Shadow Run

by Michael Miller

  A few guards discharged their weapons, but the bright bursts of white plasma were no match for the flames. The fire swallowed the blasts, absorbing the energy, and then swallowed whoever was shooting.

  It took me a few seconds to realize I was the one responsible for this, that this was what I’d reached for and brought back with me. This was the force I was controlling, if not entirely consciously. And that was about how long it took for the Bladeguard to come to the same conclusion. In a flash, his Disruption Blade was gleaming white in his hand, and then he charged me where I was strapped to the table, sword raised over his head.

  I had time for a single thought: Help.

  The burning Shadow reacted not as if I’d forced it to, but as if it were responding to me. It moved between me and the Bladeguard faster than I could blink. Maybe it was my imagination, but for a moment it looked like it parried the blow—and rendered the blade into molten goop—with flame that had a point and an edge, almost in the shape of a blade itself. But then the fire dissipated, as did the Bladeguard in a shower of ash.

  The room was suddenly empty. Everything was blackened and sizzling. The doors to the lab were mangled strips of dripping metal, opening onto an equally charred and silent hallway. The way out was open, if only I could get to it. And there wasn’t even anyone to witness. Anything that had once been a comm or a video camera was now a melted lump of synthetic material like all the others coating the flaking walls and warped countertops. Still, someone, or several someones, would no doubt be here soon to investigate why their feeds had gone dead.

  My head whipped over to Arjan. The flames hadn’t touched him—the damage to his body had still been done by human hands only. My own dress was stuck to my legs in places, scorched to nothing in others, from when actual burning Shadow must have replaced the mimicry, but I wasn’t badly burned. I was, however, still bound to the table.

  Breaking my restraints should have been easy in comparison to what I’d just done. But when I lifted my head and tried to leverage my arm against one of them, dizziness crashed over me like a breaking wave. The weight of the entire citadel suddenly seemed to press down on my body, and the back of my skull hit the metal table with a thump.

  The ceiling shivered above my face, and I thought for a second it might actually be about to give way, until the cracks that rippled along it began to glow. The eerie fissures fractured the air in my vision as much as the ceiling. They ran down the walls, along the floor, and up onto the table. When my hands and arms started splitting apart, I knew I was hallucinating.

  The hallucinations didn’t stop there, though. My skin began peeling away like the ceiling and floor, exposing tissue and bone. I saw my ribs, and then my beating heart before it, too, dissolved.

  I tried to breathe, but I wasn’t sure I could without lungs. Stop, stop, stop. At some point, I started screaming the word.

  Arjan groaned.

  Arjan. I had to move. I had to get him out of here. But time was cracking like the room, like my body. I had no idea how long I’d been here, watching it happen. Maybe only seconds, but the seconds felt like hours. And I still couldn’t break the restraints.

  I tried to talk to him, but my voice only erupted in screams. The noise was disturbing him; I could tell from the grimace on his ravaged face, though not from the emptiness of his eye socket. That told me nothing.

  …Other than that I had to kill whoever had done this to him. The blackened, crumbled ruins of bodies on the ground weren’t enough. They would never be enough. My screams turned to cries of rage, and I reached for Arjan again.

  Like last time, I didn’t actually reach him in the attempt. Or maybe I did.

  The breaking room vanished, and Arjan along with it. All I could see was a strange, glinting outline of him, a framework. It was as if his veins were all that was left of him, lit like glowing wires. The lights were racing around his circulatory system, moving almost too fast to trace.

  I tried anyway; I followed them to where the light grew brightest, somewhere inside Arjan. And then I could hear him.

  Qole…?

  Arjan?

  Help. Help me. Hurts. It hurts.

  I’m trying, Arjan, I’m trying to help you, but—

  It hurts. IT HURTS HURTS HURTS HURTS—

  Arjan’s pain reverberated through me like a shock wave. I recoiled somehow, flying away from it. This wasn’t helping him…and I couldn’t stand hearing him and being unable to help.

