Patricia Dué had to admit that Dillon seemed to know what he was doing. Even after their former ship, the Atlas, had crashed in the mountains to the north and Patricia’s newly conquered mine had collapsed, Dillon looked confident. He marched toward the shattered tunnel, barking orders before the dust had a chance to clear.
Even Patricia responded to his commands, using her macro-psychokinetic power to lift rubble clear of the mine shaft while her follower Raquel used a mix of macro- and micro-psychokinesis to drill a hole so those trapped in the tunnels could climb out. The other members of Raquel’s group—like Patricia, former inhabitants of the Atlas—used their powers to direct Raquel’s drilling.
Patricia could sense the trapped people, too. With her myriad powers, she could help them stay alive until they were rescued. And she could heal them after that, but she could do nothing about the dead. The miners lifted the bodies free anyway, so many corpses, and Patricia thought again of Naos, of the hundreds of years she’d spent as a prisoner in a mind that used to be her own.
Patricia’s terror at seeing the Atlas blaze overhead had faded a little. She had time to escape. Even with all her power, Naos couldn’t teleport or fly. On the ground of the planet of Calamity, she’d have to walk like everyone else.
Patricia turned back to the corpses, determined that no one else would die. These were her people, now, even if telepathy had initially made them that way. She couldn’t help a jolt of guilt; she’d brought them to this disaster when she’d taken over the small community. Naos wouldn’t have come here if Patricia hadn’t escaped from their shared mind.
Every other part of Patricia rebelled against that thought. She’d treated these people well, brought them together, brought them peace with their plains and hill dwelling neighbors. So what if she’d had to use telepathy to do so? In the end, they’d been happy to be convinced. At least she wasn’t like Naos who seemed on a quest to turn everyone into clones of herself.
Patricia paused and waited for Dillon’s snide voice to disagree, to call her a coward or some other vile name, but of course, he wasn’t a guest in her mind anymore. She’d found a place to put him: in the body of Gale’s mayor, the former Liam Carmichael.
Between the power users and Dillon’s efficient orders, many of the miners made it out of the tunnels alive. Patricia watched as they hugged their comrades or wept over the dead. Some seemed to be weeping in relief that they still lived, but they didn’t know how bad things were about to get.
First of the many problems she’d have to deal with: Dillon. Dillon’s new body walked toward her with a confident stride, cockier than the mayor’s steps had been. The mayor’s body was handsome, fit, and in its twenties or early thirties. He had a brown ponytail and startling green eyes. Combined with Dillon’s cocksure swagger, it was a very attractive package, even if looking at him also made her want to smack him. She was just glad he wasn’t in her head anymore to read her attraction.
He nodded to the house where she’d put him inside his current body scant hours ago. She followed without a word, leaving Jonah, her servant inside Dillon’s old body, in charge of the miners.
The mayor’s two escorts were lying right where Patricia had left them when she’d knocked them unconscious. A young woman in leather armor and a slightly older man wearing metal; they weren’t going anywhere unless Patricia’s power let them.
“What are we going to do with them?” Dillon asked.
It was a test. Did he want her to suggest killing them so he could accuse her of being bloodthirsty, or should she say to spare them so he could call her weak?
Unless… “Nothing,” she said. She wanted to say they were his problem and leave him to it, but with Naos on Calamity, she needed allies. “With a little prompting, they’ll get used to you as the new mayor of Gale.”
He rubbed his chin, then looked at his hand in surprise as if just recognizing his new body. Her powered senses detected a wave of happiness rolling off him. “I’ll need you to pull some details from them if I’m going to pull off that charade.”
“If either of them knew the mayor well, I can.” She wished she’d paid more attention to the personality she’d pulled out of the mayor, but in her haste to bring Dillon out, she’d scattered Liam’s thoughts in her own mind, and there was no putting his memories back together again. “When did you want…I mean, are you going to Gale now, or…”
“Don’t worry, sweets.” He lifted a hand before she could protest the nickname. “Patricia. I’ll help you out with Naos, the big bad wolf.” He looked at his new body as if admiring it.
She turned away, sickened. She’d stolen yet another body, something Dillon had chastised her for, but she hadn’t had a choice. When she’d claimed his old body, it had been out of a selfish need for companionship, but now she had to stop whatever Naos had planned, both for her sake and everyone else’s.
When she looked back, she caught Dillon glancing down the front of his trousers. “Ugh, grow up,” she said.
“Just getting the lay of the land, sweetheart.” He gave her a wink.
She rolled her eyes. “I only hope you approve.”
