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Did I black out?
Must have.
Taraven’s lashes flutter and his brow furrows, then his eyes open. They warm to a near-blazing pink as he looks at me, a smile curling his lips.
“You’re back,” he says.
“You knocked me out,” I conclude.
He shrugs with his free shoulder—the shoulder where Malixisn’tstill sleeping. “Your injury was worse than you realized,” he says. “I sedated you to get some rest. You slept through our trip. And then we sedated you again for surgery.”
I frown. “Surgery?”
“The joint forces worked together to secure the best prosthetic for you over the past couple days,” he says. “A new eye. Just don’t touch it; it’s still healing.”
I raise my good brow. “Is it cool-looking?”
“Lyran design,” he says. “Lots of perks—internal targeting, heat-sensing. You’ll have to mess with it.”
“So I’m a cyborg now.”
Taraven snorts. “Basically.”
“Badass,” I breathe. “On that note…where are we?”
“Jokahn’s villa,” Taraven says. “Liatra is now loyal to our cause.”
I gape at him. “No way.”
Taraven strokes Malix’s hair idly, the messy white locks smooth and clean. Malix doesn’t wake—I guess they both must be just as exhausted as I am. “Unsurprisingly, Jokahn had an ulterior motive in bringing us here,” Taraven murmurs. “He has been working with his middle sibling—the second in line of the First House—to depose the eldest. An invasion of the planet was just the kind of chaos he needed to take power.”
I scoff. “Glad we could be a distraction.”
Taraven smiles. “Malix had the same reaction.”
His eyes open at the sound of his name, fixing on me. The Lyran warrior sits up and stretches his arms high over his head, and I find myself relieved that he’s regained control of his limbs. It was tense for a while there after we left the cortex; he had all the dexterity of a limp noodle.
“Hi,” I say. “How’s it going?”
Malix groans. “I’ve been better.”
“Tell me about it,” I snort.
He frowns and opens his mouth, but I cut him off.
“It’s a figure of speech,” I say. “You don’t actually need to tell me about it; I was there. Although…now that I think about it, you didn’t ever fill me in on what you saw in the cortex.”
Malix shifts in his seat and Taraven puts a hand on his knee. They’ve bonded over the past couple days; I’ll need a recap onthat, too.
Malix meets my eyes—or, eye, I guess.
“Our theory was correct,” he says. “The message we kept getting from the temple…it was a recording—what did you describe it as?”
“Voicemail,” I whisper. “You…did you get more of it?”
“I think the record had decayed in some way,” he says. “I saw a hologram of a humanoid alien delivering the message to a figure offscreen. And it somehow infused me with knowledge of what the temple was, where it came from.”
“So what is it?”
