But the chaos was everywhere; it seemed whatever star system she had jumped into was embroiled in an outright orgy of war. At first, she thought it was a trinary star system, an alien land with one more sun than even her own Drenard, but eventually she recognized the other two glowing, fire-stricken orbs to be planets. Former planets, anyway. Both were being devoured by all-encompassing blazes, almost as if the crust of each had opened up to reveal the molten mantle beneath.

Anlyn headed up the star system’s orbital plane, hoping to escape the flat battleground where most of the activity was taking place. She threw the accelerator all the way forward and felt her body sag back into her seat with the ever-increasing velocity.

What have I done? she thought to herself.

Red alarms winked across her dashboard in answer. Anlyn fought to unravel them, her eyes darting from one to the next, none of the alarms ever having come up during her brief training regimen:

MISSILE LOCK_ HOSTILE TARGETS_ PLASMA SIGNATURES_

Her hands shook as they hovered over the hundreds of keys and knobs on the dash, so few of which she knew how to operate. The trembling worked its way up her arms, through her shoulders, back into her heart, and all the way to her legs. Anlyn wrapped her arms around herself, trying to hold her body still, trying to prevent herself from flying apart like the distant planets, quaking from their onslaught. She pulled her knees up to her chin, dug her heels into the seat, and tucked her head down, quivering and crying.

And then the first missile struck.

The ferocious blast vaporized one wing and ripped the fuselage in half. Anlyn was slammed into her flight harness, the pilot’s suit coping with a majority of the Gs, but not all of them. Her head whipped to the side, her arms and legs fortuitously protected by her tight fetal position as the wounded Bern Interceptor spun out of control around her, the physical whirlwind of disintegrating machinery exploding into the cosmos.

A bolt of plasma ripped through the Interceptor next, punching a clean hole, ringed in red and dripping sparks, right through the ship’s body. Anlyn heard her visor snap shut automatically, cutting off the banging of steel and the whine of a dozen alarms. The sound of air moving, of a tiny fan somewhere in her suit circulating her precious oxygen, was all she heard besides her heartbeat.

The end had come for her, she realized. Bodi had been right. She wouldn’t last a second out in the galaxy alone.

The next missile cruised her way, its red tip armed and hungry. As it plowed through the cosmos after a warm body to devour, a countdown in Anlyn’s Interceptor ticked toward zero. It was a warning, giving her the chance to override an automatic safety system.

But Anlyn wasn’t aware of it. She tried to hold herself together as her ship screamed and was wrenched apart. The missile drew near, pushing through the fuzzy sphere of her Interceptor’s already-expanding field of debris. The counter on the safety system reached one, the alarm high and pleading, begging to be overridden before it did something that could not be undone.

It finally reached zero.

The auto-eject systems fired, launching Anlyn—still strapped to her flightseat—out into the cold blackness of space.

But that vacuum didn’t remain cold for long. The second missile finally found its prey, consuming itself and all else in a bubbly froth of fire and carnage.

17 · Drenard · A Longer Time Ago

In Anlyn’s dreams, the fan inside her helmet was a roar. It was the roar of the Wadi winds, those never ending blasts of air that flowed over her planet, etching the canyons from solid rock. Her heartbeat became her footfalls—the clomping of her hunting boots on the dry stone. Anlyn incorporated these sounds and constructed a dream world. A world that existed only in her memory, in her not-too-distant childhood.

There were five of them in her exclusive Rite group when Anlyn went to claim her Wadi. They were cousins, all. None of them were as near to the throne as she, if measured by begottens, but her three male cousins were lightyears closer for other reasons. Anlyn didn’t mind. She had no desire to sit where her father sat; she couldn’t stand the thought of giving speeches for a living or having to decide matters of galaxy-wide importance. Her ideal life involved moving to a frontier planet, something along the rim of the Drenard arm of the Milky Way, and finding some peace and quiet to surround herself with.

