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“Done,” she said quietly.

  “Go,” Tariq replied.

  Liora activated the transporter. A moment later, they were back in the Maffei One Galaxy with the Coalition starship far behind.

  “I’m going to shoot the sails to give us some time,” Tariq told her.

  “The Coalition’s really going to be upset if we disable every transporter we use,” Liora replied. The thought of leaving the colonel and his ship in the middle of space made a small smile touch her lips. “But I’m all for it.”

  As soon as the silver sails unfurled from the Oregon transporter, Tariq tore them to pieces with the Sparrow’s cannons. The tattered sails fell away, leaving the transporter unable to charge with the light from the surrounding stars.

  Tariq sat back in his seat with a satisfied nod. “That’ll handle them for a while. I imagine it’ll take the colonel some time to rally his ships after us when he has no idea where we’re going.”

  The thought bothered Liora. “Where are we going? We have no idea where the Atlas might be.”

  Tariq studied the screen in front of them. “I think I might know how to find them,” he said. There was something to his tone as if he wasn’t sure he liked his idea.

  “Anything is better than drifting along in this ship,” Liora said.

  Tariq nodded. “That’s for sure.” He let out a breath. “Head for the Cas One Galaxy.”

  Liora glanced at him. “Will they be there?”

  Tariq shook his head. “I doubt it, but I have a feeling Dev will leave us a message.

  Liora typed in the coordinates. “Why Cas One?”

  When she looked at him, the expression on Tariq’s face was torn between a smile and a look of trepidation.

  “It was home once, a long time ago.”

  The silence that settled between them was one of relief. From what Liora knew about the Coalition, they had just escaped a near brush with what would have been a painful and certain death. The Coalition had no time for traitors, and given their role in helping Devren’s crew obtain the Omne Occasus, they would have been sent to Titus for imprisonment. No one had ever escaped from Titus.

  Chills ran down Liora’s arms at the thought of being held captive in another cell. Her time as Malivian’s circus freak mind pusher was one she would never repeat.

  “You look tired.”

  She glanced at Tariq.

  His gaze was on her hand. “And you’re bleeding again. We need to rebandage that.”

  She gave the hand a critical look. Her fingers still moved, though there was definitely swelling beneath the bandages. Her fingertips remained a good color, and even though blood showed where the knife had gone through her palm, it hadn’t soaked the gauze completely.

  “I’ll survive,” she told him. “It’ll heal better if I leave it alone.” She couldn’t quite stifle a yawn. The last time she had slept was before they landed at the last Gaulded. “I think I’ll take a turn on that bed, though.”

  “Enjoy,” Tariq said. “It smells like an entire Calypsan army back there.”

  Liora sighed. “I guess it could be worse.”

  “Could it?”

  She grimaced. “It could smell like a Gaul army.”

  Tariq’s quiet chuckle followed her to the back of the ship. She sat on the rice bags and tried not to notice the odor that wafted from them. When she settled back, another smell touched her nose. It took her a moment to recognize that the subtle scent was Tariq’s. It contained a hint of the red planet’s sands and darker tones of metal and gunpowder. The thought that he had slept there sent tiny tingles running beneath Liora’s skin. She couldn’t decide how she felt about that.

  Liora rolled onto her side and rested her injured hand carefully on the rice sack beside her. While she tried to maintain a tough front, the ache that ran up her arm made it hard to close her eyes. She wondered if she should let Tariq numb the wound, but the effort it would take to make her way back to the front of the small ship seemed like way too much. Just having the time to rest felt like a gift after all they had been through.

  Liora closed her eyes and lingered in the place between sleep and awake. Concern for Devren and his crew remained foremost in her mind. She couldn’t remember the last time she had worried about someone else. Perhaps leaving them at the Gaulded to hunt for Obruo had been a mistake. If they were in trouble and she wasn’t there, Liora didn’t know how she would forgive herself.

