Read Sea of Stars for Free Online

experience.” I blush because saying the words out loud makes me sound crazy.
    “That must be a departure for you, not using your body to get what you want.”
    I know what he’s implying, but I ignore the innuendo. “I rarely get what I want, Minister Telek,” I reply honestly, “within my body or outside of it.”
    “Speaking of bodies,” Minister Telek segues, “do you know what the surgeons plan to do to Haut Manus’s?” he asks me.
    I stare for a moment at Manus. His eyes are closed. There are several swimmi-bots tending to him. One looks to be a flesh-layering bot, patching skinlike material over a segment of his calf where the burns are not as severe. Another is like a suckerfish-bot, extracting dead, floating, barely attached skin from his shoulder.
    “No,” I admit warily.
    He gestures to one of the two thronelike chairs behind us that face the tank and orders, “Have a seat and I’ll show you what a regeneration looks like.”
    I slip into the soft chair; it makes me feel tiny by comparison, and my toes have to point to touch the floor.
    Minister Telek takes the other. We’re angled toward each other but still face the tank. A side table separates me from him, yet I feel as if we’re still too close.
    “On screen,” Minister Telek says, “Trey Allairis—cue to Regeneration file.”
    The tank containing Manus darkens to opaque. It becomes the backdrop to holographic images, like the video walls at the palace.
    My breath catches when a hologram projector shows Trey’s three-dimensional images in a rapid stream from his infancy to his childhood. Most of the younger images are Trey with his twin brother, Victus. There are several in which both brothers have one arm over each other’s shoulder with Trey holding a rather atrocious-looking fish out to the camera.
    Next, in rapid succession, and while the hologram spins to show several angles, I view Trey’s adolescence to his early days of military training. My heartbeat accelerates; I can’t hide the smile that forms on my lips. Some of the tension I’m feeling melts away as I see him grow from child to adult in a matter of moments.
    Then the holograms of Trey slow and blink off as the film changes. Booming sounds of cannon fire dropping nearby rumbles my chair from the holographic images that emerge next. Soldiers scramble to strip off blood-soaked clothing in exchange for clean smocks in a makeshift medical unit on the outskirts of a war zone. A few medics pace by the gaping mouth of the entrance to their enclosure with an air of expectation. One of them shouts for everyone to make ready. My empty hand goes to my mouth from shock as my other hand tightens on the znou petals when I recognize Trey in the center of a pair of soldiers being ushered into the medical unit. Tears spring to my eyes, and I fight them back when I see both of his legs are gone below the knees. He’s brought to a podlike surgery table. The table resembles half of a tanning bed positioned under an enormous laser mounted on a robotic arm. The laser-mounted tool goes to work, slicing Trey’s armor from what remains of his body. Bloody and torn apart, Trey moans as he writhes and trembles in pain from missing limbs and scalded skin. Agony and fear flatten my lips. The crackle and bubble of flesh is audible as surgeons cauterize the hemorrhaging arteries and scrape dead flesh off his sheared stumps. Trey’s repeated vomiting as his flesh is sutured to reattach his hand makes me taste bile in my own throat. One of the physicians screams at the anesthesiologist, directing him to put Trey under before the pain kills him.
    I look away, unable to watch anymore lest I vomit. It is a wonder he didn’t kill me upon sight when he found me , I think. I look just like the monsters who did that to him.
    “Manus won’t require the kind of extensive regrowth as this—” Minister Telek pauses. “Is this too much for you?” he asks with a bit of an amused laugh, then orders,