by E L Strife
He replayed the scene as Tanner rushed to Amianna’s side: the warning blinking on his wristband, and the door he opened displaying Atana’s bloodied body next to Azure’s. Bennett showed them the lunchroom where his team and the members of Azure’s lay in small, limp groups. Just as the horn sounded, like it had the last few times, and the image of the ship beyond the glass appeared, a loud clap roused him from Ether.
Bennett awoke to the gray confines of the conference room. Command pulled off their receivers and rubbed their foreheads.
Atana gave his shoulders one more squeeze. I had to.
It’s okay. I finished it. Bennett grabbed one of her wrists, looking up at her. Had she seen his first dream—of her? Please, tell me later what you saw that made you stop the playback.
Miskaht muttered at the far end beside Hyras. “This is not what we need right now.”
Sergio, with his hands around a steaming cup of coffee, lifted a finger in suggestion. “It could be a dream echo. They happen to us humans sometimes. Maybe you’re stressed out, Sergeant Bennett, and need to rest.”
“He’s a Prospector in training,” Terson corrected, his towering frame cocked sideways in his chair. “He’s not human anymore.”
Command broke out in frenzied chatter over what they’d witnessed and what the Elites: Miskaht, Glato, Krett, and Balie thought. It was clear they’d explained Bennett’s prospectorship to the members despite tradition.
Bennett stood and took his place next to Atana. Her eyes were alight with focus as she intently scanned the members.
“If it wasn’t for seeing myself dead in your dream,” she said, “I might’ve considered my ‘Blue Bomb’ status grounds for my removal from the premises—based on the nature of the threat.”
A twinge of remorse made Bennett’s back muscles twitch. He grimaced. “I admit, I do not know if there is a person capable of killing you.”
“I’m as vulnerable as most. Only my weapons and my skills are above average. Metal can still cut me.” Atana’s nostrils flared as if the words brought back undesirable memories.
Canting toward her, he whispered, “Maybe I’m the threat.”
Her confusion pulled no punches as it twisted her face. “Explain.”
“Out of control fireball in a place like this—” Growing nervous, Bennett rubbed the scruff on his neck and looked away. “You’re in charge of your power. I’m not.”
A quiet note of discontent rushed through her teeth. “I won’t let you make that mistake.”
He barely looked up at her before a flash of pain through his head sent Bennett toppling sideways into the wall. White spots burst in his vision. His knees caved under his weight.
“Bennett?” It was Atana’s voice.
Thunderous explosions of fire and water and groaning metal filled the space in his mind thought once took. Heat flurried to life in his chest. He gasped and opened his eyes to a brilliant fire spreading out from his sternum, radiating through his arms and into the hands bracing his head. “Fuck! See what I mean?”
Atana collected him in her arms, her voice laced with panic. “What are you seeing?”
He heard chairs squeak and shift at the table. Command had stopped talking. He had stopped breathing.
“Jameson, talk to me.” Her words grew fainter with every second. The image of Command’s conference room whisked away as if it were painted on black sand carried off by the wind.
Bennett couldn’t tell which one of them was shaking. His body had become a distant object. His vision tunneled until it slipped away into a starless night.
The floor rushed at him, passing without a sensation. Layers of light and dark flew by until his daydream thrust him out into the hallways of Home Station like a ghost on speed. The world spun back and forth, scanning equipment and rooms and shepherds. Searching. What for, he didn’t know.
“It’s happening again,” he stuttered, hoping Atana could hear. “Like on Agutra—before the sirens.”
Atana’s voice was nearly inaudible, but it was the only steady beacon he had. “Deep breath. I’ve got your back. Just tell me what you see.”
He squinted at the people he raced by. The world, or Ether—he wasn’t sure which—lurched to a stop in front of someone. The man’s image flickered from human to a sallow and rawboned creature then back again like an old fluorescent light bulb.
Bennett wheezed under the shock. There weren’t supposed to be any Linétens on Home Station. Other shepherds didn’t notice. The process continued with several more people until Bennett found himself climbing the stairs to Command’s office.
