Soul of Stars Read online

  “Like what?” she asked. “That you’re harboring another prince or princess on the Dossier? That Lenda’s secretly the heir to some grand fortune? Aragon maybe?” Because the last of the Aragons had died with the late Grand Duchess, her daughter killed by an assassin some twenty years ago. Siege flinched as Ana continued, “No, I’m fine not knowing, thanks.”

  “Ana—”

  But she’d already turned away from her captain. Siege sighed and left with Talle. Ana stormed off toward one corner of the garden, resisting the urge to kick a flower in her anger. The flowers didn’t deserve it.

  The comm-link on her lapel flashed, the silver band on her ear that also served as an earpiece crackled, and Elara’s voice hushed through. “You seem irate, Princess.”

  Ana jumped, startled. She whirled around the garden, but she was alone, save for the Solgard, looking bored and unhappy, guarding the entrance to the garden. “Elara?” she whispered. “Where are you?”

  “The Dossier, where I’m supposed to be. The ma c’zar is certainly as cold as ever.”

  “You were listening this whole time?”

  “Just a bit.”

  Hackers, Ana thought, and realized that there was nothing she could do about her anger, so she just let out a long breath. After a moment she said, “Did you know? That Jax had the dark fever?”

  “I . . . had hoped that he didn’t.”

  “And you recognized him as the C’zar when you first met him?”

  “Yes,” she replied carefully.

  Ana kicked a pebble, and it skittered across the cobblestones and into the bushes. “You seem to know a lot about us, and we know almost nothing about you.” When Elara didn’t respond, she added, “Does it have to do with that person you mentioned back in Neon City? Koren Vey?”

  “Yes. She helped me rescue you.”

  “How?”

  “Can you take out your holo-pad, Princess? It’s easier to show you. And find somewhere . . . quiet.”

  That meant find somewhere discreet where the Solgard couldn’t see her. There were plenty of bushes and trees and flowers in the garden, so she simply slipped between two budding rosebushes, thorns catching her coat, and settled down behind them, on the lip of the garden. It was a sheer drop into a cluster of official buildings a hundred feet below, where more trees and flowers and grasses bloomed in the shade. Zenteli was a strange place, a mixture of white marble and green spaces.

  She took out her holo-pad. A screen appeared, prompting a code, and it filled in itself and opened a strange program Ana didn’t recognize. “I assume you hacked it?”

  “So, don’t get mad, but I’ve been . . . looking at you for a while.”

  Ana made a disgusted noise. “Spying?”

  “Not in the traditional sense. Here.” Elara prompted the program on Ana’s holo-pad, and three screens expanded to fill the glass. They looked like windows into the Dossier’s galley, hull, and cockpit. Lenda was stocking the galley with supplies she’d bought in the market. There wasn’t any sound, but by the way her head bobbed she was singing something. Probably that snappy tune Wick played for her all the time.

  Ana looked closer at the screens. “How did you do that? The Dossier doesn’t have cameras. Did you install them when we weren’t looking or—”

  “Nope. About a month ago, I patched myself through the Dossier’s holo-screens and rewrote the projection to not only export images but input them as well. It’s part of a code I stripped from Xu while they were HIVE’d. It’s how the HIVE can be anywhere and take control of anything. The code literally creates a back door, wipes the slate clean, and rebuilds it to its own specifications. That’s how it controls Metals.”

  Ana frowned, looking through the hazy images on the screen. So that was how the HIVE could control Di. It erased him, then built him back to serve it. His memories were still there, but he wasn’t.

  “How did you get Xu back if it wipes the slate clean?”

  “Honestly? I didn’t think I could, but Koren Vey said that while the HIVE can erase data, it can’t erase them. I locked them in a lead-lined room to dampen the HIVE’s signal and started rebuilding them piece by piece, memory by memory.” The three screens minimized, and Elara’s face appeared. She looked like she was hunkered down in the Dossier’s cockpit, sitting in one of the emergency foldout chairs. Her hearing apparatuses glowed purple in the dimness. “I could do it because I knew Xu—everything about them. I’d have stayed in that room as long as it took—years, decades. But then, partway through my rewriting their first memory, Xu’s memory core started . . . well, it started to rebuild itself. Right in front of my eyes. And in a matter of seconds, Xu was back.”

