Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
VENNOX
Sleep did not come for me gently. It came without warning, without mercy, seeping through every crack I had forgotten to seal.
I had not slept well since Gorka. Could not.
Each time exhaustion finally dragged me under, the dark was already there waiting, not at the edges where I might have fought it back, but at the center, thick and suffocating, coiling around my throat like smoke from a fire with nothing left to burn.
Somewhere within my subconscious, I knew I had finally lost the fight against my own exhaustion.
The knowledge changed nothing. The Gorken's stench was already in my lungs, thick and acrid, the way it always was. The cold of the stone floor had already seeped into my bones. The bars were there, exactly as they had always been.
The shackles on my wrists carried their full weight, the chains pooling against the floor when I shifted. Added after my first escape attempt, when I had made it as far as the outer corridor before they dragged me back.
Around my throat, the collar sat where Uri had placed it, gleaming, rune-etched, waiting for the touch of her bracelet to remind me what I was to her.
I rose to my feet.
The room where my cage sat had not changed. It never changed in the dream. The same rough-hewn walls drinking the strange-hued torchlight into its’ pores, leaving just enough illumination to confirm I was still there and still a prisoner.
She was circling.
I heard her before I saw her. The click of her jewels against each other, that peculiar wet sound her mandibles made when she was in good spirits, the deliberate, unhurried pace of a creature that has never had cause to question whether it would get what it wanted.
Queen Uri. I made myself look directly at her as she came around to the front of the cage, because looking away was a small surrender she always noted.
I had learned the cost of small surrenders.
She was monstrous. Hideous and bloated, she carried herself with that obscene regal grace that had no right to exist in something so savage. Her reptilian pupils dilated as they found me through the bars, cold and calculating, the gaze of a creature assessing what it owned.
My gaze flicked to the bracelet on her skeletal wrist before I could stop it, to the stones set into it, dark and dormant, and one touch away from lighting the collar at my throat with a pain that had no edges and no mercy if I displeased her.
"There is my pet." The words came in that honeyed, clicking voice, which the translator rendered smooth and poisoned in equal measure.
"I am no one's pet," I growled. Wasted breath. We both knew it. I spent it anyway because defiance was still mine to give.
Her thin lips curved in that expression I had come to despise more than the collar, more than the chains, more than the long, cold nights on the cold floor.
She leered at me the way a collector regarded a particularly fine acquisition.
"You have been restless," she observed, her mandibles clicking softly. “You pace, Valosian. Even in the dark. I find it curious.”
My jaw tightened when I refused to answer.
I held her gaze and thought of Valose. Of the Huren jungle at suns-fall, the dark alive with sound, my clansmen's voices carrying through the domed city.
I had built that memory so carefully in the rotations I had spent in this cage.
Detail by detail. Sound by sound. The way you build a fire against the cold.
Kept it intact. Fed it. Refused to let it go dark.
I am Vennox of Clan Huren, I silently reminded myself. I am a warrior of Valose. This prison is only temporary.
She touched the bracelet.
My body braced before my mind finished the thought.
Spine contracting, jaw setting, hands curling at my sides—all the preparations that had become as involuntary as breathing, in the time since I had learned what was coming.
The collar warmed first. That was the worst of it, that slow warmth that gave me three heartbeats of the possibility that it would be nothing, before the runes ignited and stripped the possibility away entirely.
The pain had no color and no edges. It simply arrived, everywhere at once, a full-body contraction that folded my knees and drove me to the floor before I had decided to fall. My jaw clamped shut. I tasted blood where my fangs found the inside of my cheek.
I refused to make a sound.
She craved my screams. My agony laid bare for her pleasure.
I had learned that early on, watching her lean forward whenever the collar blazed, hungry for what pain she could wring out of me.
So I had taken that from her. Bitten down, bled, and given her nothing.
It was the only power left to me, and I hoarded it like a dying flame.
I slowly pushed myself upright, refusing to give in to what she wanted.
She watched me rise. The mandibles stopped their soft clicking. Her reptilian eyes narrowed, the torchlight catching the wet gleam of them, and for a long moment she simply stood there, studying me with open curiosity. An expression I had not seen on her before.
“You are a puzzle to me, Valosian,” she said, her voice having lost some of its honey. "Every other creature in my collection broke. Eventually. They all found the place where the pain is greater than the pride, and they surrendered. You have not found that place."
I straightened to my full height, ignoring the way my muscles trembled, ignoring the blood pooling in my mouth. I would not give her the satisfaction of seeing me broken, even as every nerve ending in my body screamed for relief, and I stared at her.
"What do you wait for?"
Nothing. I waited for nothing. I had killed her, and I would—
No. That was not yet. That came later.