The weightlessness and swelling heat were nauseating. Bennett scanned the convened members of Command as they argued across the table. Altruistic one moment, refractory the next, their capricious behavior had Bennett forcefully drawing in a breath to ready himself for whatever the universe had planned.
A chill swept over him like cold air blown from a fan. Though he saw himself crouched in the corner with Atana at his side, he knew he wasn’t visiting the office to return to his own body. He backtracked the chilling sensation to its source.
Command’s twins. They shimmered the same as the three he’d encountered below.
Bennett snapped awake, looking directly at Linas and Jorjan from the corner. “There are f-five,” he warned Atana verbally before remembering who could hear him and who couldn’t. Linétens.
Her grip on him tightened. “On Home Station?”
Bennett couldn’t believe his own words. He made a point of throwing the lead members of Command a look of warning. I can see them in Ether. Or whatever that was.
The Coordinator leapt up from his seat to lean over his station, rousing the interactive surface.
“What’s going on?” Vimno’s small, gray ears twitched back in fear.
“How would they figure out where we are?” Balie asked, looking down the table at Krett, whose expression had soured.
Linas slammed a fist on the desk. “Silent conversations are not permitted in this room!”
Bennett surveyed every member except Linas and Jorjan. They hid from the Mirramor and H.Co. what they are.
Miskaht set her pencil down. “Glato, maybe it’s time you challenge everyone again, just to be sure.”
The dark-haired man with green and violet eyes like hers edged to get up from the middle of the table. His skin a molten bronze, the sharp features of his face tightened in a ‘don’t fuck with me’ look.
“Why?” Jorjan asked.
Bennett listened to the twins’ auras with his heart the way a person listened for movement in the dark. His visions siphoned inward and back again, the slow motion of a time stretch blurring light. Their sparks didn’t coruscate in the manner of most others. The two were gelid masses enfolding endlessly upon themselves like serpents of liquid glass. His pulse raced as he dropped back into sync with the world. He needed to warn Command and tried to get up.
“Hold on,” Atana said under her breath as Command’s arguing escalated.
Linas’s tone was high-strung and impatient. “We’ve been through this. We need to check the bays. With all the incoming traffic, there may have been a—”
Glato reached across the table, latching onto Linas’s wrist with a sneer.
The man cried out, his body flickering different colors. His face twisted in anger as he tried to pry the hand from his arm.
Glato’s muscles bulged from the strain. “Show me! Kuakiano liryen!”
“Do you have any weapons on you?” Bennett asked staring at Linas. “I was so out of wits, I left mine in the room.”
She fixated on Linas, the same as him. “The blade on my belt. My S.I.s are in the lab doing a job for me.”
The fear in Linas’s eyes fell to a harrowing grin. His skin solidified to pallid marble, and his irises pitch black. At several cracks, his spine jutted prominently from his body.
Krett stood up so fast his chair tipped over. Hundreds of jade strands thrust out of his back, shredding his t-
shirt and snapping taut into a pair of arced wings. He circled the table and pulled Balie behind him. Crags of matching light crawled across his cheeks and up to his forehead.
Balie staggered, peach light splitting her nose-bridge open. “Krett, calm yourself.” The back of her shirt squirmed but stayed intact. “You could take out all of Home Station. How do you know we aren’t the problem?”
Krett glanced at her, eyes burning with fury.
Jorjan stood, shifting into a mirror image of Linas with ease.
The rest of Command sat watching the commotion in expressed shock and outrage.
Linas slipped free of Glato’s grasp and tore the gray robe from his shoulders. It fell to the floor, exposing a pleated cast of ebony armor. “You did this to yourselves when you pitted the entire world against us! Not every Linéten is Verros! You have taken our freedom from us, our right to live equally on this planet!”
“What do you mean—this?” Miskaht asked.
The room lurched and shuddered. Windows rattled, and coffee splashed out of Sergio’s mug.
