Page 159 of The Space Between Stars

“Walk,” spat the voice, prodding him in the spine. Nikalus moved, guided at the elbow, until they turned him around and ordered, “Sit.”

A hard stool connected with his backside. Niklaus stiffened as fingers worked at the ties around his neck and ripped the sack from his head. He turned his face from the blare of Aetech lamps, blinking to adjust.

Niklaus realized in this moment that he had a choice. He could face whatever this was—most likely death—with dignity, or cowardice. Or perhaps, he could face it as he had everything else: with obstinacy.

He turned his head back toward his captors and forced a laugh. “It’s not even my birthday.”

The laugh died in his throat. Roskaad Thyatira stood an arm’s length away, stooped so that his face was eye-level with Niklaus’s, clean-shaven down to the cleft in his chin.

“I think a meeting between the two of us is long overdue, Mesu Meyernes.”

Niklaus looked into his dark, unblinking eyes. “I could hold out for a few more decades.”

The hit came from his blind side, slugging into his gut. Lights blossomed behind Niklaus’s eyes. He gasped, doubling over. Someone grabbed his shoulders to hold him in place so he wouldn’t slide from the stool. Thyatira said nothing. The only sound was Niklaus’s blood pounding in his ears and his lungs struggling as his diaphragm failed to expand. Seconds stretched. Minutes.

Then: “I would have thought, as General Prime, you might have the means to hire some muscle.” Curse his unruly tongue. Maybe they’d take his off, too. “Not this…” For lack of hands, Niklaus rolled his head on his shoulders. “…Biscuit-level brawn. You deserve better.”

Another hit came. As with the first, it wasn’t damaging—just excruciating. It could have been deadly. They were choosing to keep him intact. This was the prelude to an interrogation.

When Niklaus composed himself enough to lift his head again, Thyatira was still staring, as though he hadn’t flinched in the minutes Niklaus writhed.

“If you’re ready to be civil?” the General Prime suggested.

Niklaus nodded. His voice was a rasp. “Proceed.”

Thyatira spoke with an authority that might freeze flame. “Where is the Azadonian?”

FANKALO

Fankalo had never been awoken by magic before. Her Luck gouged at her, so sinister she thought she might vomit. With a throaty gasp, her eyes flew open to the night-darkened planking of the ceiling over her hammock. She could almost feel the inferno. Hear the screams. Taste the blood in the air… Her magic had grown stronger. She wasn’t sure she liked it.

Her fingers scraped along the weathered wood beneath her hammock to snatch her cane, and she struggled against the netting to claim her feet. Heart rattling, she peered through the night’s veil to search her door. Mitek had finally moved back to his own bunk at the barracks. Now she wished he hadn’t—he could run much faster than her.

She paused. The steady hissing of waves cascading against beach filled the peaceful darkness around her, so contradictory to her inner turbulence. Then she looked out the porthole, seeking Mount Vespeyan. It puffed its standard wisps of clean, white smoke. Demure. Serene.

A lie.

She closed her eyes and, despite her fear, leaned into her Luck. It imparted the impression of violence. The volcano… and black ships off the ocean. Both at once. An ambush.

They didn’t have much time.

The sulfurous air whipped her dark curls across her face as she limped and thumped her way across the deck. She whistled to the nest’s night guard before signaling for him to sound the muster alarm, set into the island’s mountainside. He scurried ahead of her with a nimbleness that made her curse her condition for the thousandth time. Then she hobbled down the gangplank and onto the pier toward her Hands. Mitek’s barrack was closest.

Their headquarters in the Rollard isles housed a tenth of their growing numbers, some two thousand heads. A number they had plans to triple. Most bunked in the same compound—ten long homes of bamboo and palm on the eastern side of the island, where jetting mountains and dormant volcanoes blocked the brunt of the western storms.

Limp and thump. Limp and thump. The painstaking minutes stretched. They seemed hours but couldn’t have been, as she reached Mitek just as the first alarm pierced the night.

“Mitek.” She sat on his cot and shook him.

“Brat?” he groaned. His fingers curled into hers.

Frowning, she dislodged them like she might an octopus tentacle. “Bad Luck, Mitek.”

“How bad, on a scale of—”

“Insides-turned-outside bad, Mitek.”

He groaned again as he rolled to his feet. “I’m up, I’m up.”