Joined: Book One

by Mara Gan

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Prophecy

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49k12

  About the Author

  Joined

  Mara Gan

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

  If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case the author has not received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Joined

  Copyright © 2017 Mara Gan

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: (ebook): 978-1-945910-36-4

  Inkspell Publishing

  5764 Woodbine Ave.

  Pinckney, MI 48169 k12

  Edited By JoSelle Vanderhooft

  Cover art By Najla Qamber

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The copying, scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic or print editions, and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  DEDICATION

  This book could not have been completed without feline assistance, unholy amounts of caffeine, and that wall I banged my head against.

  She is the raven, and she is the wanderer

  Chaos dwells in darkness while an ancient lady fights

  She is the one soul created to save the galaxy

  And swallowed by shadows in the ultimate price

  —the Prophecy

  PROLOGUE

  It was a rather startling revelation to note that planetwide destruction was, objectively speaking, gorgeous.

  I know that sounds weird, but the fireballs raining down on the valley below me were surprisingly pretty. Like rainbows.

  I couldn’t even be bitter about it; bitter was a bland and wise emotion, one that involved thought and careful consideration. I had no such coherence. All I had was awe and fear, in no particular order, all blended together like a merry-go-round that had spun out of control.

  Maybe not a merry-go-round. Maybe one of those horrid Spin-O-Tron rides where you went inside this room and it spun in circles so fast that you were pinned down until someone threw up and the vomit stuck to the wall. Not that I’d know, since I’d never been allowed on either one, but I’d read about them. Merry-go-rounds sounded somewhat boring and the Spin-O-Tron sounded horrible, and I didn’t really want to go on either one. Although I wouldn’t have minded being afforded the opportunity to try it, at least, even if it was boring or horrible.

  I imagined that the scene before me was a lot like that Spin-O-Tron. Pretty and nauseating and horrible.

  But a lot worse. Much, much worse.

  But it really was pretty. Bright reds and oranges streaking across the sky, tiny embers floating in the air, little bits of green and blue and purple all that remained of the city in the distance.

  And it was all surprisingly quiet. The monastery and surrounding forest were utterly silent, something that never happened, particularly to my attuned ears and senses. But it was. Completely, utterly, horribly silent. The kind of silent that’s unnatural, not the pretty kind like with snow. (Although snow was something else I’d only read about, so I wouldn’t really know. Halia didn’t get snow and I wasn’t allowed off the planet.) No, this quiet was deafening in a horrible way. Nauseating and horrible.

  The destruction hadn’t quite reached me yet, but it would. It surrounded our little hillside monastery and there was nowhere for me to go.

  I was well aware that I was in shock. But really, how were you supposed to react when the sky was throwing volcanoes at you? Was there a rulebook for this sort of thing? I’d been trained in all sorts of political and diplomatic scenarios, but this was hardly any of those things. I knew how to greet diplomats, listen patiently, discuss treaties, offer alternatives, that sort of thing. I even knew quite a bit about interstellar law, which was pretty good for an eleven-year-old. But genocide… genocide was new, even for a galaxy as screwed-up as ours was. A species here, a race there, but never a planet. Did the word genocide even apply when a whole planet was being eradicated? Did we need to invent a new word for what was being done to my home? Somehow planetocide sounded ridiculous and insufficient.

  But then, I doubted a word would ever exist that could quite convey the present situation. Language just didn’t have that kind of depth.

  Emotions, though; images, feelings… that could do it. Except my species was the only one in the galaxy capable of sensing another’s emotions, but that wouldn’t matter much once this destruction was over. Words would be all that were left.

  I must have lost consciousness. The window had blasted inward, lifting me off my feet and slamming me into the bookcase. I remembered the pain of a million tiny glass shards digging into my back and the crack of my skull as I hit the wooden frame of the shelf, but then… nothing.

  I slowly came awake, taking stock of my body, and winced as I felt what must be glass

  shards still sticking out of my back. My mouth tasted coppery, like blood, and oh lordy did I have a headache. I gingerly touched a throbbing area at the base of my skull, and my fingers came away red and sticky.

  Great. I hated blood. I wasn’t good with blood. Blood needed to remain inside the body, not seep out of it, leaking all over the floor—

  I took a slow, steady breath and closed my eyes, trying to calm down. It’s just blood, I thought. I forced myself to find that mental calm that was such a vigorous part of my diplomatic training. Focus on what you do have. I was awake, I was conscious, I was breathing. Clearly, all of this was good. I could surely manage to not throw up from a little blood.

  Just to be certain, I didn’t look as I wiped my fingers on the carpet, trying to rid my hands of the evidence.

