The Colossus Collection

by Nicole Grotepas

  But. Holly knew herself. She was too practical to completely deny what she set out to do. If she went that far, went all the way to the city he was in, she would have to be a total idiot to not complete the task and see him.

  The singer finished his lusty, bedroom number. The patrons at their tables who noticed, clapped and then he began another, his voice dropping an octave as he began, and then flitted around the notes from the mini-piano.

  Something tickled her side. She was so absorbed in her thoughts, she barely noticed. It stopped, then began again. Holly finally realized what was happening, and touched her blazer pocket. Her communicator was buzzing. She pulled it out of her blazer pocket. It was Odeon. She sighed. He would know. He would ask where she was—it was, after all, late, and she wasn’t at home or at the Bird’s Nest.

  “Hello,” she said into the communicator.

  “Holly, where are you?”

  “Why? Where do you think I am?” She responded, evasively.

  “I don’t think you’re near me. And you have turned off your comms unit, so I can’t tell from that if you are safe. And I’m worried,” he said, His voice was gentle but urgent.

  “Thanks for being worried about me. I’m ok, my friend. What I’m doing,” she said, thinking about how to approach it. “Let’s call it a quest. A special mission that will help us in our goals. And I had to do it alone.”

  “But, where are you? And why did you go alone?”

  He sounded hurt. Holly couldn’t blame him, but at the same time, she felt a stab of irritation that he expected to be included in everything, that she could not function as an individual without Odeon desiring to be part of it. She loved it. But there was also something oppressive about it. He was not her. He was a being apart from her.

  “I’m sorry, my friend. But this one is a one-person mission.”

  He sighed. “All right. But please be safe. I’ll be here if you need me. Shiro won’t be. But I will.” Holly caught the sound of someone shouting something when Odeon used Shiro’s name.

  She ended the connection between her and Odeon, and tried to find a way to relax again. Another sip of her beer, another song beginning in the background, and Holly gazed out at the small car and the people populating it. Druiviins, Centau, a few humans, one or two Consties.

  And then her communicator buzzed again. She picked it up off the bar and glanced at it. “Shiro,” she said into the communicator.

  “Ms. Drake. Odeon tells me you’ve run away.”

  “Not run away, Shiro. I’m on my way to recruit someone for the mission.”

  “What sort of someone?” Shiro asked.

  “Someone who can take care of the children while you and I do the hard parts.” She hoped the compliment would take his mind off the particulars. She heard him sigh.

  “That will be necessary. I should tell you that I trust your judgment. More than ever before. You have,” he hesitated, and Charly could be heard in the background greeting him, “proven yourself repeatedly, handling difficult situations that call for strength that not everyone possesses.”

  Holly blinked, wondering if she was dreaming. “Thank you, Shiro.”

  “I must go, but please be safe. No one has your back, wherever you are. And—“ he paused again. “That worries me. But I know you’re strong.”

  He ended the call before she could say anything more. She felt a bit stunned as she lifted her gaze to the train car and the people in it. With the music and the setting, there was something surreal about the whole scene.

  She wanted to stay and enjoy the time. Decompress, indulge, get away from the pressures mounting around her like waves that would crash down upon her at any minute.

  She glared at her beer, suddenly resenting it for dulling her senses. Shiro was right. She was alone. No one had her back. It was a terrible idea to pretend that she was safe and that relaxing was a good idea, let alone a possibility.

  Pushing the beer aside, Holly rose and went back toward her own berth, leaving the dining car behind. She pushed through the doors separating the cars and entered the next. Her thoughts clung to Shiro’s words. She was absorbed in them. As she walked across the carpeted corridors she began to feel exposed and anxious, as though someone were following her.

  Her pace quickened. She would be safe in her berth with the door locked. No one would dare to break the glass—it would alert the other passengers.

  Or an attacker would count on the fact that the other passengers would merely hide from danger. Which, thinking of it, seemed more likely.

  Her heart raced. She questioned her own judgment about going after Elan all alone. Why had that seemed like a good idea?

  And then she heard it—the sound of footfalls behind her, matching her own pace.

  If Holly looked behind herself, would she see a perpetrator? Or merely someone heading back to their berth?

  Was she a mad woman, imagining danger around every bend? Seeing malevolence in shadows and specters in darkened corners?

  She slowed for a minute, listening hard, calming her breathing, testing. The footfalls did not slow, they drew closer. Holly dropped into a sprint.

  And so did her pursuer.

  She passed her personal compartment, dodged around a female Druiviin heading toward her, who exclaimed in irritation. As Holly passed some compartments, she tested the doors to see if they were locked. Each one she tried was locked. She wouldn’t go in one anyway—chances would be her pursuer would get inside it, whatever it took.

  She burst through the car doors and into the next one—tearing down the narrow corridor, her breath coming in ragged, panicked bursts. This was not her imagination. This was real.

  Out of that train car, onto the gangway. She chanced a look behind herself and saw through the window in the door, a man in a black suit. She couldn’t make out if he had a tattoo, but he was clearly after her. If she kept running, eventually she’d run out of train. Holly climbed the ladder onto the roof of the car that she’d just exited. The wind whipped through her hair and she nearly toppled backwards.

