Chapter 16 Orion
orion
Dark Stars and Broken Hearts
After the initial flash of panicked terror in Lyra’s beautiful face, there’s a grim resignation that disturbs me even more.
“How far did we get with the repairs, Evie?” she murmurs, numbness sluicing off her in waves.
“Not far enough, Pinky Pie,” Evie sighs over the comms. “I’m sorry. They must’ve tracked you here after the jump. Either that, or their ship wasn’t as badly damaged as you thought.”
Her words land like ice in my gut. There’s a stillness in her—a kind of fatal calm I’ve seen when someone’s already accepted they won’t make it home.
It terrifies me more than the fleet closing in.
Shame and guilt erupt in my chest, settling aside the self-loathing that took up residence when I saw Lyra overhear my conversation with Evie.
If only I’d been a better shot. If only I hadn’t let her down.
If only I’d been the man she deserved to help her win her freedom.
If only I’d had time to tell her about Xylothian matehood and how I really feel about her.
I’m going to drown in if onlys before I make it back to Xylothia. That is, if I make it back.
The look on Lyra’s face makes me wonder at the likelihood.
“I have a plan,” she says, eyes glassy with gathering tears.
“I already know I’m not going to like it,” I rasp, threading my fingers through her criminally soft hair.
“I’m going back with Kraxis,” she says, her tone steely despite the single tear that traces a line down her cheek. “To Ooneryx.”
The words slice through me. Ooneryx. Brill. Chains I thought she’d escaped snapping shut again. My pulse hammers so hard I feel it in my throat.
“Lyra…”
She’s already up, tugging me with her outside our temporary room and back down the corridor.
“We need to get back to the ship. You need to get back to the ship. Sneak aboard, take the idol, and hide out here until we’re gone. Then I need you to borrow one of Evie’s cruisers and pilot it to Epsilon-6,” she says.
Epsilon-6? My mind stutters. Why there? Who’s waiting for her?
A thousand questions claw at my throat, but what spills out is only panic—because every part of her plan sounds like goodbye.
“What?!” I shout. “Are you out of your mind? First of all, I’m not abandoning you to whatever cruel punishments Kraxis and Brill have in store for you.
Secondly, I’m not about to sell the most critical piece of Xylothian history—and the map to a world-ending weapon, I might add—to some buyer for a few million credits! ”
Lyra jogs down so many different twists and turns, I lose track of where we are.
She, however, seems to have a very good idea where she’s going.
She motions for me to keep my voice down, then pushes me into an empty service hover-vator that immediately lurches downward.
It’s oddly quiet inside the metal room—the only sounds the soft whoosh of the station decks flying past us outside as we descend.
“My contact on Epsilon-6 isn’t a buyer,” she says, blowing out a breath. “He’s a Fed.”
A Fed? For a beat, I can’t breathe. My thoughts slam into each other like debris in orbit as things coalesce.
There’s a man waiting on for her Epsilon-6—a man she trusts more than me.
A fissure opens inside me, equal parts confusion, jealousy, and relief.
She’s been risking everything not for greed, but for freedom—and still, she didn’t tell me.
My brows lift and my mouth drops open, but before I can fire the million brewing questions at her, she winces apologetically.
“After my last job went so wrong and Iathos screwed me over—literally and figuratively—I knew Brill was going to lose it. I didn’t know what he would do for sure, but I had a pretty good idea.”
My gut twists. I can see it so clearly now—her recklessness hiding desperation. The name Iathos spikes fresh anger at him, at Brill, at myself for ever letting her think she had to fight her battles alone.
“I mean, stars, a month before I shipped off, I’d just watched him disembowel a Void Stalker with his bare hands because he didn’t like the tone of his voice.
The fucker is unhinged on a good day. So, instead of heading back to Ooneryx immediately, I stopped off at Epsilon-6 to hide out for a bit and figure out what to do.
I was already half-way through an insane plot to slip some Uranian ice wort into his nightcap when an undercover agent approached me.
Said he was with the High Crimes Unit and that they’d been after Brill for a long time with no success,” she explains, rushing through her words as the hover-vator begins to slow.
