Nophek Gloss

  Threi’s back turned to him. The nophek levered against the leash.

  Caiden sprang from cover and closed the distance, bringing his glave against the back of Threi’s head. “Don’t move.” His brave words mangled. The muzzle twitched in curls of Threi’s hair. Just shoot. Do it. Squeeze.

  An icy realization zagged through him.

  The man had an energy shield before. What would shooting him do?

  “I think that’s mine.” Threi turned slowly. The glave’s tip slid through his hair, across his temple, and nestled into his forehead. He smiled.

  Caiden squeezed the firing mechanism.

  Nothing happened.

  He squeezed frantically until Threi wrenched the glave from his grasp. “Thanks. It’s nice to return something you’ve borrowed. I was going to let you keep it, though.”

  Threi twisted open the glave and slotted a thin rod into an inner chamber before snapping it back together. With the eerie smile still fixed on his face, he pointed the weapon at Caiden’s head.

  Threi shot. A blinding thread-thin beam screamed past Caiden’s ear. He jerked aside and the beam connected with something behind. Waves of hot light scorched the area, throwing Caiden to the floor.

  The Azura’s bay doors unfolded, blades cutting the spotlight.

  Sensing the gloss inside, the nophek howled at a terrible pitch.

  Panic ravaged Caiden’s brain. He scrambled up and ran to the ship, half on all fours. Threi dropped the nophek’s leash with a smack and the creature bolted after Caiden. Jaws bloody, eyes wild and flashing, claws scraping— and Caiden was back in the desert, running for his life. He hurtled inside, straight to the cockpit, leapt onto the pilot’s seat, and slammed his hand against the florescer in the ceiling to signal a new universe to save him.

  Light erupted as the universe bubbled outward, throwing him flat on his back. Air squished from his lungs. His insides became snakes. The iridescent sphere expanded to encapsulate the Azura in a fresh world. The rind shredded the pursuing nophek into red mist as it roiled past the bay doors.

  Caiden’s vision blurred with tears and dizziness, sickness tearing his gut, but he was safe. This wasn’t the desert … just the emotion of it, ricocheting inside his weary frame.

  Muffled sounds screwed into Caiden’s awareness.

  “You damn fool!” Laythan’s voice crashed through.

  Caiden was dragged up by the scruff of his coat and flung into En’s arms. Senses tumbled in his head. En tucked him under one elbow to grab a glave with her free hand.

  Ksiñe caught Panca, who collapsed to the ground.

  “Kis, shut the doors!” Taitn screamed as he launched into the pilot’s seat.

  The blind, animalistic fear in Caiden still surged, raking up into a throttled sound as he twisted in En’s grip to face the door. Threi’s figure wavered darkly past the universe rind.

  Threi was seeing it. Seeing what the ship could do.

  Laythan plowed over to smack the door panel. The plates sealed closed while Taitn reached up to the florescer and collapsed the universe bubble. The rind surged backward, ripping through Caiden’s body again. Without its universe active, the Azura’s engine sounded agitated as if once-tight materials loosened and clean fuel laced with filth. Discordant vibrations filed against Caiden’s skull. He sagged in En’s arms.

  Taitn jetted the ship away from the concourse. Laythan rushed to the cockpit, bracing behind the pilot’s chair and brushing frantically through the map holosplay. “Taitn, get us out of system, fast. That Casthen cur will be on our tail in a heartbeat.”

  The engines roared as Taitn pitched the ship upright and swung into traffic. Walls hemmed them in. Taitn dodged with gentle swerves, fitting into the crowd.

  “Panca,” Ksiñe whispered, cradling the unconscious saisn over one knee. His medical gloves cast a field of dimpled air over his palms as he palpated and glided his fingers across her body.

  Laythan charged over and knelt by their side. “What happened?”

  Ice knifed through Caiden.

  “Stable, she is stable.” Ksiñe’s posture tensed, quivering with violence. “Told you. I told you he was not worth it.” He glared up, red eyeshine leveled balefully on Caiden. His skin was a storm, coal black boiling over his eyes and bleeding down his cheeks.

  Caiden choked, “Panca … Oh, crimes, is she—”

  “Not a word from you!” Ksiñe flung open a case of medical supplies and fit vials into devices. His whipkin pet burrowed in the case and started to pull out and line up medicaments. Laythan held Panca steady across his lap, a big hand cradling her skull. She was breathing, her chest fluttering in and out. Thank the stars she was breathing.

