Merrick looks at me dubiously, but when I narrow my eyes, he starts talking.
“I think to understand how a sun dies, we need to go back to how they’re formed,” he says. “At its simplest, stars are formed when clouds of dust—nebulas—get dense enough to have a gravitational pull. Under pressure, the temperature inside the nebula increases until it’s millions of degrees, and at that point nuclear fusion occurs.”
“And that’s what makes the sun burn,” I clarify. “And it keeps happening over and over again, right?”
“Yeah, that’s what keeps the star alive,” Max adds.
I nod. “So it dies because there’s no more nuclear fusion?” When Merrick agrees, I continue. “What makes the nuclear fusion stop?”
“Stars are in balance—gravity pulling inward, energy pushing outward,” Merrick explains. “But as the nuclear fusion continues, helium is turned into carbon, oxygen, neon, and so on. Finally, the core turns to iron.
“When that happens, there’s no more hydrogen. No more hydrogen, no more fusion, no more energy. Gravity takes over, pulling it inward, so the core becomes denser, but at the same time the outer layers expand. The star becomes unstable and pulsates, sending out energy.”
“Which is where we are now?” I ask.
“Yes. The Dying Sun is unstable, shooting out flares, the core getting hotter and the outer layers expanding—soon they’ll engulf the inner planets completely.” He frowns. “The thing is, usually this takes millions of years, but for some reason our sun is going through an accelerated process. And it’s taking decades instead.
“And at some point,” he continues, “in the not-too-distant future, the core will shrink further, the temperature will rise, and the whole thing will explode.”
“Boom,” Gage says from his seat in the corner. “That’s when a star goes supernova.”
“And we all go up in flames,” I add.
Merrick nods. “Has anyone here ever heard of the Star Bringer?”
We all look at each other, most faces appearing confused. But Gage sits up a little straighter. Suddenly he looks nervous, like he wants to be anywhere but here. Still, he comes over to where the rest of us are sitting. “I wasn’t actually working on the heptosphere on the Caelestis. But I know a woman who was, and she told me Dr. Veragelen believed that the heptosphere is powerful enough to send a blast of energy into the sun and reignite the core. That she referred to it as the Star Bringer.”
“The Star Bringer?” I rack my brain, trying to remember if I ever heard anything like that in my travels, but nothing comes to mind.
“This still sounds like exactly what we need,” Max says again. “Did the doctor really think it would work?”
“Who knows?” Gage shrugs. “But according to the projections, whether it works or not, the planets of Serati, Kridacus, and Permuna will be completely destroyed in the blast.”
“Destroyed?” I repeat, waiting for him to correct me. Because I knew the Empire was evil, but murder-the-entire-population-of-three-whole-planets evil? What the fuck?
But he doesn’t tell me I’m wrong. Instead, he says, “Yes, destroyed. Dr. Veragelen plans on using the heptosphere to help her destroy three planets and everyone on them.”
“That’s not possible. Even if she could do it—”
“The models say she can. She hasn’t been able to so far, because the heptosphere hasn’t ever worked for her. But if she could…”
Merrick looks like he’s about to explode. “That’s what I came here to tell you all. The heptosphere isn’t the Star Bringer. A person is. Kali is. Which means if she activates it, we’re all in serious danger.”
Chapter 71
Ian
All I hear is Kali.
Kali is in danger.
“Why her?” I urge, my heart pounding inside my throat. “Why do you think she’s this Star Bringer person?”
“Alien DNA.” Merrick and Gage say it at the exact same time.
I look at them like they’re both confused. Very, very confused. “I’m sorry, what now?”
Gage rubs his hands together. “I’ve heard Dr. Veragelen has been searching for someone with alien DNA who can awaken the heptosphere—”
“Alien DNA.” This has to be a joke. “You mean like the Ancients?”
“I don’t understand it totally, either,” Gage says. “But that’s what a lot of the experiments were about. Why the prisoners were brought to the Caelestis. I’m not sure how it happened, but a good number of people in the Senestris System, especially people from the inner planets, have alien DNA incorporated in their own. Some of them can cause the alien artifacts to wake up and do things. And for those without alien DNA, sometimes the artifacts have…adverse side effects.”
“Like getting burned to a crisp?” I ask, and it’s all starting to make a weird sort of sense. There were a lot of hushed-up deaths while I was working on board the Caelestis.
“Yeah. Or so I’ve heard. Bottom line, Doc V’s not been able to activate the heptosphere without the Star Bringer.”
“But I still don’t get why it’s Kali specifically,” I say, turning to Merrick. “How do you know for sure she’s the Star Bringer?”
Beckett and Rain choose that moment to come back to the bridge, sounding a little breathless. Merrick suddenly looks like he could get sucked out the airlock and be less uncomfortable.
“Beckett told me about the plan to blow up the Inners,” Rain says, a grim look on her face. Then she must see something else in all our expressions because she adds, “What? What’d I miss?”
Chapter 72
Rain
“We were just discussing something called the Star Bringer,” Ian says.
Shock hits me in the gut, and I choke a bit on air. Beckett is kind enough to thump me on the back a few times until I can breathe again.
Merrick fidgets with his fingers and studies the rest of us for a minute. Finally, he asks Ian, “What do you know about the Sisterhood of the Light?”
“Not a lot,” Ian admits.
“The Sisterhood of the Light was born on Serati, because it was the home of the Ancients—we have many of their artifacts, as well as remains of their civilization. Deciphering some of those remains has taught us much about their civilization, and we came to learn that the Ancients were the architects and creators of the system. That they had the power to create suns and planets with the assistance of an orb known as the heptosphere.”
Merrick sounds so comfortable as he speaks of our belief system, as if all those doubts we talked about earlier have been resolved in him. But maybe this is the easy part. I can speak just as eloquently of our history—I’ve studied it since I was a small child—but that doesn’t mean I don’t have doubts that any of it is true.
It also doesn’t mean that I don’t wonder why I was chosen by the universe to be the high priestess when I feel just as confused and doubtful as everyone else. Especially now that I’ve met Beckett.
Maybe that’s the point—it’s not a choice if it’s easy. I just wish it didn’t have to be this hard. I’ve been trying to convince myself that anything I want must be the will of the Light—but every day, it feels less like I’m following the Light, and more like it’s just me, alone in a dark, enormous system, making harder and harder choices.