Stars Above: A Lunar Chronicles Collection (The Lunar Chronicles)(58)

Not a smile.

Not a teasing glint in his eye.

Barely even recognition.

“Jacin,” she whispered to the phantom that looked like her best friend.

His Adam’s apple bobbed with what looked to be a painful gulp. Then his jaw set and he clicked his heels together awkwardly. His gaze lifted away from her eyes, staring at the wall in the distance with the same vacant expression that all the guards had. The same emptiness.

“Shall I escort you to your quarters … Princess?”

Every bit the guard.

Winter, by habit, found herself drawing her shoulders back. A defense. She would hide behind politeness and grace.

Every bit the princess.

It was strange, how quickly it started to feel normal.

They had played this game before, she realized. A hundred times they had played it.

He, the loyal guard. She, the princess he must protect.

“Yes,” she said, as loudly as her voice would allow. “Thank you … Sir … Clay.”

A slight shake of his head. “Squire Clay, Your Highness. Guard-in-training.”

“Squire Clay.” She gulped and slowly turned her back on him, walking dazedly back through the halls.

He followed behind her. Respectful and distant.

Over her shoulder, she dared a nervous smile. “If you aren’t too busy with your training later, Squire Clay, I fear I might need rescuing from a pirate.”

His eyelid twitched. He did not look at her and he didn’t smile—but she caught it, just for a moment. The light entering his eyes.

“It would be my honor, Princess.”





The Little Android





Mech6.0 stood against the hangar’s charging wall, one of hundreds of mute sentinels watching the passengers flutter by with their hovering luggage carts and excited chatter. Before her, the massive Triton hunkered imposingly in the center of the hangar, dwarfing the crowd, as greeters scanned the ID chips of their guests and ushered them aboard. A ship’s maiden voyage was always a festive occasion, but this one seemed more vibrant than usual, as the Triton was about to set the record for largest cruiser ever to be launched. Waiters were passing glasses of champagne to the passengers as they boarded and had their belongings escorted away, women were donning their finest kimonos and hanbok and cocktail gowns, and a live orchestra had even been hired for the entertainment.

Against the festive backdrop, the ship itself appeared menacing to Mech6.0, with its polished metal paneling and small round windows glinting beneath the hangar’s lights. It hadn’t seemed so big when she’d been working on it, running wires and soldering frame pieces and screwing on protective paneling. At the time, she’d almost felt like she and her brethren were a part of this enormous metal beast. A thousand tiny moving pieces making one efficient machine. But now the result of their labors was ready to set sail, and she no longer felt attached to it at all. Only dwarfed by its magnificence.

And perhaps a little abandoned.

As the guests giggled and chattered and discussed how many space cruises they’d been on before, and the beauty of the new ship, and all the comforts the ads had promised, Mech6.0 watched and listened and felt the thrumming of electricity warming her insides.

“All aboard! Triton to debark in ten minutes. Ten-minute warning! All aboard!”

The crowd dwindled. The monotonous beep of the ID scanners trickled to an occasional sparse rhythm. One ramp rose up to the ship, closing with a thud that vibrated through the hangar’s floors and up Mech6.0’s treads—then two ramps, then three.

“Wait!” A woman’s voice echoed through the hangar, followed by the hasty padding of feet. “We’re coming! We’re here,” she said, breathlessly dragging a young girl behind her.

“Just in time,” said one of the greeters, scanning the woman’s wrist. “On up you go.”

She thanked him profusely and pushed a lock of messy hair off her face. Retightening her grip on the girl’s wrist, she gave her floating hover cart a push and jogged up the ramp.

Mech6.0’s scanner caught on something small and flat as it dislodged from the young girl’s backpack and fluttered down toward the greeter, who didn’t notice. Her programming alerted her to the incongruence, and she shuffled through proper responses.

If she found something that a human had lost, or that had been stolen, she was to return it.

But she was not to interrupt the boarding process, particularly once the captain had called for the ship to be sealed and prepared for takeoff.

As soon as the ramp began to rise off the ground, Mech6.0 knew that her opportunity to return the item to the girl was lost. She kept her scanner pinned to that small card until the ramp tilted up and up and the card slipped off and came spinning and twirling through the air. Past the greeters who were already pulling back the ropes for the ticketing lines, past the statue-like forms of her brothers and sisters, past the hired musicians, until it landed against Mech6.0’s own treads and stuck there.

The roar of the ship’s engines pulled her attention back toward the Triton, and her scanner lifted up and up as the hangar’s ceiling began to open. The gears cranked and rumbled, revealing first a teasing hint of moonlight and then a gap filled with stars. Then, slowly, an entire galaxy opened up above the hangar.

It was beautiful. Mech6.0 loved this moment—anticipated it every time they completed a new project and prepared to send it off into the sky. That short glimpse of the galaxy was not like anything else in her world, a world that was normally filled with mechanics and tools and the dark, shadowy spaces inside a quiet, lonely spaceship.