Page 7 of Enthraller

But she would rather not have them save her in such spectacular fashion going forward.

What you did is wrong.

It was?

She sensed them thinking about it.

He was already helping us. Compelling him to do more was not good repayment for his help.

They seemed to ponder her words.

With a sigh, she stood and stretched.

She needed to find out what was going on. Why she had been shot at and whether it was her own people trying to kill her.

She was due to report to the Demeter Special Forces headquarters tomorrow, and she wouldn’t be going in if they were planning to shoot her.

She straightened her clothing, squared her shoulders and walked to the brightly-painted blue door, pushed it open, andstepped into the light, airy atrium that ran the length of the building from front entrance to back.

She breathed in the sweet gyrthum-scented air, green and floral, and felt a moment of disorientation. Less than thirty minutes ago someone had been shooting at her, she had been held in the arms of a strange man in a hail of laz fire, and now she was in this most beautiful of places, her new-found haven, in the soft, golden light, standing on gleaming floors of dark purple jarram.

She put out a hand to the wall to steady herself.

“Wren? I didn’t know you were coming in today.” Histilo stepped out of the main depository room and stopped in surprise, then dipped in a bow, hands crossed at the wrists in front of her body in greeting, as was the Demeter custom.

“I can’t stay away.” Wren smiled at her, bowing back. She could not cross her hands in front of her, in the symbolic gesture that meant she was bound by the other person’s wishes. Her time as a prisoner of the Har Met Vent cult on Ytla was still too vivid for her to willingly take that pose.

After she’d escaped and found the silver balls, they had helped her avoid her pursuers and find her way back to the Aponi Special Forces base on the lushly forested moon that was Ytla.

The SF team had been readying a unit to go after her—they had actually been suiting up as she arrived, and it had almost been worth all the nights dodging her kidnappers, overcoming all the dangerous terrain and even more dangerous animals on her own, just to see the look on their faces.

She moved past Histilo with another smile and made her way to the reading section, where she spent most of her time.

She came here to access the private collection the Depository had amassed on the mystery of the ancestors—the travelerswho’d populated eight fecund planets across five solar systems, now known as the Verdant String.

As Aponi was the farthest planet out, the last known place the ancestors had settled down, it drew a certain type of scholar—one who liked to study the peninsula and surrounding forests of Demeter and the clifftop city of Nanganya, the two major centers on the planet, to try to work out where a ship might have landed and where it could now be found.

So far, no one had been successful.

She personally thought the travelers would have dismantled the ship and used every piece of it to help them settle into a new life, pieces that slowly got replaced over the centuries, effectively making them disappear.

She was sorry about the paucity of knowledge now, though. Because she was very sure her silver balls, her nanotech, had come with the travelers themselves. Little things they had communicated, little glimpses she had caught, had clued her in.

And the rusted hulk of the ancient spaceship they had been hanging from in the forest was an indication of how things had gone for the ancestral travelers on Ytla. Common wisdom was that Aponi was the furthest the ancestors had reached, but if they’d crashed and burned on Ytla, could they not have gone further still?

There could be a whole planet of Verdant String people out there, ready to be found and brought into the fold.

She settled down at a reader and touched the icon for the private files she wanted to read through.

Someone came in from the street entrance to the Depository and strode toward the main office, their boots heavy on the wooden floor rather than the light, slippered tread of most of the visitors to this place.

Wren turned her head to see who it was and her mouth fell open. She could only see his back, but she knew him.

The man that had cradled her in his arms.

Her victim.

Ed stepped backout into the midday heat, leaving the cool, scented air of the Depository behind him.

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