by Frankie Rose
“I’m not a teenager. And what makes you think you’re going home?” My voice is flat and even.
The fighter laughs, wheezes, and then coughs in pain. More blood onto the metal grating. “Oh, trust me. I wouldn’t normally give myself very good odds in this situation. I was told very specifically about what was going to happen today, though, and the story ended with me back in my own bed, busted up and bleeding but very much alive.”
“And you’re prone to believing stories?”
“Only when they’re from a seer.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh. Cold, scathing, unfeeling. I walk over to the view port, looking out at the heavy mantle of space that stretches on and on forever, not really seeing the stars that interrupt the darkness. “There are no more seers, fool. They were wiped out cycles ago. The galaxy’s free of such foolish nonsense now.”
The fighter doesn’t say anything. I turn away from the window and move to stand over him, already itching to take my gloves off. The guy looks up at me, and the fear I saw there when I arrived has now evaporated. It’s infuriating to say the least.
“They said you’d say that,” he tells me, smiling a little. His teeth are red with his own blood. When the last time I shed blood? A strange question—one that I can’t seem to recall the answer to. “They said you wouldn’t listen to me, but that you’d know the truth soon enough.”
“Oh? And how did this seer of yours say that would come about? I’d just decide to take you at your word?”
The fighter shakes his head. He looks down at my hands and pauses for a moment. Then says, “You take off those gloves, and you look inside me. They said it was going to hurt. They said I was going to scream. But in the end, you would see the truth. And you would see…her.”
Electricity floods my nerve endings, relaying adrenalin around my body, faster than light. “Her?”
The fighter just smiles another bloody smile.
“I can make it painless,” I say. “If I feel so inclined. Tell me who you’re talking about, and I’ll be kind.”
“They said you’d say that, too. They told me not to bother, Jass Beylar. They said you’d make it hurt no matter what.”
I consider him for a moment—his ripped clothes and his obviously broken nose. The defiant light in his eye, and the courage pouring off him. I could have been him, I suppose, once upon a time. If the Construct hadn’t found me. If they hadn’t drip-fed me Light until I was addicted to it, so I couldn’t go a single day without it. I could have been a Commonwealth fighter.
Curiosity gets the better of me. “What’s your name?”
He just shakes his head. “What’s the point in asking? You know I’m only going to lie. You know you’ll pull my real name out of me in a second anyway. This all seems so…futile.”
His logic stirs anger deep inside me; I’m not used to my prisoners being this calm. I’m used to them begging for their lives. Pleading. Bargaining with what little they have to make the process a little less unpleasant. Not this fighter, though. No. He believes without a doubt that he will survive this ordeal. He really does think he will be back in his own bed tonight, recovering from his injuries, hurting but otherwise unmolested.
Well, he’s wrong. I aim on showing him just how wrong he is.
I take off my left glove first, and then my right. The fighter’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t shrink away. “Take a deep breath, then, stranger,” I tell him. “And hold it while we become acquainted.”
He screams.
The sound of his agony echoes down countless halls, ringing off the walls of the cold, sterile base, and I get what I am looking for.
Name: Col Pakka.
Home planet: Pirius.
His mission here: Find Jass Beylar.
I let him go, reeling.
Me? I am his mission. I saw it clearly in his mind. His mission, the reason he allowed himself to be captured and brought to the base, was because he needed to get to me. Col, the fighter, looks up at me through wincing, watering eyes and smiles.
“You probably won’t believe this, either,” he says. “But the seer told me we were going to be friends. Good friends.” He shakes his head, breathing heavily. “Even I’m having trouble swallowing that one.”
I don’t respond. I place my hands on him again, needing to see more. Needing to find the glitch in his memories, his knowledge, that will suggest his mind has been tampered with in some way. There is no glitch, though. There’s no fault in his memories. Everything stored within his head is real.
The seer in the long robes, telling him of this precise moment.
The guards, taking Col and bringing him right here, to me.
And her.
And her.
And her.
