“I believe twelve more years, sir,” Maya said.
“Twelve,” the captain mused, and blearily, Elena understood. Her contract to Jantar. He assumed she had one like every other Sesharian laborer.
Behind her, the barrel of the pulser whined to life. She could almost feel it. The heat building. She could not burn. But a pulse ripping through her stomach, shredding her lungs? Even Samson’s fire could not heal her from that. Elena tried to call her Agni. If only she could wield, spark a flame from between her fingers, but her mind whirled. They had bound her hands so tightly that she could not even feel her fingers, let alone form the Lotus.
“Twelve years, and for it to end like this. What a waste.”
The captain raised an yron to his lips, considering the hunched laborers before him.
“You.” The unlit yron bobbed from his lips as he pointed to a Sesharian, a man with long hair tied back, his neck bare to the sun. “And you.” He pointed to a small woman who froze as his accusing finger found her. “Six years will be added to each of your contracts. Someone must make up for her belligerence.”
“No,” Elena gasped.
“But, sir, she is not—” the woman began.
“I will make sure that it is done,” Maya cut in.
The woman glared at her, and then looked at Elena with such anger, such loathing, Elena wanted to whittle into a ball. The man looked up, and she expected the same fury, but it was the look of defeat in his eyes, the tired acceptance carving the lines of his face, that cut her deeper than the ropes biting into her flesh.
“Please,” she begged. “They are not responsible.”
“Not responsible?” Kilith laughed. “You are one and the same. Remember that. And if any one of you wants to play the stupid hero, remember her.”
Elena felt the pulser engage. She heard the deep internal thrum of its sensors zap to life, creating a charge. A strangled scream escaped her throat. Agni. She needed her Agni. She wrenched her hands, trying with all her might to snap the ropes as the captain calmly reached into his breast pocket.
The pulser thrummed louder.
Focus!Her fingers clawed the air helplessly as a roar built in her ears.Focus.
Kilith turned to his superior, waiting for his signal. The captain withdrew his lighter and flicked it open. A tiny flame bloomed to life. Small, inconsequential. But Elena heard it draw in its first breath of life, a thunderous clap in the quagmire of her panic. And like a starving man who sucked water from a rock, she pushed her mind forth, latching on to it.
The lighter’s heat flared in her mind’s eye. She reached, fingers flexing as if she could grasp that tiny flame. The captain raised the lighter to his lips, and her focus slid from the flame to his mouth. To the heatof his breath. To the warmth that pulsated through his veins, his bones, his nadis. It was like a channel, running from head to toe, and the fire was her boat through it. She saw him as her Agni did. A collection of chakras and nadis, a glowing, beating mass of prana, flowing throughout.She saw the map of him.
When Samson had fused with her Agni, it was as if an invisible force had latched on to all the bright and essential parts of her, and slowly throttled them. If he had continued, she was not sure what would have remained ofher. But as she looked at the tiny flame and the heat nodes of the captain, Elena did not care.
She drove forth her mind, grasping on to the captain’s chakras as Samson had done to her.
And she tore.
The captain let out a strangled cry. His hand seized. She felt the temperature of his body rise, tasted his bitter panic as she swam through his nadis, twisting, clawing.
He gasped. Blood beat behind his forehead, his pale skin turning a deep crimson red. She could see his veins straining against his temples. All that heat, trapped beneath his skin. She spiked it up. Like a dial, she turned up his temperature, and the captain screamed. She took control of his body then. Jerked him left and right like he had done to her. She rushed her Agni’s awareness to his legs, and his feet skittered over the deck, then his arms, flapping them like a bird. He tried to scream, and she clamped his throat. His eyes bulged, the whites straining in their sockets.
Kilith rushed to him, trying to make him stop, screaming for help, screaming that she was a witch, a sorceress, but all she could hear was the rabbitlike beating of the captain’s heart.
Blood poured from her nose. Distantly, Elena noticed the drumbeat of her heart quake with warning, but she did not stop. Their eyes were wide with terror, and she relished it. And as that power flooded her veins, as her own Agni flared with a vicious, delicious force of another, she forgot how Samson had made her less. She forgot her fear. She was burning from the inside out, and it was agonizing.
It was glorious.
So Elena reached. She dug into the deep waters of the captain, wrested into his prana, and burned.
He exploded in a flash of blood and flame.
They tore frominsidehis chest, eating into his flesh. Kilith screamed. Maya swore. The Sesharians bolted away as the captain’s body toppled. The flames leapt out, rushing the deck. They climbed the gun and burned her bonds, and then Elena dropped to the deck with a solid, heavythump.
Kilith stared at her in horror as she rose slowly. Her flames wreathed around her, curling around her legs, her arms, her chest and face. A glowing, fervent inferno.
“Please—” he said.
