He yelped and cursed her in Toryn before leaping over the counter and backing away - still running his mouth, ironically, even as Restlyn stood and hit him hard in the head with the skillet. His eyes bulged and he crumpled to the floor instantly.
Ashlyn froze, realizing that her friend had probably just killed one of their two most likely information sources. "Rest - lyn!" she exclaimed. "Grossness! How could you just - "
Her tirade was cut short as the first ninja bolted by her, slamming painfully into her right arm before he beat a rather ungraceful exit (particularly for a ninja; Ashlyn felt insulted), slipping and sliding as he literally threw himself out the door.
Ashlyn herself scrambled in the flour for only a second before running after him - not that there was anywhere he could go, they were on a freaking ship - but she knew that he was still dangerous, regardless of how comically flour-caked he was.
Puffs of white powder flew up from his feet with every step. Ashlyn's heart began to thump as she realized he was heading for the exit to the top deck. How long had he been on this ship to know his way around?
"STOP HIM!" she yelled at the top of her lungs as she came barreling through the doorway to the control room.
The masked ninja vaulted over one of the panels and came face-to-face with Vargo. The red-haired Spartan smirked as he twirled an electric baton in his hands.
The ninja, of course, wasted no time with intimidation games, and promptly kneed Vargo in a rather sensitive part of his anatomy. The baton clattered to the floor and the Spartan doubled over, gasping.
As tempting as it was to point and laugh, Ashlyn couldn't afford to. She tackled the ninja from behind, slamming him sideways into one of the control panels, and hooked her legs around his shins, jerking him off his feet and onto the floor. They rolled around for several moments, each grappling with the other and trying to gain the upper hand, until one of his punches connected with the side of Ashlyn's face, and she slid across the floor.
The sleeve that she had been clutching in one fist ripped completely off, exposing his entire left arm, which was tattooed in a snaking pattern along his veins from his forearm down. Ashlyn jumped up and struck her usual fighting stance, shifting her weight from the balls of her feet to her toes and back again as she waited for him to attack.
He did, in the traditional ninja way, with no forewarning and no particular elegance about his style. It was simply jab, kick, spin, duck, as Ashlyn went through the movements of fighting without actually knowing what was coming next. It had been years, a decade and a half since she'd battled with another ninja, and she was losing ground quickly.
She abandoned the blocking and fought him furiously, spinning on one foot in a kick that only half-missed its mark before flipping forward in another offensive attack. The back of her sneaker connected soundly with the ninja's shoulder.
He grunted in pain but managed to catch her foot anyway. He danced away from her flailing fists, and Ashlyn hopped once before losing her balance and falling backwards. She used the heels of her hands to break her fall, but it hurt just as much as falling on her head probably would have. The ninja stomped once on her stomach, hard, before leaping over her and throwing open the door to the deck.
Ashlyn couldn't breathe, but she knew she had to stop him - you didn't go to the deck without a purpose. Clambering to her feet, she staggered out the door after him. Her lungs were bursting with the lack of oxygen. She struggled to focus.
He was at the end of the deck, throwing back a tarp which the wind quickly dragged over the edge, hefting the straps of a backpack over his shoulders. The emergency parachutes.
Ashlyn gritted her teeth and skittered towards him, barely able to keep her feet on the deck in the fierce wind. He climbed up onto the railing and prepared to leap, but she grabbed the backpack, cackling in delight and then suddenly screaming in fear as he took her with him over the edge.
Something latched onto her foot and Ashlyn jerked to a stop, screeching her head off in absolute terror but still maintaining her grasp on the ninja's backpack. She peered over her shoulder, blanching when she saw Vargo struggling to hold onto her. His fingers dug into the super-thick socks that she wore bunched up around her ankles, trying to find a better grip but unable to steady her.
"I've got him!" she yelled, clinging determinedly to the writhing ninja. "Pull me up!"
"I can't!" he returned. "You're too heavy!"
"Too heavy!" Ashlyn screeched. "Suck it up and pull us up, you freaking wuss!"
"Let him go, Ash! I can't save you both!"
"WHAT THE HELL KIND OF SPARTAN ARE YOU?" she demanded, the wind ripping the words from her lips.
Suddenly one of the straps broke on the ninja's parachute, and he let out a startled yelp as his other arm slid out of its strap and he plummeted downward, disappearing into the clouds beneath them.
There was a shocked silence as Ashlyn stared down at the backpack in her hands, struggling frantically to determine what just happened.
Vargo hauled her up, grasping her around the waist and pulling her over the railing before collapsing next to her. His hair was whipping violently in the wind, but he grinned at Ashlyn, oblivious to her wrath. "Guess the decision wasn't yours to make," he said, pulling the cigarette from behind his ear and clamping it between his teeth. "Poor guy."
Chapter 4
Choosing Sides
"OUCH," Ashlyn said loudly, glaring at Vargo as he swabbed her scraped hand with peroxide.
"Don't act like such a baby," he replied. "Geez, you'd think I was amputating a limb or something."
