Soul of Stars Read online

  If Robb had been looking down at his older brother, he would’ve seen a strange look pass over his face. Not quite surprise, and not anger.

  Something akin to pity.

  Because Erik felt his hand slipping out of the glove Robb held. He felt gravity and death grip him all at once, and oh, oh Goddess, was he terrified. Not that it mattered. Nothing he could have done mattered just then.

  Gravity pulled, and his fingers slipped out of his glove. One moment he was grasping onto Robb’s hand, and the next air, and he was falling, and falling, and falling, leaving Robb dangling from the railing of the garden, holding his black glove.

  Robb screamed, but he couldn’t let go—all he could do was watch, but by the time he turned his eyes down, his brother was already at the bottom.

  No, his mind reeled. No, no, no—

  He tore his eyes away, reached up with his other hand to the railing, and hauled himself up, Erik’s glove still in his hand.

  Don’t think, don’t think right now, he told himself, pocketing the glove. He expected some emotion—anything—but his heart beat harder the closer he came to Di, who was still facedown in the grass. He quickly knelt down beside his friend and went to shake his shoulder, when his wound sparked and Robb winced back, shielding his face. He gritted his teeth and tried again.

  “Di,” he said, thinking that it was a good sign that his eyes were closed.

  That meant he was alive, right? Or as alive as Metals could be.

  People died with their eyes open.

  “Di, I need you to get up,” he added a little more urgently, as the telltale sound of boots in synchrony began to echo up the stairwell from the underbelly of the garden. He knew that sound like his own heartbeat by now. Messiers were terrifying, but they were not subtle. The Messiers would come and kill them—he was quite sure of it. Mellifare didn’t seem very pleased that they had tricked her.

  Robb cursed to himself and looped an arm under Di’s shoulder, pulling him to his feet. His head lolled against his chest.

  Robb dragged Di toward the edge of the garden—the same edge his brother had fallen from. He’d give his left arm for a comm-link to call Jax. Viera had fried his when she’d electrocuted him, and he felt the burn puckering the side of his neck. He wasn’t sure how he had survived that, but he thought it might have had something to do with his mechanical arm—it had absorbed some of the shock.

  At the edge of the garden, he heard the Messiers break out into the thicket of moonlilies and roses before he saw them. They crept through the bushes, surrounding him.

  “We ask you—” began one.

  “—to be orderly—”

  “—and calm—”

  “—while you wait.”

  “Wait for what?” Robb muttered.

  “For Mellifare to get her heart,” Di replied, lifting his head a little. The slice in his chest sparked, and he winced. “And then she will kill us all.”

  “Nice of you to join me. How’re you feeling?”

  “Not good,” replied the Metal, and suppressed a painful groan. “I think it hit my memory core. You should have left me.”

  Something glinted far above them—a flash of a skysailer’s underbelly. Crimson wings. Diving down through the lines of traffic like a stone dropped from the sky.

  Guess he didn’t need a comm-link after all.

  The skysailer swirled down beneath the garden on the other side, its wings as silent as a sigh. He heaved Di a little higher on his shoulder and said, “We’re never leaving anyone behind. Never again.”

  Then he shoved himself and Di over the edge—for a split second he remembered his brother falling, falling, a crown of blood behind his head—before the skysailer appeared under them and they landed in a heap in the backseat.

  Jax

  Jax pushed up his goggles and glanced back at his new passengers as they struggled to untangle themselves from each other. “Welcome aboa— Goddess, Di, you have a hole in your chest.”

  “It is only a flesh wound,” replied the Metal painfully, pulling himself up from the floorboard to the seat. “We need to get to the shrine.”

  “That doesn’t look like just a flesh wound—are you sure you’re okay?”

  “The shrine, please. Mellifare went into my head. She knows her heart is there.”

  “Ak’va,” Jax cursed, and tapped the comm-link on his lapel. “Ana, they’re on their way to you.”

  There was only static in reply.

  “Captain?” he tried again, but there was still no answer.

