Soul of Stars Read online

  Three more Messiers appeared behind them in the grimy, dark alley.

  Of couse there were more.

  Ana tapped the comm-link on her coat. “Robb, Jax—I could use that pickup.”

  She didn’t wait for them to respond before she shoved Elara and Xu out of the alleyway and into the bustling crowd of a busy night market.

  Vendors hawking jewelry and spare mechanical parts shouted at buyers from across the way. The sound of lutes and fiddles snaked through the din. It was disorienting—to be surrounded by so many people so suddenly when she was running for her life.

  Jax replied, “We’ll be there—”

  The sound of a Metroid crackled through the crowd, and everyone ducked, scattering into alcoves like frightened mice.

  “—Was that a gunshot?” finished Jax.

  “Not the time for questions!” she replied, and looked around the market for the tallest building. The slums were low to the ground, except for an old tower that shot up into the sky like a black spike. It looked like a condemned business high-rise, leaning slightly to the side, its blown-out windows making it look like a skeleton with knocked-out teeth.

  It would do.

  “Make for that building!” she told Elara and Xu.

  “That’s a death trap,” Elara replied, shaking her head. “I am not going—”

  An electrified bullet slammed into a basket of fruit in a stall beside them, leaving a cantaloupe smoking.

  “—I’m going,” she quickly corrected.

  Elara and her Metal set out at a run toward the abandoned building, as Jax told Ana his ETA in her ear—two minutes. That was both too much time and no time at all. The scar on her stomach seared her with pain. She pressed her hand against her healed wound, gritted her teeth, and ran faster.

  The HIVE wouldn’t catch her—not today.

  Once they reached the condemned building, they ducked into the front entrance, past the forgotten security desk, and made for the stairwell and began to climb; Elara and Xu first, and Ana behind. She closed the stairwell door and blasted off the handle. Hopefully that would hold—the door buckled in—never mind. She turned on her heel and took the stairs up two at a time. One flight, then another. Ana could hear the Messiers’ Metal gears whirring behind her. One false step, and they would catch her. Her heart pounded in her chest.

  She had not been caught yesterday. Or the day before. Or the months before that. She had never been caught by a Messier or a guardsman or a patrol.

  She was Ana of the Dossier, and she would not be caught today.

  Elara threw open the door to the top level. The view stretched across the slums of Neon City, black shadows giving way to glittering windows of bright neon lights. Above them, clouds obscured the skies, thick like gray marshmallows, covering up the moving star that was the Dossier.

  Ana’s lungs burned as she tried to take a deep enough breath, but she didn’t have time. “Keep running!” she cried.

  Elara threw her a stupefied look. “There’s a ledge!”

  “Jump off it!”

  “But—”

  “TRUST ME!”

  Because she trusted Jax.

  To her surprise, Elara launched herself off the side of the building, ratty black cloak fluttering behind her like wings—

  And landed in the backseat of a skysailer. Xu landed on the cushion beside her.

  Robb whipped around in the passenger seat, throwing out his arm to reach her. “ANA!”

  She could read the fright on his face—the disbelief, and then the horror—a moment before she realized what was happening. Because as she went to launch herself off the side of the building, a hand snaked up and caught her by her hood and pulled her back.

  Away from the skysailer.

  Away from Robb.

  Away from Jax, and the Dossier and her captain.

  I’ve never been caught, she thought, and then realized her mistake.

  Because she had, on the dark side of Cerces all those months ago. Something she had almost forgotten because she had escaped.

  Because of Di.

  One moment she was launching herself off the side of the ledge, and the next she was on the floor, rolling back onto the rooftop. She heard Robb shouting her name, about to dive out of the skysailer to help her, but Elara grabbed him and held him back. Jax turned the skysailer to the sky, a rain of bullets showering them as they ascended into the night—

  And were gone.

  A Metal grabbed her by her arm and pulled her to her knees, slamming the butt of its Metroid into her cheek. She tilted sideways with the blow but caught herself. Her head spun, ears ringing. Her lungs burned.