He’s seen her. Long brown hair, tied back into a complexity of knots and braids.
Dark eyes filled with determination and fire.
Her lips, blushed and parted. Her brow, creased in confusion.
It’s Reza.
THREE
JASS
RAPTOR
I’ve never had to steal anything in the time I’ve been a member of the Construct. Not one thing. The clothes on my back. The food that’s put in front of me every day. The Light in my veins. Any vice or desire I wish to feed is catered to without question or complaint. It feels strange to be rifling through supply shelves and throwing things into a black combat sack.
I want to kill the man standing behind me, heaving and coughing up blood every five seconds, but I can’t. I saw it in his head: there’s only one way to find Reza and that’s through him.
Pirius. I’ve heard of it. A huge planet. A desolate nightmare. Beneath all of the sand that covers every last square click of the planet’s surface, the mantle of the planet’s crust is a honeycomb, a maze of old volcanic tubes back from when the place was still volatile young, fiery thing. It’s a nowhere planet. Unimportant and worthless. We thought it was abandoned centuries ago. The Construct haven’t exactly spent a lot of time mapping out the place. This Col guy doesn’t know where the girl is himself. He only knows where to meet one these purported seers, who will then lead him back to her. If I show up without Col, the seer kills himself before I can get any information out of him. If I show up and Col is even remotely close to death, I’m shit out of luck.
Col groans, clutching at his stomach. “I don’t understand why you want to find her so badly in the first place,” he mutters. “What does the Construct want with her? She’s just a girl.”
I bite my tongue. I don’t know this man. No matter what he says, we’re never going to be friends; the very thought of such a thing is preposterous. I don’t owe him an explanation for my actions. More over, I don’t need to tell him that the Construct doesn’t even know Reza still exists. She cost Stryker an eye. Scarred him for life. They’d put me to death if they knew she’d been alive all this time and I hadn’t shared that information with them. They’d do even worse if they knew that I wasn’t planning on bringing her back to the base as soon as I lay my hands on her, too. At least, I don’t think I am. I don’t know what I’m going to do. She’s like me. Of all the people in this godforsaken galaxy, she is the only person I’ve ever looked in the eye and recognized in some way. When we’re together in our dreams, she consumes me. My blood burns in my goddamn veins for her. I have to find her; that’s all I know.
“Have you met her? Do you know her?” I ask.
Col bobs his head from one side to the other. “Yeah. We’re friends. She’s been on my planet for a long time now. She’s...” He appears to think about his next choice of words. “She’s quiet. Pretty. She keeps to herself. Before the seers moved her anticipation of your arrival, she lived alone on the planet’s surface. Why?”
“None of your business.”
“Ouch.” Col scratches at the back of his neck. “I guess the broody front matches your attire well. Black boots. Black pants. Black cape. I mean, a cape? Isn’t that a little impractical? Doesn’t it get in the way w
hen you’re fighting?”
Swiftly, I spin on my heel and grab him by the throat, thrusting him up into the air, slamming his back against the wall. Col gurgles as I choke him, squeezing the air right out of his lungs. “Okay…point…taken,” he rasps. I release him, letting him go so that he slides down the wall and crumples into a heap on the floor. I go back to grabbing everything I’ll need for a couple of days on Pirius.
“I guess in hindsight it does flare rather dramatically,” Col says.
“Shut up.”
“Sorry. I just mean, the theatrics of a floor-length cape… it’s hard to pull off.”
I clench my hand into a fist at my side, focusing a ring of energy around Col’s neck. I don’t even need to touch him to close off his oxygen supply. He can surely feel the pressure building around his esophagus as I grind my teeth together. “Shut. Up.”
“Okay, okay. Shutting up,” he mumbles.
I have enough food for a few days now. Clothes and a coarse blanket, too. There’s only one more thing I need to collect before we can leave, and we aren’t going to find it here in the supply store. We need to visit my quarters before we can go.
