Kira had no idea how he’d escaped whatever had happened on the surface, but he had. And now he was standing just twenty yards away, quarter staffs gripped tightly in his hands. The rain streamed down his face, but he didn’t seem to even notice it; his vicious, unblinking gaze was focused on Ortzo, and Kira got the impression that it would take a lightning bolt to the head to break his concentration.
Ortzo didn’t assess Kobe with the same gravity. Kira knew that was a mistake.
“Well, well, well,” Ortzo said, turning his attention to Kobe. With a single gloved hand, he grabbed Mig by his right shoulder and shoved him down to the ground. “The terrorist has come to join us. How delightful.”
“You’ve destroyed worlds,” Kobe countered. “Made orphans of children, widows of spouses. Your legacy in this galaxy is one of suffering and bloodshed, yet you call me the terrorist. Ironic, wouldn’t you say?”
Ortzo shrugged. “I don’t care. When you’re all gone and we control everything, we’ll be able to call you whatever we want. Your place in history will be what we decide it is, terrorist.”
Kobe twirled his quarter staffs and took a step forward. Ortzo drew back a little.
“I challenge you to a duel!” Kobe yelled, loud and clear. “If you’re so honorable, so righteous, then you’ll call off your allies. Just you and your shido against me and my staffs. Nothing else.”
Ortzo paused, studying his shido as if he’d find the answer to Kobe’s proposal in its blades. Kira knew he didn’t have to accept the challenge, but she had a strong feeling that Ortzo’s arrogance wouldn’t allow him to resist. She just wondered what the plan could possibly be if Kobe did successfully defeat Ortzo. After all, they’d still be surrounded by a dozen sentries, and the drones wouldn’t surrender just because a Fatebreaker—ostensibly their leader—was taken off the battlefield. Still, even if Kobe’s victory achieved nothing more than the death of one of the galaxy’s most dangerous, ruthless souls, Kira would be happy to call that a win.
“My shido is the weapon of only the greatest warriors. I hold it because I’ve earned the privilege,” Ortzo said. “If you want to challenge that, so be it.”
“You bring disgrace to the legacy of that weapon,” Kobe sneered. “And I’ll be glad to take it from you and give you what you deserve.”
Ortzo dug his feet into the soft ground. “You will try.”
At that, Kobe rushed toward Ortzo, quickly closing the distance between them with his remarkable speed. He went in swinging, going for a high strike with both of his staffs. Ortzo blocked the attack, but he wasn’t quick enough to get his weapon in position to stop Kobe from swinging his staffs down and furiously pounding the Fatebreaker’s chest. Though Ortzo was armored, Kira could tell that he felt the force of Kobe’s blows ringing across his midsection.
Ortzo stumbled back but recovered quickly. He went on the offensive, lancing his shido forward, but Kobe was able to easily deflect Ortzo’s attempt. As Kobe knocked Ortzo’s weapon to the side, he flipped his legs upward and nailed the Fatebreaker in the face with a somersault kick; the blow knocked Ortzo’s helmet clean off. It landed not far from Kira, its sharp edges digging into the muddy ground.
Blood trickled out of Ortzo’s mouth, which he wiped away with the back of his hand. A mirthless smile appeared on his face as he watched Kobe stand at the ready. He was a portrait of utter calm while Ortzo—his aged, tired eyes revealed with the loss of his helmet—seemed to be coming undone.
“Percival has taught you well,” Ortzo said. “You have tremendous skill, and you’re no doubt fueled by emotions I can see you fighting to keep down. Anger, perhaps? But that would be too easy. No,” Ortzo said with a grin. “You’re grieving.”
As Ortzo spoke, Kira nudged Mig.
“Hey,” she whispered to him. “Can you walk? Actually, can you run?”
Mig turned and regarded her with eyes that spoke of his heartbreak. So lost in his sadness, he didn’t seem to even recognize who Kira was.
“I, um … yeah,” he said, tearing away from whatever thoughts were occupying his mind. “I can run.”
“Good,” Kira said, trying to sound encouraging. “See the ship over there? When Kobe puts Ortzo down, we have to grab him and run for it. It’s the only chance we have.”
Mig blinked hard. “But—Four-Qel.”