  She couldn’t catch her breath.

  Stay calm, she told herself. Her heart was racing—but not from fright. And that scared her. Because she recognized the shiver up her spine, the tingling across her skin.

  It was a thrill.

  Reckless, freeing.

  For the first time in months—since a sword had been driven through her stomach, since the new Emperor had ascended the throne, since they had fled and hidden and waited—she felt alive.

  Over her hammering heart, four humming Metroids clicked to ready.

  All aimed at her.

  She glowered up at the blue-eyed guard dogs of the kingdom. Their metal faces were impassive, their gazes unwavering. They were always unwavering. There was no thought behind them.

  One said, “You are under arrest—”

  “—for evading capture,” the second went on.

  “—and obstruction of justice,” the third finished.

  The fourth squatted down to her, but she didn’t acknowledge the Messier as she trained her eyes on a spot on the floor. It grabbed her chin and jerked her to look into its simple metal face.

  “You won’t kill me,” she told it—the HIVE—the monster who looked from behind those eyes.

  The HIVE was looking for something. That was why it burned the shrines—she didn’t know what for, but if she could trick the HIVE into thinking it needed her, she might keep her life a little while longer. And she hadn’t lived with Robb for six months to not pick up on the delicate art of bullshitting.

  “You need me,” she lied. “I know what you’re looking for in the shrines, and if I die? You’ll never get it—I can promise you that.”

  “Well, that is most fortunate,” the fourth Messier said in a voice that wasn’t Metal, but one she knew well. A voice she had heard in her nightmares, lips pressed against her ear—You should have burned.

  Di’s voice, but no longer Di at all.

  Its eyes deepened to a bloodred. “Because I was planning to kill you slowly.”

  Jax

  He would never forgive himself.

  “Turn around!” Robb cried, trying to grab the controls, but Jax shoved him back into his seat. The desperation on his face made Jax’s stomach twist. “We’re not leaving her! We have to turn back! We—”

  “We can’t,” Jax snapped, and Goddess’s spark he hated saying those words. He hated that his tongue did not curl with the taste of a lie. It was the truth in the worst possible way, and he hated himself more that he was the one who had to turn the skysailer away.

  “We have to! Ana is back there! If he gets to her—”

  “I know, ma’alor!”

  “Then why aren’t we turning back?”

  “Because we’ll be caught, too.” He curled his fingers tighter around the controls. This was a choice that wasn’t his to make.

  Ana had told him back on the Dossier that if anything went south, save Starbright. She had pulled him behind the skysailer in the cargo bay before they’d gone down to Neon City, while Robb had been tweaking his new mechanical arm.

  Jax had hissed, “Ana, you’re more important—”

  “Not right now I’m not,” she had said. “Starbright is more important.”

  “I can’t promise that—”

  “Please, Jax,” she had pleaded, a little quieter. “If Starbright can brin
g a Metal out of the HIVE . . . we’ll be one step closer to stopping the HIVE. With Starbright, we’ll have a better chance at saving our kingdom.”

  “Not without you we can’t,” Jax had tried to point out, but it was no use. He knew that defiant set of her lips. He couldn’t dissuade her. Besides, he had already seen how this exact excursion was going to go. He had seen it months ago when he had kissed Robb in the quiet of the medical bay, after the fight that took Robb’s arm. He hadn’t even been thinking when he pressed his mouth to Robb’s, and the fates had swirled inside his head again. The images haunted his dreams, burned into the backs of his eyelids—

  A building like a shard of black glass. A rusted cell. The Royal Captain. Di but not Di in a dimly lit control room. A skysailer too far away. A window of crackling glass. And then—

  From the backseat, the girl with silver hair—Starbright? Who knew—said, “Ah, fellas, is that thing supposed to be blinking?”

  A flashing red message sprang up on the windshield.

  RETURN OR RESIST ARREST, it warned.

  Oh, this was just becoming so much fun.

  He swiped the warning away. “Robb, how did they ping us? We’re cloaked.”

