by Audrey Grey
Will hadn’t planned on standing, but he found himself out of his chair. Those images of cruelty had dredged up haunted memories from his past—being beaten, broken, left for dead. Whatever he thought he felt for Talia, it was a lie. A failing of his humanness. And the logical answer was clear.
“Set a course for Calisto,” he said, thinking of the young mock girl on that stage, confused and afraid. “We’re taking the Starchaser Princess to the queen.”
The second he was done speaking, he noticed someone standing just inside the doorway to the bridge, wearing an emerald-green jumpsuit. Talia.
A loud breath of air escaped him. “Princess.”
Her bottom jaw was pushed forward, the way people do when they’re trying not to cry. Instead of responding to her name, she approached the holo-book, slowly. Fists curled at her sides.
“They’re dead?” Her voice was the same steely voice from the video. The one he didn’t recognize. She blinked at the book, her eyelashes wet with tears he knew she wouldn’t shed. “All of them?”
Oh, stars. A shiver of anguish shot through him. She didn’t know.
Jane approached Talia, carefully. “All of them, Princess. I’m sorry.”
She rested a hand on Talia’s shoulder, but Talia absentmindedly shrugged it off. The holo-screen had manual functions, and she flipped the pages back to the day of her eighteenth birthday. He thought she might skip past the worst of it, but she watched everything, unblinking and quiet. Hardly breathing. Every so often her chest would heave and she’d drag in a ragged breath. Otherwise, she was completely still. Riveted to the scenes that would shape her life and future forever.
When she got to the destruction of her family’s ship, a tiny shudder wracked her body. Her hands went out, as if for stability. Then she turned and, arranging her face into a cool, indifferent mask, marched out of the room like nothing happened.
Lux exchanged worried glances with him. If anyone understood what this moment felt like, it was her. Without meaning to, he set off to go after Talia, despite having no clue what to say.
“Wait!” Leo said. Will tried to brush him off, but Leo grabbed his arm. “Captain, something’s wrong with the hyper-drive.”
“What do you mean wrong?” Will hadn’t meant to snap, but his nerves were on edge. And all he could think about was finding Talia . . .
Jane pulled up an image of their back flank. Countless pulsing lights lit up the starscreen.
“What is that?” Will asked, drawing closer. “What am I looking at?”
“Looks like a fire net,” she explained. “By now it’ll have fried most of our fuel coils and drained who knows how much power.”
“The hunters.” Leo sunk into his chair, the tightness in his jaw confirming the crap they were in. “They must have done it while the drone was shooting at Lux. Stars!” He kicked the bottom of the operating console with one of his fancy boots. “I should have checked our rear. I knew they wouldn’t let us get away that easily.”
And if Will hadn’t been distracted inside the engine room with Talia, he would have noticed too. “We all missed it.”
He slid into the captain’s seat and then paused, glancing back at Lux. “Will you make sure she’s okay?”
She raised a sharp eyebrow, but for the first time in her life, the fiery navigator didn’t argue. “Yes, Captain.”
Once she was gone, his focus shifted into problem-solving mode, and he was relieved to occupy his mind with fixing their dilemma instead of Talia’s hurt expression. “All right, Dorian, go assess the damage. Jane, find me the closest Federation planet before Xander finds us sitting ducks. And, Leo?”
Leo flashed an eager smile. “Captain?”
“Stop looking so damn pretty and go extract that fire net before they track us here.”
“Yes, sir.”
Chapter 24
Talia
Talia didn’t remember walking up the stairs to the uppermost glass room, or sitting at the piano. One minute she was watching the last moments of her family’s life; the next, she was here. Surrounded by the stars that had witnessed it all.
She’d always loved deep space. Loved the feeling of being a part of something so much bigger than herself. Stars were romantic, magical. What the viewer saw was a beautiful illusion from thousands of years in the past.
