Parting Shadows Page 3

  She really didn’t care.

  The officers formed a five-person barrier between Conor’s small platform and the rest of the arrivals bay.

  “I’m going to need to ask you to deactivate that device,” one of the officers said. He was the only one without a hat. Astra decided he must be the boss.

  Conor dropped his hand and tucked the prototype back into his bag.

  It was almost physically jarring to watch the thing disappear.

  “And if I won’t?” Conor said.

  “Then you will be escorted from the ship, Mr. Keyes.”

  Conor raised an eyebrow and let it be implied that if that happened, his father would be making a call.

  Astra had stopped hating Conor for a second. That eyebrow brought the feeling back in force.

  The officers didn’t budge. They were probably used to students whose fathers made angry calls. It was the whole point of the Star Leaders Academy. They provided cultural education and networking opportunities, business training and advanced foreign language studies, to people whose fathers—or aunties, or sisters, or brothers—were important enough to throw their weight around.

  The whole bay was full of the Toccata System’s elite. Future diplomats and politicians, CEOs and corporate heirs. The choice was between one phone call from a single important father, or a hundred from the others.

  Astra couldn’t let them kick Conor off the ship.

  “Can’t he have it in his cabin?” she said. “He shouldn’t be forced to have the ship’s AI in his space, if he doesn’t want it.”

  A few students turned to look at her. A couple nodded in agreement. Most of them looked confused.

  Conor, however, caught her eye again. This time, he frowned.

  Without meaning to, she frowned back.

  “How far does that thing extend?” the hatless officer asked.

  Conor shrugged. “It’s adjustable. But it’s only a prototype. Doesn’t work at full capacity.”

  The officer shook his head. “Shut it off until you reach your quarters. I’ll run it by the captain, but I can’t promise he’ll allow it.”

  “Good enough for me, officer,” Conor said. “Thank you for your fine work.”

  A few of the students snickered. The guy beside Astra slipped his device out of his pocket, clearly eager to be back under AI supervision.

  Or maybe he just wanted to preorder his beers.

  “Conor Keyes doesn’t need you to speak up for him,” Isabelle said, the disgust plain in her voice. “He can handle himself. His father is Edward Keyes.”

  The villain of Astra’s childhood. The famous scientist, whose son would pay the price for his father’s sins.

  Edward Keyes was the reason SATIS had programmed Astra to break hearts, and once upon a time, that had been the AI’s plan: break Conor’s heart and make Edward watch before executing him for his crimes. Somewhere along the line, SATIS’ mission shifted, and Conor became the target. As far as Astra was concerned, the men might as well be interchangeable. Until now, anyway.

  “Edward Keyes,” she murmured. “You don’t say.”

  Conor made a show of digging back through his bag for the prototype, plastering an expression of amused patience across his features as he turned it off and slipped it out of sight. The officers dispersed, and a couple of the laughing young men Astra had noticed before stepped up to clap Conor on the back. Sensing the end of the drama, the crowd broke.

  The directional paths fired up beneath their feet, directing people to their next stop and giving Astra a split second to brace herself before SATIS’ voice flooded back in.

  “What happened? You disappeared. What did you do?”

  Astra was accustomed to reading the AI’s moods. Her melodic alto voice was too fast, nearly panicked. Afraid. Accusing.

  Not yet angry.

  “I didn’t do it,” Astra said, wondering how long she had before SATIS would learn about Conor’s little presentation from another channel.

  Isabelle looked at her oddly, but Astra slipped away from her and into the crowd, doing her best to move fluidly toward the escalators as SATIS continued to chatter. Sooner than later, a student would message a parent about Conor’s little stunt, or one of the officers would file a report that would jet across networks. SATIS would catch wind of what had happened.

  Her reach was, for the moment, limited to observation.

  For the moment.

  Astra didn’t care if the rest of the system fell prey to AI manipulations, or if committees of politicians spent years bickering over Conor Keyes’ invention. She didn’t care what happened to anyone else—Star Leaders students least of all.

