“I learned from the best.”
We stood like that until the door chimed again, this time revealing Vikkat and his full expedition team. There were eight of them total, all heavily armed and equipped with gear that suggested they’d done this kind of thing before.
My skin immediately shifted to darker tones as I took in the group. I recognized two of them from our arrival—the warriors who’d stood silent and watchful while Vikkat had done the talking. But the others were new, and something about the way they looked at Zara and me made my protective instincts prickle.
One of them, a massive male with intricate markings covering both arms and visible portions of his neck, stared at my own relatively bare skin with an expression I couldn’t quite read. His eyes lingered on the mating marks on myneck, then flicked to Zara with something that might have been disgust.
“Ready?” Vikkat asked, his gaze moving over our packed equipment with an appraising eye.
“Ready,” I confirmed, releasing Zara and shouldering my pack.
The weight was significant but manageable, and I watched carefully as Zara adjusted her own pack, making sure the straps were properly fitted to her smaller frame. One of the D’tran females noticed my scrutiny and moved to help, making small adjustments that would prevent the pack from throwing off Zara’s balance during the trek. I’d taken everything I could from her, leaving her a lighter pack, but she needed to be prepared with supplies, just in case we were separated. Not that I intended to allow that to happen.
“Thank you,” Zara said, and the D’tran nodded with what might have been approval.
But as we prepared to leave, I caught fragments of low conversation in D’tran between two of the warriors near the back of the group.
“…few markings for one who claims warrior past…” one of them muttered.
“Corrupted bloodline,” another replied. “Lost the old ways. How does one so unmarked find mate at all. Unnatural. She is from alien species.”
“Vikkat says we help them. But why? What have star-cousins ever done for us?”
I kept my expression neutral, pretending I hadn’t understood, but my skin betrayed me with streaks of dark blue and purple. My hearing was better than Zara’s, who hadn’t heardthe exchange and glanced at me with concern, but I shook my head slightly.Not now. Not here.
We followed Vikkat through the fortress corridors, passing D’tran civilians who stopped to watch our procession with curious eyes. Young ones peered from doorways, and I found myself wondering what they’d been told about our presence here. Were we saviors who might fix their broken world, strangers passing through, or enemies who could not be trusted?
The transport that awaited us was different from the one that had brought us to the fortress. This one was smaller, more maneuverable, with treads instead of wheels, and what looked like reinforced plating on all surfaces.
“Cave crawler,” Vikkat explained, seeing my interest. “For underground travel. Narrow passages, unstable terrain.”
“How far underground are we going?” Zara asked, and I heard the slight edge in her voice that meant she was thinking about her grandparents, about being trapped in spaces where safety was supposed to be guaranteed.
“Deep,” Vikkat replied. “Old tunnels. Natural caves expanded by sky-stealers for their purposes.”
The cave crawler’s interior was cramped compared to the fortress transport, with barely enough room for all of us and our gear. Zara and I ended up squeezed together on one of the benches, which would have been pleasant under different circumstances but now just felt confining. Worse, the two warriors who’d been talking about me were seated directly across from us, their expressions carefully neutral but their eyes watchful.
The vehicle lurched into motion with a grinding of gearsthat suggested its best days were behind it, and we began descending into darkness lit only by the crawler’s forward lights and the occasional emergency beacon mounted on the tunnel walls.
I settled in beside Zara, acutely aware of how she clutched the bag containing her remaining scientific equipment. She’d been working on them before we left, making modifications she’d explained to me in detail, even though I only understood about half of it.
“How confident are you that the modifications will work?” I asked quietly, keeping my voice low enough that only she could hear.
She grimaced. “Honestly? Maybe sixty percent. I’ve altered the atmospheric sensors to try to detect heat signatures and life forms through rock, but they weren’t designed for this application. The signal penetration might not be deep enough, or the interference from the planet’s electromagnetic field could scramble the readings entirely.”
“But there’s a chance they’ll work.”
“There’s a chance,” she agreed, though her tone suggested she thought it was a slim one. “If we’re lucky and the Kythrans are relatively close to the surface, and if the cave walls aren’t too dense, and if my modifications don’t just fry the circuits the moment I turn them on.”
A lot of ifs. But then again, everything about this mission seemed to be built on ifs and maybes.
More D’tran conversation drifted from the back of the crawler, and I strained to hear it over the grinding of the treads.
“If female fails to fix towers, what then?” one voice asked.
“Then they useless to us,” another replied. “Vikkat has soft feelings for star-cousins, but the rest of us remember what was lost.”
“Old knowledge. Ancient ways. They abandoned all to live in floating cities.”
