Eclipsed (Heartstone Book 3)

by Frances Pauli

“I wonder why they helped us?”

  “Maybe because we’re the only ones who didn’t shoot at them?”

  “Good point.” They passed a pair of armed men, sentries, Corah knew. Niels would have stationary points of security as well as wandering guards. They’d drilled on it back in Spectre. Years before when she was just a kid and the whole rebellion seemed like a grand adventure and an easy way to kill her enemy.

  “Except Vashia.”

  “What?” She heard it again, felt the flutter at the top of his thoughts even though she didn’t want to. This friend of his might be married, but Mofitan’s mind reacted to her name as if she were an old love. That it bothered her, that it wormed into her skin and made her spine go all kinked up, told a different, equally horrifying tale.

  “She’s taken care of them. In Wraith. Gave them a whole block of city to dig under unmolested and passed laws making it illegal to interfere with them in any way.”

  “Wow.” Corah tried to imagine that. She’d been to Wraith once or twice when Kovath was in power. If his daughter really was different, if things had changed in Wraith, maybe there was hope for Spectre too. And maybe, she was grasping at anything to distract her from how close Mofitan was, how warm his hand on her back felt. This reaction had never been part of her plans. She didn’t have time for even thinking about herself as a woman. “I wonder what it was like growing up with Kovath.”

  “Maybe you’ll get a chance to ask her.”

  They reached the shacks and angled to the left, away from the ladders into the shaft and the long shed where the requisitions creep had ended up dead. Mofitan nodded to each armed man they passed, and they weren’t challenged once, which meant either she should recognize some of them, or they all recognized Mofitan. Most likely the latter, but then, had Niels already given orders to let him roam where he would? Why?

  None of her leader’s actions since taking Banshee added up either. She’d called for an extraction. Instead, he’d taken the whole damn mine. He’d shot Gervis on sight, when for months now, he’d been holding her back from doing the man in. She tried to piece it together into a cohesive plan, but the big hand on her back shifted, and her thoughts swirled in a different direction.

  “It looks like our hovels are still ours.” They’d already reached the sheds. So fast and now—what did they do now?

  “I won’t do what he asked me to.” She blurted it, stumbled for an explanation. “To pry into your mind. I don’t…I don’t like what it did to me, I think. Doing things like that for Gervis, pretending. I had to keep my cover, but not anymore.”

  “Niels is your real boss, though.”

  “It doesn’t feel right.” She turned her face up, caught his eyes, and felt the look they held all the way to her toes. “If you… Whatever you want to tell me. I’ll trust that.”

  “Thank you.” He smiled, and Corah looked away, examined the front door, and tried to keep breathing. She was a spy, a psychic, a rebel. She had to stop herself from adding Gervis Dern’s right arm. Was that the problem? Did she even know who she was, now that she could stop pretending?

  “My people have this big crystal,” he said. “On Shroud.”

  “I’m not familiar with gemstones.”

  “It’s a cultural thing, I suppose. And our culture has been less than public for some time.” His voice changed, took on a nervous quality that she’d never heard from him. The temptation to check his emotional status flickered through her mind. She could just surf, see the big picture.

  Be the right arm again.

  Corah shook her head, and he read the gesture all wrong.

  “It’s not all cultural. There is, in fact, a measurable reaction.”

  “I see.” Except she didn’t. Without any reference emotions, without prying into his mind, she’d gotten herself lost. All she could do was smile and notice how his forehead wrinkled when he scrunched up his nose like that.

  “Vashia and Dolfan could explain this better. Words are not really my thing.”

  “I think you’re doing fine.” Vashia and Dolfan. Maybe he was going to tell her all now, trying to do what Niels asked already. If so, she might need to steer him toward more useful information, like what the military situation was in Wraith, and how much help they could really hope to summon. She should pump for information, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to ask him about his home, about what he did before falling out of a slave ship and into her life. “Tell me about the stone.”

  “It glows.” He said it in the same tone Niels talked about revolution, like this rock was something on the horizon that would fix the whole world. “When a true match is near the Heart, the crystal lights up.”

  “A true match?” Corah saw it, the glowing stone, reflected in the eyes of the purple man standing over her. Too bright. Too much hope for the world she understood. She turned her head away from that blaze and caught Niels approaching. He came alone, which Corah knew was a gesture of peace on his part.

  “Niels.”

  Mofitan rumbled and turned around.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt.” Niels held out his hands, more capitulating. He was ready to negotiate already, but Mofitan’s stance suggested he still had other ideas. Niels caught that too, and stopped just enough out of range to believe he was safe.

  Corah knew better.

  “Are you?” Mofitan threw the question at Niels, but her leader smiled and batted it back.

  “Of course. I only had an idea and thought I might give you as much time as possible to consider it.”

  “What idea?”

  Apparently, the game here fell between them, and to be honest, today she’d let them spar without her. Today, she felt too swirly and confused to offer anything helpful anyway. Corah only hoped they sorted out whatever they battled over before it cost her either one of them.

  Also, she wished she knew what that even meant.

  When a true match is near.

  She bit her lip and focused on the negotiation as if it were a sporting event.

