I walked over to the windows, looking out over the city. The view was incredible. I felt more than heard Elex come up beside me. He didn’t touch me, but I could feel the comforting warmth of his body as I gazed at the city.
“You okay?”
I nodded.
“You seem a little on edge,” he continued.
“I just don’t know why Polemos wants to meet with me,” I said. “I mean, he’s the leader of the war effort. What the hell would he want with one Soma?”
“Maybe he wants to commend you for recruiting so many Mageia,” he said thoughtfully.
“Maybe,” I responded. “But why now? I—”
My voice was cut off as I heard the sound of a pair of swiftly approaching footsteps and Bea’s voice calling out. I whirled around.
“Polemos, please! Be careful! It might to be some kind of trick—”
The door to the conference room flew open and a slight man dressed in an expensive suit stood in the doorway. His wavy white hair was shoulder length, with a single streak of black in the front. He stood frozen with shock, and I realized his face was a mirror of the one that had been filling my dreams.
Elex had already whirled and dropped to a crouch, anticipating an attack, whirls of elements appearing around his forearms. He froze, staring at a man who wore his face before straightening slowly.
Silence stretched for long moments, then Elex said a single word that shook me to my core.
“Erix.”
Chapter 9
Erix
Ugh. Paperwork was definitely the least favorite part of my job as War Leader for the Illyrians. They documented everything. I would so much rather be in my lab.
It was midmorning and I still hadn’t had a cup of coffee. I glanced at my watch. I’d asked my assistant, Penelope, to get me one, but she’d been gone for a long time. Penny was usually pretty good about not getting sidetracked, so something urgent must have come up.
My office was huge and modern and sometimes grated on me with its opulence. When I’d been a starving slave in Alexandria the thought of being entitled to something like this would have seemed like a pipe dream. The former War Leader had been a pompous ass, more interested in the trappings of the station than the work. He had been well protected, politically.
I’d worked on the Prometheus technology team for two years before being assigned to the President’s protection team.
Irene Korthios was a woman who demanded respect and had only recently come to the presidency herself. I had saved her life after an assassination attempt with one of my new gadgets, and she asked me to take the role of War Leader. I hadn’t wanted the job, but it was the only way I could control how the technology I created was being used.
As soon as I’d moved in, I’d stripped the room of all the ornamentation the previous War Leader, Garrick, had used, replacing the gilded mirrors and expensive artwork with maps of our territory and whiteboards with info on various troop movements and project updates.
The only real symbol of my status remaining in the room were the two Soma guards assigned to stand on either side of the door. Despite my best efforts, I hadn’t convinced the Council that Iwas able to protect myself just fine regardless of whether I was Bonded or not, thank you very much. The argument hadn’t gotten me very far, but at least I had convinced them to reduce the guard detail to two, instead of the half dozen they had originally wanted to assign.
I rubbed my forehead, the beginnings of a headache forming behind my eyes. I’d been up late the night before working on a new project. For all intense and purposes it was a sonic bomb.
My engineering team had been enthusiastic about the basic premise and had been working on it for months. I didn’t want to admit to them that the idea had actually come from a dream I’d had one night. Or nightmare, rather. I had been plagued with nightmares for years since I escaped Alexandria. They were always dreams of war, of death, of killing. Sometimes I wondered how I remained sane. Or if I really was sane, anymore.
I’d been up late the night before, another nightmare waking me early. I was reviewing the information we had received from our Alexandrian network. A group I had connected with when I escaped from Alexandria had started feeding us information about Alexandrian battle plans. That, along with the new technology my engineering teams were creating, were finally beginning to turn the tide on this damn war.
I took a certain grim satisfaction that the tutelage of Alexandria’s best strategists was now being used to undermine their war efforts. Under my leadership, Illyria’s military was holding its own for the first time in this war. We had even gained back a small amount of ground in the last few months, but I had a feeling our opponents were planning something big. The knowledge of it buried itself in my mind like a burr, making me short tempered and short on patience.
Who was I kidding? I was always short tempered. Something me and Elex had had in common as kids. I was just better at hiding it than he had been.
Thoughts of my twin summoned the normal tangled feelings of love, anger, betrayal and longing for the brother who had been such a big part of my life.
He would be twenty-two of course, if he was still alive, the same age I was. I had heard little about him or any of my other siblings since I had escaped. Maalik’s promotion to heir was announced as expected after he had developed his Elusian powers, but we had heard nothing from Elex, Luke, Terry, or any of the others.
Maalik was a bully and sadist, but not the sharpest tool in the toolbox. He’d been a constant annoyance to Elex when we were kids, but like all bullies, he was essentially a coward. There was nothing I hated more in this world than cowardice. Which led my spiraling emotions back to thoughts of my twin. His fear of leaving Alexandria had cut me to the core. He hadn’t trusted me enough to know I would never let anything happen to him. He’d been too afraid of leaving the familiar, as horrible as it was, for the unknown.
