22. TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-TWO
FANKALO
Location: Rollard Isles
The first rays of sunlight through the porthole were the color of blood.
A storm was coming.
Fankalo had slept poorly through the growing choppiness beneath the docked Rogue’s Rapture.
The anesthetic had worn off. Though the bones in her leg had been reset and braced, every movement provoked pain.
She had never been injured before. A scraped knee or a splinter when she wasn’t paying attention, maybe.
Her Luck had always steered her from any real danger.
Luck was no match for what they were up against.
In the three days since the assault in Solutium, she had insisted on sleeping in her own hammock rather than the medical ward cot on the island.
The last thing she needed was to be surrounded by those who were compromised—or treated her like she was.
They were to host a meeting with Thyatira’s emissary this morning.
To appear anything other than invincible would be unacceptable.
She glanced at the floor in front of the door, where Mitek had slept again. He had slipped out only minutes ago, thinking her asleep. Despite her protests, he hadn’t left her side until now. It reminded her of Calver, who’d refused a hammock or bunk in favor of that same spot for years.
Her pain was a welcome distraction from those memories. Maybe this time Calver really had abandoned her. She only deserved it. But she’d been wrong about him before. Maybe she would be again.
Fankalo’s magic pooled around her, then, commanding her attention to the door. Her eyes narrowed on it. It felt like it was staring back.
When magic acted like this without prompt—like it was a conscious thing, tugging at her with something to say—it meant she was missing something critical.
That something had everything to do with Calver.
She closed her eyes and meditated on the sensation. Her blood brother was all she could see—bright as a shooting star. He had been for a month now, ever since she’d sent him to Thacklore. She’d be dead before believing that was a coincidence.
The Fate lines grew dark as a moonless night.
Destruction. Death. Loss. She sank deeper beneath those impressions without fixating on them.
If she did, they would slip away from her without giving her more to pull from.
Submerging into the eddies of her Luck had to be done like swimming to the ocean floor: slowly.
At the surface everything was vague, but the deeper she descended, the more specific the impressions became.
Deeper and deeper she went, until the possibilities stretched for fathoms around her. Rooted below an endless sea of futures, she posed her Luck a question.
What concerning Calver have I missed?
In her mind’s eye, she received the impression of a writing pad.
Her eyes snapped open. The Fate lines slid away from her like beads of water. That writing pad was on her private bookshelf, long untouched, but too valuable to be discarded. It sat just feet away from her, stuffed between scrolls and tomes.
The medic had told her to wait two weeks before any unaided movement.
She had still asked for a crutch, set against the wall beside her.
Fankalo bit her cheek and shimmied against the hammock to set her good foot on the planks.
The opposite spiked with a splitting pain.
She bit down harder. Her fingers gripped the crutch, and she hoisted herself to stand.
Thunk. Step. Thunk. Step.
Propelled by the nag of her magic, she was nearly hyperventilating by the time she retrieved the writing pad from the shelf.
She pressed her back to the wall and sank to the floor. Her fingers fumbled as she flipped back its pages, rereading Calver’s crudely scrawled account from the beginning.
Roskaad Thyatira had mutilated and abducted him.
He’d escaped, only to find Kaidech in ruins.
Then he was captured a second time by Cul’Mon.
She didn’t reread what happened after that—didn’t need to. It had been burned into her mind eight years ago, and she could still see its char against her eyelids when she tried to sleep at night. Besides, her Luck told her that she’d already found her query. The passage concerning Thyatira.
All her life, she’d been focused on Cul’Mon. The atrocities he’d committed to her only blood. One could only harbor so much hate. Thyatira had kidnapped Calver to be an experiment; Cul’Mon had enslaved him as a genetic weapon. Cul’Mon’s damage made Thyatira’s tongue removal look like child’s play.
But what if—what if—
She reread the first, horrendously written passage.
‘Thyatira wanted to silence me.’
Calver didn’t say why. And she’d never asked. She’d just assumed that it didn’t look good for generals to kidnap shratten children for pharmaceutical schemes. Why pry deeper into the things that, when mentioned, made Calver start stabbing?
But the Kaidechi scourge had occurred only three days after Calver’s disappearance. And Thyatira could have found far easier prey than a dowagian prodigy if all he’d wanted was a guinea pig.
