As Mather pointed to the flickering lights across the valley, Jon laid a hand on Jàden’s shoulder. “To the horses, quick.”
Jon saddled his black and tied everything down, keeping one eye on the ridge and one ear to the woods for any change in sound patterns. He would rather have one more night of peace, even if it meant keeping the secret of their bond close to his heart, but he couldn’t afford to be caught by the Rakir. He’d be in chains, but Jàden’s fate would be a lot worse.
“More soldiers?” She pressed close to a tree, searching the sky as if expecting something to be there.
He lifted Jàden onto his horse. “Likely scouts. Still haven’t seen the bulk of the army.”
Clouds gathered in the east beyond the high peaks.
“If we can get ahead of the storm, the snow will cover our tracks.” The black tattoo across Mather’s forehead crinkled, telling Jon his best friend’s thoughts were on Sharie, his wife. Mather had bonded her in secret and kept her safe in a small home deep in the Flower District so the Rakir would never discover their connection.
Jon always knew his friend had a lover, but he’d never known the full truth until he met Sharie, her stomach swollen with Mather’s child. Forced to leave her behind when they’d deserted their posts, Mather’s gaze often held a deep longing to return to his family.
A sentiment Jon understood all too well.
Mather held the same stare now, his gaze piercing the hilly landscape to a memory of the past. Probably because he’d never made peace with his decision to leave Sharie.
“You don’t have to follow, brother.” Jon laid a hand on Mather’s shoulder. “Go back for your wife and head north. Sharie will want to know you’re alive, and Rakir won’t follow you into wolf country.”
They’d had this conversation dozens of times. Mather clenched his jaw. “I made you a promise, Captain. What kind of man would I be if I didn’t honor it? Besides, I need to say goodbye to the others first.”
Jon considered ordering him to turn back, even if he preferred Mather at his side, but once Mather made up his mind, no man could change it. A trait they often shared. “If we push the horses, we can find the others in a few days and get you on your way.”
After clearing away all signs of their presence from the small campsite, they trotted along narrow roads and through snow-bound valleys, their tracks a beacon to any Rakir. He and Mather stayed sharp, always searching the terrain for anything out of the ordinary while Jàden nestled at his back.
He relished her heat and the softness of her breath under his skin. Maybe she wasn’t really his to have, but Jon wasn’t going to hand her back to some asshole who’d left her to suffer. Jàden had him as a husband now, at least according to northern law, and Jon refused to take the duty lightly.
Even if she didn’t hail from the north.
The next day broke with another storm, snowfall so thick it practically covered their trail as they rode.
Jon scanned both directions at a crossing. Narrow ruts under a thin layer of powder showed the wider road still in use. Mountain folk with smaller, surefooted horses, but no northern mounts like he and Mather rode. “Let’s keep pushing. Maybe another day.”
Exhaustion from the rough terrain kept the stallions’ heads hanging low, but they trudged on with their ears forward, as if they sensed the rest of their brother-herd nearby.
Jàden eased her grip on his waist and pointed to a jagged rock formation. “There’s something buried there.”
As she squinted toward the cliffs further along the road, snow blanketed the land under dark clouds, a weathered sign pointing the way ahead.
“There should be a village close by.” Yet he followed her finger to smooth, dark metal painted with a white zankata. He glanced at Mather as if to ask if he recognized the structure, but he shook his head.
Jon didn’t have any clue either, but something about the sharp lines buried beneath rock set him on edge. He lit a cigarette, the bitter shadeleaf smoke filling his lungs. But as he doused the glow on his lighter, the same sharp lines of the small block were a striking similarity as those from the cliff.
“What is that?” Surely it couldn’t be a lighter hundreds of spans tall.
“It’s a ship,” Jàden whispered. “And that’s my zankata.”
CHAPTER 9
Nadrér
Jàden slid off the horse and bolted across the road into a cluster of sparse trees. Kale promised the bird’s symbol would guarantee her safety, so maybe the ship still had power like her hypersleep pod. She clung to the idea as snow fell silent in the stormy gloom.