  The thought brought a smile to her lips. The crew of the SS Kratos had survived for a very long time without her. Why she suddenly felt like they needed her to continue baffled her. Perhaps it was the want to be needed by someone other than herself? Liora rubbed her eyes. The thoughts were far beyond her exhausted mental state. For the moment, it was enough to accept that she felt she belonged somewhere. Whether they made it back to the Kratos was left to be seen.

  Liora’s thoughts drifted to a memory made more real for the sleep haze that filled her mind.

  After the death of her clan by the hands of the nameless ones, she had wandered the land for days until her feet bled and her throat was so dry she couldn’t make a sound. The whispers of the nameless ones haunted her, driving her further away from the family she had been unable to protect. At age twelve, she was clanless, motherless, and without anybody in the Macrocosm who cared about her fate.

  “Let her go,” a shadow hissed.

  “She’ll bleed planets dry,” another whispered.

  “More for us,” the first said. “Souls are not long for this universe.”

  “Give her a blade.”

  “Show her the way.”

  “She’ll be the key to the end of it all, the girl from the stars. The girl without a soul.”

  Liora’s tears had dried long ago. She couldn’t feel the pain of her feet or the ache of the fresh tattoos down her neck and along her arms. She couldn’t feel anything at all.

  Something hovered in the sky above her, blocking out the stagnant sunshine that lit the world around her without touching her skin. A soft hum filled the air, then she was inside a black room. It took several minutes for her sun-blind eyes to focus. During her state of shock, manacles were clasped around her wrists and ankles. Another was locked around her throat. Her clothing was sliced by a practiced hand and she was shoved into a circle of light in the center of the room.

  “Damaclan,” a voice said. Other words followed in a language she didn’t understand.

  The voice paused as though waiting for her to answer a question, but she didn’t know what the question was, nor did she care. She wanted to go back to wandering aimlessly through the desert until the nameless ones were forced to take her, too. It was the only thing that made sense, the only fate she deserved.

  Several more words were spoken before rough hands grabbed her and shoved her into another room.

  The smell hit her nose first. Unwashed bodies from various planets had been crammed into the tiny space.

  Collectors.

  The word struck her mind with a tingle of fear. Damaclan mothers warned their children about collectors to keep them from wandering too far from the clan. Mortalkind from across the Macrocosm paid money for various species to add to their collections. It was a body trade, a form of slavery in which the captives had no rights. Now, Liora was a part of that trade.

  Too numb after all she had experienced to argue about her plight like many of the others in the room, Liora didn’t speak. She ate what was handed to her without tasting it and her thirst was quenched, but the cacophony of hundreds of voices and languages battered unheard against her ears. She wished the nameless ones would take her, but in their ironic pity, they had left her to her fate.

  “What do you do?”

  The phrase was repeated several times before Liora realized the words were in her language. She blinked and her mind adjusted slowly to the meaning behind the words. She turned her head and found an elderly woman with white hair, dark skin, and three arms waiting patiently for her answer. The race Artidus came t
o Liora’s mind from her mother’s teachings.

  “What do you do?” the woman asked again in the Damaclan tongue.

  Liora wasn’t sure how to respond. She didn’t trust her tongue to speak clearly, so she limited her answer to one word. “Destroy.”

  The Artidus woman’s wrinkled brow creased despite the smile that touched her lips. “It can’t be that bad,” she said, her words soft. “I know of your kind and your training, but good comes from every race as well as evil. Surely…”

  The woman’s words died away when Liora pushed at her with her mind in the way that used to infuriate Chief Obruo. She wanted the woman to understand and needed her to. It felt so important that someone know what had happened and why she deserved to be set adrift once more on the empty planet from which she had been taken.

  She watched the woman’s eyes widen at the memory of Obruo sending her out as a sacrifice to the nameless ones. It was the only way to save their clan. She was the last, their only remaining hope.

