“The fuck do you mean, ‘It’s never been done?’” Tilcot snarled, whirling to face her once more. “Were you, or were you not the leader of these simpering bitches?”
She took a step back. “I-I was,” she said. “But you don’t understand, sir, an empath is—”
“An incomparable asset to the empire and one I intend to utilize. One the royal family is going to want to see in action themselves.”
Blinking, the Head Priestess ignored his interruption, and said, “They’re incredibly rare. The last one was centuries before my time.” Carefully avoiding my eye, she fidgeted with the fabric swirling about her knees for a moment before continuing. “But we have to try. It’s too dangerous to leave her like this, surrounded by elites. All this energy—her symptoms will only get worse.”
“Very good,” the general said, and straightened to his full height. “Until then, Rawlings, you’re off active duty.”
Fingers growing painfully tight, the captain swallowed his protest.
I felt it. In the way his temper flared with seething contempt, the dark flames lashing out behind my ribs as if his ire were my own.
But he held his silence and crushed me to his chest.
“Have your men clean run cleanup for the mess you made,” the general added. “I want that shield in empire hands before the hour is out. Intact and still functioning, if possible. Understood?”
The captain’s chin dipped, and he said, “Yes, sir,” in a clipped tone that drew a line of gooseflesh down my spine, for I could feel what was beneath it.
Tugging at the lapels of his jacket, the general smoothed his thick hair into submission. “Collect any rebel scum you find,” he said. “We’re in need of fodder for a royal demonstration, I think.”
“Sir.”
And then, with a lazy smirk displaying a row of sharp wicked teeth, the general said, “Makes quite an impression, our wildcat, hmm?”
But the captain merely nodded, turning to exit the building with enough speed to leave me reeling in his arms. Dizzy. Clinging to him as everything around me spun and lurched. It was only when the door thumped shut behind us that he murmured, “She’smyfucking wildcat,” under his breath where only I could hear it.
7
For a moment, as I hung limp in the captain’s arms—nauseous and too weak to do more than breathe—I couldn’t make sense of the scene before me.
Sparkling green lightning crackled across the surface of uneven ground, ceaseless and beautiful, even as the scent of burning ozone singed the back of my sinuses. Seeming not to dissipate, it merely moved and jumped and crackled as if the very ground itself was too charged to absorb another drop.
Electrified.
And then I saw it.
Upturned before a massive crater in the earth, an electric blue dome shimmered in the gloomy half-light between dusk and dawn.
The rebel shield.
A glimmering beacon of the rebellion. Technology that shouldn’t be possible, but was a testament to the resilience of a people forced into exile but refused to lay down and die.
Elora and Tritan.
Thriving together—there could be no other explanation. Not with the color of that shield.
A direct contrast to the sickly green lightning that seemed not to fade, spidering across the ground beneath me. The whisper of hope, the promise that at least some of Tritan’s priestesses had managed to escape the clutches of the empire and dared to fight. To create a thing that had even General Tilcot sweating and slavering at the mere thought of possessing it.
It could only be pure priestess energy.
Similar in texture to the green arcs of elite discharge still clinging to the peaks in churned mud, broken buildings, and the wreckage that was the frontlines—the shield was a magnificent thing. A thing the captain had triednotto destroy, if the location of the crater was any sort of indication.
Intact and still functioning, and soon to be in Caledonian hands.
I swallowed, squirming in the captain’s embrace, for there, in the distance, movement.
Floundering with the gait of wounded prey, but movement nevertheless.
