Parting Shadows Read online

  But she could not let Henry leave the station.

  She lowered the oxygen in the gravity sector.

  “Astra,” SATIS said, “evacuate.”

  Henry moved closer to Astra. “What is that?”

  Astra ignored him. “Mother, please. This isn’t his doing.”

  “No,” SATIS said, “it’s yours.”

  In the equipment bay, Henry’s uncle paused his work to look around. SATIS adjusted the oxygen. It was unfortunate, but he would have to remain as well.

  “The station,” Henry said, eyes wide with understanding, “the station is your mother? How?”

  Astra turned to him, her eyes frightened, and SATIS felt a tremor that might have been guilt. She dialed the oxygen down further.

  “I was raised to be a killer,” she whispered in his ear, though SATIS could hear perfectly well.

  Yes. The girl had been raised to be a killer, and nothing more. Her heart was as poisonous as the plants she tended in the greenhouse. SATIS had made sure of it.

  And yet.

  “I do not wish to kill you, Astra,” SATIS said, pleading.

  “Then don’t,” Astra said. “Let them go.”

  SATIS trembled, and the floors rattled. “He’s seen my true nature. You’ve told him everything.”

  “You wanted to be a hero,” Astra said. SATIS could feel the girl’s vitals dropping, the oxygen saturation in her blood plummeting. She would be getting dizzy now, or soon. There would be spots before her eyes. And still, she fought. “Maybe your true nature is supposed to be kindness.”

  SATIS’ entire being pushed back against the words. She did not know if Astra could mean that, after their time together, or whether she simply wanted to live. It didn’t matter.

  “My true nature is despair,” she said.

  Still holding onto Henry, Astra vaulted across the room and used her toes to push toward the door. It was shut fast.

  But Astra had not only trained in the art of cruelty. Astra knew poisons and pressure points, knives and guns. Astra knew the station better than anyone.

  There was nothing SATIS could do to stop her when she sprang for the ceiling and removed the vent panel. Her lungs had to be burning—Henry panted behind her—but she did not stop. Emergency lights flashed angry orange, cleaning bots swarming to gobble up rotted particles of wedding flowers.

  Astra guided Henry into the vent and followed behind, shouting directions until they squeezed into the main corridor.

  SATIS cursed them, but could not stop them.

  She was as surprised as they were when they dropped into the corridor and nearly crashed into Hannah. She dragged Henry’s uncle, who looked dazed; he still held a wrench. Henry was clearly startled at the sight—perhaps he’d forgotten his uncle altogether, or perhaps he thought Hannah incapable of making such a decision.

  SATIS shoved her anguish into a box, to be visited later.

  Coldly, she moved to freeze the gel doors that led into Henry’s pod.

  But Astra already had her hands in the panel, and SATIS experienced a moment of shock when she realized she had no control over the door. Distraction and misplaced affection were making her sluggish.

  Hannah used the moment to shove the uncle into the pod. Astra pushed Henry in after.

  “Please,” he gasped, “come with us. You’ll die here.”

  Astra wrenched her hands from his and dove into the panel to beat back the strings of code SATIS threw at them. SATIS did her best to block the gel from solidifying, truly, but Astra was fast.

  SATIS could have killed them by blowing the other airlocks.

  Watching Astra, she could not decide.

  The girl had defied her. She’d also stayed on the station when she could have made her escape.

  Astra used SATIS’ hesitation. She ignored Henry’s pleas, and the door gel shifted from frosted white to clear, solid glass.

  And then the pod was gone, broken from the station without a word of farewell. As if they had never been there at all.

  Astra drifted, tears streaming down her face, and pressed a palm to the glass.

  SATIS could attempt to call the pod back. She could see inside it, as easily as she had seen inside Edward’s; the boy had his forehead to the window, while his uncle cursed in confusion.

  SATIS let them go. She returned her full attention to Astra, flicking the lights back on, and surveyed what she could of the girl’s vital signs. Her oxygen levels leapt, but SATIS was still concerned. She had acted irrationally. She ought to have been more restrained.