In my nightmare, with the collar cooling against my throat and my wrists raw in their shackles, there was no later yet. There was only the pacing in the dark she had described, the cold floor, and the careful maintenance of a fire inside me that I refused to let her extinguish.
Uri studied me a moment longer. Then she turned and moved away into the dark beyond my bars, her jewels clicking against each other, unhurried, certain she would return. She always returned.
I stood alone in the cage.
The chains binding my wrists pooled heavily against the floor. The single torch guttered. In the dark beyond the bars, something moved that was only shadow, only the mind making shapes from nothing, only the long, bad hours of an infinite darkness.
I pressed my back against the bars of the cage and focused on my own heartbeat. Steady and strong, the beat of a warrior's body that had endured more than it had any right to endure.
Something shifted.
I did not notice it at first. The tremor was so faint it might have been the cage settling, or the floor beneath it, or the long, slow exhale of a world that had forgotten I was inside it. But it came again, and this time I knew it was not my prison. It came from within me.
I placed my palm flat against my sternum.
Not the steady, measured rhythm I had come to know as my own. Not the primary heart that had carried me through every fight, every rotation of captivity. This pulse was different. Deeper. Slower. More insistent. A second heartbeat, layered beneath the first.
My ancillary heart.
"Vennox.” The female’s voice cut through my nightmare. Not Uri's voice. Not any sound that belonged to this cage or this palace or this world.
My ancillary heart recognized it with a surge of adrenalyne before my dreaming mind had finished untangling the sound.
My spirit mate.
She was speaking, but I could not make out her words. They slipped through my grasp before I could catch them. But the cadence of them reached me. The warmth underneath them. The simple fact of her voice, soft and deliberate, as though she was trying to call me back from a distance.
"Vennox."
I held on to her soft voice, and when I did, the cage dimmed. The collar's phantom warmth ebbed. The torchlight wavered. It had been the only light I had known for too many rotations to count, and now it faded behind my closed eyes into ordinary darkness.
Her voice continued. The steadiness of it. The warmth. The fact of her existence somewhere beyond the dark and the distance and the bars of a cage on a world I had already left behind.
She was real. She was out there. This was over.
I had killed Uri. I had waited in the shadows of her chamber with Tyrk's blade in one hand and his blaster in the other, and when she came, I had made it swift and certain, the blade first and then the blaster to finish what the blade began, because I had promised myself I would not leave that room until she could never touch that bracelet again.
Dark, viscous fluid had coated my hands as I stepped over her broken carcass and moved without hesitation to the conveyor tunnel, the alarms already screaming through the palace walls, her guards flooding the pupa chamber as Tyrk had predicted they would.
I had walked out into the cold air of Gorka's night, and I had known with a certainty that still lived in my bones that it was done.
The Queen was dead.
She was already dead, and her cage was nothing, and her collar was nothing, and the strange-hued torchlight was nothing, and the stone floor dissolved beneath my knees as Quin's voice threaded through the dissolving dark and reached what it was looking for.
My ancillary heart steadied.
The dream went quiet, then still, then gone. Not ripped away the way nightmares sometimes ended, but eased out slowly, like a tide withdrawing from shore, leaving nothing behind it but clean sand and the ordinary sounds of the ship settling around me in the dark.
I did not know if she was truly speaking.
I did not know if her voice carried across the distance between us, or if my sleep-addled mind had built the sound of her voice from its own need or from the memory of her face filling my vision.
When Quin's hands had framed my face, and her voice had cut through the madness of the spores and brought me back.
Vennox. Look at me.
It did not matter which it was.
Real or dreamt, I held on. I let the sound of her carry me somewhere the cage could not reach, somewhere below waking where the darkness behind my eyes was simply the darkness of sleep, and nothing moved in it that did not belong there.
I had spent too many rotations in a cage refusing to break, convincing myself that the war against sleep was one I could sustain indefinitely, that vigilance was the price of survival, and I would pay it without end.
But Quin's voice had found me in the dark, and Uri had dissolved. Perhaps the Gorken queen only held the dark when no one else was in it.
Warmth shifted along my side. A presence slow and careful at the edge of the world I occupied between sleep and waking.
I did not open my eyes, but my spirit recognized her before I did, and I eased closer, bringing the heat of her within reach. My arm settled across her with the same instinct that had put me between her and every threat on this deadly planet.
An anchor.
That was what she was for me. That was what her voice had been in the dark of the nightmare.
Something solid to hold onto while the dream tried to pull me under.
I held tight to her warmth and let the steady rhythm of her breathing push the last of Gorka out of my mind, and for the first time in forever, slept without fear.