Chapter Text
The petroglyphs give him no answers.
Keith glares at them. His head is throbbing, a low level headache mixed with the worst tinnitus he's ever had. He'd hoped they might look... different, today. All his dad's old junk is going crazy. Keith's going crazy. There was a meteorite fall last night, too far away for him to chase, but now he's wishing that he'd taken his bike and gone. He'd probably be in California by now if he'd followed it, maybe staring out at the Pacific and wondering if he's stupid or desperate enough to dive in.
He looks out northwest for a long moment, at a crack of sky barely visible above the rocks. Shakes his head. Gets back on his bike, and heads for home.
It gives him something to do. Something that isn't throwing and catching his knife by the blade or writing desperate post-it notes to a man who will never read them. He's low on food, he thinks. That means a ride into town. It probably means figuring out if shoplifting's one of those things you never forget how to do.
Technically Shiro left him - not a fortune. Enough for a new bike, maybe. Enough for food for a while. But that would mean going up to a bank with an ID card and a smile and admitting that Takashi Shirogane is dead.
Keith hops off, banging a shin into one of the hoverpads. Keith swears. The metal clangs in protest.
Inside his shack, something moves.
Keith draws his knife and crouches down, adrenaline shooting through him. He probably ought to be afraid, or worried. Instead, he realizes with a sharp grin, he's mostly angry. Angry, and a little bit excited, and very much no longer bored.
Not a robber - surely not. He supposes there's a few things in the house that could be sold for scrap metal, and maybe his dad's equipment if either he or the thief could find someone who actually knows what it does, but the only real thing of value on the property is a hoverbike that was out with Keith when the intruder arrived.
That means thrillseekers, mostly likely, teenage "explorers" - or, less likely but far more difficult to scare off by pulling a knife, Garrison MPs - or, worst of all, some "well-meaning" Garrison-related guest. Adam had tried to reach out to him after Kerberos.
Keith peers in the window. No movement. He edges around the house, over to the door, feet plastered to the wall so that the porchboards won't creak.
"Hey! Get out of my -!"
He stops cold.
There is a seven-foot-tall astronaut in his living room. There is - Keith watches, frozen, recalculating, as the figure brings one long-fingered hand to its helmeted face - a seven-foot-tall, purple astronaut with pointed ears in his living room.
An alien.
There is an alien in his house.
Keith's grin widens, but he does not lower his knife. Aliens are real. Aliens are on Earth. Someone else might have doubted it. All Keith can think is how much, much more plausible "alien interference" is than "pilot error."
"Keith," says the alien. "We don't have much time. I need to get you out of here."
"Time?" He takes a step forwards. He can hear that one thing with the metal rods, the one that looks like a Jacob’s Ladder at a science museum but seems mostly to pick up on sunspots, going haywire in the stuffed closet that passes as his bedroom. "Time until what?" He tightens his hand around his knife. "And you know my name."
"I looked." The alien's jaw tightens. "I looked in the state records. I found what happened to your father, found the Garrison, but you weren't - I don't know why it took me twelve vargas to think to look here, but they're coming. We need to leave."
"Who's coming?"
"The Empire. They've learned the location of the Blue Lion."
The petroglyphs and cave paintings flash through Keith's mind. Too many questions. He doesn't have time for them. "Then you should be - I don't know! Warning the government. Warning the Garrison!" The word still tastes bitter in his mouth. He takes a step forward, then another. "Why is an alien wasting their time sifting through the contents of some crazy fuckup's stupid shack?"
The alien doesn't flinch away from the knife. Narrowed eyes hold his, firm and steady. "Because I left you behind once. I'm not doing it again."
-
She's galra. Her name is Krolia. She says she's his mother. It's not the craziest thing anyone has ever asked him to believe.
He looks at the Earth, smaller and smaller behind him. The full fleet will be coming, she'd told him. Likely Emperor Zarkon himself. All you can do is live, and fight another day.
She'd helped him rig up a warning message anyway. They'd worked in silence, as he had tried to digest it, tried to figure out if it was all a dream and he was dying of heatstroke up the back of a canyon somewhere.
But now -
Now he sees space. Now he knows that he's alive.
He'd wanted this so badly, so long. Dreamed of his first mission, his second, his third - planned them out and then changed the plans. He'd pictured himself as Shiro's right hand, the cosmos stretching around them. Sometimes they'd find aliens, sometimes they'd dodge exploding stars, sometimes Shiro would look at him softly and take his face between his big hands and kiss him until the world spun. Would look at him the way he looked at Adam. Better, even, because Keith would never dream of trying to chain him to the ground.
(Some of those memories had spiraled back up when Adam had tried to talk with him after the funeral. Keith doesn't remember exactly what he said, only that even in the moment he knew it was a cheap shot on someone already down for the count, a twist in the knife through a stab in the back. A better man - a man like Shiro - would have apologized. Keith had only run.)
The only planet they pass on the way out is Jupiter, strange and roiling. Krolia watches him as he sends out the warning message one more time, his throat dry.
This is fear too big to put a name to, fear too big to fully grasp. Keith pushes it down, watching out the tilted viewscreen as Krolia takes them into Jovan orbit once, slingshotting in the gravity well. He knows alien antigrav and inertial dampeners mean it’s an illusion, but he swears he feels the speed, the engines revving, like a hoverbike off a cliff as they leave the solar system behind.
I’m free. It’s a strange, wild thought. Free of what? But he’s out here, now, further than any human has ever been, with a rebel fighter straight out of a sci-fi movie who tells him he has alien blood in his veins – and he feels his feet under him for the first time since Iverson pulled him out of class a year ago.
He steps back. Looks at Krolia. Her hands have stilled, and he guesses the ship is on autopilot. One deep breath, clenching his fists.
"We sent a mission to Kerberos," says Keith. "What happened to it?"
Krolia starts slightly.
"The moon of one of the larger Kuiper belt objects. It was manned. Three people. They called it pilot error, but I knew it wasn't. I just didn't know until today what it was."
