Eclipse the Skies Read online

  He was trying to intimidate her, but it was backfiring. Nema was giving her more intel than General Adams ever had.

  “Careful,” she said. “Are you sure you want to be telling me all this?”

  “Normally I wouldn’t be sharing such sensitive information with the same brat who destroyed my battle jets.” He flashed her a charming smile. “But I hear your claws have been trimmed.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m not a cat.” She was a Blood Wolf.

  The corners of Nema’s mouth quirked up stiffly, a grin that hid a grimace.

  They scowled at each other in silence until Knives walked down the ramp of the shuttle, stretching his limbs. He stopped in front of the captain and sighed. “Do I have to salute?” he asked.

  Captain Nema clapped him on the shoulder. “Nice to see you, kid.”

  Knives nodded. “I’m glad you’re here. The general has called a meeting. We’re required to attend.” He flicked up a holoscreen displaying a schedule invitation.

  Thank Deus, Ia thought. That meant she could leave, grab a bite to eat at the canteen, maybe even find a place to shower. She had already turned to walk away when Knives called out to her.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Instantly, she quickened her pace. She had a gut feeling about what he was going to say next.

  Knives’s voice boomed. “Can someone please escort Ia to the officers’ conference room?”

  Aaron closed in on her escape, blocking her from entering the next transport pod to the canteen.

  She glared at the borg. Of course he had to follow orders, even if he was told to sit on a toilet somewhere for hours straight.

  “Orders are orders,” Aaron said unapologetically.

  She glanced over her shoulder at Knives. “Nice try,” he said.

  A few steps behind him, Captain Nema watched her, smiling. She knew what he was thinking. The Blood Wolf had been declawed after all.

  The conference room was ridiculous. And by ridiculous, she meant grandiose. Each person stood on their own hovering platform, which came together with the rest to form a large floating circle. What was wrong with sitting around a table?

  The platforms were equipped with their own podiums, but Ia chose to sit, resting back on her arms and kicking her legs over the edge.

  Ia looked over the officers surrounding her. Some she knew because she had seen their angry faces as her starjet rocketed past them with their cargo and resources in tow. Others she recognized from the intel meetings on Aphelion, but instead of holostreaming in, they were there in the flesh. This must be a very important meeting.

  The general’s platform was positioned to her left.

  “What am I doing here?” Ia hissed at him.

  “You wanted information,” he said. “I’m giving it to you.”

  A couple platforms away, Nema watched her with alert eyes. Thankfully, Knives was in between them, lessening the effect of the captain’s stare. Knives stood there, stiff as a pole. Most definitely because his father was there, and he had to.

  “Let us begin.” General Adams looked over to an older woman, her gray hair trimmed down to a short crew cut. Her eyebrows were elegant, but her eyes were sharp. “First of all, I’d like to thank Headmaster Talmo for hosting this meeting.”

  Headmaster Brigada Talmo leaned forward on her podium. “Of course,” Talmo replied. “We are saddened to hear about the incident at Aphelion. A true cornerstone to our institution. But, like time itself, all things are ever changing.”

  Next to her, Knives bristled.

  “We are glad to extend our protection to you all,” Headmaster Talmo stated.

  Ia could tell there was a huge conflict between the two academies, and probably all of the academies in the Commonwealth. It was a weakness. To be fragmented instead of unified. All they needed was one dangerous idea to wedge apart the space between them, and that was it.

  A middle-aged gentleman, whose missing arm had been replaced with a chrome prosthetic, chimed in. “Let’s get on with it. We all know what we’re here to discuss. Bastian’s passing is causing quite the stir.”

  A murmur traveled around the room like a wave, until Talics Banyan—the Minister of Defense and the oldest of the group—pounded his fist on the surface of his podium. “If only he had destroyed that thing, GodsEye would never have gotten into the wrong hands.”

