The words hung in the air like a death sentence.
I felt Zara sag slightly beside me, the weight of that revelation crushing the hope she’d been carrying. All her modifications to the scanning equipment, all her plans to study the control systems and find a solution—none of it mattered if the systems themselves were beyond anyone’s ability to control.
But it was the D’tran’s reaction that made my blood run cold.
Their eyes, which I’d noticed shifted color with emotion, had stayed collectively red. Not the warm amber of calm or the dark blue of sadness. Pure, brilliant red. The color of rage given physical form.
“You lie,” Dorek said, and his voice was shaking with barely controlled violence. “You lie to save yourselves.”
“They’re not lying,” Zara said wearily. “Why would they? What purpose would it serve? They’re the last of their kind and have nothing left to lose.”
“They have their lives,” another D’tran warrior snarled. “And we will take them. Take them as payment for what their ancestors did to our world.”
I saw it happening. Saw the shift from desperate hope to murderous fury. Saw the moment when the D’tran collectively decided that if they couldn’t have results, they would settle for revenge.
Vikkat tried. I’ll give him that. “No. We came for answers, and we have them. We—”
But his warriors weren’t listening anymore. The red in their eyes had spread to their skin, flushing their faces andnecks with the color of pure rage. They were done listening to reason, done hoping for solutions, done with everything except the need to hurt someone, anyone, who bore responsibility for their suffering.
I braced myself, feeling my own skin shift to defensive colors—red streaked with yellow and black—that marked me as ready for violence. The rock in my hand felt pitifully inadequate against the energy weapons held by six D’tran warriors.
But I wasn’t moving. I’d stood between predators and prey, and I was going to stay there, even if it meant fighting my own distant cousins in this dark cave beneath a dying world.
Because the Kythrans had no chance of surviving what was about to happen unless someone stopped it.
And despite everything—despite the danger, despite the odds, despite the very real possibility that I was about to get myself killed—I couldn’t let these old, fragile beings be murdered for crimes their ancestors had committed millennia ago.
Zara moved closer to me, and through the bond, I felt her fear mixed with fierce determination. She wasn’t going to run either. We were partners, and we stood together.
Even if we were about to die together.
The D’tran advanced, weapons raised, eyes blazing red, and I knew that in seconds, this cave was going to become a battlefield.
CHAPTER 18
ZARA
The first blow came so fast I almost missed it.
Dorek swung his weapon at the nearest Kythran again, and this time there was no stopping him. The elderly being crumpled under the impact, his thin cry of pain cutting through the chamber like a blade.
“Stop!” Torven bellowed, but his voice was lost in the sudden eruption of violence.
The D’tran surged forward as a unit, their collective rage finally finding an outlet. Vikkat didn’t even try to stop them, now. His eyes were as red as the blood spilling on the floor. Weapons swung, fists flew, and the Kythrans scattered like frightened animals, scrambling toward the walls with their hands raised in that universal gesture of surrender that no one was respecting. Torven intercepted one D’tran who had surged toward an already injured Kythran and was locked with him as they pitted strength against strength.
One of the Kythrans was shouting something, his voicehigh and panicked. My translator caught it automatically. “We tried to fix it! We’ve spent our entire lives trying!”
“You fools! They tried to fix it,” I translated desperately, grabbing at Vikkat’s arm. “They’ve been trying their whole lives—”
“Lies!” Another D’tran warrior kicked over a pile of data cubes, sending them scattering across the floor. “Sky-stealer lies!”
A Kythran dove for one of the intact cubes, trying to protect it, and got a boot to the ribs for his trouble. He curled up on the ground, wheezing, while another D’tran raised their weapon.
“No!” Torven flung aside the D’tran he was fighting with, but there were too many of them and not enough of us.
The chamber descended into chaos. Ancient technology became projectiles—circuit boards flew through the air, power cells were crushed underfoot, delicate instruments that might have held answers were smashed against the stone walls. The Kythrans weren’t fighting back. They were just trying to survive, to protect what little they had left.
One of them was speaking rapidly, desperately, and I caught fragments through my translator. “The central nexus… If we could reach it… Together we might…”