Just like her life currently. She’d let herself believe the illusion that her family was still alive, because they were the gravity that kept her together, just like the gravity that holds together the brightest supernova. Without them . . . she was nothing.
A girl breaking apart.
Why wasn’t she crying? She pounded her fist into the ivories, the sound bouncing off the glass. She yearned to fall into a ball of tears, to thrash and scream and curse the world. To mourn properly. But she couldn’t even do that right.
I killed you. The words lodged in her throat. Her parents and grandmother. Her little brother—
Say his name. Maybe if she could just say it aloud, he wouldn’t be dead. An irrational idea, but somehow it made sense. “Tamsin. I just saw you. They say it’s one hundred years later, but just yesterday we were playing games on the holo-screen, and I was winning. Remember?”
The silence stretched into minutes. Expecting him to answer was ridiculous.
She meant to play a tune, but her fingers became fists pummeling the keys. Smashing them over and over. But no matter how hard she hit or how painful the white-hot lightning ricocheting up her arms, she couldn’t stop the guilt from splitting her in half.
Someone cleared their throat behind her. Ripped from her trance, she looked down at her knuckles, busted and bloody. A mixture of shattered ivory and her blood smeared the broken keys.
Lux came around the side of the piano, her worried gaze sliding from the ruined ivories to Talia’s face.
“I’m sorry,” Talia whispered. But she wasn’t apologizing to Lux, and they both knew it.
Lux absentmindedly pressed one of the unbroken keys. The sound echoed in the silence. “You should have seen the wall of my bedroom after my parents died.”
Talia curled her injured hands in her lap. “Does it help?”
“For the moment, sure. But death is a tsunami, and all the pain in the world can’t stop the waves of grief about to crash over you.”
“Then how do I stop them?”
“You don’t. You learn to hold your breath and wait for them to pass. After a while, the waves are less frequent. That’s when it’s the hardest. When you can breathe again and your life feels almost . . . normal. Then you pray for the waves to come again because the guilt of living is harder than drowning.”
Talia nodded. Not once had she thought Lux’s grief might be different than her own. Lux was a mock, sure, but the anguish reflected inside her eyes was the same as Talia’s—just not as raw. A wound that had stopped bleeding but never quite healed. The last person she ever thought she’d receive comfort from was a mock, but Lux’s words were real, and they touched something deep inside that marked them as the same.
Death didn’t care if Talia was flesh and bone and Lux was metal and wires. Death wrecked both their lives in equal measure.
“How did they die?” Talia asked.
“They stumbled onto a flesher ship near the Outer Fringes. It happened very quickly, I’m told.” There was no blame in her voice, but Talia felt responsible anyway. “They should have been more careful, but the war was long over and no one expected an entire fleet of fleshers to appear.”
“The war? Between my kind and yours, you mean?”
“The day your family was killed was the start of a long offensive by the mock rebels.” Lux met Talia’s gaze, and she saw her own guilt mirrored back at her. “Fleshers made it clear they’d never set us free, so we did what we had to.”
“What happened to my people after the war?” Pain zipped up her arms, and she realized her injured hands were clenched into rocks.
“We switched roles. Considering our history, th
ere was no other place for humankind. We were smarter than fleshers, stronger, more civilized. The queen says our rise was an inevitability; that’s why the humans treated us so bad in the first place.”
Talia chewed her lip. “The queen?”
The way Lux straightened at the question, the queen was someone held in high regard. No one had ever acted that way at Talia’s name. “She saved us. First, she helped us win the war, and then she united the planets of the Seven along with the off-world colonies.”
“This mock queen. Does she have a name?”
“No. Just the queen.”
“You like her?”
“Yeah, I guess.” She tugged at the zipper dangling just below her collar. “After my parents were killed, Dor and I were shuttled to planet Calisto to meet her. There was this live ceremony broadcast over the galaxies, and all the families of those killed on the ship were there. They gave us medals for our loved ones dying. She came out at the end.”
“And?” Talia nudged, her curiosity flaring. “What did she say to you?”
