Evasive maneuvers were imperative, but when Cade went to grab the stick, nothing happened. He looked down, and then he remembered: His hand was dead, thanks to the Rokura. Instead of a palm and five digits, all Cade had was a blackened paw that couldn’t grip a cup of water let alone maneuver the Dawn through a dogfight. Looking at it, Cade felt the pain and the agony all over again, and for a moment he felt physically ill when he remembered that the ancient weapon was somewhere on the ship. It was probably just waiting for its next chance to do something unimaginably terrible.
Survival odds were dwindling fast. Down to his left hand, Cade gripped the stick and hoped he’d be able to at least come close to matching his normal proficiency. Considering the Dawn’s temperamental flight controls, he wasn’t optimistic. Plus, he’d have to alternate his left hand between plotting a course for a mass jump that would get them free and clear of this mess while evading Intruder fire once they got in range. Which just happened.
More alarms. Cade was really tired of hearing his ship scream at him, so he allotted himself a quick second to jam his right claw against the control panel and silence all alerts. He knew he was in deep trouble, again; he didn’t need a soundtrack for it. Right now he needed to focus and find a way to not be blown to space dust. Assuming there was one.
The Dawn’s nose slammed downward and shot back up as proton fire from overhead battered the ship. Cade caught the briefest glimpse of the oblong vessel as it hurtled past, its stubby wings remarkably deceptive in cloaking its offensive capacity. You’d think wings that short wouldn’t be able to hold much firepower but, as usual, Praxis found a way to innovate their capacity to kill to perfection.
Cade studied his scanner and identified the Praxis vessel as a scout-class Intruder, which didn’t come as a surprise. Typical Praxis offensive protocol called for a scout to race ahead of its squad and lay down cover fire to get a sense of its enemy’s defensive capacity. In this case, the scout had to have been overjoyed by what it discovered: There were no defenses. Cade didn’t have the dexterity, or even the warning time, to remotely man his ship’s gunner and offer a return salvo that would at least let the Intruder know someone was on board, and that someone didn’t appreciate being shot at. As he glanced at the damage report scrolling—and scrolling—across the control panel, Cade remembered the shape the Dawn was in. It would have been more concise for the ship to generate a report of what wasn’t off-line, malfunctioning, or inoperable. All Cade could make of the report was that he was hurtling through the cold, harsh vacuum of space in a vessel held together by luck and whatever nuts and bolts had the temerity to hold on.
There was no time for screwing around if Cade wanted to survive, which meant he needed help. Even if doing so would tear the tissue off his raw throat, Cade had to scream and get Duke’s attention. If Duke could manage the gunner hull and keep the Intruders at bay for just a few minutes, Cade might be able to get them to a jump lane and rocket them far, far away from here. It was his only chance, and a slim one at that.
Just as Cade opened his mouth to howl for his insolent drone, the cockpit door slid open. Duke lumbered in and, without saying a word, brought the Dawn’s heavy artillery system online. The drone had some nerve, Cade grimaced. Taking on four Intruders in this rickety scrap heap was insanity. They needed to defend and flee, not engage in a suicide run.
“Duke!” Cade yelled, feeling every syllable lacerate his throat. “I ought to repurpose you for industrial waste cleanup. Where have you been?!”
Duke looked askance at Cade, and his yellow eyes darkened. “Where have I been? Where do you think?” the drone erupted. “I was attending to your brother!”
Cade felt his chest sink as the air rushed out of his lungs. It was impossible, he thought. He saw the spear—the shido—pierce through Tristan’s chest. He felt the life wither from his brother’s body. But then again, did he? How could he know for sure? And the shido—maybe it missed anything vital. Maybe Cade had made the worst mistake of his life by leaving Tristan behind. And that’s when the real terror sunk in, when Cade’s mind flashed an image of Tristan, barely holding on to his life as he clawed his way out of the spire. All the while wondering where his brother had gone.
“How—how is he?” Cade softly asked.
Duke continued to work the artillery system as the Intruders moved into attack formation and started racing toward the ship. There wasn’t much time.
“He’s not well, Cade. And he’s certainly not happy with you.”
