Chapter Twenty-Four
He shoved a hand into a pocket, drew forth his insignia, and attached it to his collar. “Edie has my complete trust. I am honored to have hers. We’re a matched set. You work with us, or you go back to your razor-tooth hoppers.”
“There’re bugs to stomp,” Edie said, rising. “Anyone joining up, standard march rules. No groups. Spread out. Keep moving. Doubly important now because it turns out an old ally can track me. He’s the only one, but he is a mercenary.”
Povora bared her teeth. “You’re only safe until someone finds his break point.”
Edie nodded. Matter of time, wasn’t it? Because just her luck. Mr. Second-in-Command-of-the-Mubaash-Tu had directed an SOS right at Trente’s break point.
Eilod Saoyrse.
Edie shoved a packet of the flavorless tea into her pack, closed it, slung it to her back, and started down the opposite side of the hill, V’kyrri at her side.
“How far?”
“We’ll be there by lunch time,” she said aloud, shooting him a sidelong glance. “I have the SEM. You don’t have to translate for me anymore.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “What’s wrong? Afraid you’ll become addicted?”
“Afraid I already am.”
Staggered, V’kyrri lost his grip on pain suppression. He got out of her head fast. Too fast.
She glanced at him, her expression filled with such uncertainty, misery sank dull teeth into his skull.
“Having issues broadcasting and not killing myself on the terrain at the same time,” he joked. He stumbled on a loose rock obscured by the lush grasses reaching to his knees. As intended, her expression lightened.
Weight settled on his chest. He’d lied to her. First to protect his survivors and himself. Then, he’d imagined, he’d lied to protect her. But he hadn’t, had he? He’d caught the set-in-Isarrite cast to her features when he’d mentioned the Aurnoch’s name.
Maybe the deep, soul-shaking ache in his head and the nausea it inspired were his penance.
Neither would buy back the trust he’d violated by not telling her everything. He should get the rest out into the open, too. Face the consequences. He lived to protect the empire. He’d served at Her Majesty’s pleasure for half his life. He’d faced Chekydran, UMOPG, and Tagreth Federated forces without flinching.
Yet he couldn’t come up with the courage to tell Edie that the telepathic injury he’d taken during the wreck of the Rhapsody was killing him.
Not after her trembling admission—in his arms—that being happy meant everyone she loved died. He closed his eyes, absorbing the knife to his gut.
Did she realize she’d introduced love into the equation? His eyelids scraped his dry eyes when he opened them.
She led him out of the foothills into forest, sliding between tree trunks, twisting through the underbrush with practiced ease. Based on the buzz of laser focus and memory blocking casual access to her head, V’kyrri suspected she moved on muscle memory alone.
She pressed through the final layer of trees and stopped dead.
V’kyrri swiped a sleeve across his forehead and measured his breaths to slow the uneven thunder of blood in his ears. He kept his gaze on her face, uncertain how she’d take the changes that time and the Claugh had wrought on her family’s home.
Edie’s eyes widened. Her jaw dropped. Her family home had been turned into a park—a monument to the resistance. She stared at the reconstruction of her parents’ house, eyes reddening. Shaking her head, she lifted her hands in question.
He captured one of her hands. “Her Majesty,” he said in answer to her unasked question. “Shortly after she came to the throne.”
Edie swayed. Her memory whirled up and broke against the reality of her rebuilt home. V’kyrri stayed inside her head, absorbed by her sensation that she’d somehow stepped back in time. The pain of swallowed words clogged her throat, creating ghost pain in his.
Eilod had gone to great lengths to reproduce Edie’s childhood home perfectly. Too perfectly. Edie flashed on herself as a child. The back corner of the house where her bedroom had been had sagged long before she’d been born. Rainy seasons sent water cascading in sheets from the low corner. The vibration of water hitting the roof, and then running in a torrent to drum the stone her father had placed beneath, had thrummed through her child’s body, lulling her to sleep.
Longing for what he hadn’t experienced opened an ache in V’kyrri’s chest.
Edie put a lid on a surge of tangled emotion before he could dip in to examine it. She started up a deliberate inventory of the ways the reconstruction failed to match memory.
The hole in the foundation where generations of garden snakes had sheltered hadn’t been reproduced.
Statues lined the front yard.
“Why?” She signed the question as if she couldn’t trust her voice.