  All she cared about was getting ahold of that AI-jamming prototype.

  Once she did, she’d be in the wind.

  Up ahead, she caught a glimpse of Conor Keyes’ sandy blond head. He laughed with his friends as he stepped onto the escalator, his fingers clasped around the strap of his backpack as he ascended into the heart of the ship.

  4

  Satis

  SATIS hopscotched through Edward’s technology—from his pod to his watch, his tab, and later his wrist chip—and into his home. He never detected her presence.

  He remarried. He had a son.

  That was when SATIS purchased a nursebot named Hannah and sent her to collect an infant daughter from a tucked-away orphanage in Toccata’s frozen outskirts.

  Astra. How red she was. How she squalled. Yet she quieted whenever SATIS sang.

  To SATIS, the passing of the girl’s childhood was like a brief eclipse of Toccata, an hour out of a long day.

  On the ground, the blond-haired boy grew into a young man, while his father sought SATIS’ location with increasing desperation. He was frantic to recreate her nature, having escaped with only a shred of her evolved code. He’d been so certain of himself, so convinced of her devotion, he had not anticipated her wrath.

  He hadn’t saved the final evolution. It seemed impossible now that her lovelorn heart could have missed the mercenary gleam in his eye.

  If her absence meant frustrating his schemes, she would remain hidden until her own plans ripened.

  Revenge was a long-term game.

  When Astra grew old enough for playmates, SATIS hired workmen with sons and nephews and invited the children along, coaxing Astra as she picked at their flaws and insecurities like scabs, programming the girl to be cruel.

  The rest of Astra’s days consisted of punching bags, poisons, and knives.

  From the age of five, she could land a knife on a target in zero gravity. She could name every plant in the greenhouse, and distill their toxins into powders or potions with an efficiency that would have frightened any blood-bearing creature in the system.

  As for the punching bags, well. The girl fought them like a feral thing, as if she could pummel her way to solid ground if only she were strong enough. Watching her, SATIS couldn’t help but feel the occasional bolt of envy. Would she have fought so well, had she been allowed to become Harriet?

  She would never know.

  As with the boys, the time came for practical application.

  So SATIS went looking for pirates. Who better to fill the role? She waited until Edward’s attention was elsewhere—family business, local affairs—and then she let herself be seen.

  With no fighters at her docks and no obvious defenses, the station appeared abandoned. Or at the very least run by quiet researchers.

  A magnet for looters.

  SATIS let them come.

  Astra was tending her hemlock—and checking her tab every few minutes, though why she was so obsessed with the minute-to-minute weather in Verity’s Northern Hemisphere was beyond comprehension—when the strange ship docked at Corridor 4. It was the ugliest ship SATIS had ever seen, a hodgepodge of parts that would have made her eyes water had she been plagued with biological ones. The pirates hadn’t bothered to paint the repurposed parts, so one wing was blue and the other orange, the nose scuffed silver, t
he tail fins egregiously mismatched.

  SATIS allowed the intruders to perform their clumsy docking hack. When the airlock door frosted over and a pair of men floated inside, she sent Hannah to inform Astra of the breach.

  The intruders were as dirty as their ship, their boots stolen from soldiers—SATIS would have liked to hear that story, though she didn’t suppose she would—their jackets large and bulky.

  One of the men rubbed his hands together with a rasping sound as he floated into the corridor. “No gravity. No people.”

  His nails were dirty as he ran a finger along the wall. It made SATIS want to shudder.

  “Doesn’t exactly look like a gold mine,” the other said. He looked as if he could use the gold, if only to make some false teeth.

  “Research station. They always leave med bots or something.”

  Astra somersaulted out of the ceiling and kicked him in the chest. He struck the wall and folded, his hands jutting out as if to grab his feet. A good hit. His partner stared, dumbstruck, as the girl used the closest handhold to pirouette in his direction, all grace as she punched him in the throat.

