Page 64 of The Stone Curse
I was fillinga takeaway mug with coffee to take to the main building with me when Orix entered the kitchen.
“How did training go?” he asked.
Ah, so many ways to answer that one, but I didn’t have the energy for a long conversation. “Good.”
“And everything else?”
“It’s fine. We’re fine. I’m actually about to go look for Mirrowind now, so hopefully I’ll have answers and solutions too.”
“Don’t get twisted up if she can’t help,” Orix said. “We’ll figure something out regardless.”
I needed the vote of confidence right now. “I know, I just…I can’t risk failing the elite trial. Romi and Serath are depending on me. On us.”
“Not just them,” Orix said. “Everyone. We’re tasked with bringing down the graynite alpha, Cam. Bringing back Romi and Serath are bonus actions, not the main mission. You do realize that, don’t you?”
Ice filled my veins, because no, I hadn’t been thinking in that way. For me, Serath and Romiwerethe mission, and my face must have communicated that because Orix pressed his lips together, breathing raggedly through his nose in a way that told me he was about to deliver some serious home truths that I probably wouldn’t want to hear.
“You’re not a fool, Cameron. You’ve hunted, you know how priorities in the field work. The main objective mustalwayscome first. The secondary objectives can be completed afterward. The lives of the many over the lives of the few.”
A bitter tang stained the back of my throat. “You’re saying Romi and Serath are dispensable.”
He shook his head. “Not to me. Never to me, but for the purpose of this mission, yes. If we must choose between taking down the alpha and extraction, then we choose taking down the alpha.”
Choose? How could I choose? “I’m not going to leave them there. I won’t do it.”
His lips thinned. “Then you’ll end up getting us all killed. If we’re not on the same page, then we will fail. All of us.”
“The others…you spoke to them already, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “I did.”
“But what do they care? Romi is my brother, and Serath is my mate.I’mthe one with everything to lose here.”
“Listen to yourself, Cameron. Would you really put their lives above the lives of every supernatural and human in our world?”
A vise tightened around my lungs because for a moment only one word echoed in my mind.Yes. Yes, in the moment I might just do that. I grabbed hold of the counter, exhaling in shock at the revelation.
“Cameron…” Orix moved closer. “Both Romi and Serath knew the risks when becoming an elite. We are the front line. We are a weapon. Without us there is no hope. They knew what the elite team’s sole objective was—to eliminate the alpha. That is what we were chosen to do; everything else is filler. You need to understand this too.” He pressed his lips together for a beat as if choosing his words before continuing. “I was going to wait until after the trial to tell you and the team this, but I think you need to hear it now.”
My scalp pricked. “What? What is it?”
“All this time we’ve been prevented from attacking the graynites on their own turf because of a ward they have over their city, but that’s changed. It turns out the prototype that Prasan was working on was a dud, probably deliberate on his part, but the science and theory behind it was sound enough for another tech to run with, and we now have a mini disrupter. According to your sire, this other device has been in production for some time, even before Romi was taken.”
“Prasan’s prototype helped them fix their version?”
“Yes.”
So my father had been confident that we might have a way past the wards when he asked me to run for elite.
“It won’t take down the whole ward,” Orix said. “But we can punch a hole into it. We can get into their territory withoutthem knowing. We can find the alpha and take him down. And everything must be focused on that objective because we only get one shot. One use of the machine and then it’s over. Do you understand?”
He wanted me to agree to put Romi and Serath second, leave them behind or let them die if it came to a choice between saving them or killing the alpha. I wasn’t sure I could do that.
“I…I should get going.” I hurried toward the exit.
Orix gently gripped my arm. “You can’t run from this, Cameron. If you do, you could end up getting us all killed.”
I looked up into his eyes, filled with doubts and concerns, and my gut twisted. “I know. I just…I need a little time.”
