Soul of Stars Read online

  “They are also adequate weapons. They also smell nice.”

  “You can’t smell.”

  He’d cocked his head, as if it confused him. “Oh. Then perhaps I would like their smell.”

  She had rolled her eyes. “Why not spend your coppers on something useful?”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as . . .” She had thought for a moment, sipping the hot wine as it warmed her hands. “Oh! What about that new service bot the captain’s been eyeing?”

  He had turned his moonlit eyes to her. “You are not serious.”

  “Why not? The bot’ll cut your work time in half! It’ll give you more time to reread. And,” she had added happily, “it’s adorable.”

  He had looked away. Not angrily, but in a way that she knew meant he wanted this conversation to end. “I am ninety-seven-point-three percent sure this can opener will be of no help to me. I am incredibly useful without it.”

  Ana had frowned. “. . . I hurt your feelings, didn’t I?”

  “I highly doubt you could find a mere bot as apt as me.”

  “You think we’ll replace you.”

  He had come to a stop in the middle of the market, people in thick fur-lined cloaks scurrying about them. Snow fell and crusted on her eyelashes and in her dark braided hair, and frosted over his metal skin. He gave her one of his many unreadable looks. “You would never replace me.”

  “Oh? That confident, are you?” she had joked.

  “Yes. Because I am yours.”

  “That’s silly.” She tried to dismiss him, feeling her cheeks getting hot. She told herself it was because she was embarrassed.

  “Ana—”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she had added, trying to tell herself that he didn’t mean it that way.

  Even though it sounded like a declaration.

  Even though it made her heart flutter.

  “Besides, I was only saying we should buy the bot so it can do all the chores that I know you don’t like to—and I’m sure you could find some sort of use for it, and it might not be as much of a nuisance as you’re thinking and— Di?” she had called when she realized that he hadn’t been following.

  She’d glanced behind her to see where he had wandered off to. A vendor probably caught his eye, or a window display. Instead, she found him only a few feet behind her, having paused in the middle of the market, somewhere between one step and the next.

  Her heart had leaped into her throat.

  “. . . Di?”

  On some nights after, when they visited mechanics on Iliad and listened to rumors of Rasovant’s lost fleetship, she wished she had never turned around. Because Di stood frozen, shoulders stiff, legs immobile. His eyes flickered like the lightning storms on Eros, strange and all of a sudden terrifying.

  It was the first time he had glitched.

  And it would be far from the last.

  Now she wondered how different her world would be if she had never gone in search of Rasovant’s lost fleetship. If faced with the choice now, she wasn’t sure what she would do to have Di back.

  All the good memories in her head warred with the look in his red eyes as he sank his lightsword into her stomach. The way his face twisted, the grimace trying to be a smirk. It made the scar on her abdomen ache so deeply it went to her very soul.

  She bit the inside of her cheek to keep her teeth from chattering and upsetting the voxcollar. The Messiers shoved her into a vacant room. It was a small medical ward, but it had been emptied of all equipment and stocked with spare Metal parts.

  One of the Messiers grabbed her by the arm, and the door closed behind her, trapping the two of them inside. The voxcollar gave a pop, and the hum silenced as it deactivated.

  “Where is it?” the Messier asked, its monotonous voice dipping into the brassy, familiar baritone she dreaded. It made her breath hitch. When she looked at the Messier again, its eyes were red and Di looked out of them.

  She jerked out of his grip.

  How could he do that—jump into other Metals? Was it a power of the HIVE?

  He advanced on her. “Tell me where the heart is.”

  The . . . heart? The only heart she knew about was—

  The Cantos. The Great Dark’s heart.

  He took a dagger from his waist. It was steel—not a lightblade. A blade made to bleed, whereas a lightblade burned. He meant what he’d said before. He would kill her slowly. She stumbled back, mind reeling—Think, think, think!—as he twirled the blade in his fingers and advanced upon her.

  He was not her Di anymore.

