Stars Above: A Lunar Chronicles Collection (The Lunar Chronicles) (23 page)

This time, she took the knife that she had used to stab the thaumaturge and she carved three straight lines into the cheek of Winter’s father.

Winter tried so hard to stay strong, knowing that every time she sought out Jacin’s security, it would further cement his decision to stay. So she rocked herself in her bed and tried to whisper comfort into her own blankets.

Until the night she could stand it no longer.

He was the only place that was safe.

Her nightclothes still damp from the terrors, she rushed out of her quarters, pretending not to notice the night guard who followed in her wake.

Jacin would hold her. Jacin would comfort her. Jacin would keep the nightmares at bay.

Except—Jacin was gone.

That’s what they told her when she arrived, pounding on the apartment door that the Clays had shared with two other families.

He and his family had been transferred the day before and she hadn’t even known, he hadn’t even told her, he hadn’t said good-bye.

Demoted. Transferred.
Gone.

Shocked and heartbroken, Winter retreated. She wandered blindly back toward the main corridor of the palace.

Gone.

She’d told him to go. She’d believed it would be for the best. It was the only way for him to have a chance at happiness. He had to get away from Artemisia. Away from the queen. Away from
her.

And yet, she had not believed he would really go.

Jacin.

Her dearest friend.

Her
only
friend.

Just like Selene. Just like her father.

They all left.

“Win—Princess?”

She froze.

Slowly turned.

It was him, but not him.

A hallucination.

Because this could not be her Jacin wearing the pressed uniform of a guard-in-training, his blond hair tucked behind his ears, not quite long enough to be tied back. He stood with his arms stiff at his sides, like he was waiting to carry out orders.

Not a smile.

Not a teasing glint in his eye.

Barely even recognition.

“Jacin,” she whispered to the phantom that looked like her best friend.

His Adam’s apple bobbed with what looked to be a painful gulp. Then his jaw set and he clicked his heels together awkwardly. His gaze lifted away from her eyes, staring at the wall in the distance with the same vacant expression that all the guards had. The same emptiness.

“Shall I escort you to your quarters … Princess?”

Every bit the guard.

Winter, by habit, found herself drawing her shoulders back. A defense. She would hide behind politeness and grace.

Every bit the princess.

It was strange, how quickly it started to feel normal.

They had played this game before, she realized. A hundred times they had played it.

He, the loyal guard. She, the princess he must protect.

“Yes,” she said, as loudly as her voice would allow. “Thank you … Sir … Clay.”

A slight shake of his head. “Squire Clay, Your Highness. Guard-in-training.”

“Squire Clay.” She gulped and slowly turned her back on him, walking dazedly back through the halls.

He followed behind her. Respectful and distant.

Over her shoulder, she dared a nervous smile. “If you aren’t too busy with your training later, Squire Clay, I fear I might need rescuing from a pirate.”

His eyelid twitched. He did not look at her and he didn’t smile—but she caught it, just for a moment. The light entering his eyes.

“It would be my honor, Princess.”

The Little Android

Mech6.0 stood against the hangar’s charging wall, one of hundreds of mute sentinels watching the passengers flutter by with their hovering luggage carts and excited chatter. Before her, the massive
Triton
hunkered imposingly in the center of the hangar, dwarfing the crowd, as greeters scanned the ID chips of their guests and ushered them aboard. A ship’s maiden voyage was always a festive occasion, but this one seemed more vibrant than usual, as the
Triton
was about to set the record for largest cruiser ever to be launched. Waiters were passing glasses of champagne to the passengers as they boarded and had their belongings escorted away, women were donning their finest kimonos and
hanbok
and cocktail gowns, and a live orchestra had even been hired for the entertainment.

Against the festive backdrop, the ship itself appeared menacing to Mech6.0, with its polished metal paneling and small round windows glinting beneath the hangar’s lights. It hadn’t seemed so big when she’d been working on it, running wires and soldering frame pieces and screwing on protective paneling. At the time, she’d almost felt like she and her brethren were a part of this enormous metal beast. A thousand tiny moving pieces making one efficient machine. But now the result of their labors was ready to set sail, and she no longer felt attached to it at all. Only dwarfed by its magnificence.

