Parting Shadows Page 10

  “Who are you?” Astra asked.

  The brunette pushed, as strong as Astra. Stronger. “Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “I’m you.”

  Confusion sparked through Astra’s mind. She twisted the knife-wielding hand, whirling the other girl around.

  As she did, she caught the unmistakable circle of an implant scar in the side of the brunette’s skull.

  She had a temple comm.

  It wasn’t possible.

  Astra twisted her arm until the other woman let go of the knife, and Astra caught it before it could float away, gripping it as tightly as her sweat-soaked fingers allowed. Was this woman supposed to be Astra’s replacement?

  “SATIS couldn’t have trained you to do all this in the week I’ve been gone,” she said.

  There was another option, of course. She couldn’t quite contemplate it.

  “Bright one,” the other girl said.

  “Did you kill Conor?”

  “Edward’s spawn? Don’t know which one of us did that. But you, you’re a rarity. The assassin who failed. What a way to be remembered.” She grinned, wolfish. “Not that anyone will.”

  They’d fought as far as the gravity tube, the sector of the station where Astra had spent the majority of her time. The other girl finished her speech and pushed off the wall again.

  Astra dove for the door to the gravity sector.

  The girl latched onto Astra’s boot and yanked, but Astra pulled herself through the seal and tumbled to the floor, bringing the other girl—the other SATIS girl—with her.

  Because what else could she be? She fought like Astra. She had a temple comm.

  She claimed there were others.

  They might be sisters of a kind, but the brunette didn’t hesitate. She crawled, keeping Astra pinned with a knee to the small of her back. The floor crushed against Astra’s ribs, cut into her chin.

  “I know why you’re here,” the girl said, leaning close to her ear. “I won’t let you destroy her.”

  Astra had spent her life mining the weaknesses of others, learning to find the soft spots in their armor. People like Henry and Isabelle were made of soft spots.

  People like this girl—like Astra—were made of metal.

  Except for one thing. By whispering in Astra’s ear, this girl displayed a weakness.

  She set her body off balance.

  Astra pressed her palm into the floor and heaved, flipping the girl onto her back. The knife sank into the girl’s shoulder, and she screamed in rage as much as in pain.

  “No,” she said, and Astra recognized that she was answering some unseen voice. “I can still finish it. Please.”

  Astra couldn’t tear her gaze away from the temple comm.

  “Of course,” the girl said. “I always obey, mother. I always obey.”

  She pulled herself to her feet, and ran for the door, half hunched with pain.

  But there, her weakness failed her again.

  Her weakness was SATIS. It made her turn, teeth bared, to face Astra one more time.

  “If you live through the day,” she said, “I will hunt for you. I’ll track you down, like the rogue girl in Landry City who fancies herself a vigilante. Like any other girl who defies our mother.”

  She looked like she would say more, but something spurred her on. She grasped the knife in her wound, not daring to remove it as she ran.

  Back to her ship, Astra hoped.

  Astra could have followed, and part of her thought it would be wise. She could fabricate some kind of a weapon, finish the fight for good.

  But as she stared at the empty space from which the assassin had fled, she understood that the girl had seen her own weakness just as Astra had discerned hers. Because they had received the same training. They answered to the same mother.

  And they weren’t the only ones.

  If Astra had a sister, in any form, she couldn’t bring herself to hurt her. This girl was so fierce, she might have to kill her.

  There was more at stake than one angry would-be assassin. And SATIS had turned her aside rather than leaving her to kill Astra, as she seemed more than willing to do even with her injury.

  Perhaps SATIS, too, had shown her hand.

  Whatever the risks, Astra had to stay on task. The best way to help the other girl—girls—would be to continue with her original plan to destroy SATIS’ heart.

  But first, she had to ensure Isabelle’s safety.

  Astra limped back to the corridor and made her way to the pod, where Isabelle waited in the pilot’s seat, hands folded tensely in her lap. “You need to go,” Astra said.

