“Put us in the path. Now, Maya! We’ll take the hit.”
Her eyes widened. “Who knows how many will survive. Who knows ifwewill survive.”
“This ship can take the strike! They can’t! And I can control fire, remember?” A flame snaked down her arm. “I’ll protect us. Trust me.”
The comms suddenly blinked, and the warbled voice of the captain ofRelentlessdrifted through.
“Captain Risith. XO Kilith. We’re seeing pulse fire on your deck. Who has command of the ship? Who is the officer on watch?”
Elena thought fast. If theRelentlessthought theLordhad been overtaken, they would turn their guns on them. “This is Officer Narian, sir,” she said, reading the name tag of the fallen officer. “Captain Risith and XO Kilith were called to quash a Sesharian scuffle. A little noise, that’s all.”
“Are you a blockhead? We’re engaged with the enemy. Call him back!”
“I’ll send a—”
“Now!”
Elena cut the line, whirling toward Maya. “Please, Maya,” she begged. “Turn us.”
Maya stared at her, unwilling, but then she moved forward, and the engines clanged. They turned hard just as the sparker neared. And then Elena felt it.
The heat signature of the sparker. Bright and staccato, like spitting flames. They swerved into its path, and it exploded along their starboard.
The ship shuddered, and Elena lost her footing. Maya was flung over the panel. The world tilted, slingswords, pulsers, bodies, and men tumbling around her. And then the ship snapped still, alarms blaring.
She heard the hiss of the flames scratch the back of her mind.
Elena threw her Agni forward, searching, feeling, and found the new inferno. It shied from her touch, but she pursued it. Snagged into its essence. Slowly, Elena quelled it, forcing the flames to turn inward, to contract. Blood dripped from her nose again, and her arms trembled, a vein straining in her forehead. Pops of resistance, like tiny headaches jabbing in her mind. The inferno lashed back, pushing its will on her. But her will was stronger. It always had been. With sheer stubbornness, with a strangled cry, Elena sucked the inferno until she felt its will bleed—and then the flames were hers.
“I have it,” she said weakly.
She collapsed onto her knees.
Distantly, Elena heard Maya cry out in warning. She turned—and saw it out the window. It appeared like a wraith, surreal and unbecoming. Black hull as dark as oil, bones painted down the side, the red of its pulsers whining to life.
TheRelentlesshad turned their guns on them.
CHAPTER 51
SAMSON
I cannot bear to find your mad heart silenced, your inner comet stilled. There is music for us still to hear, my love. So why are you not near?
—fromThe Odyssey of Goromount: A Play
TheLordexploded in a sheath of flames running down its sides, but that was not the inferno that called to Samson. It first came with a bloom. Soft and warm, beneath the cage of his chest. Even as his own exhaustion subdued the edges of the world, he felt something sharp and vicious, awakening. He turned, half-afraid, half-hoping.Could it be?The sensation intensified into a calcified, white-hot heat that snagged the corner of his heart and tugged. He almost cried out in pain and relief. It was her. He knew the shape of her desire, the fury of her wanting. He knew it as well as he knew the curves of Seshar’s moonlit bays, or the song of the wind as it rattled through the mangrove leaves, soft and low like a murmur. He tried to call to her. To catch the indefinite ribbons of her prana, but when he tried to grasp them, they fizzled through his mind.
Samson stumbled back into the bridge, Jaya on his heels.
“It’s Elena,” he gasped. “She’s alive.”
“What? How?” Daz whirled, searching the sensors. “Did she send a signal?”
“Her Agni, I can feel it. She’s on theLord of Sea.”
Pity flickered in her eyes as Rhumia turned to him. “She’s gone to the sea, islander.”
“She is not! Why else did theLordtake the hit? She screened us.”
