Ashes of the Stars (2 page)

“Humor me,” He urged me.

I rolled my eyes behind my closed lids and then rolled over onto my side. My sleeping bag was snug but I could wiggle around in it. I propped my head up in my hands and stared at him. He was sitting up in his sleeping bag and holding onto his canteen of water, not drinking it.

“I’m under a blanket of stars,” I grunted in an annoyed tone. I could easily recall the details of my nightmare. “I’m in a green field and there are bright wildflowers everywhere only their petals are closed up because it’s night. There’s a soft, cool breeze but it’s not even strong enough to ruffle my hair…”

“Your beautiful, red wine colored hair,” Finn grinned, trying to lighten my mood.

I stuck my tongue out at him and the continued. “I can hear someone breathing nearby. It sounds nasally, like he’s not quite snoring. For some reason, I turn my head towards the boy. I can see he has bright, golden blonde hair and he’s still a teenager. I can tell from the way he’s stretched out in his sleeping bag that he’s tall, lanky.”

“Better to be lanky than a huge ogre,” Finn joked again, motioning to his own body.

“Hardy har har. I don’t need to repeat this, you know. You’ve heard this dream often enough,” I wrinkled my nose at him.

“Sorry,” He smiled gently at me. He waved his hand as if giving me permission to keep talking.

“Anyway,” I sighed heavily. “In the dream, I feel… I don’t know? I feel at peace with the boy nearby. It’s like I know him better than anyone else. And then, like I was never laying down peacefully to begin with, I’m on my feet in the same meadow and I’m breathing hard, like I’d been running for hours. There’s a sharp pain shooting down my arm and I can feel blood dripping from my fingertips. I can see my sleeping bag but it’s ripped to shreds. There’s a big group of huge, intimidating men in the meadow now and they’re restraining the boy who was sleeping beside me. Now his face is bloodied like there was a fight.

“I can hear someone behind me saying ‘take the girl, kill the boy’ and I start screaming at the men. I had started moving towards the boy but strong arms pulled me back and restrained me.”

“That’s new, isn’t it? Being restrained?” Finn was ever hopeful that there would be some new detail of my dream to dissect.

“No, they always restrained me,” I told him sadly. Finn seemed to deflate as he tried to remember that detail. “Somehow, I don’t know if they threw me to the ground or if I fell, I’m looking at the stars and they’re fuzzy and blindingly bright like I got hit in the head or something. That’s when I start really panicking and I try to get up but there’s a crowd around me holding me down. I could see when the boy gets stabbed by another boy, one who’s smaller. Then the familiar boy looks to me and he’s crying and then everything fades to black but I seem stuck there and there’s only one thing I can think about… that I’m alone. And that’s it.”

As far as nightmares went, I could think of much more devastating images to conjure up. Bloody battles, blankly staring eyes with no life left in them, burning bodies, and so much more. For whatever reason, it wasn’t so much what I
saw
in the dream that terrified me but the feelings that came along with it. It felt like losing the only thing you had left in the entire world.

“Not different,” Finn sighed in disappointment. I shrugged and rolled over onto my back again. I’d warned him that there was nothing different, I had no idea why he insisted on making me relive the same nightmare even when I was awake. I closed my eyes and let my body relax even though I knew I wouldn’t go back to sleep.

Finn and I loved each other. We loved each other from the time we met when we were just children. I never had any family so his took me in once our trainer told his parents how close we were. His mom had been like a mother to me when I was young, though as Finn and I grew up, she’d become more and more distant. It was a common trait in parents because of how much bloodshed there was in this world, everyone was afraid to lose the people they cared about.

Finn and I had experimented, sexually, when we hit puberty. That was when we realized not only were we too close, practically siblings, but Finn was gay. Ever since, we’d loved each other the way we always had: with an almost annoyed affection.

Before Finn’s family took me in, I lived in the Legion’s orphanage. The medics had worked on me day and night in the beginning and I often couldn’t recall anything they’d done. In those days, I woke up screaming from my nightmare. I would thrash, kick and scream, and bite anyone who tried to come near me. They would restrain me, strap my hands and feet to the metal frame of the bed, gag me so I couldn’t make a sound, and stabbed me with needles to inject some sort of medicine. After awhile I learned not to scream.

