Starbreaker

by Amanda Bouchet

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2020 by Amanda Bouchet

  Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks

  Cover art by Chris Cocozza

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from A Promise of Fire

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Callie,

  Our chances of meeting were slim, so I’m pretty sure

  the universe gave us to each other on purpose.

  Thank you for being my friend.

  Chapter 1

  TESS

  Where’s Daniel Ahern?

  My leg bounced under the table as I discreetly scanned the crowded restaurant for the hundredth time. Our contact wasn’t here. Fashionably late crashed and burned a good forty minutes ago, and I was ready to take care of my own business now instead of his.

  “Ahern’s not going to show,” I muttered tightly into my com.

  “We don’t know that.” Shade’s deep voice rumbled softly from his wristband into my earpiece. My eyes flicked over to where he sat, meeting his honey-brown gaze from across a sea of heads and indistinct chatter. “Sit tight.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to settle my jangling nerves. Movement blurred in my peripheral vision. My lungs squeezed as I darted a look at the door. A soberly dressed unsmiling trio walked in. Not who I was waiting for.

  “You look like you’re about to jump out of your skin,” Shade murmured. “Act normal. Eat your soup.”

  I scowled. My lunch had a better chance of landing on Shade’s head than in my stomach if he told me to eat again.

  “I can’t.” My necklace picked up my almost inaudible whisper, transmitting it not only to Shade but to Jax and Fiona, who were somewhere outside, and to Merrick, who’d stayed on the ship. “We shouldn’t even be on this mission.”

  Shade’s soft grunt of agreement didn’t change the fact that we were stuck. “Can’t say it seemed as though we had much of a choice.”

  No, and that was just one of the weird things about it. We weren’t spies. The Endeavor wasn’t a ship housing soldiers and moles. We were Nightchasers on a big old cargo cruiser, rebels who brought food, medicine, and other supplies to people who needed it around the galaxy. This wasn’t a mission for us. So why did the head of the rebel council suddenly decide that we were the ones who needed to go meet some guy about freeing his incarcerated wife from the Dark Watch?

  I toyed with my soup to look busy, little surges of adrenaline spiking inside me and keeping me on edge. I’d been here for an hour and had worked up a sweat and lost my appetite—the opposite of what you wanted in a restaurant where the food smelled so freaking good.

  While Shade polished off his lunch, I used my spoon to poke at a few recognizable vegetables and what the menu called beef. Steak and beef were just generic terms for red meat these days. I didn’t know what kind of cattle—another generic term—they raised on Korabon for food. I’d never been here before, had never planned on coming. Shouldn’t be here now. Time was running out.

  I set the spoon back in the bowl. A glance toward the basket of thickly sliced trigrain bread made my stomach flip over, rejecting even that. Anxiety killed my appetite as fast as a Dark Watch patrol showing up and barking out “Background checks!” to everyone in the room.

  Shade sighed. “Baby, it’s more suspicious not to eat.”

  I sighed back at him. “It’ll make the return trip if I try.” The few bites I’d managed weren’t sitting well. “Do you really want a soupatastrophe on your hands?”

  His quick smile blazed across the room. It ignited a little flame in my chest that helped ease some of the tightness there. “Given the choice, there are other things I’d rather have in my hands.”

  “I didn’t say in, I said on. There’s quite a distinction.”

  “Ah. My mistake.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin, probably hiding a grin.

  I mashed my lips together and forgot to be nervous for a second. I even managed a bite. Just one, though.

  Shade took a moment to look at me hard. I got the message he couldn’t say out loud over the coms. Eat. Keep your strength up. He and I were the only ones who knew I’d drawn more of my unique A1 blood.

  Or maybe it wasn’t that unique. Maybe these Mornavail I’d heard about were out there somewhere, healing faster and never getting sick. Like me—an evolutionary step up. And also like me, hiding from the Galactic Overseer, who wanted our blood to create an army of super soldiers.

  Fun times across the eighteen Sectors. My grimace had nothing to do with my soup this time.

  “My picture was just all over a database for bounty hunters. Now, you have my enormous bounty on your head. How can you eat?” We should be lying low and delivering the food we still had for the Outer Zones, not sitting in a restaurant on a highly monitored rock.

  “I may be new to life in the Dark, but I’m a fast learner. Fresh food only comes around so often in a space rat’s life. It’s tragic to waste it.”

  “Shade’s right,” Fiona whispered over the coms. “Eat the damn soup,” she hissed.

  “Shhhh!” Jax scolded quietly.

  A laugh churned inside me. Briefly, my eyes collided with Shade’s again. It was hard not to focus on him. A handsome man treating me to a meal in a not entirely shabby establishment had never happened before today. Too bad we couldn’t sit together and only one of us had an appetite.