Kira looked hard in Mig’s eyes, making sure he kept his attention on her and not his captured friend. “Listen to me. We’ll find a way to get him free. We will. But if we stay, we’re all dead. All of us.”
Mig looked over at 4-Qel, still hanging lifelessly in the containment field. He looked back at Kira, bitter resignation painted on his face, which in a way was good; he’d need that fire to get through this alive.
“Okay,” Mig said, nodding. “Okay.”
Kira turned back to Kobe and Ortzo, waiting for their opportunity to escape.
“You’ve destroyed entire worlds,” Kobe said, his words laced with acid. “My world is gone because of your wretched kingdom. My family, my friends—Praxis murdered every last one of them.”
“And yet you’ve learned nothing,” Ortzo said, his words drawn out as if they were a blade twisting in Kobe’s side. “They’re dead because they fought back. And now you will die for the very same reason.”
Both Kobe and Ortzo must have known not another word needed to be said. They rushed at each other, their weapons meeting directly between them. Ortzo altered his grip on his shido; he held it at its center, allowing him the speed needed to adjust to Kobe’s rapid, rage-fueled pace. The two parried in equal measure, exchanging a series of strikes and counterstrikes. For a moment, they almost seemed equally matched, but Kobe soon put Ortzo in an uncomfortable defensive position. Some fighters, Kira knew, worked better when fighting defensively; it allowed them the chance to study their opponent and exploit their weakness. Ortzo wasn’t this kind of fighter. He was used to being the aggressor, and his success lay with his ability to overpower opponents with his strength and skill. Kobe, though, never allowed Ortzo to gain enough footing to express his dominance. As the Fatebreaker again stumbled back, Kobe slammed his quarter staffs against Ortzo’s chest. Ortzo tried to defend himself by drawing his leg up for a kick, but Kobe knocked the strike away with a defensive kick of his own. With remarkable fluidity, Kobe followed his defense with a roundhouse kick that connected against Ortzo’s jaw. The blow sent Ortzo spinning away, but it didn’t knock him down. Not yet.
Panting with both rage and exhaustion, Ortzo went back with an awkward plunge of his shido directed at Kobe’s belly. Kobe sidestepped the weak attack, grabbing hold of the Fatebreaker’s weapon at the same time. Drawn together, Kobe slammed his forehead twice against Ortzo’s nose. Kira could hear the cracking through the rain.
“AAAH!” Ortzo screamed as he fell to his knees, expressing both his pain and his impotent fury. There was nothing he could do to defend himself against Kobe; he was beaten.
Kobe, large and imposing, stood calmly over the fallen Fatebreaker. He’d sheathed his staffs and was now in possession of Ortzo’s shido, which he was examining with revulsion.
“I wonder how many souls this weapon has claimed,” Kobe said.
“More than you could ever even guess, boy,” Ortzo said, then he spat a wad of blood on the ground at Kobe’s feet.
Kobe raised the shido above his head, ready to strike Ortzo down for good. As he did, the implacable expression on his face finally broke. Kira could see the anguish in his face, and she could only imagine the thoughts running through his head. Of his world going dark. Of holding his sister as she died in his arms. “In that case,” he snarled, “what’s one more?”
As he said the words, Kira bounded to her feet. “Now!” she told Mig, and they both began to trudge as fast they could through the mud.
Kira looked to Kobe, and she saw something: Ortzo’s hand, digging into his boot as the shido was about to come down on him. He pulled out something that glinted softly in the waning light.
Just as Kobe was bringing the shido down, fully prepared to slice it across Ortzo’s throat, the Fatebreaker pulled a blade from his boot and lunged upward with it. Had Kira not alerted Kobe, and had Kobe not been so fast, he would have been dead. The blade would have driven directly into his rib cage, leaving Kobe to suffer a slow death in the rain on Praxis. Instead, Kobe responded quickly enough to twist his body so the blade only punctured his side. He groaned once when the blade went in, then groaned again when Ortzo yanked it out.
“Never learn,” Ortzo grunted as he stood over Kobe, who’d fallen to the ground. He was going to thrust his blade into Kobe again, but Kira was already charging for him.
“NO!” she screamed, driving her shoulder into Ortzo’s spine. The blow knocked him away from Kobe, but he managed to stay on his feet. He turned to see who’d hit him.
