by Ava Jae
“Then so am I,” says Deimos.
“And so are we.” Lijdo—Kosim’s replacement—gestures to Fejn and himself.
And while it’s probably not the best strategy to put the blazing world ruler and his closest advisor on a dangerous mission that could end with everyone dead, I don’t care.
I’ve failed Mal too many times. I won’t again.
We get to the building just as the suns begin to rise, painting the deep purple dawn with orange, pink, and red. It’s a small house, two stories, sand brick and metal paneled, dusty black floors. Looks like a family probably lived here at some point—there’s a kitchen, eating areas, bathroom, rooms I guess were bedrooms. But not now. The place is empty.
“It’s secure,” Kantos says, as if that weren’t obvious.
We all got here on sandbikes, and I kept my helmet tucked under my arm. I put it on again now—which feels weird over my filter mask, but still fits—and everyone but Deimos stares at me like I’ve lost all sense, but Deimos knows what I’m doing because he’s the one who taught me how to do this to begin with.
“Shae,” Deimos says. “I was thinking tunnels as well.”
I flip the filters on my helmet until I’ve got heat signatures flaring like pillars of fire below us, hidden deep in the sand but not deep enough. “Below us.” I pull my helmet off. “They’re probably watching.”
“Okay, my turn.” Deimos pauses and glances around, then looks more intently at the smooth kitchen floor. “There was a dust covering,” he murmurs, crouching as he runs his fingers over the glossy ground. “But we’ve ruined that. Still … everyone move to the walls.”
We do. Deimos inspects the floor, muttering under his breath as he works, stepping softly, slowly, like we’re in danger of the floor moving beneath us.
“Here,” he announces, tracing parallel lines over the stone. I move closer, squinting at what he’s pointing at, and it’s not until I’m crouched next to him that I spot the faint scratch marks, perfectly straight, marring the otherwise smooth black surface. “Which means …” Deimos traces the barely there indents back with his fingers. “Here. Feel the lip?” He takes my hand and presses my fingers where he’s touching. It’s barely there—I honestly wouldn’t have noticed it without Deimos pointing it out—but we trace out a perfect, large square, about the size of what you’d expect a hidden door in the floor to be.
“Okay,” Kantos says. “So now do we have to find the control panel to open it?”
“We could.” Deimos stands, wiping his hands together to brush the dust off. “Or we could skip that and blow it up.”
Ten mos and one small, controlled explosion later, we re-enter the room wearing our sand bike helmets to see through the dust-filled kitchen. The masks meant to protect us from plague also does a great job filtering the cloudy air. The explosion was small enough—and controlled enough—to barely touch the walls of the empty room. But it incinerated the hidden door, leaving a gaping maw in the middle of the room, which leads into a long, empty tunnel with ladder rings welded into the walls.
“Well!” Deimos says cheerily. “That was fun. Now, who’s going first?”
We can only go one at a time, which is an obvious tactical disadvantage, but so be it. Kantos and four other team members go first, followed by Lijdo, then me, then Varo, then Deimos, then Fejn, then three others of Kantos’s team. The remaining three stay up top, guarding the entrance to make sure no one sneaks up on us.
Thankfully, the tunnel is wide and the ceiling is tall—this one seems more clearly built for Sepharon to easily move in and out. Everyone wears portable torches both on their helmets and at the end of their phasers, which are held out, ready.
Unlike the extensive system at the Remnant base in Elja, though, this one is simple: one short tunnel leading to one metal, locked door. Not reinforced though. Decently sure it wasn’t built to keep out a small army.
Deimos runs his hand over the door, taps it lightly, then licks it and spits at the ground. “Simple, uncoated,” he announces. “It’ll corrode with phaser bursts.”
Kantos nods. “Step back.” He gestures to the two on his either side. “You two with me.”
Everyone but the two Kantos pointed to step back. And the three of them unleash a storm of phaser bursts over every inch of the door, filling the tunnel with the thick smell of burning metal and something sharp as the door slowly turns to an eye-burning red, like the inside of a superheated coal.
