I walked away after that, because I couldn’t stand seeing how much more I might have hurt him.
* * *
I should have stayed. Because then maybe I could have stopped him.
I only napped for a few hours, which took us into the next day. The last day—the day that a decision could be made. When I reached the meeting hall from my quarters on the Kaitan, I found the discussion in a lull. Hundreds of other captains had retreated permanently to their ships, awaiting a resolution in comfort, but hundreds had stayed to debate. Of those, not many had gotten much sleep, by the looks of it. Arjan, Telu, and Jerra, who’d done a lot of the arguing on my behalf, appeared tired but resolute, and maybe even grimly optimistic. It seemed the argument was almost over. Maybe we could even wrap this up sooner rather than later, if everyone could agree there wasn’t anything left to discuss.
Not that there weren’t even greater—astronomical—challenges ahead, but at least we would be meeting them head-on, not surrendering.
And then I heard his voice. “Excuse me.”
He wasn’t talking to me. He was much calmer than he had been, his voice projecting to the entire meeting hall. I spun, apprehension surging in my belly, and saw Nev standing in the center of the stumps. Everyone turned: Hiat and Jerra, Arjan and Telu, Basra and Eton, all the regional representatives…and hundreds of the most opinionated, influential captains. Everyone important.
I wished the hall were emptier. I wished he weren’t going to say what I suddenly knew he was going to say. I wished now that he weren’t here.
“I am a member of Captain Qole Uvgamut’s crew, and like you, I know she is a courageous, strong, and passionate woman. However, I have something to add to her thoughts on the situation. May I speak?”
The word however had never filled me with such dread. I wanted to shake my head. Instead I held my breath and glanced around.
Hiat was the first to nod. Of course he would. He’d heard the however just as I had, knew that it could hurt my position. The other representatives nodded, some reluctantly, some curious. Even Jerra wheeled closer to hear, her eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“I’m not from Alaxak,” Nev began, not taking a position at any stump, as if to illustrate this, “so my name and where I’m from aren’t important. I won’t pretend to be risking as much as you, or to even fully understand what’s at stake. I do understand the nature of the threat, though. Perhaps, as an offworlder who has seen the Dracortes in action, I can lend some valuable perspective to this situation.”
He spun in a circle, encompassing all present. He was so calm, even though my heart felt like it was breaking. “You have what, a fleet of hundreds, mismatched and outmoded? The Dracortes have thousands of ships at their disposal. Thousands. Top-of-the-line starfighters, shining new from Xiaolan factories, exceptionally maneuverable, and seemingly infinite in number. Massive Treznor destroyers, equipped with tractor beams, EMP pulsars, and a missile artillery second to none. They have orbital bombardment stations, weapons you won’t even see before they burn Chorda from the face of the planet.”
He paused to let this all sink in, then once again held everyone’s collective gaze in that way he had. “If you give their queen a reason, she will bring these forces to bear on you. I have heard stories of her, too numerous and detailed to be mere rumor. Even as princess, she was pettily cruel, constantly deceitful, and utterly without mercy. As a queen, she will take everything from you, not just some of it, if you defy her. To resist, you need to still have something left to defend.”
This was worse than being hit in the stomach. I felt gutted. It was hard to breathe, but I did anyway, then cleared my throat, which was almost too tight to speak. “Don’t let him scare you.”
“And why shouldn’t we?” Hiat asked in that reasonable tone that made me want to rip his face off.
“Because.” I held Nev’s gaze. It was just the two of us, seeing each other now across the room. Everyone else might as well have vanished. “He can’t be trusted.”
His eyes widened, as if I’d slapped him.
“But he—”
I didn’t let Hiat speak. “He’s from Luvos. The Dracorte homeworld.” There were hisses of breath. Eton was from Luvos too, of course, but I didn’t mention that. They only needed to hate one person enough to disregard everything he’d said. “I hoped he wouldn’t let his loyalties get in the way of our decision, but apparently he can’t help but take advantage of us.”
“I’m not trying to—” Nev began.
I interrupted him just as I had Hiat. The fear he’d sparked couldn’t be fed, or else it would spread like wildfire. Like before, I had to fight fire with fire—betrayal with betrayal.
“As an outsider, he’s worse than those of us who would rather surrender.” I flicked a glance at Hiat in disdain, and then turned the full force on Nev. Nausea boiled in my stomach, but I made the words as hard and sharp as icicles. “He has nothing to lose, in telling us to give up everything we have. It’s only his gain for us to capitulate to his side. Cowardice is weak, but taking advantage is sick.” I took a deep breath. “And I am ashamed I ever let him onto my ship, into our world. He doesn’t belong.”
Now Nev looked like I’d gutted him. His eyes were blank and staring as he dragged a hand over his mouth. It was a mouth I had been kissing with more and more frequency lately. This was like the opposite of kissing, using lips and tongue to take away love. In return, his lips only told of shock and anguish.
