Empress of a Thousand Skies(71)

“What’s going on? Where are we?” he asked. He turned to the older woman. “Who are you?”

It was Kara who answered. “We’re on Houl. This is my mom, Lydia. Can you believe it? She’s been here all this time—she came and found me and broke me out.”

Aly felt his eyebrows raise halfway up his forehead. Would’ve gone back all the way if it were anatomically possible. He was an expert at being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and here was Kara’s mom, in the right place at the right time. A little too right.

Kara told him he’d been there only a few hours—but that was impossible. He was sure it had been weeks.

“It’s the drugs,” Kara’s mom said. “They manipulate the temporal experience. You’ll be dizzy too.”

“‘Temporal experience’?” Aly still didn’t understand, and when Kara helped him up, he doubted his own legs.

“Lean on me,” Kara said.

We’re on Houl.

What did he know about Houl? It was a planet on the Outer Belt. The atmosphere was unforgiving, and discarded parts had developed AI. The surface itself was covered with eel-like creatures that produced electromagnetic fields. Terrifying. Basically the perfect place to put a prison if you didn’t want anyone to escape. And he had a feeling it was Kalu’s.

It was starting to come back now. Jeth had told him about a secret prison; Kara had told him about a place for experiments . . . He looked over her shoulder, at the door behind them, at the dead screens that had for hours been playing the same news. All those experts had said he was guilty. Was he guilty? The only thing that anchored him to any version of reality was Kara. But was she even real? Her eyes kept changing color. But she couldn’t be a hologram—she was supporting his weight.

“Your eyes . . .” he said. But he was too afraid to say the rest. What was happening to him?

“Come on, Aly,” Kara said. “We gotta move.”

“Let’s,” her mom agreed. Aly noticed that Kara didn’t look all that much like Lydia. Must take after her dad’s side . . .

The hallway was a cylinder, not a right angle to be seen. It felt like they were inside a hard-boiled egg. It made walking almost impossible. Besides, he still felt numb and slow from whatever they’d given him, and he stumbled after almost every step.

Lydia pulled out a handheld, and a dimensional blueprint projected into the air. He understood, through the fog in his brain, that the shimmering hologram must be an image of the prison. It looked like a black cube of sliding, interconnected pieces. And they were inside of it.

Lydia nodded. “State of the art. Made on the backs of Houlis. The red marks show where the NX droids are stationed.” She pointed at the moving dots. It meant the holo was somehow online. That Kara’s mom’s holo was somehow online. “This is our exit.” Lydia brought her hand to the image and zoomed into the south quadrant, section 7E. Aly thought—no, he knew—that there were way too many red dots between here and there.

“Pavel’s there, too,” Kara said, pointing to section 7E. Aly felt something tight in his chest melt away. He’d known the soldiers took P when they got arrested on Rhesto, and Aly had been scared they’d strip the little guy down and sell the pieces for scrap.

Another tubular hallway intersected theirs, but they continued straight as Kara filled him in on the schematics of the prison—three columns and three rows made up of smaller cubes that moved separately, forever shifting, changing orientations. Each one ran on its own systems of plumbing, air, and artificial gravity.

Aly felt himself coming back to clarity, desperate to piece together the information, clawing at it like those crazy feral cats in the Wray.

“There have to be hundreds of configurations,” Aly said slowly, sliding the toggle bar on the hologram back and forth to watch the way the prison rotated.

“It was designed that way, so that escape would be impossible,” Lydia said.

“Is it?”

When Lydia didn’t answer, Kara did. “We’ll see,” she said, with that same shrug she did—but it was less cynical, more hopeful than it was before. “It’s not operating at full capacity. There are about thirty combinations.”

Still: The odds weren’t great.

They arrived at a hatch that Lydia opened with the keypad. This seemed wrong—why did Lydia know the combination? How had they even accessed his cell in the first place? Where had she gotten the holographic map?

Lydia disappeared, and they followed her through a transitional chamber between sections that worked like an air lock, with no climate control or gravity. He nearly froze his nipples off as he swam through the air toward the opposite door. Kara’s long braid trailed behind her like a tail. Through the window he could see a hallway ahead, same as the one behind them—and when Lydia breached the hatch, they fell through and got sucked sideways to the right. But it wasn’t sideways at all in this section. It was the floor. That’s why the hallway was shaped as a cylinder.

Who’d designed this thing? He had to help Lydia up, following blindly. Aly noticed that she’d started limping after the last fall, but she was trying to play it off, power through it. Aly could tell, though. And by the way Kara kept reaching out to help her mom, he knew she could too.

Lydia glanced at the map, where three red dots were converging. “Right. As fast as you can. Now.”