Shadow Run

by Michael Miller

  Thelarus stared at Basra, not with venom, but with calculation, the way a duelist might assess their opponent. “It’s a quality bluff, but you know as well as I do any attempt to devalue our product on that scale will look like blatant manipulation. No one will truly believe we don’t have confidence in our own product. Besides, you could have made these claims without crashing your ship into my citadel and getting yourselves in a dire predicament. I smell desperation.”

  Basra nodded agreeably. “That’s true, on both counts. Unless, of course, it’s not a bluff, since the sell orders have all come from within your royal citadel within the past hour.” He flicked a thumb, and a small communicator, designed to jack into a larger system, flew through the air. Father instinctively caught it. “Dracorte family members attempt to secretly unload stock, hackers uncover their fingerprints all over the sales. I can see the headlines now. It will be the financial scandal of the century…and the ruin of your family.”

  Silence filled the hangar, broken only by the steady dripping of blood from one of my hands to the floor. Everyone stood in a stillness that felt jarring and eerie compared to the recent havoc.

  It was easy to imagine that Basra was simply concocting a fantastic tale. I knew he was gifted; I knew that only the best came out of the financial corporation he’d been indentured to. How he’d ended up with Qole was a baffling mystery. But that didn’t begin to explain why Father was now taking him seriously. Basra had said he could hit my family where it hurt most, and that he’d been doing some shopping during our journey to Luvos…but that was like comparing pole fishing to a Shadow run if this was what he’d been up to.

  Even if Basra was somehow telling the truth, I still couldn’t imagine Father agreeing. To allow the crew of the Kaitan to simply leave after everything that had happened was unthinkable.

  Except…there was something Father valued more than his pride.

  “Are you thinking of what is best for the family right now, or your ego?” I asked softly.

  Thelarus Dracorte took a deep breath. In the dimming daylight, I saw some of the rage leave his face. He didn’t look at me but kept his gaze fixed on Basra.

  “Leave,” he said curtly. He finally glanced at me. “You too. Get out.” Without another word, he turned and strode back toward his troops.

  In numb shock, I stared after Father as he left. He never looked back. Not once.

  Closing my eyes was like shutting out the entire world and waking up in a different place. I could no longer hear Basra, Telu, or Eton, who’d all been speaking to me—or shouting at me, in Eton’s case. I couldn’t feel my body in the darkness, or see anything other than distant specks of light. Even though I seemed to be floating, I knew I was in a precarious place, perched on an edge, about to fall.

  Had I finally gone mad? Was I dead? Or just on the brink of one of those things?

  The lights moved closer, tentatively. With them, I felt a choice coming on. Did I push them away, try to maintain control of myself with an unbendable grip, and force this out of my life? Or did I seize those sparks, unleash the power, and try to control it?

  And yet reaching toward either option felt like leaning out over that drop. There was only the illusion of choice. Both paths would bring me to the same edge:

  Insanity. Death. But maybe there was a third option.

  Peace. The word moved through me like a whisper, a trickle, an ocean. Peace, not oblivion. Oblivion was an end. A fall. Peace was a path. Maybe another path I could take.

  Peace. Open.

  The thoughts occurred to me as the lights gathered around me again. They outlined my toes, my fingers, my feet, my hands. I felt my body coming back to me. This time, I didn’t shy away, or lash out, both of which were my first impulses—the two paths I’d been following my entire life.

  Embrace.

  Yes, I thought. That.

  My arms reached out, but not to shove or to seize. I opened them and enfolded the light.

  The flash was blinding, but not jagged and jarring. It was a warm flood, and I realized my eyes had opened. I also realized I was holding something a lot more solid than the imaginary, insubstantial lights. Someone.

  I blinked and pulled away to find bright, silver-gray eyes staring back at me. We were on our feet, our faces a finger-width apart. He must have dragged me up, and I’d apparently thrown my arms around him.

  “You’re awake,” Nev said. He cleared his throat. “We need to go.”

