Soul of Stars Read online

  He wasn’t a Valerio—he wasn’t anything. He hadn’t taken Siege’s name yet—her real name. The one she’d whispered to him in private when he had woken up in the infirmary six months ago, after the assassination attempt on Ana’s life.

  He . . . was rather afraid to take her name, he hated to admit.

  Robb’s mechanical arm twitched, and he rubbed his forearm to keep it calm. The mechanic who installed it a month ago said the glitches were normal at first—the nerves were reconfiguring themselves to the new tech—but that meant he couldn’t control it well yet, and that annoyed him. It acted up at the worst times. Like when he was angry. Or sad.

  Or nervous that Ana was about to walk into a trap—

  “The twenty-third Emperor of the Iron Kingdom will be making his appearance in Nevaeh in just under an hour,” said a reporter on a holo-screen in the top right corner of the bar. The newsfeed showed the space station of Nevaeh and hundreds of thousands of citizens crowding into the street. “Praised as a light in the darkness . . .”

  “Nothing like putting on your holy best to order genocide,” Jax muttered.

  Another man grunted a laugh. He looked like one of the dockworkers, metal toggles clasping the braids in his long peppery-brown beard. “Bet that sparkly robe of his costs more than I’d make in a lifetime.”

  “It’s easy to be rich when you don’t pay your army,” replied a woman at the table. She was about Siege’s age, with long auburn hair and a cheek implant. “Those Messiers give me the chills, and he just keeps getting more of them.”

  An older gentleman who reminded Robb of Wick, with a mechanical leg and a bad eye, shot down the rest of his whiskey before he said, “Rumor is he’s takin’ criminals he catches up to the dreadnought and changin’ them.”

  “Come on, Mirek, you know those rumors are bullshit,” said the woman. She tapped her cards on the table.

  “It’d be just punishment if it were true,” added a young man with shaggy brown hair and a scruffy beard. Van—or at least he looked like a Van. Robb hadn’t liked him since the beginning of the game. He hid cards under his patched-up brown leather coat, not that it had helped his losing hand. “I wonder what a star-kisser would look like as a Metal. Would you still sparkle?”

  Star-kisser—slang for the Solani people like Jax. Robb squeezed his forearm tightly to keep his mechanical arm still. He wouldn’t mind punching this son of a bitch in the face one good time.

  Jax fixed his expressive mouth into a thin, hard line. “I wouldn’t know. Though if he tried to come for me, I’d tell him where he could stick his punishment.”

  No one knew that the Emperor used to be their friend—or even that he was a Metal, since he looked so human—and Robb wasn’t sure if Jax’s threat was real, or if he was just playing the part. Maybe a little of both. Jax had known D09 as long as he’d known Ana. Robb was sure there’d been a lot of history between them, but Jax had never grieved when Di was taken—not like Ana had. Did he just not care? He doubted that, and Jax did seem rather angry.

  “You don’t like our Emperor, star-kisser?” taunted the man. “You know that’s treason.”

  “And you clearly don’t understand what treason is,” Jax replied dryly, taking two sevens out of Robb’s hand and placing them facedown in the middle of the table. “Or how to play cards.”

  “Two sevens,” Robb added for him, and the game went on.

  The bearded man named Van tossed down two fives and asked, “Why don’t you like our Emperor?”

  “Goddess.” Jax sighed, a muscle in his jaw feathering. “Can’t I just not like gingers?”

  “You know what I meant,” the man spat.

  “Maybe beat me in a card game and I’ll give you an answer,” Jax replied, grabbing the last two cards in Robb’s hand and sliding them down onto the table. “Two queens.”

  “That has to be bullshit. I’m calling Wicked,” declared the woman, her cheek implant flaring purple. She reached in anger for the cards Jax had thrown down and turned them over.

  She frowned when two queens stared back at her.

  “Solani can’t lie, love,” he told her, absently reaching for his winnings.

  Van pulled out a lightblade and slammed it into the pile of coppers, barely missing Jax’s fingertips. “Hold on there, friends. I think this is mine.”