  “I know how you can help us out here without us having to resort to Dern’s tactics. Sorry, Corah. I should have known not to ask.”

  “Mmm hmm.” Why would he apologize to her? She’d always been perfectly willing to do what he told her. Now, she’d disobeyed. She knew and understood he didn’t take disobedience so lightly.

  “So what is it?” Mofitan crossed his arms over a chest so wide she’d have to stretch to wrap her arms around it.

  Oh no.

  “The shafts need repairing,” Niels said. He ignored the petulance, the threatening stance, and plowed forward. This was Niels determined to get his way. One thing she could clearly identify in the chaos. Corah focused on that.

  “You want him to help get them back up and running.”

  “Yes.”

  Eureka. She’d contributed something of value to the conversation. The flutter of success died in the covert look Mofitan slid in her direction. It held a question, but she couldn’t guess at it, completely missed what he wanted her to say next. Damn.

  “Why do you need the mine functional? You’re after Spectre, aren’t you? Dethrone the villain and take over the region so you can shine the light of revolution on the people here?”

  That sounded sarcastic, but also exactly like the way Niels described Overthrow’s success both years ago and moments ago.

  “That’s not such a bad goal, is it?”

  “In theory, no.”

  They stared at one another again, not toe to toe, Mofitan’s bulk made that a risky proposition. Just standing in his shadow deemphasized Niels’s stature. He had to maintain a certain aura of authority. Corah understood that, how vital it was to obedience. It didn’t make the current predicament any less amusing though. Mofitan looked like a gargoyle and Niels had begun to resemble a small bird. He’d resent the hell out of that.

  She should totally intervene.

  Instead, she observed and imagined she was keeping score. Niels had some points to make up, i
f he meant to win the match.

  “Will you help in the mines or not?”

  “Will it make a difference between us?”

  “It would be a show of good faith, I think. Any contribution to the cause is welcome.”

  “And the mines running will help your revolution?”

  “If we control any industry, we have some leverage.”

  Corah thought Niels scored a point there. Mofitan considered it, at least. He hesitated before answering, looked to her again. This time, she tried to encourage him with her eyes. Her life would get simpler, if these two got along.

  “I’d be willing to help either way.” Mofitan dropped his arms and looked out toward the craters. “But why blow them up if you meant to use them?”

  “We didn’t.”

  “What?” Corah woke up long enough to break in. “The unit here wasn’t part of the rescue?”

  “I never had a unit here, Corah.” Niels joined Mofitan in gazing at the damaged pits. Smoke still wafted from a few of the more distant ones. “The explosions may have been triggered by our weapons, or more likely, Dern had the shafts rigged to go off in a chain.”

  “And the sabotage? We saw the damage down there.” She frowned and tried to put the pieces together. “Someone has been blowing up mineshafts here for a while.”

  “Not us.” Niels’s jaw tightened. He turned to Mofitan. “I suppose it wasn’t your friends in Wraith?”

  “No. Not us either.”

  “Damn. I was afraid of that.” Niels faced her next, tilted his head to one side, and looked her over like she was a new recruit. “I’m not thrilled about unknowns in the mix. They have a way of popping up at inconvenient moments.”

  That was aimed at her, and Corah didn’t miss the disapproval in it. Niels had his master plan to worry about, and she had no delusions. He hadn’t taken Banshee Basin just to save her ass. He’d moved in on Gervis because it suited his timeline. And he’d keep moving, if and when it worked to advance his plans.

  She’d been installed for a specific purpose, and whether Dern was dead or alive, her usefulness had vanished with her refusal to play thought games for Niels. She wouldn’t spy again, wouldn’t force her way into anyone’s mind for him, and that left her with nothing to offer.

  He didn’t need her anymore. The resistance hadn’t come to save her. It had rolled over the top of her and now, it would move on without her help. She’d spent her life serving Niels’s revolution, and now that it was done with her, she had no life left and no idea at all where she belonged.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Mofitan watched the door of the shack beside his through a gap in the metal siding. He’d found the angle by accident while pacing, and then pulled his cot into the center of the room so he could sit or lie on his bed and still keep guard over her. He couldn’t hear her shuffling around any longer, and that worried him almost as much as the way she’d looked before leaving them and shutting herself into the shed.

  Something Niels had said had taken a toll on Corah, something Mofitan didn’t understand. She’d been different suddenly. She’d shifted from stiff, put-together rebel spy to something meeker and far more confusing. He blamed Niels. Though if he had to be honest, Mofitan couldn’t be sure it wasn’t his fault. One of them, maybe. Their pissing match had pissed her off at both of them. Or hurt her somehow.

  He growled and shifted back to pacing. The rebels had settled into the mine, and as far as he knew, the remaining miners all waited in their own sheds under house arrest. He couldn’t be certain he wasn’t just as much a prisoner, though no guards had been posted on either his or Corah’s shack. They still patrolled like an oiled machine, still marched by in well-armed units of three or four rebels each, but no one had tried to stop him from moving about yet.

  Maybe it was time to test his perimeter, at least as far as the next shack over.