  “They’re not supposed to be able to.”

  In the rearview mirror, a skysailer swirled down from the night sky to follow them. Its wings were a metallic blue. Jax tightened his grip on the helm. “Well, now they’re following.”

  “They must’ve decoded our cloaking signal.” Robb bent forward underneath the dash and slammed his hand against a door. It popped open to reveal the skysailer’s onboard terminal. As he worked to input a new code into the keypad, three fingers on his mechanical hand suddenly went limp. “Goddess’s tits,” he swore.

  “Less cursing, more cloaking, ma’alor.”

  “I’d like to see you try when your arm isn’t cooperating—”

  “And you’re doing it wrong anyway. Get out of my way!” added the girl, climbing into the front seat and diving for the onboard terminal underneath the dash.

  The skysailer behind them crept closer. It was sleek and silver, its fanlike wings angled back to help the ship gain speed, with a Messier at the helm. Jax hated trying to outrun androids. They didn’t make nearly as many mistakes.

  “Hey, Sparkles, can you buy us time?” the girl shouted at him from the floorboards.

  Sparkles. There could be worse nicknames. “How long?”

  “As much time as you can.”

  “Do I have to keep steady or—”

  She extracted herself from underneath the dash long enough to give him a dead-serious look. “I could work doing a barrel roll while riding bareback on a jetcycle. I am nothing if not a professional.”

  Jax suddenly liked Starbright a little better. “Understood. Robb, buckle up.”

  His partner began to pale. “Please no barrel r—”

  He reached over and pulled Robb’s harness tight across his chest. “Hang on to her,” he said, and Robb clamped his arms around one of the hacker’s legs a moment before Jax cut the skysailer to the left. Everything in the ship—the loose change, repair tools, trash—went sliding across the floorboards.

  The ship twirled, rolling over on itself, and shot toward the heart of Neon City.

  “Oy!” Starbright squeaked. “Watch the hand!”

  Mortified, Robb jerked his mechanical hand away from her rear. “A-apologies!”

  Jax banked a hard left as he passed a tall glass building, curving around it, and cut between two traffic lines. Warning sirens blared as he barely missed a commercial vehicle and skimmed over the crowded streets below. People in ponchos and damp capes looked up as they swirled past.

  The silver skysailer followed swiftly.

  From afar, Neon City looked like a mountain of glass buildings covered in neon lights, the mist surrounding it making it glow like some otherworldly haven. It would be a fun place if it weren’t for the smell of dampness and smoke and poverty that permeated the streets. Most of its residents got by illegally—selling black-market wares, or living off cheated winnings from the gambling rings beneath the city itself.

  Every time he flew one way, the Messier skysailer would match him. He couldn’t shake the stupid craft no matter what he did. He could keep dodging in and out of buildings all day long, but he was more afraid of the Messier ship calling for backup.

  “Are you done yet?” he shouted at her.

  “Gimme a sec!” she cried. “I’m not the Goddess here.”

  The skysailer began to whine as it overheated, its trail of white vapors growing increasingly gray. And still the silver Messier skysailer had no problem following.

  Fine.

  Fine.

  If that’s how the HIVE wanted to play, he’d play.

  Goddess grant me a steady hand—and please ignore ma’alor’s luck, he added as he drove the skysailer into the sky again and cut toward a cluster of buildings that stood so closely together it looked like nothing could squeeze between them.

  Robb looked up long enough to see exactly where they were heading.

  “Jax,” he warned.

  He eased himself back and loosened his grip on the controls. The buildings came closer. They were commercial high-rises. Ironblood-owned—Malachite, it seemed. Or maybe Obsidia. Whoever it was, he hoped they had insurance.

  “Jax, don’t—Jax—”

  Closer. Closer still.

  “JAX—”

  He tapped the controls, and the skysailer tilted onto its side and eased through a crack between the buildings. One moment there was sky, and the next there was steel and glass, and they were between them. The silver skysailer tried to bank up, but it was too late. It exploded into the glass tower, sending shrapnel spiraling down into the city center.