So much the better. Or at least that was what I tried to tell myself. He couldn’t respond this way, and I’d broken his calm air of authority. If only those in the crowd knew that such self-possession came from his being a Dracorte prince, the supposedly dead one mixed up in all this…but I wouldn’t take it that far. Because then they would tear him to shreds.
“Qole…,” he said, sounding winded.
“That’s Captain Uvgamut to you.”
He swallowed, then nodded, regaining some of his composure, though his eyes still revealed the pain behind the mask. “Captain Uvgamut, where I come from doesn’t change the concerns I’ve raised. You can’t fight the Dracortes and win. They have too much power.”
Hiat wasn’t the only one nodding along with him. There was nothing else for it. Only one way to convince them now.
“Yeah?” I said, my own calm washing over me, deepening inside. My body felt like an ocean surface before a storm. My skin tingled, tight with anticipation. “Well, I know something they don’t have, and we do: Our resources. Our strength. Our Shadow.”
At those words, the Shadow lamps winked out through the entire hall, plunging us into gloom. I felt a surge in the darkness—the darkness in the warehouse, in my eyes, in my blood and bones, as I summoned that Shadow to me.
Before anyone could gasp, a purple corona burst into life above my head, coalescing into a ball of liquid energy. The strange light flickered over the dozens of faces, making them both horrible and beautiful at once. Maybe I looked the same to them.
Or maybe only horrible.
I lifted my hand, and they gasped then. My fingers touched the purple-black flames and flaring white sparks for a brief moment—but long enough to char someone’s arm right off. And yet when I dropped my hand, it was whole. I’d felt only a warm tingle.
“They try to burn us? We’ll burn them.”
Then, that hissing auditory hallucination, whispering in my ear: “No.”
No one in the meeting hall had spoken. With a flash and a loud pop, I lost my hold on the wild energy. The globe of light vanished and the Shadow lamps flickered back to life.
Everyone stared. I did too—at what no one else could see.
Nev probably knew why I hadn’t done this yet. Cracks fractured my vision, crawling along the walls, carving the faces around me. My world started falling apart, if only in my head.
It had t
o stay in my head. No one could know.
“We have the strength to fight them with the very thing they would try to take from us,” I said, forcing my tone level, strong, even though I felt like whimpering. I made myself smile, standing tall and steady, ignoring the shivers trying to rack my limbs. I looked around at the disbelieving, frightened faces, pretending they weren’t disintegrating.
That was the other reason I hadn’t demonstrated my power yet. It would make people afraid, unless they could trust I wouldn’t come to pieces and unleash such a force on them.
“You might wonder if I can sustain this, but do you see me faltering?” I asked before Nev or Hiat could think to. I spoke through the sparks crackling in my eyes, the admonishing voice in my ears, the flesh peeling off bodies—mine and everyone else’s. “I have burned soldiers and ships with this strength, our strength, and I will continue to do so. Even if it kills me, I will take as many of them down as I can, before I go.”
Nev watched me, despairing, and I stared right back. I delivered the final blow. “The only people who need to fear me are the Dracortes.”
It didn’t take long for the cheering to erupt. Arjan started it, Jerra right behind him. It rose to a roar that vibrated the warehouse walls. Telu clapped in support, while somehow looking as worried as I’d ever seen her. Basra only watched, considering and processing as usual, while everyone whooped and hollered around him. I couldn’t spot Eton. Nev turned for the exit, brushing past Hiat, who was staring at me with something bordering on awe.
I had won this little battle, but I didn’t know what else I had lost. And I just hoped I would survive long enough for the war.
If I had thought I wasn’t feeling enough emotion, a single giant bell rang inside me now, repeating the same thought, the same feeling, over and over.
You are lost.
Part of me wanted to feel angry at her for using me, throwing me aside as she had, but I couldn’t. I simply felt empty. I wanted to rebuke myself for being melodramatic, but as I made my way out of the meeting hall, avoiding the gaze of anyone I knew, the thought only grew stronger. Events were unfolding exactly as they would, regardless of what I tried. In a twisted symmetry, doing what I thought was right alienated those close to me. Except, this time, instead of my family, it was Qole.
Maybe she could do it. When freeing Arjan, I had seen her use her Shadow affinity to turn an entire platoon of soldiers into ash in seconds, and Qole herself didn’t seem sure where the outer limits of her abilities lay. But in doing so, she had almost destroyed herself. This time, if anything, using Shadow seemed to have made her stronger, more resolute. And yet I doubted that.
I knew the length she would go to for the people she loved, but I simply didn’t see how it was possible. If I was right, Qole was holding herself together through sheer determination, a thought that made my chest tighten. She would deliver herself to oblivion in defense of Alaxak. If I was wrong, I had just alienated her, and no doubt the crew. Most likely for good. And in all probability Qole would still die, only at Solara’s hand. It was a lose-lose situation.
I stopped in the middle of the street. I had nowhere to go. It wasn’t the Kaitan that had become my home after Luvos, but Qole. She was my sanctuary. And now I had lost her too. No choices presented themselves. So much for Eton’s advice.
His voice called out behind me. “Nev.”
