Renegade

by Justine Davis

  He violated strict Coalition regulations.

  He did so on my order!

  Then why did he not say so? It would have saved him.

  Because he was loyal to me, not the Coalition. And it cost him his life. Just as being loyal to his commander had cost his uncle. Which made it even more incredible that Marl had trusted him at all.

  The knowledge was a piercing, throbbing ache within him. The image of his aide’s lifeless body, his life terminated because he had refused to betray him, would torture him forever.

  He saw knots of his own men watching curiously as he and his escorts passed. Word of his arrest—for that’s what it was, despite all Fidez’s fine words to the contrary—had not yet spread, then. And an idea began to take root.

  Sedition, treason, betrayal . . .

  And yet . . .

  The streets of Zelos were deserted. He couldn’t keep from looking toward the ruin of the old taproom as they neared it. And found himself wondering what the Raider would do right now.

  He would not go tamely. Of that I am certain. It was only Jakel’s hold on his sister that had forced his hand that day.

  And he had no one to be used as leverage.

  An image flashed into his mind, of a flame-haired woman with a gentle touch yet a fierce mind.

  They would never be able to hold her, and they would never understand why.

  It was a moment before he realized what he had just admitted, that there truly was someone who could be leverage to be used against him. It was an odd feeling, yet a good one, bolstered by the fact that they did not know.

  They. Ever and always they. She is right; you no longer think of yourself as one of them.

  Then what was he? His identity, his very self, had been tied up with the Coalition his entire life. If that was taken away—no, if he was to be honest, if he threw that away—what would be left? What would he be? Adrift? Lost? Purposeless?

  If you were able to break free of the shackles . . .

  Her voice—that lovely, deep, husky voice—echoed in his mind.

  So you are open to changing your mind.

  When not doing so becomes the impossibility, yes.

  They came up to the barren spot where the taproom had once stood. Where he had first seen the painting that had changed his life, changed him. He had the odd thought that the last time he had been here, he had still carried that shard of planium in his back. The crippling piece of metal that had constrained him on all levels, limited his very thoughts. And now it was gone, now he was himself again, but he was likely on his way to his death anyway.

  He realized his pace had slowed as his mind wrestled with tangled thoughts. The four troopers automatically slowed with him, but the leader turned to look at him.

  And in that moment he realized his decision was already made.

  And what better place than here?

  He dropped into a crouch. Grabbed the leader’s weapon and pulled. The blaster fired as the man’s hand contracted automatically. The blast caught one of the rear guards. In the same instant Paledan spun and caught the other front man in the gut with a powerful kick. He went him sprawling. He sent his elbow sharply into the leader’s throat as the man grabbed at him. He reeled back. Paledan wrenched the blaster free and turned it on him. Fired. The man went down hard. The second front guard was getting up, raising his weapon. The other rear guard was staring at his fallen comrade. Paledan fired at the bigger threat, then spun back and put the last one down.

  He stood there for a moment, glorying in the fact that he had been able to do it without a twinge of pain. In fact, in being able to do it at all, he’d wondered if the year of living so carefully had erased the advantage of intense training and fitness he’d always had before.

  He glanced down at the blaster, saw it had been set to stunning force only. So they had not wanted to risk killing him before Fidez dragged him back before High Command.

  Marl had not even been given that formality.

  Fury boiled up in him again. The fury that had made him forget one very basic thing.

  Now what?

  He glanced at the sprawled troopers, realized he’d best be long gone before they roused. He gathered their weapons then moved through the ruin toward the narrow lane that had run behind the taproom. He needed to assess first, then decide. He worked his way toward the river, knowing he would be able to see across to the landing zone from there.

  When he cleared the last pile of rubble that had once been a riverfront building, he could see the hulk of the High Command ship. It was one of the largest, designed to ferry equipment as well as troops. Rovers, fighters, it had the capacity for a sizeable number of each.

  He kept going, although he was still not certain what he was going to do. He reached the bridge across the Racelock, on the road to the landing zone. The bridge where he had encountered Lana for the first time, where she had merely brushed him and set up such chaos within him that he thought he’d been ill. He realized now, now that she had unleashed these things within him, now that he felt what she had sworn Ziemites felt every day, that she had not lied. What she had given him that day here on this bridge had been merely a faint touch of the totality of emotions.

  He glanced down at the fast-flowing river as he crossed. Fidez had come prepared, for there was a small Coalition vessel just arriving on the landing zone side of the river. They had apparently already begun patrolling the banks of the Racelock. He wished them luck; this river was nothing to take lightly. And the Raider and his band had rather thoroughly destroyed the docks in one of their raids, so they were working with temporary structures that were questionable at best.