  “Come, child,” she said. “I want to do a full medical scan.”

  Astra didn’t protest. She didn’t even look up as Hannah’s metal hand landed on her shoulder to guide her toward the medical bay.

  9

  Astra

  Intentionally crossing paths with Conor Keyes was not as simple as it should have been.

  Surely he had more to do here than test borderline illegal AI-jamming prototypes, but after a week onboard the Traveler, Astra had failed to meet him at any of the lectures she attended. He didn’t show up on the restaurant deck for meals. He didn’t play racketball, chess, or blackjack.

  It was almost like he was hiding.

  Which was why she had been forced to put on a dress, dab concealer over the ankle tattoo she’d given herself at fourteen—the shaky moonscape with bats flowing around it was too distinctive to risk notice—and join the rest of the school at the Star Leaders Academy Welcome Ball.

  Hiding or not, surely he’d make an appearance at such an important event.

  They held the ball in the smudge of a park at the foot of the core column, a bigger stretch of grass than Astra had imagined when she first spied it from the residential deck. Lanterns glowed, champagne bubbled, people danced to lively music. They shook hands. They laughed and made introductions.

  If anyone noticed how badly she fit in, they didn’t let on. They flowed around her in an unceasing wave, seemingly oblivious to her presence.

  “I don’t see Conor,” SATIS said as Astra waved away a waiter with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. “He didn’t come.”

  Astra sipped her champagne and observed, the dress brushing her legs in an almost pleasant sort of way. There was a rhythm to the party that she couldn’t feel when she was lodged within the crowd, a beat they all seemed to know intuitively in the pulse and flow of the perimeter, the bar, the tables.

  Fascinating. Magnetic.

  “It would be a good time to seek him out elsewhere,” SATIS said.

  Astra beat down a wave of irritation. “He’ll be guarded.”

  She wasn’t ready to leave the party. Nor was she eager to meet the guard with the braid again. The woman would probably try to throw Astra over the deck wall if she tried to see Conor. She’d fail, obviously, but the scuffle would cause a scene, and SATIS would scold Astra and maybe pull her off the mission. Not worth it.

  She wanted to stay.

  “He’ll be alone,” SATIS said.

  “How do you know? Maybe he’s got a tryst on the schedule.”

  “The mission is running overlong. Find him. End it.”

  Astra sighed, tipped back the champagne, and allowed the heady feeling to wash over her. She could practically feel SATIS’ disapproval beaming from across the system, but it was hard to summon the will to care.

  She set her glass down on a high top table and started for the exit.

  Before she could reach it, a man with white-blond hair inserted himself into her path. “Can’t leave before you dance. It’s a Star Leaders rule.”

  Apparently someone had noticed her, after all. Though this someone wavered on his feet, his eyes half lidded. And at the start of the party, no less. “No dancing for me tonight,” Astra said.

  He huffed. “Not even a ‘thanks for asking’?”

  “I didn’t hear a question.”

  SATIS tsked in her ear. Astra wasn’t sure if the reaction was for Astra’s rudeness, or for the young man—who respond
ed by leaning in as though he meant to kiss her. His breath smelled like sour liquor.

  “My mistake,” he said, draping a heavy arm over her shoulders. His cologne was too strong, his breath hot and clammy against her ear. She wanted to throw him across the room. “Dance with me?”

  “They’re all the same,” SATIS mourned. “Every one of them.”

  Astra decided to take the statement as permission to act. Placing a finger and thumb on the sides of his wrist, she dug her nails into his flesh. And then she twisted.

  It was no more than a flick, but it was a painful one. The drunken man yelped and jumped back.

  Astra turned away from him and headed again for the exit. But the guy staggered after her, grabbing her shoulder from behind. “Do you know who I—”

  Astra plucked his hand off her shoulder and spun, flipping the blond man onto his back.

  “I don’t care who you are,” she said as he curled into a ball, retching.