And perhaps a little abandoned.

As the guests giggled and chattered and discussed how many space cruises they’d been on before, and the beauty of the new ship, and all the comforts the ads had promised, Mech6.0 watched and listened and felt the thrumming of electricity warming her insides.

“All aboard!
Triton
to debark in ten minutes.
Ten-minute warning!
All aboard!”

The crowd dwindled. The monotonous beep of the ID scanners trickled to an occasional sparse rhythm. One ramp rose up to the ship, closing with a thud that vibrated through the hangar’s floors and up Mech6.0’s treads—then two ramps, then three.

“Wait!” A woman’s voice echoed through the hangar, followed by the hasty padding of feet. “We’re coming! We’re here,” she said, breathlessly dragging a young girl behind her.

“Just in time,” said one of the greeters, scanning the woman’s wrist. “On up you go.”

She thanked him profusely and pushed a lock of messy hair off her face. Retightening her grip on the girl’s wrist, she gave her floating hover cart a push and jogged up the ramp.

Mech6.0’s scanner caught on something small and flat as it dislodged from the young girl’s backpack and fluttered down toward the greeter, who didn’t notice. Her programming alerted her to the incongruence, and she shuffled through proper responses.

If she found something that a human had lost, or that had been stolen, she was to return it.

But she was not to interrupt the boarding process, particularly once the captain had called for the ship to be sealed and prepared for takeoff.

As soon as the ramp began to rise off the ground, Mech6.0 knew that her opportunity to return the item to the girl was lost. She kept her scanner pinned to that small card until the ramp tilted up and up and the card slipped off and came spinning and twirling through the air. Past the greeters who were already pulling back the ropes for the ticketing lines, past the statue-like forms of her brothers and sisters, past the hired musicians, until it landed against Mech6.0’s own treads and stuck there.

The roar of the ship’s engines pulled her attention back toward the
Triton
, and her scanner lifted up and up as the hangar’s ceiling began to open. The gears cranked and rumbled, revealing first a teasing hint of moonlight and then a gap filled with stars. Then, slowly, an entire galaxy opened up above the hangar.

It was beautiful. Mech6.0 loved this moment—anticipated it every time they completed a new project and prepared to send it off into the sky. That short glimpse of the galaxy was not like anything else in her world, a world that was normally filled with mechanics and tools and the dark, shadowy spaces inside a quiet, lonely spaceship.

The galaxy, she had come to understand, was vast and bright and endless.

A surge of electricity startled Mech6.0, like a spark straight to the processor that was protected beneath her torso paneling. Startled, she turned her head to peer down the line of identical androids—to her left first and then to her right.

Not only did they not seem to have felt the sudden surge, but none of them were even looking up at the overhead sky. Stiff and uncurious, they remained staring straight ahead.

Mech6.0 returned her attention to the ship as it rose up off the ground and hovered on the magnetic field beneath the hangar’s roof. The thrusters burned white-hot for a moment, and the ship rose higher and higher, breaching the ceiling before it swooped gracefully up toward the starry night sky and disappeared.

As the cheers died out and the crowd began to disperse, the musicians began packing up their instruments. The enormous ceiling lowered in on itself and clanged, shutting them in tight again, and not long after the space had cleared, the lights shut off with three loud bangs, plunging the mech-droids into pitch blackness and silence.

Four minutes passed, in which Mech6.0 was still remembering the view of the stars, which she knew were somehow always there and yet always out of her reach, before she remembered the girl’s lost card.

Her sensor light flickered on, creating a circle of pale blue light around her. Her neighbors swiveled their heads, perhaps in curiosity, but more likely in disapproval, but she ignored them as she cast the scanner down toward her treads. Extending her arm, she pinched the card between her padded grippers and held it up.

