Coddling her, keeping secrets, sugarcoating things … Yeah, none of that was necessary.
A soft murmuring ahead stopped her, and she shifted closer to the wall. She couldn’t make out anything they were saying, but she was able to separate out at least two voices, both male.
Risking a step closer in an attempt to eavesdrop, Delaney steadied her finger over the trigger of her fritz just in case. All of that target practice, first with Ruckus, and then later with Trystan, had already come in seriously handy.
“Moving in?” Trystan’s voice whispered through her mind like a phantom, and the timing, and suddenness of it, caused her to jump. “Easy, Lissa.”
He rested a hand on her arm, and she turned to find that both he and Ruckus had snuck up behind her. The two of them standing in the hallway somehow made the space seem tighter, and for a moment all she could do was stare as she waited for her heart to settle its rhythm.
“What have you got?” Ruckus asked, speaking through their fittings, same as Trystan just had.
“Two of them. They sound frantic, but I can’t make out what they’re saying,” she told them, one at a time.
“Let’s go ask them to speak up.” Trystan looked in the direction the voices were coming from. “Shall we?”
He breezed past her, walking as if he were heading into a corporate business meeting, and not into a room with a couple of unknown armed men. As he did so, he adjusted his collar, then sent a quick wink over his shoulder at her.
Delaney and Ruckus followed, though they left some space between them in the very likely chance this all went sideways. The hall wasn’t wide enough for them to walk side by side, so Ruckus settled behind her, still close enough that she could feel the warm puffs of his breath fanning across her neck.
“Gentlemen,” Trystan’s voice called up ahead, and she picked up the pace just a little. “I’d like to discuss a few things with you.”
Delaney moved forward just in time to see both of the Tellers lift their weapons and take aim at the Zane. Hers came up automatically, and she had them both on the ground before either managed to get off a shot of their own.
“Well,” Trystan drawled, “that was a short conversation.”
“Could you not?” she practically growled, shoving him out of the way so she could make it across the room toward the only other door. A quick glance showed it led to another set of halls. “They could have shot you, you idiot.”
“I trusted you’d have my back,” Trystan said, already standing behind her again.
With a roll of her eyes she entered the other hall, weapon trained ahead in case any other remaining Tellers had heard the commotion. Sure enough, not halfway down the new corridor, a Teller leaped from a side room.
The Zane shot him and they kept moving, with him checking all the rooms on their right, and her doing the same with the ones on their left. Five minutes later they finally arrived to what was probably the center of the ship.
There were two Tellers in the control room, distractedly talking among themselves. They hadn’t noticed they had company yet.
“Let’s not kill these ones, hmm?” Trystan suggested, smirking when she glowered. Still, he kept his fritz raised as he entered, moving off to the side to make room for her and Ruckus to follow.
Once they had the exit completely blocked off, Delaney cleared her throat.
The Tellers whipped around, but the second they saw weapons already trained on them, they hesitated with their own.
“Zane.” The man on the left looked shocked to see him. “You weren’t supposed to be here. If he’d known you were aboard that ship—”
The other Teller hit the one talking, shutting him up.
“He who?” Trystan questioned, angling his head at them. When neither of them appeared keen to answer, he grunted, took a wild guess. “My father.”
“I know these men,” Ruckus suddenly seemed to realize, moving to step past Delaney and Trystan. His eyes scanned them, his frown deepening. “They’re Tellers in the Left-Center. You’re Vakar. Did the Basilissa set this up?”
“That’s a very good question.” Something in Trystan’s tone had Delaney looking at him. He was also staring, but the confusion that had been on his face earlier had morphed into something new. There was a calculation there, an intensity. It was the same look he got whenever he thought he’d figured out something particularly tricky.
He looked at her that way a lot.
“We aren’t going to tell you anything.” The one who’d quieted the other had his fritz pressed against his comrade’s side in the span of a blink. He’d fired the weapon and turned it on himself before any of them could react.
Delaney watched as both bodies dropped to the ground in a heap, a pool of blood already spilling out around them. “Holy shit. He just…”
Trystan cursed.
“Did you send for them?” Ruckus switched things up, drawing the Zane’s attention away from the corpses. “When you took control of Vakar, did you send for troops from other areas? To help reinforce the capital?”
He shook his head. “That wasn’t necessary. I brought a small Kint army along with me. Your men were left wherever they’d been stationed.”
“Where’s the Left-Center?” Delaney wanted to get off this ship. The hole in the side was letting in a lot of the chill, and the temperature kept dropping.
“An area near the western border that separates Kint and Vakar,” Trystan explained, though it was halfhearted. Distracted, he crouched down to get a better view of the Tellers.
“Okay, so who would want a group of Vakar Tellers to attack us?” Delaney glanced around the room, trying to find anything that could help give them answers.
“We should check their com-log.” Trystan straightened and made his way across the room, carefully avoiding contact with the bodies. “Maybe we’ll find something. And we can make sure they didn’t report us.”
“And if they did?” Delaney waited where she was as the two of them began accessing the various computers in the room. She hadn’t had enough lessons with the tutor Trystan had hired for her to be able to read their language. Maybe that was something she should consider changing.