  The nameless ones had been offended at her mixed blood and left her there to watch as they decimated Obruo’s clan down to the last woman and child. Liora’s heart clenched away from the memory of finding her mother dead in the doorway to their home.

  “That’s enough,” the Artidus woman said. She drew back, breaking the push in a way no one else had been able. She blinked and her hazy blue eyes cleared. Before Liora could say anything, the woman wrapped her in a hug.

  Liora closed her eyes. The gentle touch was something so rare in her life that she barely knew how to take it. The woman’s three arms held her tight, removing some of the pain without Liora understanding how.

  When Liora couldn’t handle the kindness any longer and backed away, the woman’s expression was filled with concern.

  “Don’t push at someone like that again, especially here,” she said. She lowered her voice. “If they know you can do that, you’ll be taken to places far worse than any these collectors can touch. Pushers are rare in the Macrocosm. A pusher who is also a trained Damaclan would be a rare and dangerous slave indeed.”

  The woman looked her over. Before Liora could draw back, the woman’s third arm that came from the middle of her chest brushed Liora’s messy brown hair away from her face.

  Her eyes showed pity when she said, “You are as beautiful as your race is deadly. Let’s hope we have time to teach you other skills so that purchasers will see past your attractiveness. The last thing we need is for you to be sold into a system to system harem where you will be used and cast aside when your appeal has been beaten and stolen from you.” Her voice carried the burden of someone who knew what that felt like all too clearly.

  “How?” Liora forced herself to ask.

  The Artidus woman pulled a charcoal pencil and a pad of paper from the tattered bag at her side. “Collectors never rush lest they miss the opportunity for another valuable haul. I’ve been on this ship for six months and we’ve yet to dock. My skills lie in healing and languages. If luck is on our side, we’ll have you reading and speaking the common tongue and able to save lives on the brink of death. Perhaps they’ll find those skills to be worth more than a beautiful body.”

  With nothing else to do, Liora focused on learning. The Artidus woman, Shegare, turned out to be an apt teacher, and Liora found that applying herself to languages left little time to think about her past or what was to come. By the time they landed, Liora’s skills had far surpassed even Shegare’s hopes. She had learned not only the common tongue, but could read and write the root languages of Zamarian, Ventican, and Galian, along with speak several of the older languages she had picked up from other captives aboard the collectors’ ship.

  “Let’s hope it’s enough,” Shegare said as they were led from the ship to a strange globe that looked as though it was made of old starships and random chunks of metal and debris welded together.

  Liora awoke with Shegare’s words lingering in her mind. She pushed away the pain of thinking about the woman who had shown her more kindness than anyone else in her life. Liora wished the memories would stay locked in the far recesses of her mind, but she didn’t know how to keep them from assailing her when her guard was down.

  Chapter 3

  Liora made her way to the front of the Sparrow again. She realized when she looked at the monitor that she had slept longer than she thought.

  “Is that the Cas One Galaxy?” she asked in amazement.

  Tariq gave an appreciative nod. “Incredible, isn’t it?”

  Liora slid into the copilot’s seat with her eyes locked on the screen. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Long stretches of lightning arched around the planets in the Cas One system. Each planet was illuminated with a different color of lightning. Blasts of orange, green, magenta, and yellow surged out into space before striking back at the charged atmospheres in colorful explosions.

  Massive ships with strange circular voids in the middle orbited the planets in the opposite direction of the lightning. The collectors sucked the jagged light into the voids where it was redirected by mirrors into holding cells.

  “That’s home,” Tariq said. He nodded toward the fourth planet from the Cas One sun.

  Liora caught the strange tone that hinted in his voice. “Has it been a long time since you’ve been back?”

  Tariq was quiet for a moment. The green lightning from the planet reflected in his gaze when he said, “My reasons for being there are long gone.”

  Liora wondered how the ship was supposed to fly through the lightning that circled the planet. Tariq steered the ship toward two of the lightning collectors. When they drew near, he switched the radio on.

  “This is Tariq Donovan requesting entrance to Verdan.”