  Caiden wilted to his knees. “What happened,” he whispered.

  “The rind,” En said, holding Caiden steady as the ship weaved through the Den interior. “Seems it’s not very compatible with saisn biology.”

  Laythan shouted, “Don’t make light of this, En. We haven’t tested the ship’s universe, it could have killed Ksiñe or Panca, or damaged your own parts irreparably.”

  Those black words soaked around Caiden’s shame.

  “The nophek,” he blurted, not an excuse— he had no excuse for recklessness, senselessness, terror— but his mind tried to pick up the jagged shards of it all. The little beast had been trying to find its parents, yearning for its own kind. “Threi was stealing back gloss from the passagers in their ships. He ordered the lockdown, he—”

  “I’ve had enough of your fixation on the Casthen.” Laythan swore, “Nine crimes, you haven’t listened to a damn thing we’ve been telling you.”

  Caving back in on himself, Caiden murmured, “Threi convinced Sina so fast. He just …” Asked and got everything he wanted.

  Ksiñe muttered a stream of sounds in a foreign language. The whipkin fetched medical items for him as he gave injections, applied spidery nodes to Panca’s skin, and stretched webbing over her mouth and nose.

  Guilt chewed Caiden as he watched. And that nophek pup—

  “Shit!” Taitn yelled. The ship braked hard; En and Caiden tumbled across the floor toward the cockpit.

  In front of them, a mass of streaking liquid whipped to a stop. A transparent, avian ship. The glass of its wings rippled as it hovered.

  “Th-that’s the Casthen ship that chased us,” Caiden stammered. “On the nophek planet. The Glasliq ship. It’s Threi. It has to be.” His voice whittled to a squeak.

  The Glasliq’s nose pilled out in concentric spikes that sharpened and amassed to spear the Azura.

  “Brace!” Taitn shouted. Laythan and Ksiñe curled around Panca’s body. En hooked an arm around Caiden’s waist.

  The Glasliq speared forward and Taitn yawed at the last minute, spinning through the Glasliq’s wing and nearly colliding with fleeing passager ships. Curses poured from the pilot as he nosed the ship down and spun. Slender vessels and blinding streaks slashed the view. The cockpit’s displays were alive with angry warnings and a blood-bright mark tracking the Glasliq’s pursuit.

  Caiden clutched En and a bar in the floor, and squeezed his eyes shut as Taitn raced the Azura away. Light seeped through the cockpit windows, the ship swerved around obstacles, filled with echoes, and sang with outlandish power. Caiden’s organs bunched against his ribs.

  Taitn piloted like a madman but the Glasliq was unreal. It flew straight into obstacles, its liquid wings slicing through harmlessly. At the same time, it gleamed like a blade, the ribby inner skeleton reshaping the ship as needed for speed, agility, or power.

  Something slammed the Azura’s shields so hard it whiplashed Caiden’s body. En caught his neck in a quick hand. He retched, dribbling sick down his front.

  “I’m with ya, kid.” En’s fingers slid over his forehead. His skull juddered against the metal floor.

  “You about done yet, Taitn?” Laythan bellowed, planting his boots and clinging to a wall strut while he cradled Panca. “We don’t have fuel for this, and there’s no t
ime for games!”

  “Not doing this for fun, Layth,” Taitn growled. Sweat coated his forehead. His arm muscles and tendons corded, fingers clawed in the twitch drive panels. “If I can’t lose him inside the Den, we’re torched in open space.”

  The Glasliq veered beside them and matched Taitn’s mad speed. Its shoulder reshaped into a bristle of cones ready to skewer. A beat before impact, Taitn winged the Azura over top of the Glasliq, upside down. Together they barreled toward the wall of a gigantic freighter.

  At the last second, Taitn split downward and Threi up, cutting each other’s path.

  Taitn flew toward a void, out of the Den’s labyrinthine interior.

  They were free of the traffic fray: Threi’s Glasliq had curbed the Azura into empty space with no escape or cover. In the holosplays wrapping Taitn, the Glasliq pursued as a smear of red fury in the map, and Caiden saw no helpful symbols— no rind or egress. Just one lone star in the distance.

