Page 5 of The Price of Peace
My blood boiled. “My name is Agent Quorath, or simply Xyrox if you must. Not criminal. I was framed.”
She heaved a breathe that blew several of her white-blonde braids from her high cheekbones. I stared. Her straight, pert nose fascinated me for no reason I could fathom. It was just a nose. A cute nose to be sure, but …Fekk!One side of her mouth quirked up in a smirk. I had to figure out a way to cut off this telepathic communication—the sooner the better.
“Listen,Agent Veylora, or whoever you are, I know what it says on the warrant, but I’m no traitor. Those men hunting you earlier—they work for the same guy who framed me—Jökull. He’s got his nasty prints on all kinds of trafficking, and I was about to bring him down when he framed me.”
Her eyes glowed a bright purple, but they continued to stare out the viewscreen. I moved to run my hands through my braids in frustration, but quickly remembered I was tied to my seat. My nostrils flared, and I huffed in agitation. “What do I have to do to convince you? If you take me back, I’ll be dead within six sols. Regent Jökull won’t take the chance of me escaping again.”
This time when she looked at me, a bit of regret flashed across her expression before she returned her focus to avoiding space junk. “Determining guilt or innocence isn’t my job,” she said flatly. “Making sure you show up for your tribunal date and my bond agent gets their money back is.”
Chewing on the inside of my lip, I searched for a persuasive counterargument when the ship rocked hard to the left. “What the fekk was that?”
Sirens blared and fire-retardant steam billowed, making it impossible to see out the viewscreen, even though it was directly in front of us. Had we hit some debris?
Then the ship juddered again. “Catastrophic damage to the starboard side. Hull breach imminent. Evacuationrecommended. There’s a habitable planet within pod number two’s range,” a calm, disembodied voice informed us.
“Someone’s shooting at us,” my captor shouted as she fought the controls.
“Let me loose!” I tugged desperately at the straps, but they seemed to be made of some type of composite material I couldn’t tear, despite my strength. Sweat rolled down my back from beneath the scales on my shoulders where some was usually stored for me to use in emergency heat. “We have to get off this ship.”
Her braids floated around her head weightlessly as the artificial gravity started to go offline. She smashed a button and glided out of her seat, looming over me with a knife. “Be still,” she commanded a second before slashing down and cutting my bonds.
Without any other instruction, I followed her the few steps to the back of her small vessel and dove into an even smaller vessel— an escape pod before she jerked a lever, and we were thrown from the ship. We were tossed around the tiny vessel several times before I managed to right myself and pull myself into a seat, strapping myself in. A moment later, my erstwhile captor was settled into the seat next to me.
We were both gasping for air when an overwhelming pressure surged through my chest, propelling us even faster. The ship had exploded, and we were caught in the blast radius. Debris ricocheted off our hull, making the escape pod shake.
My fingers dug into the armrests as my head moved on a swivel, trying to make out anything besides the vastness of space in the small windows. “There! I think that’s a planet! What are we close to?”
“I don’t know. The autopilot is bringing us to the nearest habitable planet. I hope.”
We didn’t seem to have any way to steer anyway. We were at the mercy of any gravitational pull that might pick us up. I closed my eyes and threw out a little prayer to any powers that might be listening that we be captured by the nearest planet’s gravity and not the ship that had tried to blow us out of space.
5
PEACE
They caught up with us. I couldn’t believe it. Why did the fekking fekks want me so badly? And who was this Jökull who had such a hard on for me? I’d never even been to the Pleiades star cluster, although Zame theorized I might have come from there based on my violet irises.
I closed my eyes and breathed through the panic that threatened to overtake me. The last blast had taken out my manual steering. We were totally at the mercy of the autopilot, and I had no idea whether it was working properly. We’d been close to Arktaryn Prime when the crazy fekks blasted us. I could only hope the autopilot wasn’t damaged from debris from my ship—may she rest in peace. Arktaryn Prime was an ice planet and uninhabited as far as I knew, but anything was better than floating in space, slowing starving to death or being caught by those fekkers.
A deep vibration resonated in my chest, along with words in my head.
What planet were we close to when we evacuated?
Of all the blasted suns. Why are you still in my head?I took another breath and slowly forced myself to look at my prisoner. His intense green eyes were glowing and locked on me. “Only talk to me using your mouth, please.” My voice sounded like a gong echoing through the small space. “Arktaryn Prime.”
His black brows raised in surprise, but he nodded.
I frowned at his seeming familiarity with the planet, but I didn’t have time to waste any brain cells on that knowledge. Suddenly, I realized we were spinning more slowly, I glanced out the porthole and saw the white surface of the planet coming into view, and we were in its gravitational pull. Thank the goddess! Heaving a relieved breath, I pointed at the sight.
Xyrox’s eyes followed my fingers, and I saw his chest expand and contract once, then twice. I watched all those muscles dance under his taunt red skin, his swirling tattoos somehow creating a language I wanted my fingers to translate. My mouth went dry, which was … unwelcome.
I guess I wasn’t paying attention to much besides Mister Muscles, because suddenly there was a bone-jarring thud. I jerked and looked out the porthole to see the pod skidding across a frozen expanse. We slid for what felt like kryons before coming to an abrupt halt against a bank. A fine spray of snow and ice crystals filled the air, glittering in the weak, pale light of the planet’s distant sun.
Once I was sure we’d completely stopped, I unbuckled myself from my harness I’d managed to strap over myself in our catapult from my ship. I groaned as I moved, my head throbbing, and every muscle in my body aching from the impact.
“You okay over there?” I asked my fugitive, still preferring mouths and ears to in-head communication. The whole telepathy thing was more than weird, and I didn’t have time tofigure out how it worked; or, more importantly, how to turn it the fekk off.
“Define ‘okay’,” he grumbled in his deep voice that, for some reason, gave me goosebumps that had nothing to do with the cold planet.
