by Kit Rocha
It was a good reason—and she hated it. “It’s too dangerous for you.”
“Kora.” She could feel the heat of his hands through her thin cotton pants, as well as the pressure of every individual finger. “The risk is well within acceptable parameters. Unless you think Gideon Rios intends to betray me to the Base.”
“Of course not.” But she’d spent months thinking he was dead, and looking down at him now scraped raw all the places inside her that had barely begun to heal. “You may consider the risk acceptable, but I don’t. I care about you, Ashwin. I don’t—” The words hung in her throat, and she swallowed hard. “I don’t want to lose you again.”
He stared at her forever. The sunlight slanted over him, gilding his light-brown skin. But his eyes were still dark, his face expressionless. The silence grew heavy, and he started moving his thumbs in slow, soothing circles. “This is the safest way for me, too. If I know where they all are, I can control the variables. An accusation of treason is an unlikely hypothetical. One or more of us getting hurt without this intel is a certainty.”
Kora knew it seemed nonsensical on the surface, to be more worried about what the Base might do than the deserters, especially when she’d spent most of the previous evening painstakingly cleaning Jaden’s and Zeke’s blood from under her fingernails. The threat from the deserters was present, immediate.
But quantifiable. Terror gripped her when she thought of what the men at the Base were capable of doing—not in the heat of battle, but while sitting behind their polished desks in their crisp, decorated uniforms. Theirs was a fathomless evil, one she’d barely glimpsed, but it still drove her from sleep some nights, wide-eyed and panicked.
“I know what I’m doing, Kora.” Ashwin’s voice was quiet. Sure. “It’s going to be all right.”
Terror couldn’t be reasoned with or placated. But she locked down her protests and nodded. “I trust you.”
His fingers dug into her hips, and the shadows in his eyes deepened. “Kora—”
He cut off abruptly at a knock on the door. A heartbeat later, it swung open, and Deacon stood there in the open doorway. “Good morning.”
Ashwin didn’t release Kora. “Deacon.”
He studied them both with a sardonic expression. “Sleep well?”
“No.” Ashwin tilted his head toward the desk where the treasonous drone sat. “I have your miracle.”
Kora couldn’t suppress a wince, and she opened her eyes to find Deacon watching her with surprising sympathy. “So we’re going hunting?” he asked, without looking away.
“Yes.” Ashwin stroked her hip one more time before gently pushing her away. “We’re going hunting.”
“Don’t worry.” Deacon rubbed her shoulder, the sympathy edged with something almost like calculation. “I’ll bring him back, safe and sound. That’s a promise, princess.”
Ashwin flowed out of his chair so fast, he was standing between her and Deacon before she realized he was moving. The chair tilted backwards, wobbled, and settled back to the floor with a clatter that filled the tense silence.
“I’ll find you later, Kora.” His voice was no different than usual—even and steady. But the muscles in his back were coiled. Tense.
Neither man looked at her, and the hostility in the room swelled until she could feel it pressing in on her. “Fine. I’ll be waiting.”
She slipped out and closed the door quietly, carefully. Voices drifted down the hall from the main room, and Kora headed in the other direction, toward the back of the building and the kitchen exit. The last thing she wanted right now was to see the rest of the Riders, not when she might be elbow-deep in their guts soon.
Somehow, she needed to get ready for that.
»»» § «««
Deacon was trying to provoke him.
Ashwin was accustomed to being challenged. There were few places left in the post-Flare world where people could afford to be complacent. They’d circle him and test him, poke for weak spots, and retreat when it became apparent he had none. Words couldn’t goad Ashwin into an emotional response.
But Deacon hadn’t used words. He’d used Kora.
He followed her footsteps until they faded at the edge of his auditory range, never breaking eye contact with Deacon. The other man’s easy stance and relaxed expression was a lie—he was every bit as ready to fight as Ashwin was.
