ANDROMA
ANDI EMERGED FROM the women’s bathing chambers wrapped in a pristine, warm white robe, a fluffy towel protecting her freshly combed hair.
Two hours she’d spent submerged in a pool full of blossom-scented bubbles. She’d scrubbed every inch of her body with asteroid coal, removing the grime of the past few days little by little, until she felt like she could breathe again.
For two hours she’d lost herself in the luxury of solitary silence, not a single person there to ask her questions or wait for commands or—Godstars be damned—bring up what had happened during Revalia, when Andi had danced with Dex.
Her feet were bare for the first time in weeks, a strange feeling as she unlocked her private quarters and padded onto the plush carpet inside.
The room was decadent, plucked straight from the pages of an Arcardian luxury feed. The four-poster bed was large enough for three, the mattress so soft it was like diving into a sea of spun sugar. Across the room, shimmering gold satin drapes hung over an entire wall made of windows. An attendant had pulled them back to reveal the sun setting, the two moons just beginning to brighten in its place like watching eyes.
To anyone else, it would have been a dream to be here. An honor to live in the heart of the general’s estate, with its bustling servants and straight-backed soldiers. To be at the headquarters of the Summit preparations during the most exciting time of the galactic year.
Once, she’d been caught up in the spell of this place, a willing victim to its splendor.
But now it only felt like a cage, made worse by the fact that there was an unwanted guest in her room.
It seemed her father had been waiting for her to arrive.
He sat across from her now in a plush red armchair, his blue Spectre uniform edged with shimmering strands of gold that shone in the light of the crystal chandelier overhead.
Andi sighed and moved past him to sit on the edge of her bed, legs crossed beneath her, hands folded in her lap. Her swords, usually strapped to her back, lay beside her on the bed, freshly cleaned, ready for new tallies to be scratched into the metal, to represent the Xen Pterran soldiers she’d slayed on Adhira. She could still remember the feel of each moment, each second as she chose to steal another life. Her stomach ached, thinking of all the impossible choices she’d had to make.
The silence in the room was sharper than her blades. From the moment she’d entered and seen him waiting, she’d refused to offer him a word. He could start the conversation, no matter how awkward the silence became or how long it took for the ice to break.
After a time, her father cleared his throat.
“You’ve grown,” he said. His voice was softer than it had been when he greeted her and Dex earlier. “It’s been...quite a while, hasn’t it?”
“Four years,” Andi said. “Though I guess you’ve probably forgotten with how busy the general must keep you.”
She’d spoken the words like they were light bullets loosed from a gun. Now that they were out, she couldn’t take them back.
Her father didn’t move. He only worried his hands together, his chest rising and falling with even breaths.
“His head Spectre?” Andi asked. In a whisper, she added, “Why?”
His gray eyes met hers for the first time since she arrived. Beneath his gaze, she wanted to break. She wanted to crumble and fall to the floor, begging him to explain himself. But she wasn’t a child anymore. She wouldn’t crumble. And she never begged.
“It’s a long story, Androma,” he said, sighing. “And I’m not sure you’ll like what I have to say.”
She glanced at the door that she’d made sure to lock behind her. “I have plenty of time. The general says he’s going to pardon me, once this job is said and done.”
He pressed a hand to his ear, nodding absently to whatever voice had spoken into his com. He likely had one similar to hers, but she was sure he hadn’t had to travel to some dusty moon and find a black-market doctor to install it.
He looked back to Andi, his expression overcome with sadness. But sadness for what, she wondered? The years they’d lost? The mistakes they’d both made?
He looked so much older now. Four years had passed, and yet it seemed like ten.
Had he missed her? Had he wanted to find her after she’d run?
As she looked at him, the memory of their final moments together took shape.
* * *
He’d come to visit her in the holding cell, in the southern sector of the capital city. She’d been nearly starved for three days, and her energy was growing faint.
“It’s happening tomorrow, Androma,” her father said.
She’d barely been able to look at him without wanting to cry. But she had no tears left. “Will it hurt?” she asked.
He’d glanced over his shoulder to where the guards waited several paces away down the hall.
When he looked back at her, his expression was haunted. As if he were already looking at his daughter’s ghost. “The injection is painless.”
Andi had nodded then. His words felt so unreal, they hardly registered.
Tomorrow she was going to die.
