Soul of Stars Read online

  100101010101—

  It was the deny code to power its solar core. One the Great Dark had to find before it could fix. It was like searching for a single star in a sky of billions. One by one, the lights flickered out, stranding the ship where it floated.

  YOU ARE NOTHING.

  YOU ARE NO T HI N G.

  YO U . . .

  The Great Dark’s voice faded as the ship went dark.

  As he pieced himself back together inside his body, easing power back into his other functions, he began to realize just how little power he had left.

  His eyesight began to dim.

  Voices sounded far away—

  “Ak’va—what in the Goddess’s spark did he just do?”

  “I’m reading a system-wide shutdown . . . Sunshine, I think he turned off the lights.”

  “He can do that?”

  “Jax, do you have an escape route?”

  “Ready and waiting.”

  “Take it.”

  —The voices were so familiar. He glanced around at the blur of faces. His chest was still hot, overheated, burning as it tried to cool itself down. He could no longer feel his extremities. He waited for the pull of the Great Dark to tear into his head again—

  But there was nothing. Only his thoughts.

  Only him.

  Di, and not Di, and Dmitri, and D09, and he remembered everything. The Plague and Mercer and Marigold and Nicholii, and Mellifare visiting him as he died, and waking up a Metal, and not remembering himself, and the years spent in the service of Nicholii, who found out, and Mercer, older and bearded, who shoved a little girl into his Metal arms, and Marigold finding their escape pod, and the light-years spent in love without knowing what it felt like, what it meant, that he was not broken or glitching, but that he was mortal and—

  The hand on his arm tightened. “Di?”

  He looked over.

  A heart-shaped face and bronze skin, and golden eyes. His gaze fell across her scars, as intricate as a night sky. As he turned to her, his vision narrowed into a pinprick, and he fell into darkness with her name on his lips.

  Ana

  Ana frowned, crossing her arms over her chest tightly, as she looked in through the window to the medical ward. Inside, Di sat restrained in a chair in the middle of the room, well away from anything he could use to murder anyone. His eyes were half open but unseeing, as they had been since he’d fainted in the cockpit, and the longer the minutes dragged on, the more worried she became.

  He’d saved them from the dreadnought. That wouldn’t be something the HIVE would do, would it?

  She wouldn’t know know either way standing on the opposite side of the door, but she remembered the terror she’d felt in the tomb, the way he’d pinned her against the wall, red eyes searing, ready to kill her—

  But then he hadn’t. He had saved her life.

  It could’ve been a trick.

  The HIVE’s done that before, she reminded herself, absently brushing her fingers against the scar on her abdomen, but then she paused and began to wonder. Hadn’t it?

  She had seen the lengths Mellifare would go to to kill her because she thought Ana was the Goddess. It seemed odd—almost fantastical—that Di hadn’t killed her the first time.

  Or in the tomb.

  It couldn’t have been a coincidence.

  Gathering up her courage, she unlocked the door to the medical ward and it eased open with a sigh. She kept a hand on her pistol as she crept toward him. “Di?”

  His blank stare didn’t waver.

  She brushed a lock of bloodred hair out of his face and pinned it behind his ear—

  He jerked awake with a start. For a moment he looked afraid, as if he’d just awoken from a nightmare. He struggled against his bindings.

  She took a step back and without thinking drew the dagger from her boot.

  His eyes snapped to hers, and they weren’t dark like in the palace, but a brilliant white like they had been in his old body, pitch-black pupils ringed with the color of the moon.

  “Ana,” he whispered, and his voice broke at her name. It broke like she was a ghost who had come back to haunt him, and suddenly, she was angrier at Mellifare than ever before. Mellifare took and destroyed, and even the things that came back weren’t the same. They were twisted and hurting, like Viera—like Di.

  Like herself.

  His gaze lowered to the silver dagger she pointed at him, and he flinched away. He couldn’t meet her gaze. “Let me speak to the captain.”

  She stared at him, uncomprehending. “Di . . .”

  “Please.”

