Caged Warrior

by Lindsey Piper

Leto was in pain. He was buzzing. He was furious.

  He was himself.

  Only when he felt the roughness beneath his fingertips did he realize he was touching his neck. He didn’t even know its contours. Hidden from him for two decades. Although he would bear those scars until he died, he would never wear a lonayíp collar again.

  Another surety was harder to accept.

  I’m one of the Heartless.

  Had his mother been Indranan, or had Dr. Aster done . . . something to ensure Leto’s conception and birth? Pell had been incapacitated by her gift. Was she a crossbreed, too? Nynn was, and she was powerful—so powerful. And her son was half human. Perhaps that explained some of the Dragon Kings’ trials. Split and segregated, bigoted and aloof, they’d retreated into tight-knit clans and doomed themselves to extinction.

  “We’re not going die.” Even his voice sounded different. Some combination of his liberated senses and his voice box free of a permanent metal grip.

  There was no more time to delay. He turned to face Nynn. Their gazes caught. They held hands. At the far end of the disorienting golden tunnel of light, he found her icy blue eyes. She looked scared, elated, anxious.

  “Never let me go,” she said.

  “Neither of us is in the habit of letting go of the ones we love.”

  She blessed him with a radiant smile that added more gold to their intimate bonfire. “Be ready to keep up, sir.”

  His heart pinched. “Make me proud, neophyte.”

  He could only watch as Nynn pulled the golden energy into her body. He couldn’t imagine what Nynn could do with this much pure energy at her disposal. The Pendray in her must be the difference. She wasn’t a pure, polite, straight-thinking Tigony. She possessed a wild touch of berserker.

  His job was to keep the berserker calm and speed her to safety just before the full concussive blast neared its peak. For Hark and Silence, they had the task of channeling Nynn’s gift. Two wrathful blasts were better than one. For Leto’s peace of mind, he hoped the split would save Nynn from flat-out exploding. She’d lost control before.

  Leto recalled the tattoo on her shoulder, now more a premonition than anything he’d done to save her from the Asters. It was as if Lamot had uncovered the color and shape that had already been there. Nynn, who carried a piece of the Dragon.

  Did that mean she could succumb to her own inner violence, falling into the Chasm as the Dragon had done?

  The golden energy disappeared. She threw her head back. Her whole body shook, as if his hands were live wires she’d caught while standing in a puddle of water. Lightning burst and sparked outward from where they touched. With his wild senses careening around the arena, collecting information he could barely process, Leto heard voices, guards, keys.

  Hark and Silence positioned themselves before the section of arena wall they claimed was weakest. Leto found a strange sympathy for them. If no other Dragon Kings existed, the Sath would be as powerless as humans. No gifts to steal. What would it be like to only borrow the unfamiliar? They would never know in advance what intensity they prepared to take into their bodies.

  A test, Hark had said. Can’t rely on a weak link.

  There in the Cage, they’d already tasted a sample of Nynn’s power. Leto’s long games looked like snap decisions compared to these two.

  A tremor in Nynn’s mind, a cry, a truncated scream. Between them had grown a bubble of fireworks and sputtering light. It doubled in size until its perimeter sizzled Leto’s skin. His sense of touch was radically sensitive. He jerked back, slipped, lost her hands.

  “Nynn!”

  The bubble was as tall as she was.

  Just at his peripheral vision, he saw Hark and Silence touch. Just hands. A quick squeeze. Silence had a lovely smile. He looked away, unwilling to intrude on what may have been two lovers’ wishes for luck. Or their goodbyes.

  The bubble burst in a furious blast of fire and stinging electrical currents. Leto was faster. No wonder they’d wanted to restrict what the Dragon had bestowed. He grabbed Nynn around the waist and pulled her to the far side of the Cage. She was limp in his arms.

  The blast was a tidal wave pouring over them in an arc of molten light. The Cage, which had been the bedrock of his existence, shriveled and burned like paper in fire. Briefly, the Sath pair was silhouetted against the onslaught. He cringed closer to Nynn and groaned as his eyes were stabbed by indescribable brightness. Pain ricocheted between his sockets and the back of his skull.