  Ana’s heart fluttered at the thought. Di’s memory core in her pocket felt heavy and important—so much more so than it had been before. “So if we destroy the HIVE, we can bring all the Metals back at once?”

  “No,” Elara replied, sounding troubled. “It’s not that simple. From what Koren Vey and I found out in the coding I stripped from Xu, all the Messiers are linked to one AI.”

  Ana sat a little straighter. “Who?”

  “The D’thverek.”

  The Great Dark.

  She had been right all along. She had looked into Di’s red eyes, and she had seen it, had almost been killed by it. A chill prickled her skin.

  “Metals are a part of it now,” Elara went on. “They’re all tied together in this weird symbiotic relationship that we know as the HIVE. The D’thverek feeds off of them somehow. If it dies, so do all the Metals it’s connected to.”

  “But there are thousands—tens of thousands—of Metals in the HIVE by now! It’d be impossible to detatch them from the HIVE one by one. We can’t possibly—”

  “Maybe we can. That’s why Koren Vey sent me to find you.”

  “How does this Koren Vey know so much?”

  “It’s complicated—”

  Robb crashed through the bushes, effectively cutting her short. He picked a leaf out of his hair, absolutely oblivious to the conversation. “Ana, there you are! Siege said you’d be in the garden, but I didn’t think I’d have to fight nature to find you.”

  “Robb!” She gave a start and scrambled to her feet. “How’s Jax? Is he really . . .”

  His mouth wobbled, and he shook his head. “He’s not good.”

  She didn’t think she’d heard correctly. They were here so he could get better. Not because . . . not because . . .

  Because Siege brought him here to die, that terrible voice confirmed in her head.

  He went on, struggling to find the words. “Like the ma c’zar said, his light is—it’s gone. There’s no way to get it back—”

  “There has to be a way,” she replied numbly.

  “There isn’t, Ana.”

  “Can’t they just hook him up to some sort of light-feeding machine and—”

  “He’s not a Metal!” Robb snapped. “We can’t just magically transfer him into a new body, or replace his parts, or charge his battery!” He ran his fingers through his hair, turned away from her, and sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, Robb.” She gathered him into her arms and pressed her face into his shoulder, and he rested his cheek against the side of her head, and they hugged each other for a long time. She didn’t think she could cry any more than she already had. There were tears in her eyes, but her insides felt numb, like a ligament that had lost circulation.

  After a while, he said softly, “If we don’t stop the Great Dark, his death’ll be for nothing.”

  “But we don’t know what to do, or where to look—”

  “Koren Vey can help.”

  Robb jumped, glancing around the garden. “Elara?” he called, rubbing his tears off his cheeks.

  Both of their comm-links lit up with the signal. “Koren Vey can help,” she repeated. “They’re waiting in the ark.”

  “The one down in the valley?” Ana asked.

  Robb added, “Why wo
uld they be in a thousand-year-old shipwreck?”

  “You’re just going to have to trust me, Smolder,” Elara replied evenly. “Meet me at the north gate of Zenteli—and swing by the Dossier for provisions. Lenda’ll ask if I take them.”

  “Provisions? Why would we—”

  “We’re going on a hike.”

  Then both of their comm-links went dead. They glanced at each other.

  Robb muttered, “I don’t know if I trust her.”

  She took him by his mechanical hand and gave a tug so he knew she was holding it. “What do we have to lose?”

  Goddess bright, she prayed, even though everyone thought she was the Goddess, and it felt a little weird praying to herself, help save Jax, so we can save the kingdom.

  She pulled Robb with her toward the garden gate, where the Solgard let them into the Spire and down the front steps. They passed the Solani chiseling Jax’s name into the wall, and she tried to ignore it, but the tck, tck, tck of the chisel got under her skin.

  Another name carved into her soul. Another person lost.