  But I had to do something. I reached out again, my mind stretching like an arm, a hand, fingers…stretching to a point where I thought it might break.

  And then I was on the Kaitan, moving along the familiar metal panels and wiring, the pieces of a ship I knew as well as my own body. It was almost like trying to sense Shadow, but this time, my entire consciousness headed out with the pinging signal, seeking…There was another glimmering framework of a person there—only one, and one I recognized. Maybe there were others actually present, but she was the only one I could see like this.

  It was Shadow; I was seeing the Shadow in her body, like I had in Arjan’s.

  Telu?

  The sparkling shape that was Telu jumped as if I’d sneaked up behind her and shouted in her ear.

  Qole? Captain, where are you? Her voice hummed through me, louder than Arjan’s had. Perhaps she was speaking with her mouth as well as her mind.

  I’m…I’m trapped, and I need help. Shadow is helping me, but not enough. Arjan, they’ve…I didn’t know how to describe what they’d done, it was so horrible. I can’t…My own voice grew weaker.

  WHERE ARE YOU?

  Down, deep…find…Nev…Nev was the only one, in this place, with the power to help us. In spite of everything, I knew he would. You can trust…help…

  It was too much. I couldn’t keep hold of her, no matter how hard I tried. My grip on the connection slipped, something broke, and then I was torn from her as if someone were dragging me back, or as if I’d been sucked out of the airlock. Both Telu and the Kaitan flew away from me, and I was thrown into a blackness like space, except there were no stars.

  Part of me still felt my back on the table in the lab, but the rest of me, the conscious, thinking part that mattered, was fading. And then I couldn’t feel anything. My mind dissolved in the darkness, and all my thoughts and memories and anger and fear broke apart as if they’d been torched with Shadow.

  My mind was gone. Myself, gone. I drifted on a midnight ocean, utterly lost and uncaring.

  It was there, within the slowly undulating, black waves, that the stars finally came out. They appeared gradually, on the edges of my diluted consciousness. They looked at first like only sparkles of starlight on the nonexistent water, but then the points of light sharpened and flared to life.

  I floated through them, or maybe they floated through whatever was left of me. They began to gather in strange ways, as if outlining something. And then I realized they were outlining my body. They highlighted the shapes of fingers, and suddenly I had hands again. The stars moved up my arms, rebuilding them as they went. They ran down my sides like glittering rain, and I could feel my ribs and lungs again.

  My mind was still mostly gone, and so my first thoughts—were they my thoughts?—were more like feelings than clearly defined words:

  Need. Open.

  That felt right, in some distant part of my brain that could still register these things, if only barely. Open. Out.

  Not out. Open. Embrace.

  For a moment, the light was beautiful, warm on my arms, and the thought of embracing it didn’t seem half bad. And then enough of my mind came together to remember that I didn’t want to embrace anything.

  I wanted to destroy.

  The lights flickered and shimmered away from me, as if shying from my touch.

  But the lights were helping me. They could help me do…something. What I needed to do. Out. Destroy.

  No.

  Before they could shiver away from me again, I lashed out with my new
ly formed hand and seized them. The light exploded, obliterating the darkness. Black turned to white.

  There was a ringing in my ears, and suddenly my body was no longer floating. It was heavy, held down against something, but I didn’t know what. I wrenched against the resistance and finally broke free of whatever it was. I couldn’t remember or see. It didn’t matter, because then my feet were moving.

  It was like I’d been staring into the sun for hours. My light-infused eyes could barely make out shadows. I squinted and staggered, feeling my way along a wall. I had no idea where I was, or where I was going. Who I was. The walls turned sharp and cut my hands, but I didn’t stop. I had to keep going.

  Out.

  That was the only thing I knew. I had to get out. I wasn’t sure how long I stumbled, crashing into things and half falling until I scrabbled my way up from the cold ground. My feet were bare, my legs mostly bare and battered, my hands wet with blood. Finally, my weak knees buckled and I crumpled to what felt like a stone floor.