  He shifted his gaze back to the High Command ship. And then he heard something that snapped his head around. Voices, loud ones, protesting. He stared back at the river, at the troopers now wrestling with something on the boat.

  His breath jammed up in his throat.

  Not something. Someone.

  Two someones.

  The twins.

  Chapter 53

  IOLANA STARED AT Pryl. “You’re certain?”

  The old man looked at her grimly and nodded. “The boat beached there,” he gestured toward the river, then pointed at the shallows they stood beside, “and they struggled there.”

  She could see the marks in the mud at the edge of the water. In these last few yards before the falls, the river split around a large boulder, and the smaller stream slowed in a bend and created this place where it was possible to find all sorts of things washed down from above. Including the secret stones the twins had been looking for.

  For her.

  She forced down the horror, the pain. She would do her children no good by falling apart now.

  “But who would do this?” Eirlys asked.

  “No Ziemite would lay a hand on them,” Brander said grimly.

  “Truth,” Pryl said, sounding equally grim.

  Iolana closed her eyes, reached out. Caze came to her first, his anger still high, but now different somehow. As if something had greatly changed within him. She couldn’t take the time to dwell on it long enough to read further; she was reaching for her children, for the two who had finally accepted her after resisting for so long.

  Her eyes snapped open. “They are afraid.”

  All eyes turned to her, for all of them knew what it would take to put fear into two who were known for being fearless.

  “They have them,” Eirlys whispered.

  IT WAS THE ONLY thing he could think of. But it depended on so much that was outside his control he felt beyond edgy. This was a tactic more suited to the Raider.

  So think like him. He carried on an impossible charade for years; surely you can do it for a few minutes.

  He strode over the last few feet to the dock. “Halt.”


  The two troopers turned. He glanced at the twins, enough to see the fear in their eyes. The sight did strange things to him, but then, as the fear was replaced with a trace of their old daring and he realized it was because of him, the strangest feeling of all flooded him. They would not be hurt. He would not allow it. He gave a barely perceptible shake of his head, hoping they would understand they needed to stay quiet and still.

  “Major?” one of the troopers said, sounding both puzzled and nervous.

  “Release them.”

  “But we found them outside the perimeter, which is not allowed.”

  He looked at the two coolly, thinking as he did that if the Raider managed this while under such an onslaught of emotion, he was an even stronger man than he’d realized. “You question me?”

  The two in uniform exchanged glances. The one who had not yet spoken then did, saying carefully, “We heard rumors that you were being recalled, sir.”

  “And why do you think?” He gestured at the twins. “The general has sent me for them. I am to escort them to High Command where they will be turned over for examination and testing.” The two troopers looked at the children, then at him, blankly. “They are twins,” Paledan said.

  The two men jumped back, releasing the two as if burned. As if the defect were contagious. Paledan saw Nyx straighten the small pack that slid from his shoulder, the same pack they had filled with the carefully chosen gifts they had brought him. Paledan turned his gaze from their guards as if they no longer mattered. As he once would have.

  “You two will come with me,” he ordered. “And you will stay close.” He saw them go still, perhaps at his tone of command. He held their gaze, trying to communicate the truth behind the words. “We’ll soon have you exactly where you belong.”

  He knew how the guards would interpret what he said, for they were from Lustros. He knew this because all of the High Command troops hailed from the planet of origin. Others were allowed elsewhere, but not at the center of power.

  For a moment they simply looked up at him. Then they glanced at each other for merely an instant. When they looked back at him, the trust in their eyes nearly put him on his knees.

  “You’d best have your blaster at the ready, sir,” one of the guards said. “They’re a troublesome pair.”

  “Of that I am sure,” Paledan said, and it was a struggle to keep from grinning at them. As Lana had once told him, he obviously had a great deal to learn.

  He did keep his hand on the blaster as he guided the twins away, but what he watched for was not any antics from them.

  “We do not have long,” he said to them under his breath. “They will be searching soon.” As soon as his escorts regained consciousness. And it would not take them long to couple that with his appearance at the landing zone. “We dare not stay in Zelos.”

  “We can—”

  “Go back—”

  “To where—”

  “We were at—”

  “The falls.”

  He blinked. “The falls?”

  “Where the—”

  “River goes—”

  “Over the edge.”

  “I can’t think of a more appropriate place,” he muttered dryly. “And how do you suggest we get there? I don’t think going back and stealing their mo­tored boat wise.”

  “We won’t—”

  “Have to. We are—”

  “Going the—”

  “Other way.”

  “We will—”

  “Borrow one and—”

  “The river will—”

  “Do the rest.”

  He lifted a brow at them. “Including sending us over the edge?”

  “That would—”

  “Be silly. We will—”

  “Stop before—”

  “We get there.”

  He barely stifled a smile. They looked back at him, grinning.

  “You were—”

  “Joking!”