“Come on, you bastard,” Kira snarled. Hands bound behind her back, feet covered in mud to her ankles, she was still ready to fight. “Let’s do this.”
“Oh no, no,” Ortzo said with a devious smile. “I have orders to bring you back alive.”
Ortzo whistled loudly enough for the entire area to hear, drawing everyone’s attention. “Bring the girl and her friends aboard my shuttle. Restrain them. Bring the Qel, too. I’ll attend to him later,” he commanded, then started to walk away but turned back. “Oh, and summon the commander as well. We’re leaving, all of us.”
Kira felt the presence of a dozen sentry drones closing a circle around her and Mig. The nearest drone grabbed Kobe, yanked him to his feet, and slapped a pair of ionic cuffs over his wrists. The clumsy drone wasn’t at all gentle about it, and Kobe couldn’t do anything but grimace in pain as he was pushed forward.
“Hey!” Kira yelled as a pair of powerful mechanical hands pulled her back by her shoulders. Before she knew it, both she and Mig were being marched alongside Kobe toward the assault shuttle, surrounded by sentry drones. As they shuffled along, Kira wondered what Ortzo had meant when he’d instructed the drones to “summon the commander,” but she didn’t have to consider the mystery for long. Kira looked ahead and couldn’t believe her eyes. Coming out from around Ortzo’s shuttle, led at blaster point by a pair of drones, was Kay.
And he wasn’t wearing any cuffs.
“Son of a—” she hissed, and she tried to go after him, but she was again stopped by a sentry’s inescapable grip. “You sold us out! You told Praxis where we were. You told them how to ambush us!”
“You did this!” Kay yelled as he stood just outside the circle of sentries that protected Kira and Mig. “You and Akima.”
“Don’t you dare say her name,” Kira fired back. “Don’t you—”
“I lost good men and women in a bloodbath orchestrated by your mother. She set us up, and for nothing. I don’t know what game you two are playing, but I won’t let you get away with it.”
Kira breathed heavily through a snarl. As furious as she was with Kay, she was just as furious at herself for trusting him.
“Enough,” Ortzo said, charging between the drones that led Kira and her friends forward. “Put this one in cuffs, too.”
“What?!” Kay bellowed. “We had a deal!”
“And our arrangement will be followed to the letter once the deal is complete,” Ortzo said, brushing by Kay as he was placed in cuffs.
“What deal?” Kira demanded of Ortzo. “And where are you taking us?”
Ortzo turned slowly, pointing at Kira. “I forget, Kira Sen, that you’re from Praxis. Chalk it up to wanting to push filthy traitors as far out of my mind as possible. But since you’re from here, you’ll be able to appreciate the special treat we have in store for you. You want to know where we’re going? The last place you’d ever want to go, which is also the last place you’ll see:
“The Crucible.”
As Ortzo walked away and boarded the shuttle, all the pieces clicked into place in Kira’s mind. She looked at Kay, the anger emptying out of her. He looked back at her and delivered a subtle, conspiratorial nod.
Mig was right; Kay had been working on getting them into the Crucible.
Now all they had to do was take it over.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Cade snaked his way through the palace’s winding hallways, following the thunderous eruptions toward their source. He had nearly reached what he assumed was the palace’s throne room—which would have been situated just beyond the palace’s front doors—when he felt the ground beneath him start to shake. The force of the quake was strong enough to nearly knock Cade off his feet; he stumbled against the powder-blue-and-white-tinted wall that looked like a sky streaked with clouds. The rumbling continued unabated, and Cade shoved himself off the wall just as bits and pieces of the ceiling began to crumble down on his head.
Then, just as Cade was about to continue his mission to find whatever trouble was battering the Monaskin palace, trouble found him.
A trio of Monaskin citizens bounded down the hallway, heading right for Cade. The de facto leader was holding one of the enormous blasters Cade had spotted the guards armed with when he’d first descended into the Monaskin core. The other two were armed with a tri-blaster and a compression pike, respectively, but Cade knew that no amount of firepower could compensate for the perseverance that came with being battle-hardened. And battle-hardened these three were not, which was probably why they were running. Cade could only hope that the Monaskin guards had a little more tenacity; sure, they looked the part of being formidable soldiers, but being isolated all these years, Cade had to figure, probably hadn’t done them any favors when push came to shove—or, more specifically, when defending your turf against the galaxy’s ruling power. Cade didn’t know how Praxis had found him, but he had no doubt that when he found the cause of the ruckus, he’d find the bloodred banner of Praxis waving not far behind.