She looks at him. Really looks, the way his Dad used to, jaw out and eyes that saw everything. Maybe she really could be his mother. "I know they acquired humans," she says. "One of my colleagues updates me when he can -"
"Acquired." Keith breathes the word. "Alive?" It doesn't want to leave his throat. The answers are terrifying. The possibilities are terrifying.
"Captive."
They stare each other down for a long moment. Keith tries to remember how to breathe.
"Someone on that mission meant a lot to you." There's something raw in her throat. "Keith, I can't prom-"
"Takashi Shirogane." It spills out of him in a rush. "The pilot. He's my - he's -" Everything.
She turns her seat around fully. A hand reaches out, and he feels himself flinch away. She might have been his mother once. He doesn't know her. She doesn't know him.
"Keith," she says. It's gentle, the gentlest he's heard her voice in the frantic hour and half he's known her. "When we get back to the base, I'll see what K- what my contacts can dig up. I won't lie to you. He's more likely to be dead than alive."
He could be alive.
"They put prisoners to different purposes. Most go to work camps. It's been - less than a year, right?" She waits for his nod. "Depending on the work... Many prisoners can last a year. A few have lasted decades. That's your friend's best chance. But if they put him in the gladiator pits... I've seen matches. A human wouldn't survive more than a few fights, at best. If they've taken him to the medics, or the druids -" she clenches a fist. "Then he is dead."
Keith shakes his head. The medics - but he can't think of that. He can't even think about Shiro and the human medics, the research he'd done online, the prognosis that had sent him to punching walls and trying to reschedule his dreams. The eulogy. Takashi died doing what he loved. The newscaster. His condition, in the end, proved fatal to three -
No. Shiro's alive. Shiro's alive, and Keith's going to find him.
-
Shiro’s alive.
That thought takes him through six rounds of Blades, through a twisted ankle and a wrenched shoulder and a blow to the head that has him seeing double as he clutches his knife and falls heavily through the trapdoor.
Shiro’s alive.
But the thing speaking to him isn’t Shiro, and it doesn’t matter. It asks for his knife. Krolia asks for his knife. His father puts a hand on his shoulder and then crumbles away into ash.
“I never should have come back for you,” Krolia says, but she’s fading away as well.
Shiro’s alive.
Shiro’s –
The darkness takes him.
-
He wakes, both hands clutching his knife, to the sight of a tall medic with purple, tufted ears and the news that somehow, through a series of events that have become increasingly hazy, he is now part of the Blade of Marmora.
“Your skull should recover. Bones are bones. Never worked on the brain of one of you before, though.”
Keith lets out a low breath. Bed. He’s in a bed, in a white room, and someone – presumably this medic – has bandaged up his shoulder and ankle without trying to disarm him. He likes alien hospitals better than human ones already.
“Shiro is alive.”
“You’ve mentioned.” The medic turns away. He also has a tail. Keith watches the end of it flick back and forth and wonders if they’ve put him on pain meds.
A harsh buzzing sound stops that train of thought. “Patient’s awake,” says the medic, and then chaos breaks loose.
Five Galra burst through the door more or less simultaneously, followed more sedately by a still-masked figure in the rear. Krolia reaches his bedside first, and looks at him.
“You did well,” she says. He tries to mirror her smile.
“My knife –” he starts. He has a vague memory – mixed with the rest of the vague memories – of it growing to the size of a sword, but it’s returned now to its familiar heft in his hands.
“Luxite. You’ll be able to control it with training.”
One of the Galra behind Krolia whoops, and Keith tries to figure out through the remaining haze in his mind if this is a sex joke thing, and if so how to avoid ever having this conversation with Krolia again.
“Ignore these kits,” she says, as another whoop breaks out.
“Your planet makes them strong!” A lavender Galra leans over Krolia and gestures to his swollen eye. “Tiny, though.”
“Krolia makes them strong!” Keith suspects this one is the whooper. “Six rounds, kit! This calls for drinks!”
The medic doesn’t even turn. “Patient. No drinks.”
“Indeed.”
At that voice, everyone falls silent. Keith shifts and peers up over the crowd, shoulder straining.
“Kolivan,” says Krolia.
“Krolia.” Kolivan removes his mask to reveal a scarred, patterned face. The raucous Blades come to attention, soldiers again. Keith fights the still-instinctive urge to salute.
“Your commander will be wondering where you are.” Kolivan’s voice is level. The remaining Blades begin to edge towards the door.
“My ‘great aunt’ is ill,” says Krolia. “And as my commander made clear when he signed my request for leave, having a retired admiral in the family is the only reason my career has flourished in spite of my… limitations.” What began as cheerful sarcasm turns nearly to a growl.
“Just because he’s a fool doesn’t mean his commanders are.”
“The records exist. The risk was worth it.” She looks towards Keith.
“You have a quintant to return.”
Krolia’s jaw tightens. “I know.”
Now Kolivan turns his gaze on Keith, and Keith glares back. “You are a Blade of Marmora.”
“I am.” His throat feels dry.
“Do you have any idea what that means?”
That much he does. “Knowledge or death.” At Kolivan’s shake of the head, he forges onwards. “Victory or death. You fight Zarkon. Zarkon who, right now, is destroying my planet. Enslaving my – enslaving my people. You strike from the shadows – good. I’m good at that. I’m good at fighting. I’m better at flying. I’ll fight for you, I’ll fly for you –“
“Who is Shiro?”
Keith freezes. “The Galra took him,” he says, finally.
“Emotional attachments are a weakness.” Kolivan looks from Krolia to Keith. “Your mother may have compromised years of undercover work to save your life – years built on decades of sacrifice, on death after death.”
“I understand,” says Keith. He presses back into the bed, head aching. He does not loosen his grip on his knife.
“No, you don’t,” says Kolivan. “But you will learn.”
-
He’s good at lying.
Krolia goes back to her mission, Kolivan watches him from the heights, and Shiro lingers, just out of reach, in his dreams.