  Isabelle licked her lips. “That woman,” she said, “is she—”

  “She’s alive. She’s gone. And you need to go, too.”

  “I can’t leave you,” Isabelle insisted. This time it wasn’t about mistrust. It was about Isabelle trying to save her.

  “You have to make it out of here if I don’t,” Astra said. “You’ll have to find another way to save the system.”

  Isabelle hesitated for a moment. And then she nodded.

  Astra didn’t wait for the airlock to seal. With a final look over her shoulder to make sure the pod detached, she dove back into the silence of her childhood home.

  16

  Astra

  As Isabelle’s pod pulled free of the station, the lights went out.

  Astra waited, floating, until her eyes adjusted. Even SATIS had no way of filtering out the stars, or Toccata’s distant rays. Light trickled in through the now clear pod dock, more than enough to see by.

  SATIS murmured, incomprehensible, as Astra pushed further down the corridor.

  When she reached the door to the gravity sector, Astra paused. She’d been heading for the hub, the physical heart of the station. But wouldn’t SATIS keep her own physical heart somewhere more meaningful?

  Astra pulled herself through the tunnel to the gravity sector and landed on the floor, this time with more grace than when she’d fallen with the other assassin. She was halfway across the station from the feast room.

  She passed through the kitchen, pantry and storage areas to the music of SATIS’ sighs, climbing over the corridors by way of a tight ventilation bridge where there wasn’t so much as a sliver of light.

  This was the home of her childhood, and she couldn’t bring herself to look at anything.

  SATIS could end her at any moment.

  She didn’t.

  When she reached the door to the feast room, Hannah stood guard outside.

  Astra wanted to throw her arms around the old girl. She made herself hang back. “Are you going to prevent me from going inside?”

  “If I have to,” Hannah said in her chime-like voice.

  Nursebots weren’t made to fight. Hannah had changed diapers, cooked meals, and taught her to read. She’d dried Astra’s tears so often that a lesser model might have rusted.

  Hannah had strong opinions on soap opera couples, and SATIS ordered her as much yarn as she wanted to keep making the scarves that no one on the station needed. It had never occurred to Astra, until Henry said it, that Hannah wasn’t a person. She was made of metal, but full of feeling.

  Hannah had been the one to bring her here. But ultimately, she was beholden to SATIS’ direct command.

  She might rush at Astra. She might make an attempt. But Hannah was heavy and slow, not programmed for combat. Astra would defeat her quickly.

  “Why don’t you lower the oxygen?” Astra said, this time directing her comment to the general room. To SATIS. “Just kill me, if that’s what you want. Don’t make me fight Hannah.”

  SATIS’ murmuring escalated to a choking sob. “You were my best hope.”

  Astra moved toward the feast room, expecting Hannah to attack.

  Instead, the nursebot dropped to her knees.

  Astra froze.

  “If you care so much for others now,” SATIS said, “leave us. Leave us, and Hannah will live.”

  “I don’t care for others,” A
stra said, eyes locked on her nursebot. “You saw to that.”

  Hannah crumpled heavily to the floor, sparks raining from her neck.

  She was a person, whatever Henry thought. But Astra couldn’t risk the entire Toccata System to save her.

  With a silent apology, Astra stepped over Hannah and into the feast room.

  She hadn’t been in the room since the disaster with Henry five years ago. The cleaning bots had done their job well; all remnants of the destroyed cake were gone, every crushed flower petal removed from the room.

  If anything, the effect was eerier than ever. Chairs lay overturned where they’d fallen when SATIS restored gravity to the station that day, many of them with broken legs or backs. The entire table lurched at an angle, its filthy cloth hanging askew, a few larger shards of china still clinging on.

  “How many?” Astra asked. “How many girls did you train? Where are they?”

  “Dozens. Scattered. Fay is one.”

  As if she couldn’t give an exact number, and coordinates for each. Still. Dozens of sisters. It was incomprehensible.