Behind the Coordinator, the main screen lit up with alerts and a flashing schematic of activating bulkheads and airlock doors.
Atana grabbed Bennett’s forearm, but her eyes weren’t angry. They held fear he’d never seen in her before.
“You prove our point by attacking Home Station?” Krett’s voice cracked with the force of his yell.
Hyras, Miskaht, and Ronux sprung up from their seats to monitor the damage, barking orders through their interactive stations in the table. Every other member was locked on Linas and Jorjan, cursing at them as the two slunk back against the glass walls of the conference room.
Beside Bennett, Atana slowly reached up and silently slipped her blade from its sheath.
“Easy,” he warned, glancing down at her. The blue fireflies within her body’s aura broke the surface of her skin. “Lots of Command members in the way.”
But she’d homed in on Jorjan. “Several hundred shepherds lived and worked on those levels. There is no time to evacuate. This has to end now.”
We haven’t got any information out of them, he countered. The thought sprung an idea. “Wait—”
He sank back into Ether, to the place he’d been standing in Command’s conference room. The gray walls rippled around him like water ran down their sides. Walking his ghost through Command’s table, he turned between the two Linétens. There was no time for apprehension.
Planting his spectral hands on their foreheads, he took a lesson from Glato. “Kuakiano liryen!”
Linas and Jorjan grabbed their heads like they were splitting open inside and cried out.
Two sets of memories flurried through Bennett’s consciousness. Bombs and wires and conversations in private. The storm of information turned his stomach, but he pressed on, focusing the images. “Kuakiano liryen! I will not let go until you show me where they are!”
…
Incoming messages from Team Leaders sent the room abuzz with high-pitched beeping. The cacophony didn’t bother Atana, but she didn’t like standing around. Pulling up Sergeant Tanner on her wristband, she got a sleepy response.
“Yes, ma’am? Did we have an earthquake?”
“Linéten infiltrators bombed the two lower levels. I want you tracking codes sent and received in the last hour, and I want to know all the doors are sealed off.”
Crashing sounds overlaid Tanner’s frantic explanation to Cutter. “On it, ma’am.”
Miskaht’s voice erupted over her station. “I don’t care how tired you are, Sergeant. Find that damned vessel and turn it the hell around! Blow it up for all I care. If you don’t, we’re all going to die!”
“Yes, Command!” a man shouted through her speaker.
Level Nine blinked its last signal before darkening on the screen. “Nine is gone!” Hyras swiped a finger across his surface. “Eight has two bulkheads holding!”
A running trail of wristband messages flashed beneath Tanner’s ID number on the main screen. “Looks like three codes sent in the last few minutes.”
Atana’s eyes widened as she made a connection. They stole the metal and programmed it! That’s how they got past the sensors!
Several Xahu’ré members collected Krett, preventing his brightening flumes from bowling up around his body. He grunted. “Let me kill them!” Green light flashed through the strands tangled in members’ arms.
“You’ll blow us all to the stars! Kilavi energy pulses might as well be a bomb!” Renae cried out from a corner where Sergio had her corralled.
I can do it safely. Atana’s heart kicked inside her chest.
Bennett squeezed her wrist. Wait—
Staring at him, her nerves on fire, muscles trembling and begging for release, Atana fumbled for a distraction to keep herself from lashing out. She turned her attention to Jorjan. She knew she could fight her way free, and she knew she should wait. I will be the armor for the vital spark.
Bennett’s fingers tightened around her arm.
Atana gritted her teeth. I will disarm evil.
“Got them. Five bombs,” Bennett said.
“Copy,” Tanner promptly replied. “There aren’t many people moving around. Shouldn’t be too hard to track.”
Bennett twisted his neck until it cracked. His gold-burnished eyes lifted to hers, his iron grip peeling away. Go.
Every muscle thrummed, thrilled with the freedom. Atana readied her blade between deft fingers. Time slowed when she planted a foot on the table and returned her focus to the closest twin. Diving over the glass at the Linéten Command members lifting their heads, she growled.