“No one’s come for us yet,” Ruckus said, clicking away at a counter that looked like a giant keyboard with five times as many keys.
“They didn’t get any messages out. But—” Trystan swore and pulled away from the computer he’d been searching.
“What?” Delaney moved closer.
“Tars,” he said. “They were Tars.”
“I thought you handled the Tars.” Delaney frowned at Trystan. “Back in Kilma.”
“It was a setup,” Trystan told them, smoothing his hair back in frustration. “One organized by my father.”
To get him away from Delaney. Made sense. She took a deep breath, tried to think past the anger and the lingering fear she still felt about that entire situation. Dwelling wasn’t going to help them figure this out.
“He was using them.”
“Still is, apparently.” Ruckus abandoned the console he’d been searching and joined them. “But from the sounds of it, they knew who they were attacking. Do you think the Rex knows?”
Delaney held her breath while Trystan thought it over. If his father did know, they were screwed. In order for this to work, they needed to be the ones to tell Tilda about Olena. If the Rex beat them to it, who knew what kinds of lies he’d spin?
“If he knows I’m alive and Olena is dead,” she said, “that means you aren’t safe, Trystan.”
“He doesn’t know. If he did, he would have sent a lot more than one measly ship after us. No”—he shook his head—“this was a coincidence. He must have left the Tars with instructions to attack should they ever see the Ander’s ship. My father knows that Ruckus had friends in the Vakar army, and in the palace.”
“You think this was just a precaution?” She wasn’t sure if that made her feel any better.
“They didn’t receive any order
s, or send any messages,” he reminded her. “And they’re too far for their fittings to have worked. That means they were operating on old orders.”
“The one thing we know for certain is that the Tars are working for the Rex,” Ruckus pointed out.
“Back in Kilma, all the Tars I spoke to clearly had no idea about my father’s plans,” Trystan said. “They’d been used. If they have been working for my father this whole time, I don’t think they’re aware of it.”
Leave it to the Rex to manipulate a group from behind the sidelines, having them do all his dirty work so he could keep his hands clean. Had he been responsible for everything the Tars had done, or just a few events here and there? How far did his reach with them go?
“Delaney is cold. You should take her back to the ship,” Trystan said after a moment of silence, scanning the circular room. “I’ll do a final search to ensure we’re not missing anything. We can discuss what to do with this information later.”
Ruckus lifted a dark brow. “You want us to leave you here? Alone?”
Trystan scowled and flung out his arms. “In a destroyed, empty craft? Enlighten me, Ander: What is it exactly you think I’m going to do? What nefarious plot have you imagined I’ve come up with in the past five minutes we’ve been standing here?”
“All right.” Delaney so didn’t want to deal with this, especially because, as he’d said, she was cold. Already it was getting hard to feel her stiff fingers. “But be back in ten.”
The Zane held her gaze a moment, and then nodded.
“I mean it, Trystan. If I have to come back out here to find you, I’m going to be pissed.”
“Go.” He angled his chin toward the hall at her back. “I’m right behind you.”
Ruckus clearly didn’t like it, but when Delaney took his hand, she didn’t really leave him much choice but to go with her.
* * *
“HERE, LISSA.” Sanzie handed her a mug with steam coming out the top. The liquid within was a pale pink.
“Thank you.” Delaney smiled at her, and then blew across the top of the pra, eager to take a sip and warm herself. The heating system on Ruckus’s ship had finally kicked in to full power, and even though she hadn’t been inside long, already she could feel herself begin to thaw.
They were in the cockpit, with her seated next to Fawna while Ruckus stood nearby. He’d been uncomfortably quiet on their way back, but Delaney hadn’t pressed him to speak. Eventually, he’d tell her what was wrong, and besides … It probably had something to do with the Zane.
“Take this,” Sanzie grumbled, practically tossing the mug she held in her other hand at Ruckus. She refused to meet his eye, and kept the tight expression firmly in place.
“All clear.” Trystan chose that moment to arrive, making his way up the ramp and into the cockpit with an easy gait. He’d stopped to change into a different set of clothes, and had left the coat off. “Have we come up with any solutions to our possible problem?”
“I’m scanning the area for any other nasty surprises,” Fawna answered without turning from her controls. “Unfortunately, I can’t check more than a few miles in any direction. We’re still far enough from the capital city and the palace that it could pose an issue.”
“We could stumble into another ambush without even realizing it,” Delaney figured. Great. “We need to get to Tilda. Soon.”
They only had until tomorrow, and then Trystan had to get back to Carnage or risk tipping off the Rex. She was still trying to work out a way they could avoid having him go at all, hating the thought of him with that asshole, but so far the only thing she could come up with was gaining the Basilissa’s support. If they were able to do that, perhaps Trystan wouldn’t have to go.
“Can you get us into Varasow?” Ruckus moved closer to Fawna, checking her screens as the scan continued. There were a couple of clusters of heat dots, similar to the ones they’d spotted too late earlier.
Delaney counted them, seeing that there were at least five areas they needed to avoid. They’d gotten lucky before, and there was no guarantee they’d get lucky again. There was also no way of knowing if those blips were Vakar ships, or if they were secretly being run by more Tars.