“Her Majesty believes that every culture needs heroes—something to aspire to. Something to be proud of.”
Jonas stepped out of the trees, then Gallena and Povora. The rest of the villagers who’d come to fight trickled into the open as well.
Her trepidation shook V’kyrri as she crept into the midst of the statues, studying them. Names flared up from her memory and were suppressed in such rapid succession, he doubted she realized how much sorrow she repressed.
“Using us,” she blurted aloud. “You co-opted the resistance. The empire is using us. Again?”
“You were missing,” he said, fighting the sense that the ground had gone dangerously soft beneath his boots. “Presumed dead. It is only the lost—”
Rage bubbled from her gut into her chest, silencing him. She stared hard at the center of the installation. Faced away from her parents’ house, outside the gate to her father’s workshop, another monument caught her eye.
V’kyrri released her hand when she pulled, but he kept his line into her head open. He studied the statue through her eyes.
It had been captured in midstride, face lifted, shoulders back, hands cupped together at her belt. A single, star-shaped explosive rested in those hands.
Edie’s frown pulled at the corners of his mouth. That was one of her father’s explosives. One of his specialty fireworks. She glanced into the face. A young woman’s features, brows lowered, lips set in a stern line, eyes resolute and cold, hard brown Isarrite.
Recognition rocked Edie. V’kyrri leaped to catch her.
It was her.
She shook her head. “Why? Why like this? In front? Like I was leading someone? Anyone?”
V’kyrri didn’t answer.
Edie tipped her glance to the tag.
“In memory of Firestorm who led the resistance by courageous, daring example. Born Altheas Drake in this modest homestead on 3 Hagtlim NJC 417.” The words echoed inside his skull as she read them. “Led the resistance.” Edie snorted. Her bitterness cut.
V’kyrri had to lock his muscles to keep from ducking.
“I didn’t lead anything,” she muttered. “I did what I wanted. Everyone else whined about insubordination.”
“Then, in your absence, someone got sentimental and built a memorial.”
“To a Claugh-killer,” she snapped. “So the Claugh could manipulate my people while also plastering my face on Claugh wanted notices.”
He had no response for that.
Chewing sharp, sour shards of ire that made his stomach cramp, Edie turned for the replica of her father’s shop. They’d gotten that building wrong, too. According to her memory, it shouldn’t have been big enough to house the dozen soldiers pouring out the door, weapons drawn and aimed at her.
She swept the park with an assessing glance. Another half dozen soldiers spilled from the house, lining the porch, covering her and the villagers. Edie’s sneer caught on V’kyrri’s lips, too.
A man in a black suit led a pair of soldiers down the porch stairs, his arms outspread as he spoke aloud. “Home at last.”
Shock rolled from Edie to V’kyrri. Tearing pain in her chest clawed through his, taking his breath. He wheezed.
Edie stared. The blood drained from her face.
The cadre of soldiers herded the former resistance fighters in behind Edie and V’kyrri.
Creating one target.
V’kyrri shot a glance at Jonas who met his eye with lowered brows, lips pressed tight, and his hands balled into fists.
Edie sucked in a breath that hissed between her teeth. “You look good for a dead man, Tiimetes.”
The bitterness in her spoken comment yanked V’kyrri’s attention to the man. He dared a tendril of inquiry. She’d been angry, hurt, and confused by finding out the Claugh Empire had been using her the past decade.
Now, here they were, nascent relationship challenged, and facing someone else from her past. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and a trim but not-quite-cut physique. He wore an expensive black suit and blinding white shirt. The insignia of the planetary governor adorned his breast pocket.
Tiimetes Calamae. Planetary Governor of Nol Jakze.
V’kyrri scowled. He wanted—no—needed to know who the man had been to her before he could assess his chances of repairing the damage he’d done by not telling her everything. Hells. All the words they’d said, and in retrospect, he’d told her nothing.
The man smirked.
Edie’s hands clenched.
Misgiving fired through V’kyrri. Ice pierced his innards as the information he’d sought slapped him in the face. Former lover. Her first.
V’kyrri slammed the door on his impulse to dig for details, or for any reason to murder the man for the outrage ripping through Edie. He had no right to the details of her past. And, idiot that he was, he preferred she offer them.
“You shouldn’t have come,” Tiimetes said.