  The rest of the world came crashing back down around me with far less gentleness. The hangar looked like the bottom of a dark pit into which we’d all fallen. Bodies were strewn everywhere, melted gouges and blast holes were splattered with blood, and the dying daylight dripped more red from the mangled bones of the roof and the shattered ceiling of the Atrium above.

  We were no longer surrounded. At the far end of the hangar, several guards remained, holding rifles and swords at the ready. But they weren’t coming after us. Nev’s own blades were sheathed on his back, and the rest of the crew had already made it up the ramp into the Kaitan. Basra and Telu were carrying Arjan between them on a blanket, making their way up the stairs from the hold, toward the bridge. The makeshift medi-kit was still looped over Basra’s shoulder, though the rifle wasn’t. Eton followed, dragging himself slowly up after them, his leg stained red even through the fresh bandages. He clearly needed to be stitched, and was probably making his way to the bridge’s medi-kit behind the others. He only had one pistol in his hand, which, for him, barely counted as being armed.

  “But…how?” I said, too stunned to let go of Nev. I didn’t understand why we weren’t being shot at, or at the very least stopped.

  “Basra. He convinced my father to let us leave.”

  “How?” I repeated.

  “I’ll explain later. Like I said, we need to go.”

  He reached up to take one of my hands, repositioning it around his shoulder to support me. But we took only three steps toward the ship before I realized I could walk, and that Nev was the one who needed help. I looped his arm around my shoulder to support him. His jacket was tattered and wet. He wasn’t soaked with quite as much blood as Eton, so I hoped that meant none of his cuts were serious. We had too many injuries to deal with already.

  But it wasn’t only a practical concern. Imagining him seriously hurt made my breathing quicken, my chest constrict. It was like thinking of Arjan being as injured as he was—someone who mattered so much he felt like a piece of myself.

  Arjan…

  I couldn’t think about my brother yet. I had to focus on getting us out of here, so I could think about him later.

  As Nev and I hit the ramp and started stumbling our way up, it finally caught up to me, what he’d said: We. We need to go.

  “You…,” I said, both my feet and my words stuttering once we reached the top of the ramp and stepped into the hold. “You’re coming with us?”

  Nev gave me a crooked smile, one that looked nearly broken, but not quite. “This is where I belong now…if you’ll have me.”

  As if to punctuate the impossible thing he’d just said, he hit the button to raise the hatch. It ground closed behind us, sounding worse for wear, but at least it sealed with a hiss. He slipped away from me, managing to stand on his own, even if he looked unstable. Purpose had come into his eyes, his face, and his body responded to it, if slowly. He moved for the stairs to the bridge.

  “I’ll check the ship’s systems to make sure we’re airtight, and I think between the solar sail and diverting power to the one thruster—the one that’s nearly offline, but not quite—you can lift us…”

  He glanced back at me and stopped, trailing off. I hadn’t moved. Something was bright and warm in my chest, so bright it was almost hot, stinging my eyes.

  “Sorry,” he said, misreading my face. Or maybe he just didn’t understand my expression, whatever it was. “I don’t mean to usurp your authority…Captain. If you have another idea—”

  I shook my head. �
�No, that’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  “Then…” He looked unsure. Afraid, almost. “What’s wrong? Is it all right that I’m here? I can—”

  I shook my head again. Swallowing, I tried to find my voice. “I’m glad you’re here. And please…call me Qole.”

  Relief washed over his face, dragging a smile with it. He looked lost and then found. The expression didn’t stick around; it was there and gone before he nodded. “Qole…I’m going to check our status and make sure you’re ready for takeoff.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  He bounded up the stairs, tapping into some hidden reserve of energy that I certainly didn’t have. Once he’d gone, I dragged my hands over my face, feeling wetness on my palms. I ran them back through my hair, squeezing my eyes closed, trying to banish the rest of my tears. I had to captain, to pilot a ship that would probably try to fall out of the sky at the first available opportunity, and I couldn’t very well do that while crying.

  Other than tears and tiredness, though, I was okay, for the moment. I seemed to have struck some sort of deal with the power that possessed me, even if it was all in my own head. For now, it seemed to be holding. I wasn’t insane, or dead.