“With me? Why?”
Duke gripped the edges of the weapons array as he dropped his head, shaking it in what Cade took to be disgust. Contempt, even. “Maybe because you left him to die. Is that reason enough?”
“I…” Cade stammered, but no other words would come. What could he say? That he didn’t mean to? That was the coldest comfort there ever was. “Sorry I left you for dead,” wasn’t an apology you could come back from. Still, Cade couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all wrong, and he didn’t like it. It wasn’t bad enough that he’d lost his hand, been cowed by the Rokura, and lost his brother: Now his brother had somehow returned, and Cade was made to bear the weight of giving up on the one person in the galaxy who would never, ever give up on him.
More alarms blared, and Cade punched the control panel hard, cracking the screen. “I said turn off!” he yelled, but the alarms kept blaring.
Enemy fire was incoming. Cade took hold of the stick and spun the ship hard starboard. He drove the ship down, avoiding Intruder proton blasts, but he knew they’d be locking on his tail within moments.
“The heavy artillery is inoperable,” Duke said, a hint of bitter resignation in his voice. “Maybe if the ship hadn’t been trashed during landing, we would have the chance to mount a defense.”
Cade was going to kill Duke. Decommission, scrap, and have his parts melted down. But not now. Now, he still needed his help.
“You shouldn’t have been bothering with it in the first place!” Cade barked. “Now get in the gunner hull and spray defensive fire while I—”
The Dawn’s radar exploded as, out of nowhere, a Praxis warship and a dozen more Intruders dropped on top of Cade’s position.
Cade gasped. He rose from his seat and, wide-eyed, he could see the fleet through his viewport; the busted glass splintered Praxis’s numbers from a dozen to a hundred, though it didn’t matter. They were dead either way.
Watching the Intruders and the massive warship descend upon him, Cade felt like he was losing his mind. There was no way—no way—for a fleet to jump on top of them the way they did. Even with coordinates, mass jumping was never that precise.
“Incinerator missile fired from the warship,” Duke said. “We have … seconds.”
Cade could see the missile heading his way, like a star streaking through the sky. And all he could do was stand by Duke’s side and accept his fate. Cade closed his eyes, shutting out the death that was hurtling toward him, and thought it best to go peacefully. He could scream and yell and curse destiny, condemn the Well, but it wouldn’t change a thing. This was happening. But as Cade shut his eyes for the final time, an image projected inside his head:
Tristan.
His brother was on the ship, and he was still alive. Maybe Cade was ready to die, but he wouldn’t resign his brother to death a second time. He failed him once; he wouldn’t do it again.
Cade dropped back into his seat and gripped the stick. He drove the ship to port, feeling it resist the sudden, sharp movement.
“Duke, get to the gunner! Go for the Intruders. If we can destroy enough between us and the incinerator missiles, we might be able to shake them off!”
But Duke didn’t move. His focus remained locked on the viewport, and Cade was about to scream for him to move when he saw what Duke was mesmerized by. The incinerator missile had multiplied by three, and they were all racing toward the Dawn. The lead missile seemed no more than a breath away from impact.
Cade drove the ship down as
hard and as fast as he could. He tried to voice his rejection of the situation, his utter refusal to allow this to happen, but no sound escaped his lips. Just a silent scream, then everything went white.
* * *
Cade’s eyes shot open and he choked for air like he’d been drowning. His torso propelled forward, sitting Cade upright. His lungs heaved as his eyes struggled to bring his surroundings into focus. Cade’s memory rushed fragmented images across his mind—the Intruders roaring toward him, the incoming incinerator missiles, the scorching white light, and even a glimpse of his own body, reduced to bones. The recollection felt distant, though.
Like a dream.
Cade sunk into himself. He couldn’t shake how real Tristan’s presence seemed. In the dream he was alive, and Cade felt his presence so strongly that the sensation lingered into his waking life. But as the world around him gained clarity, Cade recognized the truth: Tristan was gone, forever, his body buried in a ruined spire on a planet that no one would ever be able to reach. The realization washed over Cade, and it was like losing his brother all over again.
