by Lili Zander
She takes a deep breath. The words spill from her lips as if she can’t hold them back any longer. “It didn’t stop Beirax from trying, and it won’t stop them either,” she replies bleakly. “There’s too much at stake. Even now, the Zorahn navy is probably marshaling outside the asteroid belt. I don’t know if they will succeed, but hundreds of Zoraken will die trying to retrieve me.”
“Who’s this ‘them’ that you keep talking about? Who’s after you?”
She doesn’t answer my question; I don’t even think she hears me. “I hoped I could steal the cloakship and escape,” she continues tonelessly. “That way, they’d follow me. They wouldn’t attack this planet. But now…” Her voice trails away.
“Now the others have the cloakship?” I prompt.
Her eyes are bleak. “There’s no more hope. I can destroy the locator, but all it will do is slow them down. They will land on the surface, and they will find me, and they will destroy everyone that gets in their way.”
“Who are you?” I stare at her. “Are you that important?”
“I’m no one,” she whispers. “But I am betrothed to a powerful man, and my father will let nothing get in the way of the bonding. They will come after me. I can run, but I can’t hide, and I can never escape.”
Her fear is contagious. Goosebumps rise on my skin and my throat feels dry. I can relate to Raiht’vi’s story only too well. “We’ll help you,” I say to her.
Her expression contorts into a familiar sneer. “Bone knives against the Zoraken,” she says. “It will be slaughter. Even the Draekons that can shift cannot hope to survive the full force of the High Empire.”
Who the hell is she running from? I’m about to demand that she tell me the truth—the whole, unvarnished truth, nothing held back—when something obscures my vision. A set of hands force a thick bag over my head.
I choke out a scream. At my side, I hear Raiht’vi start to shout for Thrax and Zorux, but her shriek is cut off ominously.
There’s a blow to my head, one that makes me cry out in pain. And then… nothing.
17
Zorux:
Something’s wrong. Something tugs at me through the unnaturally thick mists of sleep, over and over again, until my eyes snap open. I stare at the ceiling for a second, disoriented. Then I realize that Ryanna isn’t sleeping next to me.
How could she have woken up without us hearing her?
There’s only one possibility. Raiht’vi drugged us.
Fury rises in me, swift and sure. If something has happened to Ryanna, I will kill that damn scientist if that’s the last thing I do.
The dragon inside rises to its hind legs and breathes fire, trapped and unable to intervene. Our mate is in danger, it roars. Protect her.
Wait. The dragon? That’s new.
Thrax rolls to his feet, a peculiar look on his face. “My dragon is talking to me. That’s never happened before.” He pauses, and then his expression turns frantic. “Ryanna is in trouble?”
Palpable waves of urgency wash over me. “Can you transform?”
Thrax’s face contorts as he tries, but nothing happens. “No,” he grimaces. “You neither?”
I shake my head. It feels like the dragon is trapped inside a thick, translucent cage that it cannot shatter. “She’s in danger. What do we do?”
Without answering, I step outside our cave. Raiht’vi isn’t in her cave either. “If the scientist did this, there will be a cost,” Thrax says grimly.
“I don’t think she did.” We follow the trail toward the stream. When we reach the water, my senses guide me to the left, to a large rock that’s stained with something blue. It’s blood, but not from Ryanna. Unlike us, the humans bleed crimson.
“Raiht’vi.” Thrax’s gaze sweeps over the ground, and something catches his eye. He crouches down. “Zorux, check this out.”
Uzzan’s light is faint, but sufficient enough for me to see the glitter of something metallic on the ground. Smashed electronics. My heart lurches in fear as I make the connection. “A communicator?”
Thrax peers closer. The man studied for a few years to be a technician, but never completed his training. Still, he knows more than me about these matters. “I don’t think so,” he says. “This looks like a locator.”
There’s blue blood mingled with the wreckage of the tracker. “Someone’s keeping tabs on Raiht’vi through an implant?”
