Beyond the Shadows (24 page)

He stalked toward her. “Yes.”

A filthy mudrat. She had let him touch her.

She felt the heat of her anger and shame in her face.

By Ona, the knot in her stomach slowly tightened. “I guess you’re living up to your family name,” she sneered.

“Cyrila’s name is honored for a reason,” he defended.

“Oh, don’t,” she shouted, shaking her head. She pounded against the shield, the sparks of energy radiating out in a web from her fists. The shock of it stung but not nearly as bad as his words. “Don’t you dare preach the Matriarchs to me,
Cyn
, you bastard. You’re going to destroy everything they stand for, and you used me to do it.” Her heart beat faster. He had wanted her on his ship, and now she knew why.

“At first,” he admitted. His voice sounded rough, raw. He rubbed his bare wrist. “I was supposed to delay your return to Azra long enough for the last of the weapons to be delivered. As soon as Palar lit the fires in your absence, we were going to strike.”

Yara couldn’t fight back her tears as she let her head fall back. She blinked up at the ceiling. “Strike when we’re divided.”

“I didn’t intend for this to happen, Yara.”

Her fury roared to life, feeding off her stark pain.

“You’re a liar,” she shouted. She rose to her feet and marched toward the shield. “Traitor.” She felt her tears slip down her cheeks, and she didn’t bother to brush them away.

He let out a ragged breath and rubbed the back of his neck.

“You don’t understand.” He stepped forward and touched the shield, his fingers pushing through the energy lock. The bastard actually had the gall to look tormented.

“Understand what? That you manipulated me into getting on your ship?” She felt her emotion clawing at her throat, and her voice rose. “Am I supposed to understand why you kidnapped me?”

“I know I tricked you into getting on my ship, but—”

“Don’t make excuses now,” she snapped. “There are no excuses. You’re smuggling projectiles and putting them in the hands of criminals.”

His expression hardened, and he smacked his fists against the shield before lowering them stiffly to his side. “Criminals. Damn it. This is exactly what I’m talking about. Azra is suffering. Your people are dying and you are blind!”

“Maybe I was blind. I certainly didn’t see this coming. You seduced me for your own sick purposes, just so you could use my emotions against me.” Fresh tears rolled down her cheek as she crossed her arms and hugged them to her chest. She had trusted him. She thought he had given everything for her. She thought she had finally found someone who had her back; instead he stabbed her in it. “By Ona, the Elite were right. They’ve always been right.”

“I didn’t seduce you.” His voice sounded low, angry. “You seduced me, Yara. God, I tried to resist you.”

“Well you didn’t try hard enough, did you?”

“Yara, I’m a lot of things, but I’m no saint.”

“No. You’re a filthy mudrat who can’t keep his pants on.” She bit out each word, feeling the sting of it in her heart.

“You’re the one who took my pants off, Pix.”

“How dare you call me that,” she shouted. “How dare you ever call me that again. I trusted you, I trusted you with everything, and it was all a lie.”

“Only my name was a lie,” he insisted. “We fought together, we bled together, Yara. Everything else was real. You know me.”

“I know you’re a rebel and a traitor.”

“Damn it, I’m trying to bring justice to our people. You should understand that!”

“You’re trying to kill the innocent, Cyn. How could you do such a thing? Spilling the blood of Azra is not justice. It’s murder.”

“The innocent are dying every day, Yara. You don’t bother to see it. Babies are being beaten, girls raped, people die of starvation and infection every day.” His voice took on a strange tone, a deep growl of fury.

“The shadows are punishment.”

“The shadows are a living hell, and there are innocent people down there.” He crossed his arms again. “They need to be saved.”

“Are they all innocent like you? Killer, smuggler. Look at what the shadows turned you into. You don’t deserve to live.” Yara felt the punch of her words deep in her soul. As soon as she said them, she knew she didn’t mean them.

“Maybe I don’t.” He turned away from her. Her eyes burned. Her heart thudded, stabbing into her chest with each aching thud. This was all so wrong.

She walked away from the shield but could only walk a couple of steps before she reached the shelf once again. Tuz paced along the edge, the rhythmic back and forth of his movements like a strange metronome in the silence.

