Empress of a Thousand Skies(56)

“I-I know her,” Kara whispered after he’d rushed back to her side. “That’s Mia Montenegro. She was at the G-1K, like my mom.”

The woman was still babbling happily. “This one is a drawing of the sunset. Earlier today. So many brilliant colors.”

“Look.” Kara’s voice cracked. She pointed at the woman’s neck, and as he looked, nausea rolled like darkness into his throat.

There, in the place where her cube would’ve been, was a terrible wound, an ugly, gaping hole that seemed to have been sutured by burning. The charred skin was visible, and beneath it, a web of scar tissue in an exact triangle.

He felt like ice was creeping into his veins. He looked around at the other people in their baggy green gowns. He realized the man playing the instrument was in fact just strumming the same two chords again and again. They acted like they’d been lobotomized.

“I know all of them,” Kara whispered. Her eyes were like two gashes in her face. “They’re all scientists—that’s Isaac Renaldioe, a biologist from Nau Fruma . . .” She bit her lip so hard he thought she’d draw blood.

“I’ve opened the door!” Pavel announced, so loudly Aly expected alarms to sound. But none did.

“Come on,” Aly said, and went to take Kara’s hand. But she yanked it away.

“We can’t just . . . leave them,” Kara said.

Aly looked at her and realized she was serious. “Kara, there’s no way,” he said gently. There were dozens of patients.

Still, she didn’t move, and Aly fought a building desperation. The word evil kept drilling through his mind. He wanted out of here, as soon as possible. Could he leave Kara behind? He knew he couldn’t. Not only was she his way into the safe house, but she was probably the only person left in the world who didn’t think he was a murderer. He’d already lost Vin . . .

He reached for her hand again; she didn’t pull away, but her hand was listless, flimsy.

“Look, we can help them better if we find your mom,” he said, though he had no idea if this was true. “Kara?”

To his relief, she nodded, and shifted her grip to thread her fingers through his. He had her. They would leave together.

The cargo bay was dark, but Pavel lit the way down the ramp and up into the craft. Aly felt a thousand times better when they were strapped in and Pavel managed easily to override the security prompts.

“All right,” he said a little too loudly to fill the silence. “Let’s get the hell out of here, huh?” He peeled off his fake bandages, amazed by how good it felt to be back in the command seat. This was his home, now: running through the vast reaches of the universe. Maybe he’d been born to be a refugee.

Kara said nothing. She had turned away from him, and she was trembling like it was negative degrees.

“Hey.” He reached out and put a hand on her thigh, then pulled away—scared it’d been too much. “Are you okay?”

“Don’t you get it?” she said in a small voice. “Do you know what that was? Do you know what they’re doing to those people?” Kara turned at last to look at him, and her eyes were dark and wet. “Someone is mining their cubes. Pirating them.”

“That’s impossible,” Aly said automatically. The pod gave a sickening lurch as they jerked away from the main ship, but his stomach didn’t settle, and the vertigo didn’t go away. Stealing cubes . . . taking them by force . . . The idea went through him like a fire, turning everything inside to ash. It was the singular law across the universe: Cubes were protected. They contained people’s impressions, memories, thoughts, dreams. You could transfer things cube-to-cube, easy. But hacking into someone else’s cube, even stealing the hardware after they died, was indecent, evil—like a violent, twisted kind of murder. In any culture on any planet, everyone was in agreement. That was the whole point of the G-1K summits, to make sure that the laws were standard across the universe. And to make sure there was some moral standard too.

Aly was suddenly furious at Kara.

“How could you say that? How could you even think that?” He was practically shouting, even as he was choking on the truth of what he’d seen: those vacant-eyed people, the horrible wound on the Optsirh’s neck, freshly scarred over. It couldn’t be true, it just couldn’t be. “That would be . . .”

“Ravaging.” Kara finished his sentence. He hadn’t wanted to say it. He shuddered. It was a violation of all living things. Ravaging was a myth—at least, he’d always thought it was. A trump card that parents would whip out when they wanted their kids back in line—if you’d been bad, a man would come to Ravage your head in the middle of the night. You’d forget everything you ever knew, and you’d never form a new memory again. Stuck in a mind loop. An eternal hell.

They talked about it in church too. The Ravaging. They said it was when you were wicked, and Vodhan sent the wind down to lift your soul away, to save you from yourself . . .

“It’s impossible,” Aly repeated lamely.

Kara wiped the bottoms of her eyes, even though he hadn’t seen her shed a tear, and sat up straighter—hands folded in her lap, blue-gray eyes straight ahead. “Right,” she said, “impossible.”





SEVENTEEN


    RHIANNON