He gave her a calculating look, then smiled, and she knew what he was thinking without reading him. He feared her powers now that he wasn’t lodged in her mind like a tick. Good, that corrected their imbalance of power a little. If he became too cocksure, she could take what she needed about combat and defense from his memory and leave him to rot, even if that left her without his forceful personality. It was good to know she had options, even if they all seemed shitty.
* * *
The sight of the Atlas flying overhead had made Cordelia’s belly go cold. She’d seen the ship before on two out-of-body experiences, and she’d never forget that sleek hull, the acres of rare metal that would drive any Galean wild.
And she’d also never forget the madwoman in charge of it.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Cordelia muttered as she’d watched the ship rattle and boom overhead, headed for the mountains in the north before its crash echoed across the plains. It would be causing havoc at the mine, shaking the mountains down around them, around Liam.
She was still staring, worry after worry piling in her mind until she realized Nettle and Horace were talking with the others, asking her what in the world was going on.
“It’s the Atlas,” she said. No one on the planet had seen it except for her and the people who’d been alive two hundred and fifty years in the past when the Atlas had first come to this planet and launched Cordelia’s ancestors to the surface to be their worshipers. Now the truth was out, and people knew that the original Atlas inhabitants who’d remained in space so long ago weren’t gods. They were all on the planet, revealing themselves as human, but they still had powers that put everyone else to shame.
And the greatest of them just joined the party. “Naos is on board, has to be.”
“Why would she come here?” Nettle asked, sucking her sharp teeth.
“Are you sure?” Horace said at the same time.
“Can you reach Liam?” Cordelia asked Horace, hoping his telepathic abilities could stretch that far.
He frowned and shook his head. “Finding one mind among so many would be difficult, and with that Patricia woman around…”
Cordelia nodded. Patricia had easily subdued him when they’d visited the mine. But with Naos around, maybe Patricia would let down her guard or turn the mine back over to Gale in order to have some allies. No matter what, she had to see that working with someone was better than facing Naos alone.
“Can you astral project that far?” Horace asked.
Cordelia shook her head. The ability to leave her body was quite handy in many cases, but her range wasn’t that far. That fact comforted her most of the time. Remembering when Naos had separated her mind and body still gave her nightmares.
“Do we go back?” Nettle asked, her head swinging between the mine in the distance and the long road back to Gale. In the swamp where her kind, the drushka, lived, the whorls and marks on Nettle’s dark brown skin would have camouflaged her against the surrounding trees, but here on the plains, where the only colors were the green of the grass and the white of stone, she stood out starkly.
As for her question, Cordelia had no answer. Part of her wanted to run back to Liam at the mine, but if Patricia didn’t want to let him go, there was little Cordelia could do. She needed Simon Lazlo, and he was in Gale. He was the linchpin who could combine enough power to bring someone like Naos down.
The sun was setting. Cordelia needed to decide. She wanted to hurry back to Gale so she could collect Simon, then take him to the mine to free Liam. But the track leading from the mine to Gale meandered between hillocks and ravines that cut through the plains. With lanterns, her party of paladins and scouts could stumble off the track and get lost, eating up more time.
“We set up camp.”
By the time they unpacked, it was already dark, and everyone fumbled through setting up tents. Cordelia didn’t feel like sleeping. She stripped her armor off and sat outside, staring at the blackness to the north. No giant balls of fire were consuming the mountains; she supposed that was a good sign. She didn’t like the idea of leaving Liam to deal with Naos’s shit, but he was already dealing with Patricia’s. He’d been a fine soldier—better at taking a punch than giving one, but still—and now that he’d been living outside his hard-ass mother’s influence for nearly a year, he’d come into his own as a leader.
She clenched her fists, fighting the urge to run to him through the dark, and trusting that he could handle Patricia, make an alliance with her.
But he couldn’t handle a fight with the biggest, baddest power user in the universe. By the time Cordelia gathered Simon and got back to the mine, Naos could burn it all to the ground.
Horace sat beside her, and she expected a lecture about going to sleep, but he only said, “Why would Naos come here now?”
“To fuck with us,” Cordelia said, certain of it.
“But she can fuck with us from space.”
“Simon cut her a bit last time they fought, made it so she can’t possess people.”
“So?” He tossed a clump of grass into the fire, looking pissed. “She can still harass people telepathically. She could grab an asteroid out of the sky and throw it at us. Why put her body in jeopardy?”
“Maybe she likes the thrill.” She remembered their last encounter, how tired Naos had seemed after tangling with every other power user on the planet, but she’d been determined as well, angry. “Maybe she thought of a plan.”
Horace sighed, a big sound she could relate to, the sound of someone who was tired of being fucked with.
Cordelia nudged him and smiled. “You ready to kick her ass?”
He nodded, his dark eyes fixed on the fire. He pushed his brown hair off his forehead and rested his narrow chin in one hand. “But then we get left alone for a while, right? With nothing to worry about except sleeping?”
