Blood of a Thousand Stars (Empress of a Thousand Skies #2)(21)

But most of all, he wanted to destroy Kara—not the actual Kara, never her, but the thought of her. He knew if he turned his head just slightly he’d catch an image of those prayer beads . . .

Aly did it. He looked. The grief wailed away, condensed until there was nothing left but fury. Now he could hardly see through the rage that surged through and around him.

He looked back at the soldier on the ground and landed the heel of his boot square on the guy’s face. Didn’t matter whose military you fought for, because all these chortois were the same, boots on the ground in neutral territory—kick—just to terrorize people, to fuck with them just to make themselves feel big. Kick. They invaded everything, even in the name of peace. Nothing would be the same after this war they’d started all over again.

Blood got on Aly’s boot. The solider lifted his hand, silently asking for mercy. Aly drew his leg back to kick again.

“Alyosha!” Pavel said—he’d righted himself for the second time, but something about the droid’s movements was off. He wobbled, and his robotic voice came out distant, like he was calling him via holo from another planet. “Enough.”

Nothing would ever be enough. But Aly nodded just the same, and stopped like P had told him to. He moved from one body to the other, and kneeled before Kara. He tried again to dig her out, pawing at slabs of concrete, sweat mingling with tears, running down his face so he could taste the salt in his mouth.

An organic memory assaulted him: throwing rocks into the shallow river basin when he heard Ma and Alina had died. The current would sweep the rocks away, around the bend and out of sight. He couldn’t hold on to anything.

Another craft landed, then. Aly felt it in the vibrations of the air, in the odd electric silence, in the vividness of the craft’s beams. It wasn’t a cargo craft. It was Ashbuli class. An attack craft.

He turned to Pavel, but the droid was frozen in place, his eyelights dark. He’d been fried. Aly strained to see in the craft’s beams, lighting the dusty darkness and muting everything into one haze.

There, before his eyes, a bunch of soldiers streamed out of the Ashbuli—Wraetan soldiers who were part of the WFC—fanning out in a second wave. He thought of the uprisings he’d been told of as a kid. These were heroes. But they’d come too late. Too late to save him or anything he cared about.

A soldier approached slowly. “Are you okay?” she asked in Wraetan. Her hands gripped her stunner firmly, but she pointed it to the ground, away from him. When Aly shook his head, she said: “When the UniForce manages a second wave, they’ll raze this place to the ground.”

Fire. It was a common enough UniForce tactic if a territory was too far gone. It killed enemy combatants, but it killed any of their own remaining survivors as well, so their tech couldn’t be used against them—and so they’d have no way of giving up sensitive intel.

Aly looked one more time at Kara’s limp hand. The Kalusian didn’t bury their dead—they burned them.

“It’s not safe here,” the soldier told him. “If you come with us you’ll be granted refugee status.”

Aly laughed. Pain spiked up his lungs. “Been there, done that,” he said. “I’m not going to be your refugee. I’ll be your next recruit.”





SEVEN


RHIANNON


RHEE’S anger was like a raging forest fire. She didn’t dare extinguish it, but instead imagined it shrinking smaller and smaller, compressing into a tight sphere that she could fit into the palm of her hand and hide away—for now. She’d need to call upon that anger later. It brought her purpose and clarity that propelled her forward in times when she needed the motivation most. But this was the time for diplomacy and strategy. She didn’t just need to win the battle; she needed to win the war.

Now she approached the Towers of the Long Now with Dahlen and Lahna on either side. The Towers were oppressive and extravagant all at once, the seemingly perfect home for Nero himself.

“This is unwise,” Dahlen warned, though he’d made his stance clear before they’d left, again en route, and then once more as he stood beside her at the entrance to the towers. “Nero cannot be trusted to refrain from slaughtering you where you stand.”

“True,” Rhee agreed as they walked. “But he could’ve killed me at any point. He knows it would be political suicide.”

“Didn’t he use you as a target when he had the Tasinn release dozens of high-velocity arrows?” Lahna asked.

“He was being showy,” Rhee said. “Sending a message in the most ostentatious way possible.”

“Or the most dangerous way possible.” Lahna shrugged.

“And did he not intend to kill you when we were on Houl?” Dahlen couldn’t even get halfway through his own sentence without his face twisting—in disgust or pain or both. In actuality, Nero had intended to kill both of them.

“The rules of the game were different then. I’m here, on Kalu, with the universe as my witness.” She extended both arms as if to demonstrate the size and scope of the galaxy. “He can’t just make me disappear.”

“And what’s to say the rules won’t change again?” Dahlen pointed out. “Nero twists the rules when it suits him.”

“Don’t you think she knows that?” Lahna asked, before Rhee could answer. Lahna was even shorter than Rhee, which meant she was much shorter than Dahlen. But she managed to speak down to him. She was the only one who did. “If the invitation this morning was any indication, we’re walking into a death trap.”