CHAPTER 10 ADRIA
CHAPTER
ADRIA
Among the Shadowlands’ many creatures, empowered by the Diakópsei’s radiation, is the batbeast. Half the size of the average full-grown nightfolk, they use one pair of limbs as both spindly arms and legs, but there’s power behind their seeming fragility.
They’ve been known to lift a child clean from their mother’s arms and carry them off into the dark, never to be seen again.
Somehow that’s the first thought that comes to mind when I see the crashed starship’s survivor.
She’s small, like all dayfolk, though perhaps tall enough among her people, not quite six feet.
Narrow shoulders and hips, a long, taut neck, lanky limbs that overshadow the rest of her body.
One of her two arms hangs at an odd, sickening angle, clearly an injury of some sort.
I’m larger, bulkier, stronger than her, but despite being visibly wounded, she has undeniable strength of poise.
Even though I can’t see her eyes, I somehow know they could pin me to the floor.
This is a creature built and trained for taking what she wants and then vanishing, unhindered, back into the Pagonian wilds. It will not do to underestimate her.
The survivor also has just enough muscle definition that it shows through her protective gear, which adheres closely to its wearer. Foolish dayfolk, fearing Pagomènos’s power, the Diakópsei’s gift. I embody everything that suit is meant to keep at bay. And it won’t be enough to hold me back.
My new and too-often-unwarranted rage, first seeded during my overcharge, pulses in my chest again like a brutal secondary heartbeat. I tamp it down with all the force I can muster. This girl is useless to me dead (or close to it if her suit leaks). I must play this carefully.
I perch above on the Second Spire’s nearest ledge, just below where the crashed starship remains wedged in the mountain, overlooking the scene.
The survivor isn’t alone. She’s accompanied by one of the dayfolk’s mechs, though it waves its arms and interrupts with uncharacteristic enthusiasm for a machine.
Its head is cocked at an absurd angle that can’t possibly be practical.
And right across from girl and robot, flouting my kingdom’s laws with impunity, is one of my own people.
Regardless of the context, I certainly don’t allow my citizens to fraternize with trespassers. Yet here stands a nightfolk girl, likely close to my own age, undaunted, reaching for a Daylands-forged Morpheus sphere.
Since the nightfolk embraced the Diakópsei, we have no need of dayfolk Morpheus chips to “protect” our minds.
Their standard usage (and rumored black market) exists well beyond my jurisdiction or interest. Most of what I’ve heard of its inner workings is likely mythology rather than firsthand reports.
Many nightfolk are inclined to dismiss the market’s reality altogether; I very nearly did.
I was wrong. The knowledge stings, like needles under my mottled skin.
I lean forward on my wrists to listen more closely. And that’s when I catch the specifics of their dialogue.
“Thank you, Kori.”
Kori.
The spire, despite being solid stone and ice, seems to waver beneath me.
I grip it tightly with my claws. Head spinning, I struggle to process.
Kori. I know better than to trespass in Daylands territory, but I know full well who this girl is.
Daughter of the Daylands’ monarch. Heiress to their nation.
And a willful criminal, apparently, judging by her presence in the Shadowlands and the smooth silver sphere of contraband memories in her open palm.
Dayfolk don’t meet with nightfolk, and they definitely don’t offer an inner glimpse of their minds.
I mean to be careful, tactical. But the anticipation of a clash with dayfolk royalty overwhelms my good sense.
A blast of radioactive power builds in my throat.
I struggle to bite it back, teeth gritted, thoughts rushing through me so quickly that they stumble over one another, a tangle of conflicting possibilities.
Kori.
On this side of Pagomènos, Kori’s presence alone could acceptably be answered with death.
But in her own kingdom, she remains the heir to the throne, despite boldly flouting her people’s laws by venturing into the dark and fraternizing with its denizens.
The dayfolk would do anything to bring their heiress home.
Would pay anything.
Enough to solidify my rule in the Shadowlands, perhaps? Enough to crush Azarii’s futile rebellion in one fell swoop?
My jaw practically pries itself open to let the furious blast of energy out.
The ground at Kori’s feet explodes. Fragments of ice and rock scatter like freezeshot shrapnel.
The girl stumbles, her mask-filtered scream swallowed by the roar of my power, her body reduced to a frail silhouette behind the blue-black haze of the blast’s aftermath.
The ground beneath her has become a gaping chasm. She falls.
The nightfolk woman scrambles back from the abyss on six of her seven hands, her last one frantically searching for a handhold in the confusion. She’s a criminal, too, daring to trade for dayfolk tech, even
if she never entered the Daylands. But she isn’t my priority. This entire affair just became much, much bigger than her.
And, thankfully, in her terror at the sight of me, she loses her grip on the Morpheus sphere, which rolls. Bounces along the rocks. Plummets into the newly formed chasm with the Daylands girl.
Swooping down into the crevice, claws splayed, I pin Kori before she can run. Claws clamping around her wrists. Wings alone nearly twice her height. She likely couldn’t flee anyway, her twisted arm surely even more agonizing after her fall, but I need to be sure.
She goes stock-still beneath me, not daring to resist with my claws so close to where her gloves meet the rest of her armor.
One leak in her protective gear, and the planet’s radiation will slip into her very being, impossible to revoke.
