Empress of a Thousand Skies(53)

When he caught her eye in the mirror she quickly looked away. Her hair fell across her face, and when she blinked it got tangled in her eyelashes. How did that not drive her crazy?

“I spent a lot of time on zeppelin freighters like these,” she said. She made a face in the mirror and tried to finger comb her tangled hair. It was no use trying to make it do anything else—it was too far gone—but he wasn’t going to tell her that. Under the door he saw Pavel discreetly send a narrow attachment with a tiny camera at the end, and Aly nudged it back with the toe of his boot. “Kalu labs rent out space on zeppelins like this all the time, for experiments they can’t get the government to approve. Since it travels between quadrants, then it isn’t in violation of any one territory’s laws. My mom’s a scientist, remember? She used to work the Kalu–Navrum line that did four-day loops. She did neurobiology stuff and even helped develop cube-to-cube interaction.”

Aly was impressed. “So you’re some kind of genius like your mom, then?”

“I wish,” she said to the mirror. She had this faraway look in her eyes, like she was actually seeing someone who’d disappeared from her reflection forever ago. “But I guess it got her in trouble, in the end. She was being watched by a bunch of different governments, all kinds of different planets . . .”

“Is she . . . ?”

Kara shook her head, so her bangs shook too. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not.” Their eyes met in the mirror again. He got a sense of weird déjà vu when he looked at her. Maybe it was just the fluorescent lighting threatening to give him a seizure. “A dozen scientists she worked with at the summit had been disappearing over the last six months, one by one. She knew it wasn’t coincidence. Someone was going after them.”

“Who?”

Kara shrugged. “I don’t know. But she left before they could take her. At least, I hope she did.”

“Zuilie,” he exhaled.

“That’s what I’m saying. I heard it’s always happened on the sly, ever since the Great War. People all over the galaxy rounded up, questioned about their involvement and their loyalties, all under the guise of preserving peace. But this is different . . .” Her face tightened. “It’s targeted. Every one of them was at the last G-1K summit. Taken one day, maybe stopped for a routine traffic violation or called in to renew a federal license, and then just . . . gone.”

Immediately, he remembered the little boy on Derkatz. Snatch-yah uptu?

Alyosha felt sick. This was what war was. It wasn’t even the bombs or the cruisers loaded with bombs. It was girls like Kara in a zeppelin bathroom, suddenly, maybe, orphaned. It was boys like him, twelve-year-olds, running after a truck, choking on the smell of dust. People always measured war in terms of the numbers dead. Maybe they should measure it in terms of the people left behind.

“And your mom told you about the safe house on Rhesto before she ran?”

“She’s gone on and on about it for years. A neurotechnologist from Derkatz turned up dead after the last summit. I never got details, but I got the feeling my mom was scared, like maybe it had been a deliberate attack.” Kara turned to face him. A strand of dark hair came loose, and she tucked it behind her ear. “She made me memorize coordinates, take self-defense classes. I know, like, six languages because she crammed them down my throat.” She looked down and started picking at her thumbnail. “I used to be ashamed of her. Thought she was a nutjob. A conspiracy theorist, you know? But when I came home that day, and our apartment was ransacked . . .”

Aly thought of Vincent’s room on the Revolutionary, just before the robosoldier had come in and nearly split his skull open. Vincent had saved him. His best friend, messy as hell and a lazy choirtoi—but he was a spy, too, and he’d died trying to do the right thing. He’d died because Aly had picked that day of all days to start a fight. Now they’d never talk taejis, mess around. He was almost glad he was offline, so he wouldn’t call up the memory over and over to torture himself.

“Hey.” Aly reached out to take her hand, not sure what made him do it. It was warm, and he felt that same jolt of electricity where their hands touched. After a split second, she pulled away. There was a confused look on her face, like she’d been woken up from a spell.

“I’m fine. We should get moving.”

Aly nodded, feeling stupid and embarrassed.

She slipped out of her jacket . . . and started to take off her shirt.

“What are you doing?” Aly asked, trying to turn away and cracking his elbow against the door.

She wore a loose tank top underneath her long-sleeved shirt. The tank top had a tiny pocket on the chest that had zero use except to draw his eye to it. He looked down at his shoes, at the ceiling, anywhere but at the tiny pocket. Her face was even worse—she was smirking.

“Calm down.” She began tearing her shirt into long strips of fabric, pulling out what looked like nail clippers to make the initial cuts. “See? Instant disguise.”

“I don’t think this is going to work,” Aly said firmly, as she motioned for him to squat down. As she wrapped pieces of cloth around his head, Aly scrambled to distract himself, but the cloth was still warm and smelled like her.

“Trust and believe, friend,” Kara said. Aly noticed Pavel trying to slide his camera under the door again, but he stomped on it—clamping it to the floor until Pavel eventually wiggled it back.