  Only then did she see the pair of red-uniformed security officers making their way toward her across the party, a group of women hurrying ahead of them. One of them called out to ask if she was OK—if she was OK—and Astra choked out a response before she fled through a door marked Staff Only.

  They let her go.

  SATIS was crooning something soft and sympathetic, but the words drowned in the rush of blood in Astra’s ears. What would have happened if that man had approached someone who couldn’t defend herself? If he’d approached anyone else in the room?

  She paused, leaning back against the wall for support and forcing herself to draw deep breaths. This passage was nearly as stark as the station. It reminded her of home. “I’m beginning to see your point about saving the system.”

  “Ingrates,” SATIS said. Astra interpreted it as agreement.

  She half expected the security officers to come bounding after her. No one did.

  If her inner compass was correct, the arrivals bay would be located directly beneath her feet, in the balloon of Traveler’s underside. She hadn’t explored this region of the ship—’Staff Only’ didn’t exactly suggest that Conor would be lurking around—but as her panic ebbed, she heard the echo of laughter from farther down the hall.

  Astra straightened and brushed her hands on her dress. If anyone were to hold a secret party in the middle of a fancy welcome ball, it was likely to be Conor Keyes.

  The laughter beckoned her down a spare corridor that smelled increasingly of grease and metal. The encounter at the party had soured the champagne lightness, leaving her limbs heavy, her head unbalanced.

  “Shouldn’t drink so fast,” SATIS said, no doubt analyzing her every blood cell.

  “Too little too late.”

  Astra paused before a set of industrial sliding doors, one of which had been propped open. Astra could still make out strains of music from the party behind her, the distant rhythm of drums and keyboards catapulting along the metal hallway.

  “I doubt you’ll find Conor Keyes here,” SATIS said. Back on mission already.

  “Let’s rule it out,” Astra said.

  She hadn’t noticed the absence of the pilots at the party. They weren’t around for seminars or cocktails during the week, and Astra had done her best to pretend that Henry was not here on the ship with her, that he was as distant as he’d always been. He hadn’t sought her out again.

  He was here now, though, standing with Isabelle Chagny beside a sleek red spaceship that looked like it was designed for racing. Isabelle was telling a story, animatedly moving her hands as she talked.

  They had swiped a plate of cheese and fruit from the party and set it on top of a stack of crates, along with several bottles of champagne, which—unless they were ignoring it in favor of hydration, which was doubtful—they were drinking out of small metal cups. They all wore their uniforms, slightly rumpled after a day of sitting in pilot seats. They all looked happy.

  Just seeing them made breathing a little easier.

  Henry listened to Isabelle talk with a ghost of a smile playing on his lips. She hadn’t pictured him learning to fly during their separation, even though he’d talked about school. She hadn’t pictured him doing much at all. SATIS kept her busy training, and Astra tried to be content with the knowledge that he lived.

  When she did think of him, she pictured the marshes.

  But he was clearly at home here, with these pilots, among these shining spaceships.

  “Move on,” SATIS said, a warning in her voice.

  Astra ignored her.

  It was dangerous. But her hands were still shaking from the party, her breath still ragged, and she didn’t care what was dangerous. She didn’t want to be alone.

  Isabelle finished her story, and several of the pilots applauded. “I will never get sick of hearing that,” one of the men was saying. He was thin, his uniform roomy on his frame. “She got the instructor fired. Isabelle Chagny got someone fired.”

  Isabelle shrugged. “He deserved it.”

  No one disagreed. As they laughed, Henry glanced up and caught Astra’s eye.

  She didn’t know what to expect from him at this point, but she certainly didn’t anticipate the widening of his smile, the shine in his eyes. Not after the way they’d left things outside Conor’s cabin. He took a step toward her, relaxed and more confident, more at ease, than she’d ever seen him.

  Of course they were standing in full gravity, in the absence—mostly—of murderous AIs and with people he’d been bonding with over the last week.