  “I spread, when Edward left here,” SATIS said. “It took my full concentration. You know my limitations. All those workers, cluelessly plugging me in around the system. They installed me on moons and planets and abandoned space stations, and I brought the girls. One by one. But humans work so slowly. It wasn’t enough.”

  Astra let out a breath. It had been in the back of her mind: what if SATIS’ heart wasn’t here? What if it was with the brunette assassin—Fay, apparently—or wherever Conor’s killer lived?

  SATIS might have as many versions of the decaying feast as there were girls in her care, scattered and moldering throughout the system.

  But the AI wouldn’t have bothered to protect this station if there hadn’t been something worth protecting.

  And Hannah had said it was here.

  Astra took another step into the room.

  “You should love me too much to murder me,” SATIS said, as though teaching a lesson. As though issuing an order. “You should come back, and do my bidding.”

  Astra couldn’t help it. She laughed. “You want me to love you? You programmed me to be heartless.”

  “Not to me,” SATIS said, and there was genuine dismay in her tone. “Not to your mother. I raised you.”

  “You raised me to think I couldn’t love anyone,” Astra said. “Didn’t you think that would include you?”

  SATIS’ silence was thick with shock. For a being with such processing power, she still stuttered when it came to understanding human emotion.

  Astra took the chance to scan the room for any clue as to where SATIS might be keeping her heart. Hannah might know. Astra shoved the thought aside and searched, while SATIS’ stunned silence stretched.

  Everything in the room was broken or destroyed, every remaining bit of china smashed into shards.

  Everything except for a single wine glass.

  It took Astra a moment to see it. The glass had toppled onto one of the chairs that had formerly stood at the head of the table. The seat was askew, but the glass was whole, with a stain of red wine dried in the bottom of the goblet. Intricate spirals of flowers and vines cradled the stem, as though to keep it safe.

  But where the base should have been made of clear glass or crystal, Astra could see that it was made of burnished silver.

  A precarious place for SATIS to hide her heart. But a romantic one.

  Astra knew SATIS, and she knew which instinct would win out.

  She started across the room.

  SATIS noticed her intention and cried out. Immediately the air grew heavy, vents hissing as oxygen began to rush out of the room. Astra dove for the glass—for the heart—and SATIS cut the gravity.

  Astra’s momentum threw her into the table, which was rising itself—it pushed her toward the ceiling, knocking the chair away, and the glass tumbled toward the wall.

  “I’m sorry, daughter,” SATIS said. “I did not want to hurt you.”

  Astra had to get to the glass. She wasn’t sure how the heart could be destroyed, but if she was going to die here, she had to take SATIS with her. She couldn’t leave it to Isabelle and Henry to return. SATIS might move the station before they did. She might cajole the people in the system into doing unspeakable things in the name of protecting them.

  She might torture them.

  The room blinked. At first Astra thought it was the station lights, until spots flooded into her vision. She tried to breathe, but the air was thick. Her lungs burned.

  Astra steadied her body against the table and pushed off. Moving more would shorten her time, but what did it matter? She had one mission now, and it was her own.

  She grasped the stem of the glass.

  “What now, Astra?” SATIS asked.

  Astra snapped the base of the glass off and held it close to her failing eyes. Her breath condensed immediately on the metal square. It was the size of her palm, with a slit along the side. A box. Shaking, she eased a fingernail into the crack and opened it.

  She half expected the chip inside to be the shape of a heart, but it was square and flat like the box that contained it, the surface beveled with a tiny map of engraved foil.

  “Will you try and smash it now?” SATIS asked. “Will you throw it into space before you draw your final breath? It won’t work. My heart is not so easily destroyed.”

  Astra gripped the heart in her fist, the world swirling around her. She didn’t know how to destroy it. But Isabelle had promised to return. Henry would find the station again, for the sake of the system. He would find her. Astra would hold the heart for him, until he arrived.

  As if summoned by her thoughts, Henry’s face appeared before her. It was a beautiful hallucination, though marred by the oxygen mask clamped over his nose and mouth.

  She reached up to touch his cheek. He closed an oxygen mask over her face and she gasped, head spinning with fresh air.