  Leto gave her a shake. Maybe too hard. He couldn’t tell how loud he shouted or how fast he moved. “Don’t you leave me.”

  “Going . . . nowhere.”

  The last of what had been forged steel landed in bits and chunks, all brittle and black like charred wood. Leto realized that much of the training arena looked the same way. Their insane plan had worked. What looked like singed wood was enclosed where layers of metal girders and roofing had been. Maybe it still was metal, just altered beyond recognition.

  Light filtered through crags and cracks in the rock, and streamed in great gushes through a gaping hole where Silence and Hark had stood. The hole was almost as big as the octagonal base of the obliterated practice Cage.

  “You meant it,” he said, pulling her into his arms. “Burn it down.”

  “Hell yeah.”

  “You’re a wreck.”

  “You should see your face.”

  “You want a pretty boy instead? Can’t help you there.” He kissed her forehead. “Time to leave. You promised to show me the snow.”

  “What if I killed them, too? Silence and Hark?”

  “Then they died on their terms. Free.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Nynn stumbled over the rubble and into the bright glare of late midday on an artic field. She’d assumed it would be morning, but the artificial markers of time in the complex didn’t match the turn of the earth. She’d also imagined mountains. This was just flat. Flatness without end. Features mashed together into a stark wash of ice on white on blue.

  That wasn’t to say it was devoid of life. Hark and Silence stood staring at the white wasteland. They looked like refugees from a coal mine.

  “Where’s your pack?” Nynn called.

  Hark looked over his shoulder with a teasing grin. “Someone’s Dragon-damned gift has a nasty kick. Our packs are ash. On the upside, we thought we’d need supplies for a long foot trek. I’m glad we can be proven wrong and still survive the shame.”

  In the distance, maybe two miles away, stood another complex. It was aboveground and ringed with helicopter pads and smaller buildings that looked like private, individual villas. Nynn knew without question that the actual game Cage was inside.

  Perhaps she and the other warriors had traveled that short distance on some convoluted, disorienting path, because those two miles could’ve been traversed in mere minutes. Their bus rides had taken a good half hour. She didn’t trust much about her perspective from that time, but she read it as another Aster trick to keep their slaves subjugated.

  One long, squat building among the others was lit for business.

  That bastard has my son.

  Leto climbed out behind her and staggered. He shielded his eyes. Nynn wrapped her hands around his upper arm, hoping to steady him. She’d never expected to get this far. The tortures of the previous year—no, the tortures that extended back into her childhood—had nurtured a fatalistic streak she only recognized now that the cold sun touched her face.

  Training, fighting, hating . . . they’d taken on a numbing cadence. Saving Jack had become a mantra, not an actual thing. No wonder Leto had been able to continue without question for so long. He would’ve kept fighting forever, to make sure his sisters were safe and that his clan name continued.

  But if he had continued, he never would’ve seen the sun or the snow.

  Eyes shut, he tilted his face up and panned across the horizon until he faced the sun where it arced toward evening. The thick muscle of his neck was shaded by th
e angle of his uplifted chin. Callouses and raw skin were reminders of his captivity, and of how intensely his freed gift must be amplifying that moment. He swallowed, opened his mouth, and slowly, slowly, opened his eyes.

  The shudder that worked down his body fed into Nynn through her hands, and maybe through her pores. Intimate and elemental.

  Beautiful pain.

  Those two words, spoken with his roughened voice, tickled between her temples. Beautiful pain. Yes, that was it exactly. She looked at the sun, stared at it, dared the elements to take what remained of her. Nothing could. She wasn’t numb anymore. She was in pain, the beautiful pain of being awake, finally awake.

  “A little help here, firecracker,” Hark said. “We need to clean up our mess. I’d rather not share this lovely snow-covered holiday with a passel of guards.”