The screech of phaser bursts almost brings me back to the day Kora blasted into my life. The day her army ripped apart my home, my family, everything I thought I knew. Day looking at me, on his knees, hands behind his back, knowing—
I dig my nails into my palm and take a deep breath of burning metal—not fire—not home. I’m here. And I’m staying here until I get my nephew back from that asshole.
Hang on, Mal. I’m here.
The phaserfire stops all at once. And the silence is loud, so loud, stuffing my ears with pressure. The fire-red door dulls to a less-intense orange, then a dull, almost brown, until—finally—dark gray. The shine is gone. It looks impossibly old.
And perfectly brittle.
Kantos nods to us and we all get ready. Phasers up. Ready to move. Heart thrumming, cool air painting me in sweat.
“Just be careful,” I say. “If Mal’s in there I don’t want him getting hit.”
“Sha, el Sira,” Kantos says, and the rest nod.
I’m in the midde of the pack, which I don’t love, but I get it—I need to be protected, even if I can take care of myself. But since I’m definitely not the tallest guy here, it also means I can’t see everything going on up front. I don’t need to, though.
Someone up front slams their elbow into the door and the whole thing shatters like razor-thin glass. Then we’re surging forward, and Kantos is screaming, “On the floor! Faces on the ground! Hands over your heads!” and then I’m in.
The room is more like a large closet—or small closet, by Asheron standards—barely big enough to fit us all. Shaw is on his knees, hands raised, smirking as his three men splay themselves on the ground as instructed. And Mal—Mal is lying on the ground behind him, and he’s across the room and it’s clear from here he’s shaking, and fuck, he’s terrified, of course he’s terrified—that fucker dragged him down here and stars know what they’ve done to him and—
I push through the crowd, pass Shaw, who has the arrogance to smile at me like this is all going to plan, and crouch next to Mal.
“Hey.” My voice is soft while Kosim keeps yelling at Shaw. “Mal, it’s me. I’m here.”
Mal lifts his head and squints at me. Too pale. “Can I get up?” he whispers.
“Of course you can.” I help him up and he hugs me—tight.
“I knew you’d find me,” he says into my chest. “I knew it. Okay.” He takes a deep breath and lets go. Then brushes himself off. “Sorry.”
“You have nothing to apologize for.” Deimos steps up to us and wraps Mal in a hug. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Mal’s voice shakes, and he nods, and I believe he wants to be okay, at least, but his face, his chest is bruised. They hit him. They hurt him.
Then someone laughs behind me and it’s a bucket of cold water over my head.
It’s Shaw. On the ground, with Kantos’s knee on his spine and his arms pulled back, cuffed. But he’s laughing, enjoying this, watching me with too-bright eyes and a full white smile.
He fucken abducted my nephew. For what, fun? To say he could? To remind me no one’s out of reach? To laugh in my face, even when I’ve got him plastered to the sandrock, even when he’s lost?
Kantos looks at me and I say, “Pull him up.”
Kantos does, bracing Shaw’s cuffed arms behind his back. Shaw snickers and spits to the side. “That’s right, Eros. You know what you want to do.”
I do.
The first punch cracks across his jaw and down into my elbow.
The second his opposite chee
k.
The third his nose, spurting blood, slickening skin like warm oil.
The room is roaring with the song in my ears, the endless drum. I think there are voices—someone saying something—but Shaw is laughing, and I don’t care that my fists hurt, I don’t care that I was done with this, this fighting, this bleeding, this killing.
I hit him again. He took Mal.
I hit him again. He hurt Mal.
“UNCLE EROS,” Mal screams, and it’s the first time a voice has cut through the dull thunder in my head, and he’s crying, he’s crying.
I’m panting. Shaking. Itching to move.
But Mal is crying. “He’s human!” he says like it should mean something, and maybe it should. “He’s human, please, please, stop …”
Shaw grins at me with blood-painted teeth. “That’s right, Eros. I’m human. Mal’s human.” Then he spits. In my face. “But you?” He leans close, leering, sweating, smiling. “You’re just a fucken mutt. No better than an animal.”