  For one brief, shameful moment I considered staying in my quarters as Father had ordered me to.

  It would mean I could deny that anything bad was happening. It would mean I could trust my parents to take care of me and everyone else in the way to which I had been accustomed, that the right decisions would be made, and that even if the wrong ones were accidentally made, I would not be responsible for them. It would mean my family would prosper, and our lives would proceed the way that Father intended.

  Staying in my quarters would mean abandoning Qole in the horrible situation I had put her in. Refusing to take responsibility for what I had done to her. Forgetting about her.

  And that was impossible.

  If my thoughts were defiant, my actions, by all appearances, followed orders precisely. I returned to my suite as quickly as possible, without talking to anyone. I considered asking someone for help, but I couldn’t imagine there was anyone in the palace, perhaps on the planet, who would disobey their king. Even if Devrak, the one to whom I would most likely turn, wasn’t a part of this, he wouldn’t work against Father. It was unthinkable.

  So what was I thinking? I wasn’t sure what I could do, exactly. There was no clear plan in my head as I stripped out of my party clothes and donned the dark gray protective training gear I had used in the Academy. It would allow me to move quietly and stay unnoticed if necessary, which would help me in the only course of action I was sure I wanted to take—finding Qole as quickly as possible.

  From the dock on my desk, I snatched an infopad and comm, which I had been sorely missing. It was tradition for guests of the ball to leave behind any device that would be considered a distraction, and although many people broke the rules, I did not.

  After all, I believed in the rules. Our rules were there to serve all.

  My comm had a single flashing message. It was from Solara, and it was short.

  Atrium, be quick.

  I didn’t know precisely why Solara couldn’t simply comm me with whatever she had to say, but maybe she was worried the lines were monitored. Considering the need for stealth in my family’s citadel felt strange, but I was coming to the realization that nothing was as it had been before. I was in uncharted space in my own home.

  At the exit to my suite, I hesitated, glancing at the wall where a thoughtful servant had placed my Disruption Blade in the dock that served as a display case and charger. Its twin rested beside it, both of them glinting under a halo of decorative light. Two swords were typically seen as the height of impracticality in combat, the province of mass media entertainment only. But a very select few Bladeguards were trained in another rare form of combat that incorporated dual weapons to fight multiple opponents. I almost never traveled with both, and I didn’t see how I could possibly need the second one now, but I’d been taught to be prepared for the unexpected.

  I took both of my Disruption Blades with me.

  The night sky seemed impossibly bright and close in the sweeping space of the Atrium. The craters of the two moons stood out in sharp relief, the stars glittering like the gems that had been in Qole’s hair. With a cunningly crafted roof that was completely clear and curved to magnify the sky, the Atrium was lit only by moonlight. It was deathly still, and the night-blooming flowers, with their faint luminescence, gave off a dreamlike air.

  Or in this case, a nightmarish cast. It was hard to believe that I was here to meet my sister in secret, and that my father was holding Qole against her will and doing…I wasn’t sure what. But Father had been talking a lot about needing to make sacrifices, and my gut roiled to think of how far he might be willing to take that with Qole.

  “Nev.” Solara’s quiet voice carried across the open space, and I felt uncustomary relief. Solara and I had never been inimical, but we had never been close, either. From age ten onward, our training had taken very different paths.

  She appeared out of the shadows of the gardens, the red of her dress in vivid contrast against the moons and the snow-capped mountains looming above us. Those mountains were the original seat of Dracorte power, where the first rich veins on Luvos had been mined. Family memory didn’t even stretch that far back. We’d been able to deduce as much because drones had stopped going through the motions of mining it. That only happened if someone gave them an order to stop, something no one had known how to do since the Great Collapse. Reroute temporarily, yes. Stop, no.