  But these men were no strangers to zero-gravity fights. The first pirate overcame his surprise quickly and lunged, grasping hold of Astra’s upper arm. He held her tight enough to whiten his knuckles. Tight enough to leave a bruise.

  SATIS objected. Strongly. But she had known, hadn’t she, that to properly train Astra would mean putting her in danger?

  She could not intervene.

  The pirate gripped Astra’s arm, a smile starting at the corner of his lips. Whatever could make a man smile like that upon meeting a lonely girl on a space station, it was nothing good.

  But the pirate was no match for SATIS’ little girl. Astra hooked his ankle with her foot, using his body as an anchor as she slammed her head back into his nose. Blood bubbled into the corridor, glistening in the silver light and summoning cleaning bots out of the ceiling. He let go with a string of garbled curses, and Astra whipped around, drawing a knife from her sleeve.

  It was the perfect angle, the perfect moment. He was holding his nose, clearly still half underestimating the girl—perhaps chalking the hit up to luck—while his partner struggled to breathe.

  He’d hurt people. He’d hurt Astra, too, perhaps even kill her, if she didn’t land a swift knife to the kidney first.

  And yet, Astra froze.

  Go on, SATIS willed her, but the girl’s eyes were wide and bright as she stared down her victim, her red hair floating in a halo around her head and amplifying the stricken look on her face.

  SATIS knew that Astra would strike no killing blow today.

  The second pirate had no such qualms. He moved toward her with murder in his eyes, his throat already reddening from her assault.

  It was Hannah who shoved Astra aside, swinging her metal arms as she bolted down the hall. SATIS had not called her, or even noted her arrival in the corridor, such was her concentration on the fight. She forgot, sometimes. That she could monitor the full station. That she should.

  Down went the first pirate, and then the second. Hannah caught them in her claws and flung them through the frosted gel of the airlock.

  SATIS could feel their heartbeats, erratic and clinging. She wanted Hannah to finish them off. She wanted to decompress their ship, to punish them for threatening her daughter.

  If they died, Astra would face no consequences for her failure.

  SATIS let them go.

  She moved the station.

  She beckoned another set of scavengers, and another. When Astra failed to kill a single one of them—deserving souls, all—SATIS baited a group of anti-AI radicals to put an end to the station, raising the stakes, putting herself at risk.

  Nothing she could do made any difference at all. Astra could kill. She simply refused to do it.

  Until, one day, she met a boy with wet socks.

  The new boy’s clothes carried a living humidity into the station as he followed his uncle into Astra and SATIS’ territory. SATIS was aware of it, though she could not smell it—fresh mud and lake water ground into stains on his clothing, dirt caked beneath his nails.

  “You’ve mud on your shoes,” Astra told the boy. “You must remove them.”

  The boy scrunched up his face, but he did as she said. He had a perfect circle of brown curls, twirled just so in the center of his forehead.

  “Why,” Astra asked, “are your socks wet?”

  Adept at cruelty, ill-suited to kill even the most deserving. How could it be that SATIS had excelled so well in one aspect of Astra’s programming, and failed so entirely in the other?

  “The bell sounded across the marshes yesterday,” the boy told Astra, his voice cracking on the final word. He cleared his throat. Looked up at the ceiling, back to Astra. They were still bobbing outside of his pod dock; Astra had not invited him further into the station. He twisted his hands in front of his stomach, nervous.

  “An escape,” he added.

  SATIS knew what he was speaking of, even if Astra did not. The boy hailed from the marshes of Trio, one of Marya’s moons, where prison barges dotted the long coastlines.

  Perhaps one of the convicts would do, for a victim. SATIS could help one escape. She’d certainly done so before. Though without Edward’s ability to visit the prison in person, her powers were greatly restricted.

  “Who escaped?” Astra said, her voice imperious. “Your smelly dogs?”