The only reason Ashwin hadn’t already broken the smug bastard’s hand was because Kora seemed to like him. “You don’t touch her again.”
The corner of Deacon’s mouth tilted up. “No, you don’t fucking tell me what to do.”
He wasn’t telling him what to do. It was a simple statement of fact—if Deacon tried to touch her again, Ashwin would stop it from happening. But even he wasn’t reckless enough to correct the man on his misunderstanding. Threatening Gideon’s second-in-command was counterproductive to his mission.
It should have been easy to choke down the urge. Violence for its own sake had never appealed to him. But the desire to punch the smile right off Deacon’s face burned in Ashwin’s gut even as he turned away. “I know you don’t like me, but what I’m about to show you can’t get out. If the Base hears a whisper of it, they’ll come after me.”
“Relax,” Deacon snapped. “I don’t like you, you’re right about that. But I’m not some punk-ass little shit who stabs people in the back.”
Ashwin picked up the tablet. “I wasn’t implying that you’d do so deliberately. But something could slip in front of a servant or the girls from the temple who party with your men. People talk.”
“Riders don’t.”
It should have sounded naïve. But Ashwin had read all the files. He’d seen one analyst after another categorize the Riders as impossible to subvert. Deacon might be the rare man who could trust in his people’s loyalty and not be fooling himself.
He handed the tablet to Deacon and picked up the drone. “I’d rather go out the back exit anyway.”
“Suit yourself.” Deacon opened the door for him, pitching his voice low so it wouldn’t carry down the hall. “How is this thing going to tell anything our people can’t? After yesterday, everyone in the goddamn sector is on high alert.”
It was easier to show him than try to explain. Once they’d stepped outside, Ashwin set the drone on an empty stretch of gravel and reclaimed the tablet. A Base tablet would have had a slick user interface with preset surveillance routes. Ashwin had done it the hard way, hacking in to override the drone’s signal and redirecting it to a single command source.
He entered the code to hover manually, and watched it rise into the air. When it hovered at about a hundred feet, he switched over to the camera view.
The white screen appeared. In the middle, a solitary blue shape marked his presence. Off to the corner, a pale red blur tracked Kora’s path back to the mansion.
He hadn’t known that she would register at all. The trace was so faint, even now, that it was likely she wouldn’t have on a higher altitude scan, which explained why no one else had discovered her. She’d been tagged with the Project Panacea isotope as an infant, but protocol dictated retagging every ten years to retain optimal tracking ability.
Clearly the effects lasted far longer.
Deacon was invisible. So were the rest of the Riders, sitting only a few dozen feet away in the common room. If there had been anyone else in the room when he turned the camera on, Kora would have figured it out. He would have been forced to spin another lie. Or worse, offer her the truth.
He had to be more careful.
He waited until she’d cleared the field of view before tilting the tablet to show the screen to Deacon. “Every soldier on the Base is tagged with one of three radioactive isotopes so specialized drones can detect them. Blue indicates a Makhai soldier. Purple is one of the elite soldiers. Green are general troops. It can pick them up inside structures, under cover—even underground, as long as they’re not too deep.”
Deacon stared at the screen befor
e turning his incredulous gaze to Ashwin. “Are you fucking insane?”
“By most standard definitions, yes.” He killed the display. “You don’t want to put any more of your men in unnecessary danger. This ensures you won’t have to.”
Deacon snorted. “Don’t get me wrong, this suits my purposes just fine. But this little toy of yours is dangerous—and not to me.”
“I understand the risks.” Better than Deacon ever could. Even Kora didn’t know how cruel the Base could be, if provoked. “I evaluated them and made a choice.”
“Why?”
He had a dozen rationalizations, lies he’d told himself during the night while he held Kora tight against his side. Then he’d picked those lies apart, one by one, until the odd, raw, improbable truth remained. “Do you care?”
Deacon glanced up at the hovering drone, then down the path toward Gideon’s mansion. “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”
“You won’t believe me.”