One slash across her armor is a death sentence, even if I never draw blood.
“KORIIIIIII!”
I turn my head, not loosening my grip on the girl.
The shriek came from her mech, whose optical processors whirl with light and …
panic? Last I checked, humans—even mutated nightfolk—were the only fully sentient Pagonian beings.
I don’t know how to process what looks awfully akin to fear in the simulated eyes.
The mech draws its arms back, little hands curling into tiny, metal balls, and runs full force directly at me.
“ASPECT! PROTECT! KORI!” The shriek makes my ears ache, but the mech is doing a painfully weak impression of protection. It rails against me, fists beating against the thick leather of my wings, feet kicking uselessly at my ankles.
My breath plumes, stark white, in the Shadowlands’ cold. “Call off the mech,” I breathe into Kori’s throat. I wonder if she can feel the heat of my breath through her protective gear. Her eyes, the pupils just barely visible through her mask, are pools of wonder and terror.
“Or what?” The words have such venom, I imagine if she weren’t wearing a mask, she would spit defiantly on the ice.
A laugh rattles through me. “Do I really have to tell you?” I hover one claw, barely, above where Kori’s right glove meets the rest of her gear.
“If you were going to kill me,” Kori says, body limp but voice pulled taut, “you would’ve done it already.”
“You’re clever.” I slam one open hand down, claws spread, pinning the girl to the ground by her throat. With the other, I whirl and catch the mech, seizing its uneven left leg. “But I might not be so merciful to your friend.”
“Friend? They’re—it’s a mech,” Kori stammers. Her filtered voice is mechanically flattened, but the slip of phrasing betrays her fear. “It’s property. Not personal.”
“Liar.” I pull, as hard as I can. There’s a satisfying pop, a grating of metal, as the mech’s left leg lurches free of its main body. The mech collapses with a disoriented beep.
Kori screams, the sound shaking against the press of my claws at her neck.
Suddenly, she seems to remember herself.
She wraps one hand around a weapon at her belt before I can process.
I hadn’t noticed it before. All at once, the muzzle of a heatshot blaster presses, coldly, against my neck, even as I loom over the girl.
Even with one ruined arm, the Daylands’ princess fights back.
“Let me make myself very clear,” Kori says, every syllable deliberate.
Measured. “I charged this blaster before I left the Daylands. I’ve got a full clip ready to fire, enough to leave you with burns even this frozen hellscape won’t easily cure.
You can release me now, let me gather up what’s left of my mech, and we’ll be sprinting out of the Shadowlands in a blink of your nightfolk friend’s singular eye. Or I can pull this trigger.”
“And I’ll slit your armor.”
“Then I guess neither of us is leaving this place.”
A heatshot blast at my throat is no bluff. I’ve yet to take a direct hit even from a freezeshot weapon, but a blast to my shoulder in a previous combat left me reeling and staggered, one wing rigidly useless, for far
too long. And my body has evolved to defend against cold. Nightfolk know nothing of sun, heat, burning. My rule is fresh and tenuous enough that a visible wound, a physical limitation, might be enough to dangerously bolster Azarii’s rebels.
“Does your mother know you’re here?” I ask.
“Does it matter?”
“It would be a shame if the heiress of the Daylands never even received a funeral. If the body were lost in the dark.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“You have no idea who I am.”
“Usurper.”
For an instant, I’m caught by genuine surprise. Then I remember she’s traded memories with my now-escaped subject, who must be one of Azarii’s rebels. How a nightfolk managed to sync her memory with dayfolk technology, I have no idea, but this is undeniable proof that it happened.
“Your own people hate you,” Kori growls. “Do you want to validate their fears by murdering me in cold blood?”
“I wonder what your people would think, if they knew their heiress spent her private time slithering through the shadows.”
“We all have our secrets.”
I crack a smile despite myself. “And now you’ll be mine,” I snarl, twisting to clamp my teeth around the heatshot pistol’s muzzle.
I feel the surge of awful distilled heat, like a brand against my lungs, but a fresh breath of radioactive power is already in my throat and swallows the shot.
I hurl the pistol aside. It clatters to the stone ground, out of reach, and lands alongside the fallen sphere.
I spit blood and ice and bits of charred flesh, retching.
Both hands now around the trespasser’s throat.
“Oh, but I’ve forgotten my manners.” I leash my fury, press only its barest edge into my clenched hands. “Welcome to the Shadowlands, heiress. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a dayfolk tourist.” Her thin breaths go murky, distant. “Enjoy your stay.”
Kori, heiress of the Daylands, goes limp beneath me. I press two fingers to where her glove meets armor at her wrist, though, and a pulse faintly ticks beneath my touch.
So she’s alive. Good. Now would’ve been a terrible time to lose all control.
I step away from her limp body, reaching to retrieve her fallen Morpheus spheres from where they lie.
A single light blinks on the surface of each sphere.
Bright red. Access denied, and brute force will hardly be enough to change that.
“Kori.” The mech drags itself toward me by its hands, busted leg abandoned. I almost forgot about the strange amalgam of metal and apparent emotion. “Kori. Kori.”
“Don’t worry,” I say, turning my attention back to the mech. “We’ll prepare accommodations for two.”
“I revoke—my request—for adventure,” the mech says, before I crush its vocal box with my foot.