The Last Girl From Earth

The ship was closing around her.

Not collapsing - rearranging. The cathedral-like room where Lyra had found the sphere narrowed, the black walls flowing like liquid, forming a corridor where there had been no corridor. The gold veins in the walls pulsed faster, urgent.

It was trying to hide her.

"Lyra, you have to get out!" Mira-7 was shouting in her helmet. "The Revenant has locked tractor beams! Imperial breach pods are already on the hull!"

Lyra ran. The Heart of Earth was no longer a floating sphere. It had shrunk, condensed, until it was a smooth, warm stone fused to her palm, humming against her skin. Her scars - those three perfect lines on her forearm - were still glowing blue-white, and the light was spreading, tracing new lines up her arm like a map being drawn in real time.

Her boots hit what had been a wall and was now a floor. Gravity shifted. The human ship was playing games with physics.

Behind her, she heard it. The shriek of Imperial plasma cutters.

They were cutting through the outer hull.

"Who are you?" Lyra gasped at the ship, at the walls. "What are you?"

The ship answered. Not in words. In feeling. A wave of calm, of protectiveness, of you are home, you are safe, I have waited so long that almost buckled her knees. And underneath it, one word in that older, deeper voice that had spoken through Mira:

Sovereign.

"I am not a Sovereign!" Lyra snapped. "I'm a scavenger! I'm nobody!"

The corridor ended in a dead end. A wall of solid black.

"No no no - open, open, you stupid -"

The wall didn't open. It melted into a cockpit. A small, perfect cockpit, clearly made for one person. A human cockpit. The seat was shaped for a human spine. The controls were not buttons or levers - they were two hand-shaped depressions that glowed faintly.

A escape pod.

"Mira, can you fly this thing?"

"I don't know! This technology is 183 years more advanced than anything I -"

The entire ship shuddered. The lights flared red. From behind her, down the corridor that was no longer a corridor, came voices. Deep, modulated through Imperial helmets.

"Contact! Aureli energy source is moving! Converge on sector seven!"

Imperial Royal Guard. Kael's elite.

Lyra threw herself into the seat and slammed her hands into the depressions.

The pod screamed awake.

Blue light shot up her arms, up her neck, into her temples. For a second she was not in a pod. She was the ship. She could feel the Imperial soldiers in her belly, cutting. She could feel the Revenant above her like a huge, cold knife pressed to her throat. She could feel something else, too - a vast, cold intelligence watching from orbit, on that dreadnought, furious and focused.

Then the pod ejected.

It didn't launch like an Imperial pod with thrusters and fire. It fell out of reality. One second Lyra was inside the human ship, the next she was outside on the dusty surface of Obsidian Moon, the human ship already vanishing behind her - cloaking, folding light around itself until it was invisible.

She landed hard, tumbled, the pod dissolving into black sand around her the second her feet touched ground. The Heart was still in her hand, now disguised as a plain black stone.

She ran for her skiff, the Mira.

She didn't make it ten meters.

A beam of pure white light slammed down from the sky and pinned her in place. Tractor beam. Not the shaky, industrial kind the depot used. This was military grade. Silent. Absolute. It lifted her off her feet.

Lyra kicked, struggled, tried to pry the light off her. Useless.

Above her, the Revenant had opened. A single drop-ship, shaped like a raven's beak, detached and descended, impossibly fast, landing without kicking up a single speck of dust. The ramp opened before it even touched ground.

Six figures in black armor came out. Not standard Imperial white. Black, with a silver crest on the chest - a star being crushed in a fist. The Royal Guard.

And behind them, not in armor.

A man.

He didn't need armor to look dangerous.

Lyra had seen holo-posters of Crown Prince Kael Veyron her whole life. The Empire put them everywhere on the outer moons: LOYALTY IS ORDER. ORDER IS PEACE. In the posters, he looked like a statue. Cold, handsome in a cruel way, his silver-white hair cut short, his uniform perfect.

In person, he was worse. Because he was not a statue. He was alive, and looking right at her.

He was 29, but he looked like he'd been carved out of war. Tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a long black Imperial coat that moved like smoke despite no wind. His hair was longer than in the posters, silver, almost white. His skin was pale grey-blue, faintly luminous - Astral blood. His eyes were the worst part. They were violet, but so pale they were almost white, and they missed nothing.

He walked straight through the tractor beam like it wasn't there. The light didn't touch him.

His eyes went to her hand. To the black stone. To the glowing lines on her forearm.

For a fraction of a second, something flickered across his face. Shock.

Then it was gone, replaced by that terrible cold.

"Human," he said. His voice was low, accented with the pure tone of Caelum Prime. Not shouting. He didn't need to shout. "You are holding stolen Imperial property."

Lyra's terror flipped into anger. That was her superpower. When she was terrified, she got sarcastic.

"Oh, sorry, I didn't see your name on it," she spat, dangling from the light. "Finders keepers, asshole."

One of the Royal Guard made a choked noise. No one talked to Kael Veyron like that.