  “Tariq, you dog!” the answering pilot responded. “How long has it been? I thought the Scavs had killed you by now!”

  A slight smile tugged at the corner of Tariq’s lips. “I’m harder to kill than that, Josen. You ought to remember.”

  Liora fought back a smile at the hint of the Cas One accent that appeared in Tariq’s voice.

  “There’s a price on your head,” the second pilot said. “Maybe we should turn you in.”

  Silence filled the airwaves for a moment. Liora glanced at Tariq, wondering if she should be worried. Tariq merely watched the dials and monitors in front of him; the slight tightening of his eyes was the only sign of emotion.

  Josen burst out laughing. “Mrs. Metis would kill us,” he said. “We know better than to get on her bad side. Open it up, Fray.”

  “Doing it now,” Fray reported.

  The two ships tipped the massive circles where the lightning was collected. As soon as the mirrors were pointed at each other, the lightning struck in the middle and arced, creating a hole.

  “You’ve got ten seconds,” Fray reported.

  “Unless we close it early,” Josen said.

  “I only need five,” Tariq told them.

  Both pilots burst out laughing over the radio as if they shared an inside joke.

  Tariq steered the ship toward the hole, hit the thrusters, and they were through before the lightning closed. Liora glanced at the monitor that showed the view behind them. The ships turned their massive circles and began collecting the lightning once more. The jagged streaks of green light covered the atmosphere, then disappeared from view the lower they flew. Darkness closed in from all sides. Liora missed the glow from the stars. She never realized how much she took it for granted.

  “Is it dark like this all the time?” she asked.

  Tariq nodded. “The atmosphere is too thick for the sun to shine through. The planet is lit from the inside instead of out.”

  A glance at the surface showed the truth of Tariq’s statement. The ground that neared was covered in what looked like yellow glowing grass. Orange light flowed through the small shrub-like trees. Houses with small yards had softly glowing glass windows. Animals with iridescent horns that caught the light from the surrounding pl
ants scattered as Tariq lowered the spacecraft to the ground.

  When the engines whined to a stop, a woman burst from the nearby house.

  “Don’t even think about leaving that machine on my property,” Liora could hear her scolding before Tariq opened the door.

  “I’ll shoot however many of you are hiding on that wreck of a ship, so help me,” the woman continued. “I’m tired of squatters thinking they can land wherever they please without regard to those they’re infringing upon.”

  Tariq didn’t appear the least bit phased by her words. He hit the panel for the door to open, and a rare smile touched his lips.

  “Mark my words, I’ll fill your hide so full of…”

  The woman’s voice paused, and her tone changed completely. “Tariq! Oh my lands, it is you!”

  Before he had even set a foot on the ground, he was wrapped in a tight hug.

  Liora stifled a smile.

  “Hello, Mrs. M,” he managed to get out.

  “Hello?” she repeated. She stepped back to look him up and down. “It’s been eight years, and all you can say is hello?”

  Tariq shrugged and the woman laughed. Her brown eyes creased at the corners and the lines on her face deepened. Her gaze shifted to Liora.

  “And who’s this? I don’t remember a Damaclan on your crew.”

  Her tone was warm despite the tattoos her gaze lingered on.

  “Liora’s a recent addition,” Tariq said. He motioned for her to come forward. “She could use a bit of your tending to. She’s been keeping me running up to now.” He nodded at her. “Liora, this is Mrs. Metis.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Liora told her. “Captain Metis is a good man.”

  “Yes, he is,” she said with a proud smile. She gestured to the house. “Come inside and get some food. You could use some fattening up. What have you been eating out there this whole time? Boiled ganthum?”

  “With zanderbin hide,” Tariq replied with a grin as if it was a shared joke.

  Mrs. Metis shook her head and the gray curls that cascaded down her back bounced with the motion. “It’s a wonder you guys are still ticking on Coalition rations. Come in and tell me what Rius and Devren are up to.”