Blood Crown Page 7

  “Wake up, Sera. You must wake!”

  I hear Minn’s voice, feel her touch before I’m able to peel my eyes open. When I do it’s like forcing two magnets apart and the light burns my eyes. I throw my arm over them, desperate to block out the too-brightness. “Is it time to go to work?”

  But I can tell it’s not, because out of the corner of my eye I see women and girls huddled together all around. “I don’t know,” Minn says. “The guards still haven’t shown up. We slept, and then we woke, but nothing’s changed. The door stayed open all night, and the lights stayed on.”

  She puts her hand on my arm. The barest of touches. “You were crying.”

  “No, I’m not.” I take my arm from over my eyes to prove it to her.

  “Not now. Then. In your sleep. You were crying in your sleep.” She looks at me and I can’t tear my eyes away. “You cried out for your father.”

  Now I drop my gaze. To my lap. Over Minn's shoulder, to the door. I wish I was in my cell, on the cot by the freezing outer wall of the ship. “No, I don’t have a father.”

  I don’t know what’s gotten into Minn because she’s barely said two words to me in the nine years I’ve known her. I always thought she hated me, thought she was a timid little thing. But now I’ve seen her stop a person—a thing—from hurting her, run away from an Elite, defy a guard and stop me from hurting another. And she hugged me.

  “What do you remember?” Her voice hovers in the air above my head and the voices in the room quiet. I wait and wait, but they are more patient, or maybe I am just desperate to be heard. Soon I find myself talking.

  “I don’t remember much,” I say. “Mostly it’s just dreams, but I don’t know if they’re real, if they’re memories, or if they’re just fantasy.” I try to shrug, but it doesn’t work. So I roll onto my side, away from Minn, and curl into myself.

  She lies down behind me and smoothes the hair at my neck, her fingers grazing my skin as she gathers up loose strands. It feels so good. So good to be clean, so good to be touched, so good to belong.

  “I dream I live in this beautiful place where I have baths every day and my father brushes out my hair and ties it back in a perfect bow. I have clean, lovely dresses to wear. Toys to play with. Father never leaves me. He is with me always. Playing with me, teaching me, scolding me when needed. He lets me ride on his shoulders.

  “Sometimes a man and woman come, but while they bounce me on their knee and chat with me, and Father says I should be happy to see them, I really just want them to go away. They are boring and make me feel strange and it’s much more fun with Archi—” I breathe in a sharp breath, suddenly unsure of my memories.

  They are jumbled up in my mind. The man and woman are Mama and Papa. And I nearly called Father by another name—a name that now escapes me. My eyebrows draw together as I try to reason through this new line of thought, this new thinking.

  Minn’s touches are constant and pull me through the tangle of emotions. “What happened to him? Your father?”

  “I don’t know.” The answer is automatic, mechanical. “Something bad happened, I don’t know what. The lights were flashing and the ship was screaming. Father—” I reach up and touch my neck, under the hairline as a memory flies by too quickly for me to catch it. I shake my head and drop my hand. “He made me hide in the shadows while he spoke with . . . a man . . .” My hands are tangled together, pressed to my stomach as I stare, eyes wide open at my memories.

  “Then there is a sharp pain and he shoves me into a dark, dank tunnel.”

  “I was so cold,” I say, and then I think . . . I had never been cold before that moment.

  I shrug my shoulders. Minn’s fingers pause for a moment, and I think she’ll stop now, she’ll pull away. But she doesn’t. I sigh as her fingers resume their stroking, working through tangles in my hair.

  “And then what?” she asks.

  “And then I’m in the kitchens and it’s loud and scary and I hide behind the crates of produce until Cook finds me and sets me at the sink. Sets me beside you.” This last I’ve said so quietly I wonder if Minn even heard, but her fingers stop and it seems she holds her breath. She heard me.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “You have no need to be sorry.”

  She is still and quiet for a very long time. A few whispers have picked up around us and I think our conversation is over. It’s the most talking I’ve ever done and I feel strangely vulnerable, exposed. Minn, and everyone else who was listening, now knows as much about me as I do.

  I can’t stand this exposure, this nakedness, so I sit up and dig around the bedding until I come up with a shift. I don’t even care if it’s mine, I just pull it over my head, over the flimsy shift I wore to serve the Elite. “I’m going to go check on things.” I climb over the women lying between myself and the door and step into the hallway. I look both ways, but there is no one. Not a single guard in sight.

  I walk the empty hallway, passing the men’s room on the right a short way down the hall. They watch me pass, gathered together in much the same way as the women. They track my passage, but they don’t speak, don’t smile. I’m certain they all think this is my fault. And for all I know, it is.

  That Elite seemed to know me. But he thought I was dead. How could that be? I know I’ve never met him, though there is something in his voice that seems familiar. I think maybe it’s because he’s the same as my father—an elite android, not the drones that sometimes come to check on us. I feel the cold dream-touch of Father’s finger on the bridge of my nose and I shiver.

  The kitchen is ahead of me, lights shining, and even before I get to the door I know something is wrong.

