Chapter 13 Rael
I had been on this planet for forty-seven days when Tyvor found a way to use me as a weapon.
It happened at night. It was always at night — Tyvor preferred darkness the way a predator prefers the advantage of low visibility, and his broadcasts were strongest when the minds he was reaching for were at their most vulnerable.
Sleeping minds were open minds. Dampened defenses, lowered walls, the natural porousness of consciousness at rest.
I was not asleep. I was sitting outside the tent I had been assigned, a small, weathered canvas structure between the weapons cache and the perimeter fence, positioned where everyone could see me and, more importantly, where I could be watched.
I was listening to the camp settle into its nighttime rhythm.
The guards changing shifts. The murmur of conversation from the mess area, where a few people always stayed up late, unable to face the dreams that came with sleep.
The distant sound of Brecca's voice in the medical tent, low and steady, talking to a patient who couldn't sleep.
Her heartbeat reached me from across the camp.
Not just the rhythm: the texture. The warmth behind it, the complex emotional state that I had learned to read the way she read blood pressure.
A baseline with variations that told a story.
Tonight her heartbeat was tired but steady, focused, tinged with the low-level distress that had been constant since the blood farm captives arrived.
She was working. She was always working.
She measured her worth in bodies saved, and the influx of a hundred and forty-seven new bodies had given her purpose the way fuel gave fire.
More heat, more light, more consumption.
I worried about the consumption. But that was her choice, and I had learned in my weeks among humans that their right to make destructive choices about their own bodies was something they defended with a ferocity that rivaled Vampyren territorial instinct.
The network was quiet. I kept my dampening tight, the narrowest possible aperture, barely a whisper.
Even through the constriction, the background hum of Lucian minds in the region registered as a low-frequency pressure.
They were south of the city, in the territory they'd claimed after the holdout Vampyren alliance collapsed.
Tyvor's forces, regrouping. Their collective mood came through like weather through a sealed window: pressure, temperature, the charge of an approaching storm.
Tyvor was angry. The cold, calculating anger of a commander who had lost an asset and was deciding how to make someone pay.
The blood farm raid had cost him his Vampyren allies.
The camp's successful defense against his kill squad had cost him five warriors and the tactical advantage of surprise.
Rael's defection had cost him a scout, a set of skills, and the symbolic victory of absolute loyalty.
The calculation would be simple: find the traitor, destroy what the traitor valued, bring the traitor back or kill him.
Standard Lucian enforcement protocol. I had seen it applied to others.
I had felt the consequences through the network — the punishment broadcasts, the psychic pain that turned a defector's mind into a burning house while every connected Lucian was forced to watch.
I had hoped that my dampening was tight enough to avoid—
The broadcast hit me at 11:47 PM.
Not a sweep. Not the wide-band pulse that washed over every Lucian mind within range. This was targeted. A precision strike: Tyvor's consciousness reaching through the network like a hand through water, finding the specific frequency of my dampened signal and grabbing it and pulling.
Pain. The full force of Tyvor's psychic weaponry, concentrated into a beam that drilled through my dampening and into the core of my consciousness.
My vision went white. My body seized, every muscle contracting simultaneously, the involuntary response of a nervous system overwhelmed by input that exceeded its capacity to process.
I fell off the crate I'd been sitting on and hit the ground and my jaw locked and I couldn't scream because screaming required muscular control and I had none.
Found you.
Tyvor's voice in my mind. Not words; the psychic equivalent of words, carrying meaning and tone and the texture of his rage. He sounded like the inside of a furnace. He sounded like the death of a star.
Traitor. Coward. I gave you purpose and you ran to animals.
The pain intensified. Layers. Tyvor was skilled at this; he didn't just broadcast pain, he sculpted it, shaping the psychic energy into specific frequencies that targeted specific neural pathways.
The first layer was raw agony, nerve endings screaming.
The second was memory — he pulled images from my mind, the deaths on Kallos, the trophy poles, the faces of the people I'd watched die and done nothing to save. The third was shame.
