Empress of a Thousand Skies(59)

And then what? Even if the plan worked, it wasn’t gonna be this happy-ending-roll-credits. Best-case scenario: He got the public on his side, proved his innocence to anyone with eyes and ears and a heart—then there’d still be the Regent’s council to deal with. Those choirtois. They’d framed him, all because it dove-tailed with their screwed-up plan to launch the galaxies into war again. For what? Money? Wraetan minerals? Power, territory, silver? He didn’t know.

What Aly did know, for sure: He’d been moved around like a little action figure, like a worthless piece of plastic you could lose and burn and replace.

Think you’re a man? he’d heard his dad say. Think you’re a big man, don’t you?

Aly could see him now, sweating moonshine, a crazy look in his eyes. Aly had packed up his stuff, but his dad swatted it out of his hand. I own this, he’d said. I own you.

So he’d left that day to join the UniForce with nothing but the clothes he’d worn, as light as a feather, grin from here to there thinking nobody owned him after all. Look at him now. It boiled Aly’s blood, picturing a bunch of old men sitting around a big wooden table deciding his fate. They’d already decided Vin’s.

The path was steep now, dirt and shale slipping under their feet as they went single file.

“It’s a forty-two percent grade,” Pavel piped in behind them, like they needed to be reminded why they were out of breath. They were practically leaning into the mountain, scrambling up with their hands when it got tough, grabbing dead roots on either side of them for purchase. He could hear Pavel’s motor struggling as his wheels spun out in the trickier pockets.

It had taken two days to reach Rhesto once the Gency ambulance pod zoomed out of the zeppelin bay, and another half-day hike to reach the spikes of the refinery towers in the distance.

“Finally,” Kara said as they reached the top of the slope. From here he could see it, a thing of beauty: the broadcasting tower. In front of that, smokestacks, huddled together and backlit by the dawn, looming over a squat mineral refinery building.

“Wraeta had thousands of refineries just like it,” Aly said. “My dad used to work in one before the evacuation.” He missed his cube for exactly this reason, because it was easy to make unwanted organic memories like this go away—just drown them out with some DroneVision channel, or set a memory of him and Vin and Jeth on constant loop.

But now, there wasn’t one memory of that old rock that didn’t lead back to his dad, to Wraeta, to his broken and crusted past. When he was younger, the refineries used to scare him. They’d looked like giant metal monsters turned inside out.

“We learned about your mineral refineries in second form,” Kara said, and for some reason he flinched when she said your. Wraeta didn’t feel like home anymore. How long had it been since he’d known what home was? “None of us would have cubes if it weren’t for Wraeta. Imagine that.”

“Imagine that,” he repeated. All the first-generation cubes were Wraetan-made—all the materials mined there, all the cubes produced there. Give the universe its greatest piece of tech, and then get yourself blown up.

She looked back at the distant steel city. He imagined her in an art gallery, or whatever they did in the Kalusian capital, that same look on her face, trying to find some higher meaning out of nothing. It was funny. Sometimes she seemed just like a street kid; at other times, like some visiting ambassador from a rich planet. He wondered which one was the real Kara.

She started down the hill. They were halfway down the slope when Aly saw movement in the distance. Sun catching on metal. Hydraulic joints, perfectly calibrated to move as if it were a living, breathing soldier. Aly grabbed her arm and yanked her down behind a rubble pile of broken cinder block and stone. He got on his stomach and motioned for Kara to do the same. Pavel felt the urgency and compacted down so that his dome was low to the ground.

“What is it?”

“Shhhhh,” he whispered.

His heart was thudding. He was clutching her arm too tightly, scared to look, like somehow it would make it more real. He counted to three, raised his head a fraction of an inch, and looked back toward the compound.

“It’s an NX droid,” Aly whispered. It was the same model that had come after him in Vin’s room, and he remembered how easily the droid had chucked him across the room, like he was nothing but an empty tin can. “We must be out of his range. He would’ve charged us if he knew we were here. But that means the UniForce is here. They’re here. How is that possible?”

“I can’t believe it,” Kara said. She looked shell-shocked. “The signal wasn’t broadcasting . . . I checked it . . .”

“The UniForce probably got to it,” Aly said quietly.

“Taejis,” she said.

Taejis indeed. If the UniForce was here, it meant all the G-1K scientists or whoever else was in the safe house had definitely cleared out.

Or they’d been killed.

What next? Aly figured the manly thing to do would be to come up with some sort of plan to get them out of there. But Kara didn’t look like she wanted to run. Her hair was pulled back in a braid, the bones of her face wide and strong—like she’d declared herself, refusing to hide.

“We need to find out whether the satellite dish is still operational . . .” she said. “We have to broadcast your playback so the galaxy knows you’re innocent.”