  Nynn blinked away from the sun and looked toward Hark. His face was partially obscured by black dots strewn across her vision. Funny that she could look upon the bright colors of her own gift, and through the golden tunnel of light she and Leto could create with their gazes, but the sun was still the sun—more powerful than all of them. Even Dragon Kings needed humbling.

  Nynn gave Leto’s arm another squeeze before joining Silence and Hark around what now looked like a pit. They’d been living in a pit. Dozens of the Asters’ guards were trying to climb to the surface.

  The Sath must’ve been gaining control of their uninhibited gifts, too, because Nynn felt as if they were only borrowing her light. They shared it. They weren’t Thieves but comrades in arms. Nynn concentrated on building her power, layering, gathering the energy of the sun and the electricity in the cold arctic air into a lethal ball.

  An inner confidence told her when it was enough. She was able to disperse the bright ferocity rather than launch it like a megaton bomb. Silence and Hark shaped it yet again. Together the three remade the gaping hole. Rock fell and twisted, melting into fresh lava before cooling in the frigid air. She staggered back and dropped ass-first into the snow. What remained of the blasted exit was a giant scar on the ground. Steam poured skyward.

  “One door opens,” Hark said, “and another closes. Ta-dah.”

  A big hand reached down. Leto helped her creak to her feet. Without speaking a word, she and the others began a fast trudge to the distant outpost.

  A few hundred yards of snow had numbed her feet before she frowned. “Why are you two coming with us? Do the Asters hold relatives of yours?”

  “Nothing so selfless. We can’t walk out of here.”

  Leto’s armor clanged because of his fast pace but he wasn’t even winded. Likely he could travel there and back a dozen times before Nynn and the others ran a quarter of the distance.

  Nynn stopped. “Wait. Leto. I’m slowing you down. All of you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just like how they channeled my gift. They can borrow yours. The three of you can make it to those buildings—fast, together.”

  Leto charged into her space in that restrained, angered way of his. “Leave you here?”

  “Yes. You could carry me, but that would be three people digging into your strength. The alarms have already warned the guards at the labs. We don’t have time to let them fortify. And we need you as strong as possible to take on those who have.”

  “You are my partner.”

  “But right now,” she said, “I’m your liability. These two have been lying in wait for months. They helped us get free. You’ll have them at your back, and they’ll have you at theirs.” She touched his face, ran her thumb over the scar along his upper lip. Out in the daylight, that streak of silvery pink was easier to see. “I’ll catch up. Go, please. Find Jack and Pell.”

  Sometimes the words that shivered out of his mind, into hers, were as distinct as if he’d spoken. Sometimes they were just feelings. Did all Indranan work that way, or was it because he was crossbred? She only felt his desperation. She felt it and echoed it. They would do what they needed to. Their goals would not waver. Even if that meant parting. Her heart was as hot as the rock she’d turned into molten slag.

  After a curt nod, he turned away and took a breath. The strength of it lifted his scarred armor. He was a mountain preparing to run—the most impressive thing she’d ever seen. Nynn had only blinked when Leto and the strange couple churned snow in their wake.

  She stood there. Blank. Frozen. Colorless and bereft. When tightening her fists, she could still feel the old breaks where her knuckles had been crushed. Escape was not the same as safety for their loved ones. And as much as she loved Leto of Garnis, having lost sight of him amid a cloud of powder white, she didn’t need him for exacting revenge.

  THIRTY

  Leto was part of the world rather than trapped beneath it. Tiny shards of ice as small as grit scored his face and his gloriously bare throat. Inhaling the air stung his nostrils with pure cold, and he could’ve sworn he could still smell Nynn—her sweet, feminine scent on the wind. Every time he’d stepped into a Cage, he’d thought his gift was in full force. Not even close.

  This was what it was to be a Dragon King.

  Even with Silence and Hark gathering some of his power for their own, he processed details at a pace that should’ve made his mind spin. He put each in correct places: environment, velocity, potential threats, and the effect his run was having on his body.

  That was an unknown. After all, he didn’t know his limits now.

  But he realized that his limits didn’t matter. He would do what he’d always done. He would fight until he emerged victorious. These stakes were the highest of his life.

