Chapter Thirty-Six

“Get her. Get her, now.”

“I’m working on it,” Pietre shouted. “Shut up.”

“V’k.” Damen grappled V’kyrri by his shoulders.

“They did it,” a voice yelled via com. “They breached the dome. The station is tearing itself and the Chekydran to shreds.”

V’kyrri fought off his best friend.

Damen tackled him.

The incidence field fired. Glowed.

V’kyrri threw Damen and scrambled for the incoming teleport. Edie materialized, slack, a hole in her chest. He crawled through the blood that had registered as a part of her and been teleported along with her.

Raj and Dr. Idylle went to work rapidly, barking orders at one another.

Dizziness swept V’kyrri. He ignored it. He took Edie’s hand, touched her face, and sank into the dimming light of her. “Edie. You aren’t dying for me, damn it.”

His mental voice echoed through the hollow confines of the temple he’d always envisioned her being. Cold panic drove him. He dove deep into the cooling ashes of Edie.

Ari’s voice, thick with terror followed him. “Twelve Gods. V’k. He’s going after her. He’s forcing her heart to beat, controlling respiration.”

“If he dies while connected to her…” Damen said.

“We die with him,” Seaghdh finished.

V’kyrri shuddered. No. They wouldn’t. He’d spared himself the moral conundrum of endangering his friends while fighting for Edie. By cutting them off during the crash of the Rhapsody, he’d saved their lives now. He could go after Edie with a clear conscience.

“Edie. Firestorm. Altheas Drake. Come back. I need you. I love you. Come back or take me with you, but no leaving me.”

Like a line jerking taut, his headlong dive into the dimming fire that was Edie bounced to a halt.

“V’k,” Ari said inside his head.

Snarling, every part of him burning, he turned on his friend and student. He struck. Power flared, snapping his blow right back at him. He reeled.

“I’m helping, you Orhait’s ass,” she snapped, thrusting a filament of bright power at him. “Here. Take it.”

“Danger,” he responded, lit beyond capacity by the weird syncopated on, on, off pulse of Ari’s energy. “Go back.”

“You’re too worn out for this, you stubborn bastard,” she said.

“No. Ari. You’ll bleed dry. I can’t…”

Feathers caressed his physical face. Color exploded across all aspects of his perception. Alien thought patterns enclosed him, the ashes of Edie, Ari, and the Ki in a bubble—maybe a cocoon—of shifting light and energy.

Recognition swept him the way antennae swept his face. The Chekydran-ki. They’d teleported to the Sen Ekir.

The kaleidoscopic cocoon might exist only in his mind, but the bubble tightened. It closed on him, scraping through him, pulling every mote of light and hope and love with it.

For a second, the bubble hesitated, wavering. It pulsed in time with Ari’s on, on, off beat of power.

Refusal.

How he got that, he couldn’t say. He knew only that the Ki gently shoved Ari out of the closing circle, leaving her to bleed energy and affront. The cocoon shrank to an orb he could wrap his arms around. It collapsed further still, brightening to the point that he couldn’t bear to regard it with any sense, physical or mental.

The Ki queen nudged him with a thought. V’kyrri created a physical construct of himself, standing amid the fading embers of Edie. The queen set the gleaming orb in his palm, the way Edie had once tipped a fireball into his hand.

The orb wasn’t Edie. It was the vital, burning essence of everything she was to him and maybe to herself.

V’kyrri knelt and nestled the orb into the ash heap.

Nothing happened. His eyes and chest burned. Air couldn’t slip past the loss swelling within him.

“Edie.”

The orb exploded.

In that flash, heat, light, and brilliant flames ripped past. Clutching a tiny filament of flame, V’kyrri fell out of Edie’s psyche. He slammed into his own body with such force he found himself sprawled on the deck plates, staring at the Sen Ekir’s ceiling. He spared a moment to hook the flicker he’d brought with him, not into his consciousness, but into his soul.