“Wait, Jàden!”
Ignoring Jon, she raced through snowy pines toward a thick line of brush. The cliff face on one side partially covered the ship’s tail fin, likely a buildup of dirt and storms millennia after it crashed. She wanted to find the airlock.
Foliage grew around the ship, stunted trees brushing their canopy on the underside of the bridge. She crawled beneath a thick bush to a tear in the hull and climbed a rusted metal ladder, ivy clinging to the steel rails.
Jàden crawled onto the platform, a long corridor leading deeper inside the ship. The pain in her shoulder flared, but it wasn’t enough to stifle the guilt creeping along her spine as Jon climbed up beside her.
“You can’t go running off like that.” He unsheathed his daggers and twisted the blades against the flat of his arm. Fatigue pulled at the tired lines around his eyes. Jon hadn’t slept for almost a full day. “Not with Rakir nearby.”
“The zankata symbol is Kale. He’s trying to tell me something.”
She squeezed his arm, and a knot tightened her stomach. Every day she rode with her arms around his waist, or sometimes she’d guide the horse while he held her against his chest. She didn’t want to admit it, but she liked the way Jon held her and the roughness of his voice when he whispered in her ear.
While hard to see most of his features under the bushy beard and shaggy hair, Jon proved to be an odd mix of gentle warmth with a harsh edge to his spirit, as if even the trees would move out of his way to avoid a fight on his moodier days.
Jàden pulled Jon’s firemark from her pocket and blew the glass orb until it glowed. As an Enforcer, Kale would understand her desperate need for survival. At least she kept telling herself this each time her body ached to slide under Jon’s blanket and curl up in his arms.
The comfort of another might help her push back the grief for a few hours of reprieve, but Kale still had her heart.
“All right, Kale,” she said. “Show me where you are.”
Jàden wasn’t naïve enough to believe she’d find him amid the starship wreckage, but if any of the electronics still worked, she might be able to connect with Hàlon’s computers.
Wires hung like vines across the shield panels as she held up the firemark and stepped inside a narrow tunnel packed with dirt. Faint illumination glowed behind the rock—a door’s light pad.
Grabbing a large stone, she slammed it against the dirt, chipping at the packed granules as they fell from the glowing plexiglass.
Jàden opened the hole enough to fit her hand and pressed her palm against the door. The glow shifted from white to blue, and machinery whirred behind the dirt wall.
The door slid open. As she gripped the stone to make a bigger hole, Jon laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Let me try.”
He slammed his shoulder into the rock and stumbled through the opening, dirt raining across the doorway.
“Fuck me.”
The awe in his voice was unmistakable as Jàden stepped into a wide corridor. Rock gave way to smooth metal. She traced her fingers across the familiar nelané shield material, a metal lighter than titanium and stronger than steel. Guild engineers forged a degree of flexibility into the mined ore to withstand both deep seas and outer space, with the ability to shift from pure obsidian to transparent glass.
Hàlon’s citizens used nelané in everyt
hing from starship hulls to machine parts to computer glass and weapons manufacturing. It was the root of all their technology, powered by the biotheric microorganisms glowing inside her firemark.
The corridor stretched in both directions, faint light glowing through the gray metal seams from the cargo bay to the bridge.
“What is this place?” Mather stepped into the hall behind her, an arrow held loose against his bow string. “I don’t like it.”
Jàden brushed her fingers over a rougher patch of metal where an emblem had been removed, the four petals of the bloodflower unmistakable. But someone chipped off the seal and painted a zankata in its place.
“It’s a nardrér starship.” Easy to spot by the tail fin and larger than Kale’s Raith fighter, the nardrér could latch onto an enemy cruiser and splice a temporary airlock onto the hull in under three minutes. They were known to be flown by soldiers to enter an enemy vessel or by deep-space salvagers.
Voices laughed in the distance.
Both Mather and Jon raised their weapons, shielding her at their backs.
