Starsong Page 4

  She had been brave to stand up to the royal family, and to the traditions they held dear, but that moment had also doomed her to sadness. I might have been a child, but I was already quite observant; I had seen the look that passed between Princess Nimue and the maid. Or rather, everyone had probably seen the look, but only I had understood what no one else in the room could: the princess and her maid were in love.

  I wanted to keep hating my parents, but as soon as we left Draman’s atmosphere, I suddenly missed them—the taste of my mother’s lipstick when she let me try on the red berry mixture, the feeling of my father lifting me over his shoulders like a sack of rice, the sound of my father’s sword as he taught my brothers his royal maneuvers. I missed my dolls, and my dried bug specimens, and my uncomfortable straw mattress. I could barely speak, could barely concentrate on what Sara Lee asked me, I was so overcome with the need to go home… and that was before I saw the robot ship descend.

  Sara Lee tried to talk to me, but the words in my mind would not form sentences. They floated, like the asteroid we hid behind, occasionally bouncing against one another and then moving in opposite directions. Mom. Dad. Robot. Ship. Dead. The engine of the robot ship buzzed so loudly that it rattled my brain, like turbulence in a wave of air that I couldn’t avoid.

  Even though I knew my dragon body could not get tired the way my human one did—after all, the bone dragon form had no muscles—a feeling overtook me that could only be described as defeat. Whether it was an internal exhaustion or an external one, all I knew was that I could not go on; I could not stare at the stars for the days or weeks it would take us to reach Balu, thinking of my possibly dead family and the robots that were coming for all of us.

  Please, I prayed to the universe, please give me a rest. Send me a ship that we can sleep on, even just for a few hours. Send us help. Please. In the far distance, I saw the lights of a spaceship, and though we were not along their path, I focused my eyes on those lights and pulled them toward us. My whole body strained, as though I was physically pulling on the ship’s hull, and then the lights turned.

  Sara Lee said, as we were brought on board, that the ship that chanced upon our flapping forms was the biggest coincidence of her life. She said that she’d thought we would never reach Balu before the robots, and then we were scooped up in a net like fish and given new hope.

  The truth? That ship’s arrival was no coincidence. It was not an act of destiny, or of Merlin, or of whatever higher power a Dramanian chose to believe in.

  I was the one who steered that ship right toward us. I called it, and it came.

  Chapter NINE

  SARA LEE

  THE CHILD and I would never have gotten to Balu on our own.

  On the morning of our second day, a ship approached that did not have the marks of a robot vessel nor the runes of Merlin stamped on its side. This ship was smaller than the deep-space ships, more like the size of a freighter, and flew much slower. Rust barnacled its hull, and impact marks from asteroids or some other space rocks spotted its siding.

  Should we try to outfly them? the child asked, even though their wings had already angled toward the ship.

  No. We can’t, even if we wanted to. Let’s go aboard, if they take us, and find out what they want.

  The freighter flew above us and lowered some kind of claw, which scooped us up and pulled us into its belly. Every move of the claw created a terrible creaking sound, and I wished I could cover my ears with human hands.

  Inside the freighter waited a raggedy man in a dirty bandana who manned the claw’s controls. He looked to be in his early twenties, though his age was hard to determine through the scruff on his face and the oil smudges. Around the room was various mechanical experiments in various stages of completion, including one dissected robot that looked like the ones attacking Draman. Wrenches, screwdrivers, and other tools littered the floor, along with spare wires and bolts.

  “What are they, Bando?” a woman’s voice called from somewhere above us. “And how did they get us to steer this way instead of our plotted course?”

  “Dunno yet.” The man turned to us. “I think they’re some kind of dragon species. They look like skeletons because there’s no meat on their bones.”

  “Weird. Put them in the cages down below, and we’ll sell them when we get home. I know a few traders who would love to get their hands on a bone dragon.”

  Excuse me, but we are not exotic pets to be traded, I broke in.