  The first thing that is wrong is the crates. Every single one is missing. The walls are bare. The counters and tables are bare. Drawers are pulled out from the wall—all empty. There’s not a single scrap of food left. I step around the small wall that juts out and separates the cleaning part of the kitchen from the preparation part.

  Cook lies on the floor, her bloodshot eyes staring up, unseeing, at the ceiling. Blood radiates out from her like a fan—and I am standing in it. It’s thick and congealed, not fresh. However she died, whoever killed her, she died hours ago—maybe not long after we all went to sleep.

  Almost as an afterthought I notice the giant butcher knife protruding from between her breasts. One hand lies near it, as though she’d held it, or tried to free it, before her strength left her. One might think she killed herself, but this is murder. I know because there’s a word written in the blood at my feet.

  Serantha .

  The lights pulse yellow for hours and I’m beginning to think we’ll never be released from this pod. Maybe it is a prison—maybe all of my soldier companions are guilty of some crime or another that has relegated them, along with myself, to this jail cell.

  So I catalog the incoming data from Sera’s symbiants—a task I have performed thirteen times over the last eleven hours.

  My knuckles are white on the flight yoke and I grit my teeth. We are very near the Capital now. My team is preparing for battle, but I gave my second-in-command the helm. Instead, I have prepared a pod—I will find the traitorous Mind leader and I will end his life. It is the only thing that matters to me anymore. I wait, ready to launch and dock with the Capital.

  I stretch my fingers and curl them back around the flight yoke. I want to be ready to launch the second we come within range.

  I imagine it’s Galen’s throat that’s beneath my death grip and not the yoke. I imagine squeezing until I snap his spinal column and sever his mind from his power source. A memory of Serantha flashes through my mind, startling me. I haven’t thought of her in years but now it seems appropriate. I will avenge her death and even if I can’t stop the extinction of the human race, at least I will take Galen with me.

  Serantha. The ship takes up the chant, whispering the word over and over. Every pulse of its engines echo my name until it is pummeling me. Serantha. Serantha.
>
  My dreams become my waking memories.

  My father, picking me up and swinging me onto his shoulders. “Sera,” he says. “Serantha.”

  Sliding forever down the garbage shoot and landing in a splash of discarded food and other organics in the kitchen. Crawling out and hiding behind the crates while I watch this foreign world reveal itself. Everyone wears black—crisp uniforms with sharp creases. I cower every time the wiry woman with the wooden spoon comes near me to retrieve a crate of goods, until one time when she finds me.

  “What have we here? Did your mother send you—you look old enough to be to work. No matter. Come on, hop to it, there’s plenty of work to do.”

  She doesn’t ask my name, doesn’t ask why I am wearing my nightgown and not the black of the support staff. She shoves me over to the sink where she pulls an older girl away. She barks some order at her and shoves me next to a girl about my own age, her thick, black hair tied into a tight, tidy braid behind her back.

  The girl glances at me and smiles. “I’m Minn.”

  I stare at her, open-mouthed.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ser—” My whisper is cut off by another shout from Cook.

  Minn passes me a plate and shows me how to use the cleansing air.

  Hours later she takes my hand, now raw and sore from the air, and draws me into the women’s quarters. They have beds, cots and proper blankets, four girls to a room. A woman is tucking a little girl into bed—I saw her working the sinks near us. She has the prettiest blonde hair that springs around her face like a halo.

  “Oh, who’s this?” the woman asks when she sees me tagging along after Minn.

  “This is Sera.”

  “Well hello, Sera,” the woman says.

  Serantha, I think. But I don’t know how to correct them and so I say nothing at all.

  The reality of my origin sinks into my heart like a stone. I don’t come from the support level. I come from somewhere above. I turn until I am facing the garbage chute. I came through there. I step forward, see the collection bin. I fell in there.

  To the right of the bin there should be pile after pile of stacked crates. I hid there. Now there is nothing. Because someone has taken them. Not someone, I correct, the Mind.

  Without a plan, I step onto the transport. It waits, pulsing yellow, until I give it orders. “Up,” is all I say, and it seems to be enough because the walls close in around me and the light pulses green and then I am rising, being pushed up and up and up.

  I’ve never gone this high in the ship, at least not that I can properly remember. When the transport stops ascending, its walls dematerialize and I find myself staring out into space. And memories.

  It’s like I’m living two lives at once. I am me, stepping into this room that’s filled with blinking lights and all sorts of things that I know I’ve never seen before but now I know are called consoles. Navigation. Life support. Weapons. Shields. And beyond the consoles, space. It’s deep and black, penetrated by pinpricks of light and swirls of color.

  At the same time I am a little girl, saying, “Papa!” while a broad man with a crimson robe over his shoulders bends to gather me into his arms. He’s not the father from my dreams, but he is Father. He points out the window, showing me Cigna Persephone, the name for the colorful swirls that Father says is a distant galaxy, much like our own. He shows the blinking lights on the console and tells me, “When you are older, Archibald will Gift you the knowledge of how to use these controls. You’ll be able to fly the ship!”

  “But I want to fly the ship now, Papa.” I curl my childish fist around his lapel.

  “Not yet, darling. Wait until you are ready, and then you’ll be able to do whatever you want.”

  “Will I be king like you, Papa?”