But he’s good at lying. He trains like none of these things matter. He learns names – Mara, Keshin, Antok – learns faces, voices, what side they lead with when they fight. His blade is an extension of his arm, and he flies the cargo shuttle they give him like it’s an extension of his soul.
And he hunts for clues.
He charts the locations of labor camps – here, here, here – marking their distances from Earth. Soon there are records of humans, mass deportations, but Shiro would have come first and he can’t rely on them.
His dreams get worse.
You abandoned them.
But he’s good at lying to himself, too. And he presses on.
-
He kills for the first time on his first mission, at the helm of a stolen Galra fighter. He ought to feel something, he thinks, as the adrenaline wears off, and then he quashes that thought right back down. He’ll never be a Blade if he starts wondering if the other pilot had a face, a family, someone waiting back home. He’ll hesitate, and he’ll die, and he’ll never find Shiro.
Krolia’s friends slap him on the back and ply him with drinks, and he swallows foul-tasting alien alcohol until he knows he won’t dream. The next morning he trains with a hangover, and Antok knocks him into the mat and then looks at him with what Keith thinks is an approving tilt to his head.
But they don’t send him on another mission for months. When he finally heads out, it’s to shuttle cargo between the main base and an auxiliary watchpost beneath the ice of a planetoid that looks too much like Kerberos for comfort. The only Blade there is a reptilian hybrid who grabs the first crate of food and then vanishes into the depths without a word. Keith takes the opportunity to download every file his security clearance will let him access.
He starts reading them on the way back, shuttle on autopilot and his feet propped up against a bulkhead. There’s news from Earth. Zarkon hasn’t found the Blue Lion – Keith frowns; this seems like something he should have been told – and they’ve begun a fullscale orbital bombardment directed at breaking up the Earth’s crust rather than its population. The news about the population is bad enough; labor camps and mass executions. Something called the Champion killed thirty humans at the last public gladiator games – not fought, as far as Keith can see. Just killed.
Krolia’s words come back to him. Shiro would have fought. Shiro would have died.
Shiro is alive.
That’s the thought he needs. That’s the thought he clings to.
That’s the thought that isn’t: and five billion other people are dead.
-
“This is your first solo mission,” Kolivan tells him, face even grimmer than usual. “We will not be able to retrieve you, but you have the codes for the shuttle hangar. If you cannot complete your mission, escape.” A long breath. “Fight another day.”
Keith nods. He already knows what isn’t being said: if you can’t escape, take your knife and slit your throat.
He doesn’t think they’d normally trust him with undercover work this early. He doesn’t really think Kolivan trusts him at all, at least to get the job done without tripping over his own feet. That’s fine. Hell, that’s fair, in a lot of ways. He’s with the Blades because he has nowhere else in the universe to go, because maybe, just maybe, he can use what they’ve given him and he can get Shiro back.
But he’s the only choice they have, right now, too, because he’s the only Blade who can pass for human.
The goal at this particular labor camp is something called the Project. It’s some kind of experimental laser cannon, it’s heavily radioactive, and humans have the dual advantages of being able to stand exposure to its particular wavelength longer than Galra and also being considered cheap and disposable.
Keith’s job is to blow it up. The Blades have tried to infiltrate via the guards, but most of those are robots; the last agent they’d sent in had been caught somewhere he shouldn’t have been and only barely managed to make his death look like an accident.
Antok supervises his transfer onto the prisoner transport, lingering longer than Keith thinks is really necessary.
“Hangar codes,” he hisses, gruffly. “Remember.”
Keith nods, and then lets himself be shoved into the cell.
There are about a dozen other prisoners. He knows – he knows – that none of them will be Shiro, but he scans their faces anyway. Slumped, dirty, and bruised. All but two are human. Only one, a middle aged man with a scabbed, bloody nose, even bothers to meet Keith’s gaze.
They’re the first humans he’s seen since – since his last supply run back at the shack. He can’t even remember how long ago it was.
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t think he has words.
-
Keith’s first day in the labor camp goes about as well as he could have hoped. He’s not assigned to the Project; instead he’s on fence repair, stringing what resembles nothing so much as barbed chicken wire across the holes made in the perimeter fence by what he gathers are this planet’s particularly hostile fauna. He works most of the day beside a completely silent blonde woman and a four-armed alien he’s fairly sure is a Unilu, who’s slightly more talkative, though only about the six-legged reptiles that howl in the night and the number of prisoners he’s seen eaten by them.
“Any idea what they’re building?”
The Unilu laughs, a dry, dusty sound. “Nope. I’m one of the lucky ones, see? Your kind, they get to die. I get to string up wires.”
Keith grunts. The twin suns are beginning to set, which means that in addition to being sunburned, soon he’s going to be very cold.
The woman lets out a hiss of breath, and Keith sees blood dripping from her palm.
“Here,” he says, ripping off the bottom of his ragged tunic. He’s suddenly struck by a desperate, preposterous need to hear a human voice.
She stares at him for a long moment. “Danke,” she says, finally, slowly.
The Unilu clicks his tongue. “Your kind,” he says again. “They die fast.”
-
The prisoners get two meals. This is supper. It’s some kind of nutrient stew that tastes even worse than the kind the Blades give him for cargo flights, and it comes in one massive vat that has already started three fist fights. Keith watches from the corner as an all-out brawl begins and the two Galra guards by the door begin elbowing each other and laughing, and tries to pretend the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach is just the fucking awful stew.
“Hey!”
Keith stares.
A young human woman with short brown hair grabs one of the brawlers, and shouts something in Keith can’t make out at another.
The brawlers, impossibly, begin to still. And, of course, that is when the guards step in.
The door is free. The part of Keith’s mind that’s a Blade notes that. A seven-foot Galra is about to pistol-whip an unarmed human woman, and the rest of Keith, the Keith that has spent years of his life trying to be the man Takashi Shirogane wants him to be, is already sprinting towards them.
He doesn’t reach under the back of his tunic for his knife, but looking back, later, he knows that wasn’t tactical planning. It was simply that his metal soup bowl was fairly heavy, and already in his hands.