  At least, not yet. I didn’t know how long that would last.

  The bridge was in organized chaos when I arrived. Arjan lay on a makeshift bed of blankets on the bench, Basra bustling efficiently over him, surrounded by infopads. He’d no doubt chosen the bridge to commandeer any help he might need, but I wasn’t sure what we could do that they couldn’t.

  I spotted at least three different faces video-comming with Basra at the same time. They looked like a variety of doctors from different systems, and I couldn’t imagine how much these comms had to be costing. Basra was following their instructions to the letter, cleaning, bandaging, jabbing injector tubes into Arjan’s neck, only speaking to ask questions or for clarification. He was deferential, and I had a hard time reconciling this image of him, nursing my brother, with the person he’d been in the lab…and evidently in the hangar, afterward, when he’d faced down Thelarus Dracorte.

  Eton had less attention, sitting on the floor next to an open medi-kit, but he was managing. Telu was helping him stitch the glaring, weeping slit in his leg when she wasn’t fetching or holding something for Basra. Instead of taking any of the injector tubes meant for Arjan, Eton clutched an open bottle of white liquor in one hand, which he poured in equally liberal amounts over his wound and down his throat. Nev was both checking the ship’s systems and occasionally calling advice to Telu over his shoulder. He’d clearly been trained to field-dress battle wounds.

  No one snapped to attention when I walked in, and I was glad. They were already doing what needed to be done. In spite of how battered we all were, we were still a good team.

  I slipped into my chair and checked the feeds. It took only a few pieces of information for me to know for sure that the Kaitan could fly.

  “I’m getting us out of here,” I said, and took up the controls.

  We had an escort, of course, consisting of the Royal Dracorte Air Guard and several of their destroyers. But like the guards in the hangar, they didn’t touch us. They only watched and waited. They were patient, at least, because we were slow. The Kaitan struggled to gain every bit of altitude, climbing as if crawling up a cliff face, with only one partially working thruster and a solar sail to power her. But she rose.

  The city of Dracorva was still grand, if injured, as it fell away beneath us. The only drones in evidence were those that had been blasted into blackened craters of wreckage. Several towers were blackened as well, others broken. Smoke billowed in thick streams from a few places still burning.

  Nev didn’t look at it, either down through the viewport or on any of the feeds. Maybe he couldn’t. He focused on my face instead, leaning against the dash and filling me in on what had happened in the hangar. He murmured the details as we made our way up through Luvos’s atmosphere, quietly so as not to disturb Arjan. My brother was no longer groaning. Basra had given him something that had rendered him unconscious but continued working over him. Eton hissed occasionally as Telu finished his stitches and then tightly wrapped his thigh with a thick compress.

  Once she finished with him, she moved over to Nev, interrupting him only long enough to command him to take off his jacket. He smiled, bemused…and no doubt loopy from blood loss, I realized, when the thing hit the floor with a wet smack. Telu immediately set to work cleaning and bandaging the cuts lacing his arms like gory latticework, working quickly to stop the bleeding.

  He shrugged with red arms at both Telu’s and my alarmed expressions. “These would have been deeper, or would have cost me limbs and life, if my father’s guards hadn’t been holding back.” His tone grew grimmer as he finished the story, explaining what had happened between him and his father, and then Basra.

  According to Nev, Basra—or Hersius Kartolus the Thirteenth, apparently—would call off his full-scale financial assault of Dracorte Industries before we engaged the Belarius Drive…but only the second before. Otherwise, if he did it any sooner, I had no doubt our alarm systems would blare once again, alerting us to a weapons lock. Based on the state of Nev’s arms under his new bandages, I suspected they would try to blow us to dust even with the king’s heir on board.

  My suspicions were confirmed when a hard voice cut over the inter-ship—and planetwide—comms.

  “Attention, lawful citizens under the stewardship of the Dracorte royal family. Your king, Thelarus Axandar Rubion Marsius Dracorte, will now be making an official announcement of grave importance.”