  He exchanged a look with Robb. That wasn’t good. The light under his skin whispered, telling him things he didn’t want to hear. His face pinched. A horn blared, and he quickly jerked the skysailer out of oncoming traffic and down toward the cityscape. The Iron Shrine stood in the distance, surrounded by a large square, and then rows and rows of buildings, like petals of a blooming flower.

  Suddenly, an emergency node blipped up on the holo-screen, and on every other skysailer’s holo-screen around them.

  CODE 49-1.

  EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.

  He cursed and swiped the emergency node away. “Di, what code is that?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” replied Di, almost irritably. “I have a hole in my chest.”

  Both Jax and Robb gave him a blank look. “Because you always knew this stuff before,” Robb pointed out.

  Di’s eyebrows jerked up in surprise. “Oh. I did.” It wasn’t a question but a realization. He looked down to the wound in his chest and put his hand over it. “I would guess it has something to do with locking down the space station. Mellifare would not want anyone to leave. Not now. Not with her heart.”

  “So this is it, then,” Robb murmured.

  “Seems so,” Jax agreed.

  The Iron Shrine loomed in the distance, growing larger and larger with each passing moment. The rest of Nevaeh carried on like it was any other day in the kingdom, and the normalcy of it frightened him. The light under his skin crawled across the timelines, the near futures and past perfects, and he didn’t know which were true and which were thwarted.

  But it didn’t matter—each of them ended in flames.

  Ana

  Ana slipped into the Iron Shrine.

  While the fire had gutted most of the inside, the structure of it still stood like an indestructible mountain. Some of Nevaeh’s citizens had already taken to repairing the structure. There was scaffolding on the outside, and the charred door had been replaced with fresh wood. She pushed against the towering ornate door, half expecting it to be locked, but it eased open.

  Inside, at a passing glance, it looked as though the shrine hadn’t burned at all. It oozed the warm, loving golden glow of a thousand candles set upon the rafters. They flickered in the draft from the open door and danced shadows across the walls, masking the blackened burn marks. The statue of the Goddess, alight with candles, towered at the head of the shrine, fifty feet high, just as Ana had remembered from her last visit. Dried candle wax pooled out of her cupped hands and dripped from her outstretched arms like pearlescent water.

  There.

  The heart must’ve been there.

  Dozens of people knelt in the pews. They muttered softly to themselves, cadences of The Cantos of Light mixed with their own prayers. Four abbesses stood at the front of the shrine, holding lit censers, the smell of moonlilies fresh and strong.

  “Oh no,” she murmured. Everyone needed to leave. She cleared her throat and greeted one of the abbesses who came to meet them halfway down the aisle. “Madam, you’re in danger here—”

  “The Goddess will protect us,” the abbess interrupted, her gaze lingering on her scars. “Please, come and worship.”

  Helplessly, Ana watched her walk back toward the front of the shrine, swinging her censer patiently.

  Fine.

  Setting her jaw, she took her Metroid from her holster and prayed that the Goddess would forgive her for this. She raised it into the air and fired a shot
into the ceiling.

  The people praying in the pews shrieked and ducked for cover.

  “Everyone leave!” she commanded, her voice vibrating across the rafters. They turned to her, staring at her as if she was a phantom come home. They began to recognize the burn scars across the left side of her face, the thick slant of her brow, the bronze of her skin, the Armorov gold of her eyes. They recognized royalty in an orphan girl from the stars.

  A ghost among marbled Goddess statues.

  The Empress?

  Ananke Armorov?

  Empress Ananke?

  Ana?

  They stared at her in awe.

  “I SAID LEAVE!” she roared, and her voice carried up into the rafters, quaking the candles.

  The worshippers sprang out of the pews, leaving behind hymn books of the Cantos and their own personal effects. When the last person was gone, and the imposing doors swung closed with a thud, Ana sighed and holstered her pistol again.