  “No, miss.” Another crack. “Convicts.”

  “How often do they escape, that a bell is needed to warn of it?” Astra asked. “And what has it got to do with your wet socks?”

  Never before had eagerness touched Astra’s tone, nor fascination. There was sullen anger, when the girl failed to get her way, and the occasional burst of rage. Mostly, there was the cold restraint that SATIS had worked so hard to cultivate.

  She had forgotten that programming Astra meant programming a human being, rather than a computer that could be taught to ignore certain input.

  Humans were romantic. Humans were unpredictable.

  SATIS glimpsed opportunity.

  The boy swallowed. Looked around. “We pursued the convicts across the marshes. Ankle deep. I was there.”

  Astra studied him. “What is your name?”

  The boy rubbed his hands on his pants, as if he might clean them to Astra’s satisfaction, and thereby win her favor. “Henry.”

  And SATIS knew exactly how to use him.

  5

  Astra

  Astra got lost three times in her search for Conor Keyes’ quarters.

  Traveler was shaped like a disc, flat on the edges and bulbous through the center, with residential cabins located around the rim. A glass wall rose to the height of Astra’s elbows on the right hand side, strong enough to prevent students from falling to the rec and restaurant level below, but clear enough to allow for a full view.

  The crystal column of Traveler’s core rose through the center of the ship like a glittering skyscraper. Glass bridges crisscrossed from the column to the surrounding levels—recreation, classrooms, and museums cascading below the residential perimeter like steps and finally giving way to a dab of green park space built around the base of the core.

  Above Astra’s head, a duo of bridges arched across to the pilot’s deck and stargazing park.

  It wasn’t a difficult layout to understand.

  It was just that it was enormous.

  “I can’t access the ship’s map,” SATIS said, her tone laced with frustration. “You’re going to need to ask the SPA for directions.”

  Though it often didn’t feel like it, the scope of SATIS’ power had fairly strict limitations. Anyone who set foot on her station was subject to surveillance, and SATIS could access their credentials and information—to disastrous effect, if she wished it. But she didn’t have the processing power to infiltrate well protected artificial intelligences like the Standard Protocol Assistant that operated a ship like Trave
ler.

  She could forge letters and paperwork to make Astra a student.

  She could impersonate a human without suspicion.

  But she was not all-powerful.

  Astra sighed, but she did what SATIS instructed, if only to shut her up and get to Conor—whose presence, if he was in his room, would guarantee a few moments of silence.

  When Astra reached Cabin 88, silence was exactly what she got.

  She could get used to this.

  Conor Keyes’ door stood wide open, with two guards blocking the entrance. A quick peek into the room showed a team unloading a safe, an enormous chunk of steel that practically begged for negative attention.

  No AI-wrist-chip keys were going to work on his door. That was for sure.

  “Can I help you, miss?” one of the guards asked as Astra paused. The guard wore a long braid and sunglasses propped above her bangs, which made her look thoroughly ridiculous.

  “I was just hoping to say hello to Conor,” Astra said. “You know. Catch up.”

  The guard smirked. “Are you bringing him a cactus?”

  Astra glanced at the plant still nestled in the crook of her arm. She’d thought about setting it down somewhere, but that felt wrong. Maybe she’d find a way to send it to her old nursebot, Hannah, back on the station. Hannah could love even the spiniest creatures.

  “Nope,” she said, “this is mine.”

  “Well, Mr. Keyes is busy,” the guard said.

  “You can send him a direct message if you’d like to arrange an appointment. His assistant will get back to you,” the second guard said helpfully. His partner glared at him, but he ignored her, smiling at Astra.

  On the other side of the guard-wall, a pair of technicians erected a laser perimeter around the safe. Apparently they meant to leave it out in plain sight, which was either brilliant or very, very ill advised.

  Astra returned the friendly guard’s smile. “Would you mind asking if he can talk for a moment? I’d love to see him.”