  He was the enemy—and it had taken six months to understand it. He wanted her dead. He did. Not just the HIVE. If he loved her, wouldn’t he have fought? Wouldn’t he still be fighting against the HIVE?

  She eyed the dagger.

  He hadn’t killed her at the palace, and he wasn’t going to kill her now.

  Robb

  The ducts of the dreadnought’s ventilation system were a lot larger than the ones on the Tsarina. He doubted he could wiggle his way through those now, having gotten a bit broader in the months since. Honestly, between running from Messiers and trying to find a mechanic to outfit him with an arm, he hadn’t really paid much attention to his growth spurt. His trousers were a little short, and his coats didn’t fit nearly as well as they had before—but it was kind of hard to find a tailor when you were a wanted war criminal.

  And he definitely didn’t expect to be infiltrating a prison on his seventeenth birthday.

  Not that he’d told anyone. He really didn’t want to—and besides, even he knew that mentioning it on the day Ana got arrested was in poor form.

  Happy seventeenth to me, he thought. He could celebrate his birthday later. With his friends. And the boy he loved. And maybe finally tell that boy that he loved him. Yeah—he would. It’d be a fine birthday present to himself.

  But first he had to find the control box, set the charges, and not die.

  Not dying was imperative.

  So he dropped down into the maintenance hallway at the end of the ducts and found the electrical junction, old and frightfully rusted, set the charges, and hid around a corner.

  He kissed the detonator, prayed, “Goddess, let this work,” and pressed the button.

  Ana

  As Di raised his blade, the halogen light above them gave a whining pop—and shattered. Ana winced as darkness filled the room. An emergency light flickered on in the corner, bathing the room in a bloodred glow.

  She and Di, through the eyes of a Messier, watched each other for a moment.

  “CODE THREE-FIVE. SOLAR MALFUNCTION,” a metallic voice announced over the intercom.

  It seemed to break the spell.

  In that moment she shoved her fright down into her belly, where her scar burned, and launched herself at Di. She slammed her shoulder into his chest. He stumbled away from her, trying to keep his balance.

  She jumped, swinging her handcuffed hands underneath her to bring her arms in front, and grabbed for the weapon on his belt—a mace. When did Messiers start carrying maces?

  Whatever.

  She slammed it into the Messier’s face again, and even though it wasn’t Di’s face, she remembered it like points in her favorite constellation. The scuff on his forehead, the slat on the left side of his mouth that creaked, the staticky tremor of his damaged voice box. She swung the mace even as tears came to her eyes.

  It’s not him—

  She slammed the weapon across its face again.

  —It’s not—

  And again.

  —Di.

  The Messier twisted to look at her, half of its face buckled in, eyes sparking, and she gritted her teeth, raised the mace over her head, and brought it down one last time.

  Die.

  The Messier dropped to the ground and didn’t get back up. She pushed the palm of her hand against her eyes to wipe away the tears.

  A heart—the Great Dark was looking for a heart. S
he concentrated on that as she dug into the uniform of the Messier and found the key to her handcuffs and undid them, rubbing at the marks on her freed wrists.

  Then she took the steel dagger from the Messier’s frozen grip and slipped it into her boot.

  She had to keep calm. Another Messier must have had the voxcollar key. Even though it was deactivated, she still wanted to get this bloody death necklace off her, then find a way out of here.

  Suddenly, something bumped against her shoulder. She glanced up, tensing to strike—

  It was a service bot, its bulbous lens narrowing to her.

  No—it was E0S!

  She recognized it from the dent in the top left corner of its cubed head where Di had “accidentally” slammed a door on it.

  It beeped and extended something to her. A voxcollar remote. She took it. “E0S, thank the Goddess, you’re the best fifty coppers on discount I’ve ever spent.” She pressed it against the lock on her collar. With a click, it released and fell to the ground. She gave a sigh, rubbing her throat.

  As a reply, E0S nudged her cheek.

  “Did you stow away on the ship to follow me?”

  It bleeped again.

