Romy panted, blinking cold sweat out of her eyes, and fired again, clipping another on the upper thigh. Nancy was right, these things jumped—something Romy had never seen when fighting them in space. She shifted her attention to another.
“Everyone in,” Tina roared over the climbing engines.
The soldiers next to her fell back in a scrambling mess. The poachers were a hundred metres back, but with the speed they ran. . . . Those inside the craft encouraged them in a shouting mess, and Romy dove inside the cargo door as it began to close.
“Get us out of here!” The command flew over her head.
The craft slowly lifted.
Romy glanced back as the poachers closed in. “Faster,” she yelled.
The cargo door gradually shut as they took off. The door got to forty-five degrees, and the soldiers who had been behind Romy’s line lowered their weapons.
Romy sighed.
The craft jolted and Thrym shouted at the black-shelled monster clawing itself over the cargo door. It hissed at them, yellow eyes blazing. Tina reacted, unleashing a flurry of bullets that embedded in the alien’s torso like bugs on a windscreen. The creature contorted in silent pain and fell to the ground, curling into a writhing corpse as the life drained from it.
Romy stared at the alien. She’d never been that close to a living one. Not face-to-face.
Thrym crossed to Nancy, hugging her close, his eyes squeezed tight.
“What was that?” Elara exploded from the front. “Houston’s sending poachers after us now?”
“He’s making his move against the Amach,” Tina answered. She sat down with a thump. “Shit. This is really happening.”
The others threw comments overhead, but Romy didn’t join in.
Shame swept through her.
“Should I open the door and chuck it out?” Leroy asked, pointing his rifle at the alien.
“Keep it,” Nancy said, shaking her head. “It can be studied.”
Romy blinked back the burning behind her eyes, knowing it was the aftermath of an intense surge of adrenaline. Partly. What had happened to her back there? She’d known how scared she was of the aliens, but she’d fought them for years. She knew more about them than almost everyone here, barring Thrym and Elara.
Why had fear seized her like that?
She turned away from Thrym and Tina’s probing gaze, placed her rifle in the rack, and joined Elara in the co-pilot seat. Romy put on the headphones and blocked out the energised chatter in the craft.
What the hell just happened to her?
* * *
Elara hadn’t probed her on the way back, and Romy was never more grateful to experience one of her knotmate’s infrequent tactful moments.
The craft landed at the Amach with a jolt. Theirs was the only craft to come back to Ireland. Their Amach was near full now, so the other crafts had landed on one of their bases in Aberdeen.
She swung the door up and slid down to the ground with a sigh. Finding Atlas sounded really good about now.
“Hey, Ro.” Phobos stood there, hands behind his back.
She gave him a tired smile. “Hey.”
“Jeez, you look like you need chocolate cake.”
Her stomach rumbled. “That’d be the day.” The Amach didn’t do chocolate cake. She’d need to have a word with Atlas about that.
“Today is that day,” Phobos countered.
“No way! Where did you get your hands on that?”
He lifted a shoulder. “I’ve got connections. Anyway, you want some?”
Romy unclipped her vest and slipped out of the bulletproof garment, giving a groan of relief to be free of it. “That’s a silly question.”
A muffled noise had her looking back to where Elara was visible. Her eyes were wide on Phobos in a pointed look Romy couldn’t decipher. He gave her a nonplussed look in return and wound an arm around Romy’s shoulders, leading her out of the hangar.
Suspicion flared within her. “Where is this cake?”
“I hid it in our room. Where else?”
“Okay,” she drew out. Her stomach gurgled again.
Five minutes later, he pushed open the door to the room and ushered her inside.
“Phobos,” Elara called from down the hall. She arrived on the threshold, puffing from jogging. Romy eyed her. Why was she running? Elara didn’t run.
“Can I have a word?” Elara panted.
“Like . . . right now?” he strained.
She gave him the same pointed look.
Romy held up her hands. A glance around the untidy room had told her there wasn’t any chocolate cake here. “Okay, what’s happening?”