It was thin but stiff, like a sheet of aluminum, and on one side was scrolled in fancy, shiny lettering:
Celebrity Holos, Collector’s Set, 39th Edition, 124
T.E
.

She turned the card over and a flickering, pale holograph rose up from it and began to rotate. She was looking at the likeness of a teenage boy who seemed vaguely familiar, with shaggy black hair and a relaxed smile.

Mech6.0 felt her fan stutter in an odd way, and wondered if there might be something wrong with her internals. If this kept up, she was going to have to alert the maintenance mechanic. But this thought was fleeting as she opened the hollow storage compartment on her abdomen and tucked the holographic card inside. Maybe she would return it one day, she considered, although her statistical calculations told her that it would probably never happen.

*   *   *

Two days passed before Mech6.0 was given a new assignment, along with fourteen of her fellow mech-droids. She stood in line with the others as Tam Sovann, the shipyard’s owner, paced around the project’s underside, inspecting the landing gear and discussing the plans with their new client, Ochida Kenji. Ochida-shìfu was a middle-aged man with a little facial hair and a very expensive-looking suit. His ship was a recreational yacht, luxurious and spacious enough for those who could afford luxury and space. Mech6.0 scanned the ship while she waited to receive her instructions, plugging the information into her database. A 94
T.E
. Orion Classic, one of the most expensive ships of its day and one of the most popular for refurbishing over the past decade. The name
Child of the Stars
had been painted near its nose, but had faded with time.

“The body is in good shape, Ochida-shìfu,” said Tam, “but we’re looking at a full engine rebuild to bring it up to code, and remodeling the interior to include all the most modern amenities will require that we take it down to the paneling. I am confident we can meet your deadline, though, while maintaining the ship’s original character.”

“Your reputation speaks for itself,” said Ochida Kenji. “I have no doubt she’s in good hands.”

“Excellent. Let me introduce you to the engineer who will be heading up your rebuild. This is Wing Dataran, one of our brightest stars.”

Like a programmed reflex, Mech6.0’s sensor swiveled toward the group. Though Wing Dataran had been working at the shipyard for almost a year, their paths had never crossed. The
Triton
had been much too big, and she had never been assigned to any of his smaller projects.

But she had known about him. She had connected him to the net database the first time she’d seen him—as she did with all of her human employers—but something about him had kept that profile in the forefront of her memory. A young hardware engineer, he had been hired straight out of tech-university, where he had specialized in spaceship engines with additional concentrations in internal design and mechanical systems.

For reasons that didn’t fully compute, she frequently found her sensor seeking him out in the crowd of androids and technicians, and every time she spotted him, her fan did that strange little jump, like it had when she’d seen the holograph. Only now did she realize that there were similarities between Dataran and the holographic figure. Not only in how all humans were similar, with their two eyes and protruding noses and five-fingered, fleshy hands. But Dataran and the boy in the holograph both had pronounced cheekbones and slender frames that suggested a particular grace. And they had both made her fan sputter.

What did that mean?

Dataran unclipped a portscreen from his tool belt after they’d finished their introductions. “I’ve already begun working up some initial plans,” he said, showing something on the screen to Ochida, “but I want to discuss with you any special requests you might have before I finalize them. Particularly those new luxury features, which can put added stress on the engine. I want to make sure it’s fully…”

He trailed off, eyes snagging on something over Ochida’s shoulder. Everyone followed his gaze, including Mech6.0.

A girl had emerged from the ship, wearing an orange-and-white kimono.

“Ah, there you are, my princess,” said Ochida, waving her down toward them. “Have you been inside the ship this whole time?”

“Just saying good-bye,” said the girl, floating down the ramp. “When I see her again, it will be like meeting an entirely new ship.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You and I are going to be involved every step of the way, making sure my little girl is given precisely the ship she wants.” Ochida wrapped an arm around her shoulders, before raising an eyebrow at Tam Sovann. “If that isn’t a problem?”

“Of course not. We welcome your input and want to make sure you’re fully satisfied with the end result.”