Ashlyn clamped her mouth shut, trying to ignore the pain that flared in her palms as the liquid fizzled against her wounds. She wasn't about to let Vargo, of all people, lecture her about being a wimp.
Her wounds had been nowhere near as bad as she'd expected - the pain when she'd fallen on her hands had led her to believe that she'd hacked off more than a few inches of skin, but the scrapes were minimal. It was just the healing that was getting to be a pain in the butt.
Eight years ago- or even eight days ago, she would have just used a heal stane and been done with it. But Jackson had the Conservation Act in effect now. The idea of the Act was to preserve as much of Kresmir’s natural energy as possible, so stanes were only supposed to be used in life or death situations.
Truthfully, if she’d been on her own she would have healed her damn hand, Conservation Act or no, but with the rest of FLD hanging over her shoulder, Ashlyn didn’t have much choice in the situation.
She'd torn a scab off of one hand just trying to hand Drake his revolver. Naturally, Vargo was the first who had jumped to her aid, but now she was beginning to regret accepting his offer for help. She knew that technically they weren't supposed to use heal stanes for minor wounds - conserving Kresmir’s energy and all that - but seriously? Suffering Vargo as her personal nursemaid was really almost too much.
She blinked hard and focused on his hairline to distract her, gritting her teeth and ignoring his hands as they caressed her wrist lightly.
Funny that she'd never noticed how . . . symmetrical the red-haired Spartan's features were. The trim lines of his sideburns continued up above his fly-away brows, meeting at the center in a perfect widow's peak. His head was bent over her hand, strands of auburn hair falling across his bright green eyes.
As she was studying him, Vargo suddenly looked up and smiled knowingly at her. "Something on your mind?"
Horrified, Ashlyn yanked her hand from his grasp. "Nothing!" she blurted out before she could stop herself, sliding off the table and tripping over her own feet in her haste. "You know, as much as I'm sure you enjoy pawing me, I'd really rather just do it myself."
"Suit yourself," he said, leaning back against the table and folding his arms across his chest. Still smirking. He looked like a puffed-up stud horse strutting in front of a herd of mares.
Ashlyn's face felt like it was on fire. She hadn't meant it like that. "You're so gross," she muttered.
Skye walked into the room then, Restlyn trailing behind him. Both were staring at the floor as if they hadn't the strength to even lift their gazes to eye level.
"Hey," Vargo said lightly. He tossed the peroxide-soaked gauze on the table and looked keenly at the exhausted pair. "I'm guessing no luck with Restlyn's prisoner?"
Restlyn had done some significant damage to the ninja she had fought the day before. The poor ninja had been conked out all night, and had regained consciousness less than an hour before.
"We had less than no luck," Restlyn said miserably. "He doesn't know a thing."
"Or if he does, he won't tell us," Skye added. He pulled out a chair and sat down, propping his feet up on the table and interlacing his fingers across his stomach.
Ashlyn curled her shuriken into her palm and maneuvered it back and forth, measuring her tolerance for the pain. "Did you push him or did you just ask politely?"
"We asked . . . a little less than politely." Skye frowned at her. "This isn't like the battle with Lord Angelo, Ash. These are actual people - your people, as a matter of fact - and we have to maintain some civility or we'll lose sight of what we're fighting for."
She wasn't anxious to see a fellow Toryn interrogated, but Ashlyn couldn't help but feel that Skye was being silly.
"You're being silly," she told him. "I trained to be Lady of Toryn practically since birth, and the first thing I learned is that wars must be won at any cost, whether you have to lie, torture, cheat or steal to do it. That's the way ninjas are - it's the way they always have been. Nobility and graciousness totally can't do you any good if you're too frigging dead to - "
"You seem awfully eager for bloodshed," Skye cut her off, his tone edgy. "He's a Toryn, just like you. For all you know he could be fighting the good fight and we could be the bad guys. And you're trying to convince me to torture him on the off-chance that he might know something useful?"
Ashlyn's eyes narrowed, and she opened her mouth to snap at him - but something stopped her.
He was right.
She had blindly accepted her friends’ explanation for the war without even pausing to consider that the Toryn army might actually be fighting for the right thing. Even eight years ago she hadn't agreed with Skye and his friends blowing up all of Lord Angelo‘s power plants - it put people on the streets, made them both homeless and jobless overnight.
But the bigger picture had been Lord Angelo, and that was something she had been willing to fight for.
But Devlyn . . . ?
If her father had chosen Devlyn as the next leader, then why wouldn't he be an appropriate Lord of Toryn? Lord Li was nothing if not a decent judge of character - hell, he'd seen right through Skye when the ex-DEMON had first stepped foot in Toryn, had warned Ashlyn about him.
She'd disregarded the caution, of course (probably blinded by Skye’s blond-haired, blue-eyed good looks more than anything), but in the end Lord Li had been right. Skye wasn't what he had said he was.
Had eight years away from her people changed Ashlyn so much? She knew the answer already. She might as well be a bloodless vagrant, with no proud lineage to boast, no ties, no home. No family except for the people on this airship, right now. And at the moment she wasn't feeling particularly chummy towards Skye.