I started walking again. I didn’t want to talk to him, or anyone else for that matter. “Didn’t work, Eton. Unless you were just trying to get Qole to hate me, in which case, well done.”
“Nev, you need to come with me.” Eton’s tone carried an urgency that made me pause. “I think I’ve found something that will help Qole.”
* * *
Eton didn’t say much more as we headed deeper into the industrial quarters of Chorda, and I was too depleted to ask. The warehouses became less dilapidated, the buildings a little taller; some of them looked like they were designed to be employee quarters, or even offices. This must be where the governor will soon work. When he came, the dark windows would be lit by busy bureaucrats.
Presuming it wasn’t just turned to ash.
Eton, reading the signs above the doorways we were passing, stopped and doubled back. I almost ran into him, but he didn’t notice as he wiped the grime off the engraving on the entry plate. An old vacuum-powered mechanism powered the door instead of the more modern maglock doors, and his hand revealed the letters to say Dracorte Mining Ind.
Mining. In past generations, my family had profited handsomely from the minerals the drones harvested from the planet. The drones were left over from the Great Collapse, and we had lost all higher-level control over them, but we were the only family with direct and consistent access to their temporary programming. Evidently, when we had cared about the minerals produced from Alaxak, some of the operations had been based from Chorda itself.
Eton pressed on the control switch, and the door hissed open in stuttering increments. A series of questions ran through my head, but he was obviously intent on showing me, and I was happy for the silence, so I followed numbly. I stepped after him into the blackness inside.
Eton stopped, his bulk dimly illuminated by the light of the street outside. “We’re here,” he announced.
I looked around. “So I see. Now what?”
He turned, and his eyes sent an icy trickle down my spine. “Now you help Qole. I found a way for you to be useful.” He walked past me, back outside, and the door slid shut.
All light disappeared. There was a whine in the darkness, and I hurled myself into a rolling dive.
I would have been dead if not for ingrained muscle memory from endless training. The telltale sound of a charging photon weapon lasted only a fraction of a second, but the reaction to it had been drilled into my subconscious. Blue energy flared and a hissing blast cracked against the pavement where I had been standing.
The momentary light had given me a glimpse of a figure, standing by the door where we had entered. An assassination.
I continued to act on autopilot, as if this were another test at the Academy and not a matter of life and death. I dodged to the side, spinning out of my overcoat as I did, throwing it as if it would stop the photon blasts that riddled it with three holes.
It didn’t, but it landed on its target, and I launched myself at the noise in a flying kick. It was risky at best, but any attempt to run in a dark and unknown environment would be doomed. I could only hope that between speed and my overcoat on the attacker’s head, I could connect the kick, ending the fight.
The kick connected, but it ended nothing. Hitting my attacker felt like hitting a brick wall, and I crashed to the ground, winding myself. I dimly heard the blaster skittering across the floor, and my satisfaction was short-lived as something hard, metallic, and glowing with a strip of white light slammed point-down next to my chest. Disruption Blade. I rolled directly into it as violently as I could, felt it rip out of the attacker’s grasp, and continued my roll, reaching for the sword in the darkness. I misjudged, and it skittered out of my grasp, warm blood oozing out of my palm where I had touched it.
The lights came on.
It was a giant space, at least two stories tall, entirely empty except for what looked like the ruins of a drone. Its mining cables lay lifeless, pieces of the hull removed where maintenance or salvage had been conducted.
When I turned, I saw my parents’ murderer standing in front of me, one hand still on the sensor that had activated the lights. He was completely still, not even breathing hard from our exchange. A small photon blaster lay some distance to the side, and his Disruption Blade, a long, single-edged affair, was on the ground between us.
I rose to my feet, experimentally making a fist. The cut was deep, but my hand was functional.
My darker reveries had already led me here many times. It wasn’t Solara I dwelled on hurting; it was
him. Fighting the person who had killed my parents, breaking him down, making him feel pain, rage, regret. Exacting revenge. Redeeming my failures.
But rage wasn’t infusing me head to toe, as I had imagined. The empty ache inside me expanded, and I wanted to engulf this man in it. I attacked, sprinting past the weapons on the floor. My bare hands would be more than enough, enough to hurt and break.
We met in a flurry of strikes, trapping and deflecting in equal measure, satisfaction settling into me as I recognized the style. He was Academy trained, and that meant there was little he knew that I didn’t. I might not have been the best at striking, but I was good, and once I got him to the ground my grappling was second to none. This was familiar territory. I would win.
My thought process was shattered by an elbow to the cheek. I staggered backward, and he advanced steadily, giving no reprieve. His style changed drastically, becoming angular, aggressive, his elbows and knees punishing me each time I attempted a hold. I shifted tactics, changed distances, but the damage became more and more lopsided. Even without the typical insectoid Bladeguard armor, his muscular frame shrugged off my hits as if they were made of air.
I’m being deconstructed, I thought muzzily, working to keep my guard up as I staggered back. The next thing I saw was a knee, coming into my field of view. That’s hard to do was the last thing to flicker through my brain.
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