Empress of a Thousand Skies(77)

“No.”

“You stupid girl! You’d die for a Vodhead?” Finally, Nero lost his temper. Spit gathered in the corners of his mouth. All his earlier composure had drained away, and what bubbled up in its place was his rage, his hatred, his petty ambitions. “I’d be doing your people a favor by killing you. A bleeding heart could not serve the throne. It certainly didn’t serve your father.”

“Don’t speak about my father,” Rhee said. She wanted to rip his tongue out of his mouth. “My father died with honor.”

“How quaint.” Nero grabbed the largest scalpel from the table next to him. The droids in the auditorium marched toward her, one coming in from either side. “I’ll make sure you follow in his footsteps.”

Rhee kicked at the glass once more as Nero moved slowly, methodically, lifting the scalpel to Dahlen’s neck. Rhee saw the gleam of the razor-sharp edge from where she stood. It mocked her. She rammed the barrier with her right shoulder and felt the pain bloom in her joint.

Rhee heard it before she looked up—the crunch of metal, the hiss of air. Four prongs, each the size of her forearm, pierced through the ceiling of the auditorium. And then the walls clamped toward the center, closing like a fist. Something unbearable invaded her chest. The oxygen was vacuumed out, replaced by the poisonous compounds outside, filling up her lungs and lining her insides. Her face bloating, her body growing hot, strands of her hair burning away. The sound of an alarm, and red flashing lights . . .

The metal fist pulled, and the whole ceiling ripped away to reveal a gaping hole. The sound was swallowed up into a roaring, scorched black sky.

The droids that had run toward Rhee flew away mid-step, their legs still pumping as they were sucked into the darkness and swatted toward the ground in the heavy gravity. She, too, was lifted into the air.

And the split second before her death, she saw Death.

Death was blue. Death was familiar . . .

It was the Fisherman she’d paid with Julian’s telescope, the one who’d marked her. She couldn’t understand what he was doing there, but it didn’t matter. There was no time to think. He was fitted with a jetpack, a harpoon gun tucked under his arm. He bent backward, reeling in the giant slab of alloy wall as you would a giant fish. In his other hand, he held a short-barreled gun that he aimed straight at Rhee.

She hurtled toward him, forcing her eyelids to stay open despite the swelling. If she’d die, it would be with her eyes open. The Fisherman fired once. Twice.

Some sort of slime hit her square in the face. It hardened instantaneously into a soft plastic, and underneath the strange mask, suddenly she could breathe. The jellylike substance thinned out and spread all around her body, protecting her from the elements. She looked over and saw that the second shot had been aimed at Dahlen, and the same strange plastic encompassed him, too, gurney and all. Rhee nearly melted with relief.

The bully, the madman, and the empress—together once more.

Their protective shells thinned out into a ropelike plastic, tethering them to the Fisherman’s belt. Through the cloudy plastic, Rhee could see little pockets of air bubbling up and circulating within the substance—all of it funneling toward her nostrils and mouth. It felt heavy on her eyelids, but she kept them open and managed to turn, somehow. The medical section of the prison had unspooled behind them. Debris was scattered across the metal ground, half-buried deep into the electromagnetic soil, so that it all looked like an organism that had withered on a vine. She searched for Nero, or the scarred man, but she could not see them.

Then the Fisherman fired up his jetpack and they thrust upward at launch speed, so that everything became a blur. Rhee and Dahlen sped behind him, tethered in their plastic cocoons.





TWENTY-SIX


    ALYOSHA



ALY’S feet dangled out of the open tailgate. He turned his face up to the sun and thought of his ma, nagging him to cover up and get in the shade with her and Alina. “You’ll get even darker,” she’d say, like it was some sort of threat. Now Aly rolled up his sleeves so the sun could touch every last bit of skin.

Maybe he’d get darker. So what?

It was like the sun’s warmth fueled him, activated his insides and made him even more pissed off. The whole godsdamned thing was rigged, and everyone was losing. But at least there was something he could do about it, finally.

At least he could help Kara.

She was taking forever, and the only way Aly could measure how much time had passed was by the layer of grit that formed on his arms. In the weak gravity, the moondust floated up in a haze and landed lazily wherever it felt like. Wild, how much Nau Fruma reminded him of Wraeta. It was the same kind of heat that made everything lag, even your brain. The kind of sunlight that made you squint or shade your eyes with the palm of your hand.

They’d come to Nau Fruma to find the Lancer, whoever that was, as Lydia had instructed them to do. Kara’d gotten them to this moon—talking her way into a trading post on Houl, bartering some simple repair work Aly did on a droid for their passage onto a freighter, scraping together spare credits to buy them clothes. All those languages she knew had helped them a lot.

It’d been less than a week since they’d escaped the prison on Houl, and since they’d buried Lydia’s body. Kara had said she should’ve been cremated, it’s what she would’ve wanted—but beyond that she didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe she was processing it on her own? What could you say to someone who’d had her whole history overwritten? He felt like a choirtoi, the way he’d run around wanting to forget his past. Yeah, there were things that hurt to remember.