  As a result, the mountain was a warren of abandoned tunnels, most of which had been sealed. Some, like the ones at the end of the Atrium, were open for a short ways to act as a grotto for the plants that required caves. It was a beautiful place, and a strange one to be meeting. I couldn’t remember the last time Solara and I had actually spent time alone together, and now, apparently, we were both willing to subvert the will of our family whose greatness was in evidence all around us.

  Perhaps we weren’t as different as I had always assumed.

  “I can’t believe this,” I said by way of greeting. I scraped a hand over my face. “Father must have wanted you to drive Qole out of the ballroom so they could apprehend her and feel justified in doing whatever they wanted afterward. I just—” I was carrying on, everything inside me boiling over, but I froze as something occurred to me. “Have you seen Arjan?”

  “Father said he sent him back to the ship so he wouldn’t interfere,” Solara said. There was no one around, but she spoke in a hushed tone regardless, far more collected than I was.

  My sigh of relief was short and constrained. “At least there’s that. But Qole—”

  “I think I know where they’re holding her,” she interrupted without preamble.

  “How? I can’t find anything on her!”

  Solara’s lips quirked in a slight smile, red lipstick looking almost black in the moonlight. “A member of the guard.” Who was infatuated with her, no doubt. “There’s a security lockdown on one of the lower levels…right underneath us, conveniently enough.” She tapped her heel on the floor.

  I glanced down at the smooth, reflective stone. “Really? I thought there was only an abandoned hangar down there.”

  My own home was big enough for me to be unclear on details like that. Much clearer in my mind was the look of disgust that Qole would have for me, if she knew such a thing.

  Qole. The ache in my chest doubled, if that were possible, as did my need to find her.

  “Well, it’s not abandoned now. Security and emergency personnel are both flocking there, and parts of the palace are being closed to visitors.”

  Once, I wouldn’t have thought that one person could merit such a reaction, but that had been before I met Qole. If she tapped into her Shadow affinity, she would be more than dangerous enough to inspire panic.

  Part of me felt sorry for anyone who would cross her path, but…if she was dangerous, security might decide she would serve my family better dead than alive. My heart started beating faster. “Then I’m going down there. I can’t let them hurt her, Solara.” I paused, considering my sist
er. “Don’t tell anyone where I’ve gone. You won’t, right?”

  Solara shook her head. “I’ll even go with you. I know a way down to the hangar from here. That’s why I had you meet me here.”

  For an absurd moment, all I felt was brotherly aggravation. “I’ve spent years crawling around this citadel, and now you’re giving me the tour. How is that even possible?”

  She turned, the red of her gown making her easy to follow as she slipped into the darker parts of the garden. “You sought adventure, I sought privacy.”

  Privacy for what? I wondered how many hearts she had broken in these gardens at night. Right now, I was glad of it.

  “They’ll try to stop us,” I warned her.

  She laughed. “We’re royals, Nev. We can do whatever we want.”

  That’s the problem, I thought.

  A few minutes later, an ancient service turbolift had deposited us in a dusty utility room. All I had to do was peer out a door to see the old hangar stretching out in front of us.

  It was chaos. Security guards were flooding in from the main entrance, even as others rushed out. Lights bobbed around on the heads of medical responders who were pushing a screaming man on a repulsor-sled. His arm and face were almost entirely gone, burned to nothingness. I shuddered. I was pretty sure Qole couldn’t have done that. Or could she have?

  “If security is running around like that, I doubt they know where she is,” Solara whispered alongside me.

  The thought gave me hope. What if Qole had tapped into her abilities and escaped?

  That would mean I just had to find her before a hundred armed guards did. Shadow or no, they would gun her down if she really had caused all this.

  “Agreed,” I murmured. “And that means we need to get through here to look for her. If I barely know all these old passages, she’s sure to be disoriented.” I scanned the hangar again, taking in the deserted equipment, the corroded doors that had once accepted ships now lost to time. Old ventilation shafts and power cables were everywhere, hanging from the ceiling and snaking across the floor. The design was old, belonging to a more practical and urgent age.