Blood of a Thousand Stars (Empress of a Thousand Skies #2)(19)
He clawed his way into consciousness. Here here here, he tried to call out. Instead he just thought it. Kara. I’m here. I’m sorry. Then darkness took him again.
He heard a motor, the familiar sound of all-terrain wheels spinning their way through the sand. Far away? Maybe not. His hearing was still shot from the blast, but at least the cloak of darkness lifted. His eyes hurt from the light. He blinked, but all he could see was the blinding brightness.
“Alyosha!” Pavel’s voice. “I’ve been looking for hours.” Pavel’s ridiculous robovoice that he’d never, ever change to sound more human. Pavel had survived. He’d found him.
Aly tried to answer, but he coughed instead. His eyes ached from the light.
“Where’s Kara?” he managed to whisper.
“I haven’t found her,” Pavel said. “I’m hooked into the database and monitoring the descriptions of survivors. I came for you first.”
“What happened?” His head throbbed. Everything hurt. He pushed himself up to his elbow only to fall down again. At least he had all his pieces; he went one by one through every limb and figured he could move each one when the time came. At least there was that.
He lifted his head and saw there were soldiers sorting through what was left of the camp. Debris had somehow made it all the way into the dunes thirty meters out.
“What happened?”
“The WFC dropped an em-bomb, presumably to free the prisoners.”
Aly nodded. It was the first one that dropped when he and Kara were running for the dunes. “But there was a second one,” he said. The explosion was the last thing he remembered before he and Kara were torn apart.
“A second bomb was deployed by the UniForce over the center of Nau Fruma. There’s now a skirmish in the marketplace in the aftermath.”
“So who has boots on the ground?”
“Apparently, everyone,” Pavel said.
Slowly, things were taking shape: silhouettes, colors, moving forms against a scrim of white. A cargo craft lifted off the ground above the camp, packed so full of people someone was about to fall out. They were Wraetans and Fontisians—people he’d been interned with. They were escaping, thank Vodhan.
It was the same type of cargo craft he’d boarded as a kid during the Wraetan evacuation, a WFC vehicle. Lots of kids from the Wray had joined up when they first came through. He remembered watching them go, jealous that someone could just leave the Wray behind. Aly had wanted to leave too, abandon that little crap town and leave behind everything and everyone in it, most of all his dad.
But he hadn’t joined the WFC. Even at that age, he was done with Wraetans and Fontisians, done living under Vodhan’s rules and feeling guilt every time something felt good. So he’d gone and passed for a Kalusian, joined the UniForce instead.
And now, the very WFC he’d fancied himself too good for had come to save him. It was a sign, from Vodhan maybe. Or maybe just a big fat coincidence, but it didn’t matter. He’d take it.
“We need to find Kara.” Aly pulled himself to his feet and dusted off, weaving back and forth as he made his way over the dunes. The sand was definitely shifting below him, but it felt like the world was spinning; he was dizzy, and practically clawed his way up to get a better vantage point of the camp.
“There are aid workers arriving now,” Pavel continued, following him. He might have said more, but they crested a dune and took in the view. Past the camp was the town of Nau Fruma, now teeming with screaming civilians. Aly saw people clutching each other, some with bloody limbs or torn antennae or bruised faces or bleeding gills. But no Kara.
Nau Fruma had always been a diverse hub of trade and diplomacy, but now it struck Aly particularly like a shaken microcosm of the whole universe all in one tiny marketplace, thrown together and turned upside down, no one knowing who to trust or where to run. It was still night, but on Nau Fruma it never got completely dark, just a tepid gray. The mass hysteria in the streets made it seem, for a moment, like the smoky, dusty air of the moon had come alive with flailing, crying tentacles.
Kara. She could be anywhere in this madness. Captured by a UniForce soldier or in conflict with the WFC or just swept away by the stampede of panicked Nau Frumans and freed prisoners.
Why had he pushed her like that? Talked all that taejis about her coming back, told her what to do? Aly knew as well as anyone what it was like when people told you what to do, who to be, made you twist yourself inside out so that your own soul was unrecognizable.
The fighting had torn through the marketplace and, like a storm, passed on to other neighborhoods. The crowds had thinned as people found the med stations that were popping up, or fled, as some soldiers went down and the first wave of the WFC took off, escorted by a blaze of escape pods holding Wraetans and Fontisians who’d been innocently detained. Could Kara be in one of them?
Aly was cursed. No, no—he was just really goddamn stupid. Only he could’ve messed this up the way he had. It was the second time she’d saved him and he’d pushed her away.
If he just shut his eyes, maybe he could feel where she was. Maybe they’d come together somehow, through a magnetism he couldn’t explain or describe. A heat, a need, a longing.
He should have told her when he had the chance how important she was, how much she meant to him—instead of running his damn mouth off. There were a thousand other things he should’ve said. I’ll never leave. I’ll never give up. I’ll never let them hurt you. So many nevers—he thought his heart and lungs would burst from the weight of all of them.