She had imagined her life there a million times in a million different ways, but every variation revolved around common themes: They started with a large plot of land, something not constrained by perpetual night on the one side and day on the other, but spread out. The land would be rolling in places and flat in others. At least one gurgling creek would pass through, playing and skipping over the rocks in little white leaps. The grass would be kept tall so it could wave to and fro with fickle, unpredictable gusts of wind, nothing like the perpetual hurricane roaring around her home world.

And there would be days. There would be a growing light expanding in the morning to swallow the sky. The sun would move through the air, shimmering and becoming white-hot as it rose to its peak. Then the nightfall would come to cool the sweat from her neck. She had heard about days from her uncles who governed distant planets. She had heard and imagined for herself the gradual sinking of suns, like balls of molten lava, crashing through the horizon.

Supposedly, the colors weren’t as severe on these other planets when their suns rose and set—they weren’t nearly as beautiful as what she’d grown up with on Drenard. But she could do without the frozen sunset of her home. Maybe, as the sight varied with each day, she would love the lesser spectacles even more. Their temporary nature might make them dearer, if drearier. She had heard as much from elders visiting from other planets.

And after the setting of the sun on her dream world, the night would come. It would be like the dark side of Drenard, but not deadly. The world would cool, shedding itself of its aura of trapped heat. The stars would begin to flash and twinkle, the sight of them temporary and fleeting. Anlyn and her husband—chosen by her and madly in love with each other—would lie out in the waving grasses and shiver and snuggle up together as their land began a plummet in temperature.

But the cooling wouldn’t go on forever. It wouldn’t freeze like the always-night on Drenard. Before the land could continue to grow cold, that forever-moving sun would race back around, hurrying through its task of warming the far side of her planet, keeping everything lovely and temperate by constantly orbiting and heating things just a little piece at a time.

Anlyn loved to imagine a sun doing that: Moving. She knew it wasn’t what really happened, that other worlds just spun in their orbits so fast that they experienced day and night, but the illusion would be hard to ignore. And it made her imaginary sun, this sun on her dream world, feel as if it had a noble chore to perform, like a spotlight of energy working tirelessly to evenly distribute its powers across all the lands.

“Hey, we’re here.”

Anlyn snapped out of her sleepy dreaming and found the shuttle had stopped. Her cousins were already out of their seats and following the cluster of guards and officials toward the exit. Outside, her uncles and her aunt strode toward the Royal Wadi hut. Anlyn gathered her things—just a small pouch of good-luck items her mom had left in her will—and hurried after her cousins.

The interior of the Wadi hut was very different from the ones Anlyn had visited in museums and on fieldtrips. Instead of bare walls and confined spaces, it looked more like a getaway mansion for a Circle member. Blue and purple finery slathered the walls and furniture; there were even hints of real wood trim framing the large windows and doorways. Anlyn would like to have pretended the differences between the huts were due to the eras in which they were built, but she knew that wasn’t the case. While most of her friends from private school were riding subways to normal Wadi huts, she and her cousins were being coddled in royal finery. And where the males would be allowed to hunt real Wadi, Anlyn and her cousin Coril would be relegated to snagging eggs, making them Drenards in the most limited of ways. In name only, really.

As they gathered inside, out of the feisty wind, their escorts gave them a brief overview of the hut, showing them the ready room and their private quarters. Anlyn and Coril picked out neighboring rooms while the boys fussed about in the ready room clashing with Wadi Lances to the chagrin of their poor escorts.

“It sucks Thooo eggs to have to wait a whole sleep,” Coril told Anlyn as the two made their way back to the lounge.

“Are you feeling anxious to get going?” Anlyn asked.

Coril nodded. “Just to get it over with. This whole charade seems like a waste of time.”

Anlyn didn’t say anything. Part of her agreed with Coril, knowing that their coddled female version of the Rite did nothing but make a mockery of what the old Wadi hunts were used for. In the days of thin living—many Hori cycles ago—the band of hospitable land on Drenard between cold night and hottest day made population growth a real concern. Back then, the Wadi Rite served a sick culling purpose, a twisted and sanctioned system of eugenics designed to weed out the weak. Now, with offworld settlements and two wars absorbing as many offspring as Drenard couples could make, the Rite had become a hierarchical selection process for some quasi-meritorious caste system. Except, paradoxically, it now meant bureaucrats and office workers were selected for their physical prowess, their tendency toward risk-taking, and their aggression. It was a trifecta of traits that had predictable consequences for the ruling of Empire: the hot-headed now dominated discussions and stifled other sorts of progress.

