Dragon's Honor (The Dragon Corps Series Book 1)

by Michaela Kendrick

  “For this.” His eyes were almost kind. There was pity there. “I promised Samara, and I promised Cade.”

  “Promised them what?”

  But she barely got the words out before his hand came up, a rag in his palm. The world swam before her eyes and she felt Talon picking her up. There was an exchange of words she could not quite make out with Nyx, and then she knew nothing more.

  Chapter 33

  Someone was arguing nearby, voice down in a desperate hiss, answered by a deeper voice, resounding deep like a gong. The voices blurred and shifted and overlapped, sliding through Cade’s brain until he could not tell who had said which words, who was real and who was imagined. He thought he would go mad. He couldn’t speak. The world he was seeing might be real, or might be nothing but memories. Time wasn’t making sense.

  “I think he’s waking up.”

  I think he’s waking up.

  Think—

  Waking—I—up—think—

  The voice echoed round and Cade turned his head as his stomach rebelled. Too disorienting, too much out of place, was he lying on his back or stuck to the ceiling? He could feel hands on his skin, catching bruises, and there was pain, but the pain might have come from anywhere, anytime—he could remember Colin standing over him with the nightstick, Talon yelling as the bullets flew in a mission, sprinting with Nyx through the sapphire mines on Vorekan, smugglers at their heels…

  Pain pierced his side, sharp and cold and shocking. Cade felt the bile come up and he must have been rolled over, because he did not feel the vomit in his mouth. He could feel hands…

  I think he’s waking up.

  The voice was speaking again.

  Can you—can you—waking—hear—up—can—me

  It was only when the world snapped back into place that Cade could put the words together.

  “Cade. Can you hear me?”

  He didn’t know that voice. He took stock, woozily, on his knees. His hands were planted on rock. There was blood on his skin, and his head hurt like crazy. The hands at his sides were soft, holding him up cautiously. No danger, even if he didn’t quite know who was behind him.

  “Who’re you?” His throat was dryer than he could ever remember it being. It scratched out with another heave of his stomach. A half-familiar face swam into view at his side, brown hair pulled back tightly, soot on the tip-tilted nose, and Cade frowned. The woman was holding a syringe. Was that what the pain had been?

  “Do you remember me?” she asked. There was only the faintest echo now. “You had a terrible concussion.” She gave a pointed look over at the rest of them, and someone cleared their throat, but no one responded.

  “Samara,” Cade said finally. He was beginning to put the pieces together now.

  “Yes.” Her eyes were kinder now than the last time he had seen them. “I’m sorry you woke up like that. We thought you would sleep longer. We gave you as big a dose of the concussion meds as we dared.”

  “Ah.” Now it made sense. He’d had this before—but in a pristine hospital room, white-suited nurses monitoring the machines as he slipped into unconsciousness. The anesthesia had been nearly perfect, only the tiniest time dislocation hitting him before the darkness dragged him under. Then, of course, he’d woken two days later with a clear mind, released from his drugged sleep gently.

  How long had he been out?

  “Aryn,” he said suddenly.

  “She’s safe,” Samara assured him at once. “Talon and Nyx got her out.”

  “Wasting time when they might have been bringing us weapons,” a new voice said coldly.

  Cade looked over his shoulder. The workers who had attacked him were ranged in a half-circle, their arms crossed as they looked down at him. There was fear in their eyes and no friendliness, but Samara’s cold stare kept them in check.

  “I told you,” she said with exaggerated courtesy, “that the Warlord was using her as leverage for some new weapon. Now that she’s free, he can’t make the arms trafficker give it to him.” She gave a lopsided smile as she helped Cade sit up at last. Her eyes were rueful. “I guess he underestimated the man. Or maybe Aryn.”

  Ellian. Everything came back in a rush, and Cade shook his head.

  “What is it?” Samara’s gaze sharpened.

  “He didn’t do it for her.” Cade’s mouth twisted bitterly. He could still taste vomit in his mouth, and his stomach was heaving with an awful combination of hunger and nausea. “It was a trick.”

