Chapter 71
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
AIRIK
Airik’s chest tightened as he walked farther in the wrong direction, away from Nora and toward where the reaper ship had landed.
Yet he pressed on, eying the ion trail blurring the air as he hung behind Torren, not wanting his actions to be scrutinized for evidence of madness.
The semicircle of shallow cuts on his hand—Nora’s bite—throbbed.
He brought the marks to his lips, grazing them with his own.
This would leave a scar. If not, he’d carve the indentations into his hand himself to make them last forever.
The only brand he’d ever accept. The only scar he’d be honored to bear.
Torren walked ahead. They stopped at a corner where the ion trail disappeared between buildings.
The reaper craft’s landing position. He pulled a scout drone from his pocket and threw it into the air.
Because the drozekar’s damaged neural engine couldn’t analyze data, all that returned to Torren’s arm pilot was a visual feed.
The static distorted the image, but the relay came through.
Rage and adrenaline shot through Airik. His muscles tensed, ready to spring.
A Veynari cargo carrier, so wide it spanned the entire block in length and the street in width, sat with its belly open, ready to be filled.
Dark shapes darted through the drone’s line of sight. Over thirty captives—shackled, collared, and some with broken gaits—pushed carts into the carrier. In the middle of the street, three reapers, identifiable by their illicit sonic blasters and electric prods, coordinated labor at a brutal pace.
Everyone was masked. The reapers wore breathing apparatuses not of Veynari design. The slaves had layers of cloth wrapped around their heads, not meant to protect from damage but merely to delay it.
Airik’s heart lurched as the feed grew stronger but retained the greenish tint.
“May the True Father call me to the stars,” Torren whispered. Fumbling with the controls on his arm, he managed to twist the drone’s position to get a wider image.
One of the slaves pushed a cart against a wall. It was broken wide open, unprotected, exposing the kudra power grids inside, like the veins of a dissected animal.
Skin prickling, Airik resisted the memory gnawing its way up his throat. Green. Something sharp. Black. A poorly sewn square of fabric. The sharp smell of antiseptic and a cold room, with a glass box holding two figures.
Untouched. Untaken. Unconquered. He gripped Nora’s pendant in his pocket.
On both sides of the street, the walls of the buildings lay melted and peeled away, destroyed by demolition automatons.
“I’ve never seen such interference on the feed,” Torren said, tapping the arm pilot, trying to clarify the green blur.
The automatons—with the Veynari wings and star insignias large on their backs—dissolved sections of wall with flames, releasing bursts of kudra particles into the air.
The arm pilot worked flawlessly; the air itself was thick with poison.
Patting his body, Torren let out a brief sigh of relief as he pulled two cloth masks from his pocket.
He usually wore them when visiting pleasure dens off-world, one to cover his face and another for the pleasure worker.
It was an attempt to hide not only his identity from surveillance drones but also the pleasure worker, who could be punished for touching a morazir.
He put one on himself, then shoved the other toward Airik. “I grabbed them out of habit,” he explained, with an ever-present smile and ease in his voice. “Don’t worry—they haven’t been worn during any…acts.”
Airik tied the mask behind his head so tight that it tore out strands of hair in the knot. He barely noticed.
They watched as another slave used metal tongs to break off sections of the thin kudra crystal tubes and carefully place them into water-filled carts to prevent more dust from spreading. A reaper jabbed him in the side with the electric prod, forcing him to work faster.
“They’re arming for something.” Torren swallowed hard.
“With this much equipment, a general—maybe more than one—must be involved. Otherwise how could they divert so many resources?” He shut off the feed, his gaze bright.
“By Ulliel’s grace, Aelior must’ve discovered this—they’re trying to silence her.
” He reached back and drew his sword. “What poor timing for me,” he complained.
“Why couldn’t the Ourex have splintered after my breeding assignment? ”
Airik remained silent, his nerves vibrating with an emotion that, if he acknowledged, would render him useless. The carts carried enough kudra to annihilate all life in Zarmur. Who knew how much had already been loaded onto the ship?
Clarity burst into his mind, his body suddenly still and charged with a singular desire—to destroy all of this here and now. Vorn’s words—how strange to think of him again—repeated in Airik’s head: You might find this mission cathartic.
