I bite her palm and twist my whole torso. She yelps and I’m free. I jump into the kitchen—she’s blocking the exit—and pull one of Yonni’s big carving knifes from a drawer. Yonni hated knives, I don’t know why the hell we have them. It’s probably dull as hell.
“Back off.” I hold the knife in front of me. The blade glints. “Just back off.”
The woman backs up, hands rising and ready. “You have some nerve.”
“I have—you’re in my suite! Who the hell are you?”
Across the room, the curtains whoosh open. A thin male figure stands dead center, silhouette swarmed by yellow dust.
“It’s beautiful out there,” he says in a pretty singsong. “We see glimmers of the world.”
The Brinkers. The Brinkers are in my suite, and one of them is hiding.
My fingers tighten on the knife, but that will make it harder to throw. I breathe, ease up, relax my bones. Tension screams “scared,” and scared screams “gut me.”
I glance at my back, but the kitchen’s empty and the cabinets aren’t big enough for even a child to fold into.
“Where the hell is the other one?” I ask.
“Where do you think?” bites the girl.
“They caught him,” the skinny one turns, floats forward. “He wasn’t fast enough. He’s theirs now.”
“And that’s on you.” The girl has topknots again, pulled tight enough her skin stretches. She steps closer.
“How the hell do you figure?” I lift the knife higher. “You people dosed me.”
She ignores this, calling over her shoulder. “Play the vid.”
“If you mean Mom’s latest,” I say, “I’ve seen it.”
“She said it was a matter of heart.” The skinny kid crosses the room to lift the remote from the table, his light brown hair haloed white. “She loves us.”
“Right,” I say. “That’s why she blew up the Archive and screwed our House.”
“Yes, exactly.” The skinny kid grins, a beautiful skeletal thing, then points the remote at my wall-screen. It wakes, bright enough to take on the afternoon sun.
I focus on the girl. “What the hell do you—”
“Shut up and watch,” she says.
On-screen, a large purple planet hangs amid star-strewn space, dark, splashed by cloud white and sea blue. Nothing special.
Except for the floating black rectangles ringed around it.
Flight stations. A whole slew of them, spaced at even intervals around the planet’s center, seamless except for a pale silver tube that winds from bottom to top. The stations look small, but they must be massive—each a fifth of the planet’s height.
“You see them?” asks the skinny kid. “They eat hearts.”
Every third station begins to spin. Slow at first, then gaining speed, while the stations between them glow a pale white. Then bright white, then blinding—until each glowing set of two could be a single sphere of white fire.
The fire beams straight into the planet’s heart.
It melts everything—blackens the clouds, buckles the land, wrecks the seas in a twisting mass of dying color. The planet cracks all the way across. I can almost hear it scream. Can almost feel it.
Fuel. They’re gutting it for fuel.
My hand lowers. “Which world is this?”
“Casendellyn,” says the girl. “The last of the independent planets. I’d have thought you two old friends, seeing as it’s where your mother was born.”
Mom’s home? I mean, I knew she was from an indie, but . . .
The newsfeeds never showed a vid.
My stomach’s a sinkhole.
Galton must be held to Account, Mom would mutter to herself, working on her digislate while I sat quietly nearby, kicking my feet against the kitchen chair and wondering if she’d ever look up. I’d made a skytower out of bread. She never did. Must. Will. They will know our loss.
“How do you know where she was born?” I ask. The Enactors didn’t. The Prime didn’t—or else he did and didn’t let on.
“Because we’re facing the same damn thing.” The girl crosses into the living room, yanks the remote from the skinny kid and points at the screen.
A new smaller planet appears, more green than purple with candy-puff cloudscapes. Three flight stations ring its horizon to the left, one to the right, an empty gap in the middle. Far in the corner of the screen, deep in the dark stars, lies the outline of another.
“Casendellyn was thirty years ago,” says the girl, “but this? Last week. While you’ve been jacking around playing hard to get, they’ve moved all the stations in place but two.”
The skinny kid moves close to the screen, hands splayed on its edges, nose brushing the clouds. He sings, soft and light as a lullaby. Something about trees and flowers and the forests of home.
“We’re gutting our own House.” The girl throws the remote at the couch, then glares like she wants to throw me, too. “And all you can talk about is being frickin’ dosed.”
As opposed to gutting an indie with no military, no backup, and a whole population with nowhere to go? I almost shoot back.
Except she’s right.
The knife burns in my hand. I wave at the screen. “How can they gut anyone? We have no ruler. Don’t they have to find the Heir first, to sign off on that?”