“Where is Mom?” Andi asked. “Is she coming to say goodbye?”
Tears streamed down his cheeks. “No,” he whispered. “She’s not well, Androma.”
As she looked at him, she felt hollow. The guards approached then, telling them that time was up.
“Just a final goodbye,” her father told them. “I...won’t be able to do it, tomorrow.”
“Make it quick, Oren,” the soldier in charge said. He glanced at Andi, equal parts sadness and disappointment in his face. Andi’s father had been a soldier his entire life, was as close as family to these comrades who worked the barracks. The soldier ushered the others a few paces away to give Andi and her father space.
“We don’t have much time,” Andi’s father whispered. “You need to listen to me.”
Andi wanted to reach for him. To hold on to him and never let go. She didn’t care, in this moment, that he hadn’t defended her in the trial days before. He had always represented safety and strength and warmth.
After tomorrow, she’d never see him again.
Tears poured down her face. “Please,” she begged him. “Please, don’t let them take me. It was a mistake, Daddy.” She was a child, sobbing in a cell meant for a cold-blooded killer. “Please.”
He crossed the cell in a few strides. Knelt before her until their gazes were level.
“Look at me, Androma,” he urged. His hands gripped her cheeks, brought her gaze to his. She tried to blink away the tears, to memorize every line of his face. “You’re strong. You always have been.” His lips were wet with tears as he pressed them to her forehead in a kiss.
“Oren,” the soldier outside said, more insistent this time. “Come on. It’s time.”
“I’m coming, Broderick,” her father growled over his shoulder.
He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around Andi. She couldn’t hug him back, her burned wrists too painful and fresh. But she felt his warm hands touch the bandages around her wrists, where the burns were still fresh and aching.
As he pretended to kiss her cheek, his next words were so low, she barely heard them at all. “Bay Seven. Tomorrow at dawn.”
Without another word, he slipped something beneath her bandages.
Something cold and solid. A key.
When he pulled away from her, his eyes burned like coals.
“Any last words?” the soldier outside said.
“Goodbye, Androma.” Her father nodded once. Wiped a tear from his cheek and turned away from her, never looking back.
The soldiers locked her cell.
In the morning, when the general and his executioner came for her, the cell door was wide open, the cell itself empty as a tomb.
Androma Racella was gone.
* * *
“You were always so strong-willed,” her father said now. His voice nearly cracked, but he swallowed and it came back stronger, the lines of his face fading as the commander he’d become took the place of the father she’d loved. “I remember the day you were born. You came out kicking and screaming so loud I thought you’d make everyone go deaf. Your mother and I used to joke that you might never stop.” He smiled then, a look that made Andi’s chest ache. “When you got older, and you started dancing, we were so proud. You used to twirl for hours in the living room, not stopping until you’d gotten every move perfect. Then, when you became a Spectre... You could’ve gone so far, Androma.”
His eyes took on the shine of someone lost in the past. He was looking at her, but it was like he was really seeing the girl she used to be.
The girl she never could or would be again.
So many years had passed since he’d freed her from death. She no longer knew the man before her, and he had no idea who she was now. They were like two strangers—together in this room, but galaxies apart. It made Andi wonder if they could ever rekindle the relationship they had in the past.
“I wrote to you,” Andi said suddenly. “Did you...did you get the letters?”
She’d sent so many messages back to Arcardius once she’d had a safe way to do so. Dex had helped her with that—finding messengers to deliver her letters, and scaring the living hell out of them to ensure that they’d stay and wait for any word that her parents wanted to send back in return.
But nothing ever came.
It had helped to harden her heart. To remind her that even though her father had given her a chance at escape...he’d moved on. It proved to Andi that no one, not even family, could be expected to stay close when the sins of life came to tear them apart.
“I couldn’t respond,” he said. “You know I couldn’t.”
She’d seen the headlines on the feeds, the suspicions about who had freed Androma Racella before she could pay for her crime.
Her father stood and began to pace. “I had to protect myself. I was being watched, all the time. Anyone who’d ever known you was under scrutiny. Classmates, professors, drill instructors. Your mother and I were at the top of that list. Any tiny mistake, Androma, and we would have been found out. Marked as traitors, too. I couldn’t live with that.”