He strikes the guard from behind, and that’s his saving grace. Neither of them sees him, and neither of them shoots him. His blow doesn’t do much more than knock the guard slightly off balance, but then he hooks his leg and sends the Galra crashing to the floor. Someone beside him roars, and then another man is on top of the fallen guard, raining blows down on the back of his neck.
A shot rings out.
Keith dives to the ground, but it wasn’t aimed at him.
Another shot, and then another, and the man on top of the fallen guard collapses backwards, red pooling beneath him. Keith recognizes, with a jolt of his heart, the bloody-nosed man from the transport ship.
There are a few more bodies on the ground. None of them are the brown-haired woman. None of them are Shiro.
Shiro would have fought, he remembers. Shiro would have died. Keith did the first, and it’s only luck that he hasn’t done the second. So far.
He and a few others are herded out of the room, and he clenches his fists, trying to stay light on his feet. If they start shooting, he draws his blade. If they search him, he draws his blade. Two Galra and a few of the robots – it’s a fight he might be able to win, if he’s willing to use the other prisoners to shield him while he does it.
If.
If he dies, he’ll never find Shiro. If he sacrifices everything Shiro ever taught him –
They aren’t searched. They aren’t shot. They’re simply flung into a cell, and left.
Keith tries to remember how to breathe.
“Hey.”
It’s the brown-haired woman. He can’t tell much, in the dim light, but she looks about his age, maybe a little older. He grunts in response.
“You were at the Garrison,” she says. “Weren’t you?”
-
Her name is Veronica McClain. Older than him, younger than Shiro. He doesn’t think he’s ever talked to her before, but she knows who he is.
“My little brother –“ she says, and then she stops.
Keith can feel the ground shifting under his feet. The Blades didn’t send him on a rescue mission. But the Blades did send him on a solo mission. The closest thing to a commanding officer he’s got right now are his memories of Shiro.
He looks around the cell, ignoring, as best he can, the huddled forms of his fellow prisoners. And something strikes him. It feels like the best luck he’s had in months.
This isn’t a cell. It’s an interrogation room.
And interrogation rooms have locks on both sides.
-
The Project explodes with a satisfying boom. The shockwave catches his outdated little fighter – the hangar had not been well-stocked, but at least she’d been armed – and he fights to recover his bearings. As he heads towards orbit, he spots a blip on his tracker, and, soon, the freighter that McClain had gotten their mob of escapees onto, hovering and yet to break atmo.
Keith curses. He’d given them the coordinates of one of the little rebel gangs the Blades keep track of, desperate and idealistic enough to accept four or five dozen mostly-humans into their ranks, particularly humans who came bearing ships. The rest of the fighters are stowed in or strapped to the freighter, which could cause problems, but she doesn’t seem to be in distress.
Keith’s communicator screen buzzes, and then buzzes again, on a different frequency. He opens it before the escapees try any more and end up accidentally calling Zarkon. “What?”
“Keith. How will we contact you?”
He grinds his teeth. “You won’t.” He shuts down communications and powers up the engine.
He’d seen their stares as he opened doors, as he knifed guards, saw them looking not at his human face but the subtle violet glow of his eyes. He’s as alien to them, now, as he is to the Blades. Fine. Good, even. He has Shiro as a weight around his neck, he doesn’t need any more.
Shiro.
Keith reopens the channel. “Wait,” he says. “I’m giving you a drop point.” He pauses, looks at McClain’s brown eyes through the static on the screen. “I’m giving you a drop point. Don’t hand it out to everyone. But.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“Takashi Shirogane,” he says. “Shiro. If you – if you find anything – ”
She nods. There’s something in her eyes like pity. Keith slams in the coordinates, then shuts down the screen.
-
“You did well.”
Keith boggles. Kolivan merely slightly lifts his brow, then continues speaking.
“You managed to free the slaves without losing sight of your primary mission.”
“It was a test,” says Keith. His jaw clenches.
“One you passed. One thing, however, remains to be seen. What will you do when there is no third option?”
Kolivan holds his gaze for a long time. Keith can’t find an answer – or, rather, can’t find a convincing enough lie. Kolivan’s eyes seem to bore straight through him.
“Dismissed,” says Kolivan, finally.
-
“Keith? This is Matt Holt.”
Five words. Five words, and his heart stops in his chest. The shuttle’s already on autopilot, has been since he left the abandoned relay beacon whose coordinates and frequency he’d given to Veronica. He hadn’t really been expecting a message. Not a real message. “We’re settling in well,” or “most of the wounded didn’t make it,” maybe a bit of useless but well-meant intel on Imperial movements.
Not Matt Holt’s voice. Prerecorded, dobashes old, but Matt’s voice. Keith’s hands shake.
“I’m sorry.”
And the bottom drops out of his world.
“-to save me, Keith – ” but all Keith can hear is pilot error, pilot error. Iverson pulling him out of class. Shiro’s hand on his shoulder, the last time he’d seen him –
“-won that fight, I don’t know how –“
Krolia’s voice, soft but matter-of-fact. “A human wouldn’t survive more than a few fights, at best.”
It’s been more than a year since they took him. Shiro is dead. Shiro is dead because Matt Holt is alive, and suddenly Keith hates him for it, hates all of them, hates himself.
“Shiro is dead,” he whispers. It’s dust in his throat. His hand is bleeding, caught in the shards of what had been his communications panel. It ought to hurt. But he can’t feel it.
Shiro is dead.
-
He needs to know.
He trains like a man possessed, takes Antok to the ground once and Keshin half a dozen times. He drinks with Mara until his head spins. He wonders what would happen if he walked up to Kolivan and asked for a suicide mission.
But he needs to know.
Gladiator matches are even easier to get information on than work camps. The Blades don’t watch them, of course, but that makes them more or less unique in the Empire. Somewhere, buried in match footage and statistic sheets and fucking alien talk shows, is the death of the best man Keith has ever known.
He needs to know. He needs to see. He needs to silence the little voice in his head that’s still clinging to hope in the face of reality. Watch with his eyes open. Build a memorial. Have something, something, to set against the nightmares in his head.
