Empress of a Thousand Skies(70)

Rhee was shoved into the front of a small craft, surrounded by Tasinn with cruel faces that all seemed identical to her. Still, they seemed almost afraid to touch her. Through the window she saw a Fontisian girl get shoved and herded into the back of a craft—the same blonde one she’d watched in the courtyard. Rhee caught her eye, and the girl glared at her, made her feel like she’d tipped into a long fall.

Her thoughts quickly went back to Dahlen. Dahlen, who’d been by her side since the moment he’d saved her life—not that she’d ever admitted this to him, but he had saved her life. Rhee had never thanked him. Instead she left him at the mercy of the Tasinn, only proving that she was the spoiled girl he’d insinuated she was.

“Nero wants to see you,” the Tasinn with the eye patch said.

As the hatch closed, she took in a deep breath, forcing down the noise rising in her throat—part sob, part battle cry. She was going to face the man who wanted her dead.





TWENTY-TWO


    ALYOSHA



HE’D imagined it would go down differently. Sure, Aly figured he’d get taken in, be debriefed and whatnot—but instead the UniForce had manhandled Aly all the way here. He hadn’t seen what happened to Kara when they took him; he didn’t know where she was or if she was safe. Now he was locked away in a room barely bigger than the shack he and his dad had shared. All four walls made up of LED screens that played a twenty-four-hour DroneVision news channel that drowned out his thoughts, made him feel more crazy than he already was.

He’d been forced to watch dozens of “experts” paraded in front of the camera, each one a little puppet with Nero pulling the strings—just like Jeth had said. Each of them testified that Aly’s cube playback had been forged, pointed to inconsistencies, minor technicalities that supposedly proved the footage had been manipulated with help from Fontisian scientists. They said the Fontisians had gotten hold of a dangerous technology suppressed and supposedly discarded after the G-1K summit: the overwriter. It was technology that allowed not just Ravaging but rewriting of old memories.

There had been rumors of this for years, though. Like there were rumors that Josselyn was alive, like there were rumors the government was hacking data from individual cubes without permission.

Aly couldn’t write off any of it as conspiracy theories anymore.

He scratched the spot on his arm where the warden had injected him with . . . what? He wasn’t sure. He noticed then that his knuckles were bloody from all the times he’d punched at the walls. It turned out these plasma screens were self-repairing. Every time he thought he’d shattered one, it would smooth out again—like a ripple in the water. When he closed his eyes, invisible soldiers cranked the volume to blasting.

He’d seen the segment on loop, counting 277 until the screens went dark and the outline of a door appeared in the static of the feed. When it opened, Kara walked through.

He knew it was a hallucination, or maybe a hologram. She was too calm, too clean, too graceful. That smile. That’s always how they mentioned the Fontisian saints. Isn’t this when they appeared too? At your darkest hours? Ready to take you to your eternal home?

Aly scrambled toward the corner, pressing himself hard against the plasma. He tried to flip that switch inside himself, when he’d crawl into the corner of his mind and block it all out. Every time his dad had called him all those names, every time those Fontisian preachers had told him he’d burn in hell, every time someone had said he was smart for a Wraetan—he flipped the switch, and an invisible armor went up over his dark skin. Leave me alone. I’m innocent, he repeated to himself. I did nothing wrong.

But the switch was choirtoing broken.

“It’s me, Aly. Stop! Shhhhh. It’s me, Kara.” She grabbed his wrists. He tried pushing her away but he felt sluggish, like all his limbs belonged to someone else. “What’s wrong with him?” Her hands felt cold. They felt real. But he knew they couldn’t be real. He didn’t even know if he was real anymore.

A woman had entered behind her, so skinny she seemed to be made entirely of muscle. She had light skin and hair, tiny wrinkles at the edges of her green eyes. “He’s been drugged,” she said.

“Help me,” Kara said to her. Desperate. Begging. He’d never expected to hear her speak in that kind of tone.

The woman leaned down and pushed Aly’s head against the wall, gripping him by his hair. With her free hand she pulled out a syringe and uncapped it with her mouth.

“No.” He tried to free himself, but his body felt like it was filled with lead. Then the woman stuck the syringe into his neck and he felt a sudden release, like pressure let out of a balloon.

“That should reduce the effects. Now get up, Aly,” she said. “We’re saving your life.”

I’m the guy who’s going to save your sorry ass, Vincent had said. Everyone had seen him say it now in Aly’s playback. But not a single person in the galaxy believed Aly.

He tried to shake himself out of this gods-awful nightmare. Bits of darkness still clung to his mind, but he felt them cracking, peeling, falling away like old paint.

“We’re going home, Aly,” Kara urged. Easy for you to say, Aly thought. He had the Wray Town, but it was only ever a place he’d lived once—and he was never going back. He didn’t have a home.