Empress of a Thousand Skies(28)
“No, Alyosha. You can’t.” For the first time, he actually sounded sad. Vin pulled his handheld device out of his pocket and slammed it on the dash. “Enable newsfeed.”
From a tiny opening in the front, it projected a hologram newsfeed between them showing footage of the Eliedio, the royal ship, exploding. Even in holographic form, the fire and the choking smoke were horrible to watch.
A familiar voice, patched in over images of the gruesome explosion, reached out like a cold finger and moved all the way down his spine.
His voice.
“I’ll finish what I started,” he heard himself say. He looked up and saw dark, grainy footage of his face. His face was covered in shadow, his skin darker than it was in real life. You could only see the whites of his eyes. “Get ’em all. Get ’em all.”
“I never said that,” Aly croaked. The sound of his voice, so soon after the edited version, seemed like a strange doubling. “They must have taken that audio from the show, messed with it somehow.”
“I know,” Vin said. He looked sorry. “But it doesn’t matter what I think.”
Under the footage a caption read, “Private Alyosha Myraz and Popular Revolutionary Boys Star Wanted for the Assassination of Princess Rhiannon.”
Part Two:
THE MARKED
In the year 918, Kalusian forces bombed the planet of Wraeta.
“I was on one of the last crafts to make it out of the blast radius. I was six. I didn’t see the bomb drop, but I saw the Kalusian vessel break the atmosphere. At first the side of the planet rippled. There was a huge explosion. Pieces broke off. I thought it would be loud, but it was quiet. All I heard were the people in my cabin, sobbing. Everything we’d ever known. Our homes. Taken away, destroyed.”
—Wraetan refugee account
NINE
RHIANNON
THEY’D arrived in Tinoppa early that morning and headed straight to one of Dahlen’s contacts. Since she had refused to take the DNA scrambler, Dahlen pointed out that she would need another disguise to get close to Seotra.
The Fisherman’s workroom was dank, lined with dark tanks—empty but for stagnant and scummy water. A single cot and balled-up blanket had been shoved in the corner. Rhiannon couldn’t imagine living here, but supposed that the Fisherman was comfortable in wet, dark places. Judging from his stretched-out anatomy, he hadn’t grown up in a high-grav environment. Combined with his bizarre speech patterns, which made it sound like his vocal cords were full of liquid, Rhee guessed he was far from his native planet.
She knew the feeling. They’d been traveling for three days and had barely gotten here on time; the ceremony Seotra was to attend was scheduled for this afternoon.
And this afternoon, she would kill him, at last. At last, it would all be over.
Then what? a little voice whispered. That was the problem with being without the cube. Not just the organic memories. The whispers, the doubts, the fears that crowded her like faceless spectators moving in the shadows.
She forced the thought from her mind. Honor, loyalty, bravery. Revenge.
“How long will the procedure take?” she asked.
“As long as I want it to,” the Fisherman replied. He lifted his enormous hand to Rhee’s face, opening her hazel eye so wide she thought he’d rip her skin open at the corners. She flinched away but he grabbed her chin. He was pale blue with a long face—all his features crowded down onto the bottom half. He had human-like eyes, tilted down at a forty-five-degree angle, which gave the impression that his entire face had slid down over time. His thin mouth made a suction sound as he chewed his tobacco. The smell made her insides twist in disgust.
But strangest of all: He had no cube. She’d never met a soul without one, though she’d heard of cultures in the Outer Belt that had refused to adopt them. The second G-1K summit had established interplanetary availability on every single world in the universe, to eliminate the technology gap. They’d even drafted a wide-ranging resolution so planets could modify their cubes according to local customs and traditions.
That was decades ago now, and an interconnected universe was only a reality for the wealthier territories.
Rhee wondered what it was like to live a whole life without a cube, or simply to turn hers off like Dahlen. She’d been without hers for just a few days and felt as if she were walking through a murk of uncertainty, with impressions that struck and then disappeared, a past unraveling behind her like a string. It was terrifying—but electrifying, too, as if she hardly existed at all.
“Hold still,” the Fisherman said with a grunt. The tiny light he shined on her was impossibly bright, and Rhee felt her eye well up with tears. When she could no longer take it, she wrenched herself free.
“Just as well, then,” he said, shrugging. “Before we get started we’ll need to discuss the matter of payment.”
“Name your price.”
“Credits amounting to five million,” he said smugly.
“We don’t have it,” Dahlen answered. “On the honor of my order, I can assure you when she is empress—”
“There is no guarantee that she’ll become empress.” He glanced over at her—it was hard to tell if he was smiling or not. She knew, and he knew, that it was a risk to come here and reveal her identity, but they had no choice. “Oh please, don’t glare at me, Princess. It’s not that I want you to fail. I just don’t care enough to have an opinion.”