Chapter 7
Maya
Zara activated the energy redirect, and immediately I felt something shift in the connection between me and the ancient Sola. The constant background pressure in my mind lessened, as if someone had turned down the volume on a radio that had been playing too loudly.
“It’s working,” I said, relief flooding through me. “I can barely feel her.”
But my relief was short-lived. Within moments, the Sola’s presence returned with a vengeance, crashing through our carefully constructed barriers like they were made of paper.
The psychic backlash hit me so hard I gasped, and I felt Rykar’s hand on my shoulder as he tried to shield me from the worst of it.
“Turn it off!” I heard Wyn shout. “Maya’s heart rate is spiking.”
Cleo was already frantically shutting down the equipment. “It’s not responding,” she said, panic creeping into her voice. “The override isn’t working.”
Through the connection, I could feel the ancient Sola’s rage. She wasn’t just angry—she was furious at our attempt to sever the link she’d worked so hard to establish. Her consciousness lashed out, and I felt the psychic shockwave ripple outward like a stone thrown into still water.
“Oh no,” Zara whispered, staring at her readings. “Jetta, look at this.”
I didn’t need to look at her scanner to see energy signatures spiking, but the color drained from Jetta’s face as she grabbed Wyn’s arm. “She’s sending energy surges all across the connected Solas. It’s affecting every living ship in the city, destabilizing the systems.”
“Disconnect the equipment’s power source,” Rykar snarled through gritted teeth. “I can’t hold all this back.”
“Working on it!” Cleo had dived behind a crate and managed to yank out the tubes that supplied power from Ledos’ Sola to the equipment without shocking herself, but the damage was done.
Even with our experiment stopped, I could see on Zara’s monitors that the other Solas were still experiencing fluctuations.
“We need to tell the lords,” I slurred, gasping in the aftermath of all that energy. I swore it felt as if the tips of my hair were singed. Speaking words was hard work. It felt like I was speaking with a lead tongue. “They need to know what happened.”
“Yeah, they do,” Jetta agreed, scratching the back of her head. “They’re not going to be happy.”
“The theories were sound,” Cleo said. “They signed off on this. Each of them.”
“It didn’t work,” Wyn said. “So now we need a different solution.”
The next few hours were a blur of emergency meetings and damage reports.
Doors in Zurian’s Sola had been opening and closing randomly, trapping scholars in their research chambers.
Savair’s lighting systems had gone haywire, cycling through the entire spectrum in a dizzying light show.
Most alarming of all, the lami production in Damiron’s Sola had turned completely black for nearly an hour, sending his people into a panic before the color slowly returned to normal.
By evening, the immediate crisis had passed, but the tension in our room was thick enough to cut with a knife. Rykar and I lay in our separate beds, both of us staring at the ceiling and pretending to sleep.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally, breaking the silence. “This is all my fault. If I hadn’t triggered the awakening in the first place—”
“It’s not your fault,” Rykar said firmly. “You were doing your job. You couldn’t have known what was buried under those crystal formations.”
“My job.” I turned onto my side to face him.
My eyes had adjusted to the light so I could make out the hard line of his silhouette.
“What a job it turned out to be. Three weeks ago, my biggest worry was whether the mineral composition surveys would be accurate enough to justify LunarLink’s investment in this system. ”
“What was your life like before this?” Rykar asked, rolling to his side to face me, too. “On Earth, I mean.”
I was quiet for a moment, trying to remember what normal felt like. “I had a small apartment in Seattle. Coffee shops on every corner, rain most of the year, and a view of the harbor from my bedroom window.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It was. I traveled a lot for planetary surveys, but it was a lovely place to come home to. My parents still live there.” I paused, debating whether to share more. “I was engaged until about eight months ago.”
Rykar went very still. “What happened?”
“Thomas wanted me to take a desk job with the Earth-Lunar Council. Something safe and predictable with regular hours and no travel. He said he was tired of competing with my career for my attention.” I let out a bitter laugh.
“Funny thing is, he wasn’t wrong. I did love my work more than I loved him.
But I couldn’t figure out how to explain that the work isn’t separate from me—it is part of who I am. ”
“He didn’t understand.”
