Blood of a Thousand Stars (Empress of a Thousand Skies #2)(10)
“You and Alyosha had always discussed the possibility of it being on Wraeta.”
“Because that’s what Lydia told us.” Kara leaned forward and pivoted the cylinder on the floor, so the coordinates grew a little bigger, a little brighter. “But what if someone moved it?”
Or what if Lydia had lied?
“Are you suggesting we go to Ralire?” Pavel asked. “Two-thirds of the planet is covered in black ice, with prairies and valleys in the southmost region—but it also has the most crime of any habitable body in the system. It’s not safe.”
But when was the last time Kara felt safe anyway?
The beach.
The memory came to her smoothly, quietly, like it always did. She and Lydia had moved around a lot, but for a while they lived in Luris, a town in the north of Kalu—cold and gray, by dark waters on a rocky shore, where Kara would watch crabs crawl in and out of layers of wet rock. A choppy ocean, and a forest at her back. It was her favorite place in the world.
“You have to be careful,” Lydia had told her one day.
Kara remembered how her long hair whipped in the wind, stinging her face and getting in her mouth. But she liked the bite of the air and refused to put on a jacket. She’d just gotten over a bad headache, and it felt like she’d woken up from a deep sleep.
Now, Kara realized it really had been a kind of awakening. Because that day on the beach had been her first day as Kara.
That memory wasn’t just any memory: It was Kara’s first memory. Even though she’d been about twelve years old.
“I might not always be around to take care of you,” Lydia had tried to explain then.
At the time, Kara had listened without really understanding. But the context of it now felt wrong; she saw the lie for everything it was. Lydia’s idea of taking care of her had been to use the overwriter on her, to erase all memory of being Josselyn Ta’an.
Then Lydia had grabbed her hands so tightly that Kara had dropped all the smooth rocks she’d been collecting. “If something happens to me,” Lydia had said that cold day on the beach, “I need you to think through all your options, to stay safe . . .”
But where would playing it safe get her now? There was a dangerous weapon out there. One that could steal memories, mine them. It could erase entire histories and make new ones. It could reinvent the world, for the worse.
“Nothing is safe anymore,” Kara said to Pavel.
“Does this mean we’re going to Ralire, then?”
Kara nodded. “As soon as we break out Aly from wherever they’ve got him.”
* * *
? ? ?
It turned out there was a single internment camp on Nau Fruma, hastily set up just a few hundred meters from the old marketplace. Aly had to be there, along with all the other Wraetans and Fontisians the UniForce had rounded up.
Kara and Pavel spent the next twenty-four hours monitoring the camp from a new lookout point, watching security guards rotate shifts. They figured out a time—a precise fraction of a moment—Kara could slip in unnoticed and break Aly out.
Rhiannon’s televised coronation would provide the perfect distraction.
Meanwhile, Kara managed to pocket tools from the vendor stalls in the central square, and secured a prison guard uniform off the black market that cost all the credits she could scramble together.
When she got back to their new lookout spot, Pavel was furiously beeping and blinking as he rolled toward her.
“I have something!” he said, projecting a holo of a line graph.
“What am I looking at?” Kara said, squinting at the screen.
“When the last round of overwriter research turned up nothing, Alyosha directed me to continue combing the holoforums.”
“He didn’t tell me that.” Her heart beat faster. Why hadn’t she and Aly talked about it together?
“He requested we keep it private, so as not to elevate your hopes if attempts were futile. However, I pieced together some information on a hunch . . .”
Kara very much doubted Pavel had hunches so much as algorithms, but sure. “Well?”
He blinked his blue eyelights. “I found a mention of a testing facility on Wraeta, and I cross-referenced it with the G-1K summit dates prior to Diac Zofim’s death,” he said. Diac was the scientist Lydia told them about—the one who’d pioneered the overwriter tech and ended up suspiciously dead immediately after. “And finally, the frequency of times Emperor Ta’an mentioned new technology in his speeches.”
The Emperor? Kara wondered. It wasn’t a variable she would have thought to include.
“And I found this . . .” It was formatted like an official memo, written in a language she didn’t recognize. It shared some qualities with the Kalusian characters, but the lines were simpler. When Pavel activated the translation screen, the letters blurred apart and rearranged themselves in modern Kalusian.
“New developments in the biotech device . . . Deletion or overwriting of the cube may result in memory loss . . . work suggests that new technology for targeted memory deletion is not far off . . .” Kara read along quickly, not sure what she was reading but with the sensation she was tumbling down a slope, faster and faster, toward an inevitable crash that would hurt—but at least the falling would end. “. . . furthermore, targeted memory deletion on a mass scale is achievable if the cube-using public were uniformly updated with the latest technology so that specific molecular mechanisms can be identified and wiped . . .”