ANDROMA
THE DEAD WERE watching her dance.
Andi closed her eyes tighter, willing them away. Though she sat in the darkness of her captain’s quarters on the Marauder, classical music blaring over the loudspeakers, her mind and her body were light-years away.
Arcardius. A planet adorned with glass that she had once called home.
She spun on the stage of the Academy, the domed ceiling overhead speckled with lights in the shape of Arcardian bursting stars. The seats that overlooked the stage were filled, though not with the living.
They were filled with the dead.
Her victims watched as Andi took the stage. As the music began, gentle at first, the tinkle of bells. Then a great swell of cymbals, and she took flight. Her body was a vessel, a conduit through which she allowed the music to move.
Her arms extended. Her toes rose to a point, and she spun, round and round, a planet in orbit.
When she opened her eyes, she saw the first man rise from his seat.
Blood pooled from a slit across his throat, red like a smile. Staining the Arcardian Patrolmen badge on his chest.
“I’m sorry,” Andi said. “I’m so sorry.”
He didn’t speak. The dead never did, and so she extended her hand to him. He took it in his featherlight grip, and together, they danced.
Round and round, they spun, gliding across the stage as weightless as two ghosts in the night. As they danced, Andi forced herself to look at him. Through the blood, through the mask of horror that he’d held in his final moments as he died by her swords, she saw the man she’d murdered.
He was a human being. A man who had lived and breathed and loved and hated, a man she’d killed in cold blood. She’d done it because he would have done the same to her. Because if she hadn’t, she would have died.
As they danced, she forced herself to look at every detail of his face. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the way his skin was tanned, as if he’d recently spent time outdoors beneath the blazing sun. A soldier training for a mission he knew was soon to come.
He couldn’t have known he would die by the hand of the Bloody Baroness on board the Marauder as his borrowed commander, a bounty hunter with eyes that pierced, urged him to take his enemy down.
Tears streaked down Andi’s cheeks, pulling her from the vision she’d created so clearly in her mind. The music grew louder, silencing her tears. She closed her eyes and forced herself back into her mind. She owed this to the dead. This pain, this dance, this time where she gave herself fully to their memory.
The next corpse stepped onto the stage.
This one was a woman, a guard she’d silenced in Lunamere. As they joined hands and spun in time with the sorrowful strings, Andi saw that the woman was young. She had tired eyes in a thin face. As if she hadn’t slept, hadn’t had a full meal, in days.
“I’m so sorry,” Andi said to her.
The woman simply danced, on and on, until her form faded like mist.
Another of the dead took her place.
They danced, cold palms pressed to Andi’s warm ones. Bodies intertwining like vines that twisted together and then came apart.
Andi danced until she’d remembered them all. Every last person she’d killed, every beating heart she’d stopped too soon. It didn’t matter that they were her enemies. It didn’t matter that in those final moments, Andi had allowed herself to make a choice.
To cross the line she’d drawn for herself. Deal out death to another, or die.
She danced in her mind until her tears had run dry. She danced until the audience was nearly empty. Until the lights of the stage had begun to grow dim, as if the stars overhead were falling into a restful sleep.
Only a single form remained in the audience now. Andi turned to face her as the figure stood. She was dressed in a shimmering blue gown that swirled around her ankles like fragments of cloud. It had always been her favorite, had made her smile and feel, for a time, like a queen.
Her pale hair, matted to her skull on one side, had turned red from fresh blood. Her eyes were closed as she stood at the base of the stage, unmoving.
Every time, no matter the dance, no matter how many deaths Andi had to remember, this girl appeared.
“Kalee,” Andi said. “Wake up.”
The girl did not move, did not open her eyes.
Andi tried to reach her, but the stage had morphed into something smaller, the space tightening, the walls closing in until she was seated in the captain’s chair of a transport ship, fire blazing, smoke clouding her lungs.
“WAKE UP!” Andi screamed.
The transport creaked. Groaned, as the fire licked closer and closer.
Heat had begun to bloom across Andi’s wrists. Pain that throbbed and screamed and begged for her attention, but she could not give it.
Because Kalee was dead.
Tears pooled in Andi’s vision, and she reached out a final time, desperate to save her charge.
Something touched her from behind.
She slipped from the vision like water through fingertips, and turned around to see him standing there, bathed in the starlight that glowed through the glass wall of Andi’s quarters.
“You promised me a conversation,” Dex said. She could scarcely hear him over the music still playing. Over the echo of her own screams, still haunting her from her vision.
Wet tears still streaming down her cheeks, Andi nodded.
Dex sat beside her on the floor of her quarters. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said. He knew her routine. She had done it since the very first night they’d shared together. Different places, different times, but the motions were always the same.
Wrapped up in the music, they sat until the song ended. Silence swept over them, thick and uncomfortable and still, but familiar. Like a long-unseen friend returning home.
“Go ahead, Dex,” Andi said.