Chapter 50 Elena
ELENA
The goddesses are similar, but their followers ignorant. Little do they know there is a being just like her, just as hungry, just as monstrous.
—from A Critique of the Ancient Gods (note: debunked by historians)
Elena sensed the sudden flare of a foreign fire racing through the sea. She whirled around, searching the screens. There! The white sparker, racing from the Relentless toward the Yumi ship.
“Fuck. Fuck!”
“Jaya and Akaros could be on that ship,” Maya said.
And Samson, she thought, surprised by the depth of her concern, her sudden desperate ache to know.
She pushed it back. In moments, the sparker would pass parallel to them in its warpath to the bounder.
Daz, the Yumi, everyone would be lost. Perhaps that was why the idea came to her.
Not out of her regard for Samson and his well-being, but for the Yumi.
After all, if she lost Daz now, who would represent Moksh at the council?
How would she intimidate the kings and queens if not with the Yumi?
It was the logic she could accept, the reasoning she sold to herself, even if it tasted gently of a lie.
“Increase speed,” she said to Maya. “We’re going to intercept it.”
Maya balked. “We have rebels on board. Free Sesharians—”
“Mother’s Gold, increase speed!” she snapped. She reached for the projection, but Maya pushed her back.
“You don’t know how to operate it,” she hissed.
“Put us in the path. Now, Maya! We’ll take the hit.”
Her eyes widened. “Who knows how many will survive. Who knows if we will survive.”
“This ship can take the strike! They can’t! And I can control fire, remember?” A flame snaked down her arm. “I’ll protect us. Trust me.”
The comms suddenly blinked, and the warbled voice of the captain of Relentless drifted through.
“Captain Risith. XO Kilith. We’re seeing pulse fire on your deck. Who has command of the ship? Who is the officer on watch?”
Elena thought fast. If the Relentless thought the Lord had been overtaken, they would turn their guns on them. “This is Officer Narian, sir,” she said, reading the name tag of the fallen officer. “Captain Risith and XO Kilith were called to quash a Sesharian scuffle. A little noise, that’s all.”
“Are you a blockhead? We’re engaged with the enemy. Call him back!”
“I’ll send a—”
“Now!”
Elena cut the line, whirling toward Maya. “Please, Maya,” she begged. “Turn us.”
Maya stared at her, unwilling, but then she moved forward, and the engines clanged. They turned hard just as the sparker neared. And then Elena felt it.
The heat signature of the sparker. Bright and staccato, like spitting flames. They swerved into its path, and it exploded along their starboard.
The ship shuddered, and Elena lost her footing. Maya was flung over the panel. The world tilted, slingswords, pulsers, bodies, and men tumbling around her. And then the ship snapped still, alarms blaring.
She heard the hiss of the flames scratch the back of her mind.
Elena threw her Agni forward, searching, feeling, and found the new inferno.
It shied from her touch, but she pursued it.
Snagged into its essence. Slowly, Elena quelled it, forcing the flames to turn inward, to contract.
Blood dripped from her nose again, and her arms trembled, a vein straining in her forehead.
Pops of resistance, like tiny headaches jabbing in her mind.
The inferno lashed back, pushing its will on her.
But her will was stronger. It always had been.
With sheer stubbornness, with a strangled cry, Elena sucked the inferno until she felt its will bleed—and then the flames were hers.
“I have it,” she said weakly.
She collapsed onto her knees.
Distantly, Elena heard Maya cry out in warning. She turned—and saw it out the window. It appeared like a wraith, surreal and unbecoming. Black hull as dark as oil, bones painted down the side, the red of its pulsers whining to life.
The Relentless had turned their guns on them.