I will preserve peace.
Reaching out, she grabbed ashen cloth, drawing the body in for the kill. Her fingernails tore through Jorjan’s robes.
For every heart.
With a violent thrust, she slashed the crisp, metal edge across his neck. A dark red shower painted the glass walls as her momentum carried them to the floor. Beside them, Linas stumbled back in shock.
Landing on Jorjan, Atana glared with full fury down at him. Blood dripped from her face, but she didn’t blink. Atana watched with satisfaction as he squirmed and struggled to breathe until his body fell limp. “Until my blood is spent,” she spat.
Atana pushed herself to her feet, looking upon his flaccid body with disgust. “And the wicked succumb.”
Chapter 24
‘DETONATE’ FLASHED ON JORJAN’S SCREEN.
Atana tore the wrist-band from his arm and turned to see flames wrap around Linas’s throat. He flew backward across Command’s table, sending members scattering. Linas clawed at his windpipe as Bennett retracted a conflagrant fist.
Seething, Bennett leaned over him, an unusual bass underlay to his voice. “That’s about as close as you will get to knowing how those shepherds down there felt as they drowned.”
Atana mused at this unusually sardonic side of Bennett as she wiped her blade on her leather pants and slipped it back in its sheath strapped to the small of her back.
Linas kicked and writhed as his face purpled.
“How could you kill all those people?” Nephma screamed at him, red spikes flaring from her pink skin.
Bennett tilted his head with a menacing inspection of Linas. “Because he feels alone and rejected—by everything and everyone he fought for. Because he believed the system was equal. And when you broke your rule by singling out Linétens—he followed the code. Destroyed evil.”
“Except they weren’t evil,” Evami cried out from Klézia’s arms. “You could’ve just killed us if we were the problem.” Her face darkened, taut with vehement rage. “Why the foundation? Why the shepherds?”
Linas stared at Atana, gulping for breath. She couldn’t hear his thoughts through the beeping and screaming chaos. Warning lights flickered on the screens. Command’s leaders gestured wildly across the table.
Atana blinked through the stabs of awakening. Home Station had been breached. Shepherds were dead.
> “Because this is more painful for you,” Bennett said, eyes radiant like coils of fiery rope tied around Linas, squeezing hard.
“You could’ve done this with words, not bombs and knives and fists. Words,” Atana added.
Linas sneered at her. You’re one to talk.
“I get the irony,” she said coldly.
“It was the prophecy,” Balie muttered.
“I don’t care why. You were, so I spoke up.” Atana returned her attention to Linas. “You could’ve proved us wrong. Instead, you stooped to feed the stereotype, which makes others perceive you as they do.” She lifted a hand. “And here you lie.”
Libesh rammed a fist against a wall, sending fissures through the glass. She sighed and ran a hand down her white braid, swaying like a fading white wolf in a winter storm. “We don’t have enough trained crews to search for the survivors locked in their rooms below.”
When Atana looked back to Linas, his eyes had glossed, and his body was still. “I’ll go.”
“No,” Hyras pointed at her from the screen he was bent over. “We want you and the prime Kyra battle-crews off of this island immediately.”
“And we’ve got our shields,” Bennett countered, to her surprise.
Hyras’s eyes narrowed and brightened. “Negative, Sergeant. You must evacuate with the others.”
Anger spilled out in ripples of fire around Atana’s skin as she backed to the door. “The hell you’re kicking me out. No shepherd left behind.”
As she stormed from the room, she shouted back over her shoulder, “You planned on me dying once already. Remember that.”
Bennett hustled to her side as she descended the open stairs to the auditorium floor. “I’m coming with you. I do not want to be alone up there with them right now.”
Sprinting across the auditorium to the main stairwell, she thought back to Bennett’s reaction to Linas’s escape. “Quite the hit.”
His entire body cringed beside her. “Something takes over, and I’m just along for the ride. It’s unpredictable.”
