Blood of a Thousand Stars (Empress of a Thousand Skies #2)(28)

And if there wasn’t that to think about, there was everything else right here and right now. Alyosha had left her. She was flat out of meds and using a piss-poor substitute of warpers that would only get her so far. Ralire—and whatever waited for her there—still felt an impossible distance away. It was like there was this great abyss between the life she had lived so far and the life she should have lived—and the sister she should have known, who was now, at this very moment, sitting on the throne of Kalu. Kara had nothing. Nothing but an unconscious stranger, this WFC soldier who had risked her own life to make sure they were okay.

Hours passed. She drifted in and out of sleep, thinking of Luris. Wading into water so cold her feet would go numb. Smooth, slippery stones under her feet. A dense forest that she could disappear into, and the salt, weighing down the air, hovering in the fog. In Luris, there would be no running, no training, no worrying about her next move or her face changing. Kara could practically feel the cold air, the need to fold her arms over her chest as it slipped through the wool of her sweater. She looked down and found something in the moss—her coin, her family coin. And suddenly it didn’t feel so safe or remote, and the sound of the birds chirping and the ocean roaring in the distance stopped. That old life would follow her everywhere . . .

Then she heard a cough.

Kara opened her eyes to see Issa staring up at the ceiling. The rusty coin was in the palm of Kara’s hand. When Issa coughed again, Kara pocketed it and went to her side.

“Are you okay?” It was a lame thing to say, but she couldn’t think of anything better.

Issa’s eyes got big. All she said was “Is it dead?”

“Dead?” she asked, then realized that Issa was talking about her cube. A shiver ran over Kara’s arms, all the way to the base of her neck. Everyone knew that a cube needed an organic counterpart to function—to live, as Issa had implied—but she’d never thought of it as a living thing. It creeped her out a little, but she answered: “Yeah, it’s out. Dead.”

“Someone’s been hacking them. Cubes.” Issa spoke in a hoarse voice, like it hurt to talk. “Even when they’re off. It’s why I needed it to die.” Her eyes were glazed over, and Kara looked at her IV feed. She’d been given a healthy dose of painkillers.

“How?” Kara asked. “How are they hacking them?” The other staff might have advised Kara not to engage—Issa sounded dazed, high—but Kara felt the gravity in her words. Because she knew what Issa said was possible. After everything she’d learned of Nero, of her mother, of their biological experiments with the cube, Issa didn’t surprise her at all. She’d been paranoid enough herself to keep her own cube off even before entering the Frontline Physicians craft, where it was required to stay offline. You weren’t supposed to be in danger so long as it was turned off.

Issa shook her head. Beads of sweat formed on her temples. She looked like she was in a fever dream. “The update.”

Kara went cold; she thought of what she’d learned from Pavel’s overwriter research. The overwriter could be used on the public if their cubes were available via the same network at the same time . . .

She rummaged for a small towel in a nearby cabinet and took deep breaths so she could stop trembling. Once she felt composed, she turned and held it to Issa’s face as her wild eyes skittered around the room.

“What about the update?” Kara asked. She felt a seed of guilt, pressing the girl for information while she was half-conscious. But it was bigger than her. It was bigger than all of them.

“Dangerous,” Issa said, then shuddered. “Our job on Nau Fruma was supposed to be quick and easy. Minimal casualties. I’m a medic—it’s not like soldiering is my specialty or anything. We were just supposed to drop an em-bomb, evacuate the camps, and get the hell out. But I pushed forward—I didn’t follow rank.” She looked up at the ceiling. Kara was losing her again. The update. The update.

“What are you saying?” Kara was desperate to keep her talking.

“That I’m the reason half my unit is dead . . .” Issa laughed, and her face, so stern and so wild at turns, was now lit up with a flash of vulnerability. “There was someone I wanted to kill.”

Kara sucked in a breath, bitter and sharp in her lungs.

Issa closed her eyes. “You think I’m evil?”

“No. Not at all,” Kara said honestly. “War is about everyone trying to settle a score.” They fell into a silence. But Kara couldn’t let it end there, when it was so clear Issa wanted to keep talking, to be absolved. She took Issa’s face in her hands and angled her gently so now they were eye-to-eye.

“What about the update?” Kara urged again softly. She felt like a predator, pumping this girl for information. But she craved the truth—any version of it she could get. She wanted to turn everything and everyone inside out. Because she thought she’d known Aly, and he’d left. She thought she’d known Lydia, but she’d lied. And she thought she knew herself—but every memory, every aspect of her identity she thought to be true was diametrically opposed to the princess she actually was. The only thing she had left was this overwriter.

“The update . . . it’s supposed to prime people for something. Make their cubes more easily hackable. It’s why we dropped the em-bomb. To stop the updates. And if I kept my cube in, I was afraid they would see . . . everything. The only way to be sure was to gouge it out.”