  Ia glanced back and forth at everyone’s faces, trying to piece together the heat of their words, their arguments, the little cracks and fissures that could become deep and never-ending chasms.

  “The years have confused you,” the general said. “I believe you were the one who suggested keeping it under lock and key in case we’d find future use for it.”

  Ia cocked her head. If she wasn’t mistaken, the general was actually defending Aphelion’s old headmaster.

  “Bastian’s work has improved gate technology more than any other laboratory in the Commonwealth—both private and government-funded. Bridges connect people, not divide them,” the general said.

  Banyan held up his finger and answered, “Connect systems, yes. Galaxies, even. But universes—that’s of the highest order. In the realm of Deus herself.”

  Ia’s eyes widened. Was that what Bastian was working on? Of course Einn wanted it, but the bigger question was why. Why would he want to open up a door to another universe?

  “You’ve seen what happened last time,” Banyan continued. “We can’t let that happen again.”

  Ia raised an eyebrow. “Last time?”

  The general tapped on his holowatch and pulled up a screen. Ia stared at the first frame. It was surveillance footage. Words were stamped across the bottom of the scene.

  Project Threshold – Location: GodsEye

  Confidential Status – Category 10

  05.27.8901 1852

  Ia stared at the date. That was twenty years ago.

  Captain Nema stirred at his podium. “Are you sure we should be showing this to her?”

  “She needs to understand what’s at stake, so we can stop the madman who wants to re-create it.”

  She caught Knives’s attention. What is this? she mouthed. He typed something and then pointed to her podium where a new holoscreen appeared. She read the word over and over in her head. Fugue.

  Her eyebrows raised. That was where Knives and Bastian had encountered Einn.

  The general pressed the corner of his screen, and the still image came to life. The camera eye was positioned to focus on the center of a huge white room where two half circles were placed opposite each other. Cables ran off frame to an unknown power source. At the corners of the screen, she noticed a reflection. The camera was behind a thick pane of clear glass. It was then that she realized she was witnessing the beginnings of an experiment.

  Bastian’s voice rose up from behind the camera. “Trial #283J. Increased the amount of charge by a factor of 9, hoping that it will be enough to pry the fissure open.”

  The archways spun slowly at first, but with each passing second, they gained a burst of momentum and were soon rotating at such a velocity that the arches themselves blurred, the lines appearing everywhere and all at once. A shadow of an orb. The structural beams wobbled from the speed, and when they looked like they were at a breaking point, something tremendous happened. It was tiny at first. But the intensity of it made everyone around her breathe in with a collective gasp as the tiny speck of light stretched longer and longer, like a slash of bright white through the orb’s center. As it tore open, she could see the faintest illuminations of a sky much like the one over her home planet, Cōcha—the one that she was named after and the same one that was destroyed when she was young.

  She saw emerald-green fields that reached far and wide to rock structures that spiraled to distant heights in the background. The vista blossomed before her in full color at first, then faded to shadow, back to color, then monotone gray, in an erratic cycle. It was as if she were viewing everything within a prism, t
he colors shifting and the image distorting whenever she switched angles.

  And then something else appeared. A shape. A length of dangerous limbs, surrounding a muscled torso. A haze of a figure.

  She remembered the story Knives told that day at lecture, the one that was supposed to scare all the new cadets. It was of a monster who ripped apart Fugue. Back then, she had imagined something like the Half-Man from the nursery rhymes or the NiteVost from myths.

  But now she knew she was wrong.

  She stared at the figure, her eyes sifting through the shadows until finally she saw that it wasn’t a thing at all, but a man. With fox-like eyes, a regal nose, and a furious expression ripping across his lips.

  Suddenly, the bridge to the other universe widened, and spirals of an alien black mass spilled into the laboratory like an invasion. Predatory tentacles grasped for anything they could reach—equipment, cables, even lashing out at the thick glass that separated the room from the scientists observing behind the camera. It was an unknown beast ready to devour everything from the bottom up.