They had never had a chance to discuss what had happened. After Andi had awoken in the hospital, she’d tried to tell them. But all she could do was cry. Then she’d sunk so deeply into herself that no one could speak to her, no matter how loudly they yelled. How desperately they wished for an explanation. She was drowning, not entirely in shock as the doctors thought, but in despair.
She knew exactly what had happened.
She knew exactly how guilty she was.
“We had to live, all these years, without you. Pretending to the public that we loved our daughter, but not the girl who’d murdered Kalee Cortas. That we never would have helped a traitor run free.”
Silence filled the room.
Andi closed her eyes, realizing in the darkness that though he’d saved her life that day...he’d destroyed many parts of her soul.
She opened her eyes and looked at him, standing there in his Spectre uniform.
“Why didn’t you come with me?”
Her father was as still as stone.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” Andi said. “Some are bigger than others. It doesn’t mean we can’t forgive them. That we can’t move on. I was a kid. Kalee was, too.”
Again, she asked him, “Why didn’t you come with me? We could have run together. As a family.”
He nodded, and for a moment, she thought he was going to embrace her. Tell her that she’d made a horrible mistake, but every mistake could be fixed, could be forgiven. Maybe he’d wrap her up in his arms, tell her that he was sorry, that he should have stood by her side. That she’d done a terrible wrong to the world, but that he had, too, when he hadn’t gone with her.
Her heart leaped a little as he did stand.
But instead of coming toward her, he took a half step away. Toward the locked door.
“Was it truly easier?” Andi asked. “Pretending that you never had a daughter at all? It’s what you’ve done all these years, isn’t it?”
Suddenly she was that little girl again, desperate for her father’s approval. But when he turned, his eyes weren’t those of her father. He looked like someone else—a man with gray hair and a sagging face, seated behind a desk too small for his massive ego.
He looked like General Cortas.
“You ruined the family name that day,” her father said. Every word was a dagger to her gut. Every breath, a stab to deepen the previous wound. “Your mother and I...we worked our entire lives to become honorable members of Arcardian society. We nearly lost that, after I freed you. And if we’d gone with you? A life on the run, as fugitives? That isn’t what I promised your mother when I married her and swore to take care of her.”
Inside, her mind was screaming no, no, no. This wasn’t how their reunion was supposed to go. And yet, her father kept digging and twisting the blade.
“We kept you alive, Androma,” he whispered suddenly. “We kept you alive, and all it’s done is tear us apart from the inside out.”
“You sent me out into the galaxy alone,” Andi said. “I could have died!”
“But you didn’t,” her father said. “You survived, Androma. Because we helped set you free, even though no soldier who’d committed such a heinous crime had ever been set free before.”
“What’s done is done,” Andi said, looking past her father at the holo clock on the bedside. “You’ve made it quite clear that you no longer care for me.”
“I know you don’t understand my situation, and I would never expect you to,” her father said. “The general offered me this position as a mercy. He’s a generous man, willing to save your mother and me, even after the destruction you caused for his family. For ours. I took the job, not because I had to, but because I wanted to. To serve our planet in the most honorable way. It was the only way to show the world that we weren’t the monstrous parents your actions made us out to be.”
Andi let the truth sink into her, heavy as a rock.
Even though he’d saved her life, he’d never forgiven her.
She doubted he’d ever tried.
“So this is how it is now,” Andi said, surprised to find that her voice was strong and steady. That with each word, she felt bravery pouring back into her. “You never were on my side, were you? Your own daughter.”
Her father reached the door, placed his hand on the scanner and waited for it to unlock. When he looked back, his eyes were haunted in the same way they’d been back in her holding cell the night he’d come to give her the key. She realized now that she’d misread his look then.
She’d always thought he was mourning the years he knew they would never share together, the struggles she would face out alone in the world.
She was wrong. His words confirmed that now.
“As far as I am concerned,” he said, glancing back to meet her eyes, “my daughter died in the crash alongside Kalee Cortas. The girl I freed from that cell was not my daughter. Whether or not she knew it at the time, she had already been stolen by the Bloody Baroness.”
He stepped out the door. It slid closed behind him, locking her in silence.
She waited for the tears to come. But they never did.
Instead she sat alone, adding more tallies to her swords. Dancing with the dead inside her head.
Later, Andi strapped the swords across her back and climbed out her bedroom window. She snuck out into the night, feeling for all the world like a nameless ghost.