Cade clutched his chest, and he was startled by the knowledge that he could clutch his chest. Cade looked down and, with no small amount of shock, saw that his deceased extremity was gone. Someone had given him a new hand, an implant that Cade assumed was supposed to be a seamless replacement for what he’d lost. But it wasn’t. The skin tone was a shade off, and the hairs poking through the latticework of skin cells on the back of his hand were slightly coarser than they had been. As Cade examined his new body part with an uneasy eye, he felt disquieted by its presence; a dull pain circulated from his wrist to his fingertips, like an echo of his gruesome encounter with the Rokura. His instinct, fleeting, was to claw and gnaw at the wrist and get the thing removed. It felt too unnatural, and in the moment, Cade would just as soon go back to the lifeless stump rather than have some foreign host agitating him from within.
He let his body fall back, and he felt his head hit a soft pillow. A bed—Cade was in a bed, though he didn’t care where the bed was or how he got there. Not now. Instead, Cade shoved the pillow over his face and screamed. Hot tears formed in his eyes, and he screamed and screamed until he ran out of breath. He didn’t even want to go on the mission to Quarry and, now, because of it, Tristan was dead and Cade … Cade was left with what? He didn’t even have anyone to notify of Tristan’s death. His parents were gone, and his only real friend, Mig, wanted nothing to do with him. Sucking in musky air through the filter of the pillow, Cade figured that the best he could hope for was oblivion. If he did nothing, then nothing terrible would happen and he could eventually fade into the fabric of the universe and live in anonymity on some planet deep in the Galactic Fringe.
It was a nice thought, but one he couldn’t sustain for long, not even in his darkest moment.
Cade might be a pain in most everyone’s side, he might not take things seriously, and he tended to follow his own set of rules—but he was no coward. While he could ditch the Well with a smile on his face as he left the Masters and Rai to suck on his ship’s fumes, Cade couldn’t abandon the responsibility he owed his brother. Having experienced the Rokura’s sheer insanity, Cade knew that if Tristan wasn’t going to wield it, then no one should. Which meant Cade had to find a way to destroy it and its terrible purpose—assuming that was even possible. Slowly, Cade pulled the pillow down from his face.
He wasn’t on a starcruiser, that much he could tell. There was no grav system tugging at his core, adding just enough heft to his body mass to remind him that he was connected to the ground only by the grace of artificial gravity. He took a long, deep breath and got a good whiff of antiseptic, industrial-grade cleaning products, and urine. That alone was enough to tell him that he was in a medical facility. With that conclusion drawn, the rest of the room began to take shape around him. A half-dozen monitors blipped and beeped in disharmony at his bedside, aligned just over his shoulders in a tidy row. Just outside his door, a wellness drone wheeled back and forth, rehearsing the delivery of a troubling diagnosis in the chipper voice modulation all doc bots were packaged with. If Cade could fling something at the drone to get its attention and order it to get lost, he would. But there was nothing nearby except his comms device, and that had been buzzing with so many alerts that he didn’t want to even look at it. Cade narrowed his eyes like he was fighting back a headache. He had to slow things down. He was in a med center, and it was safe to assume it wasn’t a Praxis facility, which meant he hadn’t been captured. The memory of crawling out of the spire came to him, how he desperately called Duke to rescue him. Cade put aside what a low point in his life that was—putting his life in Duke’s hands—and he struggled to recall what happened after that. But there was nothing. Just blackness between then and now. And there was no telling how large the gap between the two was or what happened to him in that time.
That’s when Cade’s heart dropped. The Rokura. His head whipped around the room, searching, like the galaxy’s most powerful weapon would be propped in the corner as if it were a broom.
Terrific, Cade thought. I lost the thing already.
In a panic, Cade tried to bolt out of bed, only to have his body fiercely reject his movement. Everywhere hurt. From his skin to his muscles, all the way down to his bones and even his teeth, he felt bruised, sore, and tired. As quickly as he popped up, he slumped right back down. If this was his permanent condition, he didn’t want to ever move again. It was like the first time he’d gotten drunk off cheap root whiskey back on Kyysring with Mig. As he debated which side of the bed it was best to vomit off of, he pleaded for mercy from the universe, vowing to never drink again.
