The man gasps, flies back three meters into the wall. Despite her injuries, Saedii kicks another’s legs out from under him, slaps the third’s rifle aside, blindingly quick. But the rest are ready for her, blasting her full in the chest with pointblank disruptor shots. Stun blasts ring out in the cell and Saedii crashes backward, braids flying. I’m half out of my cot before I realize it, face to face with another marine’s rifle. He peers down the barrel at me, his laser sight lighting up my bruised and bare chest.
“Give me a reason, traitor,” the private says. “I’m begging you.”
“This isn’t the way we do things,” I say, despite the agony in my throat.
“We?” he scoffs, looking at the tattoo on my arm. “Who’s ‘we,’ Legion boy?”
“I’m Terran just like you. I don—”
“Those pixies killed a few thousand Terrans during the Andarael attack,” the lieutenant growls, picking himself up off the deck. “And she was calling their shots. This is exactly how we do it. So shut your mouth before we do you, too.”
“You’re getting played!” I hiss. “The GIA is using the TDF to start a—”
The private steps up and clocks me in the face with the butt of his disruptor. I’m rocked backward, tumbling down onto the cot.
“One more word, traitor,” he growls, “and you’re gonna be picking up your teeth with broken fingers.”
I raise my hands, pressed back onto the bed. I watch as one of the marines slings the semiconscious Saedii onto his shoulders, as the lieutenant shoots me a poison glance and, with a barked order, sends the whole squad marching out of the cell without another word.
I lick the split in my lip, tasting blood, my skull still ringing from the blow.
I have no idea what they want with her, but it can’t be good. And then I think of the Ra’haam, wearing those GIA colonists like second skins. I think of Cat with her new blue eyes. All the things I should have said and done.
And I shake my head and sigh.
Maker’s breath, none of this is good.
24
THE ECHO
Kal
She has come so far in these last months.
I watch Aurora from our camp, my breath taken clean away by the power she wields. The clearing we sleep in has been transformed. The simple fire she summoned so long ago has been replaced with an ornate stone firepit. The grass we slept on has been crowned with the grandest bed I have ever seen in my life—four-poster, carved wood, silken sheets. My be’shmai even crafted me a siif so I could play during the day while she is about her training.
I sit now beneath our trees, strumming the instrument’s strings, watching her. Aurora floats high above me, just a silhouette against a blinding sky. Boulders larger than the Zero orbit her in perfect synchronicity, moving in all directions. She floats in the center, sitting as if on the air, her right eye burning. I watch as one boulder shatters into a thousand shards, its fragments forming a perfect sphere around her.
The Eshvaren floats nearby, watching. It does not look at me. It does not speak to me. As ever, I feel a vague sense of … not hostility, but unwelcome, in its presence. But as I strike chords upon the siif my be’shmai made me, I see that the hues within its crystal form change with the music I play.
“May I ask you something?” I call.
It does not look at me. But I feel a fraction of its attention shift.
Ask, it replies.
“A thought has been playing on my mind since we arrived.” I strum a minor chord, watch the Eshvaren’s hue shift and dance. “Why do you look like us?”
It turns its head then. Regarding me with kaleidoscopic eyes.
I do not fear this thing. A warrior fears only to never taste victory. But I feel the power in it. My people are one of the few species in the galaxy to still hold belief in the Eshvaren. The Ancient Ones were mythical figures to me as a child. And sitting here in the presence of their collected memory, I find its gaze … unsettling.
“I mean to say, you do not look exactly like us. But you are bipedal. Humanoid. Do you appear this way to make it easier for us to look upon you?”
It is a long time before the Eshvaren replies.
We do not look like you, young one, it finally says. You look like us.