“Breathe,” I sent softly, just as the thin band of my palmlight buzzed against my wrist again. The third incessant buzz in as many minutes. “Just breathe,” I repeated, possibly more to myself than to Elise. “Let your senses flow.”
I closed my eyes. Tried for my own deep breath. It came like sucking air from a vacuum. A remnant of the punctured lung that’d already had two cycles to heal? Sure. Maybe. Definitely not apprehension over my buzzing palmlight and all the unwelcome scud it no doubt heralded—scud I was in no mood to think about right now.
So I sank into my extended senses instead, doing my best to breathe. I focused on Elise. Felt the tendrils of her presence unwrapping from her physical form, stretching out slowly, tentatively.
“The stone,” I sent. “Focus on the st—”
My wrist buzzed again.
Alpha be damned.
I opened my eyes to find Elise watching me, concern evident in the depths of her startlingly blue eyes.
Had I said that out loud?
I tilted my head toward the pebble on the floor between us. “Aren’t you supposed to be focusing?”
“Kinda hard with…” She bit her lip, rethinking whatever she’d been about to say. “I can feel you too, you know.”
I dropped her gaze, focusing on the pebble. “Let’s just try again.”
“It might be important, Hal,” she said slowly. “Maybe you should—”
“Later.” I forced myself to meet her eyes, softening my tone. “This is more important, Lise. Let’s try again. Please.”
A small grin tugged at her lovely lips. “Well, since you asked so nicely…”
She was so gorgeous when she smiled like that. So gorgeous all the time, really, with her regal cheekbones and her vibrant blue eyes and her raven hair, pulled into a tight ponytail. But it was the smile that killed me—sweet, gentle, and just a touch hesitant, like she was awaiting my signal to go ahead and let me have it in full.
I wanted to give that signal—to beam it like an exploding star. Alpha save me, I wanted more than anything to forget the stupid stone and throw myself at her like any reasonable teenage guy would have. But I didn’t do any of those things. Couldn’t bring myself to rise to the heavenly invitation.
That was what really killed me.
Elise let out a breath as I looked away and gestured at the stone.
A dejected sigh? A calming breath of focus?
Maybe both.
I felt her in my senses, closing her eyes, settling hands to knees. Breathing, breathing. Dark eyebrows knitted together, her forehead creased with concentration. She extended herself more smoothly this time. Found the stone with only a slight waver. From there, I did my best to wait patiently as the seconds ticked by. And by. And—
The stone twitched on the rug. It wasn’t much. I might not have even noticed had I not been monitoring with my extended senses. But it was something. And before I could point that out, she was already trying again.
This time it wasn’t just a twitch. The stone visibly moved—rising up on its edge, slowly, slowly. It was like watching a tingler bug ascend the Auborean Mountains. But I waited, breath held… until the stone turned its edge, lost its balance, and keeled back to the rug on its other side.
I consciously refrained from sighing.
“What?” Elise asked anyway.
“What, nothing. That was great, Lise. You’re right there. All you need to do now is control it.”
Her eyebrow took on the arch that said I was barking for a beating in our next sparring match. I held up my hands in surrender, a genuine smile threatening to spill over. Then my palmlight buzzed for the fifth time, killing that smile right where it stood.
“Why don’t you just turn it off?” she asked.
“Just… Look, let me help this time. You lift, I’ll stabilize?”
Elise frowned at my palmlight a moment longer, then nodded and settled back into her focus. I reached out as I had ten-thousand times before, not bothering to close my eyes as I fixed my mind on the stone. Elise’s brow furrowed, and a second later, there she was, her mind brushing lightly against mine.
“Easy,” I sent. “Control.”
The crease in her forehead lessened, and the stone began to slowly stand once more. I drew the faintest trickle of energy from my own body heat to keep it stable, fixing it on a steady track in my mind that would only allow it to move up or down.
Up or down.
Slowly, slowly, the stone rose from the rug.
Up or—
Buzz.
“Gropping scudbuckets!” I cried, slamming my fists to the rug as the stone flew across the room and buried itself in the pale yellow wall with a thwap and a small puff of plastwall debris.
Elise opened her eyes and looked meaningfully between the wall and me. “You were saying? About control?”
I clenched my jaw, biting back the thoughtless retorts fighting to escape. “I know, I know. If Johnny would just stop—”
“If you wanted it to stop,” she said, giving me a look usually reserved for unruly toddlers, “you’d turn the damn thing off.”
“Well, I…”
Scud.
I what? Wanted to know that Johnny was trying to reach me just so I could throw a tantrum about it? Maybe I deserved that look. I shook my head and turned toward the display on the wall.
There must be some reason he was being so tenacious today.
At a wave of my hand, the display came to life with a list of recent newsreel stories. It didn’t take long to figure out what I was looking for—or for my stomach to turn to ice.