“Why did you come after me?” she asked as she closed her eyes. She opened them again and turned to face him. “If you wanted to destroy me, why didn’t you just let them have me?” He accused her of not understanding, but she understood plenty. The one thing she couldn’t understand was why he had given up so much to save her life, only to turn around and betray her.

He sighed and picked up the knife off the crate. “I told you, not everything was a lie.” He didn’t look back as he left the room.

YARA SETTLED ON THE EDGE OF THE METAL SHELF, WITH HER WEIGHT RESTING on the heels of her palms. She hung her head, overwhelmed by the emotional battlefield she’d just crossed. She didn’t have the luxury to wallow in her own pain or guilt. Azra needed her now, and for the Glory of Esana she would not crumble and leave Azra to those who would destroy her.

She took a ragged breath, the pain in her chest still choked her, but her mind began to clear. Fear overrode her betrayal and grief. Her thoughts came quickly, pushing aside her emotion.

Her whole life she had thought the training to expunge her emotion had been a waste. She needed to rely on that training now.

Azra needed her.

Cyn. Her thoughts lingered on his name for only a moment. It almost surprised her how quickly he became the rebel traitor in her mind. It was as if Cyrus, the man she had known, evaporated, leaving a gaping wound in her chest. The void she had known her whole life grew deeper, like a vicious and unforgiving black hole.

Oh yes, she was alone. As the Grand Sister of Azra, she always would be. She could never trust anyone. Friends would only try to manipulate her, and lovers would have the power to destroy her.

Cyn
.

He wasn’t going to kill her, not directly. She had that going for her. They were also traveling back to Azra, which meant at some point he’d probably turn her over as a hostage to the mudrats staging this uprising.

She didn’t have any weapons.

She was an Elite warrior, bred and trained for one purpose.

She didn’t
need
any weapons.

If she could stay calm and purge her heartache, she would be the perfect spy. She didn’t know how much the Grand Sister knew about this uprising. Details were essential, and she had been trained by the Union army in intelligence.

She also had Tuz. Her cat rubbed up against her arm, his rough purr filling the compartment while his thick tail lashed at her back. She sat up and stroked him, thankful that she wasn’t completely alone.

Why did she feel so alone? Deep in her heart, she mourned the man she thought she knew. But she did know him. He couldn’t lie about the love and care he showed his ship. He couldn’t lie about his bravery in the face of battle or his selflessness in the face of evil.

Not everything was a lie
.

His words tormented her.

The story of his scar was real, she knew that for certain. The girl didn’t die on some backward planet—it was Azra. Did she deserve it? What was her crime? Being born in the wrong place? He was right, that wasn’t justice.

But it wasn’t possible for everyone on the ground to rise to the cities. There were dangerous criminals there. Absolution for all of them wasn’t justice, either. Giving the true criminals projectile weapons and having them unleash generations of resentment against the peaceful inhabitants of the high cities was out of the question.

Once she became Grand Sister, she’d consider ways to help those on the ground and bring it up for debate with the rest of the Elite. Maybe if she spoke with Cyn and promised things would change, he’d call off the attack.

She wanted to believe it. She needed to believe that the man she had surrendered herself to was noble. The crates of the projectiles stood like silent prison guards, shackling her to the truth.

The ship shuddered as they came out of macrospace. Yara’s heart pounded as her adrenaline made her limbs feel weak.

A light cracked the shadows as Yara looked up at Cyn’s silhouette. A shadow himself, he exuded raw power, grace, and the chilling resolve of a soldier.

“Put these on,” he commanded as he slid a set of arm shackles and a lock belt through the shield. The transparent barrier sparked with shots of yellow discharge, then returned to normal.

“Why should I?” She didn’t bother to look at him. She couldn’t.

“If you do as I say, I’ll take you with me. If you refuse, I’ll leave you here.” His voice sounded as calm and sure as she’d ever heard it.

Damn him to the filth.
He could have threatened her with death, come in with some sort of weapon aimed at her, he could have promised to beat or torture her, but no. He knew the one thing that would get her.