The march back home was a silent affair. No one could help the crunching of ice beneath their feet but no one spoke. Everyone seemed trapped in their own heads, maybe remembering the most recent mission like I tried not to. My team was used to silence; we were the Legion’s stealth team, a squad of bloodthirsty killers best known for quiet and discretion.

Our counterpart, the scouting team, were the ones who left on missions to find enemies. My team often had to wait for their reports before we could go do our job and obliterate them.

I took a moment to look back at my stealth team as they trailed behind me. Finn was taking up the rear to ensure there were no stragglers, but I couldn’t see him from my vantage point at the front. My team was dirty, covered in blood, and they all looked exhausted even with the grungy white masks that hid their faces. Most of my team was older than me. I was only nineteen years old when I was named the youngest Captain in the history of the new world a year ago.

We were getting close to home. I could almost smell the crispness of the frozen bay. As it was, I could smell and taste the salt in the air. I wondered then what my team would think about me if they knew what I thought of myself or if they saw how simply and quietly I lived. I wondered how they would feel if they knew that there were two parts of me inside that were constantly at war with each other. Every day was a struggle for me to get up out of bed, to keep going on.

They call me the Reaper. I heard different versions of
why
but they all boiled down to the same thing, I was the one that swooped in and took life away without fail. That was what everyone else knew me as; that was what I portrayed myself as. If they only knew that I lived in constant torment. I once thought that others felt the same guilt and evil inside that I did, now I couldn’t fathom how anyone could feel as I did and live with themselves after all of the killing.

I led the way over a gradual hill and as I neared the top, I could see my hometown come into view. It was a beautiful city, always. I couldn’t remember the first time I had seen it from the outside as I could see it now, but there was never a moment I thought of it as ugly. The protective walls on the outside were frozen stone that were so high they blocked out the buildings inside. There were gates to the north and the south that were made of a strong, black metal. They had to be oiled often by the guards or else they froze shut. The frozen bay was the city’s backdrop to the south though there was a steep hill that had to be traversed in order to reach it.

The guards at the north gate nodded at me as we approached and they swung the doors open wide to let us in. Inside the cold walls the buildings were all made of the same stone, the rooves were the same metal as the gates. There were less buildings on the surface and a lot of heavy wooden doors with stone tunnels leading underground. There were rows upon rows of unnatural looking stone chimneys popping out of the ground all over the place. All of the housing was underground and I couldn’t wait to get to the peace and quiet of mine. I lived closer to the center of town where the massive food hall was, the underground jails, and a circular opening where stone statues of Legionnaire heroes were honored.

Slowly, my team broke off one by one. I stopped paying attention to them and the other teams and civilians out on the streets, and focused on getting back home.

My house was cold so the first thing I did when I arrived was to set a huge, roaring fire in my fireplaces. I briefly rubbed my cold hands together before the flames to warm them up after I shed my white gloves and tossed them onto a stiff wooden chair. Once my hands were sufficiently warm, I braved the rest of my house and started pouring a hot bath. The water was steaming and almost burned my skin when I’d shed the rest of my uniform and lowered myself into the tub. I leaned back in the tub and let my neck rest against the rim.

“
Aili
,” I heard a whisper. I jumped, startled, and twisted around in the tub to look behind me where the whisper sounded like it came from. When I couldn’t find any source for the phantom voice, I felt terror grip my heart tightly.

My ghosts,
I thought.
They’ve finally come to kill me.

I waited for what felt like an eternity. I didn’t know what I was waiting for. Maybe a shimmer in the air to reveal a lost soul? Perhaps I waited for an invisible entity to wrap its wisp-like hands around my throat and choke the life out of me; maybe to be pushed under the warm, dirty water and held there until I drowned. It would be nothing less than what I deserved. If my ghosts didn’t kill me, my bosses might’ve. They’d killed people for less than being late to meetings before.

There was a candle lit in the windowsill. It had been there for only a short period of time. A man sat behind the candle, staring deeply into its small, flickering flame. He had had the candle for ten years now and he only lit it once a year. It was the anniversary of the most important day of his life.