“I don’t see Xallix,” he said. “He must be in the carrier. With your suit, my sword. You need to flatten the field with the sword—ground the kudra and the reapers with its gravity.”
Torren drew back, eyeing him up and down as if he’d suggested inviting the reapers to share a tasty meal.
“I know your brain is a bit addled and you’re a little upset about leaving your human, but surely you haven’t forgotten that you can’t step into an active field without being crushed by it yourself. ”
“I won’t,” Airik said. “Split the gravity field. I’ll walk through it. Do you remember Aelior showing us how—just before we swore the Morazir’s Oath?”
Hesitating, Torren’s lips curled into a smirk. “An illicit lesson she felt one of us would need one day. I…remember.”
“An error in the sword’s gravity programming,” Airik added.
“An error, hm?” He spoke quietly, watching the glowing scripts shift across the belly of his sword, awaiting a command input.
“I’ve heard the word error more than enough times.
Both of us have.” He turned the blade, as if noticing its strength and beauty for the first time.
“What if there’s an ‘error’ again?” His expression hardened.
“I won’t do it. If something goes wrong and you’re hurt, Aelior will never forgive me—”
“Aelior is imprisoned.” Airik looked intently at his friend.
“You must do this. We can do nothing for Aelior from here. Xallix wears your suit, and even if it doesn’t fit, he’s immune to the sword’s pull.
Splitting the field is the only way. You know what kudra has done to me.
I know this isn’t all the kudra in the territories, but it’s most of it.
And I…need to fix this to make things a little safer. For Aelior. For you. For…Nora.”
Torren moved slowly, his fingers hovering over the command inputs.
But instead of commanding the split, he looked to Airik, the sparkling evidence of emotion gathering in his eyes.
He’d never been able to wrap his emotions away as Airik had.
Too much to hide, and there’s no room inside, he’d said as a forgeling.
“You know the word brother,” Airik said, giving him a small smile. “Now I’ll teach you another human word—okay. It means everything will be all right for us. Things will be good. I’ll be…okay.”
Torren blinked, brows drawn together. His blue tears vanished as he burst out laughing.
“Don’t fill my head with any more useless information—the space up there is already so limited.
” He quickly tapped the scripts to split the gravity field in two, leaving a narrow strip just wide enough for a man to walk through.
“All right, Airik. Do what you need. But the moment you’re down, I’m breaking the field. ”
Both stepped out from the shadows and the shield of the building’s corner into the wide-open street.
They stood at the end of the block, with the scene stretching out before them.
The reapers were still lined up in the center of the street, as far from the kudra as possible, despite their protective masks.
One slave spotted them. They stumbled back, raising a blackened finger, its tissue already dying. “They’re here—”
Torren raised his sword, then slashed down with mighty force. The gravity field snapped into place.
Everything in front of them slammed to the ground. The air cleared of the yellow-green haze. Everyone ahead crashed down. They’d barely be able to breathe. Even the freighter creaked as its shape compressed, pushed down under its own weight.
Torren turned his blade, and the sea of gravity split in two. “I’ll hold it until you reach the carrier—otherwise it’ll be chaos with panicking slaves.”
Airik squeezed into the tight gap in the field. He struggled to breathe, forcing air in and out of his lungs. The gravity engine wasn’t perfect, and the two fields weren’t even in opposing strength. The blade wanted to fall in one direction, and the wielder was pulled along.
The field wobbled, falling over Airik’s left side until he heard Torren grunt behind him, struggling to straighten it. Blood rushed into his extremities. His vision flickered.
Nora. Nora. Nora.
He chanted the words, forcing his legs to move in sync with his heartbeat as his muscles flexed and pushed blood back into his heart. The reapers could do nothing but watch his approach, crushed against the ground.
The words of past instructors and morazir who had forged him floated up as his body fought the pull down.
Efficient.
The eyes of the first reaper blew wide as Airik stood over his head. He was not a true sapient species but from one of the dozens of worlds with intelligent life that had fallen to the Veynari.
Competent.
Airik crouched, pulling the combat knife from his boot. The reaper’s eyelids twitched.
Useful—despite his wild constitution.