“Again,” the queen commanded. The tips of her blue braids danced in the wind, mirroring her cold blue eyes. Soahm’s eyes.
The whip cracked again, doubly as hard. Duran screamed as his skin split open. But still, he held his ground.
Tears streamed down Sonara’s cheeks. She had only enough strength to utter a plea.“Just me.”
But the queen only lifted her hand again, and the guards brought down the whip once more.
Duran finally took a step forward.
“Fight against them,”Sonara thought to him. With everything in her, she wished he could hear her words, could take comfort in her presence.“Don’t let it end like this.”
Another step. This one a lurch as Duran sidestepped, another lash open on his side. The motion sent pain rocketing into Sonara’s body, the wind howling, the cold salt spray like a knife reopening her wounds.
Part One
Blood
Chapter 1
TEN YEARS LATER
On board theStarfall
Outskirts of the Milky Way Galaxy
Karr
It took less than twenty-four hours for outer space to claim Karr Kingston as its own. Seventeen hours and forty-three minutes, to be exact.
The problem wasn’t the warp speed at which theStarfall,the fastest ship in Jeb Montforth’s black-market legion of Graters and Streakers, traveled through light-years of space and stars.
It wasn’t even the two MREs Karr had downed right after he woke up on the ship, which could be more or less explained as eating freeze-dried cat, and maynothave been one of his prouder moments.
It was the metal walls.
It was the feeling—thereality—of being so damn trapped. Again.
“Not for long,” Karr said, as he fumbled with a stubborn screw on a ruined escape pod in the belly of theStarfall.The pod was an ugly thing,battered and bruised and long since forgotten for flight.
Instead, it had been used all these years as one of hundreds of hiding places on board the massive ship.
The seats inside the pod had been torn open, the stuffing removed and replaced with sealed packages of smuggled drugs. They’d been sewn back together with an unsteady hand, as if a drunken surgeon had been given the job.
Karr sighed as he stared at the mess that would be his escape.
The cosmetics of the pod didn’t bother him. And besides, he wouldn’t have time to worry about the stitching on the seats when he was trying not to crash-land. All Karr cared about was the mechanics, those vital, running bits of the pod’s insides that would hold his life in balance when he strapped himself in and ejected himself from the belly of theStarfall.
Tomorrow,Karr thought.Tomorrow, I’ll get the hell away from here.
That is, if he could keep himself hidden until then. He’d shared plenty of false stories with the crew about his whereabouts, knowing that with their loose lips and watching eyes, he wouldn’t be able to hold the truth off for long. He’d even rigged the locks on the storage bay’s door so that when he was found, they’d have a hell of a time getting through.
The newly formed lump on his forehead throbbed as he thought of the Captain’s wrath. If he was discovered… he’d never make it back to Beta Earth.
Heaven,Karr thought.
Or, at the very least, it had felt like it for the short time he and the rest of the crew had been docked there. Karr had traveled all his life,bounding around from one end of the Milky Way to the other, never staying on any one of its 8.8 billion planets for more than a few weeks at a time.
But Beta Earth?
