over his forehead, a shade darker than his usual mahogany color beneath the starlight. She studied his face, his heavy-blue eyes and sharp cheekbones, so much like the boys she knew at home. Did he still feel human emotions like she did, or was his every reaction a derivative of his programming?

  His lips drew her attention. Her intended, Prince Cassius, had a cruel mouth, but Will’s was constantly half-quirked, as if he knew a secret.

  “Done with your assessment?” he asked quietly.

  She laughed, shaky like a butterfly, and wiped her palms on her pants. “No, I’m wondering how much of your actions are programming versus human emotions. Like, if I kissed you right now . . . would it be your mock side or your human side that responds?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed down his pale throat. “Try it and we can find out.”

  “No—I didn’t mean I wanted to kiss you.” She waved her hand for emphasis, but that only made her feel sillier, her core heating from embarrassment.

  Why did I mention kissing him?

  “Right.” He drummed his fingers over his thigh. “An escort with standards.”

  “That’s not fair. And I didn’t mean . . . Look, never mind, okay?”

  “Fine. And, for the record. I’m all mock.” He rapped his knuckles against his temple, the metal beneath making a sharp clack. “And proud of it.”

  “Why?” she scoffed, before realizing how rude it sounded. “I mean . . . wouldn’t you rather go back to being real?”

  “Real? You mean enslaved by my emotions? Wracked with near-constant hunger and fatigue? My flesh bruised and torn and my muscles aching all the time? Tiny invisible germs making me so ill I’m puking my guts up every other week? Yes, I want to go back to that.”

  “It’s not all that bad.”

  He stared into the stars, his jaw set. “Isn’t it?”

  Rolling her eyes, she jumped to her feet, knocking the bench back a few inches. “Goodnight, Captain.”

  “Sweet dreams, flesher.” The arrogant mask she despised was back, his focus on the piano keys. As if she were insignificant. Nothing more than a minor annoyance to shoo away. “Just so you know,” he added. “Tomorrow we’ll be docking on the off-world planet, Oberon, where I suspect your lie about being an escort will fall to pieces. Last chance to tell the truth . . .”

  Turning on her heel, she made a rude gesture with her middle finger and stormed out the door. Little did Captain Egopants know that soon she’d be rescued and done with them all.

  Chapter 18

  Talia

  Breakfast came around, a sad mixture of slop not fit for a mock, much less a human. Talia pushed away her bowl, too excited to eat. By now the reinserted tracking chip should have done its job. Only a few more hours and she’d be on a shuttle back to her family.

  Only a few more hours until freedom.

  Rays from planet Oberon’s sun filled the bridge with warm, yellow light. The planet itself was a blue-and-white sphere of snow and ice, parts of it glittering as dawn broke over this side of their world. As the ship neared, she could make out the gray granite mountains that covered the wintry world.

  Oberon was an off-world planet, colonized by a Starchaser centuries ago for the water trapped inside its massive glaciers. From this distance, the dark, metallic ice-haulers looked like ants on a hill. Convoys of them formed spider-webbed lines of gray against the pure white.

  As Odysseus approached, a sleepy city of pale stone houses appeared on the other side of a mountain range, clumped around a boot-shaped lake. A silver semi-translucent screen of ice covered the surface, but the ice couldn’t hide the indigo-blue waters hiding below. Orange light from the rising sun glinted off the rows of solar panels used to heat the town to acceptable temperatures. A near-invisible habitat shield domed the entire city, and every so often the light hit just right, sending rainbows rippling down the shield’s surface.

  She glanced out the starscreen at the crowded airspace, cargo transport shuttles hovering around as the crew waited to be cleared for landing. The Odysseus maneuvered through the bulky airships with ease, until it neared a thick cluster of obsidian, snow-capped mountains.

  Static filled the air as Leo spoke into the com. “Drake, we cleared for landing?”

  “Hanger at the base of the smallest peak,” came a gruff voice. “Make it quick. Flight enforcers are up my ass these days.”

  Leo chuckled. “Quick as a virgin on his first time.” He shot Talia an apologetic glance. “Sorry.”

  Grinning, she said, “I’ve heard worse, Leo.”

  Which was true. The royal guards used to say horrible things when they thought she couldn’t hear. And the flight school students were even worse.