  As the outpost gained shape and size, he signaled to his unlikely companions. They responded as they would have in the Cages. Instantly. Efficiently. They split away from Leto to flank the building to his left and right. As long as their goals overlapped with rescuing Pell and Jack, they would be welcome allies.

  The lab was more like a fortress. He circled but could find no way in. He was on the verge of returning for Nynn—her gift would’ve made fast work of this hellish place—when his senses sizzled. He sniffed the air. The hair at the base of his skull prickled. Without diverting power to his conscious mind, he ran based on instinct, following the path Silence had taken. Around a sharp corner. Down a long stretch of marble and ice and iron.

  The low building they’d assumed to be the laboratory was menacing. It was an eerie blight on the white landscape, even more pronounced than the hole Nynn and the Sath had punched out from the ground. This place radiated with screams. Leto couldn’t tell if he heard the screams with his ears or his brain. His newly freed Indranan powers almost overwhelmed the senses he’d trusted for a lifetime.

  The arena that housed the battle Cage was huge. It looked even more impressive in its stone housing than from his usual vantage in the center of the action. He veered away from it, intent on finding the source of his sizzling awareness. The sensation was hot and sputtering, pressing out from his forehead and temples. Something was coming. Violence.

  The moment he realized Silence’s footprints had gone missing was the moment he glimpsed the source of that sizzling crackle. A small device on top of a generator at the rear of the squat building was blinking red, red, red. For all his training, he had no idea what it was. He wanted to strip his armor and beat it against the marble wall. Useless. Being out in the world was as new as a being born.

  Yet he wouldn’t let himself retreat into maudlin. Whether scent or sound, something gave Silence away. He wasn’t surprised to find her crouched on one of the slim eaves, two stories up. Any warrior who didn’t admire her elegant balance was a fool. She was looking down at the explosive device that had skittered cold up Leto’s spine—a cold very different from the newfound snow and ice.

  “What is it?”

  Silence shook her head, cracked the knuckle of her right thumb, and mouthed, “Boom.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Tallis of Pendray leaned lower over the handlebars of his snowm
obile. Dark goggles protected his eyes. He left no skin exposed to the elements. Riding three vehicles deep on either side of him were the Honorable Giva and five members of the nameless underground. Tallis wasn’t a member of that secret network. He didn’t want to be. His missions were personal. Perhaps that’s why he pursued them so doggedly.

  For more than a year, he’d suffered guilt so strong and potent that sleep was nearly impossible. The strength to hold back his rage—the berserker rage he’d suppressed when living among the humans—was beginning to ebb.

  He’d killed and he’d done worse. And he regretted none of it.

  Except for what he’d let happen to Nynn.

  She’d been just another step toward the Sun’s prophecy of uniting the Five Clans—steps he’d taken since murdering a Pendray priest. Only after leading the Asters’ guards to Nynn’s home had Tallis realized her identity, and that some means were too sickening to stomach, no matter the noble ends.

  He needed his conscience washed clean of her pain. And he needed revenge against the Sun, the living goddess whose dreamtime deceptions had guided his life for too long.

  The snow was beginning to blend into dreamtime. Predictions and prophecies were streaked by each new spray of crystals. He shook free of those dreams’ seductive hold, only to find himself back in the light of a waning sun and surrounded by his own kind. Despite his appearance at the Council, rumors insisted he was dead or some crazed myth. That was for the best.

  He tightened his mouth. His resolve was unshakable; his course was set as if by the Dragon. He still had work to do on this earth.

  Tallis could barely see the massive complex on the horizon. They had no Garnis among their number, but that was no surprise. Leto and his siblings were the only ones of the Lost that Tallis had known, even in his far-ranging travels. They could’ve used the amplified senses and speed of a Garnis warrior. The elements conspired with the gathering dusk to obscure even the defined outline of the huge arena’s walls, let alone potential threats.

  The Giva sped to the front of the triangular formation and motioned toward another distant spot. Not the outpost.