  And she wished, like a thousand times before, it had been her name instead.

  They stopped by the Dossier as Elara asked. She had apparently slipped away when Lenda, after a brief shopping trip, had inserted herself into a fight ring and won a few hundred coppers. Now there were at least twice as many people working on the Dossier as before—all of whom had lost to Lenda in the ring.

  Apparently, it was very boring down by the docks.

  Lenda was taping up her bruised knuckles, sitting on a foldout chair in the mouth of the hull. “What? It’s not my fault they lost.” A guy passing them carrying new coils for the solar engine high-fived her. “Besides, work’s been pretty sparse with all the shit going down in the kingdom. And I’m still payin’ them.”

  Ana quirked an eyebrow. “With what money?”

  “The money I won off ’em in the fighting ring, obviously. Oy!” Lenda called around them, pointing to a squirrelly man folding up some of the Dossier’s laundry on the docks. “Fold the towels left side first! Goddess’s spark, gimme a minute.” Slamming her hands on the armrests, she pushed herself up and strode down to the dock.

  Xu had pulled out a box and was sitting on it at the edge of the ramp, their legs crossed beneath them, letting a beautiful monarch butterfly rest in the middle of their face where, if human, their nose would be. The butterfly flitted its wings, fanning them out like a skysailer in full glide. Ana couldn’t imagine this Metal, with the patience of a saint, ever donning the Messier uniform.

  But then again, she’d never thought Di would, either.

  Ana and Robb grabbed a rucksack with a few provisions from the galley—a few fruit preserves, a flash-dried nutrient bar—and as they were about to leave, Lenda asked, “Has the guard captain found you yet?”

  Ana frowned. “No, I thought she might’ve come back here. Maybe she’s still praying?”

  “She isn’t one to just disappear on us, though,” Robb added, slinging the sack over his shoulder.

  “What would you do if you were tortured for six months?”

  To that, he pursed his lips.

  “Perhaps she needs time,” said Xu, startling the butterfly off their face. They watched it flutter away before adding, “I am sure she still has . . . things she must sort out on her own.”

  Ana agreed. “And we’ll be here when she wants to talk. Lenda, if we’re not back by sundown . . .”

  “Tell the captain, yeah,” Lenda replied, looking up from her taped knuckles. “You know, Xu says the ark is off-limits. To everyone.”

  Ana rolled her eyes. “What are they gonna do, arrest a dead Empress?”

  “They could arrest a live one,” Xu replied.

  She sighed at that. “Do you know about this Koren Vey?”

  The Metal shook their head. “I cannot say. I made a promise.”

  The more she thought about Elara’s timing in contacting her as Starbright, the more suspicious all of this became.

  Lenda ran her fingers through her hair. “Just be careful. I don’t want the captain having my head.”

  “She’ll have mine,” Ana replied. She and Robb hurried down the ramp of the Dossier to the docks, and onward to the far gate at the edge of the city.

  Elara squatted outside the wall, almost invisible to the naked eye. When she saw them, she got to her feet and gave a wave. “Did you get the provisions?”

  Ana offered out a rucksack.

  Elara grabbed it and rifled through it for a can of peaches and popped it open. She turned down the dirt road and began to eat. “Oh man, I was starving. Thanks, Princess.”

  “You do know I’m not—”

  “A princess, yeah. No one followed you, did they?” She glanced behind them to make sure. Ana and Robb shook their heads, no. “Good, good. Come on—it’s a long trip down into the valley, but at least it’s not raining right now. That would suck.”

  “But who exactly are we going to meet?” Robb asked as Elara paused and turned back away from them. “I mean, you didn’t tell us anything, and we’re not just going to follow you to follow you.”

  Elara ate another slice of peach and started down the path again, and almost helplessly they had to follow. “Long story short, my parents were archeologists. They wanted to study the ark down in the valley.” She pointed down the mountainside, toward the enormous bone-like carcass reaching out of the tree line. “So they did, even though it was forbidden, and the elders in the city didn’t much like that. They exiled my parents—and me—from Zenteli, and stripped away our last names.”