She realized that Vargo, Restlyn and Skye were all still staring at her, waiting for her response. Her throat tightened uncomfortably. "I have to go," she murmured, brushing past Skye and hurrying out the door.
She hadn't made it ten steps towards the holding cells before Vargo was next to her. "Hey, wait up a sec," he said, grabbing her elbow. "Skye's just being . . . Skye. Don't worry about it."
"Do I look worried?" she said, and kept walking. "No worry here. I am worry-free. Happy now? You gonna go back and give a glowing report of my condition to our fearless leader? Make sure you add that I'm now thoroughly confused about which side I should be fighting for, thanks to his - "
"I don't report to anyone," Vargo interrupted. "And if I was going to, it definitely wouldn't be to Skye. Relax, sweetheart. He's just pissed 'cause the ninja didn't tell him anything."
Ashlyn swiped the back of her hand across her eyes, trying to alleviate the sting of tears. "Of course the ninja didn't tell him anything. Ninjas, real live ninjas, not like the ones you read about in the storybooks, aren't gonna break down and spill the beans if you ask real nicely. You have to do something serious, like chop off their fingers or tear off their stupid kneecaps."
"Nice visual." Vargo glanced down at her, eyebrow arched. "Is that what you're going to do now? Hack off a finger for every refusal?"
"No, but that's a good idea." Ashlyn sniffled and swapped the shuriken to her other hand. "I'm just going to see if I know him. Maybe he'll tell me something if he thinks he can trust me."
Vargo stepped in front of her and braced his hand against the doorjamb, blocking her way. "Would you just stop and . . . and talk to me for a minute?" he exclaimed, frustrated. "How are you going to convince a ninja that he can trust you when you're flying on the enemy's airship? Not to mention you already fought him once and kind of let his buddy fall off the deck without a parachute. I'd say it's a pretty fair chance that he's going to know you're not on his side."
They both swayed on their feet as the airship began its descent for landing.
"And who says I'm not on his side?" Ashlyn said evenly, without missing a beat. "I think Skye said it best - for all I know, my kin might be fighting the good fight and you might be the bad guys. I need to find out for myself."
Vargo stared down at her, searching her eyes for sincerity. "I can't believe you," he said. "You don't even know who you're fighting for. I could tell Skye what you just said and blow your cover right now."
"You could," she conceded, her voice soft.
There was a long pause, their breaths mingling in the silence. Finally Vargo dropped his arm, shaking his head as he stepped back. "Don't stay in there long. Skye might get suspicious."
She nodded, her heart in her throat at the trusting gesture, and walked through the doorway.
"Ash."
She glanced back; he stood in the doorway, hands shoved in his pockets, his expression troubled. "When I was with Lord Angelo," he said slowly, his green eyes bright in the dim light, "I shut my mouth and did my job. I knew it wasn't right, but I couldn't call it wrong - it was just a job, something I was good at and pretty much all I knew."
It wasn't really clear where he was going with this. She found her voice and said, "Are you regretting it now?"
Vargo smiled humorlessly. "I guess it doesn't really matter, does it? It's in the past. But I . . . I just wanted to say that I can draw the comparison between then and now, then, when I was fighting for Lord Angelo and now, when I'm fighting for Jackson and the free lands. And, uh, I believe in what I'm fighting for this time. You know. It just seems right," he finished lamely.
Her mouth was dry. Ashlyn looked at Vargo for a moment, seeing him for the first time as something other than a Spartan. "I'm glad," she said, and turned away before he could read the thoughts in her eyes.
The airship had settled now - she assumed that they would soon be leaving it to enter Cosmea, so she had a few minutes before anyone noticed her absence.
The ninja was slumped in the corner of his cell, his feet curled underneath him, his head against the wall. His head was bare and his shoes were gone. Without the hood he looked young, younger than Ashlyn even, and there was still a youthfulness lurking about his eyes and mouth that made her think that maybe he wasn't old enough to be fighting this war in the first place.
He looked so familiar to her. It had been a long time since she‘d seen another full-blooded Toryn.
"I welcome you, young ninja," she said in Toryn, gracefully seating herself on the floor outside his cell and setting the shuriken beside her.
His head shot up - obviously he hadn't been expecting his own language. His eyes narrowed as he recognized her from the fight earlier, but he d
id not comment, instead returning the greeting in the traditional manner, "I thank you for your welcome, elder."
Ashlyn smiled brightly, like turning on a light bulb, and continued, "I trust you bear no wounds from your ordeal?"
"I was treated for a concussion and cracked ribs," he replied, hand drifting to the bandage around his head. His dark eyes were intense upon her, trying to find some clue as to why another Toryn would be in this place, and unshackled to boot. "And you, elder?"
"These wounds will heal," she said. She held out her hands for examination, and curbed her shock at the seriousness of the scrape she had re-opened. No wonder the freaking peroxide had hurt so much!
"My respect," the younger ninja said, bowing his head.
"And to you." Ashlyn shifted her weight slightly, her smile fading. "Have you sworn oath to reveal nothing?" she asked.
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