Blood of a Thousand Stars (Empress of a Thousand Skies #2)(27)

“I have no idea why she did it,” the medic, Russev, was saying to anyone who would listen. “She’s acting like a feral cat.”

The girl hissed, “Take it out. Take it—” The Wraetan words got lost in a gruesome gurgle.

“Need a translator in here!”

Kara pushed past Nicola, attacked by a mist of sterilizers as soon as she crossed the threshold. She came to the girl’s side, elbowing out a nearby nurse. She caught a glance at the metal ID tag on the girl’s wrist. It said her name was Issa.

Issa kept yelling even while Nicola and two other medics moved her braids back and worked to stanch the flow of blood from her neck that had already drenched the table. When she started to choke, Nicola plunged two fingers into the ragged hole in her skin while Russev tried to repair the damage with silicone thread. “It updated! They’ll come for me. I have to disable it . . .”

“Who’s coming for you?” Kara asked her in Wraetan. “What update?” She realized her own hands were shaking; she didn’t know how to steady them. Issa pulled her head away, and Nicola cursed as she lost her grip and blood spattered her protective mask.

“We’re going to inject a numbing serum,” Russev said, holding a needle. “And then restart the cube. Tell her if she would just stay still . . .”

“No!” the girl yelled in Wraetan. The word for cube was nearly identical in most languages—a Kalusian loan. She grabbed Kara’s hand, blinking in shock. “Don’t resuscitate it! They’ll track it!”

Kara’s eye started to throb again. She thought of Nero tracking her, tracking all of them. She remembered how he’d framed Aly, and how he’d removed the cubes of all those patients on the zeppelin.

“She’s scared,” Kara translated to Russev. “She doesn’t want you to.”

“We’ll risk infection if we leave it as is. There are antibodies that activate when neural connectivity is operational. She’s lost too much blood already.” Kara looked down and saw it was dripping off the gurney and pooling on the floor. She felt sick. Dizzy. What was it like when Lydia had used the overwriter on her?

Issa was fading fast. “Let me die. We’re all as good as dead otherwise,” she responded. The words slurred together.

“What the hell is she saying?” Nicola demanded.

Kara fought through the nausea creeping up on her, the edges of her vision going fuzzy, the heaviness of her head. She didn’t know what was right. Save the girl, or heed her warning?

“Stop,” she blurted out, her eyes never leaving the WFC girl’s. She might have been paranoid, confused—how could they be tracked with their cubes off?—but then again, she might be right.

The second medic huffed, “We can’t stop, she’ll—”

“The patient said she has seizures,” Kara lied, taking her eyes off the girl to lock them with Nicola’s. She remembered vaguely that Lydia had researched the cube’s effects on people with epileptic conditions. “She said you need to know. If you resuscitate the cube now, it could trigger a fatal seizure.”

Nicola and the other two medics exchanged a look.

One of them muttered, “She might not be able to handle the neuroelectricity . . .”

Finally, Nicola nodded. “We have to disable it then.”

“You mean break it?” one of the attendees said, his eyes glassy. “It could kill her!”

“It might,” Nicola said. “But we know she’ll die for certain if she has a seizure. She won’t survive with the cube in place as is.”

What had Kara done?

The medic gave in. He took a pair of delicate pliers to Issa’s neck and simply snapped her cube in two. It was much cruder than Kara had thought it would be.

“That’s it then?” Kara asked softly.

“That’s it. The cube will never be functional again—just a useless scrap of biotech lodged in her neck,” the medic said, shaking his head as he cleaned the wound.

Issa’s eyes fluttered closed, and Kara wondered if she would die now, and whether it would be her fault—another life added to the list of her losses.

But the Wraetan girl did not die.

Her wound had been sewn up but she’d been hideously bruised, the stitches showing shiny and black against her dark skin. She was one of those girls who looked pretty when they slept; her high, angled cheekbones looked dramatic, and she had a natural pout to her lips.

Kara curled up in a chair pulled up next to Issa’s cot as the girl lay unconscious, and waited for her to wake up. Sitting in the darkness, she stayed very still as the pulsing in her head quieted, the pain aching up her arms and legs dulled. She was lost in her own fog of grief and shock. Issa’s surgery reminded her of her own procedure. Lydia had overwritten her memories. Her past, the Josselyn of her, was as good as gone. Whiteness closed in on her vision, like the foam of a wave crashing over her.

Sometimes it felt like losing the memories from her other life was nothing compared to being lied to. Kara had thought Lydia was her mother. When she’d spent all those late nights in the lab, when she’d come home absentminded, absorbed in her work, when Kara had to figure out dinner for herself without so much as a call—Kara thought that maybe she’d fallen short somehow. That if she had turned out different, Lydia would be more maternal. Available, like other moms were.