I’ve managed to control my need for Light, I only take it once every three days, but the doctors in the med center don’t know that. They think they still dose me every day. Regis monitors my addiction constantly, keeping tabs on how much I take and when. It serves me to have him think I lean more heavily on the drug than I really do, so I alter the doctor’s memories, along with the records they keep. I show up every morning, pretend to take my dose, stash the vial of clear liquid, and then I leave. I never take the Light in the med center. Never. For twenty to thirty minutes after I dose, I’m vulnerable. The way the Light affects me…nothing can compare. My mind wanders to places and planets unknown to me. I’m filled with power, I’m perhaps at my strongest during that time, but I’m also incapable of reigning myself in. I’m volatile, emotional, and liable to outbursts of violence that even I recognize are wild and uncontrollable.
I always dose in the privacy of my own quarters. The vials of Light I don’t take are stashed there, hidden in a small box beside my bed. How many have I hoarded now? Twenty? Thirty? I can survive for three months with the supply I have saved, which is more than enough. I plan on being gone two days. Three at the most.
“Come with me,” I growl, slinging the combat bag over my shoulder. “And keep up. If anyone sees you bleeding in the hallways, they’re going to want to know why you aren’t dead yet.”
Col grunts as he gets to his feet. “If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of injured.”
“If you haven’t noticed, you’re in the middle of an enemy base and you’re surrounded by thousands of Construct guards, not commonly known for their mercy. Regis told me to kill you. We have to leave before someone realizes I haven’t followed orders and decides to take matters into their own hands.”
I hurry out of the supply store, walking briskly in the direction of my quarters. Col follows behind me; he doesn’t complain again, but I can feel how much pain he is in. It’s rolling off him like smoke from a fire. His discomfort crowds my head as I make my way through the narrow, angular corridors. He remains quiet as we pass one bank of guards and then another.
The cells are down a level, in an entirely different area of The Nexus, so there’s no reason for me to be dragging Col around here. None of the guards question me, though. I have a reputation, after all. I just made a big deal about Regis’s men wanting to know what I’m doing with Col, but they’re not really that stupid. They don’t want their necks snapped or their spines shattered, so they let us pass without comment.
My room is below sixty degrees, just how I like it. Col shivers as I usher him inside and force him to sit in the low-slung chair at the side of my bed. “Damn, it’s freezing in here,” he groans, his teeth chattering together for effect. “I heard you were cold-blooded but this is crazy.”
There’s no point sniping back at his jibe. It’s a waste of time verbally sparring with him, I know that, but it’s tough to keep my mouth shut all the same. The vials of Light are in a small wooden box by the side of my bed. It’s in plain sight; the box opens for no one but me so there’s no risk in leaving it out. I place the box into the combat bag, and then I open my storage locker and start throwing clothes into the bag as well.
“Got anything white in there?” Col asks. Facetious bastard. He can see everything inside the locker is black. I continue gathering shirts and pants, grinding my teeth together.
A moment passes. Then another. Col’s desperate to say something. I can feel his need burning off him, making him glow like a signal flare. Finally, he spits it out. “Pirius is a desert planet, y’know. Hot. Sunny outlook, twenty-eight hours a day, nine days a week. You’ve seen it for yourself inside my mind. How do you propose to hike across a desert in thick black military gear?”
This man knows nothing of the training I’ve endured. The blisteringly hot uninhabited planets I was airdropped onto and told to somehow make it back alive. It was adapt and survive, or die. Pirius’ surface temperature isn’t even half as warm as any of those planets. I’ll be just fine in my thick black military clothing; I won’t even break a sweat.
“Your concern for my wellbeing is touching, but I’m going to have to ask you once again to keep quiet. I’m trying to think.” My mind is racing. I can’t quite seem to still it long enough to figure out what I’m doing. I’m acting rashly, I’m aware of that, but I can’t stop myself. This pull I feel, this urgent drive flooding my body…it won’t be ignored. It’s consuming me even more than my need for the Light I’ve just packed into the bag.
