The Elder’s face didn’t change. “If the Princess won’t watch her tongue . . .”
“You’ll what?” She knew she was being reckless but she didn’t care. “You’ll kill me? And Fontis and Kalu will go to war again, and half the planets in the galaxy will be blasted into nonexistence?”
Only the swift rustling of arrows recalled to her that the archers were watching. In an instant, their bows were all pointed in her direction again.
Then the cracking of wood echoed throughout the monastery, and glass came shattering down. Tasinn swarmed the monastery, exploding ancient relics, dropping the archers where they stood. They wore tactical gear of lightweight armor, and a gas bomb made her eyes and throat burn. In the struggle that ensued, the Tasinn threw monks against the altars—destroying statues, scattering offerings. She couldn’t even hear herself think; the sound of coughing and choking was unbearable.
The Tasinn were worse than the droids that were made just for the purpose of destruction. They had hearts and minds and chose not to use them.
The Elder grabbed her hand and tried to run, but a stunner sent him flying forward, and Rhee let go of his hand out of reflex. Just a second too late. The electricity had passed through their hands and traveled up her arm. Then she felt two pricks in her back. An excruciating pain shot up her spine, a fire seizing all her muscles. All the order fell in the same way. The Tasinn had come prepared to use any means necessary.
“Princess,” one of the Tasinn said. He came toward her, smiling. There was a patch over his left eye. “I can’t thank you enough for your help today.”
She was coughing too hard to reply. The gas had done something. It felt like there was glass in her lungs.
He squatted down and touched her cheek with long, oily fingers. “You were very brave, coming here on your own,” he said. “Very brave, and very useful. We’ve been trying to find a way to get in past the Fontisian archers for a week now. It seems we should just have sent a princess to do our work.”
Something had reached into her soul and tugged, made her unravel inside. Everything good in her life had been destroyed: Was it all her fault? The archers who had followed her inside had left the hillside vulnerable to attack.
The Tasinn had raided the monastery because of her—because she’d come, seeking answers. That organic memory bubbled up from deep within: that little girl in a new palace, sobbing away until there were no tears left, like a piece of dried fruit left out in the sun.
Rhee was shoved into the front of a small craft, surrounded by Tasinn with cruel faces that all seemed identical to her. Still, they seemed almost afraid to touch her. Through the window she saw a Fontisian girl get shoved and herded into the back of a craft—the same blonde one she’d watched in the courtyard. Rhee caught her eye, and the girl glared at her, made her feel like she’d tipped into a long fall.
Her thoughts quickly went back to Dahlen. Dahlen, who’d been by her side since the moment he’d saved her life—not that she’d ever admitted this to him, but he had saved her life. Rhee had never thanked him. Instead she left him at the mercy of the Tasinn, only proving that she was the spoiled girl he’d insinuated she was.
“Nero wants to see you,” the Tasinn with the eye patch said.
As the hatch closed, she took in a deep breath, forcing down the noise rising in her throat—part sob, part battle cry. She was going to face the man who wanted her dead.
TWENTY-TWO
ALYOSHA
HE’D imagined it would go down differently. Sure, Aly figured he’d get taken in, be debriefed and whatnot—but instead the UniForce had manhandled Aly all the way here. He hadn’t seen what happened to Kara when they took him; he didn’t know where she was or if she was safe. Now he was locked away in a room barely bigger than the shack he and his dad had shared. All four walls made up of LED screens that played a twenty-four-hour DroneVision news channel that drowned out his thoughts, made him feel more crazy than he already was.
He’d been forced to watch dozens of “experts” paraded in front of the camera, each one a little puppet with Nero pulling the strings—just like Jeth had said. Each of them testified that Aly’s cube playback had been forged, pointed to inconsistencies, minor technicalities that supposedly proved the footage had been manipulated with help from Fontisian scientists. They said the Fontisians had gotten hold of a dangerous technology suppressed and supposedly discarded after the G-1K summit: the overwriter. It was technology that allowed not just Ravaging but rewriting of old memories.
There had been rumors of this for years, though. Like there were rumors that Josselyn was alive, like there were rumors the government was hacking data from individual cubes without permission.