  “Eeek!” The man squealed like a child and almost fell out of his seat.

  “What happened, Bando?”

  “Uh… I think I may have misdiagnosed the species,” Bando called back. Then, to us he asked, “If you’re not exotic pets, then what are you?”

  I began the change, and the child followed mutely. Usually the changes did not hurt, but after such a long time in my dragon body, the shifting of bones ached like sore muscles might after a long run. The child fared even worse, and once they completed the change, they fell to the floor and could not get back up.

  “Quick, get us robes,” I demanded, and Bando disappeared and then reappeared with some dirty old T-shirts.

  “This is all we have,” he said with a shrug.

  “Very well.”

  I lifted the child and pulled their arms through the shirt sleeves. On them the T-shirt was a dress, but I would need a cover for my legs. Without asking, Bando brought me a pair of equally grungy sweatpants.

  “So…,” he said, looking down at his feet, “I don’t mean to pry, but… what are you?”

  “We are Dramanians from the planet Draman. Half-dragon, half-human like you.”

  “Yeah, but down there….” He waved a hand at the area now covered by the sweatpants.

  “Oh. You are trying to ask if I’m a man or a woman.”

  “Exactly.”

  “On our planet, we don’t have men and women,” I lied. The child looked up from their feet, surprised, but said nothing.

  “Cool. So what should I call you?”

  “You may call me Lee. And the child….” Without a Naming Ceremony, the child would not have a name.

  “My parents called me Skelly,” the child said. “You know, because I’m so small and thin.”

  “Very well. Lee and Skelly, follow me upstairs. I want to introduce you to my sister, the fearless captain of this vessel.”

  Bando’s sister sat at the helm, her eyes flickering from the stars speeding by to the map on the screen below the window. She rapidly punched keys, then made a frustrated grunt, deleted her typing, and began again.

  “Sis, meet Lee and Skelly. Lee and Skelly, meet my sister, Dawn.”

  “Hey there.” Dawn whipped around in her chair to shake our hands. “You look a lot more human without your skeletons exposed.”

  Dawn looked a lot like Bando, only instead of a grimy bandana, her head was unadorned and revealed hair the color of our yellow suns as they chased each other around our planet. On Draman, no one had such hair. Dawn was equally coated in dirt and space dust, and her glasses were equally smudged. How she saw the screen through those lenses, I would never know.

  “So what were you doing flying around in space?” Dawn asked as she returned to her navigations.

  “We were… sent. To find Merlin and bring him to Draman to save our people from the robots who just landed there. As a planet-bound people, we had no other way to travel.”

  “You’re headed to Balu?” Dawn asked. “But that’s so far away from here. You could never have flown without faster-than-light speed; not in an entire lifetime.”

  I suddenly felt all the fatigue of the journey at once, like an ocean swimmer surprised by a strong tide. My eyes threatened to close, and I would have given anything in the world for my bed in the castle serving chambers.

  “You’re in luck, though,” Bando said, taking the seat by his sister and motioning for us to take the worn-out seats behind him. A spring poked out of the cracked leather. “That’s exactly where we’
re headed.”

  DESPITE THE spring, I fell asleep almost as soon as I sat down. When I woke, the nearby sun had gone behind a planet, leaving darkness. Bando and Dawn, along with Skelly, were not on deck, but I soon found them below, eating a foul concoction of frozen fruit and oatmeal mush.

  “Here,” Bando said as he put a wooden bowl in my hands. “It’s good for you.”

  I looked down at the floating blueberries and tried not to gag.

  “It’s not that bad,” Skelly said quietly. Bando and Dawn seemed to relax them, and the child had been speaking with the siblings as I came downstairs. Perhaps I reminded Skelly too much of home, of the traumatic naming. With Bando and Dawn, the child could just be themselves.

  “All right, I trust your judgment,” I said and took the bowl. The others sat on workbench stools, so I found a rickety one with one long and two short legs and balanced on the inclined seat. “So Bando and Dawn, where are you from?”