In Anlyn’s much cooler opinion, at least.

“You’ve been awfully quiet on this trip,” Coril pointed out. “You’re not scared or nervous, are you?”

Anlyn shook her head. “No. I think I’m like you, just wondering what we’re doing here.”

Coril looked out at the colors wavering above the canyons. The two cousins were currently much closer to the twin stars of Hori than normal, which made the light shimmering through the air look different.

“You’re not bummed about the throne one day moving off to another family, are you?”

Anlyn shrugged. “Maybe a little. But not because I’d ever want to be king, or because I wish I were a boy. Maybe I just feel a little guilty, or something. I guess I feel bad for my dad for only having me to pin his hopes on.”

“I would never want to be king,” Coril said. “All they do is get blamed for everything.”

“Yeah, but if you were king, nothing would ever go wrong,” Anlyn joked.

The two girls laughed. Everyone said Coril could do no wrong—that problems rolled off her like wind on marble.

“Oh, I’d make plenty of mistakes if I were king,” Coril said. “Don’t forget, I’d have to be a boy.”

They laughed even harder at that, the two of them bending over, panting, and wiping at their eyes. Anlyn peeked back at the hallway and saw one of their uncles leaning against the doorjamb, frowning.

“I think we’re supposed to be taking this more seriously,” Anlyn said.

“Yeah? Well, then they should take us more seriously, first.”

••••

Anlyn spent that night tossing and turning, her head full of nightmares of large empty eggs and hatched Wadi scratching at rock. She awoke from one of the nightmares with a start, her heart pounding and her mind overwhelmed by the sensation of a nearby presence. She sat up, clutching her sheet—and a large figure at the foot of her bed shifted, as if startled by her movement.

Anlyn flinched.

“Gil? Is that you?”

“Not so loud,” he hissed.

Anlyn leaned closer, blinking away the sleepiness and peering at the dark form sitting at the foot of her bed. “Gil, what in Hori’s name are you doing in here?”

“I can’t do this,” he said softly.

Anlyn saw him shake his head, her eyes gradually adjusting to the soft light filtering in from the hallway. Gil had always been one of the few male cousins Anlyn didn’t mind being around. He rarely teased her, possibly because he was familiar with being on the receiving end so often. At the age of two Horis, he was just barely double the size of a female youth, which put him on the small side among his more manly classmates, who rarely let him forget it.

“You’ll do fine on your Rite,” Anlyn told him. “Our uncles wouldn’t send you into any trouble you couldn’t handle.” And certainly not us girls, she thought to herself.

Gil scooted closer, forcing Anlyn to tuck her feet up under herself.

“But I don’t think I can do it at all. I mean, kill a real Wadi.”

“It doesn’t have to be a big one, Gil. You can always—”

“I know, I know, size doesn’t matter for me. My dad’s got a cushy job waiting no matter where I end up ranking. It’s not that. And it isn’t the moral objections, I mean, I fantasize about killing one as big as my dad.”

“And shaped like him, too?”

Anlyn and Gil had to stifle their giggles. The two of them scooted even closer.

“I’m scared,” Gil said flatly.

The cousins sat in silence, digesting the concept.

“I think I’ve always known I couldn’t do this. I don’t know how I even got here.” Gil reached out and fumbled for Anlyn’s hands. She squeezed him back.

“Is there anything I can do?” Anlyn asked. “Anything I can say?”

Gil shook his head. “I wish you were bigger so we could swap places. No one would know with our Wadi suits covering us from head to toe.”

Anlyn felt a sudden sadness for her cousin as she realized just how terrified he must be to utter such craziness. She rubbed his arm. “And I would do it, Cousin, but the escorts would know. And anyway, I’ve heard rumors that they use tracking devices to make sure nothing bad happens to us. But I promise, if there was a way . . .”