“Bastard,” she whispered as she picked up the cuffs, secured them to her wrists, and tied on the belt. Her wrists came together then, magnetically locked to the plate on the belt, rendering her arms useless.

“Now, give the voice commands for Tuz’s collar exactly as I give them to you.” He slowly stated a string of commands. The first set forced Tuz to remain within close range of her, the second shut down his ability to record intelligence, and the third was a locking password so she couldn’t change the commands. The password he had created was at least seventy characters long. There was no way she could remember it to unlock the collar.
Shakt
. No one could remember a code like that except a filthy catgar.

Once satisfied that they were secure, he let down the shield. Yara stepped through. She fought the surge of emotion as she walked directly toward him and looked him in the eye.

“How do you live with yourself?” Her heart raced as his gaze slowly wandered over her face. He blinked once, a slow, sad motion that almost seemed tired.

“I manage.”

The cargo ramp opened with the deafening squeal of metal grinding on metal. Hard light poured into the bay with a gust of damp, salty air. Yara had expected to see the green of the jungles of Azra. Instead, she looked out at a vast and endless ocean. The wind whipped distant frothy crests of water as the occasional sea bird circled overhead.

This was one of the landing platforms for the Nudari miners. They came to Azra seeking refuge from a plague of oxygenleeching bacteria that had destroyed the oceans of their home world. For over a thousand years, they’d lived beneath the waves, mining ores that the Azralen traded on the intergalactic market. Their mutually beneficial relationship had always been peaceful. The Nudari knew their place and never stepped out of it.

The miners couldn’t be a part of the revolt. It would ruin their livelihood. It would take a truly vile act of corruption to turn the Nudari against the Elite. Yara’s unease twisted through her gut as she stepped out on the bleak platform. A hexagonal panel split into triangular sections and disappeared into the platform as a lift emerged from beneath the deck.

Cyn took her arm and pulled her forward. His hand was gentle and firm, but his expression was unreadable. At least twenty of Xan’s crew efficiently unloaded the stacks of crates, turning into a surge of coordinated motion, as pile upon pile of boxed weaponry formed a long wall on the barren platform.

A Nudari man with smooth skin, shining blue black hair, and hooded eyes stepped out of the lift and greeted Cyn.

“Welcome, Cobra.” He noticed Yara for the first time and his eyes narrowed. “What is this?”

“A witness. Don’t mind her. Have your people found a way around the communications barrier?”

The Nudari’s grim expression remained fixed on her. “Was she a witness to the poisoning?”

“What?” Yara turned to Cyn, hating that he was her only source of any information.

He grasped her arm tighter and pulled her back behind him, just enough to put himself between her and the Nudari. “I told you, very few of the Elite were involved in that,” he stated. “Only the Grand Sister and two others.”

“What poisoning?” She leaned to the side so she could make eye contact with the Nudari man. Some of the Elite negotiators believed the Nudari had mind powers, but she knew it was nothing more than a culture-wide attention to the most miniscule facial expressions. She wasn’t lying about her shock, and he’d know it.

He assessed her. She didn’t have to struggle to see the pain in his face. “It was your leader’s generous way of renegotiating our contracts. She contaminated the air supply to the fourth sector of the Skeal complex.” He swallowed, as if he found it hard to speak, while his hands clenched into tight fists. “It was our residential sector. Two hundred thirty-seven. Dead.” His voice shook, even as Yara tried to think through her shock and horror. It couldn’t be true. The Grand Sister wouldn’t do such a thing. “We will be paid back in the blood of those responsible.”

“Dalan,” Cyn warned. “I promised that those responsible would be delivered to you to face the justice of your people. A thousand years of peace and prosperity remains between our two cultures. Let’s not abandon it for revenge.”

The Nudari straightened and glared at her. “Change will come,” he promised with bitter sincerity. “We are ready to rise. We follow you, Cobra.”

Cyn nodded as Xan’s crew unloaded the last of the projectiles. A small black canopy cruiser glided swiftly over the horizon, its triangular body cutting through the powerful wind. It hovered with the grace of a sea bird before perching on the far side of the platform. The overhead shield dissolved and an Enforcer with a scarred cheek stepped off the low open platform behind one of the short wings.