  Taitn shouted, “I have an idea and none of you are going to like it!”

  “When do I ever like your plans?” Laythan snapped.

  “Kis …” Taitn’s voice broke. “C-can Pan take one more hit? We need the Azura’s universe for this …”

  The ship pitched hard to one side as the Glasliq skimmed their belly, battering the shielding.

  Ksiñe hissed angry words. His gloved hand rested on Panca’s forehead over the core there. “Only if absolutely necessary. Harm is neutralized for now.”

  Curls of brilliant light soaked the cockpit from the approaching star. En’s eyes bulged in alarm. “Wait. No. No, no, no, don’t do it!”

  “It’s the only place he can’t follow!” Taitn leaned into the twitch drive, fingers curling, powering forward as the Glasliq intercepted. He cut the tip of its wing, glass cracking into sticky liquid that splashed their cockpit windows. A screech of skeleton knifed the side of the Azura as Taitn powered ahead.

  En cried, “Taitn, you can’t fly into a star!”

  CHAPTER 14

  STARHEART

  The star drew closer. The very idea of flying into it didn’t fit in Caiden’s mind.

  Laythan roared curses and tipped Panca into Ksiñe’s lap. “I’ll do what I can to optimize fuel. Without Panca and proper tests, this might be a death run.” He bolted to the engine room, stumbling as Threi’s Glasliq rammed the ship again.

  Caiden’s guilt shoveled deeper. He was a mechanic. He should have been able to help but knew nothing about his own ship.

  The star engulfed their entire view. Scarlet eruptions of sticky flame ravaged its surface. The ship was headed straight into that massive, radiant, fiery sea of raw energy. Blooms of heat peeled across the Azura’s outer armor fields.

  Taitn’s hands shook violently in the pads to keep steady at immense speed. Unable to move, he screamed, “Hit the rind! Someone hit it now!”

  Caiden lurched to the cockpit, vaulting up the back of the seat to slap the florescer.

  A fresh universe engulfed them. The radiant bubble expanded until it passed through the ship walls.

  The Azura sang. Happy in her own world, her metals grew soft and lost their shiver, resonant hollows filled with a silken rumble of speed, and the scalar gravity took on an aqueous thickness that lightened Caiden’s body. He melted to the floor, his palms squeaking down the back of the pilot’s seat.

  He looked over at Panca. She was limp, pinned with blinking sensors and dermal devices, and Ksiñe curled over her, with waves of blue worry coursing across his skin. The whipkin mewled as she snuggled up to Panca’s neck and chest.

  The star grew closer. Eruptions of liquid fire raked across its surface. Light licked the rind of the Azura’s universe, sending shivers of iridescence across the view. Taitn really was going to fly straight into it and hope the universe kept them all from being melted. Caiden was too stunned to grapple with the reality of how a bubble of light could keep them safe from … so much fire.

  Laythan stumbled back into the bay from the engine room. “There’s only enough fuel to sustain the universe for a few arcminutes before it collapses again.”

  The Glasliq surged ahead of them. Its shielding burned in angry textures, and the glass turned rosy molten. Threi was forced to peel away. The Glasliq’s watery wings foamed against its body and re-formed in a new position for a velocity thrust toward a safer proximity.

  Taitn continued sailing the Azura straight into the roiling surface of the star’s skin. Burning fusion bit against the resplendent rind but didn’t pass through and inside. The ship sang serenely, muting the violent view. The windows sparkled with glitches as they shielded the intensity bleeding through.

  They really were safe. While the fuel held out.

  Like a bubble through water, they cruised into the plasma of the stellar core, a realm of whiteness without boundary, glinting colors Caiden never knew existed. The substance around them was a fiery, aqueous, crystalline stuff in constant motion. Tiny swirls of light built up into one great force questing outward.

  By far, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  Taitn looked as bewildered and adrenaline-ravaged as Caiden felt. The pilot peeled his hands from the pads and wiped rivulets of sweat back into his damp-curled hair. He put a weak hand on Caiden’s shoulder as they both gazed out in awe.

  The sight speared his soul in place. Between the resplendence and the Azura’s happy world, his worries melted away.

  Even Ksiñe and Laythan looked entranced.