  “Did he set it up with the Warlord?” Samara’s voice was urgent. “Were they followed back to the bunker?”

  “I told you it was a bad idea to go for her,” one of the other rebels muttered.

  “Shut up.” Samara did not even look as she tossed the order over her shoulder. “Cade, are you still with me? This is important. What does the Warlord know?”

  “They aren’t working together.” Cade held up a hand, his eyes closing as he thought through the rest of it. “The Warlord paid off one of the other bodyguards to take Aryn, so they weren’t working together.”

  “But you said it was a trick…”

  “Ellian’s trick.” He felt a wave of shame. He had seen all the signs and still had not realized what the man intended. “He’s using Aryn as…bait. He doesn’t love her. I think. He just wants the Warlord to think he does.”

  Samara sat back on her heels, her eyes distant.

  “He really did refuse to give up the weapon, then. He knew the Warlord would try to force him. He guessed it would be Aryn that would get taken…” Her brows drew together. “Then what’s he bargaining for?”

  “I don’t know.” That part still eluded him. “Price? It must be the price of what the Warlord wants. But it’s a damned cold thing to do for more money—he has money.” It didn’t add up.

  “Wait.” She stopped, her hands out. “Are you part of this, do you think? Did he put you down here to find something out, or—” She broke off when Cade laughed, his hands at the still-tender ribs.

  “No,” he said, ignoring her offered hand and pushing himself up to his feet. After you get knocked down, you have to get up on your own, or you’ll never keep going. Talon’s words. Time was still sliding at the edges of his mind. Cade shook his head and tried to remember when now was. “No,” he repeated, remembering Samara’s question. “This was revenge.”

  “For?” She looked up at him, not moving yet from the floor; weariness showed in the set of her shoulders.

  “Aryn.” Cade met her eyes.

  “Another reason he let her get taken?” she guessed. She, too, stood on her own. “Well, this is a mess.”

  “We should get to her,” Cade said quietly. I have to see her. He swallowed back the words. “They know about the rebellion, but if Ellian’s playing his own game, there may still be an opening.”

  “Talon’s launching an attack,” she told him simply. There was a warning hiss from behind her, and she narrowed her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, he’s on our side.”

  “He’s a Dragon.”

  “Which means, concussion or no concussion, that we’d all be dead if he wanted us dead.” Her gaze passed over them. “That is the last time I will hear you all say that. Do you understand?”

  There were mutters, and Cade raised an eyebrow at her.

  “You didn’t like me much at first, either.”

  “We need you,” she said frankly. “And I need them to understand that. You’ve seen wars. What’s the Warlord going to do next?”

  Something had been tugging at the back of Cade’s mind, and it snapped into place now.

  “They can’t run that mission.”

  “What?” She had been gathering weapons; now she looked back at him, brow furrowed.

  “You have to call it off.” Cade was moving, looking for weapons and armor that weren’t there. “How the fuck didn’t I see—“

  “Slow down.” She put a hand on his arm.

  “No time,” he snapped back. At her blank face, he suppressed a
wave of frustration and clenched his hands. Talon would have understood. Nyx would have understood. But these people here… He took a breath to steady himself. “Ellian is moving on the Warlord.”

  “What?”

  “He knew the Warlord would take Aryn,” Cade said brutally. “It gave him an excuse to stay. The Warlord thought he had a bargaining chip. He wanted something Ellian wouldn’t give, and no one in their right mind would come to the Warlord’s palace if he meant to deny the man something. Ellian. Shouldn’t. Be there. Which means there’s something at stake beyond what the Warlord is doing. And Talon is still planning without that in play. They need to call off the mission. Right now.”

  He could not put his finger on what Ellian’s plan was. He would not have been able to name a mechanism. He could not see the jaws of the trap swinging shut. All he could see was chaos—not the carefully-orchestrated chaos of a Dragon op, but the true chaos that could take good soldiers as well as bad, civilians as well as combatants. When she didn’t move, he shook with anger—anger that wasn’t hers to fix, but that he could barely suppress.