  Anin had taught me to steel my nerves, Ena had taught me patience, and the Malaika had taught me to focus. I drew on their lessons and tried to calm myself.

  The Malaika. My eyes suddenly shot back open as I remembered them. Standing swiftly, I winced briefly at the pain and dizziness but fought it off as I ran to the open window.

  We
ll, “open.” The window was, more precisely, gone.

  As was the forest.

  I bit my lip to keep the sob inside my burning chest. There was no way the Malaika would have survived; the forest was nothing but ashes and smoke, a smoldering campfire of the beautiful green it had once been.

  Every spare moment of joy I’d ever experienced had been there; with my tiny friends I had climbed trees, listened to the wind, and understood the animals. With the Malaika, I had experienced true peace, true freedom, and learned to calm the anxiety I felt from empathic overload.

  The ancient cedar forest wasn’t the only thing that had been razed; the monastery I lived in was perched on a hill, overlooking the village and the valleys in the distance. Beautiful rolling hills, some forested and some grassland for farms, stretched as far as the eye could see. Little cottages and fences dotted the landscape, but there was little to see but pastoral peace and beauty.

  All of that was gone.

  The sky was crimson with fire; you know how sunsets look on particularly hot days? That part near the sun that gets all wavy-lined and fiery? That was what the entire sky looked like. Fire rained down like shooting stars, leaving gaping holes in the earth and changing the landscape. The air reeked of toxic smoke and chemicals that I couldn’t identify. I would find out later that the heat had been so intense that shadows had burned into the ground.

  From my vantage point on the hill, I could also see something else I wished I hadn’t. In the rubble of the village, not every burning heap was part of a building. Charred bodies littered the landscape. Animals, humans, no one had escaped below.

  Nausea threatened at the back of my throat. I braced my forehead against the splintered window frame and allowed myself one selfish moment of misery.

  Taking a deep breath, I pushed away and willed myself to calm down. The Malaika had taught me to focus, and focus I would. I would steel my nerves and get through this. I was the heir to an entire galaxy, a leader, and no decent leader fell apart when things were crumbling. Leaders who found themselves in desperate situations did what they could to salvage those situations.

  From one of the other windows, I saw something that spurred me to action. While the initial blast to the village had leveled much of the town center, the effects continued to ripple outward. But some people were still alive: desperate survivors tried to stamp out the furious flames to save their belongings—or their loved ones. Some were merely staring at the chaos while others screamed in agony amid the fiery rain that continued to fall.

  I clenched my teeth. Maybe I didn’t have much time, but I wasn’t leaving without every last survivor I could find.

  Halia might be lost, but we would survive.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Nine years later, in another part of the galaxy

  “He’s what?”

  “A mercenary.”

  “You hired a mercenary to be the Heir’s bodyguard?”

  From my place behind the wall, with the conference room’s door slightly cracked, I could almost hear Synie’s jaw hit the floor. I would have been surprised, too, had I not known this was coming.

  I stood still in the next room, careful not to move or even breathe too loudly; my hearing was exceptional, what with these pointy Halian ears, but Kos’s senses and abilities made him practically omnipotent. The man was insane. Thanks to him, I swear I’d spent most of the past nine years honing my sneaking-around skills to such an extent that I could probably sneak into the royal treasury all by myself. Not that he’d told me to hone those skills—rather the opposite—but he put so many restrictions on my freedom that I’d had no choice.

  Kos was replying to Synie’s incredulity. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Kos, when you said you were leaving for a few days to find a Protector, I assumed you’d come back with some big, quiet, honorable boxer or something. Instead, you come back and tell me you’ve hired a mercenary?”

  I stifled a chuckle. Synie was about to get even more indignant when she learned exactly who Kos had hired. “Not just any mercenary. I hired Perseus.”

  There was a pause. I wished I could peek around the corner to see her face, but based on their voices, I had every reason to assume Synie was facing me and would not take kindly to me eavesdropping again.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. I could almost hear her pinching the bridge of her nose with her fingers. “You not only hired a mercenary, but you hired the most notorious one in the entire galaxy? Have you gone completely bonkers?”

  Yes. Yes, he had. I had thought much the same thing when I’d found out.

  They didn’t know that I knew, given that I’d found out who he’d hired by going through Kos’s correspondence, but that’s what they got for keeping such secrets from me. That and the name of my Intended. I mean, really—it was my life and I was a big girl. I was the heir to the entire galaxy and they kept major details about my life from me like I was a child.

  Hence the eavesdropping and database hacking. I didn’t even feel bad about it.