  His eyes were trained on the floor, and they didn’t waver. A muscle, or a gear, or something in his jaw throbbed. The longer she waited, the stranger the silence grew between them.

  She lowered the dagger.

  “You are not safe in here. What if I am still HIVE’d?” His voice was cold and detached, so different from his old and damaged voice, that she wondered if he was the same at all. “I could break these handcuffs and kill you now. Is that not what the HIVE would do?”

  In susprise, she blinked. “The HIVE wouldn’t have asked.”

  His shoulders stiffened. She now recognized the motion of his jaw working—the grit and throb of it—because it looked like the movement of someone trying not to cry. Metals couldn’t cry, but she wondered what the feeling of needing to felt like. He said, “You cannot be so sure.”

  “You’re right,” she replied, putting the dagger back in her boot and leaving the medical ward.

  As the door slid shut, a hot tear fell down her cheek, but she quickly wiped it away. Why was she crying? She was angry—angry that she was relieved to be out of that room, angry that he wouldn’t talk to her, angry that she left.

  Angry that . . .

  Angry that she couldn’t tell if he was her Di, or another trick of the HIVE. Angry that, if he was hers, he wasn’t the Di she remembered. Something terrible had settled between them, prowling the ten feet that separated them, teeth bared. Her fingers pressed against the ropy scar on her stomach, not sure if it warded off the monster or kept it tethered there.

  She had dreamed of wrenching her Di out of the HIVE so many times. She had envisioned exactly how it’d go, because she always thought it would feel like coming home.

  But maybe her Di was only in her head.

  Maybe she didn’t love him at all—did she? Love was stubborn, and love was impatient, and thoughtless and self-centered and vainglorious. It hid in the crevices of your soul when you thought it had run away, and it never left—like a scar: deep and ugly and enduring.

  She wiped another hot tear from her cheek when she heard Jax come down the stairs.

  “We’ll be arriving in Haven’s Grave in a few hours. Is the metalhead awake yet? I really don’t want to go in to dock with him still unconscious.” He didn’t realize she was crying until he came to stand beside her. He gave a start, the light under his skin flickering. “Oh, love! Is everything all right?”

  “Fine.” She quickly wiped her eyes with the back of her hand again. “I’m fine. He’s awake.”

  “Oh.” He glanced in through the window. As if he heard them, Di lifted his moonlit eyes to the window. “So he is.”

  “He won’t talk to me.”

  “At all?”

  She shook her head and wrapped her arms around herself tightly. “He asked for the captain.”

  “Huh.” He clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “Do you think he’s still HIVE’d?”

  She hesitated. “It’s reckless to say no, isn’t it? I know he could still be tricking me, but . . .”

  Jax didn’t say anything for a long moment. The light under his skin shifted quicker than before, as if under duress, and his frown deepened. “Without Elara here, there’s no way to prove to him that he isn’t still HIVE’d—” His words caught in his throat. “Actually, I’ve an idea. Don’t get the captain yet.”

  “What are you going to do?”

 
“I’m not sure yet, but if you hear me scream, please come running—with a gun,” he added, and unlocked the medical ward door.

  Jax

  The light beneath his skin whispered softly, warning him. Not of Di. Not in the way he expected. But of what would come after. He had an idea, but he was hard-pressed to actually believe that it would work.

  He took the chair from the corner of the room and came right up to him, spinning it around to sit backward on it. They were but a few feet away from each other, and if the HIVE was still banging around in Di’s head, well, then it would make quick work of him. Jax should have been afraid of that, but he was afraid of plenty more things much larger and scarier than this boy lost in time.

  When he sat down, Di glanced up at him and then straightened in his chair. “Jax, I need to speak with— You are glowing,” he interrupted himself in surprise. “How did . . .”

  Jax waved him off. “It’s a long story, but yes, I’m a glowlight. It makes reading in the dark riveting.”

  In reply, Di’s lips twitched, as if trying to form a smile, but it quickly fell away again. He shifted in his chair. “Jax, I need you to smash me.”

