Neither of them immediately took her up on that offer.
“Too bad.” Tess shrugged and tossed one of the test tubes into the air.
“Wait!” Raquel cried.
Tess caught it. She arched her brows, waiting.
“Fucking unchip him!” Raquel snarled to Solan, throwing an impatient hand in my direction.
Solan took a thumb-sized remote from his pocket, squatted, and swept it over my right calf. It beeped, and he hit the flashing button. A small pain flared in my leg, almost like the jab of a needle. The remote went dark and quiet. Solan dropped it on the ground and stepped on it. He left the broken remains on the blacktop. “The chip’s still in there, but I destroyed it. We all set now?”
“No,” Tess answered. “Swear on your daughter’s life. Both of you. Agree to my terms, or I smash these.” The test tubes glinted in the sunlight, the liquid inside a shocking bright-red against Tess’s black jacket.
Solan and Raquel quickly agreed this time, swearing on Maya’s health and safety. Solan cut through the cuff, freeing my wrists from the plastic binding and shoving me forward. I turned, facing them as I walked backward. I rolled my shoulders and rubbed my wrists, trying to work the kinks out of them. I gave them both a frosty once-over.
Tess met me halfway and placed her blood on the ground. We both backed away from the vials. “You got a cooler?” she asked.
Solan nodded. “What if it doesn’t work?” He moved forward to retrieve what he thought were cure-alls.
“If that doesn’t work, then nothing will cure your daughter.” Tess offered them a smile they didn’t deserve from her. “I hope she lives. And when she does, tell her the Incorruptible have helped her.”
Raquel took the vials from Solan’s hands and carefully put them in her pockets. “The Incorruptible?”
Solan frowned in my direction, as if I had answers. I was as clueless as he was—and didn’t like it.
“Let’s go,” Tess said, looking at her watch. The alarm she’d set ten days ago would beep any second.
“I want to see them take off.” I hoped their priority was getting the cure-alls to Maya, and they’d given Tess their word to leave us alone after this. They’d also proven to be underhanded people, and I didn’t want them following us.
Tess nodded and waited beside me. If she was impatient, she didn’t show it.
Gruffly, I said, “I hope Maya gets better.” I’d probably never know one way or the other, which left an ache inside me.
Solan and Raquel both just looked at me before walking away without a backward glance. No goodbye. No thank-you. No have a nice life, or don’t get killed. Nothing. The ache grew, surprising me. We hadn’t been exactly friends lately, but we’d still been something.
The meeting-day alarm went off. Tess stopped it after three beeps and didn’t pressure me to leave yet.
A cruiser I recognized finally took off in the distance, heading straight up into the atmosphere. And that was that. The last chunk of my old life—gone.
Briskly, I turned to Tess. “First things first. Let’s pick up those weapons and sweep the cruiser for bugs.”
We gathered Raquel’s belt and the discarded guns and bullets. I pulled two search wands from my utility chest, and Tess checked the inside of the cruiser for tracking bugs while I covered the exterior of the ship. Neither of us got a hit. We swept each other for good measure and came up clean.
Satisfied, I fired up the cruiser and we took off, heading for the Grand Temple. Neither of us suggested the resort shuttle at this point. We had another unfortunate meeting to get through today—and we might already be late.
Chapter 7
TESS
As if the morning hadn’t already been terrifying enough. Cyclodiles having their breakfast. Suspended bridges over murky rivers. Draakwings that couldn’t flyawayfrom human heads. A sneak attack by a pair of nasty bounty hunters. I had to face my uncle now?Great.
It took us a while to find him. The sanctuary was huge and not well lit except for intermittent spotlights shining down on garish relics. The constant throng of people filtering in and out of the different sections didn’t help. A tall man with broad shoulders finally caught my attention, mainly because he wasn’t shuffling along with the rest of the slow-moving crowd.
Nathaniel Bridgebane stood under a representation of the Sky Mother suspended in an alcove near the east entrance. The Great Star hovered above him, her five points forming an abstract human figure, the arms and legs outstretched and her elongated head rising from them. Several rotating rings of smaller stars orbited her in gyroscopic circles. A soft radiance emanated from somewhere within the statue and reflected off the smaller stars—Her Powers.
The alcove’s lighting threw Bridgebane into alternating patterns of brightness and shadow, making him harder to spot than he already would have been in the dimly lit temple. He also wasn’t in uniform and looked a lot like everyone else here, dressed in predominantly dark colors. My uncle wasn’t alone, which violated our deal. Then again, neither was I. Shade was with me. A black woman I didn’t recognize stood beside Bridgebane. She wasn’t in uniform, either, but I could tell she was military just from the way she held herself, alert and fighting ready.
In a low voice, I pointed them out to Shade. We veered in their direction. They hadn’t seen us yet, and Bridgebane’s hand tapped against his thigh, his posture stiff and his searching gaze impatient.
