CHAPTER 1
The alarm screamed through the ship and Ember jerked awake, tangled in sheets that felt like they’d been dipped in lead. Her body was sluggish and unresponsive, slow to struggle upright. The emergency klaxon pulsed red through the cabin’s darkness, painting everything in bloody strokes.
Move.
Her feet found the thick carpet just as the ship lurched, and she grabbed the edge of her bed to keep from pitching sideways. TheWind’s Whisperwas a small craft, barely more than a luxury shuttle, but right now it felt like a coffin trying to shake itself apart.
“Captain Merton?” Her tongue felt swollen, and her voice came out thick and wrong. “Anyone?”
Silence answered, broken only by the relentless wail of the alarm.
She forced herself to stand. Her reflection caught in the dark viewport—pale skin, blonde hair wild around her face, grey eyestoo wide in the red-strobed darkness. She looked like a ghost. She felt like one too, her body not quite her own.
What happened?
TheWind’s Whisperhad departed from Port Garig eighteen hours ago. A simple trip to the family’s secure vault on Tuknis, the second planet in the system, where her mother’s jewelry collection had been stored since before she was born. Her father had always wanted her to wear the pieces for her twenty-first birthday. Something to remember her mother by at the celebration next week.
Now the ship was screaming, and no one was answering, and her blood moved like syrup through her veins.
Someone drugged me.
The realization cut through the fog. She’d eaten dinner with Captain Merton, his second, and her lady in waiting—three people she’d known since childhood and trusted with her life. The food and wine had tasted perfectly normal, but she’d excused herself early, still struggling with the emotions raised by thoughts of the mother she had never known. She’d been trying on the necklace and thinking of her when a wave of fatigue had washed over her.
Have the others been drugged as well?
She stumbled towards the cabin door and managed to find the release pane. The door hissed open to reveal a corridor already filled with smoke. The acrid scent hit the back of her throat immediately. Not the clean smoke of an electrical fire, but darker and oilier. It burned her eyes and coated her lungs with each breath. Through the haze, she could see the glow of flames licking at the far end of the corridor, between her and the bridge.
“Captain Merton!” She coughed, pressing her sleeve over her mouth. “Freeman! Alma!”
Nothing.
The lack of response was worse than the alarm. Three people should be checking systems, fighting the fire, running towards her. Instead, she heard only the crackle of flames and the endless shriek of the warning klaxon.
They’re dead. They have to be dead.
The thought tried to buckle her knees. Merton had taught her to play chess when she was seven. Alma had snuck her contraband candy during the long years of her father’s dietary restrictions. Freeman had a daughter Ember’s age and showed her pictures every trip.
Grieve later. Move now.
She dropped low, where the air was marginally clearer. The corridor stretched ahead of her—ten meters of narrow passage to the bridge, where the main controls were housed. She didn’t even make it five before the heat drove her back, but it was far enough to see the bridge itself engulfed in flames. If Merton and Freeman were there, they were gone.
The fire had eaten through a junction panel on the ceiling, feeding on the ship’s internal wiring. Orange flames licked downward, spreading across the walls with unnatural speed. Someone had used an accelerant.
This was planned.
The certainty settled into her bones like ice. Someone had drugged her, killed her crew, and set her ship ablaze while she slept. Someone wanted her dead.
But they’d made a mistake. They’d underestimated the dosage, or she’d metabolized it faster than expected, or they’d simply gotten unlucky. She was still breathing.
For now.
She retreated from the flames, her mind already racing through alternatives. The bridge was inaccessible. The fire suppression system that should have been activated automatically appeared to have been disabled. She ran through the schematics of the ship in her head, and stumbled to a secondary control panel further down the corridor. Her thumbprint provided access, but the controls inside were dark and unresponsive. Hands shaking, she carefully tapped out the manual override sequence.
Access Denied. System Locked.
“No, no, no?—”
She tried her personal override code, one that should have given her access to anything controlled by Duvain Enterprises. The screen flickered once.