  “That worked a little too well,” she commented to herself, and turned her eyes up toward the fifty-foot statue, and the Goddess’s outstretched arms, hands cupped together. It looked a lot higher than she rememebred, she thought, shrugging out of the Valerio uniform to a dark undershirt, and tossed the jacket into the pews. Then she climbed up onto the pedestal where the Goddess’s feet were planted.

  The base of the statue was as thick as five tree trunks, but there were handholds to climb up the side of her, oddly enough. Someone had to light and change out the candles covering the Goddess’s hands, arms, and shoulders, but she’d expected a ladder or something. Not footholds in the statue’s dress.

  She scaled the Goddess, careful to listen to her comm-link for any chatter. It had been increasingly quiet, and she didn’t like that at all. She didn’t look down, mostly because she knew what she’d find. The floor. Very far away. It wasn’t that she was afraid of heights, but she was afraid of gravity at this height. Wax covered most of the statue, rubbery and soft. She found herself sinking her nails into it as she climbed up onto the arms and started to crawl across, trying not to knock the candles down as she went. The wax accumulated for centuries, because no one ever scraped it off, only ever adding a candle for each year since the Goddess’s death. She knew that because of Di. The main character in his favorite book, The Swords of Veten Ruel, was raised to be a priest of the Iron Shrine, and so Ana learned that the candles were changed every three days, when the wicks burned low.

  “It is interesting,” he had once said. They were on a stakeout in the humid city of Ventura on Eros, hunkered down in a skysailer to wait for the leader of the Red Dawn to leave his cushy hideout. He owed Siege money. “There are magic spells and tactical battles and the very precise use of the trajectory of a turtle. It is quite thrilling. Are you interested yet?”

  She quirked an eyebrow. “How exactly does it use a turtle?”

  He began to answer, but then he must’ve thought better of it and said instead, “You will have to read it to find out.”

  “That’s infuriating—read it to me, then.”

  “I do not have it with me.”

  “Then recite it,” she had said, fanning herself with a piece of paper from the glove compartment. Anything to keep her mind off how miserable she was. It had been so hot, condensation began to collect on Di’s metal body. “I know you know it by heart.”

  He had been quiet for a moment, but then he cocked his head and said, “In a time before our time, in the far weathered north of the Bavania Range . . .”

  She had actually liked the story as he read it to her—well, recited it. Perhaps after this, he could read her some other books. Of course she could read herself, but stories always sounded so much better when he read them. She was so lost in thought, she accidentally knocked off a candle, and it went skittering into the pews and went out.

  Oh, oh, it was a long way down.

  She quickly refocused on the arm and kept crawling.

  There were thousand candles in the shrine. A thousand years. The prophecy had been right about that, at least. The Great Dark returned after a millennium.

  She was surprised the wax hadn’t melted off in the fire.

  She crawled down into the Goddess’s cupped palms. And there, underneath years of candle wax, was a dark shape that looked startlingly like a lockbox. She slid her dagger out of her boot and quietly began to dig for it. When the dagger struck the box, she quickly abandoned her tool and pried the wax away with her fingers, nails chipping as she dug the box free. She cleared the lock of wax, jammed the tip of her dagger into the lock, and twisted. The lock broke free.

  She steeled her courage and opened the box.

  A cool white light oozed from a small metal cube. A memory core. It looked so similar to the one she kept in her pocket now. She picked up the heart, and it vibrated—pulsing like a heartbeat.

  This was the end of galaxies? This cube sucked the light out of people and feasted on their souls?

  It was terrifying, how something so small could be so dangerous.

  Gently, she took the heart in her hand, and she could hear it whisper—to her! She could see now why the Lady Valerio never wanted to destroy it. It was too important. There was so much more she could do with the heart than without it. It was childish to want to destroy something so perfect, something so—

  The front doors to the shrine swung open, bringing with it a gust of wind that snuffed out half of the candles. The burst of cold snapped her to her senses, and she quickly closed the lockbox again. What—what had just happened? She remembered it whispering and then . . .