Shiro is dead. Shiro died galaxies from home to the cheers of a drunken alien crowd.
He needs to know.
And then he needs to kill them all, or die trying.
-
Vardox12: all im saying is the last one would of made it a fucking show
Kasarrrrr: yeah, right before he tripped on his own stupid horns
2Zolia: you saw the last fight, right?? Climbed up its back and slit its throat from behind!!!!
2Zolia: he can kill prisoenrs however he wants to. Can’t blame him for being bored
Vardox12: then make ur own entertainment!
Vardox12: don’t just kill them in one blow and fall over
1239879234: fall over, huh? sheep
1239879234: im telling you it’s the druids
1239879234 has been BANNED
Keith shuts down the screen, grinding his teeth. Still nothing. The Champion has apparently become a reliable method of executing human prisoners – and usually only human prisoners – but whatever “fall” had happened in the last bout had apparently caused Galra censors to scrub all the footage they could find. As Keith is trying not to use more sensitive Blade methods (such as borrowing Keshin’s passcode) until he’s certain he’s on the right track, that also means they’ve scrubbed all the footage Keith can find.
He’s seen a few of the executions. Unpleasant. No Shiro. More of the fights: the same. Last night he dreamt he was in the arena, Shiro looming over him, close enough to touch, a red line gaping its way open on his throat. They’d fallen through the floor of the arena, locked together, and then Keith had woken up.
He hasn’t eaten yet. He hasn’t actually left his quarters. He’ll drag himself out to train later. Kolivan had nodded at him a couple of days ago; he can’t be falling apart too much.
The screen flickers to life for a moment, and beeps at him.
Keith narrows his eyes. A message. Blade message. It could be his next mission; it could be Keshin getting concerned and trying to coax him out to eat again. He hits the button anyway.
Cousin Yorak, it begins. Please inform Great Aunt Erinya that…
His eyes narrow further.
The message is from Krolia; that much is obvious even before he reaches her name at the bottom. It’s a recommendation to “Yorak” of a doctor for his aunt. He scans it over again. I was pleased to hear her situation remained stable. That could mean something. I wish I could do more. His heart thuds a beat at that. At least she’d had a reason to leave him. She’d had a galaxy burning where his dad had had that house.
The wound is still there. But it’s an old wound. If he leaves it alone, it won’t fester.
The doctor has a contact number.
Keith doesn’t call it; it has one too many digits, to start with. But she’s given him a number. She’s given him a code.
She’s given him something to do that isn’t trawling through alien message boards looking for Shiro’s corpse.
Maybe she is his mom, after all.
-
He pulls the message’s source encoding, and runs through it, number by number. He finds one repeating segment, but putting it into Roman letters yields “U-L-A-Z,” which could be a Galran name but equally likely could be a dead end.
A human won two gladiator matches a phoebe ago. His hand hovers over the video button for an unforgivable, tortured second, but the second he starts it he can see that she’s not Shiro. He watches her lose her third match, muting the sounds of the crowd when he can’t take them any longer. Her opponent’s barbed tail catches her across the throat before a blade spikes through her belly.
She doesn’t have a name. The only human out there to hold her memory is Keith, and even he fails her, because that night in his dreams she turns to Shiro over and over again.
“Get some sleep,” Antok tells him, sharply, when he trips over his own feet in the training room. “You’re useless right now.”
Keith lies on the mat, and thinks about taking his advice. A hand on his back makes him jump, scrambling to get his legs under him, but Keshin only takes his arm and lowers him gently back to the ground.
“He’s right, you know.”
Keith glares at him. “I’m fine.”
Keshin sighs. He has a long, feline face, and it’s a dramatic motion. “Kit. What happened?”
He says nothing. His throat closes up, his fists clench, and he realizes, to his horror, that there are tears prickling at his eyes. Shiro’s dead. Shiro’s dead. Shiro’s dead.
“He’s dead.” It’s a dull, flat voice, and he doesn’t quite recognize it as his own. “Shiro’s dead.”
Most of the time, most of the Blades are like Keith. They don’t touch people. It’s only long nights after long missions when he’ll see groups of them piled together like kittens. The little group he still thinks of as Krolia’s friends, the ones who seem to think it’s their job to look after him, will clump together when they’re drunk, and Mara, a primate-hybrid like Keith, will occasionally act like she’s picking bugs from behind people’s ears.
Keshin rubs Keith’s upper arm, awkwardly.
“Shiro’s dead,” Keith repeats. It should mean something, saying it out loud. It should quiet that awful, hopeful thread of a voice.
Should, should, should.
-
They send him on a milk run. Keith takes the time to filter through more of the coded message. If he spins it out into Roman letters, and cyphers with every other number, he can make “Y-o-r-a-k” turn to “K-e-i-t-h.” He pulls up the source code again and lets the computer try to crunch through it with the same set.
A loud crunching from the cargo hold below him announces that he’s been paying more attention to the flashing numbers than to the settings on his tractor beam. With a grumble, Keith checks to make sure the airlock is sealed, then lowers himself through the hatch.
The bulkhead is scratched; his target is more-or-less unharmed, though shrouded in the ruins of what, centuries ago, had been solar panels and are now a knife-edged mess. The relay beacon squats in the center, and he stares at it a minute too long.
Keith? This is Matt Holt.
No. No time for that now. He downloads the messages and jettisons the thing into space.
He reads through the ones he can access more out of habit than curiosity. Fleet admiral. Dispatch 9… and then he stops dead.
He knows that string of numbers. They’re the numbers Krolia gave him.
Ulaz.
-
The reports are in a standard Blade code; they uncrunch easily and quickly, words spilling across the screen as Keith’s heart stands still.
Ulaz is a medical officer in the heart of the fleet, liaising with the druids, developing modifications and augmentations for soldiers and “projects” both. This is a record of his work with the Champion, and none of it looks pleasant. But that isn’t why Keith is shaking. That isn’t why the sounds of the ship around him have gone silent, reduced to the sound of that small, hopeful voice, louder than ever, keening in agony.
