Empress of a Thousand Skies(48)

The Tasinn stood up and retreated, moving back through cargo the way he’d come. Aly didn’t realize he’d stopped breathing until the hiss of the mechanized doors told him he was safe—didn’t realize, either, how tightly he’d been holding the girl until she moved away from him.

“Whoa,” the girl muttered. She stood up, and Aly did too. Pavel lit up tentatively, as if afraid to fully power on, so she was cast in low blue light.

“They’ll be back,” he said. He’d have to disembark earlier than he wanted and find some other way to Portiis. He asked himself for the thousandth time what Vin had expected him to do with his crappy half-information, about a maybe-lost princess and some random contact in the United Planets.

Then again, he couldn’t stay on the zeppelin, especially if Nero was sharing his airspace. Since his cube was off, Aly’d been missing most of the news—he wasn’t all that interested in seeing a MURDERER or WANTED label slapped over a bad picture of his face—but he’d picked up that Regent Seotra had up and disappeared. “Vanished,” the holos said. More like assassinated, Aly figured.

Now Nero was practically in charge, making a big show about how Kalusians—the good guys they were—had tried diplomacy. Now it was time to take action.

Take back what’s ours had become the rallying cry of Nero’s rabid supporters.

It was a veiled call for blood. Aly’s blood, specifically, as well as the blood of anyone who supported Fontisian or Wraetian calls for peace. Aly guessed people were fed up and didn’t need a whole lot of convincing. All Nero had to do was just remind them how horrible their lives were and point a finger on the sly. See who they blamed then. It helped Nero’s case that he looked the way he did. A jaw that cut glass, a slick-looking haircut, a permanent smile on his face that made people go weak in the knees.

Aly had felt off that time Nero invited him and Vin to the gala. He was easygoing and seemed to take a liking to Vin; they were both second-wave Kalusians and Nero could’ve been his cool, younger uncle. Nero was nice enough to Aly, too, and introduced him with the minimum level of pleasantries—but there was something about the way his eyes flickered over him, like Aly was a roach in a tux. When Aly brought it up to Vin, he said what he always did: “It’s in your head.” Apparently not.

“I gotta keep moving,” the girl said. She stared at him for a long time. Her gray-blue eyes were intense, like the choppy parts of the ocean where you weren’t supposed to swim, but he willed himself not to look away. He realized she was half asking for permission and half trying to say goodbye. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone about you.”

Aly nodded. What else could he do? He wasn’t going to hold her against her will. He wasn’t going to become the monster that Nero and his council were trying to claim he was.

As the girl passed Pavel, she touched the top of his dome. His blue eyelights blinked softly. Maybe he was surprised by the gesture too. When she got far enough away she turned, breaking into a sprint as she wove her way toward the same door the Tasinn had used. She stopped suddenly before she reached it.

“Where will you go?” she asked.

“To find help.”

She spun around to face him then, and for a split second Aly thought she might charge him. But instead she blurted out: “Do you want to come with me?”

Yes.

“Why?” he asked instead. “Why trust me?”

“I don’t.” She shrugged. “But if you’re still alive when half the universe wants you dead, you can’t be an idiot. And there’s safety in numbers.”

“Not when one of us is plastered all over the holos,” Aly said. Besides, he wouldn’t be anyone’s charity case.

“I’m going to a safe house,” she said finally. “There’s one on Rhesto.”

“A safe house? On Rhesto?” Was everyone in the galaxy some kind of spy? “But that whole place is poisonous.”

Rhesto was a small moon and the site of a nuclear plant before the Great War, but it had a meltdown when Fontis bombed it. Anyone who hadn’t died had abandoned it: Supposedly, the radiation would last in the soil for something like twenty thousand years.

“Nothing radiation pills can’t fix.” She spoke matter-of-factly, and he wondered if she was being serious or if she had a sense of humor to rival Jeth’s. Why the hell would she help him? “It’s still not as toxic as staying in Kalu.” She frowned, and he waited her out, banking on the fact she’d say more eventually. Thankfully it worked. “It’s my mom, okay? She’s a scientist and was part of the G-1K summits. A bunch of them have been targeted, hunted down. But they’re smart, obviously, and they organized themselves. This safe house is theirs. And they set up a massive universe-wide broadcast to beam a DO NOT ENTER signal across all the holos. They have to manually disable it every day. If there was trouble, we would know.”

By then Aly’s heart had started beating very fast. An idea flashed in his brain like a starburst. “You said they can broadcast . . . out?”

She nodded.

Rhesto was one of the Kalusian moons, the other one being Nau Fruma. For an hour a day, the two crossed orbits; it blocked any DroneVision broadcasts.

For the first time in days, some of the bleak grip of hopelessness eased. He’d had no idea Rhesto had its own tower, or capabilities to broadcast out. If the planet could send that kind of distress call, then it could send out his cube playback, easy, for the whole universe to see. He’d broadcast his own version of events. He’d show them, once and for all, that he didn’t kill the Princess. And maybe then they’d stop chasing him. Aly could finally stop running. Vin had told him to go to Portiis, which was all the way in the Heryl Quadrant and nearly a week’s ride away, and ask for the United Planets’ help—but this was the immediate solution, and exactly what he needed to prove his innocence. He’d still see his promise through to Vin, but he’d do it afterward.