“It’s the stem blast,” someone said from behind Cade. For a second, Cade thought maybe it was the universe come to answer his plea, but he’d recognize that gravelly voice anywhere. He knew it was Ser Jorken.
Cade shifted his head just enough to see Jorken coming around the foot of his bed. Jorken was a tall, bulky man who always seemed to wear a sour expression, even though it belied his pleasant disposition. Every Master at the Well was charged with mentoring young Rai through their training and spiritual development, and whether by chance or design—Cade didn’t know—Jorken drew Cade. And whatever happy countenance Jorken might have had in him prior was ground to dust by Cade and his antics. But, to be fair, it was the intensity of their relationship that drew them together. Jorken was like a father to Cade, and it was very unusual for a Master and a Rai to get that close. Most Masters had sparring rods up their butts, and the relationship they forged with their wards rarely grew beyond a rigid mentorship. What Cade and Jorken shared was parsecs beyond that, and Cade knew he would never have made it through the Well’s rigors without Jorken’s guidance.
“Your injuries were so extensive that the doctors figured it would be best to give you a comprehensive refresher. Plus, they were able to give you that new hand while you were under. The effects will wear off in, oh, about an hour by my watch.”
“How long was I out for?” Cade asked, his voice dry and raspy.
“Just over two days,” Jorken said, handing Cade a small cup of water. “Take some, but go slow.”
A single drop of water met Cade’s lips, and he felt like he’d been plunged into a spring on the cooling shores of Ohan, the paradisiacal planet. The water soothed his mouth and throat; he even felt it cool his insides as it slid into his belly. Cade drank down the entire cup, greedily, never knowing water could taste so amazing.
“Now,” Jorken said, drawing nearer as his eyes examined Cade’s face, “let me get a good look at you.”
Cade withdrew from Jorken’s gaze, which made him feel uneasy. “What? Why? I’m fine,” Cade said. “Just a little banged up.”
Jorken’s scowl upturned into a proud, endearing smile. “Oh, I’d say you’re more than fine, Cade. You’re the Paragon.”
Cade blinked hard, three times, and on the third blink he held his eyes shut in what had to have looked like a
pained squint. He knew Jorken had said words, and Cade knew what each of those words meant, but he couldn’t make sense of them in the order they were delivered. Although Jorken had no sense of humor—though his wry observations could be funny in their blunt honesty—Cade assumed that his Master had to be messing with him, and he almost let out a self-deprecating laugh. But then he considered the circumstances: Cade was unconscious when Duke landed them on Ticus, the Well’s home planet, and when he was carted out of the ship, he wasn’t alone. The Rokura was on him. And who could possess the Rokura other than the Paragon? Nobody. And since Duke knew nothing of what happened inside the spire, he couldn’t contradict everyone’s natural conclusion: Cade holds the Rokura. Therefore, Cade is the Paragon.
Things keep getting better and better, Cade thought.
Cade’s immediate impulse was to correct Jorken, to end this madness right then and there. But he stopped himself. If he copped to being a fraud, the Masters would yank the Rokura from his hands—forcibly, if need be—and they’d have a brand-new reason to argue and squabble among themselves over what best to do with it. There would be tribunals and closed-door meetings, open debates and latent animosity. The weapon would languish in their possession, as their inability to compromise, conceive a plan, and act would corrode the opportunity staring them in the face. Worse than that, though, was when they finally did put the Rokura to use, the consequences would be unimaginable. Because they’d never listen to Cade. No matter how deeply in horrifying detail he described his ordeal with the Rokura, no matter how hard he pleaded his case, knowing what its power could do to the galaxy, they’d never dare destroy it. If there was one thing all the Masters shared in common, it was desperation. They needed the Rokura, and Cade wondered if it was more to restore a balance of power to the galaxy or to justify their own existences. Either way, Cade would be damned if he was going to let the Masters step in and screw up his plans. If that meant lying to every single person at the Well until he could make his escape, so be it.
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