Empress of a Thousand Skies(4)
The moment she learned of her family’s deaths, she’d fumbled through all the memories on her cube, searching to recall their last moment together—only to wish she hadn’t. Her mother’s hair, gray and frizzy; the dark circles under her father’s eyes; her sister purposefully ignoring her. All of them angry, disappointed, colder-looking in recall somehow than they had seemed in the flesh. As if they’d already been dead for years.
No one told you that about the way recall worked: how easily you could ruin the things you loved. Rhee chose to rely on her organic memory to remember only the good moments: Joss sneaking dried myrah candies to her in bed when she was sick; insisting the tailor make them both a set of pants like their father’s; and flinging aside her parasol to cartwheel in the sun, over and over, in the buckwheat fields outside the palace. Her father, a tall man, lifting Rhee easily onto his shoulders for a daily walk along the palace perimeter. And her mother, undoing Rhee’s tight braids every evening—something a servant could’ve easily done—and rubbing her aching head with lavendula oil. “Be a good girl” was the last thing she’d said to Rhee. And Rhee remembered nodding, as if she’d been saying I will.
But she’d lied.
Their father had given the sisters special coins once, souvenirs from a trip he’d taken in the Bazorl Quadrant—one for Joss and one for her. When her father ushered her family on the craft the night of the accident, Joss and Rhee had been fighting about whose turn it was to press the thruster deploy.
“Stars you’re stupid. Soil you’re still stupid,” Joss had told Rhee, flipping her coin to show Rhee it didn’t matter which side landed first. Rhee had been six years old, and furious. She’d snuck off while her parents were distracted. She’d wanted to go get her own coin—and prove Joss was even stupider. Acting like a baby, just like Joss always said.
She’d been gravity-bound when the craft launched, when it tore off into the atmosphere and disappeared. She hadn’t known, of course, that it would never return, that exactly four minutes after takeoff it would burn up in the outer rings of Rylier and crash, killing everyone on board, instantly.
All because her father had wanted peace. In signing the Urnew Treaty that ended the Great War between the planets, he’d signed his own life away. Seotra had warned him. Half the beings in the galaxy will want you dead, he’d practically snarled. His hands clutching onto the collar of her father’s shirt. Your own people will make you pay. Rhee had burst in at that moment, interrupting their standoff. No one had ever spoken to her father that way, or handled him so roughly. Rhee clenched her fists as she remembered the threat laced in the Crown Regent’s words, the menace she felt when she went through her cube playback, searching for all the memories she had of her father just before he died.
Your own people will make you pay.
As in, Seotra would make him pay. He’d made her father believe that he had to take their family and flee from some imminent danger on Kalu. But the only danger was Seotra himself.
Once her family boarded the ship, isolated from all of their friends and allies out of a need for secrecy, it would have been easy enough for Seotra to orchestrate the explosion that ended their lives. He’d had connections from the war. And there was no doubt in Rhee’s mind he’d killed plenty of men before he’d killed her family that day.
She’d never shared the memory with anyone. No one would’ve believed a child. And now that she was grown, mere hours from becoming empress, there was no need to tell anyone, ever. She’d have her revenge on her own terms.
“Just take it,” Julian said now, motioning to the telescope in her hand. “Pretend it isn’t a birthday gift. Let’s say I’m just letting you borrow it ’til I see you next.”
’Til I see you next, she repeated in her head. By then, everything would be different.
She’d learned that there was no guarantee of anything, or anyone, ever.
Streaks of orange and red cut across the black sky. Shining, burning, bubbling. Edges chipped away as the meteors moved at impossible speeds. Cheers erupted all around them as everyone burst into applause. Rhee couldn’t record it; she’d just have to remember how she felt at this moment, looking up into the void, every joy and fear inside her boiling, as if she were the same temperature as the supercharged rocks hurtling across the sky. With each flare the question she’d asked herself for years burned brighter and brighter inside of her: Why her? Why did she survive?
“Do you think I’m good?” she asked him suddenly. There was a prickling sensation in her throat.
“Rhiannon . . .” He trailed off. After all these years, she wasn’t sure if she’d ever heard him say her whole name, and she didn’t like it—didn’t like the formality of it, the way it made her feel as though she’d already floated far away from him, and from this life. But wasn’t that what she wanted? Wasn’t that better for everyone? He seemed as if he was going to say something serious, but finally he shook his head and took her hand. “No. I think you’re weird.”
They’d held hands a million times before. To help each other over the crest of the sand dunes, or to pull the other up off the dojo mat. But now, he laced his fingers through hers and squeezed. She held her breath, wondering if she should squeeze back, if it even meant anything, if she was overthinking it completely.