The bully, the madman, and the empress—together once more.
Their protective shells thinned out into a ropelike plastic, tethering them to the Fisherman’s belt. Through the cloudy plastic, Rhee could see little pockets of air bubbling up and circulating within the substance—all of it funneling toward her nostrils and mouth. It felt heavy on her eyelids, but she kept them open and managed to turn, somehow. The medical section of the prison had unspooled behind them. Debris was scattered across the metal ground, half-buried deep into the electromagnetic soil, so that it all looked like an organism that had withered on a vine. She searched for Nero, or the scarred man, but she could not see them.
Then the Fisherman fired up his jetpack and they thrust upward at launch speed, so that everything became a blur. Rhee and Dahlen sped behind him, tethered in their plastic cocoons.
TWENTY-SIX
ALYOSHA
ALY’S feet dangled out of the open tailgate. He turned his face up to the sun and thought of his ma, nagging him to cover up and get in the shade with her and Alina. “You’ll get even darker,” she’d say, like it was some sort of threat. Now Aly rolled up his sleeves so the sun could touch every last bit of skin.
Maybe he’d get darker. So what?
It was like the sun’s warmth fueled him, activated his insides and made him even more pissed off. The whole godsdamned thing was rigged, and everyone was losing. But at least there was something he could do about it, finally.
At least he could help Kara.
She was taking forever, and the only way Aly could measure how much time had passed was by the layer of grit that formed on his arms. In the weak gravity, the moondust floated up in a haze and landed lazily wherever it felt like. Wild, how much Nau Fruma reminded him of Wraeta. It was the same kind of heat that made everything lag, even your brain. The kind of sunlight that made you squint or shade your eyes with the palm of your hand.
They’d come to Nau Fruma to find the Lancer, whoever that was, as Lydia had instructed them to do. Kara’d gotten them to this moon—talking her way into a trading post on Houl, bartering some simple repair work Aly did on a droid for their passage onto a freighter, scraping together spare credits to buy them clothes. All those languages she knew had helped them a lot.
It’d been less than a week since they’d escaped the prison on Houl, and since they’d buried Lydia’s body. Kara had said she should’ve been cremated, it’s what she would’ve wanted—but beyond that she didn’t want to talk about it. Maybe she was processing it on her own? What could you say to someone who’d had her whole history overwritten? He felt like a choirtoi, the way he’d run around wanting to forget his past. Yeah, there were things that hurt to remember.
But his past was everything that made him him.
Kara didn’t know who she was.
“Does this work?” Kara asked. He turned around to see her messing with a purple scarf around her head. When all her hair was tucked away, it brought out the shape of her face, like a heart. There were freckles across her cheeks he’d never noticed on her tan skin. He tried to memorize her, tried to soak in every detail, as if he could absorb the truth of her, of this moment, through the heat between them. “Do I blend in?”
What she didn’t get was that she would never blend in. Not really. Plus she was wearing the duhatj too far back.
“Not exactly,” Aly said. He stood up and brushed himself off. “You gotta kind of . . .”
He reached behind Kara to unravel the scarf, and her messy black hair fell everywhere. It smelled good—just a little bit sweet—and he brushed it out of her eyes for no good reason.
“Your eyes are still changing color,” he said. Her right one had specks of green and yellow in it, like the first days of spring. And her left one was brown and deep and perfect for exactly those reasons. Aly cupped her face and she grabbed his arm; he thought she’d pull it away, but her hand stayed there, soft and warm.
“You don’t have to help me,” Kara said.
“I want to help,” Aly said, taking in her face, the slight pout of her lip. His cube wasn’t on. He’d have to remember every detail. Gods. It felt more important, precious somehow, knowing that once the moment passed it would be gone forever. “I’m not going anywhere, Kara.”