“It appears so. Or they did. It doesn’t matter.” He steps back, his forehead furrowed, and stares into the woods. Following his gaze, I see something in the dim light. Symmetry where there shouldn’t be any. Striding among the trees with Thrax on my heels, I approach the crude shelter that caught my eye. It’s not much more than a hole in the ground, covered by some leaves.
“How long has this been here?” I grind out, my pulse racing in fear. Ryanna. Where is she? Each minute she’s missing, the danger grows. “Could someone have been watching us?”
Thrax’s expression is furious. He kneels down and runs his hand on the inside of the hole. “Freshly dug,” he says. “It’s still damp. This was a crime of opportunity. Someone came here, saw Ryanna and Raiht’vi, and took them.” His eyes are glued to the ground. “Look at the way the grass is flattened,” he says. “The assailant loaded them on a travois and dragged them through the woods.” His fingers glide over the bent blades. “This happened three hours ago.”
My heart sinks. Whoever took the women has a substantial head-start on us. “Let’s grab our packs,” I grind out. Terror grips my throat, and it’s almost impossible to force the words out. “We can’t wait for the sun to rise. We follow them now.”
“Of course,” Thrax replies. He marks the grass, adding in the sign for ‘danger.' “Arax and Vulrux will be able to track us when they get here.”
We follow the tracks for two hours. The mystery assailant—and from the tracks, it’s clear that there’s only one—seems to have stayed alongside the stream and it soon becomes obvious why. When we reach the grasslands, the stream widens and there are no more tracks. “He took the river.”
“Then we make a raft.”
All my life, I thought I lived in fear, but nothing has prepared me for the intensity of this moment. If something were to happen to Ryanna, my soul would shatter. At the thought of her in danger, my vision blurs, and I can’t breathe.
Only my iron willpower keeps me moving. Only the conviction that I would know if something happened to her gives me hope.
“She’s our mate.” Thrax sounds a little dazed as he strips branches from a nearby tree. “I can feel her here.” He places his hand on his chest and gives me a distressed glance. “Am I good enough for her, Zorux? What if I make her unhappy? What if I let her down?”
I understand what’s going on. Thrax grew up in an orphanage. He’s had to fend for himself all his life. He’s always friendly, and he’s always cheerful, but underneath that, he keeps himself apart just as much as I do.
“Why are you going to look for Ryanna now?” I ask him. We’re moving quickly, chopping branches down and lashing them together with the rope we carry in our packs. Never has a raft been put together this quickly. It’ll be a miracle if it survives the journey, but we have no choice but to move as fast as we can. “Why not look for the Cloakship containers? You could still find all seven. You could still leave the prison planet.”
He looks at me as if I’m crazy. “Ryanna is in danger,” he says, his hands clenching into fists at his side. “You think I’m capable of ignoring that?”
I give him a steady stare. “No. I have complete faith in you, Thrax. More faith than you do in yourself.”
He doesn’t reply for a long time. We finish building our raft, using one of our sheets as a sail. Pushing it into the water, we jump on and start paddling down the river.
The current is swift, and we move quickly. The sun is starting to rise, flooding the pale crimson sky with brilliant orange-hued light. “You’re right,” he says finally. “I won’t be able to b
ear seeing her unhappy. She’s too important to me.”
Though we’re making good time, I can’t tell if we’re gaining on the rogue Draekon who took Ryanna and Raiht’vi. We drift along in silence, using two long branches as oars to navigate around rocks.
“You said something last night,” Thrax says after about an hour of quiet. “You said…”
“That I’ve spent my entire life in fear.” I take a deep breath. Thrax is my pair-bond, as much as Ryanna is my mate. There should be no secrets between us. “It’s a complicated story.”
He waits in silence for me to continue.
I trusted Ryanna with the truth. I have to trust Thrax as well, even though confiding in people doesn’t come easily to me. “Ryki is in the middle of the Northern Wilds,” I start. “It’s extremely remote. The House of Rykiel is the only Highborn family there.” I’m fairly sure that whatever Thrax might think of my revelation, he won’t act against me until after we find Ryanna. But what will happen then? “When I was ten, I found out that my father wasn’t Highborn at all. He was a servant of Lord Saarex, and he’d killed his master.”
