EPILOGUE
VESPER
my shoulder, startling me awake.
I sucked in a breath and sat bolt upright. My head snapped left and right, but instead of Zane’s cluttered library, I was in a maintenance-room-turned-workshop on board the Dream World, Kyrion’s blitzer.
“Vesper?”
Kyrion loomed over me, the way he so often did. My gaze traced over his longish black hair, dark blue eyes, and pale skin. He looked the same as always, right down to the Arrow uniform he was wearing, and some of the tension in my chest eased. I was here with him, and not stuck half a galaxy away with Zane.
I blew out a breath and sat back in my chair. “I must have fallen asleep.”
“Obviously.” Kyrion gave me an amused look, then reached down, took hold of the edge of a piece of plastipaper, and gently peeled it off my cheek.
He tossed the clear reusable paper down onto the table in front of me, causing the gossipcast still playing over the holoscreen to flicker. On the feed, Zane was holding his hands out wide, calling for silence as he answered one question after another about the latest Techwave attack.
“Vesper?” Kyrion frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“I saw Zane,” I confessed in a low voice. “Through a door in my mindscape.”
A mindscape was the place inside a seer’s mind, heart, and body where their magic resided. Each mindscape was unique to its seer, although mine was a round room with arched doors, pale blue flowers, and jeweled sapphsidian eyes set into the dark stone walls.
I recapped accidentally going to Zane’s library and our heated conversation. When I finished, Kyrion glowered at the hologram of Zane still hovering over the table.
“He’s actually going to follow Holloway’s orders and come after us? Arrogant bastard.” Kyrion spat out the words. “After I told him about you, I thought . . .”
“What?”
Kyrion shrugged his broad shoulders. “That Zane might do the right thing for once in his miserable life. But it looks like I was wrong, and you were right. Your being his sister isn’t going to change anything for him. Still, back at Crownpoint, I almost thought . . .” His voice trailed off, and a contemplative look creased his face.
“What?”
“That Zane was helping us escape.”
“Helping us?” I barked out a laugh. “You almost cut his blasted leg off!”
Kyrion shrugged again. “I did, but I’ve been thinking about my fight with Zane ever since that night, and something about it just doesn’t add up. If I didn’t know better, I would almost think that . . .”
“What?” I asked in a wary voice.
Kyrion stared down at me. “That Zane let me cut him on purpose. So he would be too wounded to capture us.”
An unexpected bit of hope flared in my stomach, streaking up through my chest like a rocket zipping through the atmosphere, but I swatted it aside before it could crash into my heart.
“No.” I shook my head. “Zane would never do anything to risk his position as the new head of the Arrows. Especially not something as foolish as helping us escape from Holloway.”
But even as I said the words, a tiny needle of doubt pricked my heart. I wanted to believe it was true. I wanted to believe Zane had helped us, that he had some small concern and consideration for me, that he might actually view me as his sister.
That one day, I might finally have the loving family I’d always wanted.
But once again, I swatted aside that foolish hope. I’d learned my lesson with Nerezza the hard way when she had abandoned me as a child. Just because you were related to someone didn’t make them your family. Nerezza had never cared about me, so why would Zane or the rest of the Zimmers?
“Forget about Zane,” Kyrion said in a gentle voice. “Have you made any progress on the information Asterin sent you?”
Tivona and Leandra had posted all the details of the solstice celebration attack on the private, encrypted group channel that Daichi had set up for us. Asterin had chimed in with her thoughts and shared the schematics for Jorge Rojillo’s new temperature-shielding device, although she hadn’t revealed how she had gotten the information. She also hadn’t revealed how she’d broken into Jorge’s R&D lab or what tech she’d been after, but I didn’t begrudge my friend her secrets.
The stars knew I had enough ugly secrets of my own to worry about right now.
I glanced down at the plastipapers that covered the table. “I was looking at the schematics when I fell asleep. Lord Jorge’s device seems promising, but I’m not sure what the Techwave wants with climate-control technology. Maybe they think it will keep their new hand cannons from overheating.”
“Perhaps,” Kyrion agreed. “Or perhaps they’ve shifted their focus to something else, now that Harkin Ocnus is dead.”
“Or maybe General Ocnus is planning something even worse, now that his son is dead,” I muttered.
Kyrion and I fell silent, contemplating that horrible possibility.
“Well, whatever the Techwave is up to, it can wait until you get some sleep. Why don’t you come back to bed?” Kyrion asked, a husky promise in his voice.
He stepped forward and trailed his fingers down the curve of my spine. Equal parts heat and anticipation spiked through my body at his light touch. “Give me a few minutes to shut everything down.”
Kyrion caressed my spine a moment longer, then left the workshop. I slid my chair back from the table and gathered up the loose plastipapers that featured Jorge Rojillo’s design schematics, as well as some of my own inventions. I tried to put the papers in order, but after a minute, I gave up and just shoved them all off to the side of the table, creating a haphazard pile. Maybe Zane was right. Maybe clutter did run in our family.
Our family.
My gaze skipped back over to the gossipcast that was still playing over the table. Zane continued to smile at the cameras, but my seer magic surged up, and suddenly, I was seeing a second Zane hovering in the air—my brother as he’d been in his library.
Instead of the cocky, composed, arrogant Arrow I was used to dealing with, Zane had been disheveled, exhausted, and almost heartsick, as though the Techwave attack had bothered him far more than he’d let on in front of the gossipcasters.
His raw vulnerability had surprised me.
So had our conversation.
We’d exchanged barbs and insults, just as we had all the other times we’d talked to each other over the past few months, and Zane had been smug and infuriating, as usual—until he’d said what Beatrice had done to me was wrong.
He’d seemed so blasted sincere in that moment, as if his grandmother’s actions and all the secrets she’d kept had truly pained him. But even more surprising had been the way he’d looked at me, as if I were some marvelous creature that he had never encountered before.
I’d expected Zane to sneer at me, dismiss me as wholly unimportant and completely beneath his lofty notice, but I’d had his full, undivided attention, as though our familial connection had been weighing on him as heavily as it had been weighing on me.
And then he’d gone and ruined things by saying that Kyrion and I should turn ourselves in and surrender to him. Arrogant jackass.
I sliced my hand over the holoscreen. The gossipcast vanished, as did the image of the second, more vulnerable Zane that my seer magic had conjured up. I glared at the empty air a moment, then spun away from the table, slapped off the lights, and shut the workshop door behind me.
I strode down the corridor, heading toward a set of tight spiral stairs that would take me to the upper deck where Kyrion was waiting, but I couldn’t escape my troubled thoughts, and I kept replaying my conversation with Zane in my mind. His last words haunted me, especially since I couldn’t tell whether they had been a threat, a promise, or both.
See you soon, little sister, Zane’s voice whispered through my mind.
A sharp finger of unease jabbed into my heart. My long-lost big brother was going to be a problem. I just couldn’t see how much of one yet.
Only Hard Problems. Zane, Vesper, and Kyrion will return in Only Cold Depths, book 4 in the Galactic Bonds science-fiction fantasy series.
of Jennifer's books? Keep reading for a look at Karma Girl, book 1 in the Bigtime superhero series.