The shame was the worst. Because Tyvor knew me.
He had been in my mind for centuries, feeling what I felt, knowing what I knew.
He knew about the cowardice. The silent resistance that was no resistance at all.
The years of watching atrocities and requesting scouting missions instead of standing up and saying stop.
He took that knowledge and he turned it into a blade and he drove it through the center of my consciousness.
You think defecting erases what you watched? You think healing one human woman's patients makes up for the thousands you let die? You are not a hero, Rael. You are a coward who found a convenient cause.
I tried to dampen. Tried to close the aperture, seal the connection, retreat into the silence I'd maintained for weeks. But Tyvor had his grip and he wasn't letting go. My dampening was a wall and he was a battering ram and the wall was cracking.
And then he found it. The link between my mind and hers.
I felt the moment he discovered it: a shift in his attention, a sudden, predatory focus that replaced the generalized rage with something sharper.
Something fascinated. Through my connection to the network, he could see the tendrils extending from my consciousness — outward, toward a mind that shouldn't have been reachable.
A human mind. Warm. Bright. Connected to me by a frequency that Tyvor had never encountered in all his years of psychic manipulation.
What is this?
No. No no no—
You've bonded. With a human. His surprise was genuine, and brief. Replaced almost instantly by tactical calculation. Because Tyvor was, above all things, a strategist, and he recognized an exploitable vulnerability when he found one.
He followed the thread.
I couldn't stop him. I threw every ounce of psychic energy I had into severing the connection, building walls, collapsing the bridge between my mind and Brecca's.
But what bound us was woven into the fabric of my consciousness the way a vein was woven into flesh.
Closing it would require cutting away part of my own mind.
Tyvor moved through me like poison through a bloodstream. Along the connection, through the link, reaching for the warm bright mind on the other end.
I heard Brecca scream.
Not through my ears. Through the link between us. Her consciousness being touched by something alien and hostile and wrong. Tyvor's rage pouring through the connection I'd built, using the bridge I'd created to reach a mind that had never been designed to withstand psychic assault.
She was in the medical tent. Her terror reached me as a frequency I'd never registered before, sharp and bright as breaking glass.
The confusion. The sudden eruption of sensory input that didn't belong to her.
Tyvor was showing her things. The destruction of Lucis.
The trophy poles on Kallos. The Lucian war machine sweeping through human settlements, the heads on stakes, the black blood on dirt.
Violently, pumped into her consciousness like water into lungs.
This is what your lover is. This is what his people do. This is what he watched and did nothing to stop.
And underneath the images, the pain. Tyvor's specialty. The psychic agony that could drop a Lucian warrior to his knees, now channeled into a human mind with no defenses, no network experience, no walls.
Brecca screamed again. Her mind was a tangle of clinical analysis and raw panic, the medical instinct trying to categorize what was happening even as it overwhelmed her. Psychic intrusion. External stimulus. Not my thoughts. Not my memories. Hostile contact through the link—
I pushed myself off the ground. My body was shaking. Tyvor's assault on my own mind hadn't stopped, the pain still drilling through my consciousness, but the sound of Brecca's scream gave me something that pain alone couldn't: a reason to move.
I staggered toward the medical tent. Fifty yards.
The camp was dark and the distance felt like miles and every step was fought through the psychic noise of Tyvor's broadcast hammering against my mind.
My vision was fragmenting. Half my visual field was the camp at night; the other half was Tyvor's projections bleeding through the network, images of burning cities and trophy poles and the faces of the dead layered over the physical world like a double exposure.
The guards saw me and raised weapons. I didn't stop. I couldn't stop. If I stopped, Tyvor would keep pouring poison into Brecca's mind until something broke.
I crashed through the tent flap and found her on the floor.
She was on her hands and knees, shaking, her forehead pressed against the ground. The patient she'd been tending to was backed against the far wall, eyes wide with terror. Jonas was crouched beside Brecca, his hands on her shoulders, saying her name.
"Brecca. Brecca, what's happening? Talk to me—"