She took a deep sip of her drink, needing a moment to separate herself from her thoughts. The fact of the matter was, they didn’t have any choice but to continue forward. There was no one else on this planet they could go to, no one who stood even a remote chance against the Rex. And Tilda deserved to know what had happened to her daughter, the one she’d done so many awful things in the name of.
All of that pain and suffering, for nothing. With Olena dead, the Vakar throne was once again without an heir.
“I can,” Fawna was answering Ruckus, and Delaney came out of her head just in time to catch her words. “On the outskirts, in any case. If the Zane is correct, and we were attacked because they recognized the ship, it’s too risky going farther in.”
Ruckus nodded. “Set us down as close as you can to Varasow, and we’ll foot it from there.” He glanced at Delaney and Trystan. “It’s going to put us behind schedule, but this is the best we can do.”
“Agreed.” Trystan turned to her, then noticed what she was holding, plucking the mug from between her hands. When he saw what was inside, he made a face, but risked a sip anyway. A second later he licked his lips and handed it back. “Surprisingly, that wasn’t awful.”
“You’ve never had it before?” she asked, glad to have it back to keep her hands warm.
“Pra is traditionally a Vakar drink—” he started to explain.
“We’re going to need to change your hair,” Ruckus interrupted.
“Excuse me?” The switch in topic caught her off guard.
“He’s right.” Trystan scowled. “Being a redhead will give you away.”
Seeing as how she was the only one currently on the planet who had red hair. Crap. She fiddled with a strand, twisting it around her finger. This wouldn’t be the first time she’d had a physical change in order to survive Xenith. Before, though, they’d had the device to help make the alteration easy.
“I don’t suppose you guys keep a bottle of hair dye on this ship?”
“It’s not as popular a custom here as it is on Earth.” Ruckus shrugged apologetically. “We’ll have to wait until we’re in the city. There’s a place we can go; it’s just a matter of getting there undetected.”
“What about you two?” The Ander had been marked as a traitor after his rescue attempt, and the Zane, in his royal uniform, would be impossible not to recognize.
“I have an idea.”
CHAPTER 8
A couple of hours later Fawna dropped them off in a forest on the edge of what was supposedly Varasow.
As the capital of Vakar, Varasow was home to the Ond family, and housed many spectacles—or so she’d been told. It wasn’t large in comparison to most cities on Earth, but it had a vast population. As they approached, Delaney ran the numbers through her head, figuring that at least a fifth of the Vakar people had to live here.
She was tucked beneath a heavy hooded jacket, a deep forest green. The hood shielded her face so that only her mouth was visible. It also had the annoying side effect of making it practically impossible for her to see anything herself, and she had to be carefully led forward by one of the guys. At least through the forest she’d been able to keep the hood tipped back enough, but now that they were closing in on the city, there was too great a risk she’d be spotted.
“This was a terrible idea,” Trystan grumbled from her side for the hundredth time since stepping off the ship. He was helping to lead her, his hand at her elbow, and though he was gentle, it was impossible not to note the annoyance simmering beneath his surface.
“You look fine,” she tried—also for the hundredth time—but he growled.
“I look ridiculous.”
Ruckus had pulled out a set of dusty old clothing, non–military issue, and given it to the Zane. He seemed to get a real kick
out of the fact that they were still in traditional Vakar greens and blacks. All they were missing were the gold embellishments.
Ironically, it wasn’t that he was going to have to dress in the colors of his enemy that bothered Trystan. Nope. The holes and crooked collar on the shirt made him cringe, as did the permanent stains on the black pants.
He’d asked Ruckus what the purple blotches had been caused by, and had received only a laugh in response. Delaney sort of felt bad for him, but there was nothing that could be done about it. He needed a disguise, and this was as good as any. Especially since Ruckus had donned clothes in a similar style.
“It’s only until we take care of my hair,” she reminded Trystan. They’d decided having the Zane walking around dressed in his royal uniforms would draw too much attention. It wouldn’t be a big deal once she was no longer a redhead, but until then, they didn’t want to risk being seen and him having to explain who the strange hooded woman with him was.
Especially if word somehow got to his dad.
Trystan was carrying a bag over his shoulder with three sets of Kint uniforms for them to change into as soon as they’d taken care of her hair.
“Ruckus is going to have to pretend to be one of your guards,” Delaney said, “and you don’t see him complaining.”
“I am not complaining,” Trystan mumbled, automatically discrediting his words.
“Almost there,” Ruckus called, and with a start Delaney realized he’d somehow moved ahead of them.
Damn hood.
“We’ll be entering the city in roughly three minutes,” Trystan told her, not that he needed to. Though it was late in the afternoon, the city sounded very much alive.
With her head down, Delaney tried to match all the sounds she heard to something familiar, but was only able to with a few things. Talking people, for one, were obvious. She made out snippets of conversation as they moved deeper in, distracted some by the changing ground beneath her feet. They’d been walking over grass up until this point, but now everything was black marble. It glittered gold wherever the light hit, like someone had dumped a vat of the metal into the mixture.
Within Ash and Stardust Page 8