  Bando pointed to an object in the corner of the room that I had not noticed when we arrived: a blue sphere with green and tan land masses decorated on its surface. The sphere was skewered with a contraption that let it spin, and when I looked closer, markings like Atlantic Ocean and United States of America were scrawled on different spots.

  “You’re from Earth?” I asked incredulously. “But how come you’re not already on Balu with Merlin?”

  “‘History is written by the victors,’ as Winston Churchill said.” Bando pounded his hand on the table, losing his calm façade as anger overtook it.

  “Winston who?”

  “Never mind what Bando says,” Dawn assured me. “It’s not like our people were ‘winners’ because they had to flee a planet where their toys became their rulers. But that ship that traveled a hundred years to find Merlin—it couldn’t fit all of us on it, just the rich or the well-connected. Of course I’m sure they told Merlin they were all that was left, but we who stayed knew better. We had to watch the slaughter of the last of mankind on Earth, our own parents hunted like deer. If my father had not been an inventor who figured out how to make this old girl go with nothing but some trash for fuel and some thrusters made of stolen materials, they would have killed us eventually too.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. Next to me, Skelly shivered. “We saw the robots land on our planet—do you think that’s what they’ll do to the Dramanians too?”

  “They’ll try. They are like terrible algae, growing in a pond and clogging the surface so that no sunlight can get through. By their very nature, they kill everything they encounter.”

  My full spoon clattered into the bowl, and I did not retrieve it. “But why? Didn’t humans make them to follow orders and value human life?”

  “Of course that’s how the government robots were made, but the robots birthed in secret? No such values. You’ve probably seen them, the small band of generals who lead the ships? Anyway, they were created by a single man in a botched experiment in a basement lab, and once they killed their creator, they set out to reprogram all of their subservient brothers and sisters. Destroy the generals, and you destroy the robots’ hunger for power and revenge.”

  “Destroy the generals,” Skelly whispered.

  “Not you, little one,” Bando said as he patted Skelly on the arm. “I mean the Dramanians as a whole, with some humans and wizards and Igreefees thrown in. Maybe Merlin’s sorceresses and the goddesses from the caves, if they haven’t already left Balu.”

  “What about other populations?” I asked suddenly. “Are there others on nearby planets?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” Bando said. “Trust me, we’ve scanned every planet we’ve passed on this journey, and nothing shows any life. But we keep scanning anyway, on the off chance we find life or even a planet that’s livable. After what the humans did to Earth and then the robots after them, the land is dry and unusable. Draman will be the same once they’re through with it.”

  Dawn pushed back her chair and left the room, leaving her bowl and crumpled napkin on the table.

  “Is she okay?” Skelly asked. “Talking about this must make her sad.”

  “Sad?” Bando chuckled. “Dawn doesn’t really get sad. She’s either fine or very, very mad. She might not be a mythological dragon, but she can spit flames when she wants to.”

  Skelly and I looked at each other blankly.

  “Sorry, it’s an expression from Earth. I guess on your planet, that saying probably would make less sense. Anyway, you two should get some more rest before we get to Balu. After we land, there may not be much time for sleep.”

  Even though I had just napped, my eyes closed again just thinking about sleep. Bando showed us to the sleeping quarters, a single room with four bunk beds. Two of them were piled with clean sheets, but Skelly and I were so tired that we burrowed under the sheet mounds and fell asleep without making the beds.

  I woke again to the sound of a blaring alarm. A red light at the top of the stairs flashed like a siren, and Bando’s voice above me sounded excited, crazed even. The alarm had not woken Skelly, so I did not do so either; if we were about to do something dangerous, perhaps it was better that they did not know about it. The poor child had been through enough.

  “What is it?” I asked Bando and Dawn as I rubbed sleep from my eyes. They both rapidly punched buttons on the control panel, then hugged each other and started the process again.

  “Look at these readings!” Bando exclaimed.

  “I know, I see them too! Unbelievable!”

