What if she had survived? What if she had escaped?
“Dembos, do you read me?” Aly said, tapping his cube. “Dembos, this is Private Alyosha Myraz. I have a visual on an escape pod with the Eliedio call sign. Over.” But there was silence. He tried the station three more times, the Revolutionary twice, and a handful of satellites in southern Wraeta. No dice. The electromagnetic net that kept the various fragments of rock together was probably also messing with his signal.
He hesitated. He should go back, or at least loop around to get a signal and call it in—but he might lose the pod. This was his chance to do something big, his chance to be a soldier. He’d be a real hero, not just play one on DroneVision. And then they’d never send him away, no matter what.
The pod was disk-shaped and spun wildly, end over end. If the Princess was in there, she didn’t know how to drive the thing. Even watching it made Aly want to throw up. The Tin Soldier had about zero thrust and was more of a steering machine, but Aly found a current alongside the electromagnetic net and rode it hard.
Without thinking, there it was—the organic memory, the worst one. He was suddenly eight years old all over again, watching his mom and his big sister, Alina, pull away in the back of a truck loaded with a bunch of women from the Wray during the evac.
“Now or never,” the driver said. He was more like a savior, since he’d been there to take the ready and willing to work in the factories in the south of Fontis. Aly still remembered the look on his mom’s face when she saw there were only two seats . . .
So Aly had pushed Alina toward his mom and turned away. His ma started crying, grabbing Alina with one hand while she tried to reach out for Aly with the other. The Fontisian watched on like he was bored, and Aly’s dad had to step up, calm her down, be the wall that separated a mother from her son. “I’ll watch out for Aly. Take our baby girl,” he’d whispered.
And his ma went, crying her eyes out as she picked a thrashing Alina clean off the ground. In his memory, Aly stood behind his dad, clutching his dad’s shirt and willing himself not to break, not to make this harder on his ma. But as soon as the truck started, Aly was running, small and worthless, as gravel kicked out from behind the truck’s wheels and his family receded into the distance. His mother and Alina had looked like copies of each other, their smooth faces like dark pearls, big hair blown back as the truck picked up speed.
Aly didn’t want to think about that sad little kid who’d cried his eyes out, sprinting after a life and a family that wasn’t ever going to be. Aly knew the score now, and right in front of him he could see that he was closing the gap between his pod and the Eliedio’s. He locked on to it with his grav beam and slowly stabilized its spin. It’ll stop, he told himself. It has to.
And when it did, he clicked the air locks into place and shouted—a wild, primal scream. He grabbed the medbag from under his seat and waited for their air locks to depressurize.
The hatch hissed open, and the metallic smell hit him first. He stepped through and nearly slipped on the slickness underneath his feet. There was blood, lots of it. His heart shot up through his throat.
“Princess Rhiannon?” he called. His voice had cracked. Stupid, he thought. A dead girl couldn’t respond.
Do it, he urged himself—but waited until he thought his heart would burst before he finally went any farther. The first thing he saw was a boot. A guy’s boot. It wasn’t the Princess, but an old black man—maybe Wraetan, like him. He looked like the grizzled old veterans of the Great War who were so common at interstellar refueling station bars. Aly looked away and pressed his index and middle fingers lightly to each eye—as if he were asking Vodhan for mercy. His heart still beat rapidly. Relief and disappointment stirred in his blood.
He’d seen dead bodies before—he’d grown up in the Wray, after all, where it’d been crammed with refugees and a lot of taejis went down—but he’d never seen an old man who was murdered like this. His bloodied shirt was soaked through, and red handprints ran up his stomach and neck. Aly was so dizzy, so overwhelmed by the smell of blood, he almost missed the long, black braid laid across the man’s chest. It looked like a snake. The stupid part of him was scared, like it might come to life and snap at his feet.
But then he recognized it: The braid belonged to the Princess. Back in boot camp, Vin would freak him and Jethezar out with wild stories about the ancient traditions on Kalu, and how their warriors left locks of hair on the first person they ever slayed. As creepy as it sounded, he had a feeling that Princess Rhiannon had made her first kill.
FIVE
RHIANNON