  Okay, I did feel sort of bad about it. I was a pretty notorious for feeling guilty about anything and everything. And I knew they’d be mad. But I still didn’t regret it.

  I sensed an unusual flicker of emotion from Synie; as one of the Mousai, the royal guardians on our floating city-station in space, she had an incredible amount of control over her thoughts and emotions—something for which I was grateful, with the way my abilities had been spiraling out of control lately—but I could occasionally get snippets from her and the other guards. “Wait a sec. This isn’t… the same Perseus who had a Rage and—”

  “The one and only,” Kos replied, his deep voice surprisingly cheerful. “I daresay the name has become unpopular in the past several years.”

  “Kos, you can’t be serious,” Synie snapped. “Mathans are insane. Perseus is the most insane. Most Mathans come out of their Rages. Perseus didn’t. Doesn’t that worry you?”

  “I think you’ll find he’s really quite calm when you meet him,” Kos said dryly. “His eyes have never returned to normal, that much is true, but I daresay he is not in a permanent state of Rage.”

  I had only gleaned a little since finding out my Protector’s identity, but even I had heard of Perseus. He was from the planet Mathos, a world about little which was known except that its people were incredibly strong and powerful, and prone to rather destructive fits of temper. Rages, they called them. Everyone gets angry; Mathans, however, entered a different brain cycle, much the way most of us fall asleep. Their eyes dilated and their tempers took over completely, and usually they left an incredible amount of destruction in their wake.

  Perseus had apparently entered a Rage state, his first ever as a boy, and never quite come out of it. He was the only Mathan known to have gained partial control over his Rages, given that he was in a permanent state of one, and this automatically made him more feared than other Mathans. Whereas most Mathans were predictable in their unpredictability, no one knew quite when Perseus would snap.

  And snap he most likely would, someday.

  “What can I say?” Kos said. “The Oracle said he was the one. I tracked him to a bar on Kroy a few days ago, pitched the job, and he said he would do it. He said he had some loose ends to take care of, but he’ll be here tonight, I should think.”

  “You… found him on Kroy? In a bar?” Synie asked. There was a slight thunk, like the sound of someone sitting. “Good god.”

  I could understand her opposition to that notion, given the reputation of that planet. On Kroy, women were just toys, bait for men, and even worse, the women seemed to prefer it that way. No women teachers, no women scientists, no women politicians, nada. It was depressing and offensive, to say the least. I wasn’t thrilled my future Protector had been on that planet, either, but given his profession, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But if he was a sexist pig…. Boy, were we going to have problems.

  “How did you know he is even able to do the job?” Sy
nie asked. “What if he’s slow and lazy?”

  Kos chuckled. “He is most certainly neither of those.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “The Oracle told me,” he repeated. “The Oracle has never been wrong. She told me to find and train Perseus. That he was the Chosen One, the one whose duty it would be to protect the Heir of Galaxia.” He paused. “The Oracle also told me that he can see the future. That’s part of why he has never lost a fight.”

  “He can see the future? I figured most of that stuff about his abilities was just legend.”

  “Most legends do stem from truth, somewhere,” Kos reasoned. “Besides, it’s only until the Heir comes of age. Then she’ll be eligible for protection from the Mousai.”

  “Bloody Oracle,” she muttered. “Someday I’d like to meet the Oracle for myself and give her a piece of my mind.”

  “Maybe if she knew you weren’t going to lecture her, she’d allow it.”

  “Maybe this Oracle of yours is entirely fictional.”

  “You know she’s not.”

  Synie sighed. As the leader of the Mousai, her job was administering and organizing the security of the city. Despite my blatant disregard for her orders, she meant to protect me, and was really one of my favorite people. I admired her to no end; she had personally recruited and trained each of the Mousai, and her ability to organize, direct, and administer orders from the king was nothing short of awe-inspiring. I was thoroughly grateful that her species was long-lived, because I knew there was no one I’d rather have providing advice and protection for me when I took the throne next year.

  The mystical side of the Galaxian system was beyond her expertise, though. Only Kos ever saw the Oracle. As the sole imperial advisor, Kos possessed knowledge that could probably destroy half the universe if he saw fit.

  He was the other half of Galaxian administration. Galaxia was a vast city with a sprawling population all squeezed onto a large asteroid at the center of the galaxy, and Galaxia was also the name for the government that ruled the entire galaxy. As best we could, anyway. While King Cepheus was the official leader who met with planetary rulers, wrote laws, and made the decisions, Kos and Synie were the ones who executed these orders with razor-sharp precision. Synie understood real-world affairs while Kos oversaw the amorphous, mystical aspects of our government, of which there were plenty.