“Hello?” Jàden stepped between them and followed the sound deeper into the ship.
“Watch me run, Daddy. I’m fast like…”
The voice drowned under a rush in her ears. Why would a nardrér be crashed? Hàlon hadn’t encountered an enemy ship once during her twenty-three years, and a training simulation gone bad would have been salvaged. The thought only added to Jàden’s growing list of questions about why she’d been in hypersleep for nearly four millennia.
A little girl spoke from deeper inside the ship. “I’m strong, Daddy, like Jàden.”
Her heart skipped a beat.
The voice came from beyond the far door. She pressed her palm against the light pad for the bridge, frosted plexiglass shifting from white to blue.
The door swished open. Tree branches slapped her cheeks as she coughed on a burst of snow.
Jàden shoved aside the barbed foliage, a zankata crowing from the other side of the door. It spread its wings and flew off as she wiped the excess dirt from beneath her nose.
“Wait.” Jon tried to hold her back.
But she eased through the door, alert to every sound of children’s laughter beyond the thick foliage. They giggled again, and the same words repeated as if caught in a loop. “I’m strong, Daddy, like Jàden.”
“Hello? Anyone there?” Jàden said.
Snow fell beyond the branches onto three seats facing a wide console. Glass cracked across the transparent shield panel, fracturing a video of children racing through the screen.
“I’m strong, Daddy, like Jàden.” The unfamiliar little girl grabbed a pile of dirt in two hands, gripping it tight as a seedling sprouted between her fingers until it exploded into a burst of tiny leaves.
“Strong like Jàden,” Jàden muttered, a woozy light-headedness gripping her.
The girl grew a seed from the dirt in her hands, something Jàden had never done in her life. Her power didn’t fuel life. It destroyed.
As if on cue, the moon’s heartbeat whispered alongside hers, a bond of connection that Jàden ultimately feared. If her power grew too strong, she could lose control and tear all of Sandaris apart.
Her breath came fast now as panic gripped her.
Jàden grabbed the nearest chair to steady herself. The seat twisted, and bones clattered—a decayed skeleton in gray fatigues. Hollow eye sockets met her gaze, and she stumbled back, knocking into Jon.
“Who are these people?” Jon’s deep voice filled the chamber as he traced his fingers over the uniform’s shoulder patch.
No infinite circle wrapping the drain and ladder logo. This person wasn’t a guildsman but from general maintenance, fourth-class citizens banished from taking Guild exams because of their crimes.
Most had almost no credits but those they earned working on Hàlon’s sewers, garbage maintenance and a thousand other jobs.
When the little girl spoke again, Jàden eased the chair back around so the skeleton could watch the screen.
Sorrow was etched into Jon’s deep brown eyes. “Is this him?”
If only it were that easy. Jàden stifled the rising grief as she recalled those final seconds before the explosion.
“I love you, baby.” An orange glow flickered across Kale’s features, flames rising higher in the cockpit. “When you wake up, go back to the beginning.”
She winced at the memory of his final transmission.
“It’s not him.” She clutched Jon’s shirt and leaned against him, aching for his warmth and the comfort it offered. Jàden imagined the skeleton was once a young mother who couldn’t go home and wanted to spend her dying minutes with her children. “This woman was probably still alive after the ship crashed, maybe bleeding internally.”
“I’m strong, Daddy, like Jàden.” The little girl’s voice looped again.
A life born after her disappearance. The red numbers on the hypersleep pods made more sense with each passing day. While Jàden slept, Hàlon lived, but where were they all now?
Stepping toward the console, she eased into an empty chair. “This pilot might be dead, but someone has to be alive.”
“What are you doing?” Jon hovered over her shoulder as she scanned the different buttons.
“Calling home.” Jàden pressed the HUD’s heads up display button, the screen lights jumping out in a three-dimensional display.