“Kretch,” she whispered, voice trembling. Fourteen years. Thyatira’s game went back fourteen years. Maybe more.
They were so fucked.
Mitek chose that moment to reenter, holding a tin of topical anesthesia and a satchel of raw moss. He took one look at her and threw them to the floor. His hands shifted under her arms, as if to hoist her back into the hammock.
“Don’t treat me like a beached jelly, idiot!” She shoved him off and grabbed her crutch, pressing painstakingly to her feet. She shambled to the porthole and set her chin onto its frame.
His voice shook too. “Then don’t huddle on the floor like a beached jelly! What happened?”
Her heart was beating too hard to speak. She felt every throb of it in her toes.
“Get it together, Brat. Thyatira’s messengers arrive in two hours. Do you need me to take it alone?”
Mitek always played the part of the Hand for all matters Thyatira, a matter of image control, but she usually signaled to him from the emissary’s blindside. Hearing his name pushed her past her mental block.
“It was Thyatira,” she gasped.
“What was Thyatira?”
“All of it. The whole thing—the failed demolition, everything—was his set-up.”
“I don’t have magical intuition. I need you to draw me a picture.”
“Thyatira brought the Tera’thians to Kaidech. That’s why he silenced Calver. Thyatira is a Tera’thian agent.”
Mitek shook his head. “Take a moment to think about what you’re saying. Thyatira is a figurehead for the Groundling movement. He wants to revitalize Nelfindar, not destroy it.”
What better way to revitalize a nation than have an external threat crumple its oligarchy?
“And if Thyatira were working with the Tera’thians to thwart the demolition,” he continued, “then what was the point in feeding us the Aetech plans in the first place?” She didn’t have to say it out loud; Mitek worked it over on his own.
He clapped a hand to his head. “He wanted us to lose everything.”
Fankalo swallowed. He hadn’t gifted them Aetech’s plans in hopes of a future alliance.
It had been a parlor trick to cannibalize their budget.
“We’re the largest threat to his takeover.
Were, anyhow.” Her body shook. Her leg ached.
She wanted to sink back to the floor, but wouldn’t in front of Mitek.
She’d wondered, these past weeks, how Thyatira would react to Seraphindo’s newfound heir stealing his bid for rule over Nelfindar out from under him.
Of course, if he had been working directly with the Tera’thians all along to devise an ambush on the Red Wing in Steila, handing over a Ruxian during the event only sweetened the deal for him.
Seraphindo’s heir would be a coveted part of Cul’Mon’s project.
Fankalo’s skin prickled. Cul’Mon wasn’t a fate she would wish on anyone.
Mitek was still reeling. “How did he know we were working on anything related to distortion in the first place?”
A valid question. Thyatira’s information network must have perforated their ranks. “One of ours is feeding him intelligence. Someone close.”
They looked at each other, a million shared horrors and what-ifs darting between their eyes.
“Who?”
“You don’t think—”
They both spoke in unison.
“Calver,” Mitek growled, as she gasped, “Drogus?!”
Again, they spoke as one. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
If she could have cut him with her glare, she would. “It’s. Not. Calver.”
He held out a hand. “Bratty, let’s unpack this—”
“It’s not Calver!”
He held out a fist. A challenge, to see who would make their argument first. She brought her free fist to meet his. Her gaze locked onto his dark eyes.
They moved at first blink, fingers flying through a progression of shapes, one to mimic each of nine sea creatures from a childhood game of wits.
Of course, when Fankalo could predict every creature Mitek planned, victory was skewed in her favor.
To keep it fair, the game had long since devolved into a race. Whoever finished first would win.
Mitek.
“Your squid was missing a tentacle!” she snarled.
“This is not a time for you to be a sore loser, Brat!”
She crossed her arms and leaned back, sinking to the floor.
“It can’t be Drogus,” Mitek spat. “Think about what you’re saying. He’s risked his life for you time and again. He’s given us almost every piece of information we’ve used to our advantage. It would kill him to know you even suspected him.”
“Do you think I want to suspect Drogus? He’s—” Her words came up short. There was no term dear enough. “You know what he means to me.”
Mitek shook his head. “This isn’t going to be easy, but you need to look facts in the face. Calver spent six years working for the Tera’thians—”
“Enslaved by the Tera’thians!”
“Hear me out!”
She pressed her lips into a line.