“Hey,” a voice said in the hall. “I got a note telling me to meet you here.”
Her insides froze.
Deimos appeared in the doorway next to Phobos.
“You are kidding me,” Romy said through clenched teeth. “That’s why I’m here?” She made to push past Phobos, but he barred her way with an arm.
“It’s time to listen to him, Ro.”
“It’s time to move,” she said, kneeing him in the upper thigh and punching him in the solar plexus.
“Shoot.” He coughed.
Thrym arrived behind Phobos, blocking the doorway. “I thought we were postponing it after . . . today.” He frowned at Elara.
“I tried,” she protested. “But Phobos ignored my looks in the hangar.”
Thrym deliberated, taking a look at Romy’s mutinous face and then at the gathered members of Knot 27. She saw the moment he decided to commit and tensed to bowl him out of the way.
“We’ve shown our hand,” he shouted. “Grab her!”
Romy dove for Thrym, the weak link. Thrym was too nice to hurt her.
. . . So she’d thought.
“I’m not doing this!” she snapped at them as he threw her onto the single bed in the room.
“You are,” he said, shrivelling under the force of her glare.
“It’s my decision, Thrym.” Romy bounced to the edge of the bed. “Mine. I hate him.” She glanced around the knot, noting Deimos’s violent flinch with savage pleasure. “I won’t ever forgive him for what he did. He’s not part of my knot.”
“Romy, that puts us all in a crap position,” Phobos countered. “If you’re not going to give him the courtesy of listening, do it for the rest of us. I know what it’s like to be caught between two of my knotmates, and I won’t be repeating it again.” He glanced at Deimos. “I love Ellie. I want to be with her for the rest of my life and have little Ellies. I came to save you because you are my brother and I believe you’re not a selfish prick, though you’ve made mistakes. But if you can’t support Ellie and how I feel about her, we’re going to have a problem. We share something no one else understands, Dei. And that will never change.” He stared at the knotmate they’d always referred to as his twin. “That is where I stand.”
Deimos nodded and looked at Elara. “I was a dick.”
She blinked furiously. “Yeah, you were. But you were right about some things, too. I didn’t give your friendship space, and when I should have tried to understand what you were going through, I got angry instead because you’d turned your back on me.” Large tears fell over her delicate features. “I’m the reason you left.”
Deimos’s eyes widened. “That’s not. . . .” He moved to Elara and wrapped his arms around her. “That’s not the case at all. I was jealous of what you guys had, and yeah, I felt left out, but it was no excuse for acting the way I did. Phobos is my brother, but I love you just as much. Even if you are annoying sometimes.”
“You’re annoying,” she said in a watery voice.
“You are,” he said gently.
They shared a soft smile.
Thrym was watching Romy and she refused to look at him. That was great and she was glad for Elara’s sake that she was rid of that guilt.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she said to Thrym.
“You see it.”
“I can’t believe you did
this to me,” Romy whispered, wanting to join Elara—and now Phobos—in shedding a few tears. “You know how I feel about this.”
“I know what you think you need to feel about it. And I know what will give you the most happiness in time. I’m your best friend, am I not?”
“You want the honest answer?” Her cheeks began to burn.
He winced. “No, I don’t guess I do.”
Phobos strode to the door and planted himself in the exit. “You’re staying here until you listen to Deimos, Ro. This is a knot intervention.”
CHAPTER TEN
Romy tested her restraints. She was now tied to a chair with the bed sheets in the middle of the room. She tried to keep her breathing even, but she really didn’t like being restrained.
Her temper was only partly to blame for the recent battle that had torn through the tiny room.
She felt utterly, completely betrayed by her knot for entertaining Deimos’s lies after what he did to her. The worst part was, she felt sick because a part of her was beginning to doubt whether her stubbornness was warranted—and it was warranted. She knew that. Before her knotmate had left with Houston, Romy wanted nothing more than to heal the rift between Deimos and Elara. Her heart yearned for what they’d had as a knot before crash-landing on Earth. Her stomach roiled to think of Phobos, Elara, and Thrym having that with Deimos and excluding her.
