by Natalie Grey
“I’m sorry.”
“…What?” She did not know what to make of this.
“It’s bad for us—it’s fucking terrible for us—but it’s worst for you. We should remember that.”
Tera looked away.
Very quietly, she heard him say: “There’s a lot you haven’t answered yet, though. You know that. You know if our places were reversed, you would want more surety than this.”
She did. She’d told herself she would be patient. Tera slowed her breathing.
“What do you want to know?”
“Why you’re really here.” His jaw twitched as he stared at her.
He liked her and he was trying not to. That should fill her with triumph, not empathy. Tera considered her options, letting the calculations fall as they must.
“Why I’m here now isn’t the same as why I was on Akintola Station,” she said finally. “I went there to kill you because you were his enemy.”
Talon watched her, eyes hard and flat.
“Apollo … knew.” She chose her words carefully. “About Aleksandr being the Warlord. It didn’t bother him. It wouldn’t. He would have done the same thing if he was clever enough. My father told him not to tell me, but I found out because he was careless—and it bothered me.” She swallowed. “We quarreled, and I said I was leaving, that he could do it on his own. I was leaving the station when I saw that he’d called for mercenaries and put a lock on your ship.”
His look said that he wasn’t ready to believe her, and she knew by instinct that an impassioned response would only make him more suspicious. She waited, watching him, and decided that he was ready to wait indefinitely for her to say something more.
“I want to say goodbye to him.” She said the words simply, staring into his eyes, and saw his brow furrow. “I know I can’t. I won’t get that chance. But I never had a chance to confront him with what I knew. I want to say goodbye. And I want to ask….” This was too much to pretend. She turned her face away. The problem with telling something so close to the truth was that you started to believe it, and she had let herself wonder how it would be if she really never saw her father again.
If she failed.
“I want to ask why,” she asked finally. “How he could do it, and why he did.”
Her missions had never been like this, and she felt a rush of fear. What if her father had been right? What if he had been right that this mission wasn’t for her?
“I didn’t mean—” Talon voice broke off. He was clinging to what he was, and he was slipping.
She should have smiled at him as though she were hurt, needing comfort. She should have drawn him deeper. Instead, she could not even force herself to meet his eyes.
“I’ll let you be,” he said finally, his voice quiet. He left with that same deadly silence, only the whisper of the door showing that he was gone.
In the brig, Tera sank her head onto her arms. She should not have come here. Or she should have taken the ship out with all of them on it. She was hardly closer to figuring out their information source than when she’d gotten here, and she was only being drawn further in with every passing hour.
She had never infiltrated a group before.
She tipped her head back against the wall and steadied herself with a deep breath. In for six counts, out for six counts; it worked just as well on cyborgs as it did on full humans. And with her implants still drained, still dragging at her energy to recharge themselves, she could feel her eyes drifting closed.
This is going to work. Her lips didn’t move with the words; she knew they were watching her. I’ll bring them down. Then I can go home. And even if she never made it home, she told herself, it would be worth it.
9
Talon’s fist shot out and Loki stumbled as he ducked, sprawling on the metal floor of the armory. He winced as he pushed himself up.
“The pain isn’t real,” Talon reminded him. Bones that had been quick-healed were stable and strong, but the brain never believed it. It took effort to ignore the signals the brain was sending, the absolute unwillingness of the human mind to comprehend that a bone shattered one day could be strong and whole the next. A warrior might easily still wince in pain that was only half-there, or—as Loki was doing now—favor one leg over the other.
And for a Dragon, a single second of hesitation, of doubt before settling weight or launching into a jump, could mean death. So they trained, over and over, focusing on the once-broken bone until the soldier learned to forget this particular warning, this legacy of their past.
They’d been training for two days, and Loki was close to shutting out the impulse. Now he planted himself on the once-injured foot to kick, toes lashing up toward Talon’s face. Talon ducked, smiling as the bare foot grazed his cheek.
“Much better.” The kick was followed by another kick and a punch, both of which landed, and Talon felt the air leave his lungs in a whoosh. “Ow. Very good.”
“What’s gotten into you?” Nyx asked curiously. She was perched on some of the crates, swinging her leg idly, eyes narrowed.
“He’s fast,” Talon said defensively. He was not unaccustomed to being beaten in sparring. Dragons were good, very good—the best of the best. At least half the crew had more natural speed than Talon, and a few were stronger. Loki was the best of those on both counts. In all his years as a Dragon, Talon only met one soldier quicker than Loki, and that was Cade Williams, out of the service for two years now.
Talon would pay a decent amount to see the two men square off in a fight.
He looked up from his musings to see Nyx arch an eyebrow.
“And most of the time, you’d be accounting for that speed, wouldn’t you? What’s the saying, boss? Old and crafty is better than young and fast?”
Talon ignored her. Dimly, some part of him knew that she was not poking fun at him. Nyx was worried, and had been for days. As Talon beckoned Loki into the circle for another bout, he saw her eyes flicking between them. She knew he was putting off making a decision on where to go next—and putting off, too, the interrogation he knew he needed to give Tera.