The Champion is human.
He knows. He thinks he knows before he opens the first video file.
A figure on a table. Face hidden. Broad, bare chest marked with still-bleeding scars. “No!”
“Put him under again.” Another voice. It could be Ulaz. It could be Iverson, for all Keith knows or cares.
Shiro.
Shiro in agony, his face still hidden but his spine bowing, and Keith would have known him even if he’d never spoken. His eyes are glued to the screen, his hands tensed and shaking, his breath a hiss between teeth that suddenly seem too sharp.
This is the first video. There are seventeen.
He skips to the last, frantic, desperate. Shiro.
The footage is distant, fuzzy. A hidden camera, notes the part of him that’s still a Blade. The rest of him is focused on the largest figure in the arena below. The shape of his shoulders – he knows it’s Shiro, but the posture is all wrong, standing but slumped, his head down. Like a puppet with his strings cut.
Like the best man Keith’s ever known, the brightest thing in the universe, thrown into an arena and forced to kill for sport.
There’s something wrong with one of his arms – a wound? – but at this distance Keith can’t make it out.
There are other figures, too, slumped, huddled together. They don’t look like gladiators, he thinks, and then realizes why. This is the fight he spent weeks trying to find. The execution.
Shiro jerks into action. The crowd roars and the camera shakes, and Keith snarls, digging his fingernails into his palms, his breath coming in harsh pants. This is an abomination, a perversion of everything that Shiro is, everything that Shiro means.
One blurry prisoner falls. A neck snap. Another. They’re trying to fight, but they haven’t even been given weapons. After the third kill Shiro stills for a moment, and then twists, flinches, raising his wounded arm.
Not wounded. Keith can see the glint of metal. A prosthetic?
A weapon.
Shiro’s hand – the place where Shiro’s hand should be – glows purple. He slits a throat, and then another, lowering the bodies to the ground now, not letting them fall. One prisoner remains, charging at him, and Keith can feel his mouth opening to shout a warning.
Shiro whirls, slices. Again, he lowers the body, but this time, he goes to the ground with it. He hunches over, a dark smear in the blurred camera feed, but Keith knows him, Keith can see him, arms around his knees, head down.
“I’m coming for you,” Keith whispers, low and rough. He rests his fingers against the screen, against Shiro’s back. There is blood trickling down his hands from where his nails have bitten into the skin, the pain just sharp enough to ground him. “I’ll get you out of there, Shiro. I promise.”
Shiro is alive.
Nothing else matters.
-
I’m sorry. Be safe, says the fourth paragraph of Krolia’s message, decoded.
“We must seize this opportunity,” says Antok, tall, chest puffed out, right in Kolivan’s face.
“We will.” Kolivan narrows his eyes, and Antok shrinks.
“Something’s changed in you,” says Keshin, when they spar.
Keith only nods, and glowers.
Shiro and the Holts were captured by Sendak, a high-ranking officer with pretensions to being one of the Emperor’s right hands. Keith reads through file after file, studies the images until he could pick Sendak out of a crowd. Not that it would be difficult. Large even for a Galra, and with an arm just enough like Shiro’s prosthetic to make him grind his teeth.
He wonders if Ulaz had put it on him. Wonders if it has an off-switch hidden somewhere, a remote control – but that seems like a lot for a lone agent to risk.
Keith drifts off to images of his blade through Sendak’s throat, trying for better dreams. He’s read that some people can do it. Instead he dreams of Shiro.
Shiro’s hand on his chest, aglow with purple light. Shiro’s lips on his own, their breaths mingling amid too-sharp teeth. They’re together on the cliffside where they used to sit, now, Shiro warm against his side, but his face shadowed and hidden. The cliff shakes, and the earth shakes, and Keith can see them now as though they’d always been there, the lights and beams of a thousand Galra ships, the screams and cracks as Earth dies around them.
He reaches for Shiro’s hand, and then he wakes.
Alarms blare, the bass tones shaking the room around him. Keith grinds his teeth and slides into his Blade uniform. He knows these sounds well enough – they’re not being attacked. They simply need all hands on deck, and they need them now.
-
“This,” says Kolivan, “is the Blue Lion.”
Keith watches the footage, eyes narrowed. Earth. Earth quite early on in the invasion, if the state of the atmosphere is any judge. No miles-high clouds of dust, no cracking continents, not even much space debris. And then he watches, head moving to the side in unison with two dozen other Blades, as a beam of light races up towards orbit. He can’t make out much lion-shaped about it at this distance, but he can make out the shape of an Imperial cruiser exploding.
Chaos breaks out in the orbital fleet. The Blades remain silent, watching; Keith wonders how many of them are like him, feeling the corners of his mouth tilt up in a sharp, bitter grin as two more cruisers collide, as the Lion, growing clearer, slams into the engine mounting on a dreadnaught and sends half their thrusters careening off towards Mars.
It flashes by them for an instant, and then its gone. “Rewind and freeze,” says Kolivan. Keith takes the moment to try to remember how to breathe. Around him are the kind of low, excited murmurs that even Kolivan’s presence can’t still.
Keith looks over the frozen image. It’s… a blue lion, alright. Something between a ship and a robot, with a face, even in profile, that looks far too knowing to just be decoration for the pilot’s viewscreen. And it looks… he doesn’t know how to word it, even silently in his head, let alone in a way he’d air to Kolivan. But it looks wounded.
It looks hurt.
“Now,” says Kolivan. “Watch the way it flies.”
In slow-motion, he thinks the rest of the Blades can see it, too.
“Damaged,” says Antok.
Kolivan nods. “It has not been sighted since. We must search for the Blue Lion, because Zarkon will not let up his own search. But we are looking for a single ship, dead somewhere in space. We are, therefore, stepping up efforts elsewhere – as is Zarkon.” He taps a button. “The Red Lion.”
Keith stares. He can recognize, around the lion and its protective barrier, the telltale colors and wall structure of an Imperial Navy vessel. What he hears, somewhere distant, is the song that haunted his dreams in Arizona.