  As they swirled out on the other side of the buildings, Jax glanced behind him one last time to make sure they were gone, then pumped his fist into the air. “And boom!”

  In reply, Robb let go of the hacker’s legs, his face so pale he looked like a corpse. “I’m going to puke.”

  The Metal, still perched in the backseat, one leg crossed over the other, applauded. “There was only a twenty-three-point-four percent chance of us surviving that. Congratulations, we are alive.”

  “For now,” replied the hacker, who tapped Robb to help pull her up from the floorboards and back into her seat. She flipped back her shoulder-length hair, and Jax noticed that she was Solani as well, though she must have had hints of Erosian blood. She gave a start when she saw Jax—they’d barely glanced at each other when she first fell into the skysailer—and his skin prickled.

  She hadn’t recognized him, had she?

  If she did, she didn’t mention it. Maybe that was worse. “That signal should keep us cloaked for at least twenty minutes, but I’ll say fifteen just to be safe.”

  “To do what?” Robb asked. “Ana’s gone.”

  In the rearview mirror, he watched as a silent conversation passed between the girl and the Metal, and then she nodded and reached into the Metal’s dark bag. She pulled out a holo-pad, her fingers moving quickly across the glass. “Not quite. I slipped a tracker underneath her coat collar. No one ever looks there.”

  Jax turned around in the seat to give her a weary look. “Why would you do that?”

  “So . . . I could find her?”

  Robb blinked. “Who are you?”

  Without even looking up from her holo-screen, she waved to her Metal friend. “This is Xu, my partner, and I’m Elara Vath’aka.”

  Vath’aka—a name given to Solani with no birthright. Her family had been exiled, then—either her parents, or grandparents, or great-grandparents before that. The little knot of tension that had solidified in his chest began to unravel, because if she was born without a birthright, she had probably never visited Zenteli. Which meant she wouldn’t have recognized him.

  She didn’t know he was the C’zar.

  “The HIVE has her in a skysailer already. Taking her off-world and o
nto one of those dreadnoughts the Emperor recommissioned, if I’d hazard a guess. And that’s not good. If those rumors are true . . .”

  “They can’t be,” Jax said, pulling at his gloves nervously. “Only Rasovant knew how to make people into Metals. It’s just a rumor.”

  “But what if someone else figured it out?” wondered Xu.

  That was something Jax definitely didn’t want to think about. “We should save her either way—as quickly as possible.”

  Robb gave him a solid look and dipped his head in to say quietly so only Jax could hear, “Ma’alor, I don’t trust them. It seems so fortuitous. How did they know to contact us? That we were looking to stop the HIVE? It’s too easy. We should make them promise on iron and stars to help us.”

  Like how Jax had made Robb’s mother promise on iron and stars to keep Robb safe, and so she stepped in front of a bullet meant for him. Jax had never mustered up the courage to tell Robb—and whether or not it had any hand in her death, he felt ashamed anyway. To hear Robb ask to make this girl and the Metal promise, it made his skin prickle. He wouldn’t let Robb make the same mistake he had.

  “We’re not going to do that,” he replied sternly.

  Robb narrowed his eyes, but when Jax refused to relent, he looked away with a huff. “Well, I’m not telling Siege.”

  “I will tell this Siege,” the Metal said.

  In the rearview mirror, Jax watched Elara quirk an eyebrow at her partner. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know who Captain Siege is.”

  “She is probably quite lovely, Elara.”

  Jax programmed the coordinates to the dreadnought into the guidance system of the skysailer and banked up out of the atmosphere and into the star-filled sky.

  Emperor

  The orange light of morning spread across the crowd below like a slowly creeping fire. It reminded him of the way the Iron Shrine in the square below had burned, red then orange and then golden, until its insides were charred and the bone white of its steeple was the only part of it left standing. It reminded him of the way the Iron Palace had burned. The North Tower. This entire kingdom, if his sister had any say in it.