Kael didn't blink. He stepped closer. He was close enough now that she could see the faint scars on his knuckles. Close enough that she could smell ozone and cold.

"You triggered a galaxy-wide event. You blacked out my warship. My father's entire communications network. Do you have any idea what you have done?"

"Yeah, I made your lights flicker. Sorry your nightlight went out, Princess."

Mira-7 in her ear: "Lyra, stop antagonizing the man who can vaporize moons!"

Kael stared at her for a long moment. Then, slowly, he reached out. Not for the stone. For her face.

Lyra flinched, expecting a slap, a grip.

He just brushed a strand of hair behind her ear with two fingers. His gloves were black leather, cold. The touch was almost gentle.

"Twenty-two," he murmured, almost to himself. "Female. Aureli resonance. You match the description."

He turned to his second-in-command, a man with a scarred face who hadn't taken his eyes off Lyra.

"Rylan. Scan her."

Commander Rylan Cross stepped forward, holding a scanner. The scanner was Imperial tech - it should have beeped, given a readout.

When he passed it over Lyra's chest, the scanner screamed, then shattered in his hand.

Rylan swore and dropped the smoking pieces.

Kael's pale eyes narrowed. He looked back at Lyra, and this time, really looked. At her dark wavy hair, at her stubborn jaw, at the way she hung in his tractor beam and still glared at him like she could kill him.

"Who are you?" he asked quietly, and for the first time, there was something other than cold in his voice. There was curiosity. And something like dread.

"Lyra Vale," she said. "Scavenger. Pain in your ass."

"Lyra Vale," he repeated, tasting the name. "The last human lie."

He reached for the stone in her hand.

The second his gloved fingers touched it, all hell broke loose.

The stone - the Heart - rejected him.

A pulse of pure force, gold and blue, exploded outward. It threw the six Royal Guards ten feet back, slammed them into the dust. It threw Rylan. It shattered the tractor beam. Lyra dropped to the ground, gasping.

Kael was the only one still standing. He had been thrown back a step, but he hadn't fallen. His coat was smoking where he'd touched it. He looked down at his glove, which was now blackened and cracked.

He looked up at Lyra, and his expression had completely changed. The cold was gone. He looked... stunned.

The stone in Lyra's hand was blazing now, projecting light into the sky, projecting text in a language Rylan couldn't read, but Kael could. Every Astral royal was taught Old Earth as a dead language.

Kael read it out loud, his voice hollow.

SOVEREIGN OF HUMANITY CONFIRMED. PROTECT THE QUEEN.

The dust around Lyra's feet began to rise. The black sand of Obsidian Moon was vibrating, forming patterns - circles, constellations.

Rylan scrambled to his feet, weapon drawn, pointing it at Lyra. "Your Highness! It's a weapon! Terminate her, as ordered!"

Kael's father, the Emperor, had given a secret order an hour ago: Find the last human royal descendant. Kill her on sight. No witnesses.

Kael's hand went to his sidearm.

Lyra saw it. She saw her death in his pale eyes. She clutched the Heart tighter.

Kael drew the weapon.

And pointed it at Rylan.

"Lower your weapon, Commander," Kael said, his voice ice again, but different ice. Sharper. Directed at his own man.

Rylan stared, disbelieving. "My Prince? The Emperor's order -"

"Was based on a lie," Kael said. He didn't look at Rylan. He was looking at Lyra, at the light in her arm, at the floating text that called her Queen. "My father told me humans destroyed themselves. He told me they were monsters."

The ground shook. The human ship, still cloaked, was powering up underneath them, responding to Lyra's fear.

Kael holstered his gun and walked to Lyra. He knelt in the dust in front of her, his expensive coat getting dirty. He didn't touch her this time.

"Can you understand what this says?" he asked her, gesturing to the projection.

Lyra, shaking, shook her head.

"It says you are not the last human scavenger," Kael said softly, so only she could hear. "It says you are the last human queen. And if that's true..."

He looked up at the sky, at his own dreadnought, where his father was undoubtedly watching.

"...then my father has been lying to the entire galaxy for 183 years. And he just ordered me to kill the only person who can prove it."

He stood, and in one smooth motion, took off his long black coat and draped it around Lyra's shoulders. It was heavy, warm, and smelled like him - cold and stars.

He turned to his guards, who were staring, weapons half-raised, utterly confused.

"Change of plans," Crown Prince Kael Veyron announced, his voice carrying across the bone-yard, making the dust tremble. "We are not taking a prisoner to Caelum Prime for execution."

He looked down at Lyra, wrapped in his coat, glowing like a small sun.

"We are taking a Queen into protective custody. Anyone who touches her dies."

He scooped her up - one arm under her knees, one behind her back - as if she weighed nothing, as the Heart of Earth pulsed against his chest and didn't burn him this time.

And as he carried her toward his drop-ship, Lyra's eyes fluttered shut from exhaustion, and Kael felt something he hadn't felt in twenty years.

A second heartbeat, syncing with his own.

The bio-bond had just activated.