Empress of a Thousand Skies(72)

They all quickly skirted around a corner, just missing a droid. There was a trick to evading them, a start-and-stop motion, a rhythm that felt wrong until it didn’t—same as the clutch on a pod. Except now they weren’t just cruising from point A to point B. They were running for their lives.

Whatever Lydia had injected him with was finally kicking into high gear, and he started to realize that they were being tracked by the deadliest machines the UniForce had ever produced. He was sobering up quick.

And that’s when he started really paying attention.

“Are these jail cells?” Aly asked, pointing to the glass panes that lined either side of the corridor. Each cell was transparent from certain angles and completely dark from others, like the lens of a solar glass. Inside one of them he saw the silhouette of a woman—at least he thought it was a woman. She was hunched over and looked as if she might be crying.

He wanted to shatter the glass, pull her up to her feet, and tell her to run—but where? He didn’t even know how they were getting out.

“We have to keep moving, Aly,” Kara said.

“We can’t just leave them here.” He felt anger simmering just under his skin. He was furious at her, himself, at everyone.

“We can’t stay, either,” Lydia said. She turned around, and Aly unconsciously backed up. “Do you have any idea what’s at stake? How important the two of you are? Better question—do you know why they haven’t killed you yet?”

He felt like his brain had been seared. A white-hot flash of confusion and déjà vu.

“Why did they frame you?” Vin had asked. Challenged. “I’m the spy. I’m the one who sent out the hail.”

“They were prepping you, Aly,” Lydia said now, answering her own question. “They wanted to Ravage your cube. While you were alive. Wanted all your memories so they could mount a case against you. Prove without a shadow of a doubt that you did it—that you killed the Princess.”

Aly shook his head. He didn’t believe it; he couldn’t even think it. The Ravaging. He remembered all those people they’d found on the zeppelin . . . the woman drawing triangles she believed were her son’s face . . .

Kara had said they were leaching memories, souls.

He suddenly felt like he might throw up.

Did that mean they had the technology, too, to twist his memories, to shape them into a story?

“Now take how horrified you feel and multiply it by infinity, and you’ll know how I feel,” Lydia said quietly. Her jaw was set. Her eyes burned into him, made him want to look away.

“Why?” Kara asked. Aly shook his head, afraid to know the answer. “What’s it got to do with you?”

“It’s got everything to do with me,” Lydia said, looking back toward her daughter. “I’m the one who designed the technology. I’m the one who taught them how.”





TWENTY-THREE


    RHIANNON



AT last, she would come face-to-face with the real killer. Nero.

“I know I’m intimidating,” Rhee said drily, “but are these escorts really necessary?” Her hands were cuffed behind her back as she walked alongside the man with the eye patch. Two NXs flanked her on either side, and the zipping noise of their joints grated on her nerves.

The man smirked in a way that lifted the scarred corner of his mouth. “Let’s just say they’re here to encourage your best behavior.”

As if her life were a reward she’d have to earn through being quiet, obedient, good. The man clasped the back of her neck, the way her father would—but pinching it so that her muscles tightened involuntarily. The man wore Dahlen’s ring on his pinky finger, which was curved around her neck toward her cube. Rhee didn’t know where they were keeping Dahlen, and not knowing made her feel like a balloon descending—all her logic, her perfectly constructed revenge fantasies, emptying out into the void.

“Where are we going?” They’d made so many turns that she couldn’t keep count, until eventually they stood before a nondescript door.

It was an auditorium inside, stadium seating facing down into a dark pit that was the stage. Her skin crawled, recalling the moment Veyron had led her to the room of her ancestors’ altars—the night he tried to kill her. Dahlen had saved her then. She only hoped she had time to save him now.

The droids split behind her and walked to either side of the room and halfway down the stairs, where they stood guard. Rhee walked down the center aisle, keenly aware that the scarred man had allowed her to do so. Whereas the auditorium on the Eliedio had been carpeted, with low lights and plush red velvet seats, this had a clinical quality to it. Shiny metal chairs. The antiseptic smell of bleach and lemon. A glass barrier, she realized once she descended all the way, that split the seats from whatever was on the dark stage. Rhee’s hands had been cuffed behind her back.

She pressed her face up against the cool glass, watching her breath fog up, fearing what waited in the shadows.

The lights came on then, and Rhee swallowed a gasp. White tiles. Metal tables with wheels, covered in white sheets and sharp medical tools arrayed in delicate, almost beautiful arrangements—like an ancient mandala. Lining the wall of the round room were more tables, more vials, cranks for ancestors knew what.

Nero emerged. His wide shoulders cut a silhouette that Rhee would’ve thought impressive before, but now she saw it for what it was: a man playing dress-up in his double-breasted blazer, desperate for power, full of hatred. “Princess,” he said as he walked up to the empty center, bowing in Rhee’s direction. His formality was a slap in the face. “How do you like my new facility?”