  “Not this game,” Robb replied, keeping his voice level. “We won.”

  Van grinned wide, flashing a golden front tooth. “The kingdom’s got a warrant out for an exiled Ironblood and a star-kisser. For treason. You wouldn’t be them, would you?”

  Robb turned to Jax and said, “Maybe he does know what treason is, ma’alor—”

  The entrance to the LowBar buckled in with an inhuman kick. Two Messiers stepped inside, their blue eyes scanning the crowd.

  Robb took hold of Jax’s arm as they scrambled to their feet—

  He turned, and the mouth of a Metroid pressed against his forehead. Goddess’s spark.

  Van grinned around his golden tooth and drew back the hammer with his thumb. “You and that star-kisser ain’t going nowhere. Maybe now I’ll find if Solani Metals sparkle—”

  Before Robb could so much as think of what to do, Jax grabbed the man’s pistol and shoved it upward. The surprise made him squeeze the trigger, and a bullet burst the neon light above. It showered sparks onto them. He twisted the gun out of the man’s grip, slamming the butt of it across his jaw, and the man slumped to the ground.

  The bar erupted into chaos.

  Patrons scattered for the back exit, kicking up chairs, their drinks flying.

  At the front of the bar, the Messiers pulled out their weapons to fire. The ammunition glowed hot. Robb thought quick—he grabbed the table’s legs and flipped it over onto its side as a hail of bullets slammed into it.

  He and Jax pressed their backs against it.

  A bullet bit through the table at his elbow, and he hissed in surprise more than pain, jerking his arm up. “Any escape plans?”

  “Aside from not dying?”

  “That would be helpful!”

  Jax shook his head. “Can’t really think of any, no.”

  “Perfect.”

  In the reflection of one of the overturned steel tankards, Robb watched as the Messiers slowly made their way toward them. The two androids split up, one taking the left side of the room, the other the right—odd, since they usually traveled in packs, but now they circled from opposite sides.

  Prowling.

  His mechanical arm twitched again.

  He hoped Ana was faring better.

  “Peace, citizens,” said one.

  “And come quietly,” finished the other.

  Quietly? The Messiers did know who they were dealing with, didn’t they? He and Jax were probably wanted on at least fifteen other charges—driving in a no-fly zone, trespassing, transportation of illegal goods, gambling, hijacking a skysailer, illegal use of stolen funds. . . .

  And as far as Robb could figure, that’d been only in the last six months since the assassination.

  It would be easier if they could just kill the Messiers, but then they’d be no better than murderers. Lord Rasovant had preyed upon sick people during the Plague twenty years ago and uploaded them into Metals. For years, the kingdom praised him for creating the perfect AI, but as it turned out they weren’t AIs at all.

  It rather sickened him.

  He glanced around the bar, racking his brain for some sort of plan. Think. What could disable Metals? What could—

  His gaze caught sight of the exit door.

  Who says we have to fight them?

  It was a terrible plan, but he couldn’t think up another one that wouldn’t end in their immediate demise. He anchored himself against the table. “I got an idea. On the count of three, we push the table back into them and make a run for the door—got it?”

  “That’s your plan?” Jax hissed quietly.

  “One,” he mouthed.

  Jax gave him an incred
ulous look and shook his head.

  “Two.”

  Jax anchored himself against the table begrudgingly.

  “Three!”

  Together, they rammed the table into the Messiers, pushing them flat on their backs.

  Then he grabbed Jax by the hand and yanked him toward the exit door. They stumbled into the alleyway where their skysailer waited. Jax vaulted into the driver’s seat and started up the engine, Robb in the passenger seat. The engine hummed, lights igniting on the console, as golden and black wings fanned out.

  Robb tapped his comm-link. “Captain—Ana? We have a problem. Some cheating piece of spacetrash ratted on us—”

  The two Messiers exited out the back door after them, aiming their Metroids.