“Holy shit, what is that?” Jon leapt backwards. He eased toward the lights, his fingers passing through the holographic display. “Too dangerous to use magic. Someone might—”
“This isn’t magic.” Jàden punched several keys, trying to familiarize herself once more with the console before she tugged a headset over her ear. She pressed the button to call directly to the nardrér’s command unit, glancing over her shoulder. “Where’s Mather?”
“Went to look around.” Jon’s jaw was tight.
She pressed the headset against her ear. It was standard procedure for Hàlon to monitor all distress calls, no matter where they came from. Jàden punched in the pilot emergency distress button.
Jon leaned against the back of her chair. “Are you sure about this?”
Her hand froze on the mouthpiece. As far as she knew, Enforcers still had a standing order to kill her. Maybe she should shut down the signal. A dozen soldiers might recognize her face and fly in to bomb the area to get rid of her for good. Or they would want to take her into custody.
And put me in another cage. “No, I’m not.”
A voice blared from the headset, an AI monitor with an almost human voice. “Nardrér 3625-7C, what is your status?”
No going back now. Jàden turned toward the console as the HUD typed across the air, scan data from the ship showing more errors than working systems.
“Crashed,” she whispered into the headset. “On the surface of Sandaris. The pilot is dead.”
“Transferring to operator 573-D.” The scan data disappeared and pulled up an image of an empty chair inside a tower control room, one of thousands scattered across the giant starship. Overhead lights and most of the computers were on, the narrow-focus camera showing more than a dozen unoccupied stations.
“Where is everyone?” Her stomach twisted into a tight knot. Nothing moved, not even the data on the screens, as if the room had been cleared and everything frozen. “Is anyone there? Please. I need to find Sergeant Jason Kale.”
Dead air filled her headset. She covered her ears, hoping to catch a door closing off camera or any small sound, but absolute silence bled through the speakers.
“Hello, this is”—she hesitated—“the Bioengineering Guild. I need your help.” Operator rooms were never left unattended. “Pan the camera. AI. Operator. Anyone.”
Finally it pulled back, widening the focus to more than fifty empty stations and a silent docking bay beyond the far glass.
“We need to leave this place.” Jon yanked the headset off a
nd pulled her out of the chair.
He didn’t seem like the type of man who spooked easily, but one look at the hard set of his features said he was clearly rattled. “That is one creepy ass place, Jàden.”
“It’s where Enforcers monitor the ships coming in and out of a docking bay. Maybe they all went to lunch.”
Guild command would never allow an operator room to have fewer than ten people on duty. As Jon guided her out the door, she gripped the edge and glanced toward the HUD, the little girl’s voice still chatting on the looping video.
“I’m strong, Daddy, like Jàden.”
Jàden clutched the door frame to hold on a little longer in case someone walked across the screen. Hàlon housed over a million occupants. Someone should be there.
Jon slid his arm around her waist and leaned next to her ear. “Rakir are close. We protect the living. Then we can chase the dead.”
CHAPTER 10
The Forbidden Mountains
Captain Éli Hareth often heard that revenge was a confession of pain. But his late brother Sebastian told him once that revenge was a liberation of anguish, if a man could target his enemy well.
As the morning storm blew off the sea into the foothills, Éli trudged across the muddy camp, the familiar tingle of the Dark Flame brushing his senses. Smooth as silk when it slid across his thoughts, the thrumming power called to him like a beautiful mistress he’d been forbidden to touch.
He clenched his fist to keep it contained, hating that he could wield his sword without mercy, but even a meager amount of magic would get him executed. Éli refused to die, at least until Jon Ayers suffered for what he’d done.
“How long do we have?” Éli said.
Granger, his second in command and most trusted ally, fell into step beside him. “Message received an hour ago. They’re three days out.”
Flurries blew with an icy wind as they walked the line of picketed horses. The animals hated to be tied up, and most could easily escape their ropes, which was why they’d had to use locking nuts to keep them from scattering.
Granger grabbed Éli’s arm, stopping him in his tracks. Then Granger lowered his voice. “Ayers ain’t ridin’ with his men though. Scouts say he’s got some woman with him.”
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