  “Why can’t we take a skysailer down into the valley, though? Why do we have to—” In classic Robb fashion, he tripped over a tree root to exemplify his point. He caught himself and jerked upright again, coolly smoothing down his shirt. “Why do we have to walk?”

  Elara pointed a half-eaten slice of peach up to the top of the wall. “Because you see those guard towers? It’s someone’s duty to watch over the ark and make sure no one gets close, and with all the Messiers swarming and shrines burning, they’re definitely on high alert. The ark’s basically holy remains, after all. The last of our history.” She rolled her eyes and tossed the rest of the peach into her mouth. “It’s just rotting down there in the valley. Our entire people’s history is sitting in that ark, and instead of trying to learn about it, we just watch as time eats it away.”

  Ana tugged at the collar of her coat and glanced at the canopy of the trees above her. She really didn’t much like nature. All the dirt, and bugs, and humidity. “Why did your parents get in trouble for studying it?”

  “The ship’s been unstable since we crashed here a thousand-odd years ago. The elderberries up in that cushy Spire are scared that if we mess with it too much, it’ll go boom and take with it the history stored in its databases. But if we don’t even try to access that history—learn it—isn’t it already, you know, kaboom?”

  “And so this person, Koren Vey, is hiding in the ark?” Robb asked skeptically, and shot Ana a regretful look.

  I know, she wanted to tell him. I’m feeling pretty regretful right now, too.

  Elara said, to their surprise, “It’s not like she can leave, Smolder.”

  “And here’s where we just have to believe you, I suppose,” he deadpanned.

  “Yep.”

  Well, at least it was better than waiting in that stupid garden.

  She didn’t want to admit that maybe she was just running from the inevitable—because as long as she was moving, pushing forward, doing something, time wouldn’t catch up with her.

  Time that Jax no longer had.

  Because of her. Because she was reckless.

  Elara dug into the can, realized it was empty, and tossed it out into the forest. By now, Elara had eaten all the provisions, and both Ana and Robb realized that the provisions had been because Elara was hungry—not because the trek was long. The path they followed was almost not a path at all, overgrown with ro
ots and vines. There were buzzy . . . things . . . everywhere, and she kept swatting them away.

  Ana was raised on a starship.

  She wasn’t meant for nature.

  It had taken only an hour or so to get down the side of the mountain, with the help of a few pulleys and antiquated zip lines hidden in the foliage. The last bit of the trail was a hilly descent into the valley, and the ark already looked impossibly big.

  It had once housed hundreds of thousands of Solani—but Ana hadn’t realized how big it was until she was halfway down the mountain and the bones of the ship stretched from one side of the valley to the other, like the skeleton of some great beast of lore. It wasn’t a natural valley, but a crater made from its impact.

  Elara stopped them at the edge of the forest and looked back up to the city on the peak. “This is the tricky part. The lookout will definitely spot us here.”

  “Then we can’t go any farther?” Robb asked, irately batting away a fly that had started pestering him about half a mile back.

  “Nonsense, Smolder. We just have to go faster!” Elara spun back to them and dug into her own bag. She produced two fist-size plates. Ana recognized them from the Solgard’s belts. “I managed to slip away with a few of these. They’re shields. You just push the middle button here and”—she pressed the button in the center and a sheet of silver whirled out on all sides to form a fairly decent shield that covered most of her body—“magic!”

  Ana and Robb each took one.

  “And why do we need shields?” Robb asked dryly.

  “Watch and learn, Smolder.” Elara dug out a third shield for herself, extended it, and took a running leap over the hill. She tucked the shield underneath her feet a moment before she landed on the grass, and went surfing down toward the ark at a remarkable speed.

  Robb’s eye twitched. “We couldn’t have used hoverboards for this?”

  Ana popped out her own shield and patted his shoulder. “Well, if I die, it was nice knowing you, Smolder.”

  She heard Robb squawk in protest at the nickname as she made a running start for the edge of the hill, launching herself off it. She tucked the shield underneath her feet and landed hard on the grass, then surfed off after Elara.