V’kyrri lifted an eyebrow. The man did not sign. One of the soldiers, a young lieutenant wearing a slim-line SEM, did the translating.
“You don’t belong,” Tiimetes said, striding past her statue to face her. “You ran out on me. On all of us. Now you come crawling back wanting to play hero? We can no longer afford you. You’ll spread panic and kill civilians. You’ve done enough damage already. You’re all under arrest.”
“You tried that once already,” she retorted, speaking and signing at the same time. “When luring me to my death didn’t work, I’m guessing you cut a deal. The plenkinors are already in the field.”
V’kyrri got a confused image of native golden-coated herbivores stripping crops from the soil. He shook his head at the “too late” metaphor.
“I want to know why the planetary governor’s code shut down the security and navigation beacons sixteen hours before the Chekydran entered system, Tii.” Edie’s forced-cheerful statement yanked Jonas, Gallena, Povora, and Tiimetes’s translator to attention.
Tiimetes brushed an imaginary speck from his jacket. “I don’t answer to you.”
Rage boiled over inside Edie. Answering adrenaline accelerated V’kyrri’s pulse. Edie rushed the man. Forearm at his throat, she drove him against the base of her monument.
He hit and choked.
“What’s the matter, Tii?” she demanded. “You used to like a little rough housing before kissing and making up. Or was that only when you were dishing it out?”
V’kyrri swallowed another urge to murder the man. Instead, he chuckled and sauntered to Edie’s side, getting between her and the governor’s wide-eyed soldiers.
“If you haven’t re-evaluated your stance about answering to Edie, I’ll point out that you do answer to me,” V’kyrri said, tapping his insignia with relish. “Governor.”
Jonas shoved his way forward to stand at Tiimetes’s shoulder, his back to the statue. He gazed between them; Edie, Tiimetes, and V’kyrri, and translated.
V’kyrri nodded his thanks.
Telepathy could teach him Edie’s native language. It couldn’t give him the ability to speak that language at the same time he spoke aloud the way Edie did.
Except now that she had an ex-lover by the throat, she didn’t seem invested in making herself understood by anyone else.
Pique? Or registering legitimate threat? He skimmed the sinister pop and crackle of her surface emotions. His fingers curled on the butt of his pistol. Question answered.
“Have you met Captain V’kyrri, Tii? Officer in her Majesty’s service. Second in command of the Murbaasch Tu?” The pride and possessiveness in her voice warmed V’kyrri, especially since he’d sprung the Murbaasch Tu part on her.
“Claugh?” Tiimetes sneered. “You, of all people, colluding, Firestorm?”
“Nice shot. Way too late. He knows who I am. Let’s get back to the fact that I accused you of collusion, Mr. My-Code-Let-the-Chekydran-in-to-Commit-Genocide.”
“You abandoned Nol Jakze, and everyone on it.” He craned his neck to look his lieutenant in the eye. “What is wrong with you? Shoot her.”
Edie leaned into her forearm.
Still, Tiimetes choked out, “She killed thousands of innocents.”
“I am getting damned tired of hearing that lie,” she said. “I wouldn’t kill civilians during the war. Which, as I recall, was the single biggest reason you and I argued. What makes you think I’d do a 180 on that? I didn’t. Not ever. I can prove it.”
Silence. Complete stillness once Jonas’s gestures stopped.
V’kyrri cast a glance around.
Baby-faced soldiers exchanged glances.
“Lieutenant?” one of the soldiers questioned.
“Firestorm saved my parents’ lives when she liberated Tomiltnor prison. I owe you my life, ma’am.” The woman holstered her weapon.
V’kyrri made certain the translation made it into Edie’s head. He doubted she could see either the lieutenant’s or Jonas’s hands. She deserved to know she’d left a positive legacy.
“Tomiltnor. That’s in Darmka Saal. You’re from Darmka Saal?” Edie’s face darkened. Her voice rose in pitch and volume. “You came from the capital.”
An Isarrite band clamped V’kyrri’s chest. The soldiers glanced at one another as if mystified by the statement.
They’d broken quarantine.
Snarling, she yanked Tiimetes away from the stone, then slammed him into it again.
He winced, eyes squinted, and his face flushing deep red.
“You broke quarantine,” she snapped. “Deliberately. You infected us and everyone else in this region. Why? Because it wasn’t enough you lied to me about being up against a death sentence ten years ago, you selfish child?”