He slumps in Kantos’s arms, out before I register my smarting knuckles. His blood on my skin. Wet. Warm. Cooling.
I wipe it off on Shaw’s shirt. Turn to Deimos, to Varo, to Fejn, and Kantos, and Sepharon men watching me grimly, with something like respect.
It’s true I’m human. It’s true I’m Sepharon. And it’s true the language of violence is one the Sepharon have honed bone-shard-sharp, and I know it too well and I hate that I do.
Call me what you want. Call me a half-blood, a mutt, a murderer, a victim, disgusting, a waste of air, an animal—say what you want about me, I’ve heard it all.
But hurt the people I care about and I will fucken destroy you.
“Take him.”
29
Eros
“What are you going to do with him?” As my bedroom doors close behind Deimos and me, Kora is looking at me through the glass, brows furrowed, not really disapproving but more like—concerned. I would have expected the whole we saved Mal and arrested Shaw thing would’ve gotten at least one congratulations or at least a I’m glad Mal’s okay, but instead, that’s the first thing she says.
What am I going to do with Shaw?
“I don’t know.” I stifle a yawn. It’s the dead segments of the morning, still technically night and I probably shouldn’t have called Kora so fucken early, but it turns out she was up anyway. And I just—don’t know. Needed to talk to someone separated from it all. “I haven’t had enough time to think about it. We only just got back.”
“You’ll need to come up with an answer quickly,” Kora answers. “I imagine it won’t be long before Rani contacts you, demanding the same.”
Deimos glances at me with a look and he doesn’t have to say it. So, yeah, she’s probably right. But stars, it’d be nice to have a mental break from all this for, like, I don’t know, a couple breaths, even?
“We’ll strategize a response.” Deimos sits on the edge of my bed as I settle next to him. “But I imagine you’re right. I expect we’ll hear from Rani and I suspect she won’t be at her most charitable.”
I snort. “You say that like she’s ever been charitable.”
Deimos just waves his hand in response.
“You realize she’ll be reacting the same way you did upon realizing Mal was missing, right?” Kora says. “She took your family, and now you’ve taken one of hers. Her primary concern will be getting him back immediately, and by whatever means necessary.”
I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but, yeah, that’s probably true, too. I run my hands over my face and take a deep breath, trying to fight off the impending brainblaze. “Maybe I can use it as leverage. Force them to negotiate.”
“Or,” Deimos says, “in the highly likely event that she still won’t want to negotiate, you could try him, because he’s a criminal, and criminals should be processed through our justice system.”
“You mean our execution system,” I answer flatly.
Deimos just grimaces.
“Whatever you decide matters less than making sure you decide something. The world is watching, Eros, and you need to have a strategy ready to handle the Remnant’s response.”
After ending the conversation with Kora, Deimos and I check on Mal to make sure he’s asleep. Except he isn’t, not even close, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising despite the stars-cursed time, all things considered.
Mal’s lying on some pillows tossed on the floor, arms crossed behind his head, in his dark bedroom. He doesn’t turn his head when the doors open, so for a moment it almost looks like he is sleeping, except his eyes are open, and I’ve barely taken a step in the room before he says, “I’ve been thinking.”
Deimos and I sit on either side of Mal. We haven’t really talked to Mal about what happened yet, though Zarana told us he’d said the bruises were from when he was initially taken and after that “nothing happened,” whatever that means. But I know what it’s like to go through shit and not be ready to talk about it, so I don’t want to force Mal into a conversation he isn’t ready for.
So instead, I let him lead.
“What about?”
Mal takes a deep breath. “I’ve had this idea. I’ve been talking to the techies and you know how we got here—humans, I mean—on a giant ship, right? Just like the stories said, from Earth, where there are other humans like us, like, a whole planet of just humans.” He’s smiling now, and this is not at all what I was expecting this conversation to be, but if this is what he wants to talk about …
“Uh. Sure?”