  “Fine.” I steeled myself and took a bite so that everyone would stop hounding me. “Happy?”

  Shade huffed, evidently unconvinced.

  I forced down another mouthful, chewing and swallowing care
fully. At least my battle with the soup got my mind off Ahern. And the food would do me good. The six bags of blood I’d taken from my own veins in as many days hadn’t totally wiped me out, but I hadn’t been able to completely shake it off yet, either. Beef—or whatever this was—would help.

  The two women occupying the table next to Shade’s threw him flirty glances and leaned over to ask him a question about desserts. The waitress immediately joined in, having already attempted to draw Shade into conversation twice. I got it. It wasn’t often that tall, dark, and smoldering sat alone in a restaurant.

  They finally left him alone after deciding on a choco seed dessert loaf to share. The waitress went to get it.

  “Wow, you really are a wanted man,” I grumbled, a hint of tartness in my voice.

  Shade’s small snort vibrated over the com, tickling my eardrum. “I want their dessert.”

  “You are their dessert.” He was six foot two of solid yumminess with a healthy appetite, broad shoulders, a square jaw, and scarred knuckles that said I can protect you with my bare hands. I’d even bitten him and knew for a fact he tasted good. “But trust me, neither wants to share.”

  Humor sparked in his eyes, and for the first time in an hour, I forgot why we were here.

  The happy lapse didn’t last. My heart kicked when the door opened again. An older couple walked in, and the waitress for my corner threw me a dirty look, clearly wanting me to get lost so she could give my table to someone who might actually eat something.

  I’d love to, I growled inside my head. If Daniel Ahern would just show up.

  If Ahern wanted us to rescue his scientist wife from her extended stay in the imperial prison system, he needed to get his rebel butt in here and give me his new intel before a Dark Watch patrol spotted two of the galaxy’s Most Wanted through the floor-to-ceiling windows, stormed in, and Shade and I were toast.

  I chewed my lower lip, wondering what was really going on. “Why the short notice? Why us?” I murmured. We only just found out about this mission, giving us barely enough time to wrap up the ship improvements Shade had been working on in the Fold, make the jump to Korabon, dig out the old coms I kept aboard the Endeavor, and get a few hours of sleep. We’d arrived in the dead of night here and couldn’t do much else.

  “Been asking myself the same questions, starshine.” Shade’s low curse told me he was still livid about not having more time to prepare. “Giving us this little to work with feels like we’re being set up to fail.”

  “I don’t believe that.” I couldn’t.

  The sudden attention from Loralie Harris and her rebel council didn’t surprise me, even if the last-minute nature of this odd assignment did. We’d just managed the coup of the century, stealing Overseer Novalight’s entire supply of super-soldier serum and bringing it to the rebel leaders in the Fold. We’d dealt the biggest blow in living memory to the tyrant I used to call Dad, and now we were apparently special enough to get “the good missions”—just when I needed to be left alone.

  Still, that didn’t explain the lack of information or support tech. All we got from the rebel council was a picture of Ahern and a meeting place. No handy gadgets. Nothing about Korabon or the Dark Watch here. Maybe it didn’t matter. We weren’t tourists, and the military on Korabon would be like anywhere else: all over the place.

  Right now, I was more worried about bounty hunters coming after my boyfriend. I probably wasn’t all that recognizable outside of Shade’s ex-circle of elite hunters. Images of the Overseer’s supposedly long-dead daughter popping up on screens across the galaxy would raise questions that even a shut up or blow up dictator might have trouble answering. But Nathaniel Bridgebane, top Dark Watch general and the Overseer’s right-hand man, had threatened to go after Shade with a vengeance—and my uncle always did what he said.

  I stole a look through the windows but didn’t see Jaxon or Fiona. They’d hunkered down somewhere discreet and weren’t muddying up the coms with unnecessary chatter like we were.

  My mouth puckered. I was more than ready for all of us to get back to the Endeavor.

  To hell with it. There had to be a time limit on waiting for informants. I couldn’t sit here anymore, stewing in my own fear about getting where I needed to go with those six bags of blood by tomorrow, universal time, or I’d lose one of the most important people in my life. I was done here.

  I wiggled a hand into my back pocket and grabbed some of the currency units Shade had handed me earlier to cover the restaurant charges. I was broke after paying for repairs on the Endeavor. Paying Shade, actually. But he was finding ways to give the money back, such as buying and installing top-notch hot-water tanks for the Endeavor’s kitchen and bathrooms and getting my room a bigger bed.

  Four nights together—that was all we’d had since I decided to give Shade a second chance.

  Bringing cat toys to Bonk had helped melt some of my lingering reservations after Shade nearly cashed me in to the Dark Watch. On our first day in the Fold, he’d come back from hardware shopping with a pair of rodent-shaped mechanical playthings that did tight little flips. Bonk kept presenting the now half-mangled fuzzy gray robots to me like gifts.