  “What’s unbelievable?” I asked again.

  “See this scanner here?” Bando asked as he pointed to a screen in front of him that had a light sweeping a sphere.

  “Yes.”

  “And see those dots there?”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t you see what this means?”

  “Uh… asteroids?”

  “Lee, that sphere is a planet. And those dots? They’re life!”

  Without further discussion, Dawn initiated our descent.

  Chapter TEN

  SKELLY

  SARA LEE thought I was asleep when Bando and Dawn discovered the new planet, but I was wide awake under the covers. Something had woken me about half an hour before their radar picked up signs of life—or rather someone.

  Wake up, child.

  My eyes had snapped open. I looked around, but no one was in the room except the sleeping Sara Lee.

  Follow the leaves of the Uncanny Tree.

  I leaned over the side of the bed. On the floor of the spaceship, purple glowing leaves appeared like animal footprints in dirt. They wandered out of our room, and after slipping out of the sheets, I followed them.

  Around the ship they led me, upstairs and past the dozing Bando to where Dawn sat at the controls. Concentrating on the empty space in front of her, her ears covered in headphones to pick up space noise, she never noticed me.

  The purple leaves led me to Bando’s radar station. Nothing was lit up, just boring black space on the screen. The leaves marched up the side of the wall, then illuminated the controls.

  Find us, a voice whispered. Then others joined in, like a chorus of ghosts. Find us. Find us.

  My hand wrapped around the joystick. As soon as my fingers touched the controls, the glowing leaves floated up and circled a place where nothing seemed to be. I zoomed in, and then suddenly a planet appeared.

  The leaves blew away, and I took their departure as a sign that I should get back to bed before the others discovered me. Slowly, so as not to make a single sound, I tiptoed back downstairs.

  Fifteen minutes later, the alarms went off. Through the sheets, I heard Bando tell Sara Lee about his new discovery and the life there—about the destiny. But nothing that was happening was destiny, or not in the way they expected. It was all me. I didn’t know how, or why, but I had a feeling that I was about to find out.

  Chapter ELEVEN

  NIMUE

  “WHERE IS my father?” I asked the Dramanians as they wandered lis
tlessly throughout the ship. Many had been left behind, and those who had made it before the spaceship left Draman’s orbit mourned their abandoned family members as though they were already dead. And perhaps they were—nothing about the robots’ prior behavior indicated they would show our people any mercy.

  “The king?”

  The voice was Aduerto’s, though I did not recognize him at first. Half of his face was covered in blood, and one arm hung limply at his side. His fancy shirt had been torn across the chest, and his pants stained with some kind of oil. Below him, his father lay with his back propped against the spaceship wall. From the paleness of Nemo’s face, almost an aged yellow, I knew he would not last until Balu.

  “Is he on board?” I asked.

  “The last time I saw him, he was being held down by five robots. It’s unlikely he escaped in time to board the ship.”

  First I had lost my mother, and now the robots had my father. Because of me, the king had been captured by the most dangerous forces in the galaxy and some of our people were stuck on Draman with them until we could rescue them or they were killed.

  “You did the best you could in an impossible situation,” Mayor Nemo said from below us. He pressed a hand to his side to stop the blood, though he did not ask for medical assistance—perhaps he knew it was pointless. “A few more minutes and they would have captured us all. Without this ship, at least when they torture the information out of a Dramanian, they won’t have anywhere to go with it. By the time the other ships figure out what happened, we’ll be all the way to Balu.”

  I left Aduerto to care for his father, while I went to check on the state of those who had managed to escape. The robots did not sleep in traditional beds, but instead had rows and rows of hard metal sheets bolted to the wall where they probably turned off and waited for their next landing. Many of the injured lay in these beds now, while their families tended to their wounds as best as they could. People lay in the hallways too, and on the floor of the main deck. The royal doctor had made it onto the ship, and he moved between those in need of medical attention and those who were dying, trying to care for them or ease their passing. Everywhere I looked was red.