The image of the lion jerks away, and Keith flinches.
“Zarkon is escalating efforts to find a pilot.”
Keith digs his fingers into the still-healing scabs on his palms, and steadies himself, readjusting his posture back to something Iverson-approved instead of a child gawking at the screen. There are five pictures – naval ID photos, most likely, but like most Garrison IDs, they’ve turned out looking more like mugshots. One on the left was even caught mid-blink.
The one on the far right is Sendak.
“Keshin, Regris, Tikara, Zoran. Remain for further briefing. Antok, you know your duty.”
Antok nods. “Victory or death. I’ll need to take the new shuttle to the rendez-vous. Mara, with me.”
Mara stands and nods, asking no further questions. She’s an engineer; either the new shuttle is troublesome or they’re rigging it for a “accidental” explosion.
He stares at Sendak’s image on the screen as the Blades around him rise to leave the room. You sold Shiro to the gladiator pits. To the druids.
He’s made it through file fourteen. He wants Shiro. And then he wants the Empire to burn.
Someone grabs his arm, and Keith realizes if he stays any longer he’ll be eavesdropping in plain sight on a top secret mission briefing. Keshin, at the head of the room, gives him a strange look, and Keith tears his eyes away from Sendak, following the last of the Blades out of the room.
-
File fifteen is the specs for Shiro’s third prosthetic arm so far. Higher fit; removed scarring and necrotic tissue.
…removed scarring and necrotic…
He reads the sentence over and over, as if that will help. It’s not even the worst of it. The video this time claims simply to be a 3-D rendering, but all the last ones have featured surgery. Keith thinks he knows which of the doctors is Ulaz; he’s the one who actually waits for the anesthetics to kick in.
At least, he hopes that’s Ulaz. If it’s not, then there’s one more name on his kill list.
Improvements in quintessence drain –
“Kit.”
Keith whirls in alarm.
Keshin has his hands up disarmingly. “Still on edge, I take it?”
“I…” That’s the problem with Keshin. He thinks that because he’s Krolia’s friend he’s Keith’s.
“I requested you as my second.”
Keith cocks his head. “What?…Why?”
Keshin quirks his mouth. “They’re sending me to assassinate Sendak. You’re good with a blade, you’re small enough fit through passages full-bloods can’t, and, well. It’s Sendak.”
Keith’s heart stops, briefly. He tries for a nonchalant, “Oh?,” but whatever noise he actually makes causes two Blades eating on the other side of the room to look up and stare.
“Shiro was part of the Earth mission he captured, right?” At Keith’s look, he shakes his head. “You’re not the only one Krolia writes to. Kit, you used to have drive. Then you had none. Now… Now I think you do, but maybe not the kind that Kolivan likes.”
Shiro’s alive. Shiro’s alive. But he can’t say it.
“Kit- Keith. I don’t want to pry. But I’ve been where you are.” His voice trails off, before rallying again. “You want revenge. Kolivan thinks the best cure for wanting revenge is self-discipline. Now, I would die for Kolivan. He’s a great man. But in my book? The best cure for wanting revenge is getting it.”
-
Don’t do anything stupid.
Blunt and to the point. It’s the last line of Krolia’s letter. Keith is reminded of another voice as he gears up.
Patience yields focus.
His hands are shaking as they board the ship. He isn’t sure if what he’s doing is stupid or impatient – isn’t sure if that matters to him. Because this is everything he wants handed to him on a silver platter, and he’s clinging, with both hands, tightly, in case it’s jerked away.
Half the Galra fleet will be parked in and around this particular solar system. Zarkon explicitly won’t be, which has a few of the Blades, Kolivan included, wary of a trap. Keith doesn’t care.
There are gladiator games scheduled. There’s a ship, in orbit around the fifth planet, that he’s eighty percent sure Ulaz is on. There are reports, from a scout who’s now gone silent, that druids are crowding around the second planet, the life bearing one, like bees around a hive.
Keshin nudges him in the side. “Stick close with me.”
Keith nods, dry-mouthed. Shiro. He needs to say something. Keshin had stuck his neck out for him. Keshin might even understand.
But Keshin might also turn the ship around, and the thought of that is a bike crash, a house fire, an orbital bombardment. Keith might never be this close again – and every second he wastes is a second Shiro spends in hell.
“Don’t give me that look,” says Keshin. “I know you’re capable. But if you get yourself killed, Krolia will disembowel me.”
Keith runs his fingers over the insignia on his blade. Thinks of Krolia. Wishes, suddenly, that he’d sent her some kind of reply. Anything at all.
“I’m not here to get myself killed,” says Keith, and pulls his mask up over his face.
-
It all goes to hell so fucking quickly.
“C’mon, c’mon – ”
Keshin is dead weight in his arms. The guards had been on them the second they’d docked, stealth systems be damned. He drags Keshin into what looks to be a supply closet, knowing even as he bolts the door that it’s useless. Blade armor is decent, but that had been a direct shot to the head.
He squeezes his eyes tightly shut for a moment. Blood and worse drip down from his shoulders as he lowers Keshin to the ground, as he peels stiffening fingers away from the handle of his blade.
Telling him about Shiro wouldn’t have changed anything. It couldn’t have. But guilt sits like a lead weight in Keith’s chest all the same. Your fault.
The harsh, shrill sounds of an alarm pierce through his skull. For a moment he feels too brittle to move.
Shiro is alive.
He hangs Keshin’s blade on his belt, keeps his own in his hand. Rigs one of their small explosives to the corpse – just a corpse now, he tries to remind himself.
Shiro is alive.
Now that he knows what supply closets look like, he drags a guard into one of them, blade at his throat.
“Where are the prisoners?” he hisses. “Where’s Sendak?”
He gets the first and not the second. Blood drips down his arms, and he wants to vomit, wants to run.
He can’t. He won’t.
Shiro is alive.
Shiro is alive.
But there are no prisoners, just empty cells and a single carapaced corpse. He flings open cell after cell, feet heavy, no longer caring if he makes noise.