  She crawled along the curved roof of the train car, moving over the narrow windows and vents and gripping the raised edges of the ventilation openings to keep her balance. Night scenes sped past her. Their course had already taken them out of the city. The night was bright. Light from Ixion cast an eerie glow on a portion of the horizon, but the giant planet wasn’t visible. Other moons draped the night in grays and yellows. As Holly moved across the roof, their course took the train into a mountain range. It was blanketed in dense evergreens. A river ran along the gorge through which the tracks traveled. Soon they were passing a lake. The moons glittered off the waters.

  Holly was halfway across the train car when she heard a noise behind her that wasn’t part of the creaking and clanking of the train, that rose above the rush of wind across her ears. She risked a glance over her shoulder and saw the man rising over the edge of the compartment.

  She cussed and turned back, hurrying to get away. Something whizzed by her ear—she looked up and caught the moonlight glinting off a blade as it clattered onto the top of the train car, losing its momentum quickly against the wind.

  A knife! That meant it was likely Shadow Coalition. No one else used knives regularly. But did it mean she was momentarily safe from being shot at?

  The thought of being hit by aether bullets urged her along. The going was slow as she avoided putting her knee through a vent or skylight.

  “Why am I doing this?” She asked herself aloud. “Come on, Holly, come on.”

  A crackling sound passed her ears. It was an aether projectile.

  She looked back at the moron shooting at her. “Really? You want to play it that way?”

  She pulled the Equalizer out of her waistband. With one hand holding white knuckle-tight against a skylight, she angled her body sideways, aimed, and shot back at him. He fumbled and dodged to the side. The violet pulse of energy missed him. She shot again.

  “Is this fun?”
She yelled back at him.

  He didn’t answer. She squeezed the trigger again. He dodged again. She briefly considered firing rapidly, but realized her goal wasn’t to watch his face burn in a blast from her gun. She wanted him to stop. She wanted to warn him off.

  Her arm wavered, the gun was heavy and she was tense all over from the strain of the situation and the adrenaline of the danger. She couldn’t hesitate. If he got another chance to shoot at her, he could kill her. He began to rise, like he was going to stand.

  “Fuck,” she said, standing up herself. The wind beat against her back as she faced off with the SC thug. And she knew then, that only one of them was going to make it out of the situation alive.

  18

  Holly didn’t want to be in the middle of a gun fight on the roof of a speeding train—but there were no other options at the moment.

  Though she’d realized that she had to kill or be killed, she still searched for another option. Ways to warn off the thug, a method to get him disarmed, or just off her trail.

  But there was only one trail on the roof of a train car, just as there weren’t many options down below in the train cars.

  She’d hoped to reach the gangway again and move back into the compartment and lose him. She could have hidden in an empty berth.

  But since it didn’t happen in that way, she had to work with what she had at her disposal.

  Shooting at his feet seemed safest, except that if she missed, the aether projectile would take out some of the roof of the train. It was too beautiful to damage, not only that, there was nothing that said her bullets wouldn’t go through the roof and hit a bystander.

  These thoughts rushed through her mind in a matter of seconds. She decided and aimed even as the thug pointed his gun at her. He swayed as the train leaned into a curve. Holly squeezed the trigger before he could shoot her. She knew that her aim was off. But it worked the way she’d been hoping and he wasn’t able to get a shot off on her. She shot again rapidly, but he’d also fired on her. She ducked, hitting the roof of the train car hard, gouging her knee against the corner of a skylight.

  When she looked up, he no longer standing thirty feet away from her.

  She cussed, her first thought being that he’d somehow run past her and was behind her. She stood back up, keeping her weight off the hurt knee and looked over her shoulder. He wasn’t behind her either. She looked back where he’d been and heard a scream. It was more precarious to walk along the rooftop standing up, but it was faster as well. She stepped carefully around the skylights and vents and went to where he’d been and peeked over the side. Not there. She checked the other side.

  Her pursuer hung on with one hand gripping the raised bevel of a window.

  “Help me!” he cried.

  A pang of fear and pity jolted through her. She dropped to her stomach and reached over, anchoring herself on the raised edge of a skylight.

  This person had tried to kill her. But she couldn’t walk away and leave him to die.

  Holly stretched farther and grabbed him by the wrist.

  “Climb up!” she called.

  The look of panic on his face was replaced with a malicious grin. He swung his other arm up. It still held the aether gun. Holly stared down the barrel. The aether sparked and ignited deep inside the barrel. In the dark of night it was clear as a burst of sunlight. She bit her lip. Her life flashed before her eyes . . .

  And she let go.

  The Shadow Coalition thug shrieked as he fell, his body bouncing against the rocks below in the river gorge. The wind ripped the sound away. The silence that followed echoed with a hollow permanence. Holly gasped, trembling everywhere.

  She wasn’t dead, somehow, miraculously, but she wasn’t out of danger’s way. She had to make it back down into the train car.