  If that voice had been hard, it was nothing to the one that came next. It didn’t sound anything like the man I had met in that ornate sitting room. Thelarus had acted like a king then, but I could still imagine him as Nev’s father. There was nothing to balance the king in his voice, now. Nothing of a father.

  “I hereby announce the formal disavowal and disinheritance of Nevarian Dracorte. He is my son, my heir, and your prince no longer, and may make no further claim to the other names of his ancestry. His own actions brought this ruin upon him, first and foremost, but it is by my hand finished.”

  We all froze, looking at Nev in shock. He blinked, as if the news hadn’t hit him yet.

  Thelarus’s voice fell like another powerful blow. “I hereby banish him from the planet Luvos, and if he ever sets foot upon it again, he will be executed for treason. His life is my gift of my mercy, the final mark of what he once meant to me, but if he should lose it at another’s hands, it will be of no importance to us, the Dracorte family. He may keep the Dracorte name only in remembrance of his shame and dishonor. His fate is now the Great Unifier’s to decide.”

  Even though the ship had remained airtight, it still felt like the oxygen had been vacuumed out into the upper atmosphere. Nev looked winded, his hand scraping over his face and mouth, fingers parting to reveal his eyes. His eyes were terrible.

  “As a result,” Thelarus continued in a pitiless tone, “it is both my duty and honor to announce Solara Ysandrei Rezanna Verasia Dracorte as my heiress. Upon my death, she will be bequeathed all titles, domains, and assets belonging to me, and with those, the Throne of Luvos and all the responsibilities that sitting it will entail. May she someday rule wisely, honorably, and with unwavering loyalty to her family.”

  Nev’s eyes closed on the last words, and the comms fell silent.

  We were all quiet for a moment, except for Basra, who’d mostly ignored the whole thing and returned to questioning and listening to the doctors. Even Eton was looking at Nev with some measure of pity, though maybe only because his gaze was glassy and the liquor bottle half empty.

  Then Telu shrugged and slapped a last piece of tape on the end of Nev’s bandages, making him wince and open his eyes. “We all knew it was going to happen anyway, hey? This is just a formality, the bit that everyone else sees—the rotten frosting on top of the scat-cake, if you know what I mean.”


  I was about to tell her that she maybe wasn’t helping when Nev straightened from his perch on the dash. He smiled, though it wasn’t cheerful. It was the opposite of cheerful.

  “I think Eton wants to bake me that cake,” he said. He stepped away without looking at me, heading off the bridge.

  “Nah,” Eton said from where he sat with his back against the wall, his words lazy and swooping, a bit like how the Kaitan was trying to fly. “Not really, not anymore. Maybe. Anyway, you saved me…but let’s be honest”—his voice dropped—“you didn’t do it for me.”

  Nev paused and met his stare. Something passed between them, and then they both glanced at me. I turned in my seat and looked fixedly back out the viewport, hiding my flush. Stars were nearly visible through the last of the atmosphere now.

  “I’m pretty sure I saved you,” Telu grumbled, maybe to ease the tension, “by keeping the Air Guard busy with drones so they didn’t blow you to bits.” She hesitated. “Then again, you saved me while I was still on the ship hacking those drones. And Qole saved us before that by vaporizing an army. And Basra saved us all after that…I guess we all sort of saved each other, so stop taking all the credit, hey?”

  I was an idiot. Because, in spite of everything we’d been through—in spite of my ship and my crew being practically held together by bandages, my brother unconscious on the bench behind me, our distance from our enemies not yet great enough to engage the Belarius Drive—my focus drifted as I pictured the look in Nev’s eyes. My heart started beating faster.

  But then Nev left without a word, taking my childish hopes with him. I was doubly an idiot. Because not only was the young man who made my heart pound from a different world and a royal bloodline he could trace back before the Great Collapse, but I’d just helped him get exiled and disowned.

  That didn’t keep my thoughts from churning as I brought us farther and farther from Luvos. Maybe I was triply an idiot, because I didn’t shut them down. But closing myself off hadn’t done me much good in the past. It might have hurt me, as much as unleashing myself without restraint had. Maybe I just needed to stay…open. To look for balance, not extremes.