  “Shut it off!” “Power everything down!” she heard people screaming on the recording.

  But despite the horror, Ia’s gaze was still fixed on the figure who stood in the center of all that chaos. That man. She couldn’t even blink for fear she would lose sight of him. And all the memories started flooding back.

  This man used to sing to her. This man pressed the blood-red feather to her heart whenever the storm clouds brewed overhead. This man had abandoned her and her brother many, many years ago.

  It was her father.

  She understood it all now. Why Einn was after this type of tech. And her brother, who still wore their father’s white hearts on his collar, would tear apart the universe to find him.

  CHAPTER 13

  BRINN

  THE SECOND THEY LANDED, Brinn went through all the streams searching for news of the riots, but she couldn’t find anything. Even that first headline had disappeared. It was as if her imagination had made it all up. She called her brother, and when he didn’t pick up, she called her parents. No one answered. She looked around at her fellow cadets, none of them from Nova Grae. She had no one to ask. No one to cry to. She felt like she was fading away.

  Besides, the cadets in her class were all Citizens. None of them would sympathize with those protesting for refugee rights. They would be rooting for the other side, the same side they had chosen to lay their lives down for once they graduated.

  So Brinn remained quiet, her fear in step beside her as they were ushered down to the ground for a tour of the academy museum.

  The museum was domed by a large glass roof, so the light from above flooded in, illuminating everything from old vessels from the Uranium War to early prototypes of warp drives, now obsolete according to today’s standards. A huge amount of history was displayed before her. It would have excited her a year ago, thrilled her to learn as much as she could about the Commonwealth, but now she didn’t have the heart to even read the words on the displays. History, she now knew, often had a way of ignoring certain facts to rosy up the truth.

  Brinn looked around at the Aphelion cadets, still wearing their academy emblem on the sleeve of their flight suits. Only a handful of them remained. She counted no more than forty in their group who’d decided to stay after the Armada lay waste to Aphelion. The news of the attack was too big to keep under wraps. The media had caught wind of it the day after they had broken free from the Armada’s control and landed safely on AG-9.

  Despite the media’s constant questioning, the Star Force was tight-lipped with their official reports in order to maintain a sense of control over the situation. Everyone blamed refugee rebels for the attack, and the Commonwealth was fine with letting that story stand. To the conservatives on the Council, it was fuel to sway the public as the vote to repeal the Sanctuary Act approached. There was tension in the air, and now, being here on the capital planet of the Olympus Commonwealth, Brinn felt it a hundredfold.

  The museum was open to the public, so their tour intersected with the paths of museum visitors who were admiring the displays of engines and medals along with them. A lot of them, she could tell, were too distracted to even look at the exhibit.

  Brinn felt it as they passed. Their eyes, lingering on her for seconds too long.

  She reached back to raise the hood of her sweater to cover up her navy-blue hair. Liam stopped her, his fingers touching her forearm, gently nudging her hands back down.

  It’s okay, he mouthed. She nodded, directing her focus on him and pretending she didn’t care that these people were slicing at her with their stares.

  Her holowatch, set to quiet mode, flashed upon her wrist. She looked down at the new message, and despite all her worries, she smiled.

  It was from Angie.

  Behind you.

  Brinn swiveled around, letting the rest of the class pass her by. Angie stood before her, red lacquered lips grinning from ear to ear.

  “You finally made it!” Angie squealed.

  Brinn gawked at her, and then her eyes began to water. A year ago when they were both in primaries together, she tried so hard to stay out of Angie’s path for fear of being bullied by her. Brinn had never thought the sight of Angie would bring her to tears—at least not the tears of joy she was crying right now. Angie was her only connection to home.

  Brinn rushed toward her, her feet trudging against the floor from the shock of seeing her friend.

  “Oh, don’t,” Angie said as she wrapped her arms around Brinn in a hug. She took a step back, using her sleeves to wipe away any stray tears. “Come on, now,” she said. “Crying will make your eyes look red.”