“No, he didn’t. He saw my job as something I did, not something I was. When I turned down the desk position to take this assignment, things just…deteriorated. Not exploded. Just fizzled out until we decided to go our separate ways.”
“You chose your job.”
“I chose myself,” I corrected. “My parents are still recovering from the breakup. They liked Thomas a lot, but for the first time in my life, I chose what I wanted instead of what someone else wanted me to want.”
Rykar was quiet for so long I thought he might have fallen asleep. Then he said, “I’m glad you did.”
“Yeah?” An unplanned snort came out of my nose. “Even though it led to all this?”
“Even though.” He shifted in his bed, and I caught a glimpse of him propping himself up on one elbow.
The soft bioluminescence from the walls cast enough light for me to see the defined muscles of his chest and shoulders, and I had to remind myself to breathe.
The colors on his skin were serene blues and greens.
“What about you?” I asked. “What’s your life like as a transport pilot?”
“Busy.” His voice carried a note of humor I hadn’t heard before.
“Everyone thinks I’m a transport pilot only because of—well, because of losing my family in the Brakken war.
But I actually like travel. We have that in common.
” His eyes gleamed in the dim light. “Want to hear about the time I accidentally delivered a shipment of live Altarian singing worms to a monastery?”
I laughed, happy with the change in topic. “Please tell me this is a true story.”
“Unfortunately, yes. I typically only run supplies to and from the Destran city, but I’ll take jobs for extra credits if I have room in my cargo hold and I have room in my schedule.
The shipping manifest said ‘organic meditation aids,’ which I assumed meant incense or herbs.
Turns out, Altarian singing worms produce a harmonic frequency that’s supposed to enhance spiritual contemplation. ”
“Supposed to?”
“Well, it might have worked if I’d delivered them to the right monastery. The order I accidentally brought them to had taken a vow of complete silence.”
I could hear the grin in his voice, and it transformed his entire demeanor. This was who Rykar really was underneath all the guilt and grief—someone with a sense of humor about the absurdities of life.
“What happened?”
“Picture this: I’m unloading these containers of what I think are meditation supplies, and suddenly the entire monastery fills with this ethereal singing.
Beautiful, really, but definitely not silent.
The monks didn’t know what to do—they couldn’t speak to tell me I’d made a mistake, so they started gesturing frantically. ”
“Oh no.”
“It gets worse. The worms were supposed to be kept in specialized containment, but the instructions were missing and since I thought they were just herbs, I’d left the containers unsealed during transport.
By the time I realized what was happening, there were singing worms loose throughout the entire monastery. ”
I was laughing so hard I had to bury my face in my pillow to muffle the sound. Interestingly, the energy I was getting from the Sola was soft, like gentle music. “How did you fix it?”
“Took me six hours to round them all up, and I had to break the monks’ vow of silence to do it. Turns out they were actually quite helpful once they were allowed to talk. Apparently, this wasn’t the first time someone had mixed up their meditation aid orders.”
“Where were you supposed to deliver them?”
“A monastery on the other side of the planet where they specifically used music in their worship. The singing worms would have been perfect there. Instead, I spent my afternoon playing worm-herder while a bunch of monks who hadn’t spoken in a very long time caught up on ten years’ worth of gossip.
” His teeth flashed as he smiled. “These days, I require much more specific instructions and coordinates for taking extra jobs.”
I could picture it so clearly—Rykar chasing musical worms around a monastery while previously silent monks chattered excitedly in the background. The image was so ridiculous and charming that I found myself seeing him in an entirely new light.
“You’re different when you’re not talking about the Sola or your siblings,” I observed.
“Different how?”
“Lighter. Like you remember that life can be funny and unexpected and good, not just tragic and difficult.”
He was quiet for a moment. “I have lighter moments, but not usually here.”
“Because of memories?” I knew I shouldn’t be pushing, but he wasn’t resisting. And it was interesting, getting to know him like this.
“Probably,” he admitted. “But right now, this is good. When we’re together—which is all the time right now—I don’t think about anything but you.”
The words hung in the air between us, heavy with implications neither of us was ready to examine too closely. I wanted to say something, to acknowledge what was growing between us despite the impossible circumstances, but exhaustion was pulling at the edges of my consciousness.