“So, right, I’ve been with the techies in the lab a lot—they’re super nice and even let me kinduv help a little. Oh, oh, one of them even gave me this.” He lifts his wrist and points to a shiny black band I hadn’t noticed. “It reads stuff for me since, you know, I can’t really see anymore and I never learned how to read Sephari anyway and it also like—it tells me if I’m going to walk into something or someone and gives me directions. It helps a lot.”
“That was … nice of them.” I glance at Deimos and he glances back at me with a bemused shrug.
“Right, so anyway, they have the ship!”
I’m really struggling to keep up with this. A mo ago, Mal was missing and I was trying to handle the Remnant thing and ignoring my fucken endless brainblaze through an exhausted fog before I took more painkillers and then I got fucken bit and Kosim is sick and now we found Mal and took Shaw and Mal seems to be fine and is excited about some ship and dammit, I wish I could be excited with him. I wish I could get where he was going with this, but I’m just so fucken exhausted.
I really need to sleep but the thought of it makes me sick.
“The ship humans arrived on?” Deimos says. “It would be ancient at this point, wouldn’t it? That was, what, several hundred cycles ago?”
“Well, shae, it’s old as fuck,” Mal says. “But they’ve preserved it and they said with some upgrades they could easily get it working again and it still has all communication stuff intact, like—they didn’t damage the ship at all when they took the first humans captive. They just took the ship for themselves and the humans never got it back, which was shitty, but, like, they have it!”
I’m not sure if he’s supposed to be implying something obvious and I’m just too tired to get it or if he’s actually being too vague to really follow, but either way I have no idea what’s going on.
“Okay,” I say, more flatly than I mean to.
Mal frowns at me. “Okay? That’s all you have to say?”
I close my eyes and rub my temples. This throbbing brainblaze is getting bad and now that the adrenaline is long gone, my shoulder is burning again. Maybe I should ask for those painkiller things they gave me after Lejv’s guys attacked me. That thing worked so well it was like a pain eraser.
“I’m just—not sure where you’re going with this,” I manage, opening my eyes again.
“Well it’s obvious, isn’t it? We could go back!”
Deimos arches an eyebrow. “Go
… back?” he says carefully. At least I’m not the only one totally confused.
“To Earth! The humans could leave, and then there wouldn’t have to be any more fighting about humans and Sepharon sharing the planet. We could go to Earth where there are only other humans.”
I frown. “I don’t think it’s that easy.”
“Sure it is. We take the ship, and we—”
“Mal.” I sigh and press my palms against my eyes. “There are a lot of problems with that plan.” When I lower my hands from my face, Mal is scowling and crossing his arms over his chest.
“Like what?” he demands. “Name one problem.”
“Well not everyone’s going to want to go, for one,” I say. “The Sepharon haven’t made human lives easy, obviously, but generations of humans were still born here. This is just as much their home as it is the Sepharon’s.”
Deimos nods. “Not to mention there are many more humans here now than those who arrived here hundreds of cycles ago. There have been generations upon generations of humans who were born here, descended from that original group of humans. They likely wouldn’t all fit on a ship designed to hold a fraction of them.”
“And like you said, that ship is old as fuck. Even with upgrades, it’s pretty risky throwing thousands of people on a hundred-cycles-old ship and hoping it’ll just work.”
Mal frowns. “Okay but you’ve already solved, like, one of those. If not everyone is going to want to leave, then the ship doesn’t have to hold so many, right? Maybe there will be enough room. And maybe it’ll be enough to show the Remnant that you’re doing something.”
“And if there isn’t enough room?” I ask. “What then? I don’t want to introduce a new thing for humans to fight over. And I’m not sure suggesting humans leave is really what the Remnant is looking for. That’s probably the opposite of what they want, really.”
“Well, for the room thing … then we send them on Sepharon ships, too. It doesn’t have to be just the one ship. And it’s not exactly what the Remnant asked for but they said you had to show signs of taking steps to reorganizing the current system and this could be a step if you present it right.”