Bishar looked down at her, frowning. Like Edison, he was nearly a full meter taller than her and he stood close by, as was the habit of Drenard males. Also habitual was the intimidating sensation this elicited from Anlyn; she turned to gaze out at the Keep beyond the glass rather than strain her neck looking upwards.
“The cutbacks aren’t too severe,” Bishar said. “Besides, we’ve seen an incredible reduction in breakthrough attempts over the past few sleep cycles. We’ve been able to rest up two entire regiments as we prep some of the pilots for transfer to the war effort. It’s a small sacrifice for the defense of the empire.”
“There’s been a drop-off in breach attempts?”
“Quite. Practically to nothing, in fact. Perhaps that’s why you find me in such a pleasant mood, Cousin. Besides, it’ll be a Wadi Winter before you convince me that anything will come of your little plan.”
Bishar laughed in the panting, breathy Drenard way. “Ambassador to the Bern!” he said. “That’s as good as they get!”
Anlyn frowned and waited for him to settle down. “I’m afraid it isn’t your call, Cousin. It’s entirely within my rights as a Councilman of the Circle and member of the royal line to make diplomatic gestures to a hereto uncontacted race of sentient beings—”
“Spare me,” Bishar said, waving his hand. “Uncontacted is a stretch, and you know it. Besides, nobody knows the Scrolls better than I. Ever since the Rift was discovered and the Keep created, the old hierarchy has ceased to apply here. Anything that comes out of the Rift will continue to be hunted down and exterminated. Period. You can sign treaties with the ensuing debris, if you like.” Bishar smiled. “Now, I’ve set aside suitable living quarters where you and your volunteers can get a good look at the entire process. You’re welcome to stay for however long your lunacy persists.”
Anlyn bristled. “As second in—”
Bishar waved her off. “I heard about our uncles, and I know where you stand in the royal line. However, even if you and your furry friend manage to one day scrounge up a male heir—and let’s say the hybrid boy assumed the title of king—even then, you’ll not have jurisdiction here. The importance of this job grants me full immunity from our family’s politics, from your superstitious followers, and thank Hori it walls me off from the Council’s petty squabblings.”
Anlyn turned her back once more, this time to hide the disgust on her face. Then she saw it herself, clearly reflected in the visisteel. She realized Bishar could see it as well. There certainly seemed to be no hiding of anything on the Keep.
“There now, Cousin, let’s keep our temperate selves. If I’m being too cold, I assure you it’s with an inner warmth of mirth. These are exciting times for the Empire, a chance for lasting peace—”
An enormous explosion interrupted Bishar’s optimism. It registered all around them, blossoming like a new sun in a thousand panes of visisteel—a prismatic glory of destruction reflected everywhere at once.
The command room filled with sounds: beeping machines, alarms, and cursing Drenards. Anlyn looked from one bright image to another, hunting for the original as all the workers reflexively slapped at the devices around their necks, triggering even more alarms.
“The ship,” Edison roared in English.
Anlyn turned and found him pointing, a quivering claw extending out toward one transparent wall. His gesture directed her to the sight of the original image, to the burning fury beyond the Keep responsible for all the false reflections.
Anlyn felt her body grow cold. She placed her hands on the visisteel, staring. Disbelieving. The ambassadorial ship had been replaced with a cloud of expanding fire and chunks of glowing steel.
Its crew. Her supplies. Everything.
They were all gone.
3
Two weeks after their struggle with Byrne, Molly and Walter search planet Lok for a member of the Drenard Underground.
Meanwhile, the rift they thought they’d prevented from opening releases ship after Bern ship.
The craft gather as a fleet in orbit.
Molly weaved her way through the dusty, crowded market full of anxious shoppers, the bark of hagglers, and the desperate leer of eager booth attendants. The place looked identical to the last five markets she’d visited in the last five dry husks that called themselves villages. And everywhere they went, the desiccated Lokian air attacked her in the same manner: it wicked the moisture from her mouth, substituting it for cotton. Even her Wadi, who rode along on Molly’s shoulder, seemed weary of her arid, childhood planet. The lizard-like creature’s normally active tongue remained in its mouth as its head bobbed lazily with Molly’s gait.
