I’d floated the idea of getting the slaves on our side, but Hyrek had nixed that instantly. Any slave, human or the aeons they kept in the feed pits, would reap huge rewards for reporting us, which meant none of them could be trusted. Still, I was happy they were all tucked away down in their bunkers. I knew what was coming, and I wanted the humans as far as possible when it hit.
All in all, the journey was much less hairy than I’d expected. The xith’cal’s complete dismissal of the “lesser races” they enslaved meant there were few cameras in the slave roads and no guards. In the end, we were able to make it all the way to our destination without a single fight.
According to Hyrek’s map, we were now in a tunnel that passed directly beneath the arena. It looked so much like every other slave road so far, I was a little worried we’d missed a turn, but then as we walked, I began to hear the roar of the screaming crowd through the metal over my head, and I knew we were in the right spot.
“How’s our boy doing?” I asked, scanning the tunnel’s ceiling with my density sensor for the place where the metal was thinnest.
Not so well, Hyrek replied.
“Not so well how?” I said, but before Hyrek answered, Rupert waved me over. He’d moved down the hall a bit and hopped up on a pipe to pry a panel off the ceiling. I jumped up to join him, putting my head through the opening he’d made. At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, and then I realized that Rupert had pried the bottom off a ventilation grate. Through the metal mesh, I could see straight into the arena itself, and Hyrek was right. It wasn’t good.
I didn’t know how long Caldswell had been in there. It had been almost half an hour since I’d seen him on the screen, but I was willing to bet he’d been fighting a lot longer. The captain was panting and pale, and his clothes were soaked through with blood and sweat. When I’d first seen him, he’d been facing off unarmed against three xith’cal warriors. Now they had him fighting some kind of huge, hairy, sharp-toothed animal I didn’t recognize.
At least he had a weapon now, a heavy xith’cal knife that was way too big for him. For all that, though, he handled the oversized blade deftly, waiting on the alien to charge before stepping aside with blinding speed and planting the knife neatly in the beast’s spine like he’d been doing this all his life. If I hadn’t already guessed he was a symbiont, that little stunt would have clinched it for me.
“Why hasn’t he transformed?” I whispered.
“He is old,” Rupert whispered back. “The symbiont heals, but the change is hard on the body. Caldswell doesn’t do it unless he must.”
“I’d say we’re past must,” I muttered, leaning closer to Rupert to get a better view as the captain yanked his knife out of the dying creature’s back. “I wonder why Reaper hasn’t killed him yet?”
“He is sworn prey,” Rupert said, his voice disgusted. “That means spectacle. Caldswell humiliated Reaper, and pride must be paid.”
“So they’re toying with him,” I said, looking up.
At the far end of the arena, a huge, brightly lit box hung suspended high above the bloody sand, and Reaper was sitting on it like an idol on an altar. Even this far away, I was struck again by the size of him. If I hadn’t known for a fact Reaper was a xith’cal, I’d have sworn he was a different species entirely from the warriors that stood crowded around him.
“All right,” I said with a deep breath. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
Rupert might not have liked my plan, but to his credit, he didn’t waste time now. We were getting the first missile ready when the crowd’s screaming kicked up a notch. When I jumped back on the pipe to see why, my breath caught. “Rupert!”
He was beside me in an instant, and I heard him mutter something that sounded like a curse. Now that Caldswell had killed the huge beast they’d sicked on him, his next challenge was being brought in through the gate on the arena’s far side. The captain watched the rising barrier with calm acceptance, the knife easy in his hands. But Caldswell had never been nearly as good at bluffing as Rupert, and when his face flashed up on the xith’cal’s huge screens, I could see the hints of fear. When I looked back at the arena gate, I saw why.
Something was coming out of the dark, dragging chains behind it. It walked jerkily, like it was sick, but it wasn’t until it stepped into the light that I realized the thing was a symbiont. One with broad shoulders and a stocky build I recognized all too well.
“God and king,” I whispered. “That’s Brenton.” I frowned at his shambling steps. “What’s wrong with him?”
“They’ve enraged his symbiont,” Rupert said quietly. “The alien part of us was taken from the xith’cal initially. It still responds to several of their drugs.”
“Why would they drug him?” I asked. Having spent a day in the man’s company, I was pretty sure Brenton would jump at the chance to kill Caldswell all on his own, no drugs needed.
“Because they mean this to be the end,” Rupert said. “When Brenton went rogue, he was one of the two best fighters the Eyes had ever produced. Caldswell was the other, though for my money, I’d have bet on the captain every time. Now, with the drugs and Caldswell wounded?” Rupert shook his head.
“Then we’d better get a move on,” I said, hopping down. Rupert could finish setting up the missile. It was time for me to do my part.
Ever since the incident with Maat, the little phantoms had been following me. I hadn’t seen them at first since I’d had my cameras on, but once Rupert had agreed to my plan, I’d pushed up my visor to check on them every few minutes. I pushed it up again now, and there they were, a little cloud of light drifting just out of reach.
“Remember what I said,” I told Rupert as I sealed my helmet again. “Don’t get near me once I start. And don’t touch me, whatever—”
I cut off as Rupert’s arms circled around me, hugging me tight through my armor.