  That was not what he was expecting.

  “My memory core is in the center of my chest,” the Metal went on. “I can help you aim for the correct location and—”

  “Are you asking me to kill you?”

  He winced. “I am not alive, so no. You would not kill me. It is the only way to ensure I am not HIVE’d. I do not trust myself. What if I hurt Ana again? Or you again?”

  Oh, no, all of this was beginning to make a lot of sense now.

  “And that’s why you asked Ana to go get the captain, right? So you could ask her to do it?” he asked angrily.

  “No, I would have provoked her into doing it.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Di, there are other ways to—”

  “Are there?” Di snapped. “There is no way to tell if I am still under the influence of the HIVE. The program it uses, is so perfectly tuned that it is difficult to pick the HIVE from my own thoughts and actions. I was not under the control of it. I was it. Its thoughts were mine. I would try to rebel and then it would—it would correct me, as simply as if turning a knob. Metals have never left the HIVE—”

  “Yes, they have.”

  “Liar.”

  “You know very well I can’t lie. We have a Metal on board—Xu—who escaped the HIVE,” he informed him, nudging his head toward the door. Xu was up in the galley helping Talle prepare a snack for the crew.

  Di bit his bottom lip and looked away.

  Above them, the halogen light flickered, as if in reaction to the Metal’s mood. It seemed like Jax wasn’t the only one with strange powers. He folded his arms over the back of the chair and rested his chin upon them. “So, the question remains, how did you escape?”

  The Metal rolled his shoulders, clearly uncomfortable, but he didn’t really need to say anything.

  The light whispered under Jax’s skin, the image of Di at the palace, grasping ahold of—

  “E0S,” Jax murmured, and Di gave him a surprised look. He went on as the past whispered to him through his skin, “You implanted data into the bot, and when it found you again in the XO, it uploaded the data back into you. Well, that explains why E0S had shocked the ever-loving spark out of that Metal.”

  The halogen light above them flickered again, this time more distraught, reflecting the confused look on Di’s face. “How did you know that?”

  “You aren’t the only one with new powers—could you stop that?” he added, pointing up to the light.

  Suddenly, it blinked back to life and stayed on.

  “Sorry,” Di added sheepishly. “I cannot control it sometimes.”

  “Mmh.”

  Di went on, “With the data E0S gave back to me, I began to remember who I am, but the point is moot because I do not know if I am still under the HIVE’s influence or not. Ana is right not to trust me.”

  He feigned shock. “She said that?”

  Di gave him a deadpan look. “Jax, the window is glass—it is not soundproof.”

  He grinned. “I know. I just wanted you to admit that you were eavesdropping.”

  “I was not eavesdropping—”

  “Were too.”

  “You really are insufferable.”

  “I won’t kill you,” he said suddenly.

  Di ground his teeth. “Then bring me the captain, who will.”

  “I don’t think she will, metalhead. I don’t think any of us will. Well, except Viera, but we aren’t letting her within ten feet of you,” he added as an afterthought, remembering the way the ex–guard captain had looked at Di just after he had saved them from the dreadnought: like she wanted to murder him.

  With a frustrated growl, Di tugged at his bindings, and the metal cords groaned with his strength. “I almost killed everyone!” he snapped. “I almost killed Ana and I enjoyed it!”

  “That was the HIVE—”

  “Was it?” Di snarled. “Or was that who I really am?”

  “No, it wasn’t, Dmitri.”

  The sound of his name caught him off guard. Jax knew from the light flickering under his skin that it was the first time Di had been called that name in twenty years, and the sound was strange and wrong, like a crown that had once fit but now felt too small. And then Di began to tremble. “I am a monster, Jax. I kill everything I love, so I should just—”

  Like a wind bending the trees, the light inside him took hold of his body and leaned him forward, and he cupped Di’s face in his hands. The light thrummed, pulsing out of his skin, through his clothes and his gloves, surrounding them in a celestial golden-white light. Di’s eyes widened as the light sank into his synthetic skin, and across his wires, and found the soft core of his soul.