His black hair was long now; he kept it tied back at the nape of his neck. His green eyes darkened and tanned skin paled in the small light. He hadn’t always looked so. Once he’d had very short hair, his skin had been unhealthily pale. Just the same as he hadn’t always had this candle on this anniversary. Her death.

He hadn’t known her, hadn’t seen her apart from the one time. He’d been but a boy when he’d seen her himself but that one flickering moment, like the candle, blew out too soon. He hadn’t
seen
her die but he knew that life. He couldn’t believe in her survival, not knowing now what he did about her. Still, he’d made a promise and he would continue to look for her ghost as long as he lived. Maybe even longer, if you believed in that sort of thing.

No one knew about the candle, his makeshift memorial. He’d been alone in his home all his life and he hadn’t bought the candle so no rumors could spread. He’d made it himself with a bit of string and beeswax that he’d dipped repetitively for hours.

“Aili,” He whispered softly before he blew out the candle.

Chapter Two

I dressed in a fresh, crisp white uniform. It consisted of white cargo pants, a white utility belt from which sheaths for weapons hung, a long-sleeved white shirt, a white full face mask, though at home it was replaced with a plain white cap, and a thick white parka. Each individual parka had the design of a squad symbol. Mine, as Captain, were three thick grey bands over the left shoulder, the middle extending further down the torso. Finn only had two grey stripes, and non-ranked soldiers were only given a single stripe.

Once I met with the four decrepit Commanders, the leaders of the Legion city, and had given them my report from the mission, I still couldn’t relax. I had lost two soldiers during this mission. One was a young girl, only fifteen, who had been acting carelessly. She had become overwhelmed by a group of enemies and been stabbed to death. The other was an older man whose reflexes had long since slowed and who shouldn’t have been in the field in the first place. His family would’ve been the easiest to face.

I didn’t know where they had lived. After my report, one of the Commander’s liaisons had given me directions to the dead’s former houses. I made my way to the older man’s first. In my year as being Captain I had made countless visits to bereaved families to tell them the news. It never got any easier.

I knocked on the door and took a deep, steadying breath.
Part of the job, Aili. It’s just part of the job,
I reminded myself. I waited, listening to the footsteps on the wooden stairs as they rose. An older woman answered the door, her graying hair pulled back into a tight bun. I could see the residual soldier-like behavior in the way she held herself gracefully, but age and gravity had begun pulling her down.

The older woman took me in, eying me up and down, before she finally stopped on my Captain’s patch on my shoulder and chest. She took a deep breath. “How did he die?”

“Quickly,” I lied. I didn’t know how he had died exactly but he had been found in one of the frozen streets upon inspection with a dagger sticking out of his chest. His eyes staring lifelessly up at the starless sky.

The woman, I could tell, didn’t believe me. She nodded once, a curt bob of her head, and then she closed the door. She didn’t want comfort from what, to her, was a child. I was not known for my empathy as it was.

I made my way much slower towards the girl’s house. When I arrived, I filled my lungs with the frosty air before I knocked. The answer was much faster here. I had expected a woman or a man but it was a child who answered the door, no more than eight years old. She looked up at me with innocent brown eyes. Her mousy brown hair was pulled back into a tight braid.

“Is your mom or dad home?” I asked the little girl.

“Yep,” She said a little too loudly. I winced and shied away from the little girl as she spun around and skipped down the stairs. She left the door open so I followed her down, pulling it closed behind me. She had disappeared into the house before I’d even gotten halfway down the stairs and I could hear her talking to her parents.

I expected this to be a nightmare in and of itself so I wasn’t surprised, when I reached the bottom of stairs and stepped into the main room, to see a mousy-brown haired, chubby woman with tears in her eyes and her hands covering her mouth. There was a short man behind her with his hands tightly gripping her shoulders.

“
Samara!”
The mother wailed. I could see her knees give out beneath her and even though her husband caught her, I rushed forward to help. I knelt in front of the couple who cried out for their dead daughter and I felt their pain crushing my heart.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I told them. They were old enough to be
my
parents if I’d had any. Who was
I
to be trying to comfort them?

“Mommy?” The little girl asked, her voice shaking with fear.

