Page 24 of Shadows of Stardust

Most nights, the trouble I got myself into on an Aux cruiser bound for headquarters, the cell they threw me in before I faced the tribunal, the way everything fell apart so quickly and so spectacularly stays right there. Light-years away. Too far away to touch me.

But tonight, I can’t keep it away.

Tonight, I see the faces. I’m sucked back into dark pools of memory. I speak out, but I can’t stop it.

But it wasn’t a mistake.

Then, and now, it wasn’t a mistake.

My mistake was in trusting my commander.

A male I’ve known more than half my life. An honorable one, I had thought.

But it turns out the credits Veren earns by feeding into the recruiting apparatus that scours the Seventh Sector for cadets—searching for the orphaned, the poor, the younglings who don’t have enough sense to see through the pretty tales recruiters weave of glory and prestige—mean more than his paltry honor.

In exchange for helping to identify the most likely sources of those young recruits, he lines his own pockets and blithely disregards the collateral damage.

It’s damage I know well, because I’ve lived it.

I met my own recruiter in a group shelter for younglings orphaned after Revexor’s fall. With no one to speak sense to me, with nothing to my name, with a bleak future before me and delusions of heroic grandeur in my head, I signed my life away.

But tonight’s not the time to dwell on the black well of those thoughts. It’s not the time to be distracted.

I’ll do my penance, serve my time, take any and every opportunity to work my way back into my prior rank.

And the next time I move against the bastards snapping up orphaned younglings and recruiting them into the Aux, I won’t fail.

As long as I don’t do anything else monumentally stupid and screw it all up again.

Like protecting a little human criminal for no good fatesdamned reason.

I’m already playing a dangerous game with the way I’m choosing to handle this situation with Roslyn. Perhaps I’d be better served by turning over what I know to Brivik and washing my hands of it.

Only…

She hasn’t actually done anything. Not yet. Despite her questionable behavior and my suspicions, she’s broken no rules. Giving voice to those suspicions would only make her more of a target, and maybe it’s just the same fatesforsaken noble streak that got me into all this trouble in the first place, but I can’t do that to her.

No, Roslyn is my problem for the time being.

A small problem, all things considered, and nothing compared to what I’ll have waiting for me when I finally earn my way back into the upper echelons of the Aux, but my problem all the same.

Which just means I need to solve it quickly.

I need to get to the bottom of it, find out what she’s up to, crack that obstinate shell of hers and learn what morsel she’s hiding.

Those thoughts are a welcome distraction as I drift off.

Flipping through my mental file, adding a few new pages, replaying the scene between Roslyn and Rhevar as if it might give me some clue what she’s up to. It all eases the tension still lingering in my muscles.

It gives me something else to focus on.

Something real. Something immediate. Something that doesn’t make me feel as if the dark well in the center of my chest will swallow me whole while I have my guard down.

I imagine what tomorrow will bring. I imagine the ire Roslyn will throw my way over what happened tonight. I imagine the way her emerald eyes will cut me and the way her cheeks will redden with emotion.

In the midst of all that imagining, I might almost be able to convince myself a bit of the darkness lingering in my chest lightens. If I were a more sentimental creature, I might believe it was a small, unlikely smile tugging at the corners of my lips as sleep finally claims me.

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