  The duo led the way out of Zelos along the bank of the Racelock. As they went, Nyx looked back at him.

  “Is it true?”

  “What?” Paledan asked.

  “You have been—”

  “Recalled?” Lux finished.

  “Not exactly,” he said with a grimace.

  “Then what?”

  “They are . . . not happy with me.”

  “But you are a hero.”

  He shook his head. “Not to them. Not anymore.”

  The twins exchanged a glance, and when they looked back at him there was utter delight in their expressions. “What?” he asked, his brow furrowing at their obvious glee.

  “You have—”

  “Done it!”

  “You are—”

  “You, and they—”

  “Are they.”

  He wondered if it was a sign of how far down this careening path of emotion and feeling he’d already gone that this made complete sense to him.

  By the time they were clambering aboard a small wooden boat that seem­ed to him more raft than vessel, the two were chattering quite like themselves, their narrow escape apparently no longer of concern. He only half listened, for he was still trying to deal with the newness of all these tangled feelings, uppermost at the moment the complete and utter trust of these two who on his world would not have been allowed to exist.

  As his own twin had not been allowed to exist.

  He shook off the thought, knowing it could well overwhelm him, so unused was he to these feelings. And this was not the time to become lost in a maelstrom of thoughts, not when they could easily become lost in an actual maelstrom upon this river.

  But the twins seemed to handle the questionable vessel easily enough, as if they had done this before. He wondered who, here in this place where individuals still claimed property despite the edict that all belonged to the Coalition, claimed this shaky craft.

  “Whose . . . boat is this?”

  “Enish Eck’s,” Lux said.

  “The man of the two-headed snake?”

  They looked pleased that he’d remembered. “Yes. He will—”

  “Not mind.”

  “Or rather—”

  “He will, but—”

  “He will—”

  “Get over it.”

  This time he couldn’t stop the smile. And the smile they gave him back only widened his own.

  He became aware that the flow of the river had quickened in the same moment a distant roar registered. And he felt a qualm; he’d only observed the falls from the air, on a flyover inspection, but they had seemed fierce enough that he understood why High Command had classified the river as unnaviga­ble beyond the bend east of the landing zone. If you got caught in this rush and went over . . .

  But in the moment he thought it, the twins moved, using the wooden paddles to steer the boat to the side opposite the port. For a moment he thought they were headed straight for a large boulder that jutted up out of the water, but then he saw that a thread of the river veered around the other side. They slowed the moment they were out of the main force of the flow, and the twins beached the little craft with surprising efficiency. Although why any­thing about these two yet surprised him he did not know.

  “This is where they picked you up?” Two synchronous nods. “We should get out of sight. In case they come back.”

  They. Always they. The twins were right; he had completely separated himself from the entity that had once been his entire life.

  They reached the trees that ringed the curved shore where the calmer, separate stream slowed lazily, with the fierce flow of the river visible beyond. Nyx set down the pack, and Lux immediately reached into it. When the girl drew out a small cage containing a bird the likes of which h
e had seen fre­quently on his reconnaissance walks, he frowned in puzzlement. He glanced at Nyx, who had pulled out of a side pocket of the pack what appeared to be a tiny fragment of paper and a writing instrument of some kind. The boy wrote something on the paper, then rolled it up into a tiny tube. His frown deepened, until his sister held up the bird she’d freed from the cage, and the boy slid the paper into a small tube fastened to the bird’s right leg.

  It hit him abruptly. He stared, almost unbelieving as Lux held the bird to her cheek and whispered something that sounded like “Go to him, little one.” Then she opened her fingers and lifted; in the same moment the little bird’s wings unfurled, and it took flight.

  “That’s how?” he whispered incredulously. “That’s how you communi­cate, why we could never figure that out, no matter that we monitored every possible airwave?”

  If they noticed he’d slipped back into “we,” for he did take this one fail­ure a bit personally, they did not react. Nyx shrugged and began it. “Except the—”

  “Simplest.”

  “Our sister says—”

  “The simple creatures—”

  “Are beneath—”

  “Their notice.”

  “And she is right. Once again Coalition arrogance has cost them.”

  Lux nodded, but Nyx was already on to something else, and darted away into the trees. Were it anyone else he would have questioned it, but he knew the boy would not desert his sister, and so he simply waited. And the boy was back in just a few moments, a wrapped package in his hands.

  “I knew they did not find it!” he said triumphantly.

  “Good. I am hungry,” Lux said.

  The package turned out to be an array of foods, some he recognized, some he did not. The twins looked at him.

  “We will—”

  “Share. You are—”

  “One of us—”

  “Now.”

  What he felt at the simple declaration outweighed even what he’d felt when they’d pinned the Legion Cross, the highest award the Coalition could bestow, on him.