Headline after headline, all basically the same, the first ones from a couple hours ago, when Elise and I had been tangled in our morning spar.
Oasis Under Attack by Foreign Forces.
Alpha be good and gropped.
Elise sucked in a sharp breath when she saw it. I was already on my feet somehow, looking around the room like there might be something to explain how the scud this was happening. Because foreign forces could only mean one thing.
The raknoth.
I waved the first story to full screen, pretty sure I knew what was coming, but not quite able to believe it until the display filled with a distant shot of Oasis.
It didn’t look good.
Black smoke drifted lazily up in the morning sun, tiny figures converging on the standing defenses with inhuman leaps and bounds—too far away to make out the details, but I knew if I could’ve, it would’ve been the scaly green hides of raknoth hybrids I saw. Nothing else could move like that.
My palmlight was open and at the ready before my brain could even register what I needed to do. Instead, I just stared dumbly at the azure light in my palm. My hand was trembling.
How was this happening?
We’d warned them. Alpha damn them, after everything we’d gone through to warn them…
Too late, I tried to pull away from the memories.
Hybrids tearing through the crowd, madness in their pale red eyes, crimson blood rolling down their stubby snouts. Bodies. Civilians and legionnaires and hybrids alike. Hundreds of them. The dark stone of the Great Hall thick with their blood.
And Carlisle…
Something slid around my chest from behind. Elise’s arms, I vaguely noted. She might’ve whispered something too, but I was too lost in my thoughts to hear.
The White Tower Massacre, the newsreels had dubbed it. My very own Sanctum execution ceremony turned nightmare bloodbath. The same night Carlisle had blown the entire Great Hall and every enemy in it to dust right along with himself and his old mentor. In one stroke, he’d destroyed two of the raknoth and severed their control over The Sanctum and the Legion.
And yet here the raknoth forces were, right on the reels, attacking the third-largest Legion base on the planet. Because the world had been too frightened to listen to us. Because the wise clerics of the Sanctum and the hardened generals of the Legion couldn’t bring themselves to believe Enochia could actually be under invasion by bloodsucking aliens. Because—
“Hal,” Elise said, squeezing me tight enough to tell me it wasn’t the first time she’d said my name.
The contact pulled me back to our dull living quarters. Back to my racing pulse and painfully clenched fists. I disentangled myself from her arms, wiping off sweaty palms before remembering my palmlight.
Johnny’s messages. That’s what I’d been trying to check. I pulled them up. Eight of them, six from the past ten minutes, and two from a few hours earlier, when I’d been sparring with Elise.
<Your favorite lizards are back in town. Could be bad.>
<It’s bad. Real bad.>
<Check the reels.>
<Unless you’re either 1) actively swiving our favorite raven-haired staff twirler or 2) suffering honest-to-Alpha rage-induced heart failure at all this contact from the outside world, check the reels.>
<In which case, still check the reels.>
<Also, FEEL FREE TO REPLY ANYTIME, you ass. Alpha’s wrinklies, man, it’s not like I’m asking you to come to couples’ therapy with me…>
<Hal, I think we should consider couples’ therapy. Love, Johnny>
<P.S. THIS IS NOT A GROPPING DRILL. Check the reels.>
I stared at the messages, wanting to think his light tone meant things couldn’t actually be that bad. Definitely not the-raknoth-just-destroyed-Oasis bad. But I knew better.
If the day ever came when Johnny Wingard didn’t try to crack a joke, it probably meant we were already dead.
I swiped with shaky fingers at the translucent azure holo of my palmlight. <Saw the news. Big five there?>
Johnny’s reply came back with startling rapidity. <Only a threesome as far as we can tell. You around this afternoon?> Moments later, another message followed. <See, it’s funny because you haven’t seen the sun in over a cycle. Seriously, though. Stay put. Please.>
“What do we do?” Elise asked softly when I looked up.
“Stay put, apparently.” I looked numbly from my palmlight to the smoking outline of Oasis on the display. “They’ll route the hybrids at Oasis, and then…”
But I didn’t know what else to say. Because what if they didn’t route the hybrids? I didn’t even want to think about it. Almost before I knew it, I found myself wrapping Elise into a tight hug. After her own flicker of surprise, she returned it readily.
“It’s okay, love,” she said softly, her breath warm against the side of my neck. “We’re okay.” She didn’t ask why my heart was hammering like I’d just escaped a roomful of hungry haga beasts. She just held me tight, cradling the back of my head, whispering comforting words.
Eventually, she pulled back to meet my eyes. “Maybe you should call Johnny. Get more details.”
“Maybe.” I kissed her forehead and glanced at my palmlight, rereading his last message. Stay put. Please. “Something tells me we’ll be talking soon anyway, whether I like it or not.”
