The chips would be an extravagance for Fi—more useful for Boden. Energy to power the village, to keep houses warm through the endless winter. Larger cities had central power factories, fleets of human workers to Shape energy into the conduits. Nyskya ran on a smaller workforce, supplemented with chips charged elsewhere.
Most settlements turned to their ruling daeyari for such aid. That had been the pact between mortals and immortals for centuries, when the beasts came down from their trees and offered to stop hunting humans like wild game. Peace and partnership—in exchange for willing sacrifices to keep them fed.
Where Fi and Boden grew up, Verne Territory, the call for sacrifice went out every few years, whenever the town needed new parts for their energy conduits or better commissions for metallurgy. Sometimes, volunteers came forward. Sometimes, meetings stretched long into the night to decide who’d have to go, their father returning silent and hollow-eyed.
She and Boden fled to Antal Territory seeking escape, a less vicious daeyari with an uncommon policy: the village didn’t need to send a sacrifice, so long as they didn’t ask for aide. That meant repairing their own conduits. Tracking down their own energy chips. Sourcing their own food and medicine. A rare cause worth supporting.
Boden closed the box. Spoke softly. “Thank you, Fi. This will help.”
“Of course.” She looked away from his sincerity, more comfortable with bristles. “Keep the people from freezing. Wouldn’t look good for your re-election.”
Fi owed him more than this.Muchmore than whatever numbers he kept in his ledger.
Void knew, she was a pain in the ass little sister, flighty as a Curtain, prone to cussing too much and parading bombs across his doorstep. Here was one meager attempt to repay him for everything she’d put him through ten years ago. For giving her safe harbor in a Plane full of claws. For being the only family she had left.
“This was your payment?” Boden said. “These chips are worth more than the capsules.”
“People pay more when they need something specific.”
Did the job smell off? Of course. Fi kept her margins tight through calculated risk, profit weighed against consequence. Twenty daeyari energy chips were wortha lotof consequence.
Boden, who inherited enough worry for both of them, scowled, but didn’t press. He never asked for names, details. Safer for both of them.
“Anything else you need? Other than pilfered soup.”
Fi gripped Aisinay’s lead. “Drop off is in two days. I’ll lay low until then. As usual, if anyone asks about me…”
Boden pressed a hand to his heart, his tone a tadtoodramatic. “Fionamara? I haven’t seen that woman in months. Selfish thing never visits. Never thinks about family.”
Fi left him with a kiss on the cheek. A punch on the shoulder.
She and her horse and a cart of energy capsules left the village. Her home lay an hour’s hike up a snowy canyon, but Fi never took the long way. Once they cleared the houses, she stepped through another Curtain, off the Winter Plane.
The space beyond lay quiet. Snow-dusted. A meadow of silver grass and leafless poplar trees, ground crumbling into the Void within sight in any direction.
Far smaller than a Plane. Smaller, even, than the Bridge that brought her from Autumn. Shards were the tiniest, mostnumerousscraps of reality scattered through the Void.
Prevailing theory claimed a single world existed once, an age that far preceded flimsy human memory. Then, that reality shattered like a dropped mirror. Planes were the largest fragments, hundreds of separate worlds split from the whole, now scattered throughout the Void. Bridges were smaller slivers, connecting one Plane to another.
Shards were dust around the edges, tinier pockets of reality that connected to no more than one Plane. On the surface, thismight make Shards seem like nothing more than extra-dimensional holes to hide in—which Fi had doneplentyof as a kid, avoiding chores or her father’s chastisement.
As she got older, Fi discovered the true advantage of Shards lay in how they distorted distance, compared to the neighboring Plane. She walked Aisinay past one Curtain that would return her to the Winter Plane across the valley, at her favorite copse for hunting hare. Another Curtain that, in two days, would take her a hundred miles away to Thomaskweld.
Where the ruling daeyari lived.
Fi huffed the Void-empty air. It was just a city. Just a job. She’d successfully avoided those beasts for a decade.
At last, she reached the Curtain to take her home. She stepped back onto the Winter Plane, onto a forested ridge two miles above Nyskya—traversed in a matter of minutes.
A short walk through sighing shiverpines brought her to a clearing, a cottage with shingled roof and dark windows. Fi unhitched the cart. Finally free of the load, Aisinay cantered into the trees, off to forage dinner in the nearby river. Fi crossed her porch, kicked the snow off her boots, then stepped inside, eager for a hot bath full of pomegranate bubbles, a warm bed piled high with furs.
She’d dream of ten more energy chips waiting for her in Thomaskweld.
Not of claws lurking in the trees beyond her windows.
3
It’s unfair to look that sexy