“Where’s the shuttle bay?”
The guard burbles at him, and then gives him a sharp toothed smile. Keith follows his eyes.
The guard brought friends.
Shiro is alive.
Keith tears through the ship, losing the first five guards by crawling through a pitch-black airduct and then meeting seven more on the other side. He tries to remember the layout, but it’s all in Keshin’s voice, and there’s a thin line between that and the sound Keshin made when he was hit.
Downwards. He slides down a ladder, into a maintenance tube. Down and aft.
Shiro is alive.
Keith’s hip is burning, his arm bleeding. There’s a ringing in his ears, and he can feel the skin around his left eye beginning to bruise and swell. He stumbles through another door.
The light is strange. Too blue, too bright. He squints, the lenses in his mask adjusting, and feels the bitter quirk of his lips.
He’s found the Red Lion.
It’s beautiful. Keith takes in a ragged breath, strange voices whispering in his ears. He raises a hand to the barrier.
It’s firm and cold beneath his gloves. Different, in a way his tired brain can’t quite analyze, from Galra shielding.
“In here!”
Keith braces himself against the barrier, blade ready. Shiro is alive, he thinks, once more. Shiro. Shiro, I’m so, so sorry.
He blocks the first shot, but a second grazes along his calf, the force of it still enough to knock him back.
Shiro –
Back, and through.
-
The Lion roars.
Keith, in the cockpit, watches as the guards give way, and then the bulkhead behind them. Space. Empty space.
His hands come to the controls of their own volition, as though this is something he’s always known. The Lion leaps.
He’s flown fighters, shuttles, miserable little cargo craft. He’s never flown anything like this. He speeds past a wing of Galra fighters, then makes an effortless one-eighty to barrel back past them, the Lion’s claws extended. And all around him the hum, like the songs in the desert, like a sunrise in his mind.
Shiro is alive, he tells it, and then, with helpless laughter, I’m alive, too.
A knot of ships and a little station orbit the fifth planet. That’s where Ulaz is, and that’s where Shiro is too. And if not – well. If not, he’ll take this fleet apart, one by one.
“You have – a gun. In your tail?”
The sunrise rumbles a bit.
Keith locks on to another wave of fighters.
He scans the ships. Most of them are undocking, or trying to. Two destroyers slam into one another, barely unhooked from the station. Keith grits his teeth.
Ulaz’s ship. He has the class. He has three of the ID numbers.
He has it in visual range.
The Lion charges.
-
Keith climbs down out of the Red Lion’s jaws. It’s lodged into the main bulkhead of what should be the prison block, a supposition confirmed when the first helmeted guard tries to shoot at him. Keith disarms him, blade to his throat. There’s no guilt, now. He’s too close to Shiro for anything else to matter.
“Where’s the Champion?”
“Far – far end. I think. I –”
Keith slits his throat.
The best cure for revenge, Keshin had said. Keith isn’t sure. He could kill every face in that cheering crowd, and he’s not sure it would stem this dark thing that’s risen up inside him.
He opens the first cell. A few aliens goggle at him. Most of them look elderly; none of them are over three feet tall.
“Where’s the Champion?”
The foremost member of the group shakes his head, feathers flopping. “I don’t know anything, please – we were just brought here!”
Keith takes a long breath. “There’s a… lion. That way. I think it has a cargo bay beneath the cockpit – oh. The barrier’s probably up. Look. Just… wait there, and I’ll get you someplace safe, okay?”
Two in the back whisper to each other, but the group slowly makes its way out of the cell.
The next two aren’t much better – three more prisoners, none of them gladiators, all somewhat skeptical of his promise to whisk them away to safety in a robot lion.
“The bad men. The… fighters. They’re back that way,” whispers the last of them, squeezing his hand between three of her tentacles.
Keith nods. He can hear alarms starting to blare.
The next three cells are empty, but turning a corner brings him somewhere much more promising. He kicks open the next cell door to reveal three enormous, craggy figures individually chained to the walls.
“Where’s the Champion?”
“Behind you!”
Keith whirls to see an electric prod inches from his shoulder. He kicks out, tripping the guard holding it, then snaps it in half. “Where’s the Champion?” he repeats.
“That way.” The largest figure lifts a rocky hand. “More guards’ll come.”
“Let us out,” suggests the middle gladiator, slightly slimmer and much hairier.
Keith grins.
He dodges and weaves through what quickly becomes an all out prison riot, his three new allies taking up position on his flanks.
“That way,” repeats the largest, as they come to a fork.
“Bad place, yes,” hisses his third, previously silent companion. “Druidssss.”
“None there now.” A heavy hand cuffs Keith’s shoulder.
The hairy one shoves it off to rest his own paw against Keith’s back. Keith stiffens.
“Galra,” he growls. “Die –“
Keith buries his knife in the gladiator’s belly. Listens to his body fall. He thinks the rocky one is still behind him, but the hissing voice is long gone, back into the fray.
The noises behind him, though, seem strange and distant, voices in a dream. There’s a heavy black door in front of him. He raises a hand to the keypad.
Something boils up, hot in his throat. I can’t survive it, if it’s not him. I can’t, I can’t, I –
You must, says a voice, the crackling of a distant fire. You will.
But an unforgivable second ticks away, then another, before he slams his hand down.
The door slides open.
-
A huddled figure is curled against the far wall. Keith can see the glint of metal, see messy dark hair speckled with white, the shape of a broad, scarred back.
“Shiro,” he whispers.
The figure flinches.
“Shiro!”
Keith flings himself into the cell. Hands come up hard against his arms, nearly slamming him to the ground – and then, softer, up to his face.
“Keith?” Shiro’s voice is a ragged whisper. “Keith?”
Shiro’s hands fall away from his face, down to his shoulders, as though he’s not quite certain what to do. Keith leans into him, and the dam breaks. They cling to each other, Keith’s arms around Shiro’s ribs, his face buried in his chest.
“You’re alive,” he whispers. “You’re alive.”