The three of us turned our heads to look at the little girl who stood trembling in the doorway to another room. I didn’t know what to say to the little girl so I looked away from her as her father got up from the floor with his tear-soaked cheeks, and I turned my attention back to the woman. She had her palms cupped over her face and she sobbed into them.

“Is-s-she… W-Was s-s-she…” The woman didn’t seem to know what to ask.

“She fought very bravely,” I told Samara’s mother truthfully. And she
had
been brave but she’d also been a little too cocky in her abilities. She hadn’t held the right kind of fear in her heart if she’d held any at all.

“She served our cause as best as she could,” I gave the woman my standard speech. I felt the cold set of my features, the lifelessness to my eyes, but I knew I couldn’t betray the sorrow and fear in my heart. My pain meant nothing to this woman.

“H-how di-di-did she…” The woman trailed off again. She couldn’t seem to mention any word having to do with death. No one who lost a loved one seemed to be able to say that word.

I reached out and put my hand stiffly on her shoulder. I found the contact to be uncomfortable, as I usually did, but I left my hand there. The woman wasn’t looking at me so I let the smallest of frowns mar my lips. “It’s better to think of the good memories of your daughter. Try not to think of her death, it will only hurt more.”

“Have you heard?” A woman sat down beside me. We weren’t really friends but we were cordial enough. I took a big gulp of water from my cup, delaying the inevitable conversation. Finally, I looked at her. She looked like me, covered head to toe in white. Her Captain’s mark was a serpent wrapping around her sleeve, a medical symbol as old as time itself. I liked hers better. Underneath of her cap, she had flat, brown hair, and she shaved it off completely on one side.

“I’ve heard a lot of things, Nyolda,” I sighed at her and turned back to my food tray, which was barely picked from.

“Ceid went to check out a new camp,” Nyolda told me as if it were some big secret, leaning closer to me and speaking softer.

“In the jungle, I know,” I said. I took another sip of my water and looked back at her. “Is there something else?”

“Word is, this is the third time a team has tried to scout this camp,” Nyolda said, narrowing her eyes at me and crossing her arms at her chest. I could tell she was annoyed that I wasn’t playing her secretive game this morning. It had been two weeks since I’d gotten home and my ghosts had been playing their own secretive game with me.

“Oh?” I raised an eyebrow at her. Now the subject had piqued my interest.

“Yeah,” Nyolda’s tone became cocky. She knew something I didn’t know, that much was obvious. I really hoped she didn’t drag this out.

“And the word is…?” I trailed off, waving my fork in the air at her.

“Word is, you might have to take your team to scout them. Not exactly a first, but it’s been a long time since the stealth team has had to do another team’s mission,” She spilled. I didn’t mind scouting. Everyone thought I hated it and that was fine, I let them. Scouting just meant that things might not get violent and there would be less ghosts to haunt me in the end.

“Someone said this already? I mean, they haven’t been gone that long,” I shrugged. My breakfast was already cold, I didn’t have much of an appetite.

“Ladies,” Finn said by way of greeting as he flopped down in a chair across from us.

“
Captain,”
Nyolda growled at him.

I snorted and shook my head, “Who’re you trying to convince, Nyo?”

“Shut up.” She crossed her arms at her chest and looked away from me.

“You up for a scouting mission, Finn?” I asked him carefully. I didn’t look at him as I asked. I concentrated on my breakfast and how much of it I could push around on my plate to make it look like I’d taken more than two bites.

“Why?” He asked. “Says who?”

“Says me. That’s what I heard and it’s only a maybe right now,” Nyolda answered, still using her dejected, I’m-actually-powerful-in-rank tone.

“I hate scouting,” Finn grumbled.

“Not fun unless there’s blood, eh, Finny?” Nyolda asked him.

“I can do without the blood,
Captain.
It’s my team that gets restless,” Finn answered in a snarky tone.

“
My
team,” I corrected without looking up, “They don’t get restless, they get afraid.”

“How would you even know what being afraid looks like?” Nyolda snorted at me. “They don’t call you the Reaper for nothing.”

I narrowed my eyes at her and put my fork down on my plate. Slowly, so that she heard every syllable, I said, “And what do you think people feel when they see that the Reaper has come for them? I have killed more people than you have saved,
medic.
Remember that.”

