Empress of a Thousand Skies(15)

So Aly had pushed Alina toward his mom and turned away. His ma started crying, grabbing Alina with one hand while she tried to reach out for Aly with the other. The Fontisian watched on like he was bored, and Aly’s dad had to step up, calm her down, be the wall that separated a mother from her son. “I’ll watch out for Aly. Take our baby girl,” he’d whispered.

And his ma went, crying her eyes out as she picked a thrashing Alina clean off the ground. In his memory, Aly stood behind his dad, clutching his dad’s shirt and willing himself not to break, not to make this harder on his ma. But as soon as the truck started, Aly was running, small and worthless, as gravel kicked out from behind the truck’s wheels and his family receded into the distance. His mother and Alina had looked like copies of each other, their smooth faces like dark pearls, big hair blown back as the truck picked up speed.

Aly didn’t want to think about that sad little kid who’d cried his eyes out, sprinting after a life and a family that wasn’t ever going to be. Aly knew the score now, and right in front of him he could see that he was closing the gap between his pod and the Eliedio’s. He locked on to it with his grav beam and slowly stabilized its spin. It’ll stop, he told himself. It has to.

And when it did, he clicked the air locks into place and shouted—a wild, primal scream. He grabbed the medbag from under his seat and waited for their air locks to depressurize.

The hatch hissed open, and the metallic smell hit him first. He stepped through and nearly slipped on the slickness underneath his feet. There was blood, lots of it. His heart shot up through his throat.

“Princess Rhiannon?” he called. His voice had cracked. Stupid, he thought. A dead girl couldn’t respond.

Do it, he urged himself—but waited until he thought his heart would burst before he finally went any farther. The first thing he saw was a boot. A guy’s boot. It wasn’t the Princess, but an old black man—maybe Wraetan, like him. He looked like the grizzled old veterans of the Great War who were so common at interstellar refueling station bars. Aly looked away and pressed his index and middle fingers lightly to each eye—as if he were asking Vodhan for mercy. His heart still beat rapidly. Relief and disappointment stirred in his blood.

He’d seen dead bodies before—he’d grown up in the Wray, after all, where it’d been crammed with refugees and a lot of taejis went down—but he’d never seen an old man who was murdered like this. His bloodied shirt was soaked through, and red handprints ran up his stomach and neck. Aly was so dizzy, so overwhelmed by the smell of blood, he almost missed the long, black braid laid across the man’s chest. It looked like a snake. The stupid part of him was scared, like it might come to life and snap at his feet.

But then he recognized it: The braid belonged to the Princess. Back in boot camp, Vin would freak him and Jethezar out with wild stories about the ancient traditions on Kalu, and how their warriors left locks of hair on the first person they ever slayed. As creepy as it sounded, he had a feeling that Princess Rhiannon had made her first kill.





FIVE


    RHIANNON



RHEE had replayed at least a dozen times the hologram of the Eliedio exploding. Even more souls lost. Another explosion she’d escaped. She should’ve been among them . . .

“Don’t you get tired of watching the same thing?” asked the Fontisian. She’d recently learned his name was Dahlen, and that he was insufferable.

“No,” Rhee said. She pulled the handheld back, just out of his grasp, and the projected image distorted across the pod’s ceiling. “Not even close.”

Only a few passengers had managed to escape, Tai Reyanna among them. Rhee was relieved to hear of her Tai’s survival—her caretaker, who’d lived with her family even before the accident, and her only remaining tie to that life in the palace. Even now, Tai Reyanna was organizing a public vigil at the base of the sacred crystals in Tinoppa—a tiny asteroid currently equidistant from Kalu and Nau Fruma. It was famous for its ancient monument of crystals, impossibly large and arranged in a half circle. It was thought to be a sacred site, and it was there the galaxy would mourn Rhee’s passing.

Would Julian go? Could his mother afford it, now that Veyron was gone?

Rhee pushed the thought aside. Her skin felt itchy. The wool Fontisian-style tunic she’d been given to wear aggravated her skin, though anything was better than the red embroidered coronation dress.

Dahlen shook his head and placed a red pill on the console in front of her. After they’d jettisoned Veyron’s body in the Eliedio escape pod, she’d boarded the Fontisian’s craft; it was made of some kind of organic matter that must have belonged to his native planet. It smelled strongly of oak and cloves, and it looked like it was carved from the inside of a tree. It was bursting with plants, like a rain forest in the sky, and the green foliage seemed to angle toward Dahlen wherever he went. The console itself was a stump, with rings that Rhee could trace with a finger.

“You’re out of options,” he said. “Take this.” He couldn’t have been older than eighteen, but he acted like all adults did: bossy, distracted, annoyed to have to repeat himself.

“I told you already,” she said. “I won’t take it.” She picked it up to examine it.

The pill was the size of her pinky nail, and filled with a gel-like substance. It was a scrambler—it would rearrange her DNA so that the scans wouldn’t detect any trace of Rhee. Not in her eyes, her fingerprints, her blood, or her saliva. If she took the red pill, Rhiannon Ta’an, the last empress of the Ta’an dynasty, would be gone.