Elise gave me one last squeeze before pulling away. “I’m gonna call my dad, make sure they’re safe.”
I didn’t argue. It wasn’t like we were going to be able to return to our training session. But before she’d even unlocked her palmlight, a soft tone chimed through the small living space.
Someone was here. One flamboyantly red-headed legionnaire, if I had to guess. I met Elise’s curious look with my grim one and gestured the wall display over to the door camera feeds.
Not one, but six men stood in the cramped hallway outside our modest Legion-sponsored living quarters. We’d been hesitant to take their off-base amenities. Almost as hesitant as they’d been to let us nominally pardoned terrorists wander off without a handy way to keep an eye on us. They’d insisted our staying here would be safer—though for them or for us, they didn’t specify. Either way, as Franco put it, if we ended up needing to disappear, better they feel overconfident rather than wary from the start.
Except now, staring at the armed men outside, I couldn’t help but think I might’ve rather taken them on edge at a distance than comfortable on our doorstep.
Of the two men who stepped forward, I was a bit surprised to see Docere Mathis, my old instructor. His ebony brow was scrunched into its perpetual scowl, and right beside him—surprise, surprise—was Johnny, who hardly looked light-of-spirit himself. That didn’t bode well.
“Should I put on tea or something?” Elise said.
Something between a sigh and derisive laugh blew out of me. “I dunno, are you feeling particularly hospitable toward the people who blew your real house to shreds last season?”
Elise frowned. “Fair point.”
I unlocked the door with my palmlight. I suppose I could’ve gotten it by hand—it wasn’t like the apartment was very big. Mathis, though, seemed to be in a hurry. He was striding in almost before I could blink, the fiery red fuzz that was Johnny’s hair marching along at his heels. Even buzzed to Legion regulations, you couldn’t miss that hair.
The other four legionnaires posted up outside to wait.
Part of me wished Franco was there. He was a good man to have around when it came to sensitive conversations, which was exactly what I was guessing we were about to have. But he was off with Phineas and James, tracking down a lead—a farmer who claimed he’d sighted the raknoth ship landing on Enochia twelve years ago.
Of course, since the raknoth had been at least unofficially outed to the public, there’d been about as many of those stories as I had hairs on my body, but we had to start somewhere if we wanted to find that ship. And we wanted to find that damn ship.
At any rate, it’d probably be another day or two before Franco returned, which unfortunately meant it was down to Elise and I to make sure this didn’t blow up.
Maybe I should have hid in the tiny pantry. But it was too late now.
I forced myself to meet Johnny’s blue-green eyes, guilt curling through me. He went straight for the throat.
“So all it takes is a major raknoth attack to get a reply these days, huh buddy?”
I opened my mouth to spit back some retort, then decided to leave it to Mathis, who was favoring Johnny with a perfectly unamused scowl.
“What?” Johnny said, spreading his hands. “You heard High General Glenbark, sir. ‘You will lubricate negotiations as you deem fit, Legionnaire Wingard.’ That was the order.” He went distant for a moment, then blinked, remembering himself. “Uh, sir.”
Mathis’ jaw was pure adamantus. “Legionnaire Wingard, you will mind your tongue or I will leave it nailed to the door right alongside you and your lubricant for the duration of this meeting. Understood?”
Johnny looked like he was waging war with his lips for a moment, but he settled and gave a passable, “Sir, yes sir.”
I watched them, caught between my desire to maintain stubborn silence and to launch into a thousand questions about what was happening and what the scud they were here for. Luckily, Elise had no such hang-ups.
“How major is major?” she asked. “What’s happening over there, and what does it have to do with us?”
Johnny opened his mouth but fell silent at Mathis’ glare. Satisfied, Mathis considered Elise warily before fixing his gaze on me.
“Citizen Raish, your presence has been requested at Haven.”
The formality of his address was a hot knife in the side—a deliberate reminder of the fact that I’d made no effort to return to Legion service once my name had been at least nominally cleared where the Legion—if not the Sanctum—was concerned.
I couldn’t even conjure a bitter smile in response. “Good to see you too, sir. Might you be able to tell me what the Legion wants with me?”
Any petty judgment he felt toward me vanished behind his professional mask. “You saw the news?”
I nodded. “Oasis is under attack. But you have the numbers ten times over. I assume it’s under control.”
Mathis traded a look with Johnny. “It is indeed.”
“And?”
“And it’s not our control it’s under,” Johnny said, all traces of humor gone now.
Dread crept in—the same dread I felt at nighttime when memories of red eyes and my bloody parents came to visit me in the darkness.
“You’re saying…”
Mathis gave a reluctant nod, looking more tired than I’d ever seen.
“The raknoth have taken Oasis.”