  “That was dangerous,” she scolded. “You could’ve gotten killed. C’mon—I don’t know what caused the blackout, but I’m not going to waste it. Do you remember the way to the docking bay?”

  The bot bobbed in the air like a nod, and she told it to lead the way. It zipped out of the room and turned down the dark hallway, and she followed.

  Jax

  For the record, Jax hated this plan.

  He knocked a lightsword away with his obsidian cuff and drove it down through the Messier’s skull.

  He didn’t hate this plan because he had to play the bait in this Goddess-forsaken prison. He didn’t hate it because the entire dreadnought smelled like disinfectant and old socks. He didn’t hate it because his comm-links to Elara and Robb were out, or because the red lights were giving him a headache, or because the suit was making him chafe. He didn’t even hate it because this was the fourth Messier he had disabled, and he was finally breaking a sweat—

  No.

  He hated the plan because he would never find Ana, and these stupid Messiers were taunting him.

  “You cannot save her,” the first Messier had said just before Jax pounded its face in with the butt of its own lightsword.

  The second said, “This is senseless.” He ran a blade through that one’s chest.

  “She is safer with the Emperor.” He simply cut its head off.

  “You will die here.” That one he broke a sweat killing.

  Muttering a string of Old Language obscenities, he wrenched his blade from the last Messier’s chest and continued toward the control room. The outer wall of the hallway was a sheet of glass that looked out to space, filtering in enough starlight to give him energy to keep going. Solani didn’t fare well in the dark.

  He wiped his sweaty brow with his sleeve and hurried down the emergency-lit hallway. Through one of the windows he saw a large room. Once it would’ve been used as a mess hall or a meeting space, but now it was simply filled with lines and lines of Messiers, their eyes blue and sharp, staring straight ahead into the next Metal. There must have been a hundred—maybe two—crammed into the space. Just waiting.

  There were so many.

  And there were no outlaws or criminals. The convicts who had been brought here were nowhere to be found.

  He hated to think the rumors were true.

  Nervous energy itched just under his skin. His thumb-kiss with Robb lingered on his lips like a regret. He should have kissed Robb. Really kissed him—with tongue, just to make it worthwhile.

  To leave Robb something to remember him by.

  His . . .

  Nervously, he pulled at the collar of his space suit.

  “Jax! Jax help me!”

  He whirled in the direction of the voice. “Ana?”

  “Jax!” she screamed, so frightened her voice crumbled at the end. “JAX!”

  He didn’t even think—he just ran toward the door at the end of the hallway. It was closed, unlike most of the others. He slammed his lightsword into the door. The white-hot blade cut a molten-red line down the door. Then he leveraged the hilt against his body and began to pry it open.

  With one final jerk, the door cracked open enough for him to shimmy inside. “Ana!” he called desperately. “Ana, where are y—”

  He was halfway into the room when he realized where he was.

  The bridge of the dreadnought.

  It was dark, the consoles and panels dead. One wall of windows looked out toward space, the other down into the docking bay below.

  Two Messiers stood up from their stations. Ana was nowhere in sight. His throat constricted. He remembered this bridge from Robb’s stars.

  “Identifying—” one Messier began, the other answering, “Jaxander Taizu.” And then, like a secret, “C’zar.”

  “Sorry, haven’t been that in a while,” replied Jax, irritated. The HIVE had tricked him—the voice hadn’t been Ana at all. He raised his sword to point at the two of them. “That little trick of yours has made me very angry, but I’m feeling generous. I’ll give you a choice: Do you want to die first”—he turned the tip of his blade to the other one—“or do you?”

  The Messier on the left reached for the pistol on its hip, and that was all the answer he needed. He threw the lightsword at the Messier before it could draw its weapon. The blade slammed into its chest—

  As the other Messier fired a shot.

  He drew up his obsidian cuff to shield his face and charged at the Messier. A second bullet glanced off his wrist with the impact of a punch, a third ricocheting off his space suit’s breastplate.