“Try me.”
Ashwin stared down the path, too. It curved fifteen feet down to disappear into the trees. Kora would be safely back in the mansion by now, snug and protected by guards trained to defend kings and princesses. “Seeing her sad is...unsatisfactory.”
“Unsatisfactory, huh?” Deacon laughed, genuine amusement coloring the sound. “Do yourself a favor—find a better fucking way to tell her that.”
He didn’t have a better way. He was good at this, making plans and taking action. Turning the tablet again, he pulled up the command line and started tapping out the code that would set the drone to scan Sector One and alert him to any positive hits. “This is what I do. I take care of problems.”
For thirty-seven seconds—Ashwin counted them automatically—Deacon remained silent. Then he exhaled roughly and nodded. “All right. Then let’s take care of this one.”
Ashwin tapped in the final command. The drone buzzed higher, until it was almost out of sight, and shot off to the south. “If they’re still in Sector One, we’ll know by lunchtime.”
“So we’d better get ready.”
Ashwin followed Deacon back to the barracks, oddly at peace in spite of the line he’d just crossed.
Treason wasn’t new to him. He’d been committing it every day since the first time he laid eyes on Kora.
Chapter Nine
It took Kora over an hour in the bath to settle down. She would have preferred a shower—warm, rushing water to rinse away her worries along with the stress of the last twenty-four hours. But it was too easy to let the water drown out her thoughts, and she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She needed her thoughts in order, her head on straight.
The bath worked. She felt almost normal again as she dried off, dressed, and went in search of Gideon.
Then she found him, and every bit of that roiling emotion came roaring back.
He was in the courtyard. Laid out in front of him on one of the high stone tables was Jaden’s corpse, naked except for a strip of white cloth over his hips. She watched as Gideon dipped another cloth into a silver basin, then drew it slowly across Jaden’s shoulder.
It had the solemn, sacred air of a ritual, and Kora took an instinctive step back.
“It’s all right.” Gideon spoke without looking up, his attention fixed on Jaden. “If you want to stay, I’d appreciate the company. But you don’t have to.”
“I don’t want to intrude.”
“It’s not an intrusion.” He dipped the cloth again before starting down Jaden’s arm. “Isabela used to help me with this. I can’t ask Maricela. She’s...close to the Riders in a way Isabela never was.”
Help. Kora latched on to the word like a lifeline, and she stepped up to the table. “What can I do?”
He nudged the basin toward her. Another scrap of fabric rested over the rim—woven cotton with delicate embroidery around the edges. Kora picked it up and shivered when the warm water sluiced between her fingers, slippery with some sort of oil. It smelled like the incense at the temple, heady and fragrant.
In the city, they employed people to wash the deceased prior to cremation. She’d seen it done, though it involved spray hoses and disinfectant, not perfumed oils. In Sector One, families prepared their dead, relying on guidance from the priestesses as well as older members of their community.
But she’d never seen Gideon do it, not even for the Riders who were killed in action during the war with Eden.
Her confusion must have shown as she stepped around the table to wash Jaden’s other arm, because Gideon spoke again. “It’s been a while since I did this, almost a year. Josiah. He fell to raiders, but he saved dozens of lives before he did.”
“What about the war?”
“Too many died in that final charge.” Sorrow roughened the edge of his voice. “Thirty-one Riders in less than an hour. As many as I’d lost in the decade leading up to it. And once the wall came down, my duty was helping to decide what was going to replace it.”
Her first instinct was to wonder why he hadn’t asked her for help, but what could she have done? The month after the final battle had passed in a blur of unending work for her, as well, a stream of patients with everything from knife wounds to heart attacks.
It had kept her going, kept her from falling into despair, worrying that her refusal to leave the battlefield with Ashwin had sent him off to his death. Worrying about him in general. In a very real way, her work had saved her.
All Gideon had to show for all his work was guilt.
“You can only do so much,” she murmured. “Isn’t that what you tell me all the time?”