  Fear curled in her chest. The heart needed to be destroyed, but a terrible part of her wanted to open the box again, to keep it safe—

  Mellifare stepped into the shrine, a feral scowl tearing across her face. She raked her red eyes across the shrine.

  “I know you are here, Ananke,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper, but it carried all the way up into the rafters. The doors slammed closed behind her, trapping Ana inside.

  Jax

  Jax knew something was amiss the moment he saw the square in front of the Iron Shrine. Usually the square was teeming with people browsing the vendors set up around the square. There was always some sort of music, and the smell of freshly baked bread and meat skewers, but as he crested the last building and looked down—the square was empty. The stalls had been abandoned as if everyone had left in a hurry, baskets of fruits and vegetables overturned, mechanical parts strewn over the cobblestones glinting in the evening sunlight that came down from the harbor. He landed the skysailer on the far side of the square, beside the captain’s. As he landed, he noticed bodies in the debris left behind, blood pooling beneath them. He couldn’t sense their light at all, and he knew they were dead.

  A single figure stood on the steps of the shrine, blocking anyone from entering.

  Siege was leaning beside her skysailer, half using it for cover, her once-bright hair a simmer as she kept a hand on a bloody wound in her side, and Talle was on the ground beside her, wrapping up her own foot. Robb was already out of the skysailer before Jax could land it properly, rushing over to Siege, and once Jax parked he followed, helping Di out.

  “Ana’s in there,” Siege said before any of them could ask how she was. The light underneath Jax’s skin whispered the truth anyway, and it made him clench his fists. “We dropped her off and stood guard. I—I didn’t see them coming. Mellifare tore through the square. Viera surprised us—stabbed me good. Everyone scattered.”

  “It’s okay,” Talle soothed.

  “No, it’s not. I have to get in there, starlight. I have to.” Jax had never heard such pure desperation in his captain’s voice before. It frightened him.

  Across the square, the sentry on the steps did not move. Viera didn’t waver as she stared at them, a lightsword unsheathed in her hand. Her hair was no longer smoothed back but hung in her face, and beneath it her eyes burned a terrible, gut-wrenching red. Now that he concentrated,
he sensed the HIVE—the thousands of souls—tied to her. If they came any closer, she would attack them.

  “She was a Metal this whole time?” asked a voice behind him.

  He quickly turned around to face Lenda. She looked as if she’d run a long way. The sanctuary was a few blocks north—he figured Siege had called for backup once Mellifare attacked. She stared out across the square to Viera on the other side.

  “Yeah, she’s a Metal,” replied Robb. “Mellifare tricked us. Viera’s been HIVE’d—Goddess knows for how long.”

  “And those people on the ground . . .”

  “Viera was so quick, we couldn’t stop her,” said the captain, grinding her teeth. “I should’ve seen this coming. After all these times.”

  Jax didn’t understand what that meant, but as he felt her light shift and flicker, he began to realize that he didn’t know a lot about his captain.

  “She’s been standing there since Mellifare went inside after Ana,” Talle said softly, and went to help Siege to her feet. Blood splattered Siege’s shirt, quickly soaking through. “She hasn’t attacked us yet. And all of the channels are down.”

  “Maybe Viera can fight the HIVE,” said Robb, “like Di did.”

  “I don’t think she knows she can,” Talle replied. “And there’s no way past her.”

  Lenda took her gun out of its holster. “All right then, I’ll find out—”

  Robb caught her by the arm. “That’s suicide.”

  But the gunner shook her head. “Nah. She’s family.” Then Lenda set off across the abandoned square toward Viera, and in turn the ex–guard captain eased down to the steps to meet her.

  As Siege rose to stand, she gave a painful wimper and leaned against her wife. “We need to get into that shrine.”

  “We can try,” Jax promised her. “Di, can you—” He glanced back to the skysailer, but Di, it seemed, was gone.

  Ana

  Mellifare prowled deeper into the shrine, humming gently to herself. “Come now, you know you cannot hide from me forever.”