As the leader closed the distance between herself and Cade, she waved for him to go. “Run! Get out of here!” she screamed, and while Cade took cautious steps backward, he wasn’t inclined to flee, especially since he’d come from the direction these people were heading and knew there wasn’t anywhere to go. With the intention of being helpful—inspiring, even, seeing that these people had probably seen the cool stuff he was able to do with the Rokura—Cade held up his hands, urging the fleeing trio to stop. But then a weapon of some sort—Cade had no idea what it was—came spinning down the hallway and sliced clean through the leader’s skull. And it kept coming. Without a moment to spare, Cade ducked just in time to watch as a gleaming, circular blade with razor-sharp teeth zipped overhead. It lodged itself in the wall behind him, thankfully without his scalp attached to it.
The two people who’d been on the run didn’t waste any time getting back to their flight; they scampered around their decapitated friend, leaving her and her novelty blaster behind.
“Well, then,” Cade said with a devious smile. “Looks like you’re all mine.”
The blaster, unsurprising, was heavier than a sack of bricks. Cade groaned as he wrapped his right hand on a handle that rose off the top of the gun; his other hand gripped what he assumed was the trigger, but it was a guess at best.
“You’re not going to win any awards for being user-friendly,” Cade whispered to the blaster. “But let’s see what you can do.”
Cade centered himself in the hallway, feeling the floor rumble beneath his feet and debris from the ceiling fluttering on his head. He was waiting for the pursuers to arrive, and thankfully, he didn’t have to wait long.
A sentry drone charged from around the corner, wielding a tri-blaster in one hand and the blade-shooting weapon in the other. It abruptly stopped when it saw Cade, like it was stunned by the sight of him.
“That’s the one we are looking fo—” the sentry was saying through its tinny, monotone voice modulator when Cade squeezed what he figured was the trigger. And when he did, the bulky, unwieldy, ridiculous weapon gave Cade one
of the most satisfying experiences of his life.
Multicolored blaster bolts larger than any Cade had ever seen sprayed all over the passageway and shredded anything in their path. After the first sentry stumbled into the hall, it was followed by so many others, and none of them knew what was waiting for them.
Cade kept a steady hand on the trigger, mowing down drone after drone. More than mowing down, though, Cade’s blaster blew the sentries to bits, the force of its strikes exploding their bodies into pieces that careened up and down the gleaming hallway. It was a pleasant sight, but not as pleasant as the blaster bolts’ brilliance transforming the passageway into a kaleidoscope of light. Cade found himself grinning ear to ear as the sentry bits and pieces lined the hall, making it look like a derelict catacomb. After the journey he’d taken into the depths of his soul, Cade was relieved to blow off some steam, and this was just the ticket. Cade would have liked to have copped to not knowing how much fun it would be to wield a hand cannon and decimate a legion of drones, but that would have been a lie. This moment was everything he’d dreamed it would be and more.
But even the best of times had to come to an end.
Without warning, the blaster’s carousel of ammunition went dry. Disbelief struck Cade; he pulled on the trigger again and again just to be sure, but every squeeze was met with nothing more than a dry click. For a moment, Cade was more disappointed by the end of this good time than he was concerned with the enemies that were still coming for him. Reality sank back in hard for Cade, especially when he spotted a line of five sentries armed with compression pikes spread across the width of the hall, kicking aside what remained of their fallen brethren.
“Fine,” Cade said, dropping the blaster and pulling out the Rokura. “We’ll do this the hard way.”
Cade considered testing his newfound comfort with the Rokura but figured it was best not to push his luck. Drones he could deal with, and he didn’t want to get in the habit of calling on the Rokura every time he needed his back scratched. So instead, he charged the drones, thinking he’d make use of his training as a Rai. But as Cade got within striking distance, the sentries didn’t move. They remained completely static, which he found odd. Undeterred, Cade was about to drive the Rokura through the centermost sentry’s chest plate when, suddenly, the drone dropped face-first onto the floor. Behind it was another sentry—and this one had a blaster.
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