  “We need to call it off.” The words were clipped.

  “We can’t.” Her face was white. “The satellite uplink is off until morning, the Warlord’s scanning this area. He knows we’ve been planning at night, we can’t—”

  “How far are they?”

  “Fifteen kilometers.” She shook her head at him. “The roads are watched.”

  “Then give me another way,” he snapped. “If not satellites, then comm links, radios, smoke signals if we need. Give me something.”

  Bless her, she really thought about it instead of shutting down, as many might.

  “There’s a radio tower at the edge of the district,” she said slowly. “If we can get there, we can use it.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “It’s…not that simple.”

  “It never is,” Cade said savagely. His coveralls had been pushed down over his arms while he slept so his wounds could be treated, and he shrugged the cloth up over his shoulders, wincing at the movement. “Let’s go.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “Is this your only gun?” Cade pointed at the rifle she carried slung over her shoulder.

  “Yes.”

  “And you know how to get in contact with them once you reach the radio tower?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give me the gun.” Cade plucked it from her hands and swung it around to the side wall, tilting his head to peer through the sights. “It’s calibrated?”

  “Yes. It’s one of the new ones.”

  “All right.” Cade dropped it down and nodded to her. “Stick to the shadows, and make for the tower. I’ll be nearby. If you hear gunfire and no command, start running. Don’t look back. Don’t try to save me. Do you have that?”

  She nodded tightly.

  “Then let’s go.”

  The tunnel to the surface was twisty, tiny, built for someone much smaller than the average Dragon. Cade hauled himself upwards, muffling his grunts of pain as well as he could, waiting under the surface as Samara poked her head out to look around. With a hiss, she urged him up after her and pulled him into the shadows. In the distance, a green light blinked on and off from a tower near the wall.

  “Got it.” Cade nodded down at her, then pushed her into the deeper shadow of an alcove as a patrol materialized ahead. “Wait here.”

  He padded quietly forward, hugging the wall. He was close before they saw him—much too close—and they were slow after years of a weak rebellion. Their weapons weren’t drawn, and they groped for the guns sluggishly, terror slowing their reactions as he launched himself out of the darkness.

  It was done quickly, quietly, one of them crushed against the wall, another stabbed with his own knife. Cade turned to the last one, knowing he had to keep his momentum, feeling the familiar creep of guilt. These guards were young, too young to die on some backwater planet… The third one was already down, Samara wrenching a knife out of his neck. She looked up at Cade impassively as she wiped the knife on her pants and stood.

  “You were supposed to stay put.”

  “I’m not helpless,” she said simply. “Either one of us could die here. There’ll be more patrols. If you get to the tower first—the frequency is three megahertz.”

  “Thank you.” Cade nodded to her to help him drag the bodies into the shadows.

  They were lifting the third body when they saw it: the sparkle of a life monitor from under his shirt, flashing red as it registered the man’s missing vital signs. The comms in their ears were buzzing with activity, and the next moment, the wail of a siren went up behind them.

  “Run,” Cade whispered harshly. He grabbed Samara’s hand and they burst into motion, sprinting down the broad avenue as the floodlights along the street came on.

  Chapter 34

  Talon leaned out of the way for Aryn to peer between the rocks with the tiny set of military binoculars. She gripped the rocks for balance, thrown off balance as the scope of the eyepieces zoomed and focused.

  “What do you see?” Nyx’s voice was low. She crouched behind Aryn, presumably to tackle her and keep her from running away.

  The two Dragons had been watching Aryn like a hawk for hours. When she woke up in the bunker, it was to find Talon and Nyx nearby, conveniently placed between her and the door. If she was Cade, Aryn reflected wryly, she might have been able to get away from them—but she had neither the speed nor the combat skills to get past one Dragon, much less two. They’d been emphatic about tying her up before they left to scout, until she pointed out that she knew the contents of each nondescript building better than they did. Even now, they seemed half-sure she was about to go running down the mountain to find Cade.