  The trip across the roof of the train compartment went faster on her feet. With no one on her heels it was easier to focus on keeping her balance. She kept a low center of gravity as she went, retracing her steps rather than heading into the wind. The ladder down onto the gangway was cold against her hands. She was numb. Couldn’t think about what just happened. About how her compassion had almost gotten her killed. Just get into your berth. Lock the door. Don’t come out till you’re in Elan’s town.

  “And Holly?” she said aloud to herself, to overcome the chilling quiet as she opened the door into the compartment. “Trust no one.”

  19

  Holly stepped out onto the train platform in the small northern town of Rochers Deshiketes. Autumn came earlier in the northern reaches and the morning breeze quivering across her body carried a chill. She inhaled deeply and walked toward the exit. Dawn sunlight glinted off Eau Verte, the nearby lake. As she strode to the street outside the station she watched the fishing vessels sailing across the lake. Their sails were an assortment of brilliant colors—orange, green, yellow, and purple.

  Holly made her way through the streets of the small village to the wharf, found a peddler selling drinks and ordered a coffee. She took a chair at one of the outdoor tables, sipped her drink, and watched the sun rise above the mountains that surrounded the lake and shielded the village from the frigid storms that raged at the pole beyond the chain of towering cliffs.

  The night before, she’d spent the rest of the train ride locked in her berth, not sleeping, waiting anxiously for someone to appear and pound on her cabin door until the window shattered. Though it seemed unlikely that would happen, the situation on the roof of the train cars had unnerved her so much that she knew for a fact that she was never safe. The danger she’d found herself in caused her to question her own judgment. Should she have brought Odeon? Or Charly?

  Normally that would be Holly’s first thought: bring a friend. Traveling alone was risky and now she knew just how perilous it was. If it had been her to fall to her death off the train, no one would ever know. Her friends would look for her and perhaps never find her, because she’d turned off her comm unit to protect her location.

  God, what am I doing? she asked herself. These decisions, though there was something necessary about them, were also idiotic.

  And yet, even in the midst of that realization, sitting near the lake with the autumnal breeze skipping across its surface, the tranquillity of the setting soaked into her. She began to shed some of her tension. Her crew was far behind her. The rescue mission, a distant concern for the moment. She closed her eyes and sipped her coffee as the sun rose behind her and warmed her through.

  Holly only had a vague idea of where to find Elan. The information Darius had given her was that he lived in the town of Rochers Deshiketes. She could walk up to this house, or she could take this moment to regroup and make sure she was doing the right thing. It was possible that she was making a terrible choice and that she should simply turn around and catch the first train back to the City of Jade Spires.

  What would she even say to him? No, she knew what she’d say. She had always known.

  Around the lake and up the mountains coniferous trees grew. Their foliage was green. Some had small, flat needles, others purple and feathery. Holly didn’t know which worlds they originated from, but she knew that they were ideal for the snows that came in winter. Her gaze followed the mix of trees up to the jagged peaks where nothing grew. Soon snows would blanket those craggy features.

  When her gaze came back to the wharf, a Druiviin man stood twenty feet from her, a line full of glistening lake fish dangling from his hands, forgotten. His silvery hair was pulled back into a bun on the crown of his head. What she could see of it suggested that it was longer than it had ever been. He wore a traditional crossed top, tied on the side, with elbow-length, wide sleeves, and shorts that went to his knees. His complexion was darker from being out in the sun on the lake. His eyes were a brilliant, pale lavender, and were currently narrowed and staring at Holly as though in disbelief.

  He’d stopped in his tracks when he saw her, and now he moved toward her, his head bowed, his stride purposeful.


  “Holly,” he breathed when he reached her. “Is it really you?”

  She couldn’t find her voice. It stalled somewhere inside her. She cleared her throat. “Yes,” she croaked. That’s it? Yes? She felt her cheeks redden in embarrassment. She’d figured he’d be on the lake for the whole day.

  Elan sat down across from her, a faint smile on his lips.

  “You’re here for me?”

  Holly blinked and looked at his feet. He wore sandals. His legs were strong and covered in a fine silvery hair. He said what he thought. During the time that they worked together, their rapport had deepened to the point that Elan didn’t hide much from her.

  “You came back to the city during my trial, but you didn’t come to see me.”

  “Yes,” he said. She looked up at him and he averted his eyes, studying the fish. “One moment.” He rose and jogged back out onto the wharf and disappeared down a side slip. Holly took the time to catch her breath, to clear her thoughts. There was so much noise in her mind about him. Thinking straight was a challenge.

  He returned with a bucketful of water and put the fish it. “I should have done that from the beginning.”

  “Are they dead?”

  “Not yet. This species has evolved to be able to process air, but only long enough to survive drought periods, when the rivers dry up. I don’t want them to suffer needlessly. Putting them in the water will be good for them. When I get back to my house, I keep them in a small pond.”

  “Until?”

  “Until I’m ready to eat them.” He laughed softly.

  She nodded. “Which world are they from?”

  “Yaso,” he said.

  “How do they taste?” She was stalling.

  “Delicious. I’ll make you some, if you’d like.”

  “That could be nice,” she shrugged.

  His gaze fell to the bag at her feet. “Are you planning to stay a while?”