“This is insane,” I cut in, disbelief tangling with my sense of betrayal. It burns through my ribs like acid, but it’s mixed up with admiration. She’s been walking a knife’s edge between two devils, trying to carve a way out. And still, she never told me the truth or asked me to help her.
“You’re working with the Feds? You’ve been working for them this whole time and you didn’t tell me?”
The hover-vator stops, but Lyra holds the button to keep the doors closed.
“Kind of? But not exactly,” she whispers, peering out the windows to check if the coast is clear.
“As it turns out, he had a pretty substantial file on me, too, but promised to make it all go away if I could help them nail Brill. This was all supposed to be off the books for them because apparently it’s in a kind of legal gray area, or something, which meant I still needed to stay off the radar of the rest of the Federation.
He made it very clear to me that if I got caught in the interim, he couldn’t step in to help me.
The upshot to that was that if I did help him nail Brill, he could sneak enough credits into my account to keep me out of trouble and comfortable. ”
“Your big payday,” I snap. The words taste wrong the moment they leave me. Bitter not because I think she’s greedy—but because I hate that she’s had to sell her soul piece by piece to survive. I can’t fault her for taking a desperate deal to try and take care of herself.
“Well, you don’t want me to be a serrika, you don’t want me to steal—how else do you want me to pay for food, Orion?” she retorts, her tone biting.
I want to say I’d feed you. I’d fight for you. I’d burn the stars themselves if it meant you never had to steal again. But the words stay locked behind my teeth.
“Anyway, this guy suggested I try to persuade Brill to send me after the Solar Mother idol—he was posing as a buyer to encourage Brill’s financial interest. Since I hadn’t quite figured out the finer points of my murder plot and I really didn’t want to go to prison, I agreed.
I went back to Ooneryx, placated Brill with details about the biggest score this side of Andromeda, and got him all rabid about the Solar Mother idol. ”
“Brill wasn’t even interested in the Solar Mother idol before you put it on his radar,” I say, realization dawning. Disappointment and despair leeches into my words. “And now he’s going to follow the thread to one of the most dangerous weapons in the universe.”
Lyra flinches and huffs in exasperation. She releases the button and pulls me into a darkened hallway. As soon as we step into the corridor, lights flicker on above us, casting everything in a sickly jaundiced glow.
“That’s not entirely true. Brill has a laundry list of everything he eventually hopes to acquire.
The idol is on there, but it was just…closer to the bottom of his list. But you’re right, none of this has gone according to plan.
And for that, I am truly sorry. You have every right to be pissed at me for keeping the truth from you, but right now, I am trying to save your ass and your sparkly little doll, so bear with me.
If we make it out of this alive, you can read me the riot act, okay?
” She approaches one of the heavy metal launch bay doors marked A12, peeks in through the small window, and grunts in frustration.
“Which launch bay is my fucking ship in?”
“You don’t get to do that! I’m not done being angry with you,” I growl.
But anger is easier than what’s really clawing at me.
The truth is, I’m terrified. She’s slipping through my fingers, and all I want is to keep her—and the idol—safe.
My instincts are roaring to claim, to protect, to follow.
But honor demands I let her choose, and her choice might be walking back into the dark.
“Don’t try to get out of this by trying to save my life because every time you try to save me, somehow we end up narrowly avoiding the business end of a plasma weapon,” I say.
“I wasn’t going to give Brill the real idol—that was all part of the plan.
I was supposed to take the real idol to Epsilon-6, swap it with a copy they were working that had all their secret surveillance shit inside, and then take that back to Ooneryx.
As soon as they had the bug in Brill’s vault, they’d be able to get scans of his compound, patch into his network and download everything they needed to bust him.
Brill being incarcerated voids my contract.
He’d be in prison, the idol would be returned to Xylothia, and we’d all live happily ever after. ”
The slow realization of just how fucked up this situation has become dawns on me.
Every line between right and wrong blurs to static.
The Feds are after Brill. Lyra’s helping them.
She’s also the reason Brill knows about the idol at all.
The irony’s enough to choke me. She’s trying to save us, but the web she’s caught in keeps getting tighter—and somehow, I’m tangled in it too.
“But then I showed up,” I say grimly.
“But then you showed up,” Lyra agrees, checking the launch bay on the other side of the corridor marked B24. “So now, we’re going to pivot.”