She thought about it and shrugged. “I could do without the mad, power-hungry gods, but if regular people didn’t try to kill me now and again, I don’t know what I’d do.”
Instead of laughing, he seemed thoughtful, opened and closed his mouth several times.
“Out with it,” she said, thinking of a recent conversation she’d had with his lover, Simon, about how their lives had changed. When he stayed silent, she remembered how quickly he’d volunteered to come on this mission when he could have stayed home and worried about nothing much.
“I get it,” he said at last. “When we were living out on the plains for months, there was always something to do, mostly minor emergencies, but something. When we got back to Gale…” He hung his head. “I’m afraid I’ve become addicted to adrenaline.”
“Happens to the best of us.”
“Not to me,” He put his head in his hands, and the firelight brought out gold highlights in his hair. “I’ve always wanted to be content.”
She put an arm around his narrow shoulders. “You can be content and not be standing still. And once we sort Naos out, there’ll always be more to do in Gale.”
“I want to learn how to defend myself,” he said. “Without powers.”
She thought of how easily Patricia had thrown them around. “Being able to fight didn’t save me from Patricia, either.”
“Even so.” His eyes seemed haunted for a moment. “With my power to regenerate my own cells, I could live…a really long time.”
She nodded slowly. She supposed the idea of living longer than everyone else was a daunting thought. At least he’d have Simon to never grow old with. And he could regenerate anyone else he really wanted. She shivered at the thought. The threat of dying had been part of her life so long, she couldn’t handle the idea that it wasn’t in her future. “When we have a moment, I’ll show you a few things.”
He gave her a grateful smile. She returned it, then yawned, the stress of this whole situation getting to her. Her back felt like a bag of sand.
“May I?” he asked, his hand hovering.
“Please.” She was so glad he now asked instead of just helping. Most people didn’t mind the occasional jolt of healing. She probably hadn’t minded in the past, but with all the various powers flying around lately…
His power flowed over her like a warm bath, soothing her muscles. She hesitated a moment, afraid not only of looking weak but of feeling weak. He probably already knew what she had in mind, being a telepath and all. She trusted him not to dig in her thoughts, but she was probably projecting for miles. “I, um, could use a good night’s sleep if you’ve got one handy.”
He grinned. “My pleasure.”
He didn’t follow her into her tent, but he didn’t have to. As soon as her eyes shut, she fell into a deep sleep, not even waking when Nettle crawled in beside her.
When they reached Gale the next day, Cordelia found it quieter than usual. People hurried through the streets rather than congregating and sharing news. She hoped it was only the arrival of the Atlas that had everyone spooked, but she knew they couldn’t be so fortunate as to have only one crisis at a time.
She dodged the questions of those who tried to stop her and went to the Paladin Keep first. Private Jacobs informed her that Simon Lazlo had been attacked twice, once when he was almost burned to death in a warehouse, then his home was raided by a group of kidnappers trying to steal the Storm Lord’s children. And the paladins hadn’t been fast enough to save one of them.
Face flushed and angry, blue eyes flashing, Jacobs reported that Miriam, one of the telepathic yafanai, had been left for dead outside Gale, her newborn stolen from her, but Simon had saved her life and wanted to go after the kidnappers.
Cordelia was torn. She’d rather march on the mine and use Simon’s power to bash Patricia into acquiescence. Then they had to prepare for Naos. On the other hand, a kidnapped baby needed her help. That was a problem she could put her blade to, not one that would be solved with mind-fuckery.
Before Cordelia could speak, the ground in front of the keep churned, and several brown roots burst into the light, bringing with them Pool, the tall, lean, green-haired drushkan queen. Her long brown face seemed grim, narrow mouth turned down, green eyes hard and unblinking.
“I have heard of the baby being taken, Sa,” she said before Cordelia could greet her.
Cordelia nodded. The drushka hated the idea of anyone attacking children. As nasty as relations had gotten between Pool’s drushka and the drushka from the swamp, they’d never involved children in their fights.
“My scouts tell me these cowards have fled Gale,” Pool said. “Their trail leads into the plains.”
“Going where?” Cordelia asked. “Jacobs said they used powers, so they’re yafanai, not plains dwellers. Pakesh is the only plains dweller with powers, and he was attacked along with Jacobs and Simon.”
“Perhaps they have struck some bargain with another clan,” Pool said, lifting her hands and dropping them. The stern look on her face said she wasn’t interested in what the kidnappers might now be doing or their motives. She only wanted them dealt with, and Cordelia was inclined to agree, though they had to decide which problem to deal with first: a stolen child or the madness of Naos.
It was time for a council of war.