  And suddenly, it was no longer a Metal sitting there but the shorn-haired young man from the Plague hospital, tears fresh in his brown eyes.

  “You are good,” Jax said.

  Dmitri heaved a sob. “But it’s all my fault.”

  “You are good,” he repeated. The light faded, and as it did, Jax found himself looking into the moonlit eyes of the red-haired Metal again. He wiped a tear from Di’s cheek, a tear that shouldn’t have been there.

  Di blinked. “How did you . . . ?”

  “If you were a monster, you wouldn’t have a soul,” he said, and thumped his knuckles against Di’s chest. “Remember when you tried to save me on the dreadnought? You reached out to me and grabbed my hand, and before all hundred-thousand-something souls sucked the life out of me, I saw you—and I saw every other soul in the HIVE. But just then? There was only you.”

  Jax wasn’t a fool; he knew that Di understood what that meant. That the HIVE no longer infested his code. That it was him, and wholly him. And slowly, his old friend gave in to the truth, and his shoulders drooped as if in a sigh.

  “We need your help, Di,” he said carefully. “We must stop the D’thverek, but if she finds her heart, then we’re all dead, and you’re the only one who has been in her head who can help us.”

  “And the only one I trust,” added the captain in the doorway, her hair swirled up into a topknot, pulsing orange then red then orange again. As she stepped into the medical ward, Jax quickly got to his feet. She motioned to Di. “Release him, and then I need you to make some calls.”

  He gave a start. “To whom?”

  “Everyone. I’ve a feeling we don’t have a lot of time left.”

  “Yes, Captain.” He quickly undid Di’s bindings. The steel cords clanked heavily against the ground. Di massaged the side of his neck, rotating his shoulders, and nodded a silent thank-you to Jax. He smiled in reply and left the ward. It wasn’t until he was halfway up the stairs that he glanced over the railing and through the window, as Di stood and faced his captain.

  And he wondered why Di looked so afraid.

  Robb

  The Valerio manor was an empty shell of itself.
r />   It was winter in Ablos on the planet Eros, and the skies were a cotton gray that stretched to the edge of the horizon, just a shade darker than the thick layer of white snow that clung to the wrought-iron fence at the entrance and covered the barren grounds.

  He hoped that his memory hadn’t failed him. While he’d sat in the prison in the Spire, he had finally remembered why Resonance had been so familiar. Once, when he was fourteen, he had slipped into his mother’s study to try to find some clues about his missing father. He had scoured her desk, her computer files, her cabinets and books, and when he’d found a decrepit holo-pad, he had powered it up. On it were files labeled Resonance.

  He hadn’t gotten a chance to look at them before he’d heard his mother, stashed it back in the drawer where he found it, and leaped out of the window and into the hydrangea bushes.

  Frost bit at his arm where metal met skin, and he rubbed his shoulder, hoping he didn’t get frostbite. Even his thick fur-lined coat couldn’t keep the chill out. He rarely visited the estate in the winter. His mother would have spirited him off to the Academy in the fall, and he wouldn’t return until the lilies were blooming again in the spring.

  “I’ll wait right here with the skysailer, Smolder,” said Elara, curling her Cercian fur-lined cloak around her. “You go do your thing. Yell if anyone kills you.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Thanks. You’re a big help.”

  “I try— Wait.” She grabbed him by the shoulder and nodded up toward the mansion. The hearing apparatuses flickered bright purple in her ears. “I hear something.”

  “Right, I’m sure,” he sighed, and she squeezed his shoulder tighter.

  “I’m not joking.”

  Oh. That wasn’t good. “Messiers?”

  She hesitated. “I’m . . . not sure. Be careful. I don’t like this.”

  “I never liked this place.” He pulled his lightsword cross-body over his shoulder and started up the long path to the Valerio estate. Snow crunched underfoot. The grounds looked to be empty as he wandered up the driveway to the main house, but he didn’t trust the silence.

  It was too quiet.