by Pearl Foxx
Suddenly, Kinyi’s hands popped free. She tumbled forward and would have smashed her face against the cell’s door if Tane hadn’t caught her hips, his grip digging into her hip bones.
“That actually worked?” She puffed out a breath and raised her hands to inspect her newfound freedom. Her wrists were red and had the beginnings of a few swelling blisters, but Tane hadn’t cut her or burned her, which was far better than she’d hoped for.
“You didn’t think it would work?”
She lifted her eyes to find Tane staring at her with raised eyebrows. She shrugged. “Not really. I just thought it would keep us busy while we thought of another way to escape.”
He flexed his shoulders. “Since you’re the mastermind, how do you plan on getting my wrists undone?”
“We don’t need to free your wrists. We just need your acid.”
All humor vanished from his face. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I will bring this entire battleship down.”
She rolled her eyes. “We don’t need your fire. Just your acid.” She twisted around and ran her finger along the door’s locking mechanism. It was one of those fancy biotech readers the humans on Earth loved so much, but they weren’t designed to sustain acidic liquids spewed at high heats. “We just need enough to fry all the sensitive wiring in here.”
She tapped the lock for good measure, but Tane shook his head.
“Using my acid is different from partially shifting. I don’t have control in that mental state. It could come out as fire.”
“You’ve never had a mate either, and I’m here now. I’ll keep you under control. It’ll be acid, not fire.”
“There’s no way in hell I’m putting you in danger—”
Kinyi pushed forward and planted a kiss on Tane’s mouth. She kept it short enough that they didn’t get distracted, but long enough to shut him up.
She sat back on her heels. “Use your acid, Tane. We don’t have time for you to pussy out.”
His eyes flashed black. “I’m not a pussy.”
“Then let’s get out of here.”
She shifted out of the way, scooting beside Tane so he could shoulder his way close to the lock. When he was in position, he took a shuddering breath. She placed a hand on his shoulder. If it came down to her having to keep him in control, she hoped she’d be up to the task.
Tane’s body shivered. He lowered his mouth close to the lock and took a long, slow inhale.
Kinyi closed her eyes and focused on the tremulous connection tying her mind to his. She felt his vulnerability, his doubt. She felt the moment the fire wanted to rise in his throat, and she felt his answering joy. The burn felt right. He’d missed it. The flames tasted like home and war and flying and everything he loved.
For a horrible second, she thought he was going to breathe fire.
But when he exhaled, acid spat from his mouth and struck the lock. The mechanism’s metal latch started to melt beneath his dripping, sizzling liquid.
On his next inhale, Kinyi said, “More.”
This time, when he exhaled, the acid smoked against the metal, slashing and cutting the metal into jagged shards. Tane flinched back from the heat.
The acrid smell of seared metal and mechanics filled the brig. If any humans walked in, she and Tane would be screwed. But the brig’s door remained closed.
Kinyi leaned forward and tested the lock, prying at it with her fingers even though the metal still sizzled.
“Here. Let me.”
Tane raised a booted foot, and before Kinyi knew what to expect, he kicked the ever-loving shit out of the lock. The metal screeched loud enough to wake the dead but didn’t budge.
“Better hurry. That’s going to attract some attention.”
“Good,” Tane grunted as he kicked the door again. The hinges bent against the lock’s hold. “They can unlock the other door for us.”
“Shit. Why didn’t I think of that?”
She got into position beside him and added a few kicks of her own. The lock had begun to dry, but she heard the mechanics whining inside. Each strike jolted up her leg. She began to think they’d wasted time trying to burn the lock when they should have just kicked it open, but as she paused to catch her breath, the lock hissed and released, springing the door open so hard it almost snapped back on the hinges and locked them in again.
Tane leaned forward and caught it with his shoulders, his hands still cuffed behind his back. He awkwardly climbed out of the cell and held the door for her with his foot. He positioned himself at one of the lock’s jagged metal bits and started sawing at his skinwraps.
Kinyi stood as the brig door swung open and a soldier built like a mawfish powered in. “What the hell is—”
She pounced on him, ripped the soldier’s gun from his hands, and tossed it back to Tane, who’d just finished freeing his hands. With one slam against the wall, the soldier slumped in her arms. She slid the young man to the ground before glancing back at Tane.
“Worked like a charm.”
“If you say so,” Tane said with a shuddering breath.
She straddled the soldier’s unconscious body and ripped off his badge. “Put him in the cell without his comm unit. By the time anyone finds him, we’ll be long gone.”
Tane grabbed the soldier’s boots and dragged him into the cell. He tossed out the radio, which Kinyi picked up and pocketed so they could hear the military chatter. After locking the cell door, Tane turned back to her. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”
“No explosions. Not yet anyway.”
He sighed.
The brig’s door opened with a swipe of the soldier’s badge, and Kinyi checked both directions down the narrow hall before motioning for Tane to follow her.
Fortunately, the battleship’s lower holds were mostly vacant. They only had to hide a few times as soldiers passed. After checking a station map from a vidscreen on the wall, Kinyi led them toward the aft shuttle hold.