She scanned the crowd for Walter, which had become another fam-iliar pattern. He was supposed to be helping her find an old friend of her mother’s, but Molly seemed to spend as much time looking for the troublesome Palan as she did hunting down the lady who could get them to hyperspace and back.
A young Callite snuck up and tugged on Molly’s sleeve, interrupting her thoughts. She turned and politely declined whatever he was selling. As she waved the boy off, however, something in a nearby glass case caught her eye—the shape of the thing popping out in her peripheral as intimately familiar.
“Relays and converters,” the boy said more insistently. He held up a basket of electrical parts in front of Molly and rattled them for effect.
“I have what I need,” Molly said. She patted the canvas sack dangling by her hip.
The boy ignored her and launched into his practiced spiel, detailing every sick member of his family and every atrocity committed by the Lokian government. Molly hardly heard him as she brushed past and moved toward the booth of used electronics. She knelt down by the display case and peered inside at the reader propped up on its stand. It was the same make as the one she’d lost on Palan, but just a few years older. There’d been a dozen instances over the past two weeks when she’d wanted one—not so much for reading a book as to have something to write in that her mother couldn’t access. She checked its condition while her Wadi pawed at its own reflection in the glass.
The reader appeared a tad beat up, but no more than a new one would after a few weeks of use. Molly studied the pads of her fingers: swollen and purple, they bore dozens of scabbed-over prick marks and throbbed with a dull, persistent ache. She hated the idea of bartering for any more supplies, but she really wanted that reader.
“Excuse me, how much for that one?” She looked up at the shopkeeper and pointed through the smeared glass.The Callite booth attendant bent down behind the counter to see which one she was pointing to. He rubbed his brown, scaly jaw, and a forked tongue flicked out over his lips. “Three hundred,” he said in a gruff voice not yet accented by his time on Lok. “And, of course, a vote for the Freedom Party.”
Molly groaned and clenched her fists protectively. Beside her, the Wadi pulled its head back and shot out a forked tongue of its own. It wasn’t that Molly had anything against the Freedom Party—she didn’t care one way or the other about Lokian politics—she was just sick and tired of being polled in general.
“How much if I don’t vote?” she asked.
Through the glass, she could see the shopkeeper’s eyes narrow, his pupils squeezing into vertical slits. He stood and peered over the counter at her. “It’s the elections,” he said. “Everyone votes.”
Molly held up her hands, palms out, to show him her fingers. “I’ve already voted dozens of times. I’ll give you three-fifty for it.”
“The Freedom Party really needs your vote,” the shopkeeper whispered. His English was impeccable, obviously learned in an off-planet school and at a young age, nothing at all like the drawling slang common to Lokians and local Callites. He narrowed his eyes at her silence, the sideways lids coming together like elevator doors. “Don’t you care about what’s going on up there?” He pointed up to the tattered fabric roof of his stall. “The Navy is putting together a new fleet, disguised as aliens. The Liberty Party is behind it all.”
Molly shook her head but kept her mouth shut.
“What about my people?” the Callite asked, moving to a sales tactic Molly had heard too often. “Every day more and more are shipped out—”
“Only the illegals,” Molly interrupted, unable to contain herself. She looked down at the reader behind the glass, wondering if it was worth getting in an argument over.
“But now those shuttles are being shot down. My people are being daily murdered, and you hesitate to vote.”
“I’ve voted plenty,” she said.
The Callite hissed. “For all I know, half those marks on you are for the Liberty Party. The least you can do is cancel one out. And I’ll make it two-fifty.”
Molly blew out her cheeks. “Four hundred and no vote,” she said. “I promise you, I’ve voted Freedom twice as much as Liberty.”