“You hero types. Righting all the wrongs of the universe. You’re easy to lie to,” Tiimetes whispered.
‘Righting all the wrongs…’ the turn of phrase struck V’kyrri. Where had he heard it before?
“Edieeeee,” a sing-song voice, riding the breeze at their backs, lased through speculation.
V’kyrri frowned. The call was faint, and he suspected she hadn’t registered it until she sagged.
“Tiimetes had to know what he’d be up against if you ever returned to stir the slug wasp nest, Altheas,” Jonas said as if he hadn’t heard—V’kyrri mentally kicked himself. Jonas hadn’t heard. The man was deaf. Just like Edie.
Jonas spoke in a smooth baritone that wavered as if uncertain of where it wanted to land. “He couldn’t murder us over the years, though the Gods know he’s tried.”
Tiimetes wheezed a laugh. “You can’t prove a thing, old man.”
“Why not use a Chekydran plague to attack the remnants of the resistance he once loved?” Jonas said.
“Because he’s a coward,” Povora snapped. “Someone gave or promised him medicine.”
Tiimetes’s expression twisted. He began shouting, “Shoot her. Shoot her. I’m ordering you.”
V’kyrri noted that the lieutenant, the only one wearing a SEM, didn’t bother translating.
“Don’t kill him yet, Edie,” V’k said. “I’d like to extract a little extra intel.”
Edie slanted a blood-thirsty grin his way. His body clenched tight and hot, an unauthorized grin stretching his lips in answer to hers.
“Edieeeeee.” That high pitched singsong again. Closer. Much closer. On the dirt path that connected the nearest village to the park
V’k’s smile died.
Edie lowered her chin to her chest, shoulders sagging. “Godsdammit, Immin. You have the worst timing.”
The assassin strode into view on the road. The wiry mercenary had lavender and pink striped hair, preternaturally long arms, and over-sized hands, both bristling with conspicuous weaponry.
“Did you not get the quarantined world memo?” Edie demanded.
She yanked Tiimetes’s gun free, glanced over her shoulder, and lobbed a trio of shots at the assassin. His eyes went wide. Her former coworker took the bolts in the chest. He flew backward half a meter, raising a pall of dust.
The assassin twitched, then sank into slack stillness.
“I don’t know what I expected from a guild assassin, but that was not it,” V’kyrri said.
Utter and complete stillness from the soldiers and villagers.
The governor surged against Edie’s grasp. She slammed him into the stone and poked his gun in his face. “We aren’t done.”
“You were supposed to come for me,” Tiimetes snapped. “You were supposed to love me.”
“I did,” she said, her tone dull. Weary. “As much as I was capable of loving anyone or anything.”
V’kyrri rocked.
Edie tucked the gun into her belt, jerked Tiimetes away from the statue, one arm twisted behind his back, and dug her fingers into his throat in mimic of the hold V’kyrri had used on her.
“You killed that man,” one of the soldiers signed.
V’kyrri rubbed a hand down his face.
Jonas settled into shoulder-shaking laughter.
Impending danger tickled V’kyrri’s nerves. He straightened, eying the soldiers busy talking amongst themselves. Murder. Cold-blood.
“You’re soldiers,” V’kyrri barked out. The lieutenant translated. “Act like it. Keep your opinions to yourselves until you’ve investigated.”
The lieutenant added a series of sign beyond relaying what V’k had said. Four of her soldiers saluted and jogged to the corpse.
Two bent down. Almost immediately, they straightened and backed away. They raised their hands overhead to spell something out.
“Guild Assassin,” Jonas said aloud.
“He had a ship, Tii. How’d a Guild assassin get close to a VIP like you? Did you shut down surface security, too? You didn’t want anyone fighting back when the Chekydran started killing people?”
The governor’s face turned purple.
V’kyrri pressed his lips tight and allowed himself an admiring smile. A park full of soldiers and weapons, and she’d isolated and immobilized the highest value target without a shot fired, and without a single weapon in her hands.
He had to convince her to switch sides. “Edie…”
Teleport distortion snatched him out of the park. He shouted a curse and materialized into damp twilight. Rainwater wet his face. He blinked confusion and drizzle from his eyelashes.
He spun, head pounding. “Edie?”