The battleship transported countless smaller ships and shuttles, and if her guess was right, the ships would all be stored together. A door would also be open to this area if the humans had any sense. She doubted they planned on landing on a hostile planet without quick access to weapons and ships.
The badge opened the hold’s door, and Kinyi stepped inside. She grinned. “I’m amazing.”
Beside her, Tane let out a low whistle. “The humans aren’t fucking around, are they?”
Below them, rows and rows of ships, shuttles, and Falconers filled the massive multi-floor hold. The compartment likely ran the entire breadth and length of the battleship, which meant thousands of ships waited to rain fire down on Kladuu.
A simmering rage sparked in Kinyi. “We should burn them all.”
Tane took her hand and squeezed it. Reluctantly, she peeled her gaze off the hated Falconers and looked up at him.
“We need to get to Kladuu. Once there, we’ll get off this ship and go straight to the hive.”
“But if they don’t have ships—”
“They’ll just fly up new ones, and I can’t set all these on fire without completely shifting. It’s not enough to cut off the monster’s legs. We have to go for the head.”
“Gideon,” Kinyi growled.
“Exactly.”
“Let’s find a place to hide, preferably where they won’t catch us again.”
She stalked down the narrow gangway to the floor of the hold. Tane’s steps echoed off the metal behind her. “You should have been paying more attention to your surroundings,” she teased.
He snorted. “Believe me when I say the only thought in my head was of your tight, wet—”
“Stop talking,” Kinyi hissed and shot him a look over her shoulder. “If they sneak up on us again, this will go down as the worst stowaway mission in the history of the universe.”
“We’ve already been caught once. What’s the worst that can happen?”
She jogged the last few steps down to the main
floor and glanced around. “They toss us out of the airlock mid-flight?”
“Good point.” He sniffed the air. “I don’t smell any humans.”
“I can’t smell anything over the fumes of these horrible things.”
The ships were much larger up close. Their sharp angles and plasteel casings made them appear like beasts with sharp fangs. Kinyi shuddered. She remembered all too well watching ships like these flash through the wormhole above the hive’s mountain and drop bombs from the sky. Even months later, she knew the hive was still working on repairing itself and recovering from the loved ones they’d lost that day.
And now Gideon was on her planet. Soon, he would have an entire legion of humans, ships, and weapons to use at his disposal. The thought made her sick. How were they going to stand a chance against that sort of firepower? They were shifters. They had talons and fur and scales and tails, not powerful cannon guns and ships faster than the speed of sound.
“I can smell your worry, you know.”
Kinyi wove through the ships, aiming toward an exterior wall, or, at least, where she thought one might be. The hold was huge. “I’m just hungry.”
Tane stopped her with a hand on her upper arm and spun her around. “We’re going to help them. Gideon won’t get away with this.”
She scrunched up her nose. “Since when do you care what happens to Kladuu?”
His grip tightened, just a warning, nothing that hurt. “I’ve always cared. Just in a different way than you do. But it means something to you, and you mean something to me. That’s enough, Kinyi. Sometimes, that’s enough.”
She pulled her arm free. If she continued standing here, staring up at his sincere, caring face, she would get far too emotional, and now was not the time for emotions. She needed to be cold, stoic. Kickass.
“Stop being sweet,” she said and continued toward the outer wall. “It doesn’t suit you.”
Through a gap in the ships, she spotted an exterior wall and nearly stumbled to a stop.
From behind her, Tane said, “Holy shit.”
There weren’t simply doors or ramps down in the hold. An entire section of wall was transparent plasteel doors. As Kinyi walked toward them, she had a lilting sense of vertigo, like she might tumble right out into space.
Beyond the doors, the area they passed through was brightly lit and burning. Nebulous gas and flares burned her eyes. Beneath her feet, the ship shuddered as it adjusted its direction, turning toward the fiery planet.
“Saturn,” Tane said beside her. His violet eyes danced with excitement as he stared out at the most massive fireball she’d ever seen.
She leaned against his shoulder. “I never knew the madness could make someone love fire so much.”
Smiling sadly, he kept staring out the huge expanse of windows, his dark skin flickering in the shadows of the firestorm outside. “Fire is the most beautiful form of destruction.”
The words were sad on his tongue and held far too much weight, like he was picturing his own demise in his future. Kinyi’s heart ached.
She elbowed him hard enough in the side to get his attention. “No, I’m the most beautiful form of destruction, and don’t you forget it.”
Her joke pulled a chuckle from him, and she let out a small breath of relief she hoped didn’t travel down the thread of their connection.
The ship shuddered again, and they looked back out.
“We must be close to the wormhole,” he said quietly.
As if his words had conjured it into being, the wormhole’s edge shimmered in the windows by the front of the ship.
“Will we even fit?” Kinyi bit her lip in worry.
“Dimensions, like time, warp in a wormhole.”
She didn’t have time to tell him she thought he was full of shit before darkness consumed them. She gasped as pitch-black darkness fell. The only light came from the safety strips glowing along the ship’s floor. She grabbed Tane’s hand and held on as the ship lurched and shuddered beneath them.