The thought that a Starchaser wasn’t ruling the galaxies was foreign, and hard to swallow. What was this new queen like? Was she fair? Clearly she wasn’t to humans, but to mocks at least?
Lux’s eyes unfocused slightly, and she twisted a bit of purple hair through her fingers. “She told me she would make them pay.”
“The humans who fired on your parents’ ship?”
“Every last surviving human in the universe. Those were her words.” Frowning, Lux pulled a thin green cuff from her pocket. “Give me your wrist.”
Talia slowly complied, eyeing the thing with distrust. The second Lux had the band around Talia’s wrist, it shrunk to fit. Surprised, she tried to yank it off, but it had molded to her wrist.
“What the—” Talia’s question died as holo-Tandy appeared to her left, her image shimmering before solidifying. She wore a galaxy’s worth of makeup and a slinky silver dress that draped over her hips, the bodice plunging to her navel. Her blond hair was pulled back in a severe bun, showing off her long neck and high cheekbones.
As soon as the holo-girl recognized Talia, the trademark pout emerged, and her eyes flashed fire at Lux. “Where’s Leo? You said he needed me for a high-class function.”
“Sorry, doll. There’s a tiny emergency on the bridge, but Talia here will keep you company.” Lux leaned in close, and Tandy’s body language changed; she angled her body to mirror Lux’s, one finger running along the exposed curve of her breast. Tandy was a pleasure holo, after all. Seduction was in her nature. “Leo wants you to keep an eye on Talia for us. Can you do that?”
Tandy’s face lit up. “Of course. Anything for my Leo. What specifically should I look for?”
Lux maneuvered out of Tandy’s reach before the holo-girl could finish her seduction sequence. “Set off the operating system alarms if she tries to do anything suspicious. Like taking a weapon or messing with the coms, trying to escape. Stealing a shuttle”—Lux cut her gaze to Talia—“that kind of thing.”
“Oh, I’m the right girl for the job!” Tandy squealed. If she were a dog, her tail would have broken the piano bench with all her wagging.
“Wait.” Talia stood, bumping her knee on the bench. “Will said he was taking me to the queen. That’s her, right? The one who hates humans?”
Lux didn’t answer, but the way she stared just behind Talia, as if meeting her eyes was too hard, confirmed it.
“She’ll kill me. You know that, right?”
Grinding her jaw, Lux pivoted on her heels, obviously in a hurry to avoid talking about what exactly the queen would do. “I’ll have Leo bring up some tea for you when everything’s calmed down.”
As the door clicked shut behind Lux, Talia released a deep sigh. Now, more than ever, she needed to escape her captors and find her people. She knew her kind, and they wouldn’t give up so easily. There had to be pockets of them out there, probably on the Outer Fringes. If she could just find a way to them . . .
Talia forced a grin as she turned to holo-girl. “Tandy?”
Tandy, arms crossed over her chest and bottom lip pushed out, cut a sideways glance at Talia. “I don’t think I should talk to you.”
“They didn’t specify that, did they?”
The pleasure holo’s frown deepened as she scowled at Talia. “No.”
“Then we can talk to pass the time.”
“About what?”
“Oh, I would love to talk about directly after the war. But they probably didn’t upload you with history, so . . .”
Tandy scoffed. “I’m an A-grade luxury pleasure holo, familiar with anything a client can possibly want to discuss. Even the smallest, most boring detail. I can also change my design to best please you . . .” Her face began to change, her heart-shaped head and delicate chin elongating, her jaw thickening. Stubble appeared on her tawny skin, her wide eyes shrinking and lightening. Will stared back at her; Tandy had even captured his half-smirk.
“No, just . . . go back, please.” Something about the way Talia’s heart had leapt at the captain’s face bothered her, and she was relieved when Tandy reluctantly changed back to her original design, huffing as she did.
Her arms tangled over her chest. “I was only trying to please you. I’ve seen the way you look at the captain.”