  Then he was on the Messier and grabbing the pistol, pushing it away so he couldn’t be shot at again. He twisted his fingers under the automaton’s chin slats and pulled. Wires popped out, short-circuiting its optics. The Messier stumbled sideways as Jax twisted the pistol out of its grip at last and fired two shots into its chest, shattering the memory core inside.

  The Messier slumped, bits of its blue core slipping out between the bullet holes, and died.

  Goddess forgive me for that, he thought, knowing that he shouldn’t have aimed for its core, but he didn’t want to die yet either.

  Jax shoved the gun onto his belt and winced when his arm spiked with pain. He inspected it. Goddess, seriously? A bullet had skimmed his biceps, the only unprotected part of his arm, leaving a bleeding gash. Lucky shot, but nothing he’d die from.

  Still, it’d leave a scar.

  Not that he was worried about that anymore.

  He couldn’t change the stars this time, not like he had with Ana on her coronation day, because what he hadn’t known then was that the stars took other things instead. Where Ana had been saved, someone else had not. Viera Carnelian—the Royal Guard Captain—or her brother Vermion, or Lady Valerio . . . but Jax knew, deep down, that in saving Ana he had damned Di.

  Of all the things he regretted, he regretted that the most.

  That he couldn’t have saved them both.

  He swiped his fingers across the console to wake it up out of emergency power saving, disabled the ship’s defenses, and sent a hail to the Dossier. “This is Jax—come in, Dossier.”

  There was static across the comms for a moment, and then it crackled, and the voice of his captain came through like dawn breaking over the horizon. “Reading you loud and clear. We are ETA three minutes and forty-three seconds. Are you safe?”

  “As safe as I can be, sir,” he replied.

  “Have you found Ana yet?”

  “No, but trust me—Robb will find her. She’ll be fine. Just be at these coordinates as quickly as possible. Robb and Ana will leave in a skysailer from the docking bay.”

  There was a pause, and for a moment Jax worried that he’d lost her, but then she said, “Jax, you come back with them—”

  He exit
ed out of the comm-link, his hands shaking. There wasn’t time for regret. He pushed the Metal off the operations console and sat down. He had to open the docking bay doors or Robb and Ana weren’t getting out of here alive. They would be down there in five minutes and seven seconds, so he set a timer for then, hoping he wasn’t misremembering from his vision. They would be in a skysailer by the time the doors opened.

  Just as he finished programming the command, the door to the bridge opened with a snap.

  The clock began to tick down from five minutes.

  4:59

  4:58

  4:57

  He spun around in his chair.

  A Metal stood in the doorway, hands on either side of the cut door. This android was different, though. It wore the same Messier uniform, but there were more bars on its shoulders. Higher in rank.

  The dreadnought’s XO—its Executive Officer—if he had to guess.

  It turned its red eyes to him—and Jax saw the monster peering through.

  Di.

  Jax bit the inside of his lip so hard, he tasted the blood against his tongue, and it grounded him for a moment.

  This was the beginning of the end. And he wished he had a second—just a second more—with Robb.

  “Well, that’s new,” he told Di. “Can you patch yourself into service bots, too? Street-sweepers? Trash receptacles? I bet you’re right at home there—”

  “I should have known it was you,” said the Emperor through the XO’s mouth.

  4:48

  4:47

  Just a little longer. He unsheathed his lightsword. “I am rather predictable,” he replied, and launched himself at the Messier.

  Ana

  “Are you sure this is the right way?” she asked E0S.

  All of the hallways looked the same, but she could’ve sworn she had already passed these doors before. She needed to get to the docking bay—hijack a skysailer and get the heck out of here. Trouble was, there weren’t any bloody signs around this deathship. The dreadnought was more confusing than the palace—and she’d gotten lost so many times in those hallways, it bruised her ego.

  E0S gave a blip and flew down the corridor. Without much choice, she followed. She passed what looked like a tech bay with darkened Metals inside, spare parts lined up on the far wall like different pieces of armor. It seemed like the HIVE had an endless supply of soldiers at its beck and call, and that worried her.