Empress of a Thousand Skies(75)

“What are you saying, Mom?” Kara asked. Her voice was rising toward panic. Aly motioned for her to move over so he could drive, and she didn’t argue. She crawled into the backseat with Lydia, and he slid over to grab the wheel.

The steering wheel vibrated in his hands, and he could feel how hard the car resisted the pressure of gravity bearing down on them. He did a two-step with the clutch and gas before he downshifted. In the rearview he could see Kara slip her arm under her mom’s head.

“He knows,” Lydia said, locking eyes with Aly in the rearview. “Don’t you, Aly?”

“What is she talking about?” Kara demanded.

“Your mom wasn’t a prisoner,” Aly said, after a moment’s hesitation. “She was a warden. Right?”

Lydia’s eyes flickered, even as Kara shook her head.

“No,” she said. “That’s impossible. That’s impossible. Right, Mom?”

Lydia didn’t answer directly. “The Uniforce, they put something in me. A poison, right here, behind my heart.” She brought her hand to her chest. “Once my coordinates get too far from the prison, it’ll trigger. The whole thing will burst . . .”

“No.”

“I haven’t seen your real eye color in years, not since we first met.” Lydia smiled, and brought her hand up to Kara’s cheek. Aly felt a pulse of shock. So he hadn’t been hallucinating earlier. Her eyes really were changing colors. “You stopped taking your meds?”

“Mom, don’t worry about that right now. I had to lower my dosage because I was running out.” Kara was clinging to Lydia, choking on sobs. “Please. What’s going on? We’ll slow down. We’ll hide until we can figure out how to remove the poison . . . Aly, stop. Stop.”

But Lydia shook her head. “Don’t, Alyosha. You both have to get far from here. You owe me. I risked everything so that you could escape. Do it!” she said hoarsely, and Aly kept his foot on the gas, wishing he could block out the sound of Kara weeping. He knew the feeling, pleading for more time, trying to reverse it, trying to make a different ending.

“It’s too late, anyway. It was too late the moment we left the prison.” Lydia coughed, and black liquid welled to her lips. For a long time, she said nothing, and Aly thought it was over, though he could still hear the wheezing of her breath whenever she exhaled. Kara was still crying, not even bothering to try to hide it. But finally, Lydia took a deep, rattling breath.

“You’re not sick, Kara,” she said. “Ancestors forgive me. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“What do you mean?” Kara’s voice wavered. Now her eyes were more than half green. What the hell? He’d never seen anything like it. Back in the Wray, some of the ladies used to take bleaching pills to lighten their skin and their eyes, but it always turned out blotchy and made everyone gossip. But this—this was different.

“Those nightmares you have? They’re memories.” Lydia was consumed by another coughing fit. Kara used her shirt to wipe away the blood.

“Memories? Whose memories?” Kara asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Yours. Before the accident. The overwriter—I was the one who invented it. I was the one who hid it, on Wraeta, not far from my first laboratory.” Aly sucked in a breath as Lydia wheezed, struggling to continue. “Diac Zofim was my partner. We developed it together, but he ended up dead, and I had to hide it. I used it only once . . . on you. The medication helped keep the new memories from doing harm. It helped change your facial features, too, and your eye color . . .”

It all feels made up. Like I made it up, Kara had told him.

Lydia was slipping away. “But your blood—it’s the key to everything.” She fumbled for the coin Kara had shown Aly on the zeppelin, the one Kara had kept stashed in her pocket. “This binds you to your family. There’s history in this coin . . .”

“What family? You’re my family. You have to stay with me.” Kara was crying so hard, Aly could hear her gasping for breath between sobs. He felt his own heart breaking. He wanted to grab the both of them and sprint to safety, erase everything bad that had happened. “Please, Mom. I can’t do this without you.”

“You can,” she said, even as she started to choke. “You have to. In Nau Fruma, the Lancer will—”

Suddenly Kara was screaming, as more and more blood bubbled out of Lydia’s mouth.

“Clear her throat,” Aly yelled, narrowly swerving to avoid a metal roadblock. “Clear her throat.” He slammed the rover into park and lunged into the crowded backseat. Kara scooted aside to make room as they laid Lydia flat, working on getting her windpipe clear, telling her to hold on, to keep going, that it was going to be all right. They worked long after Aly knew there was nothing more they could do for her, and when finally, exhausted and shaking, he felt Kara’s hand on his shoulder, he stopped. Lydia was gone.

Kara scooted back into the seat and eased her mom’s head into her lap. “So she’s comfortable when she wakes up,” Kara said, her eyes now a vivid green, luminous and terrible, splintered with faint pieces of black.

“Yeah, of course,” he said.

Kara ran her fingers through Lydia’s hair and leaned her head against the window, crying quietly. Aly drove north, and tried not to look in the rearview mirror.