“V’k.” Jayleia rushed to his side, her voice thick. Moisture tracked her face. “Look at me. Are you…”

Blinking the whirl of fire and pain out of his mental eye he rasped, “Edie,” and struggled to rise.

“Stay still,” Jay commanded, shoving him flat. “Raj and Dr. Idylle are working on her, there’s still a chance, V’k. Tell me you’re okay.”

He couldn’t.

“What happened?” Jayleia demanded.

“I-I think the Ki tried to help me and Ari…get Edie back.”

Jay’s dark eyes widened.

“There was an explosion. I thought she was called Firestorm because of what she did during the war,” he said and shook his head. “That’s wrong.”

Fresh tears tracked Jay’s cheeks. She sat cross-legged on the deck beside him.

Fear constricted his chest. It powered him to sitting.

Jayleia smiled. “S’okay, V’k. She’s still on the edge, but Linnaeus and Raj are pumping her full of blood products since we have a legion of donors. Internal damage from the chest wound is nearly repaired. They’ll start closing…”

The Chekydran-ki queen stepped into V’kyrri’s line of sight. She convulsed and spat a reddish-purple gelatinous substance onto her forelegs. She leaned past V’kyrri.

He scrambled to his knees.

Jay grabbed his wrist.

Dr. Idylle and Raj looked up.

The queen dumped the goo in the middle of Edie’s open chest wound.

V’kyrri swayed. “What…”

Both doctors smeared the substance across the chasm in Edie. Raj and Dr. Idylle spoke over the top of one another, their words a jumble. “Healing. Damen. Proven efficacy. Fast. Healing.”

He forced himself to breathe in time with the machine breathing for Edie. Through the window of gel, he detected the flutter of Edie’s heart, intact now, and pink. He shook with a bitter laugh.

“When I said I wanted your heart,” he murmured, “I didn’t mean like this.”

Laughing and crying at once, Jayleia punched his shoulder.

“V’k.” Ari’s voice via com.

“Ari. I’m sorry—”

“Don’t,” she said. “I get it. I’d have attacked, too, had you tried to get between me and Seaghdh. You’re off duty. That’s an order. But you might consider making a statement.”

“What?” V’kyrri looked around, finally registering that far too many bodies had crammed into the Sen Ekir’s tiny medi bay. He brushed fingertips across Edie’s still cheek. Heat flooded his system. The chill of space had relinquished her. Warm skin met his touch. Her heart still beat, though he was losing visual on that as the Chekydran healing gel darkened.

Edie was alive.

“You have a crowd amassed outside,” Seaghdh said. “One hundred thousand and growing.”

“Eilod and her machinations,” Ari muttered. “She couldn’t have turned Edie into more of a legend if she’d tried. And she did try.”

V’kyrri bristled. “She—”

“Stand down, V’k,” Seaghdh said. “Edie’s a hero. She’s a symbol of courage and self-sacrifice to her people. The sagas are already being written.”

“You’re afraid this’ll get dangerous,” V’kyrri said.

“It already has,” Seaghdh said.

“Get out there,” Ari said. “Go covered in her blood and tell them.”

“Tell them what?” he demanded.

“She’s alive,” Raj snapped. “I don’t know how, but she’s alive, and the longer that’s true, the better her chances.”

V’kyrri’s knees didn’t want to hold him.

It took Jayleia and Damen supporting him to get to the gate. Determined to address the crowd in their own language, he shook off his friends, and looked at Jonas, Povora, Raz, and the rest of the resistance. Tears streaked their faces. Holding his hands over head, V’kyrri said, “She lives.”

As if saying those two words broke a vital part of him, tears burned his eyes and spilled over. “She lives.”

Motion and the noise of cloth brushing cloth rose and crested like a wave running outward as the news rippled through the throng of people. Jonas came and clapped V’kyrri’s shoulder.

“Praise to all Twelve Gods,” Jonas said.

The crowd echoed him. As he scrubbed his face dry, V’kyrri did, too.