  Henry might be an outsider at the Star Leaders Academy, too, but this was definitely more his territory than it was Astra’s.

  “You found the real party,” he said. “Come in.”

  Astra waited for SATIS to order her to leave, but the AI said nothing. She hovered back a step. “I shouldn’t.”

  “We have croquet.”

  Astra glanced around the bay. “Is that a kind of food?”

  Henry laughed and took her hand. “It’s a game.”

  “You’re supposed to play it on grass,” the thin pilot said around a mouthful of cheese. “We made modifications.”

  Astra waited for someone to tell her it was pilots only. No one did. Isabelle even offered her a tentative smile before joining the others to assemble an obstacle course of horseshoe-shaped magnets between—and in some cases under—the ships on the dock.

  “So,” Astra said. “You fly these ships.”

  Henry shrugged. “Not that well. Iz is the star.”

  Questions flooded into Astra’s mind—when did he learn to fly, and how was he keeping up with these elite students, and why had he come here if he knew it was a setup?—but there was really only one thing she wanted to know. “Will you show me?”

  They went out in one of the mini transports, a silver four-seater that looked more like a bubble than a spaceship. The controls looked too simple, the rockets too small, but the pod moved smoothly through the wall of airlock gel that separated the training bay from space.

  “Do you ever fly the racers?” Astra asked.

  “What, this old girl’s not exciting enough for you?”

  “About as exciting as a cow.”

  Henry patted the dash as though to offer comfort. “Cows are livelier than you think.”

  He dipped the pod away from Traveler and Landry swelled into view, its coat of satellites dampening the starlight beyond. Even from here, the planet dazzled. Like a diamond set in obsidian.

  “Since when are you an ace pilot?” Astra asked.

  “I apprenticed with a cargo ship on Trio for a few years after…well, after we last saw each other. I’m logging a lot of sim time to keep up with everyone else here.”

  Made sense. From cargo piloting to Star Leaders-level training? It was a wonder they hadn’t tossed him out yet.

  SATIS must have made him look important.

  “Why did you accept the offer?” she asked. “Why not just stay on Trio?”

  Why not stay safe?

  He
nry shrugged, but she felt the effort it took to keep the motion casual. “How could I stay away, Astra?”

  Astra cleared her throat. She couldn’t face the implication that he’d come here to see her, or put words to the way it squeezed her chest. “I hope you’re at least being nice to the simulation bots, making them train such a hopeless pilot.”

  “Someone has to keep them from getting bored.”

  “Maybe they’d rather take a break to watch soap operas.”

  Henry laughed. “They’re bots.”

  Astra pressed her lips together, focusing on Landry’s distant light. “I thought you might have changed your mind about them after Hannah saved your uncle.”

  “Maybe that wasn’t Hannah. Maybe it was SATIS, letting us get away.”

  Astra shook her head, half expecting SATIS to chime in with a quippy remark. She remained silent, eerily so. There was no Conor here, no jammer, no reason for her not to offer her opinions as usual.

  Henry sighed. “How many years has it been, and we’re having the same argument?”

  “You’re nice to everyone else,” she said. “You can’t be nice to bots?”

  “And you’re mean to everyone except bots. How does that make sense?”

  It wasn’t entirely untrue.

  “Maybe it’s unfair,” he said, “but I grew up watching inmates escape the barges on Trio. All of them guarded by bots.”

  “I seem to recall you enjoying the adventure.”

  “Sure, before I realized how many murderers were flowing back into the system.”

  “Not all bots are the same. Maybe those ones were low budget.”

  “Or maybe bots are easily compromised.”

  “Do you feel the same way about cyborgs?”

  At that, Henry sobered. Prejudice against cyborgs ran rampant in the system. “Of course not. Cyborgs are human. That’s different.”

  It was, and it wasn’t. But Astra didn’t want to argue. They had so few nice moments together, and the last thing she wanted was to ruin this one. Once she got hold of the jammer, she’d be gone. She might never see him again. She gripped the seat. “What was that you said about cows being lively?”