  “Right,” Leo said. “You’re a . . . a . . .”

  “Escort?” Lux offered, raising an eyebrow and glancing from Talia to Leo. “That the word you’re choking on, Leo?”

  Will snorted. “Guess we’ll find out soon, won’t we?”

  Talia cut her eyes at him. “Oh, we will.”

  They’d all find out the truth of her identity after the Alliance ship tracked them here. She was a little shocked it hadn’t already, but perhaps the rescuers were waiting until the Odysseus docked before attempting Talia’s extraction. Stars, if only she could see Will’s face when he realized he’d been taunting a Starchaser princess.

  The illegal hangers were expertly hidden behind the mountain range, cast in deep shadow and muted by a raging blizzard. White, snow-covered tarps camouflaged the roofs, making them blend in with the rest of the landscape. If not for the crew outside, bundled in their white coveralls and furs and waving flares, she’d have never even noticed the secret docks.

  Snow flurries filled the air, blinding the crew for a moment as Will guided the Odysseus beneath the hangers. His landing was so soft she didn’t realize they’d touched down until the others stood. Leo conjured white-and-gray camo snowsuits from somewhere, and they suited up. Everyone but Talia and Leo.

  “Where’s ours?” she asked, wrapping her arms around her chest. Already the air was cooling. Sometimes she swore they forgot she was human and susceptible to the cold.

  Will finished zipping up his suit and turned to her, his grin apparent even beneath the wool facemask that would protect his synthetic skin. Apparently even mocks had to worry about frostbite. “You stay here.”

  Her mouth fell open. “What? Why? No, I need to get off this ship for a few hours. I need—”

  “You need to stay here with Leo,” Will interrupted in a voice that told her not to argue. He finished slipping on his gloves and fixed her with a defiant stare. “Unless you want to save us some trouble and tell us who you are and why Xander wants you?”

  She was fully prepared to argue, until he mentioned her lie. Shutting her mouth, she ground her teeth and looked pleadingly at Leo. “Surely we can walk around and stretch our legs?”

  “In this weather?” Guilt flashed across his face, and he looked away. “We’ll, uh, play cards or something while we wait. It’ll be fun.”

  Scowling, she watched the others leave, trailing their forms across the snow-packed ground until the blizzard swallowed them whole. Then, for the hundredth time, she flicked a quick glance over the tracking chip. Still there. A dim blue light flashed around the tracker slot, where before, it’d been empty and red.

  What if her rescuers couldn’t find her in this blizz
ard?

  Leo scoured a rack until he pulled out some holo-dice game Talia vaguely recognized playing with Tamsin once, and asked if she wanted to play. She obliged, but Talia couldn’t focus on anything but the sounds from outside, straining to make out noises that indicated another ship was docking.

  Leo sat the cup they used to shake the die upside down on the table and then leaned back. “You okay, Ailat?”

  She blinked; this was the first time he’d used the name she’d given them. “Yeah, just a little stir crazy.” Not a lie. “Wish we could have gone with them.”

  “No, you don’t. It’s freezing out there. Besides, they’re just grabbing supplies. You’d be bored to tears.”

  She shrugged. “Will’s also trying to find out about me. Prove I’m lying.”

  Uncrossing his massive legs, Leo leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he peered at her. “Are you?”

  Her heart skipped a beat. “No. Why would I lie?”

  “I don’t know.” He quirked an eyebrow. “Maybe if you thought the truth was dangerous.”

  The sudden intensity added to his usually playful tone made her sit up straight. As she did, the revolver inside her pocket shifted, reminding her of the weapon’s presence. “Dangerous?”

  “Yeah.” He tugged at one of the braids woven into his hair. “Although sometimes people’s reactions will surprise you.”

  What was he implying? She leaned in closer. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m just saying that, if you wanted to tell me, I might not react the way you think.”

  All the moisture in her mouth disappeared. Was he saying he knew her secret and she could trust him? Or maybe—maybe he was trying to trick her into talking. She wanted to trust him, but trust in Ailat is what led Talia here, or rather trusting in her own judgment of her mock.

  Before she could make a decision, the com crackled to life, and they both jumped. The man, Drake, from earlier spoke. “Leo, an unscheduled arrival just landed nearby. They’re at the main starport.”