  I caught Shade’s eye again, murmuring, “Five more minutes and I’m done.” The coins I’d counted out hit the table with a clink. I put what was left back in my pocket.

  Merrick’s voice came through for the first time along with a faint crackle of static. My coms were shit—a hodgepodge of old pieces we’d connected to the same signal. “Something must’ve held Ahern up. You can’t leave until he shows.”

  I shook my head in silent rejection. I could, and I would. Either Mareeka’s or Surral’s life hung in the balance while I sat in a restaurant in Koralight Crown, one of the ten most disliked cities in the galaxy—or so I’d read during my negative two seconds of prep for this.

  “Easy, partner. You’ve got this.” Crazy as it seemed, Jaxon’s voice helped. I still couldn’t see him—he might be a block away or five—but I could feel him inside me, reassuring me and untangling some of the knots in my stomach. We’d been partners in prison. We were partners on the Endeavor. There was no one I trusted more than Jax.

  “Just sit tight, Tess. A little longer, that’s all.” His voice lowered to the soothing tones I remembered from when I was nineteen, terrified for my life, and tossed down a mine shaft on top of him. Keeping me safe on Hourglass Mile, both above and below ground, had been the only thing that stopped Jax from totally disintegrating in the face of his grief after just having lost his wife and children. “Fi and I can see you through the windows now. We’ve got your back.”

  After a slight hesitation, I gave a quick nod. It mirrored the one Shade gave me from across the restaurant, reinforcing what Jax said.

  As much as I wanted to give up on Ahern, they were right. I couldn’t bail on the first job the rebel leaders had specifically assigned to my crew, even if interrupting a prison transfer was an odd choice of tasks for us. Nightchasers weren’t part of the rebel forces. More like the rebel periphery. We pursued our own missions, mostly scouring the galaxy for food and medicine. We believed in a more equitable distribution of both, even if that meant theft. We also believed in training and prep work, so being slapped with our first spy mission only hours ago and just when I needed to be somewhere else really sucked.

  Shade wasn’t impressed. I’d heard him mutter earlier that poor planning and shitty gear were how alive people turned up dead.

  I wiped my clammy palms on my lap. The need to move spidered down my spine and into my legs. The thought of missing my clandestine—and frankly treasonous—blood exchange with my asshole uncle was eating a hole in my hide.

  How much longer do I have to wait? I didn’t want to ask. Everyone would just tell me to stay put.

  Merrick would be so much better at this. He’d done some spy work for the rebellion, but then he got caught, shot up again
st his will with the Overseer’s experimental enhancer, and turned into a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall, faster-than-the-eye-can-blink, barrel-chested, muscle-banded super soldier who’d escaped the Dark Watch. The big black man didn’t exactly blend in.

  Soft and low, Shade’s voice whispered over the com again. “You’re on, starshine.”

  My head whipped up—the exact opposite of playing it cool. Daniel Ahern walked in, or a man I was ninety-nine percent sure was him. Adrenaline ripped through me. I’d been waiting for this, just wanting it to be over, but now, I didn’t feel ready in the least.

  This guy fit the picture Loralie Harris had shown us in the Fold. Tall and slim, with a head of thick silver hair, a long face, and green eyes. Eyes the color of grass, according to the rebel leader. Grass colors varied from planet to planet, and a lot of places didn’t have a single blade, but when people said something like that, they meant green. Generalizations always went back to Earth. It was our one common denominator after generations of expansion across the stars.

  Ahern swept a casual glance around the restaurant. Only two people dined alone. His eyes lighted on Shade first but didn’t stop. They got to me and locked on. Someone must have told him to look for a woman.

  What else does he know? More than we did wouldn’t be a stretch.

  He headed straight toward me, and I took him in as he walked. He was about sixty years old, distinguished-looking, and sharply but conventionally dressed. His brown suit and stiff white shirt matched the plain colors the Overseer favored, but he’d folded a rebellious red handkerchief into his breast pocket. It just peeked out and looked like a bloodstain on his chest.

  I swallowed. Logically, there was no reason to fear this meeting—this wasn’t the hard part—but nerves still gripped my throat in a stranglehold.

  Had someone followed him here? Could he have made a dirty deal to exchange me for his wife? What if he wasn’t who I thought, or who he said, or a friend at all? Could it all be lies? It wasn’t as though that hadn’t happened before.

  I glanced at Shade, a sharp jerk yanking at my heart. I trusted only a handful of people or let them anywhere near my personal space, and Shade—the man I fell for with the speed and recklessness of a meteor on a collision course—had messed with that. In the end, he’d saved my life and was trying to make up for his deception, but sometimes, the hurt and betrayal came roaring back and knocked the air from my lungs.