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The game is afoot. And finally, I begin to smile.
I’M BLIND WHEN THE COMMANDOS storm the ship. Their stun grenades emitted white flashes that activated every photoreceptor cell in my eyes. Though we surrendered, they beat us beyond sense. I take several rifle butts to the back of my head and finally reel sideways as one bloodies my nose.
They grab my hair and slam my head to the ground. A boot presses down on my head as they frisk me and cuff my hands behind my back with magnetic shackles. They latch a second metal cuff around my right ankle and jerk the two shackles together so that I’m hogtied, blind, and bellydown on the floor. Something tight slithers around my neck and constricts.
With six seconds of ancient method, they strip my humanity away.
I feel them dragging me. Slowly, indistinct shapes coalesce, though a pulsing blue afterimage remains in my vision. They carry the crew we rescued out of the ship with me.
I see one of them screaming uncontrollably and holding on to a metal panel. A soldier stomps on his hands till they break. The blood leaks down my throat from my broken nose. There’s horrible choking from someone nearby. Thick, asthmatic barking from animal throats and a blitz of commands.
Stay down.
Slag the floor.
Hands behind your back.
Nose to metal.
Nose to metal, gahja!
This is my fault.
Not the choice to lead us to the asteroid, but my hubris or vanity or misguided honor, whatever it was that led me off that lift, into the corridor, wasting seconds and then making the gamble that might now cost us our lives. And for what? Out of loyalty to a Color so devious they destroyed themselves? It was such an illogical chain of decisions of which I am ashamed.
A wet, mucus-filled mouth snaps centimeters from my face.
Scaled paws and serrated talons scratch the metal deck. I twist myself and see point-blank the four-legged kuon hounds—insectoid-canid hybrids. There are three of them; bred for war. Chitinous black shells along their torsos ripple gray as they move. Spines of needle-thick translucent hair stand on end upon their backs. The Gray houndmaster jerks the beast back from me. Its bark is deafening, its eyes yellow and compound. I shudder away from the hound, trying to master my fear.
It’s impossible.
My grandmother’s lessons and Aja’s meditations flee as my heart slams in my chest, and boots against the deck match the beat as a second squad moves up into our ship. A terrifying old Gold woman in a brown cloak with a bald pate and a laconic drawl issues orders to the soldiers around her to search the ship for bombs and other passengers. A Blue woman, one of the crew we rescued from the Vindabona, finds the chaos more than she can bear. She panics and tries to run.
They let her go, perhaps as sport, perhaps to set an example, and after her tenth step, the small metal cuff on her right ankle blinks green and detonates. The lower ends of the tibia and fibula explode. A flash of sizzling light cauterizes the wound. She screams and spills to the ground, leaving her foot behind. Leg wheezing smoke. The kuon hounds are released and pin her on her back, one tearing into her thigh, the other biting her right wrist, before waiting for the next command. The houndmaster looks to the old Gold woman. She gives the command herself.
“Yokai.” The old Gold looks to the largest of the kuon. “Hakaisuru.”
The largest kuon lunges like a rail slug out of a barrel and the Blue woman’s face disappears into its maw.
“Stop!” I shout, trying to rise up.
A steel-toed boot disabuses me of my empathy.
—
When I come to in a small pool of my own spit, I see the world sideways. The boot is still on my head. Nausea wraps me in a hot cocoon. There’s weeping to my right from the lowColors we rescued. Two of the hounds are still hunched over the Blue woman, snapping and snarling as they feed on Blue bones brittle from a youth spent in low gravity. I force myself to watch and see what my mistakes have wrought.
Cassius meets my eyes from his place on the ground nearby. His face is unrecognizable but the cool look there gives me strength. Patience, it says. I focus on breathing, on allowing everything else to rage around me, and control myself.
A bored young Gold with a hollow, pale face stands with her boot on Cassius’s head and her hasta, a long razor, balanced just above his spinal cord. Pytha shivers in fear beside me, listening to the hounds feed.
“Do not be so maudlin, gahja,” the woman says to Pytha, pulling up her head by the hair so she must watch the kuons feed. “It’s just carbon.”
I dare to steal a look at the Archi.
They’ve pulled her into a large hangar with a pulseShield sealing the open bay to space. We lie in front of our home, surrounded by a cadre of Peerless Scarred. They’re tall and severe. Their bodies elongated by the low gravity of their birth. Their hands and faces pale from their long absence from the sun, but callused and battered by the harsh elements of their volcanic plains and ocean moons. They wear loose-fitting storm-colored cloaks. Arrogance earned fills the room, radiating from them. Gray legionnaires inspect the outside of our ship with Orange techs. Guarding each of us are several Obsidian slave knights. Not the freeColors of the Republic, but the indoctrinated slaves of an imperial system. In their minds, they serve the gods. They wear tribal cloaks, carry axes, and wear thin gray metal collars like the one they strap on my leg. Buzzing about the rest of them are half a dozen other Colors—mechanics and support staff. It’s like watching an ant colony.
I’ve not seen such harmonized efficiency before, not even when watching Luna’s preparations for the Rising’s siege. The old Gold woman bends in front of Cassius and looks him in the eye. She doesn’t like the fierce look she finds there. She lets him go and turns to me.