Gideon inclined his head. “True. But you’ve been here long enough to understand, Kora.” He pressed his hand to Jaden’s forehead. “If I’d asked him to pull out his gun and shoot himself in the head, what do you think he would have done?”
She stared down at the table. Water dripped off the rough edge and splashed on the stones by her feet. For a moment, she was back in the dining room, standing by another table, and it was blood spilling over the edge, not water.
She knew the answer. And she would never, ever say it out loud.
Gideon resumed his slow, gentle movements. “That’s a weight no man should carry lightly. My grandfather did. That’s why I stepped in and claimed the Riders. And I’ll honor their loyalty with the gravity it deserves.”
“I understand.” Someone had closed up the bullet holes and surgical incisions in Jaden’s abdomen. Kora dipped her cloth again and washed away the traces of blood that lingered around the wounds. “Reyes said he was originally from Sector Seven. Did he have family here?”
“A sister, Grace.” Gideon smiled gently. “She’ll be taken care of.”
Gideon’s guilt alone would have ensured that, even if it wasn’t standard procedure for those left behind after a Rider’s death. “Do their loved ones ever resent it? The sacrifice, I mean? The Riders are free to make their choices, but it touches their families, too.”
“The ones who grew up here? Rarely. They do their grieving the day the Rider joins up—if they have any grief at all. We don’t fear death here the same way other sectors do.” A sudden tightness around his eyes turned his smile into something wry. Self-deprecating. “Their sacrifice isn’t death. It’s the blood on their hands when they die. They’re giving up their chance to join everyone else in the glory that comes after life. That’s why they’re revered.”
And why they remained alone. The unity of family was a sacred thing to the people in One, a bond that transcended death. For the Riders to separate themselves from that was a profound renunciation of the heavenly rewards that were supposed to await them.
It wasn’t just lip service, and the raven tattoos memorializing Jaden’s kills weren’t just symbols. They were very real reminders of a soul that was now lost forever.
She cleared her throat. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“You,” she repeated. “They have different expectations of you, don’t they? Their leader
, their king. What’s your sacrifice—your legacy?”
“I don’t know.” He squeezed the water from the cloth and watched the droplets fall to form little ripples on the bowl’s surface. “I probably shouldn’t admit that, so don’t tell anyone.”
“I’m serious, Gideon.”
“So am I. War tore Eden and the sectors apart.” He gestured to the water. The ripples had rebounded off the sides of the bowl and were now crashing into each other, creating chaos. “We have the opportunity to put it back together into something better. Maybe that will change my legacy. Maybe it will change theirs. It’s too soon to be sure.”
Kora had grown up under the kinds of restrictions that you could escape if you ran hard and far enough. But Gideon’s responsibilities were part of him, from his name to his blood, and she couldn’t imagine the weight of it. “What do you want?”
“I came as soon as I heard.” The guards bowed their heads as Avery hurried into the courtyard, her red cloak swirling around her legs. She stopped short at the sight of the body on the table, misery shadowing her features. “Oh no, not Jaden.”
“Avery.” Gideon’s voice was as gentle as always, but Kora recognized the subtle shift in his demeanor. Her brother vanished, replaced by Gideon Rios, the man who treated every person in his sector like family without letting any of them too close. “I’m sorry. I know you were fond of him.”
Stricken, she met his gaze. “Malena was sweet on him. She’s one of the refugees from Two—Lotus House. He used to come by and help her with chores or fix leaky faucets—” Her voice broke.
Kora’s eyes stung. Her words painted a sweetly domestic scene, the kind that should have been at odds with Jaden’s hulking stature and warrior status. But it fit, even if playing house was the last thing a Rider like Jaden was supposed to do.
Gideon draped his washcloth over the edge of the bowl. “Thank you for telling me. If she needs anything…” A muscle in his jaw jumped. “Let Maricela know. If she was special to him, then she’s special to us.”