  “—and Messiers know we’re here everything’s fine tell Ana to call us right now bye!” Jax finished, slammed the disconnect button, and, with a jerk from the controls, lifted the skysailer off the ground and into the neon lines of traffic above.

  Ana

  Ana glared down at the shadowy figure—Starbright. “As you can clearly see, I’m not a Messier.”

  “But that does not mean you are harmless, either.”

  She ground her teeth. She hated that she’d fallen for something this stupid—and she’d just walked straight into this trap. “Yeah, and you’re a coward, hiding in the shadows. Why don’t you come out and show yourself?”

  “Very well.”

  Then—like twin stars igniting—moonlight-colored eyes flickered to life on a face made of metal slats, forming angular cheekbones and mouth and chin. There was a horrible, deep scrape across its temple that had been soldered closed.

  A Metal.

  “You . . . are Starbright?” she asked cautiously. “Then—is it true? You know how to bring a Metal back from the HIVE?”

  “Correction,” the Metal said. “I am the Metal who was brought back from the HIVE.”

  Her heart leaped into her throat, so bright and buoyant it felt like—

  Like—

  Hope.

  She tried to pry her arms from the magnetic plate again, but they wouldn’t budge. She needed to tell her captain that it was possible. And if it was possible for this Metal, then . . .

  Then . . .

  Perhaps Di wasn’t lost. Not yet.

  “Then we need to talk,” she quickly said, unable to keep the desperation out of her voice. “I need your help. Or I need Starbright’s help. And I am definitely not going to discuss anything while hanging from the ceiling.”

  “Then it looks like you’ll be up there for a while,” came a soft, annoyed voice.

  A glowlight flickered on, and Ana turned her face just enough to find a young woman leaning against the doorway, holding the light. She was around Ana’s age—eighteen, maybe—with shoulder-length silver hair that partially shadowed her sharp face, and wide violet eyes rimmed with kohl. Her lips were painted black to match the rest of her wardrobe. She was short and curvy, with wide hips and thick legs that tapered into knee-high gravity boots. She was a Solani like Jax, but her skin was darker, reminding Ana of the cold deserts on Cerces. There was a wire that looped from her right ear down into her collar and disappeared. A hearing apparatus.

  “Who’re you?” Ana asked.

  The young woman ignored her and stepped to the edge where the magnetic plate began, studying the scars on Ana’s face. Her long tassel earrings levitated, rising with the magnetism. “You do look like the image Koren Vey showed me. Are you the Empress?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” Ana snapped, and tugged—gently this time—on her sleeves. Her cuff links could be torn off easily enough, and she could feel that if she shifted she could slide out of her pistol holsters. Her boots were magnetized only by the daggers in them, but the magnetism was surprisingly weak through the synthetic material.

  Thanks to the glowlight, Ana could make out the rest of the store now. There was a small cot rolled up in the corner, along with a few days’ worth of takeout containers. It had been a hiding spot, but not a very permanent one. The magnetic trap she was currently stuck to was junk-engineered on the fly, sheets of metal taken from the roof, probably, hooked up to a ceiling outlet to make an electromagnet.

  It was brilliant, and that infuriated her a little more.

  The Solani girl cocked her head, and something dark flickered across her deep violet eyes—much darker than Jax’s. “Leave her, Xu. I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Wait! You can’t leave me up here!”

  “Can’t I?” the young Solani woman scoffed as she turned to leave. “If you are the Empress, you left your kingdom, your people, your duty. You’re nothing more than a coward—”

  With Starbright’s back turned, Ana jerked her arms away from the magnetic plate, and with a snap her cuff links popped off. She swung her feet forward. As she fell, she twisted her shoulder enough to slide her arms out of her pistol harness and caught it by the straps, jumping on top of the Solani. She pinned her to the ground.

  “I am no coward,” Ana snapped, shoving the girl facedown into the floor, her knees on her shoulder. She slid a dagger out of her boot and pressed it against the back of the girl’s neck. “And you will help me.”

  “Elara!” the Metal—Xu, Ana had heard Starbright call them—cried.

