I would not let anything take her from me again. Ever.
I looked once more toward the magrail line, to where stone met machine, where ambition met recklessness, and narrowed my eyes. The Renegades had nearly ended us last night. We still didn’t know how they’d gotten that weapon, or what else they had hidden in their filthy camps.
But we were about to walk into the center of everything: the capital, the court, and the mystery that had brought Daphne back from the dead.
As we descended from the ridge, I noticed something that deepened my unease. The workers weren’t spread out the way they should’ve been. They were clustered near one end of the site, gathered like carrion birds around something freshly unearthed. Shouting. Gesturing. Some crouched in the dirt, others paced, muttering into comms or waving palmtops through the air.
Korran noticed it too. He shifted in his saddle beside me, hand already hovering near the hilt of his blade. “That doesn’t look like routine maintenance.”
“Ney,” I said quietly. “It doesn’t.”
As we rode closer, one of the males peeled away from the group and jogged up to meet us. I recognized him immediately, Tovahr, the site foreman. I’d met him several times during the early briefings about the magrail. He wasn’t a warrior, but he was sharp and well-respected, with a scholar’s mind and a soldier’s pragmatism.
“Vissigroth Mallack,” he called out, breathlessly. “Thank the gods.”
I reined in the nicta and dismounted carefully, cradling Daphne in my arms. She stirred again but didn’t wake.
Tovahr’s eyes darted to her, then to the others behind me. He looked rattled, more than he should have been. “We found something,” he said. “You… you need to see it.”
“What kind of something?”
“A chamber. Hidden beneath one of the new pylon foundations. Old… impossibly old. It triggered some kind of energy signature when the stabilizers engaged. We haven’t touched it further.”
Something inside me triggered.Impossibly old. Tovahr's words sounded like a warning.
A second figure broke through the gathering now, a seffy, human. Her hair was tied back in a haphazard bun, and she was wearing a dust-streaked white uniform with reinforced shoulders. Claudia. One of the engineers whom Myccael had brought in from the Cosmic Coalition to consult on the project.She wasn’t military, but her credentials were impeccable. Or so Kyra assured us.
Her face was flushed with exertion and something else—excitement. “I told them not to dig any deeper until one of you vissigroths got here,” she said, panting slightly. “You need to see it for yourself. It's incredible.”
I looked past them, toward the excavation, and caught sight of it: a jagged hole in the ground, framed by scaffolding and sensor towers. Cables snaked into the depths like veins, and the edges of dirt around it glowed faintly violet beneath the shadow of the rail.
The same color I’d seen etched into the bomb the Renegade used.
I clenched my jaw. “Show me.”
Claudia and Tovahr exchanged a look, then looked at the sleeping seffy in my arms and hesitated. Snyg.
The labored trotting of the nicta, the sleepless night before, and the warmth of Mallack's chest, all of it had lulled me under, and the dream took me as gently as the day’s light faded from my thoughts.
It had been days since the healer had come and gone. My mother’s arm looked better; the swelling was gone, and the angry red was already fading. She still winced when she moved, but she’d begun to hum again while she sipped broth.
The physician had recommended a mix of dried katha leaves and ground voss-root for the pain—both rare and expensive. Mallack had said he would bring them, but I insisted I could find them myself. I needed to get out. To prove I wasn’t helpless. Prove that I was still something other than a shadow living in a borrowed house.
I pulled the hood up over my head and kept to the neglected side alleys with their cracked stones and weeds growing throughthem. The smell of fire still hung in the city, less now, thinner, but it lingered and probably would for a while.
The market was small. Half the stalls were abandoned or looted, but a few were open. Scavenged herbs lay out in tied bundles, overpriced and underweight. I found what I needed, bartered hard with a patch of fabric I’d sewn from scavenged silk, and was turning back when I heard the shouting.
The town square was a crater of ash and scorched banners, once proudly waving under Susserayn Groyk’s seal. Now the space was ringed with dragoons, watching two vissigroths face each other like a storm pounding against a stone statue.
Mallack. He was towering over another vissigroth, standing still as a mountain, but he was loud as thunder. The other vissigroth I recognized as Kennenryn. The male who wanted to be our new susserayn. I had never seen him up close, but I had seen images of him on other people's palmtops when they felt generous enough to let me look.
“You dishonor every oath we swore as vissigroths,” Mallack’s voice echoed off the broken walls. “Your males pillaged homes. They took what and whoever they wanted, killing indiscriminately.”
Kennenryn sneered. “Those were not innocent citizens; they were Groyk supporters.”
Mallack stepped forward. “Do you honestly think that after your males have kicked these people out of their homes, raped their mates, sisters, and daughters, and killed their sons and brothers, they’ll juststopbeing Groyk supporters?”
The crowd, who had so far pretended not to listen to the spectacle, tensed. A few dragoons looked away, while one,more vocally, spat on the ground. Kennenryn's lip curled in distaste. “You speak like they’re innocent.”