“Make it fast,” she said, glaring at Deimos with angry eyes. She gave some of it to the others afterwards. “I want it noted that you guys have seriously fucked me off.”
Elara folded her arms.
Deimos cleared his throat and perched on the edge of the bed. “I’m not sure where to start.”
“Just like you told me,” Phobos said.
His twin shook his head. “It was different with Romy. What I did to her was worse.”
Damn right it was.
He sighed, peering at his hands. “I wasn’t in a good place after the crash-landing,” he said in a curious voice. “The rest of you coped with what had been done to us, but I never seemed to get over it as well. I let the injustice get to me . . . change me.” His green eyes lifted.
Romy rolled her eyes. So that was his game.
“It wasn’t long after Phobos and Elara got together. I . . . didn’t like your relationship, but not for the reasons I told you, or realised. There was a wrongness inside of myself, and the more that grew, the more distant I felt from who I’d been. When you guys got together, it was another change. I mean, the Mandate had taken Romy. My little sister,” his voice broke, “taken by the people who enslaved us. I didn’t know what they’d do to her or if they’d kill her while I was surrounded by people who didn’t appear to give a damn. I was slowly being driven mad.” He swallowed. “That’s what split our knot apart,” he said. “That worry. I cleaved away because I thought you didn’t care enough about finding Ro. Looking back, I see that we were each drowning in our grief and too self-absorbed to do anything else.” He shook himself. “Houston began to talk with me. I liked him—his intelligence, his quirkiness. He was the only person who understood. As time went on, he introduced me to other people. These people were just as angry as I was with what wasn’t being done. In this way, I became involved in the plans to overthrow Gwenyth.”
Romy stared at the far wall, listening and hating that she was doing so.
“You came back, Ro,” Deimos whispered. “Your platinum hair was just the same, your blue eyes as soft as ever. But they’d hurt you.” His fist clenched. “I saw the burn marks at your temples. Houston showed me the file of what they’d put you through up on Orbito Four. How they’d scrubbed you of your memories, tried to change your personality. My hate grew when it should have lessened. And briefly, fleetingly, it did,” he said. “Until your mind began to crack.” Deimos looked at her. “You didn’t see yourself then, but I did. I saw you brought to your knees, made to crawl by a force you couldn’t even see. I saw you smiling through the pain and it made me angrier than I’d ever been in my life.” His knuckles turned white. “The Mandate was doing this to you, I convinced myself.”
“If they started it, Houston finished it,” she interjected bitterly. Her chest was tighter than she would have liked.
Deimos gave a sad nod. “The attempt to overthrow Gwenyth flopped, but the discontent within us surged. To that point, the meetings with Houston had seemed like a game of sorts. It’s like that thought of leaving you all pierced through where nothing else had. Houston sensed my new hesitation. He gave me a front seat in the decision-making, by his side. He reminded me how it would look to go back, with what I’d done. Not in so many words, but . . . I understood his implication; I was in too deep. I gave up the thought of backing out. I knew I’d screwed up by now. I’d had a moment of clarity, but like all the moments before it, I then made the wrong choice. I convinced myself the rest of you didn’t want me around. Thrym didn’t trust us with information, Elara was taking my best friend, and my best friend was letting her.” He closed his eyes. “Do you know what my favourite moments were?”
The others didn’t move. Romy slid her eyes toward him against her will.
“When we were out on mission together. I was happiest when there was an excuse to be in your company. All of you seemed so far away, but my mind wouldn’t accept that of Romy for some reason. Possibly because she hadn’t been here and I had a chance to right myself in her eyes.”
Romy dug her nails into her palms.