  En stood up and braced a hand on a wall. “Are we dead already or do we have a moment? Wow.”

  “Fuel’s dying,” Taitn whispered, staring.

  “We’ll be obliterated the moment this universe fails,” Laythan said, rousing himself to march to the cockpit maps and string together a course. “We jet out this way to the nearest stellar egress. With the twitch drive, we can fly undetected if we cut power, and escape the Casthen’s watch, in a direction he won’t expect. Go now,” Laythan barked. “Now!”

  Taitn leaned in and flew from the calm, white oblivion of the stellar core into its violent outer flux. Gold and red fusion twisted across the view. Caiden finally realized the incredible value of the ship’s power. It really was able to traverse where no one could ever go otherwise.

  And it was Caiden’s fault that Threi knew it existed. His fault that Panca had been hurt.

  The Azura sped out of the star, shedding veils of plasma. Taitn cut the power, the universe bubble shrank back into the florescer, and a dire silence sucked away all sense of motion. He kept one set of fingers in the twitch drive panels as the ship sailed stealthily into the void. He pulled out his other hand, and ran it shakily through his hair again, slicking back sweat. “The Azura’s universe … it was made for these engines. Or the engines were made for it.” Taitn exhaled and twisted around to see behind him in the bay. “How is Pan?”

  Caiden moved toward her, but Ksiñe stormed up, fist balled and face aflame. Caiden flinched and stood his ground, ready to take the strike.

  En intercepted, catching the Andalvian with both arms. “Easy. Words first, fists second.”

  “You saying that?” Ksiñe shoved En away and stood breathless, on the edge of brutality. “Could have killed her. Winn spared not one thought for us.”

  “I get it,” Caiden said quietly. “You can’t make me feel worse than I already do.”

  “Winn,” Laythan said, “you weren’t thinking of the crew’s safety because you weren’t thinking. If fear and anger rule your reasoning, you’ll hurt everyone around you when you lash out.”

  How do I heal fear and solve rage? Caiden backed to the wall and sank down it. He felt permanently misshapen. Could the acceleration fix him?

  Ksiñe said, “We discard him when we reach Emporia.”

  “Hey!” Taitn said. “You aren’t without your own mistakes, Kis. I’ve lost count of the universes we’ve had to flee because of you and En.” Ksiñe’s face blanched at that, then marred with jagged scarlet. Taitn flin
ched. “Sorry. But I would think you of anyone would applaud him, after all, you and the Casthen—”

  “I do not applaud stupidity,” Ksiñe snipped in.

  En positioned herself in the middle of everyone and crossed her arms. “You’re all overreacting. Panca is fine and I’ve gotten us in and out of worse disasters than this.”

  “I haven’t forgotten those,” Taitn said.

  En glared. “Yet you all seem to forget how little time has passed since Winn escaped a brutal genocide.”

  Caiden warmed at his champion, but something else shut down, his body clammy, his mind churning on the events in the Den, the riptide between the crew …

  “Laythan.” En squared her shoulders at the captain. Long black hair slithered over her muscular shoulders, and the smoky stain around her eyes made their gray all the fiercer, rivaling even Laythan’s flinty stare. “Did you stop taking in strays because they point out the fact you’re too scared to deal with your own shit? At least Winn isn’t running from his past. You two want to ditch him in Emporia? Has ditching inconveniences these past years really gotten you ahead?”

  Laythan said nothing. Ksiñe hissed, “Yes,” whirled on his heels, and went to pick up Panca. He struggled, and Laythan treaded over to help— avoiding En’s argument, which seemed to prove her point. Laythan, much taller, easily hoisted the saisn in his arms.

  Ksiñe led the way to the engine room and muttered, “Resonance will heal.”

  Laythan didn’t spare En or Caiden a look as he strode past, and when he returned alone he dived right into organizing the weapons. He pulled out the small flask he and Taitn drank from and took a heavy swig.

  If Caiden couldn’t appear more stable, the crew would kick him out. And every stitch of care they showed him proved how much he needed something like family now.

  “In the Den …” Caiden started to say, but hesitated. This wasn’t the right time with the grim mood burgeoning between the crew, but the thought jammed in his mind. “Threi spoke to Sina … somehow … and just changed her mind. She said yes to his requests so fast. He ordered me locked up, and if I hadn’t—”