  In response, she pressed tighter against Starbright’s neck. “One more step and I won’t be nice.” The Metal stepped back again, hands rising into the air. Ana turned her gaze back down to the girl pinned beneath her. “Xu—that Metal—said they escaped the HIVE. How? How did you do it?”

  “Lost a lover?” Starbright—Elara—asked sarcastically. “It’ll cost you. A million coppers a Metal—”

  Ana tightened her grip on the handle of her dagger. “No, not just one. All of them. Every Metal in the HIVE. If we can save them, we save the kingdom.”

  The young woman studied her face with a furrowed brow. “Why do you care about Metals so much?”

  Her grip on the hilt of her blade tightened. “Because Metals were once human.”

  “. . . What?”

  “Like us. Alive,” she added. “That’s how Rasovant created them. He uploaded people’s—their subconsciousness or whatever—into memory cores. The HIVE erases everything they are, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I want to save them. I have to.”

  Elara turned her head to the side, and Ana realized that the collision with the floor had broken her nose. Blood smeared her face. She and her Metal exchanged a look as if they knew something but didn’t want to say what.

  Ana pursed her lips. “Look, if you didn’t want me here, then why did you ask me to come?”

  “Well, that’s a very good question—”

  “Elara, they are here,” said her Metal, flicking their gaze to the storefront window.

  From across the street came a patrol of half a dozen Messiers. Ana heard them outside—a dozen more surrounding the store in a synchronized march. Her blood ran cold.

  How had they found her?

  It doesn’t matter—they won’t catch me, she thought, and grabbed Elara by the back of her coat and hauled her to her feet.

  “Is there a rooftop exit?” she asked.

  “In the back, up the ladder—”

  She took her by the arm, dragging her toward the back of the store. The Metal shoved something into a dark bag before they followed. Behind them, the Messiers broke the storefront window and leaped inside.

  The storage room was filled with old coat boxes and empty hangers. There was a ladder that led up to the rooftop.

  “Jump to the next one!” Ana commanded, slamming the rooftop hatch down and driving her lightblade into the lock to slow down the Messiers.

  “Jump?” Elara squawked. “And why in the Goddess’s tits should we do that?”

  “Just trust me, okay? You’re right about me disappearing—I did. I disappeared from the kingdom, but it’s not because I gave up on it. I won’t give up on it, and I need your help to save it.”


  The rooftop latch rattled as a Messier pounded on it to open. The lightblade held fast. For now.

  Elara visibly gulped, glancing at her Metal friend for guidance, and when the Metal nodded, so did she. “Okay—yeah, okay. Lead the way, Princess.”

  So Ana did, and hurtled across the gap between buildings to the next rooftop, and then the next, and Elara and Xu followed. Below them in the street, Ana counted at least a dozen—maybe two dozen—Messiers swarming the abandoned shop they had just left.

  Di would’ve tsked and told her that there was a 92.7 percent chance of her absolutely screwing this up—but Di wasn’t here, and there was no percentage of success she could bank on. She hoped she wasn’t leading Elara and Xu to certain death.

  After she hopped down onto a generator, and then the street, someone grabbed her by her coat and spun her around. Her vison filled with the blue eyes of a Messier.

  “Identifying—” it began.

  “GET DOWN!” Elara shouted a moment before something whizzed past her head. A boomerang with its blade glowing a pale yellow. It struck the Messier across the neck and lopped its head clean off.

  The body stumbled back, fuses hissing from its torso.

  Ana stared, befuddled, at the headless Metal. “You—you took its head off!”

  “You said they were alive once, right?” Elara straightened Ana’s coat, running her fingers peculiarly down her lapels. “I can’t help you get them out of the HIVE if they’re dead.”

  “But it’s—it’s headless!”

  “But not dead,” she pointed out, and stretched her left hand back toward the dead Messier, one of her bracelets glowing. The boomerang jerked out of the Messier’s body and returned to Elara’s hand with a swish through the air, and she placed it back on her belt.