“He impersonated a Highborn?” Thrax looks shocked.
“Yes.” I tell him the rest of the story, how my mother begged me to kill myself and my siblings; how I was too weak to do what was necessary. When I’m done, I survey Thrax cautiously. “I cannot ask you to keep this a secret.”
He gives me an incredulous look. “Of course I’m going to keep your confidence, Zorux.”
“Why?” The strictures of the homeworld go deep. I don’t understand why Thrax is pretending that my revelation hasn’t changed everything.
“I’m an orphan, Zorux. I’m Midborn only because of the Narm Proclamation, remember?” He shrugs. “You spent your life on the homeworld. I spent mine in space. Out there,” he gestures to the sky above us, “A person’s worth is measured by their actions, not by their blood status. And I’ve learned,” he says, his lips twisting wryly, “that Lowborn bleed the same blue as Highborn.”
There’s really nothing I can say, no words that express how moved I am by his support. “Thank you,” I mutter.
“You might find,” he says, surveying me with a thoughtful gaze, “that I’m not the only one that doesn’t care about the rules governing the homeworld.”
“What do you mean?”
“The High Emperor Dravex made the Narm proclamation because he believed that children deserved a clean start. Arax is his son.”
“And so is Lenox, who rescinded his father’s order.” I shake my head. “I am Draekon, condemned to exile, and I will never see my family again, but I cannot risk their lives.”
“We survived on this planet for sixty years because the fourteen of us trusted each other.”
Not with this. Never with this. It’s too much.
I straighten my shoulders and change the topic. “Do you think we’re gaining on them?”
Thrax doesn’t press the issue. “I hope so,” he murmurs. “Because if anything were to happen to her…”
My heart shies away from that thought. Nothing can happen to Ryanna. I won’t allow it.
18
Ryanna:
I’m not in the mountains anymore. When I wake up, that’s the first thing I notice. The air here seems thicker somehow, more laden with moisture.
Also, my head is really, really sore.
Rubbing the bump on my scalp—I’m going to kill whoever did this to me—I look around to take stock of the situation. Strangely, I’m not as terrified as I thought I’d be. What’s happening to me seems unreal. Maybe I’m in shock.
Raiht’vi is sprawled at my side, not moving. Is she dead? I watch her, my heart in my throat, for a few seconds, until I notice that her chest rises and falls. Okay, she’s breathing. That’s a relief.
Sit up, I order myself.
The next thing I realize is that my wrists are tied together, as are my ankles. As is Raiht’vi, except her hands are bound behind her back. Whoever brought us here isn’t taking any chances that we’re going to escape.
My heart starts to race, but I force myself to take deep breaths. You can fall to pieces once you get out of here, girl. The stern voice echoing in my head is Grandma’s. Cry when the job is done. Not until then.
A movement outside catches my attention. For a second, I freeze, wondering if the person that did this to us is out there, but it’s just a branch covered with purple leaves waving in the wind.
Wait a second. I’m not lying on the ground; I’m on some kind of wooden platform. Those leaves are not high in the sky; they’re at eye-level. And when I look through the narrow gaps between the slats, the ground is far, far below.
My stomach lurches as I connect the dots. Murphy’s Law strikes again. The woman with no head for heights is stuck in some kind of alien tree-house.
Raiht’vi stirs and moans. I want to stay mad at the Zorahn scientist for drugging Thrax and Zorux, but despite myself, I feel a twinge of concern. Our conversation yesterday made it clear to me that she’s running scared, and I know from experience that a person doesn’t make rational decisions when they’re afraid.
In my own way, I’ve been doing the same thing. I’ve insisted on keeping Thrax and Zorux at arms’ length. Though I slept with them, there’s still a part of me that’s afraid they’ll leave me when they find their mate.
I’d give anything to see them now. To tell them I was wrong, and they were right. Life is short, and everything can change in the blink of an eye. I thought I was marrying the upstanding sheriff of my small town, but he turned out to be a wife-beating abuser. I thought I was heading to an alien planet to be a glorified space lab rat, but I ended up crashing on the prison planet instead. There are no guarantees.
