“Twist reality,” Menace rumbles behind us.
I look over my shoulder and up at his smoldering red eyes. He’s a tall, stocky Titan, dark grey in the light, pulsing blue in my vision in the darkness.
“Yeah.” Needing a distraction, I turn to Poppy again. “You said you knew my family. What did you mean?”
Poppy guides away from Menace and Shifter. “Aniah said your last name was Parimith.”
“Can’t believe she remembered that with everything else going on.”
“A Parimith stood guard at my side during the migration. She gave her life to protect me during the Solcrue invasion after I landedValienton Earth Minor. She got me off of the ship. Parimiths and Volencas protected pilots and got us disconnected from the ships and underground. We are alive because of your ancestors.”
“Doubt I’m like them,” I mutter, feeling like I haven’t done anything nearly as grand or important.
“You are. More than you know,” Poppy remarks.
Hot prickles flood my spine, race up my head, and into my vision. I wince, stop, and turn to find Menace watching behind us. He’s sensed something, too.
Poppy notices Menace and me turning back and calls ahead. “Tighten the group! Pack approaching!”
The growls from the tunnel behind us and the plethora of shimmering shapes in my vision make me hang my rifle across my chest, draw my handguns from my thigh holsters, and point them at the growing mass.
Beside me, Menace snarls and drops to all fours. I’ve seen him slash through Solcrue on mothershipVessnaduring the Iridithatium raid and soar through the void in a spacesuit, tearing solcruean fighters to pieces. But this…this monster side of him is something different.
“Menace?”
He sneers at me, “Stay here. Save your bullets.” Then he barrels down the tunnel, muscles bulging with fury, and tears into the welvirs, turning the approaching pack into bloody chaos.
“What in the actual fuck?”
“There’s a reason he’s the last,” Poppy says.
I lower my guns, but I don’t holster them. “Because he’s sadistic?”
“Not last in the migration order. Because not even Morbid or Savage have Menace’s skills.” Poppy turns her back to the people we protect and keeps her rifle half-raised down an adjacent tunnel.
“He is different from other stealth models. Morbid is, too, but they adapted differently. I know all of the specs of every model Titan ever built. Rebels loaded the data into my core before the jailbreak mission with Cara. Menace is not wholly his design. Someone modified his and Morbid’s batch before they were put into service.”
“Corrupted?” I watch the shapes shift in the distance. Menace’s silhouette flings welvirs off of him with impressive strength and then confronts the next like it’s just another annoying day at work.
My core tenses with strange intrigue.Holy shit.
“I don’t know.” Poppy’s shorter than the other Titans but still a head taller than me. “They put them through different training. They took good men with second chances at life and turned them into violent, sinister creatures. It’s like they took humans’ worst nightmares and made them real.”
Welvir shimmers attack Menace then fly off of him and slump one by one until only the pulsing outline of an exhausted Titan stands among fading shimmers of the animals he’s just killed.
Menace glances back at me. I see a red eye focus on me and jerk my gaze away. His raw, primal nature interests me in a way I don’t expect. I have never seen blood spray sparkle through the air in such a manner before.
What the hell has Menace become?But I know the question I should be asking.What happened to him to turn him into that kind of monster?