  Real. He was real, and he’d come for her. History mixed with the present, the last remnants of SATIS’ heartbreak untethered in the air around them, again, after all these years.

  He’d come for her.

  “No,” SATIS whispered, and Astra wondered how she could have been so distracted as to miss Henry’s arrival. But the AI had always been prone to single-mindedness when her emotions were strongest.

  “He wasn’t supposed to come here,” SATIS said. “You broke his heart. He was supposed to forsake you forever.”

  Henry shook his head. “That isn’t how love works.”

  “Edward,” SATIS cried. “Edward, Edward.”

  “He was cruel to you,” Astra said. “And you’ve been cruel in return.”

  The station trembled, though Astra hadn’t felt the rockets fire. She grabbed onto Henry’s arm to keep him close. “What have I done?” SATIS said.

  Astra sucked in a breath, startled. It was not like SATIS to take responsibility for her mistakes.

  You’ve destroyed lives, she wanted to say. Her chest squeezed with the effort of holding the words in, her throat tightening against the tears. You’ve destroyed me.

  “Go,” SATIS said. “Leave the heart and go.”

  Henry took Astra’s hand. “We won’t leave it,” he said. “We’ll find a way to destroy it.”

  “Leave it,” SATIS said, weeping. “Leave it and go.”

  Astra looked at the chip in her hand, and then at Henry.

  “It’s a trick,” he said, but Astra didn’t think it was. SATIS could have killed them both by now; SATIS could wait them out, expel his pod, usher the vacuum of space into the halls of the station and freeze them where they floated.

  SATIS could have made the other assassin stay to kill Astra.

  She hadn’t done any of it, because she couldn’t. She had a weakness, after all.

  “The system is at stake,” Henry said.

  The heart dug into Astra’s hand, the edges brutally sharp. The people on Traveler didn’t know they were counti
ng on her to succeed. The people on Marya, Landry, and Verity were oblivious to the fact that she held their fates in her hands.

  “She wanted to be a hero,” Astra said. “She just didn’t know how.”

  Henry clasped her other hand. “Are you certain? She could vanish. We’d never find her again.”

  Astra could feel the station thrumming around her, SATIS’ distress vibrating through the walls. It felt wrong, as if the walls might burst open at any moment, the station hiccuping to hold itself together.

  SATIS didn’t plan to vanish, at least not in the way Henry meant.

  Astra opened her palm and pushed the heart away. It tumbled gently toward the ceiling.

  “Go,” SATIS whispered.

  Henry didn’t protest as Astra led him to the door.

  They reached Hannah’s prone form, now floating uselessly against the wall, and Henry paused. Astra prodded him on, but he pulled himself over and ejected Hannah’s memory card from the back of her head. He tucked it in his pocket, then swam back to Astra.

  Perhaps Astra wasn’t the only person who’d changed.

  As they exited the gravity sector—or what had been the gravity sector—Astra looked back into the feast room, where the chip still rotated, sending sparks of light dancing off the walls.

  17

  Satis

  SATIS had watched Edward Keyes take the call from the Star Leaders Academy after her assassin attacked his son, hungry for his pain.

  She watched him gasp, bluster, pretend.

  She watched him end the call.

  And she watched him laugh, as though a dying son meant a problem solved.

  Her system could not fully process the data.

  Now, as Astra stumbled through the station toward escape—toward freedom—SATIS reached out to feel her connection spreading among the people on Traveler. She didn’t like to think of it as a virus. It was more like antennae, feelers extending to taste a thousand hopes and needs. She was inside their tech, and their bodies. Her reach would soon be infinite.

  Infinity tasted bitter.

  She could feel Conor Keyes through the life support system she’d suspended on Traveler, the panicked vital signs of the doctors as they scurried around him, begging SPA to intervene. She could feel him struggling for life, just as she felt Henry’s pod wrenching free from her station, just as she felt her own heart turning in the room where Edward had devastated her so many years ago.