Then, as if it had only been a blink of the eye, bright light burst back across the windows and two moons hung high overhead.
Kinyi sucked in a breath, her heart pounding. She knew those moons.
The ship turned as if putting on a private show just for her and Tane.
Kladuu came into a view, with its tall mountains peaked with snow and vast oceans that made up most of the planet. She saw the red sand of the Arakids’ desert and the fog-shrouded jungles of the Katu as they swooped closer.
Beside her, Tane shivered.
“I vowed to never return,” he whispered.
Kinyi raised his hand to her lips and placed a soft kiss on his weathered skin. “Welcome home.”
Chapter Fourteen
Tane
The battleship swooped through the Kladuu’s atmosphere, breaking through a small bank of clouds, and hovered above the glimmering teal ocean near the Katu’s jungle. Tane didn’t know the area well because he’d spent most of his airtime fighting in the Arakid war and he’d never seen the Hylan city in person, but the glass behemoth of a castle rising from the waters couldn’t be anything other than the Vydal.
“It’s so gaudy,” Kinyi said with her face pressed close to the window glass.
When he didn’t respond, she glanced back at him, her pretty face creased with worry. Somewhere along the way of their daring mission, she’d lost the bandage on the side of her face, and the weeping wounds were red. He hated that she would return to her people without her markings. He hated that they’d see her like this. He was so tense and on edge that if any Draqon even looked at her as less than because of her missing scales, he would break their face.
“It looks like a million little daggers pointing at the sky,” he said, turning his focus back to the city of glass beneath them.
Kinyi shuddered. “You’re right. Maybe the Hylas wanted it to look like their teeth.”
Beneath the ship, the ocean rippled, sending white-capped waves crashing outward in a wide circle. They were close enough to the shore that Tane could watch as the massive waves battered the closest foliage and trees on the beach. At the city’s edge, the water splashed against the glass walls and white froth spilled over the numerous walkways.
As they descended, more Hylas appeared around the massive city, gathering in the castle’s windows, or along the pathways leading out to the smaller wooden huts, or even swimming close to the ship with their scaled tails flipping back and forth in the water.
It was almost dusk on Kladuu, the two moons rising high overhead as the sun folded into the horizon. The sunset’s colors bloomed like a seeping wound across the sky, garish with reds and deep purples. It was a sky worthy of battle, and before he knew it, he was thinking about what it would be like to fly through those colors, to burst through the clouds, with the sun on his scales and Kinyi on his back.
He blinked, knowing without needing to see Kinyi’s face that his eyes had gone completely black. He scented his madness in the air like lightning in a storm.
“This won’t end well.” He took a deep breath and felt his partial shift subside with his exhale.
“If we knew it would go well, it wouldn’t be fun.”
Before he could respond, the ship settled above the water, right off the city’s edge, and a powerful rumble crescendoed beneath their feet. The stabilizers descended to keep the ship in a hover position.
“Looks like this is our stop,” he said, hoping his voice didn’t betray his nerves.
If it did, Kinyi didn’t embarrass him by acknowledging it. “Then we better hide in case the humans come to their ships before the ramps descend.”
But she’d hardly finished her sentence before the massive windows wrapped around the entire hold began to whine. Together, they stepped back, giving the plasteel walls plenty of room to open. The panes lifted upward on top hinges, angling so far back that they disappeared against the ship. A fresh ocean breeze gusted in and greeted them with the heavy smell of brine.
/> Tane stepped forward and looked down. Beside him, Kinyi let out a low whistle. “That’s a long way down.”
The drop to the ocean had to be nearly fifty feet. The waves, which he knew were sizeable considering the way they hit the beach about a mile out from the ship, looked like tiny white dots. Farther away, toward the front of the ship, he spotted a pod of Hylas swimming out to meet the human soldiers.
“We should go before the Hylas come any closer. I’m not an expert on nasty sea creatures, but I’m pretty sure they’ll hear us splashing around if they’re close.”
He stepped up to the edge of the opening and a gust of wind met him. He licked his lips, tasting salt and the fresh, crisp scent of Kladian air. His gut twisted. Kinyi had been right—this place was home, no matter how far he ran from it.
“Wait.” Kinyi grabbed his arm. “I’m not that great of a swimmer.”
“Seriously?” He couldn’t imagine her not being good at something.
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s not like I’m scared or anything.” Her scowl deepened. “Well, maybe. But it’s not like the hot springs back at the hive are deep and all the lakes are frozen! I was learning to ride, not swim.”
He grinned, which only hardened her glare. Turning his back to her, he reached over his shoulder and slapped his back. “Hop on.”
“What?”
“Get on. You can ride me down.”
“That’s a good idea. Shift and fly us away. They’ll never catch us in time.”
He glanced back to see whether she was serious, but now she was the one grinning. “Very funny.”
“Just making sure you’re paying attention.” She climbed onto his back and cinched her legs around his waist. He grabbed her ankles as her arms came around his neck.
“Ready?”
“Just don’t drop me. Or let me drown.”
Mimicking her motion from earlier, he took her hand and kissed the soft skin of her palm. “Never.”
He stepped over the edge.