If I get out of here, I promise myself solemnly, Thrax and Zorux can have all the anal sex they want. And if the result of that is a baby, well, I’ll cherish my little bundle of joy with all my heart. No matter what the future holds.
Then I have to giggle, because as far as life-changing realizations go, resolving to have anal sex is hardly the most uplifting one.
The scientist’s eyes open and she croaks something incomprehensible. “Are you okay?” I ask her, concerned, and she murmurs a reply, but I can’t understand that either.
Shit. I’ve lost my translator. Zorux has been teaching me Zor, but so far, all I’ve learned is to count to ten, order a beer—technically, there’s no beer on Zorahn, because barley is not a crop found there, but according to the translator, the closest equivalent beverage is called samit—and ask where the nearest bathroom is. My vocabulary would be perfect if I were sunning myself in the Zorahn equivalent of the Caribbean, but it’s absolutely useless for plotting an escape plan.
I lift my tied wrists to my ear. “No translator,” I say ruefully. “It must have fallen out somewhere.”
Raiht’vi, on the other hand, still has her earpiece, so she understands me perfectly. She mimes holding a knife and pats her body. “Are you asking me if I still have my knives?” Why didn’t I think of that? My head bump seems to have made me stupid. That should have been the first thing I checked.
I roll myself clumsily into a sitting position and pat myself down. Like the Draekons, I carry multiple blades on my person. Of course, that’s during the day. When I got up to follow Raiht’vi, I hadn’t bothered with all that fuss. I’d just grabbed the knife under my pillow.
It’s nowhere in sight. Damn it. Whoever took us must have searched me and removed the blade from the holster under my right arm. Now what?
“Ryanna,” Raiht’vi hisses. She flexes her knees and inclines her head toward her legs. There’s a bronze blade sticking out from one of her shoes. Well, well. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the Zorahns have been watching James Bond.
I inch over as silently as I can. A branch cracks outside our little treehouse and we both freeze. The seconds tick by, but nothing happens. My heart hammering in my chest, I place my bound wrists near the sharp edge o
f her shoe and start sawing.
In less than a minute, I’m free. I quickly untie my legs, then free Raiht’vi. “Arsak,” she murmurs when the last knot is undone.
Arsak. That’s Zor for thank you. I made sure to learn the words for ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ right away. Gotta be polite, after all. My grandma taught me well.
My muscles scream in protest as I get to my feet. Pulse racing, I inch my way to the edge of the platform, make the mistake of looking down, and almost throw up as my stomach roils. Raiht’vi, who is obviously not bothered by heights, waves me forward.
There’s a rope ladder. Raiht’vi clambers down it like a monkey on steroids. When she reaches the bottom, she gives me an impatient wave. “Scared of heights, remember?” My mouth is dry, and as I stand at the tip of the ledge, I have to do everything in my power to keep from running back inside the crude treehouse, where I’ll be safe.
Of course, I don’t do any such thing. If the choice is between ‘homicidal alien kidnapper’ and ‘losing my lunch while climbing down a rope ladder,’ I’ll take the latter, thank you very much.
Don’t look down, don’t look down, I chant as I descend. When I reach the ground, knees trembling and knuckles white with fear, Raiht’vi gives me a scathing look. I’m willing to bet that she wants to chew me out for my glacially slow pace, but alas for her, I’ve lost my translator, and can’t understand her lecture.
Even though I’m almost incandescent with fear that our assailant might return at any moment, I smirk about that. Just a little.
“What now?” I whisper. The area around us is thickly forested, just like the Lowlands. Trees crowd us in every direction, and I don’t know which way to run.
A sudden clarity falls over me, quieting my chaotic thoughts. Thrax and Zorux will come for me. I just have to give them a chance to find me.
Crouching next to the nearest bush, I reach for the fronds of purple feathered leaves and quickly weave my mark. Now, if my Draekons reach this spot, they’ll know I was here.