  “I didn’t know you were assigned here.”

  Angie nodded. “Nauticanne accepted my transfer, of course. It was all my dad’s doing. He wanted to keep a closer eye on me, especially with him in session at Council.”

  They followed the tour as it funneled into the main atrium. The walls of the lobby were paneled with windows that reached from the floor to the ceiling, giving them a clear view of what was going on outside. An anti-refugee protest had gathered in the large park across the street. They held signs, each filled with discriminatory slurs, while a man with a megaphone screamed for Citizens’ rights. Brinn felt a wave of panic rip through as if all her bones had turned to stone.

  Angie stood shoulder to shoulder with Brinn, staring out at the same sight. “It’s nothing like what’s going on at home.”

  Brinn stiffened, and the terror was back rippling up her spine. She thought back to the headlines she saw before leaving Aphelion, the same ones that gripped her with worry throughout the flight.

  “You know what happened? There isn’t even a murmur of it on the ArcLite.”

  Angie clenched her jaw. “They’re trying to sweep it under the rug. That’s probably why.”

  So it was real. The protests, the outbreak of violence in the streets of her home. Brinn felt like she couldn’t move; the people around her were pressing toward her like walls of a tomb. “Angie, I haven’t heard from my family.”

  “Oh, Brinn…” Angie grabbed her hands. But that was all she said. Not They’ll be fine. Everything will be okay. Perhaps because she knew she’d be wrong.

  All of Brinn’s thoughts screamed at once, and it was too much noise. She pulled away from Angie and shouldered through the crowd. She didn’t care about the looks they gave her, the muttered phrases. Miffing mungbringer. Dirty ref.

  Brinn pushed her way through the main entrance and took deep gulps of fresh air, her lungs starved for oxygen. She tried to regulate her breathing, to quell her heart, which was threatening to knife its way out of her rib cage.

  It’s okay. He’s safe. It’s okay. He’s safe.

  She flipped through her contact list and dialed home. Immediately, a screen popped up with her mother’s face. Her eyes were stained red.

  Too many tears can do that, Angie had warned.

  Brinn heard only
bits and pieces of what her mother said next. “I’ve been…Hurt all those people…. You need to know.” It was as if waves of water had crashed onto her, drowning out a few words at a time.

  Brinn pressed her palms to her eyes, trying to block everything out, but somehow her mother’s last words pierced through to find her. “Faren’s gone.”

  Brinn’s body went limp. Her arms swung loose at her sides, and her head fell back to look at the sky. Tears stung her eyes, and she let them. Blurred shapes of passersby walked around her, not even bothering to ask her if she needed help. She stared past them, forcing herself to look straight at the sun hovering in the sky.

  The sky was clear. No clouds. Nothing except for a strange black stain in the teal blue.

  But before she could make sense of what this anomaly was, an explosion thundered above, so loud that it rocked the ground underneath her feet.

  CHAPTER 14

  KNIVES

  “LET’S GO! LET’S GO!” The orders flew all around him. “Ready for your squadron assignments.”

  Knives took in the view from the large service entryway that lay open at the end of the flight deck, and that slash ripping through the atmosphere. The shape of an oblong circle, its center housed a different sky with constellations not even close to being near this star system. A wormhole, he realized. But without a gate? How was that possible?

  They had still been in the conference room when an earth-shattering boom interrupted the tail end of their meeting, the noise cutting off the general’s final remarks. The sound crackled in the air for minutes afterward. It was only when Knives got to the flight deck that he realized the source of the noise was this thing tearing through the horizon.

  The general ordered them to carry out the natural disaster protocol, but whatever this was, Knives was certain it wasn’t natural. All officers of rank were ordered to the flight deck to prep their ships. It didn’t include any of the cadets, and it certainly didn’t include Ia.

  That was why he was surprised to see her zigzagging underneath the wings of the parked jets awaiting flight.