Empress of a Thousand Skies(58)
Rhee had stood in the dark, still sniffling, and listened and thought. In the echoes she had begun to hear water running down from somewhere—faulty pipes, surely, the sound of leaking water. She went toward it. As she did, she touched the pattern of moss on the walls and found it thicker and more colorful in places, pigmented, because it was closer to the light. She had begun to make choices. Left, right, left. Josselyn had said nothing, never corrected her, just followed silently with the torch. They’d been down there for hours. Finally, Rhee found a set of worn stairs that led to one of the palace’s pantries, and she had burst out into the light, exhilarated, exhausted.
Josselyn hadn’t congratulated her. She had merely said, “Good.” And then she’d bent down and taken Rhee’s shoulders. “There’s always a way in, always a way out. You just have to listen.”
“What do I do, Joss?” Rhee whispered now. She closed her eyes. Her throat was the size of a fist: Her sister had said she would never be alone. But how could Rhee find her way without Josselyn there, without her torch? “Help me, please.”
Listen. The word was the whisper of memory, and her sister’s face, still and pointed and bright, like that of a flame. But she couldn’t listen: Even with her cube off, she heard a clamor of memory, saw images pouring over her, threatening to overwhelm her. Seotra. Nero. Tai Reyanna, her eyes huge and full of grief.
And then she heard. The memory came rebounding like an echo and shocked her into opening her eyes.
Erawae. Dahlen had told her his order was there. She fumbled for Dahlen’s ring in her pocket, and only now did it occur to her: Could his ring grant her refuge? Would the order be sympathetic to her cause, if it was she who could truly stop a seemingly imminent war? She felt a pulse of hope so faint it made her second-guess her own heart. The feeling reminded her of the afternoons on Nau Fruma—fine moon dust floating in the air, each particle catching the sun so that she saw brief shimmers that didn’t seem real. But this was real. Erawae was real.
Josselyn had told her to listen, and Rhee knew, of all people in the galaxy she could trust, alive or dead, that she could trust her sister.
“Thank you, Joss,” she whispered, and set a course for Erawae.
Part Four:
THE AVENGED
“It’s no secret that among our vast universe, the enormous array of religious and philosophical convictions may always lead to tension and even dispute. Nothing that we can say or do here will change that fact. But I stand before this council in good faith, not in an effort to change Fontis or to be changed, but to live in peace. Let us work together. Let us respect those differences and not seek to eradicate them. Let us put the fear and distrust behind us. Let us establish cube technology standards to facilitate cooperation and communication. Let us end the war, so that future generations can know peace.”
—Emperor Ta’an, upon signing the Urnew Treaty
EIGHTEEN
ALYOSHA
IF he’d thought Derkatz was the biggest pile of taejis in the universe, Rhesto was giving it a serious run for its money. Ten years after the bombing, and everything was still dead. Where Aly and Kara walked, branches cracked underfoot, and he didn’t see a single speck of green.
Aly couldn’t stop thinking about water. They’d passed two streams they were too scared to drink from, worried about contamination—even though they’d managed to pop some super-duper radiation pills, full of some hard-to-pronounce antioxidants that would heal their bodies as they went.
Still, Aly didn’t feel too hot. His lips were chapped. There was a film on his tongue; he didn’t think it would ever produce actual saliva again. Sweat dripped down his face, and not even big old eyebrows like his could keep it from stinging his eyes. He told himself he was too tired to care, but when Kara wasn’t looking, he wiped down his face with the sleeve of his shirt.
They barely spoke as they walked, side by side when the rocky path allowed it. One foot in front of the other. That was all he’d let himself think when everything started to get too real in his head. Apart from Kara, there was all kinds of other stuff to worry about. Like the fact that he may or may not have seen the end result of a Ravaging—hollowed-out people who’d lost their souls, just like they’d described in the sermons. Their existence had a beginning and an end, and what was once a seed had grown and thrived and now withered on the vine, the roots rotted in the soil. Such was life. But he never imagined it would start with ladies babbling on about their sons and their favorite type of tea. And it sure as hell didn’t say anything about the end of them all happening in a lab.
Kara said members of the G-1K summit were being taken—and Ravaged. Did someone want them to forget whatever they’d been working on? Or was someone trying to use their memories for another purpose? And who had that kind of power, to abduct these men and women from their homes, to Ravage them with impunity, to keep all of it secret?
Was it the Regent? Had he disappeared to engineer some master plan, or was he already dead?
As if that didn’t already take up enough head space, there was the fact that when you came right down to it, Aly had traveled to Rhesto because maybe Kara’s mom would be there, and maybe he’d be able to broadcast his cube playback to the universe so maybe he could avoid getting executed for a crime he didn’t commit.