Bonds of Brass (The Bloodright Trilogy #1) - Emily Skrutskie Page 0,113

were miracles of engineering.”

“Were,” someone else interjects pointedly, and a sober silence sweeps over the hold like an Umber warbird’s passed overhead.

They’re dancing around a question without asking it. What’s left for them if they take back their homeworlds? The empire will never be the same again. Governments have been ousted, power redistributed, cities burned and built. I close my eyes, picturing Trost as it once was and Trost as it is now. The imperial palace and the system governor’s estate that replaced it after the warbirds bombed it into a husk. The massive crater of the Warning Shot, visible from the city’s downtown. The landscape of the old empire simply doesn’t exist anymore. These soldiers are wandering in memories that have no match in the Umber Empire’s reconstruction.

“What are you doing?” a voice whispers in my ear, and I reel back, nearly toppling into the hold.

“Wen,” I snarl, but it’s too late. All of the soldiers are looking up at us. Some of them look guilty, like they shouldn’t be talking about Archon-as-it-was. Others soften when they meet my nervous gaze. Sims offers us an encouraging smile. “You’re from Rana itself, aren’t you?” one of the snipers, a willowy woman named Tarsi, calls out.

“She isn’t,” Arso, the squad leader, says, nodding to Wen. I recognize her voice as the sharp-edged one from before. “You’re Corinthian, ain’tcha?”

Wen shrugs. “Guilty.”

Arso lets out an ungrateful scoff, and Sims checks her on the shoulder. “Wen was just curious,” he says. “Come on down, you two. Plenty of stories to go around.”

“I actually gotta—” I start, but Wen’s already scrambling down the ladder into the hold. The soldiers have laid out their cots with five packed against one wall and five against the other, and most of them are sitting propped up on them, hands folded on their laps. The conversationalists sit cross-legged on the floor, with dice and cards scattered around them. Wen drops to her knees at Sims’s side. She glances back up at me, grinning slyly, and waves me down.

With one last forlorn glance toward the lavatory, I descend after her.

* * *

—

By the third day, my silence is getting suspicious. The soldiers talk their way around it, always bringing up Rana, the war, and the aftermath and waiting for me to fill in the gaps. Sometimes I’ll nod along, acting like I’m expecting someone else to fill the hole in the conversation. Other times, I’ll excuse myself to check on the autopilot. We’ve passed into Umber territory, and all of our proximity sensors are dialed up. So far, the only thing on our scanners is a few members of the assault fleet, traveling in staggered formation along slightly crooked vectors that will eventually coalesce at the rendezvous.

Gal’s joined us in the hold. Like me, he’s been listening in on the conversations, his own silence noticeable but justified. The soldiers don’t care too much for him—even Sims’s easy smile tenses whenever the two of them make eye contact. No matter how instrumental he’s been in arranging the assault and how heroic the senior staff paint his role as dreadnought bait, they can’t ignore that he’s not an Archon citizen, a fact they like to jokingly throw in his face over and over again.

He shrugs off their barbs with strained, diplomatic smiles that mask his guilt. After his apology for walling himself off, he’s trying to make up for the way he shut down on the base. But his eyes get more and more hollow with every story. If all goes according to plan, these soldiers are eulogizing themselves, and we’ll be the only ones left to carry their memories.

“So Ettian,” Arso starts, steepling her fingers. “You might know—in the Feda System, same one that hosts Meridian, there’s a planet called Vilt. Kinda backwater, low population, mostly mining colonies. I had uncles out that way, and…”

I rack my brain, frowning. In between the storytelling, it’s been a constant barrage of questions like this from the soldiers, each of them worried about relatives on worlds I barely remember. The war separated them and the secrecy of their exile silenced them, but they still hold out hope that there’s something left