“The night of our mutiny came,” he continued, “and Houston told me we were taking Romy. We were surrounded by his people and I had to go along with it. I told myself if I didn’t go, I couldn’t be assured of her safety. So instead of taking Houston out, I helped him wheel her to the hangar. She looked like a bruised and battered angel that night,” he told the others. “Hair shaved, cuts and marks all over her. Shattered, yet still somehow as she’s always been. You’ve seen the strength she has. When Romy woke and discovered what we intended to do, that strength came out.” He chuckled without humour. “I hadn’t expected the hold over me could snap so abruptly.”
“When did it happen?” Elara asked in a low voice.
He focused his bright green eyes on Romy. “About the time Romy punched me in the face and knocked me out.”
Romy blinked.
“I have an unfailing belief in the integrity of your character, sister,” he said. “You possess a softness of heart that I only ever see harden when your family is threatened. As your fist swung toward me, I couldn’t move through the shock. Because I knew what it meant that you would strike me. You saw me as the threat. My knotmate was afraid of me. She was protecting herself against me. I was the monster now.”
A tear slid down Romy’s cheek.
The breath shuddered in her chest, wanting to escape, but Romy wouldn’t let it. The emotion in Deimos’s words was unmistakeable. But they were words. “You betrayed us,” she said hoarsely. “All of us.”
His eyes were moist. “I know.”
A lump rose in her throat and she broke away from his look.
“Keep going,” Phobos encouraged.
Deimos craned his neck to look at the ceiling. “I woke up at the base in Florida. I went straight to Houston to tell him the game was off. Before I could figure out how to do it without him losing it, he took me to see the space soldiers he’d woken up.” He struggled for words. “You’ve seen them, but back then, it was ten times worse. They had no idea, and where I’d suddenly seen my mistake, I then understood why it happened. They needed me, so they didn’t become like me. That’s why I volunteered to take the injection first.”
He broke off and glanced around the room. “I had to get them away from Houston, so he couldn’t manipulate them. When he began testing on them again, I accelerated the plans.” He threw a glare at Phobos. “And when Pho turned up—”
“— he helped you set the plans in motion,” Phobos challenged. Deimos scowled at him.
“How did you get all the space soldiers out
?” Thrym asked.
The twins shared a grin and Elara snickered.
“You do realise who you’re talking to, right?” Phobos said, bumping knuckles with Deimos. “We contaminated the guard’s food with norovirus, and Houston’s. Gave him a really good batch.”
“You didn’t?” Thrym said, aghast.
“Symptoms may include nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, and cramps,” Deimos rattled off, counting on his fingers. “We gave Houston the shits, in other words.”
Well, that explained . . . that.
As for the rest, Romy refused to give Deimos an easy out. She’d listened, and now she needed time to talk about what she’d heard with someone she trusted. “Untie me, please,” she said.
Thrym and Phobos scrambled to do so, probably well aware they were in her bad books.
Freed from her bed-sheet restraints, Romy’s heartbeat settled and she straightened her coveralls, not looking at anyone. “Have a good evening,” she said.
And walked out.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Houston has definitely thrown down the glove,” Tina whispered in Romy’s ear as they stood around a huge map with the commanding officers. She’d come to find Atlas after the ‘knot intervention’, and located him in the middle of a frantic group of commanders and captains.
“Twenty of our teams have encountered Critamal today,” Tina added.
Romy’s eyes rounded. “Really? Any casualties?”
“Yes. Nine killed, forty-seven wounded, and five in critical condition.”
“I didn’t expect the poachers to do Houston’s bidding like this. I mean, I know he gave them the means to land on Earth, but how is he controlling them so tightly?”
Tina sighed. “With the same trump card he’s holding over the rest of us.”
“The cannons?” Romy asked. Tina nodded.
A woman jogged up to Atlas. “Sir, there is a large host of Critamal within range of a group of battlers over Japan. The aliens are nearly in contact with a settlement there, but there are human Renegades members with the Critamal, too.”
Atlas crossed his arms over his chest, staring at a projected image the woman pulled up on a nano. “How many in the settlement?” he asked.
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