I expect Col to continue talking, but mercifully he keeps quiet. I gather up the few remaining things I need, and then I turn and head out of my quarters without saying a word. Col follows after me, still clutching at his ribs and his stomach, his boots making loud squeaking sounds as he stumbles along behind me, trying to keep up. We make it to the hangars, and my raptor is right where I left it, at the end of the closest line of crafts. The sleek black outer hull of the ship glints and gleams under the stark overhead lighting as I hurry toward it, refusing to even glance in the direction of the group of flight deck mechanics sitting around a table a hundred feet away, playing cards. Col, lurching along next to me, raises a hand and grimaces at them, giving them a wave. I hit him in the arm, just below his shoulder. Hard. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you want to die?”
Col yelps, rolling out his shoulder. “I already know I’m not going to,” he says. “It’s been seen. So why the hell shouldn’t I fuck with those guys? And with you, for that matter.”
I place my bare hand over the raptor’s access panel and the door soundlessly slides back. I step inside the ship, dumping the combat bag in the storage bin to the rear of the vessel. Col steps into the ship after me, and his eyes momentarily light up, the pain on his face disappearing. He whistles as he spins around, taking in the control panel and the state of the art comms units in the back. “Hell’s teeth. Talk about fancy. You really are daddy’s favorite, aren’t you?”
“Sit down and strap yourself in,” I command, stabbing my finger at one of the rear seats. “We don’t have clearance to leave. As soon as I power up the engines, the flight crew will know something’s up. We’re going to have to scramble.”
“You’ll need a co-pilot, then,” Col says.
Sitting down at the helm, I turn my head and glare at him. He must feel my displeasure crawling all over his skin. “I will not.”
Col sits down in the seat beside me anyway, clipping his harness into place, wincing as he twists and turns his body. “You don’t have many friends, do you?” he asks breezily. “Your blinding wit and charm probably intimidates people, I’m sure.”
On the outskirts of my mind, I sense something—a wrinkle. A potential problem, yet to develop. I close my eyes, casting my mind out further, stretching across the expanse of The Nexus, and I locate the source of my
hesitation: Stryker. Shit. He’s thinking about me. Thinking dangerous thoughts. Someone’s told him I took Col up to my quarters. He knows something’s wrong. I hit the ignition on the raptor’s control panel and the engines roar into life, creating eddies of pressure that buffet the craft behind us, forcing it to roll back. We have to get out of here, and now.
“Hey! Hey! Lieutenant Beylar! Stop!” One of the mechanics runs toward the raptor, waving his hands in the air, a panicked look on his face. “Lieutenant Beylar! Kill your engines! You’re going to destroy the surrounding craft!” He yells his warning out to me, frantic, as though I’m unaware of what will happen if I start my ship here on the hangar floor instead of having it deployed from the launch bay. The craft behind me slams into the hangar wall, it’s nose crumpling as the pressure from my jets grinds it against a support pillar.
Chaos explodes on the hangar deck. Everything happens at once. The mechanic in front of the raptor draws his gun; the hangar doors swing back and a unit of soldiers run in, their weapons already primed and butted up against their shoulders, aimed at the raptor. The soldiers don’t waste any time once they’re inside the hangar. They head straight for us, their visors flashing red for high alert. Next to me, Col begins to look a little nervous. “Your boss has unleashed the hounds. Might I suggest we get the hell out of here? Like, now?”
A caustic response would be perfectly timed right now, but before I can say anything, the intercom on the control panel buzzes and Stryker’s voice floods the cockpit. “Where do you think you’re going with that prisoner, Jass?”
I’ve never liked Stryker. I don’t like anyone on The Nexus—friendships aren’t encouraged here, and even if they were everyone’s too afraid of me to get close—but I especially despise him. The man was put in charge of my training by the Order of the Elders, and ever since he’s made it his personal mission to make me miserable, keep me chained and compliant. He encouraged Regis to put me on the Light so he could control me like a dog, and I will never forgive him for that.