  His chuckle is soft and full of love as it shakes my whole body. “Not king, no little one, but Queen.”

  My eyes are wide as I consider this. Of course I know all this. I’ve always known I would be queen one day. “Like Mother?”

  “Little one, you will be so much more—you are greater than your mother and I combined.”

  Such an outrageous statement, but my little girl self knows what he says is true. I will be greater. Because Archibald will make me greater.

  Now I stand in the room, slowly turning, seeing the controls as I never could when I was a child. Papa was wrong. Archibald taught me nothing. The only thing I understand is that I am alone. My mother and father have abandoned me. Archibald, my Servant, who promised to never leave me, that he would be with me and my children forever, is gone, too.

  Everyone is gone. Every guard, every andie, every Servant. Except for the support in the lowest level of the ship, we have all been abandoned.

  I am unsure of what to do. I turn and see, off to the far right, the side of another ship. It is as red as blood, red like the Elite leader’s suit. White pulsing lights on its hull look like ribs on a fish. The Mind. They’ve relieved us of our food and resources. Maybe they want to see what we’ll do, how long it will take for us to die if they don’t take care of us. And that’s when I know what we have to do.

  I push away the little girl, the memories of my father, the king, the memories of Archibald and how he betrayed me. Archibald might not have Gifted me all that I need to know, but I have talked to the ship for years. I can feel its life force, the way it moves, operates, functions. I stare down at the controls and while I don’t know what they are exactly, I feel confident I can figure them out. A few moments convince me I can do it. I turn and run for the transport.

  When I reach the servants’ level, I call for Minn, for Sher and Tam and all the others. I forget all about Cook lying there in a pool of thick, viscous blood until the first of the support arrive. He shouts out when he sees her. At first he stares dumbly at her body, but it’s no more than a breath or two before he’s turning an accusing glare on me.

  “You. You did this.”

  What? “No.”

  Everyone’s there now, crowding first around Cook’s body, then surging around me. They are deadly quiet. The crowd parts and someone shorter than the men walks among them. When I hear her gasp, my heart sinks. Minn.

  And now she’s walking toward me, her face as pale as Cook’s. “Sera?” Her voice quivers on the last syllable and tears gather in her eyes.

  Two options present themselves: Break down and cry, beg for their forgiveness and allow them to exact justice—which will mean releasing me out the airlock. Or run. But I know there really isn’t a choice—I have always been a survivor, as if something within me demands that I fight to live, fight to be in charge of myself.

  I back into the transport and shout, “Up!” I don’t know if it’s the urgency in my voice, my plea to the ship, or something else, but the transport seems to respond more quickly, anticipating my needs, my desires. Because with no more than thought I am surging upward to the command center of the ship.

  By the time I arrive at the control room, my decision has been made. First I lock the transport so the men hungering for my blood can’t reach me. Then I turn for Navigation and begin powering the ship for flight. I will save myself, and in doing so, I will save them.

  I tell myself that’s all it is, that considering how cruel they have been to me my whole life, they don’t deserve to live, that saving them is only a side effect of saving myself—but as quick as I think it, I abandon the thought. It seems I am incapable of letting them starve, of saving only myself—I will save them whether they want me to or not because that is what my real father and mother would have done. It’s what I was born to do.

  While I am working, the Mind’s ship moves more squarely into view. It hovers like a monster about to pounce, so I avoid looking at it and concentrate on the controls.

  “Serantha,” the Mind leader says through the com. His face, so impassive and elegant, comes into view on the screen. “Stop what you’re doing.”

  I can feel the urgency in the ship’s systems—our flight
is imminent.

  “Power down immediately.” His tone is the same as Gart’s when he is about to become very, very mean. Stop, or I will make you wish you had.

  On the command console, the screen that showed the ship's systems, now shines with white lights that pulse in the shape of a hand. I place my palm on it and the Mind leader, and his ship, disappears. It feels as though we are an arrow shooting through space, like the transport when it flies upward, impossibly fast. We seem to be in a tunnel, the stars like streaks of white light shooting past us. I grip onto the edge of the console and grit my teeth.

  Then, suddenly, the ship lurches and shudders to a stop. I reach out my senses, while my fingers fly over the console, but the ship is no longer speaking my language. It has once more been overrun by the Mind.

  “Did you really think I’d let you go, just like that? When I’d only just found you?” The voice comes from everywhere, surrounding me.

  “Yes! Why do you even want us?” I shout the words, even though I know he can’t hear them—probably can’t hear them. “Let us go!”

  “I don’t want them, Serantha. I want you.”

  His voice sounds from behind me. I whirl around in time to see the Mind leader stride through a door.

  “How did you get here?” I ask without thinking.

  He smiles benevolently and he speaks like one might to a dimwitted child. “I docked with your ship, of course, and simply took the bridge.” The expression on his face says he knows I don’t understand, and my ignorance pleases him.

  “Now, how did you suppose to win this? How did you imagine it would go? You have no food. No resources. And you would . . . what? Fly until you completely ran out of power? Then what would you do?” He steps nearer and I back up against the console.

  “These people are going to die, Serantha. Is that what you want?” Nearer.