“There are no more rumors,” I sighed heavily as I flopped down on Finn’s stiff mattress. He sat in a chair at his desk, inking something I couldn’t see onto a thin and cracked page. I often wondered what he could have so much to write about but I’d never thought to ask him. If he wanted to share, he would.

“Rumors?” Finn asked in a mildly disinterested tone.

“You remember that conversation with Nyolda a few weeks back? About that camp we might need to scout?” I prompted.

I watched as Finn stopped scratching his pen across the page and he glanced over his shoulder. “We are going to scout, then?”

“Yes,” I watched him carefully. “Ceid got back a few hours ago, a meeting was called.”
“And?” Finn asked, not altering his posture at all.

“We leave in two days. Apparently, they couldn’t get enough details on this camp to determine whether they were an enemy or not,” I said, picking at invisible dirt underneath my fingernails. Finn was quiet for long enough that I eventually looked up.

He had a wide mirror as a backdrop to his desk and I could see my reflection in it. I was so pale my skin almost matched the white clothing that I wore. My wine-colored hair hung loose around my shoulders, hidden at the top from my cap. My eyes were an icy blue that hardened instantly at my reflection; I hated to see the monster looking back at me.

“Aili,” Finn finally spoke. He pushed away from his desk and turned around in his chair so he was facing me, “We are not scouts, that’s not our job.”
“On the contrary, we’re the
stealth
team. Our job is to be invisible, unseen and unheard. Why are you so opposed to this mission, Finn?” I asked, frowning at him.

“I’m worried about you,” He blurted out so quickly that I almost didn’t hear what he said, it took me a minute to process. I wanted to tell him not to worry but he could always see through me.

“You…” Finn took a deep breath and opened his mouth to try again. He did that a few times before he shook his head and finally spoke again, “Last night you came here and you were crying. I don’t even think you were completely awake. And you cried for someone, someone I don’t know. You said something about ghosts.”

“I thought that was a dream,” I whispered. I remembered perfectly what he’d been talking about. I had heard my name as a whisper in the air again the night before. I’d woken up from the same childhood nightmare drenched in sweat and crying. I’d thrown on my jacket and cap and rushed the short distance to Finn’s house; when he opened the door I’d told him that I couldn’t stand the ghosts anymore. I didn’t remember anything after that but I had woken up again in my own bed.

“Well it wasn’t, Aili,” Finn frowned at me. “I think you need to cool it on taking missions, even just to scout.”

“I
can’t,”
I snapped at him. “I’m just supposed to tell a Commander ‘no’? Best case I’d get demoted for that, worst I’d be executed!”

Finn stared at me for a long time. Finally, he nodded his acceptance. I could tell he wasn’t going to let it go but he had no leg to stand on anymore. I was right and he knew it. A Captain’s job was to follow the Commander’s orders directly. Besides, I didn’t want to take a break. It tore me up inside when we went on invasion missions, but sitting around at home waiting for the next mission was even worse.

She was just a little baby. Her skin appeared to be as soft as a cloud in the sky, it still retained the fresh, pink glow of newborns. When I returned home the night before we left for our scouting mission, her cries greeted me at the door. The sharp, high-pitched screams filled the air and created nearly visible sound waves around me as I descended my long, rickety, wooden staircase. I took each step cautiously as if each stair might turn to sand or water beneath my weight. I tried to pretend that my body had no mass, that I was as light as air floating above the steps.

Her screams were high-pitched on exhale and raspy in the hollow of her throat as she sucked down fresh air. She’d been screaming for a long time. I wanted to find out who had shown up while I was out, who had a baby in my home, but I was afraid to see because I thought I knew the impossible answer. My mind whirled as I tried to come up with a logical solution.

Panic ripped through my chest like hot flames licking the walls of a chimney. My heart pounded so hard and fast, I could feel the sweat beading on my forehead. My anxiety felt like another living entity inside of me. I knew it was mine but it felt foreign. It ripped its way through me in a blaze of hot glory, each step a flare of pain. My breath was coming out in short, quick gasps but I couldn’t make it stop. She screamed louder as I got closer, as if she were waiting for me.