  He mulled on it until the light changed. He alternately watched her door, paced, and cursed his own cowardice until Wraith’s tiny moon rose. Niels wanted him in the tunnels tomorrow. Crack of dawn, he’d said. Didn’t leave him any time but the present to face the woman next door.

  Coward.

  He thought it twice, imagined the word in Dolfan’s voice and inspired his feet to move at last. The air outside smelled of dead chemicals. The damps oozed from the rubble now, built a thick fog of semi-toxic gases that helped push his steps across the narrow space between their huts. Not that the shabby filters working at the back of the row of sheds could ever make up for the gaps in the metal, of course. But inside, the illusion of safety and breathable air persisted. To his instincts, walls defined safe space.

  At her door, his plan crumbled. He couldn’t rush at the woman—she’d been deflated when he saw her last, troubled by something that his fumbling advances couldn’t possibly be qualified to remedy. What did he hope to achieve here, standing in the dark at Corah’s doorway? He reconsidered, dropped his fist from the panel without knocking. She’d probably already fallen asleep.

  “Is someone there?” Her voice came from the other side of the door, directly on the other side of the door. It revved his heart up and caused him to stumble back a step.

  “Damn.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Mof, Mofitan. It’s me.” He growled at himself and jumped again when the door opened. “I just…”

  She had her hair down. Her face looked different too, splotchy and half asleep. He’d definitely woken her up, but then, she’d been waiting right on the other side of the door.

  “I wanted to check on… You seemed upset before.”

  One of her hands moved up to brush the hair away from her eyes. She shrugged and then turned her back on him and walked farther inside. She left the door open, however, and it only took him a few breaths to work up the nerve to use it. Once he entered, Mofitan could see the wadded blanket on the cot, the open bags and the clothing and sundry items strewn from one end of the shed to the other. He closed the door behind him. Either Corah had terrible housekeeping habits, or she’d been throwing things around her shack on purpose.

  “Something is wrong.”

  “Isn’t everything?”

  “I’m not sure.” He’d stumbled into very weird territory, the realm of feminine temper, and he had no reference points whatsoever to guide him. He’d have killed for a beacon or probe of some kind, an indicator light that could flash red if he needed to exit quickly. “Is it?”

  “I’m completely useless.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.” She opened her mouth to say something else, but clamped it shut and dropped onto the bed instead. Her legs tucked up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. She laid her head sideways across her knees and sighed.

  Mofitan froze and kept his mouth shut.

  “I’ve been a spy my whole life. You know that? At least, all the years that I can really remember. Before Niels and the revolution, everything is kind of a dark, unpleasant blur.”

  “Your parents.” He nodded and dared move a little, just enough to fold his legs and sit on her floor, facing the bed. “You mentioned them before.”

  “I just wanted Gervis dead so badly. I’d have done anything to make that happen, and Niels promised me it would eventually. He calmed me down enough to see that revenge didn’t do much for one soul. But for a whole movement, if we could time things just right, killing Gervis could help everyone in Spectre.”

  “So you signed up, and ended up right next to Gervis all this time.”

  “But not allowed to kill him.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You’re going to tell me his death wouldn’t bring back my parents, that it won’t fix my rotten childhood or maybe that it would damage me more than letting him live would?”

  “I make it a policy not to tell anyone how to make their own choices.”

  “Oh.” She lifted her head a little, made eye contact long enough for him to feel it, for his skin to warm a little. “Is th
at why you didn’t try to stop me?”

  “It wasn’t my place to judge.”

  “But you helped me.”

  “Yes.” He didn’t explain why, and though he willed her silently to ask, Corah didn’t dig any deeper into that. She shifted gears on him instead, and the tremble returned to her words.

  “Now that he’s dead, I don’t know what to do.”

  Mofitan could help her there. At least, he had some fairly strong suggestions, but he gathered she meant something different than he hoped. She was thinking about Niels and the revolution he’d forced on her. He knew what Niels wanted from her. What confused him, or possibly gave him hope, was why she refused to do it.

  “You have psychic ability.”

  “What good is that, when they all want me to use it like a thief?”

  “You did it before.” He’d meant to ask her what had changed, but the sharp look, the way her head snapped up, told him he’d stumbled again. “I just wondered what changed.”

  Emotions flickered over her features. He knew those feelings, anger, confusion, his territory. At least if he pissed her off good, maybe she’d go back to being fighting Corah, stiff, controlled Corah. This lost and vulnerable thing, he didn’t have a clue how to handle properly.

  “You,” she said. Right. He’d figured it would end up his fault somehow. “You changed it, Mofitan. It changed when they ordered me to push…to spy… It just felt like a violation all of a sudden. It felt wrong.”

  “Maybe because I’d willingly tell you anything you want, Corah.” He said it softly, but she reacted like he’d slapped her, recoiled and rewrapped her knees tighter. “Go ahead, ask me. You name it. I’ll tell you and then you can give him what he needs and it’s all good.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? If you have the information Niels wants, you can tell him you got it however you like.”

  “Why would you tell me, though? I didn’t think you cared for Niels or from the sound of it, for revolutions at all.”

  “Because I trust you. If you believe in this thing, in this guy, and you think he needs to know, then that’s good enough for me.”