A mother trailing three squealing kids approached, stopping for a moment to look in the shop’s display case. Molly and the Callite stared at one another, waiting for the family to move on.
“Fine,” he finally said, his pupils relaxing. “Do me a favor, though—” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Stick your finger in and pretend, just in case anyone’s watching. I can’t have you making this a trend.”
Molly nodded and reached gingerly into her front pocket to fumble for some chips. Her fingers were too injured and numb to tease the denominations apart by feel, so she brought a few of them out to look through. The Callite made a coughing sound at the sight of the money. Molly tried to curl her fingers around the small pile to hide them. She plucked out two decas and slid them across the counter.
The Callite nodded to the voting machine beside the register. It had become a familiar, fear-inducing sight with its Galactic Voting Company seal stamped on the side. It was about the size of a portable toolbox, but with a single opening on the front and two buttons on the top marked ‘F’ and ‘L.’ Molly noted the letter ‘F’ was nearly worn off the button, while the ‘L’ was shiny and new. Voting machines on Lok tended to bear the mark of their owners, rather than the political stance of its users.
Missing, of course, was any list of candidates—or any way to know who or what one was actually voting for. When Molly told her mom they’d arrived in the middle of an election cycle, she thought Parsona was going to fry a circuit board. After their first few supply runs and stays in a handful of small towns, Molly and Walter had discovered why: election years weren’t the safest of times to be running around, needing things. Most people stocked up well in advance.
The Callite swiped his arm over the two chips, and the money disappeared from the counter. He deposited them in the slit at the top of the register, where they fell a long way and landed with a hollow thunk. The keeper frowned, then reached to the top of the voting machine, pushing down the ‘F’ with a loud click.
“I appreciate this,” Molly said. She stuck her index finger into the machine, looking up and down the stalls at the milling shoppers to see if anyone was watching—
Without warning, the padded clamps inside the device squeezed around the joints of her finger, locking her digit in place. Molly whirled on the keeper, and her Wadi hissed.
She put her other hand on the face of the machine and tried to pull her finger out. The Callite placed both of his hands on top of the heavy device, holding it firmly in place. He leaned close.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just such an important election. Hold still, there’s only a tiny—”
Prick.
Her index finger had already been hit once that day in order to secure a full tank of water for Parsona. The metal needle hit that fresh wound, and it felt like a bullet ripping through the pad. Molly gasped as the pain shot all the way up to her elbow like an electrical current. She slapped the top of the counter with her other hand and bit her lip to keep from yelling out. The Wadi shot down her back, sticking its head under the hem of her shirt, its tail swishing madly.
With a loud click, the ‘F’ at the top of the machine popped up, and the chemicals in her blood logged one more vote for the venerable Freedom Party.
The clamps loosened soon after, and Molly withdrew her finger. She pressed it into her shorts, which were already spotted on both sides with brown dollops of dried blood. The Callite bent down and smiled as he removed the reader from the case. He laid it on the counter, and then dropped an “I Voted” adhesive healing strip on top of it.
Molly grabbed the reader and shook the strip off onto the counter. The stupid things just made her hands more useless.
“Thanks for shoppi—”
“Flank off,” Molly grumbled. She dropped the reader into her shop-ping bag of assorted fruits and hardware parts and shooed the Wadi to her shoulder. She stalked away from the booth, kicking up plumes of dust with her flightboots as she went.
All around her buzzed yet another dry, dusty village she couldn’t wait to get out of. And as soon as she found Walter and finished her latest project on the ship, that’s exactly what they’d be doing. For the past two weeks, they’d traipsed halfway across her birth planet looking for an old acquaintance of her mother’s: a Callite that went by the name of Cat. The ephemeral alien possessed an uncanny blend of notoriety and elusiveness. Everyone knew her, had recently seen her, but wherever they gestured, Molly and Walter found only another trace of her passing—another nod and extended arm pointing them ever after the mysterious woman. But now Molly had a solid lead on Cat’s whereabouts, even though she loathed where it was taking her.