Resisting the urge to protest, Talia nodded. “Tandy, it’s obvious you were made with the best of everything. But, if you really want to make me happy, you’ll fill me in on our history.”
Tandy’s eyes lit up at the compliment. “Try me. Any question, and I bet I know the answer.”
Talia smiled; she was counting on it.
Chapter 25
Will
Will stood outside Leo’s door, breathing hard while leaning his face against the cold metal. On the other side of that thin door was Talia, dreaming her human dreams. The image of the broken piano keys, dark with human blood, was emblazoned on his mind. When he first entered his viewing room and saw the mess, the memories came flooding back in a wave he couldn’t stop.
His mother, slaving away inside General Crayburn’s palatial townhome during the day and entertaining in the evenings. His father, darkened with the metallic ore dust after a long day in the mines.
The day the other fleshers came for Will and his mother inside their cramped, squalid little home just outside the city, he heard them from half a mile away. Cursing and cajoling her name in the streets. Names like metal lover and mock whore drifted across the sluggish breeze that filtered through the flesher town.
Scared, he begged his mother to flee. Even then, at thirteen, he knew how much they were hated by their kind. They were jealous of his mother’s nice job inside a mock home, and some of the flesher slaves whispered about his mother’s relationship with the general when the sun went down. Will’s father included.
But she refused, convinced they would never hurt them. When he peeked out the front windows and saw his father leading the pack, face red from drink and anger, a horrible feeling settled in Will’s stomach. Memories after that moment were a blank, as if a door was shut on the violence that followed.
But, sometimes, on the rare occasion when he dreamed, he heard his mother screaming for him. Saw the blood and the terror on her face as she was beaten by a man sworn to love and protect her.
A rustle came from the other side of the door, bringing Will back to the present and the complex emotions he couldn’t shake. When he first saw those destroyed piano keys, he was angry. But somewhere between there and Leo’s room, that feeling had transformed to pity, and Will went from wanting to yell at Talia to wanting to comfort her. To take her in his arms and ease her pain.
Then he remembered the mock girl crying at the Princess’s feet, and her cold indifference. The way she’d looked at the poor mock girl, her own companion, the disdain in her eyes—
Sucking in a cleansing breath, he shoved off the door, propelling himself away from Talia as fast as possible. Her humanness was corrupt
ing him. Bringing back terrible memories of the past and waking up emotions that made him weak.
He clenched his fists as he stalked away.
She was a human; he was a mock. They were enemies. A few hours until they docked at the city of Palatine and replenished their fuel cells, and then they’d hyperdrive all the way to Calisto and hand Talia off to the queen, and he could forget all about Talia Starchaser.
No more wasteful emotions. No more indecision.
In a few days, his whole life would be back to normal.
Chapter 26
Talia
Talia hadn’t slept at all after she and Tandy retired to Leo’s old room. Instead, she used the time to learn everything about the last one hundred years she could from Tandy, who, surprisingly was very knowledgeable. Someone had taken great care to ensure she was uploaded with a comprehensive history, and holo-girl was more than happy to answer Talia’s questions and show off that knowledge.
In the last eight hours, Talia had learned that a massive joint attack took out all the main human rulers the day her family was killed, throwing their forces into chaos. On that same day—Insurrection Day, they called it—the mocks on all the off-world colonies and Seven worlds rebelled. Her people didn’t stand a chance. The virus, or what the mocks now called the Awakening, was much more widespread than anyone knew, allowing even the most trusted mock companions to rise up against their masters.
But there was also reason for hope. Tandy admitted to several large human battalions unaccounted for, much like the one that killed Lux’s parents and disappeared. Where did those ships and their crews go? And not all mocks had been in favor of human enslavement, either. There was a minor coup to overthrow the queen a few years after the end of the war. Whispers of an alliance between mocks and humans flitted through the galaxies, and ships like the one Will manned before this one—Tandy was full of information—hunted these rebels of the queen down.