Empress of a Thousand Skies(2)

She only wished she could kill him more than once.

“Honor, bravery, loyalty,” she whispered.

Rhee looked back toward the palace where she had spent most of her childhood. It was high up on the hill, just a short distance from the town, though it felt like a world away—a prison meant to keep her from the real world, and her destiny. It had once been the second home of her family. To the east of it she could just make out the throat of an old volcano, isolated, rising up from the flat desert plains around it. Crown’s Rock. Tai Reyanna, Rhee’s longtime governess, had remarked on how fitting it was for Rhee to be so close to a crown.

“Eweg nich!” boomed a deep voice, and she was nearly knocked off her feet by a Modrussel. Its tentacle left a sticky residue on her clothing. Looking over her shoulder, she could only make out antennae protruding from a high-collared outfit, its clothes soaked with a slimelike secretion—as their temperatures ran high, Modrussels were known to sweat profusely.

She hurried on. A message came through her cube just as she reached the square, and Tai Reyanna’s call sign flashed across her vision. Rhee’s blood leapt.

The Tai was a sect of teachers and caretakers, and Simone Reyanna was a Tai of the highest order. She served the royal family and had been Rhee’s exclusive governess ever since her family died. Rhee wasn’t used to ignoring her calls. But she wasn’t used to running off in the first place.

Rhee knew what she had to do. Sucking in a deep breath, she brought her finger to the spot behind her right ear and pressed to power down. Immediately she felt dizzy, disoriented, like something essential had drained out of her. It was the security of being online, the comfort of never getting lost, the knowledge that every thought and experience would be recorded to play again and again.

But it was freeing too. Nothing would be recorded, and nothing could be accessed either. At least not the specific memories she’d programmed to recall immediately and in full, memories that seemed to absorb her. With her cube down, the chatter of the crowd instantly shifted from her native Kalusian language to different dialects from across the solar system. She forgot that her translator had been connected to her cube, and now the foreign words, tongue clicks, whistles, and beeps shattered the air around her. Her great-ancestors had managed without cubes, and Rhee wondered how they could have possibly learned so many languages just by studying.

“They’re auctioning off droids too. Decommissioned models . . .” a boy ahead of her said. His Nauie caught her ear, a local accent with a singsong cadence.

Julian. He turned around even as she picked him out of the crowd. His blue eyes widened. They’d been the same height for as long as they’d known each other, until he shot up a couple of years ago. She had to look up into his eyes now, which annoyed her to no end—it was a competition she would never win.

“Shhhh!” she insisted just before he called out her name. “You have to power down your cube. Quickly,” she added, when it seemed like he might argue.

“You’re being paranoid,” he said. It was supposedly impossible to hack into someone’s cube, but there were rumors that Seotra and his lackeys monitored the citizens this way, by invading their memories and observations through their cubes, and Rhee couldn’t risk it. “Besides, my mom told me if you do it too much you’ll go mad.”

So they said. Most people went their whole lives without going offline, but there were entire communities—hundreds of thousands of people in the Outer Belt—that hadn’t had native cubes installed. And what were a few minutes here and there offline? Rhee wouldn’t say she liked the feeling, but she liked the discomfort of it. With every minute she managed to endure, she felt stronger.

“Just do it,” Rhee said.

“I hate the way it feels . . .” But Julian put his finger to his neck and made a face like he’d been pricked with a giant needle, and Rhee relaxed. “And what are you even doing here?”

“Well, ma’tan sarili to you too,” she said, muttering the Kalusian greeting under her breath. Had she wanted him to be pleased? Rhee wasn’t sure.

She shoved her hand deep into her pocket and felt the cool telescope in her palm. It belonged to Julian—it always would. They’d known each other ever since Andrés Seotra had banished her—or practically banished her—to Nau Fruma nine years ago when he became regent. “My flight’s been delayed,” she added. It wasn’t exactly a lie, since the craft wouldn’t leave without her.

He glanced behind him at the boys he’d been speaking to, then turned away from them again, nudging her farther into the crowd. There was a layer of dust on his skin and matting his dark blond hair. Veyron, his father, was part Wraetan—but Julian looked Nauie through and through; his great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side was one of the original settlers on Nau Fruma.

“You know the Eliedio is one of the safest crafts out there,” he said, reaching for his cube out of habit. “There’s only a two percent malfunction rate, and there’s never been any kind of accident that—”

“That’s not why I left,” she said, grabbing his hand so he wouldn’t power up. She dropped it quickly. Ever since their last spar, it felt strange when they touched. “I’m not scared, if that’s what you think.”

“Okay.” He tilted his head and squinted, a thing she’d seen him do a million times before. Rhee stiffened at the way he sized her up, the way he seemed so certain he was right. “I just thought, because of what happened to your family . . .”