The Ta’an was an old bloodline. The throne had been in her family for twelve generations, and you could trace the Ta’an back nearly three centuries. They were among the first settlers in the east. The dark soil of Kalu was part of Rhee’s skin, the ocean in her veins, the roots of the trees her own. She’d spent weeks replaying her memories of her childhood in the capital, so that when she finally returned, it would feel like home.
Seotra had rallied the support to send Rhee to Nau Fruma in the first place. “For her safety,” he’d claimed. And while it was a politically neutral moon according to the Urnew Treaty, it also kept Rhee as far as possible from her true birthright—the throne. It was a power move to remain Crown Regent and block her ascension to power. Seotra was worried.
As he should be. Rhee would see to it that he pay for what he’d done to her family. She’d trained for years for the very moment when she would end his reign, and his life.
She only wished she could kill him more than once.
“Honor, bravery, loyalty,” she whispered.
Rhee looked back toward the palace where she had spent most of her childhood. It was high up on the hill, just a short distance from the town, though it felt like a world away—a prison meant to keep her from the real world, and her destiny. It had once been the second home of her family. To the east of it she could just make out the throat of an old volcano, isolated, rising up from the flat desert plains around it. Crown’s Rock. Tai Reyanna, Rhee’s longtime governess, had remarked on how fitting it was for Rhee to be so close to a crown.
“Eweg nich!” boomed a deep voice, and she was nearly knocked off her feet by a Modrussel. Its tentacle left a sticky residue on her clothing. Looking over her shoulder, she could only make out antennae protruding from a high-collared outfit, its clothes soaked with a slimelike secretion—as their temperatures ran high, Modrussels were known to sweat profusely.
She hurried on. A message came through her cube just as she reached the square, and Tai Reyanna’s call sign flashed across her vision. Rhee’s blood leapt.
The Tai was a sect of teachers and caretakers, and Simone Reyanna was a Tai of the highest order. She served the royal family and had been Rhee’s exclusive governess ever since her family died. Rhee wasn’t used to ignoring her calls. But she wasn’t used to running off in the first place.
Rhee knew what she had to do. Sucking in a deep breath, she brought her finger to the spot behind her right ear and pressed to power down. Immediately she felt dizzy, disoriented, like something essential had drained out of her. It was the security of being online, the comfort of never getting lost, the knowledge that every thought and experience would be recorded to play again and again.
But it was freeing too. Nothing would be recorded, and nothing could be accessed either. At least not the specific memories she’d programmed to recall immediately and in full, memories that seemed to absorb her. With her cube down, the chatter of the crowd instantly shifted from her native Kalusian language to different dialects from across the solar system. She forgot that her translator had been connected to her cube, and now the foreign words, tongue clicks, whistles, and beeps shattered the air around her. Her great-ancestors had managed without cubes, and Rhee wondered how they could have possibly learned so many languages just by studying.
“They’re auctioning off droids too. Decommissioned models . . .” a boy ahead of her said. His Nauie caught her ear, a local accent with a singsong cadence.
Julian. He turned around even as she picked him out of the crowd. His blue eyes widened. They’d been the same height for as long as they’d known each other, until he shot up a couple of years ago. She had to look up into his eyes now, which annoyed her to no end—it was a competition she would never win.
“Shhhh!” she insisted just before he called out her name. “You have to power down your cube. Quickly,” she added, when it seemed like he might argue.
“You’re being paranoid,” he said. It was supposedly impossible to hack into someone’s cube, but there were rumors that Seotra and his lackeys monitored the citizens this way, by invading their memories and observations through their cubes, and Rhee couldn’t risk it. “Besides, my mom told me if you do it too much you’ll go mad.”
So they said. Most people went their whole lives without going offline, but there were entire communities—hundreds of thousands of people in the Outer Belt—that hadn’t had native cubes installed. And what were a few minutes here and there offline? Rhee wouldn’t say she liked the feeling, but she liked the discomfort of it. With every minute she managed to endure, she felt stronger.
“Just do it,” Rhee said.
“I hate the way it feels . . .” But Julian put his finger to his neck and made a face like he’d been pricked with a giant needle, and Rhee relaxed. “And what are you even doing here?”