The assassin, he reminded himself, sidestepping neatly as Loki charged. He impaled the younger man on a punch. His body knew what to do in a fight if he only got out of the way, and Loki’s speed was as much of a detriment as an asset, keeping him from changing directions once he got going. Only a couple of months into service with the Dragons, the younger man had yet to learn the art of waiting in a fight; he always charged in headfirst. Talon sank away as Loki set up for another attack.
The assassin, Talon reminded himself again. Not Tera. Not a friend, no matter how she might seem. He was beginning to face the facts that the smartest way to use her was … just that. To use her. Never to trust her, never to let her know when they made their final move on Soras.
I want to say goodbye to him. Her voice echoed in his head and Talon was there, in the brig with her, his attention fully on the past while his fists lashed out and connected. Take down the enemy. Move with logic. Don’t give sentiment an opening to foul this up. He only felt the tackle a full second after it had happened, and then he was sliding across the metal floor with a wince of pain and Nyx was staring down at him.
“Snap out of it,” she said brutally.
“What?” He pushed himself up on his elbows.
“Well, you gave the kid a concussion.” She jerked her head to where Loki was pressing one hand over a swelling eye, blood running freely from his nose. “And your nose is bleeding, too, by the way. Loki, go see Tersi.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Go.”
“You hate seeing medics,” he said thickly, around the blood, but he went dutifully.
Nyx sat back on her heels, waiting until the door slid closed before she spoke. “What the hell is going on with you?”
Talon sat up and wrapped his arms around his knees, hanging his head while he thought.
“We can’t trust her.”
“Of course no
t.” She didn’t ask which her.
“I want to.”
“I do, too.” She scooched back and settled against a crate, laughing at his expression. “I do. She doesn’t kill without cause, and she’s got a mouth on her, she doesn’t just take shit. I like that. So, yeah, I want to trust her.”
Talon raised his eyebrows in consideration.
“I ran the info on the other assassin, you know. Apollo? He’s as big a shitbag as she said. Frankly, I’m surprised it took her this long to do him in.”
“She killed him to gain our trust,” Talon said harshly. It was the truth, and he knew it. A good first impression, and a dramatic one. He could feel it working even while part of his mind acknowledged the deceit.
“He was gonna wind up dead one way or another,” Nyx pointed out. “He was real determined that only one of you was getting out of there alive. You’d have killed him if she hadn’t. Look.” Her voice was unusually soft. “I get it. I do. You want to trust her and you know you shouldn’t. What I don’t get is why this is getting under your skin so much.” When he shot her a look, she met his gaze blandly. “You’re bleeding, and you nearly just killed Loki.”
“Fair.” He pushed himself up to get his towel and wiped at his face, examining the blood dispassionately.
“Is it the rest of it?” she asked him quietly.
“What rest of it?”
“That they don’t believe you.”
He stilled. She had gone right to the heart of it, to what they all knew but hadn’t said: if the Alliance wanted the Dragons to come back in, the very people who were most qualified for a mission to bring Soras back….
It meant they didn’t believe the intel.
“I expected it,” Talon said.
He’d been so careful to get his evidence in order, but the truth was, it had been stupid of him to think that any amount of evidence would convince them. Over the past few days, more and more of the Alliance brass had been coming out in support of Soras, and they had been sending increasingly frantic messages for Talon to come back in. Talon had jumped the Ariane out of Alliance space and they were drifting, waiting for a decision he couldn’t seem to make.
“You didn’t expect it,” Nyx corrected him. “You wouldn’t have sent any intel at all if you thought they wouldn’t believe you. You wouldn’t have bothered.”
“I should have expected it.” Talon lifted his shoulders. “And I must have, a little, since I sent it to the press. They have the information. They’ll get to the bottom of it. For now, we just have to find him.”
“While running silent. Kuznetsova was supposed to be in on this with us, and how’s she going to find us now? And we’re dealing with the possibility that we might run into his pet Dragons, too.”
Talon gave a short laugh. “He took the worst of us.”
Nyx gave a smile in silent agreement. It wasn’t uncommon for Dragons to go bad, to be so accustomed to being the best in the room that they refused to keep up with their training, or resented the ones who did.
The ones Soras had taken would easily outstrip normal mercenaries … but they would not hold a candle to true Dragons.
“I’m just saying, though…” Her voice was quiet, still echoing in the armory. “You haven’t been yourself since this began.”
“He betrayed us.” Talon felt his hands clench. “And—you all think I’m taking this too seriously, don’t you?”
“No.” Nyx looked up at him. “We wouldn’t be here if we did.”
“I see all of you doubting this, you know.”
“What you see is us worrying for you. You worry for all of us, all the time. Let us return the favor.” Her voice was flat. “We joke about you being vengeful, that’s true. But Talon—” She broke off. Nyx was not a person who made friends easily. Though she’d never been rude to him, and they’d developed an easy camaraderie, it had taken years working in close proximity before she began to open up; and he realized he still knew very little about her. It was not like her to use first names. “We’ve never seen you like this,” she finished carefully. “We’re worried. You’re not a man who makes mistakes. You don’t take risks like the ones you’ve been taking. Now, you aren’t making any decision at all. We’re worried.”