“What did I just say?” I snapped, struggling, but Rupert only hugged me tighter.
“Just in case,” he whispered, leaning down to press his scaled mask gently against the side of my neck.
He didn’t say anything else, but he didn’t need to. His body said it all as it wrapped around mine. I’ve been held by a lot of men in my life, but not a one of them had ever come close to making me feel as precious, loved, and wanted as Rupert could with a single gesture, and it took an extraordinary act of will to pull away.
“Rupert,” I said when I finally managed to step out of his arms, doing my best to form my breathy voice into a warning.
“I know,” he said, cutting me off. “But I’m not sorry.”
His hands settled on my shoulders as he spoke, turning me gently but firmly until we were standing face to face. For a second, I was staring up at his alien mask, and then his chest flexed, and the scales receded to reveal Rupert looking at me with the same defiant determination that had prompted Caldswell to grumble that I’d ruined his best Eye.
“I meant every word I said before,” he said, trailing his black claws down my arms to gently cup my hands. “You’re what’s most important to me, and I will not lose you. Remember that before you decide to do anything stupidly brave, because I will come after you, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
I stared at him for a second, and then I started to laugh. It was horribly inappropriate, but I couldn’t help it. He just looked so serious, like if I ran into that arena and started randomly shooting lizards, he’d run in right after me without even hesitating. And that stopped my laughter, because as he looked down at me, I realized he would. I might not be ready to trust him on a lot of things, but right now, I knew to my bones that Rupert would follow me anywhere.
“I’ll keep that in mind before I jump off any more cliffs,” I said. “Now shove off and let me work.”
Rupert leaned over, dropping a quick kiss to the top of my helmet. Before I could react, he was gone, his scales folding back over his face as he returned to his missile. I stared after him for several seconds, and then I shook myself like a dog and got back to the task at hand.
I strode down the hall for several dozen feet. Then, when I’d put what I judged as a safe distance between myself and Rupert, I sat down and pushed up my visor. As always, the phantoms had followed. They were all around me now, drifting through the dark, dirty walls of the slave road.
I looked around until I found a nice fat one, and then I stopped, taking a deep breath. Back in the hangar, I’d treated this part of the plan like a given. My confidence had been vital. If I’d shown any hesitation, Rupert would never have agreed. Now that we were down to the wire, though, I had to face the fact that I wasn’t sure this would work at all. I’d only done it once, and not on purpose. Still, no one got anywhere by not trying, so I shoved my worries aside, closed my eyes, and focused on getting mad.
It didn’t take much. I’d been fighting my rage since I’d realized it was what made the black stuff spread. But it’s not my nature to hold back, and the moment I stopped trying, the righteous fury came roaring back like a furnace.
I bared my teeth, thinking about how Maat had sold us out even after I’d put my life on the line to save her daughters. That made me more sad than angry, though, so I thought about Caldswell instead, how I’d risked everything to get him on board, and now those idiot xith’cal were butchering all my hard work. That got me going nicely. Nothing pisses me off like having my sacrifices undermined.
And Brenton. I could hear him up there, roaring like one of the xith’cal as he strained against his chains. The sound made me furious. He might be nuts, but Brenton was up there because he’d stayed behind so I could get out, and I wasn’t about to let him die for some lizard’s amusement. I wasn’t going to die here either. Neither was Rupert. I wasn’t giving those lizards a goddamn thing.
By this point, I’d worked myself up so well that I didn’t even notice the pins and needles until they were racing up my arm. The black stuff spread faster than ever before, passing my elbow in seconds to shoot up my biceps and over my shoulder. When I could feel the crawling edging down toward my chest, I snapped my eyes open.
The phantoms must have known something was up, because while my eyes had been closed, they’d all drifted away, but not far enough. The one I’d had my eye on earlier was still floating about ten feet down the hall, a fist-sized semitransparent blob with a dozen tiny kicking legs. I took careful note of its position as I slid off my glove. The moment my ink-black skin was free, I jumped.
Every time I’d grabbed at one of the little phantoms, they’d run away before I could touch them. I’d never made a serious try, though. Now I was serious as the grave, and the bug didn’t have a chance.
I flew at the blob like a bullet, snatching it out of the air with my bare blackened hand. The little phantom was surprisingly soft against my palm, its surface cold and slick and slimy as a mud skink in winter. For a moment, it was surprisingly difficult to hold on to, but the phantom’s struggles stopped when the stain of my sickness began to seep into its body.
Just like the phantom on the asteroid, I could see the blackness curling through its frosted-glass body like ink dripped in water. But this phantom was much, much smaller than the one in the cave had been. My blackness ate it in seconds, and as its light died, the emptiness bloomed in my mind.
It was only for an instant, but an instant was all I needed. The second the darkness fell, I reached out with that strange otherness, straining far and fast. It actually was much harder than I’d expected, like trying to throw a knockout punch with an arm you haven’t used in ten years, but I didn’t have the luxury of failure. I’d suggested this plan, I was going to see it through, and I reached out with all my might, throwing myself into the dark as hard as I could.