  They didn’t need to worry. Aryn had long since given up on that endeavor, beginning with the part where Talon refused to tell her just which district Cade was in. Aryn had a new plan now: find Samara and ask her help in locating Cade. She’d left a message in the bunker in case Samara came back while they were gone; now, she would have to wait.

  “The building with the four raised corners is just for processing documents,” Aryn told them.

  “It’s huge,” Talon protested.

  “There are a lot of documents.” Aryn laughed, a bit bitterly. Documents were part of the lifeblood of Ymir. Everyone needed papers to go anywhere or do anything, and checkpoints along the streets ensured that workers went only where they should. Accordingly, only those absolutely loyal to the Warlord worked in the document offices.

  “Okay, what’s the one to the right of it?” Talon was marking things on a roughly sketched map.

  “That’s one of the armories. It…wait a second.” Aryn tilted her head to the side and wiggled forward.

  “What?”

  “There’s something…” She was getting close to the edge and wiggled one of her legs. “Hold me up.” Someone’s hands grasped at her feet and she crawled forward until her torso hung out in the open.

  Beyond the borders of Io, where the walls made an easy line to show who was where they shouldn’t be, there was a strange sense of movement to the darkness. It was something Aryn could not quite seem to see, no matter how sure she was that something was there. She frowned and dialed in the scope, trying to focus, clear her head. Why couldn’t she make sense of it?

  “What is it?” Talon asked softly.

  “It’s like the…darkness is alive.” Aryn wiggled her way back and stripped off the binoculars, holding them out. “It’s like when something’s filled with maggots and they’re all writhing around, only I can’t actually see anything when I look.”

  “Hold my feet.” Nyx plucked the binoculars out of Aryn’s grip and eased herself down off the ledge. She held herself straight as she dialed the scope, and then began to scan, looking past Io to Persi, and over on the other side, toward Hanin. She nodded decisively as she moved back in. “ShadowBlack,” she said to Talon. “There’s infantry arrayed along
this side of the habitable zone, at least.”

  “Infantry?” Talon looked over at her, eyes narrowing.

  “What?” Aryn asked.

  “We thought the Warlord was going to be using chemical attacks,” Nyx explained. She leaned over the map, frowning as she marked the locations. “Infantry movements, though…”

  “Are ideal,” Talon said bluntly.

  “They are?” Aryn craned to see the numbers Nyx was writing down. “There are thousands of them.”

  “That’s thousands less near the palace. The Warlord’s troops that are already here are a contract army. If we can take him out, we can pay them to leave. They have no loyalty to him. If we can strike before they start moving, we’ll end this before it even starts.”

  Aryn’s breath caught. He couldn’t be serious. It couldn’t end so easily, not after all this time. But Talon was giving a sharp, feral grin.

  “He’s really going senile, then.”

  “Has to be,” Nyx agreed.

  “How do you know that?” Aryn looked between them. “There are so many of them…”

  “Infantry isn’t as useful now as it used to be,” Nyx explained. “Gigantic troop movements, lining up thousands on one side and another few thousand on the other and running them into each other? It worked when everyone was still riding horses, but it’s not all that effective now. Technology makes it easy to take out an array that big, and while we could, they’ll be hamstrung as soon as they move into each of the districts. He means to go door to door, breaking in and taking all of the resistance leaders out.”

  “And he’ll be able to,” Aryn hissed back. “Don’t you see? There’s going to be so many of them in the streets that the resistance won’t be able to run.”

  “Because he still views the resistance movement as infantry, too,” Talon reminded her. “But most of the resistance is already holed up in the bunkers. If they can get outside the walls, they’ll be able to get to the palace easily—and from the number of people here, it’s clear enough that the palace is almost deserted. The Warlord will have no backup.”

  “Why would he do something like that?” Aryn shook her head.