He was unexpectedly touched. He looked over at her, and saw them all, there in her eyes: Sphinx and Tersi and Jester and the rest. His crew. His people. Following him without a word of question when he took off on a mission they knew was against regulations.
“She’s the key to it, you know.” He looked away.
“As in….” Nyx’s brow furrowed at this change of topic. “You think she’s why he did it?”
“No.” Talon shook his head. “I’m not crazy, don’t worry. But doesn’t it occur to you that none of us ever actually knew who he was? We all trusted him.”
Nyx nodded, displeasure evident in her face. It was no good telling a Dragon that everyone had been fooled; every one of them was angry about it.
“The thing is, she knows. She knows his weaknesses. She knows who he really is. And…”
Nyx waited.
“And she doesn’t want to kill him.”
“Would you?”
Talon’s hand slammed against one of the crates. “I just want it to be simple, goddammit. He’s the Warlord. And now I have some woman who’s his fucking daughter—“
He broke off at the sight of Nyx’s face, pity in her eyes. He turned away, eyes on the ceiling.
“I just wanted it to be simple,” he said finally. “For once. Just a bad guy. I didn’t need this to turn into—”
“Boss?” Jester’s voice echoed around the armory.
“We’re in the armory.” Nyx answered the comms while Talon struggled for composure, and he gave her a grateful look. “What is it?”
“You’ll want to get up here.” Jester’s voice was cautious.
Talon took the comm from Nyx. “Jester. What is it?”
There was a pause.
“They’ve issued a warrant for your arrest,” Jester said finally. “I’d say we have about a day and a half before someone’s on our tail.”
The line hung open, and Talon and Nyx exchanged a quick look. “Jester?”
“They’re taking orders from Soras,” Jester said finally. “He wants you brought in. He asked.”
10
Something was happening. For three days, they had drifted in space and the ship had gone this way and that while Talon, apparently, formulated a plan. Tera had been content with that—a man as driven as Talon, as decisive, did not take three days to formulate a plan if he were sure of himself. The fact that he had come to talk to her five times, his familiar tread sounding on the metal floor, and then gone away before opening the door, was even better. Talon wanted to see her, and yet thought it was a bad idea. Talon was uncertain.
Uncertain was good.
Three days, however, was long enough for Tera’s mind to wander as well. No amount of training in this tiny space could keep thoughts away forever, and she built a fairytale in her head. Eloquently, passionately, she would lead Talon away from this lie he had been told, and she would show him the truth. He would realize that her father could be trusted. He would promise to call his troops off, and she would see gratefulness in his eyes, and…
The daydream at once unsettled her, and filled her with such a wild hope that she thought her heart might burst from her chest. When she closed her eyes, she saw his face. When she thought of their time on Ragnarok, it was his every movement and smile that she remembered.
And she needed to remember it, she told herself. She needed to sink into his mind until she could know him well enough to turn him away from this reckless course. He was her opponent. Of course she thought of him.
But it was that that led her to an unpalatable truth. As she sat, remembering their words after Loki’s injury, remembering her lies with a stab of guilt she should not feel, and his kind words with a warmth she should not acknowledge, she had a sickeningly clear m
emory of just where she had tripped up: I want to say goodbye to him. It had been true, after a fashion, and Talon had apparently taken it to heart. She thought over the activity of the past few days, the footsteps in the corridor.
It might not be indecision and yearning. It might be a complicated mission … and guilt. If Talon moved on her father now, he would not bring Tera with him. He would know that her feelings would interfere. He might have been coming to warn her of what he was doing, and he might have been coming to get the last pieces of information he needed about the Blad.
Exactly what he wanted, however, did not matter. Tera was up and moving in the next moment, tapping on the glass of the door. She should sit and think for a moment; she should make a plan. She was too panicked to do so, however. When the Dragon’s face swam into view, Tera forced her lips into a smile.
“I need to speak to the Major, please.”
She expected to have to justify this, but the man only nodded to her and made a quick call from his wrist unit. He ducked his head awkwardly at her a moment later and went back to stand beside the door, evidently discomfited by her staring. Tera cursed slightly and began to pace, rolling her neck and her wrists in a vain attempt to calm herself.
A plan. She needed a plan.
She still didn’t have one when Talon came in the door. Her stomach had given a strange sideways leap when she heard him in the hallway, and she turned too quickly to look at him when he came in the door. She knew she must not rail at him, or accuse him.
What she didn’t expect, however, was the smile that split across her face at the sight of him. He was just as she remembered him, his movements so graceful that she forgot, always, just how much muscle he carried. There was stubble on his jaw—evidently he was not one for regulations when he was out of Alliance oversight—and his green eyes were alight with answering warmth.
They remembered themselves in the same moment. Tera looked away hastily and Talon cleared his throat.