Swooping down into the crevice, claws splayed, I pin Kori before she can run. Claws clamping around her wrists. Wings alone nearly twice her height. She likely couldn’t flee anyway, her twisted arm surely even more agonizing after her fall, but I need to be sure.
She goes stock-still beneath me, not daring to resist with my claws so close to where her gloves meet the rest of her armor. One leak in her protective gear, and the planet’s radiation will slip into her very being, impossible to revoke. One slash across her armor is a death sentence, even if I never draw blood.
“KORIIIIIII!”
I turn my head, not loosening my grip on the girl. The shriek came from her mech, whose optical processors whirl with light and … panic? Last I checked, humans—even mutated nightfolk—were the only fully sentient Pagonian beings. I don’t know how to process what looks awfully akin to fear in the simulated eyes. The mech draws its arms back, little hands curling into tiny, metal balls, and runs full force directly at me.
“ASPECT! PROTECT! KORI!” The shriek makes my ears ache, but the mech is doing a painfully weak impression of protection. It rails against me, fists beating against the thick leather of my wings, feet kicking uselessly at my ankles.
My breath plumes, stark white, in the Shadowlands’ cold. “Call off the mech,” I breathe into Kori’s throat. I wonder if she can feel the heat of my breath through her protective gear. Her eyes, the pupils just barely visible through her mask, are pools of wonder and terror.
“Or what?” The words have such venom, I imagine if she weren’t wearing a mask, she would spit defiantly on the ice.
A laugh rattles through me. “Do I really have to tell you?” I hover one claw, barely, above where Kori’s right glove meets the rest of her gear.
“If you were going to kill me,” Kori says, body limp but voice pulled taut, “you would’ve done it already.”
“You’re clever.” I slam one open hand down, claws spread, pinning the girl to the ground by her throat. With the other, I whirl and catch the mech, seizing its uneven left leg. “But I might not be so merciful to your friend.”
“Friend? They’re—it’s a mech,” Kori stammers. Her filtered voice is mechanically flattened, but the slip of phrasing betrays her fear. “It’s property. Not personal.”
“Liar.” I pull, as hard as I can. There’s a satisfying pop, a grating of metal, as the mech’s left leg lurches free of its main body. The mech collapses with a disorientedbeep.
Kori screams, the sound shaking against the press of my claws at her neck. Suddenly, she seems to remember herself. She wraps one hand around a weapon at her belt before I can process. I hadn’t noticed it before. All at once, the muzzle of a heatshot blaster presses, coldly, against my neck, even as I loom over the girl.
Even with one ruined arm, the Daylands’ princess fights back.
“Let me make myself very clear,” Kori says, every syllable deliberate. Measured. “I charged this blaster before I left the Daylands. I’ve got a full clip ready to fire, enough to leave you with burns even this frozen hellscape won’t easily cure. You can release me now, let me gather up what’s left of my mech, and we’ll be sprinting out of the Shadowlands in a blink of your nightfolk friend’s singular eye. Or I can pull this trigger.”
“And I’ll slit your armor.”
“Then I guess neither of us is leaving this place.”
A heatshot blast at my throat is no bluff. I’ve yet to take a direct hit even from a freezeshot weapon, but a blast to my shoulder in a previous combat left me reeling and staggered, one wing rigidly useless, for fartoo long. And my body has evolved to defend against cold. Nightfolk know nothing of sun, heat, burning. My rule is fresh and tenuous enough that a visible wound, a physical limitation, might be enough to dangerously bolster Azarii’s rebels.
“Does your mother know you’re here?” I ask.
“Does it matter?”
“It would be a shame if the heiress of the Daylands never even received a funeral. If the body were lost in the dark.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“You have no idea who I am.”
“Usurper.”
For an instant, I’m caught by genuine surprise. Then I remember she’s traded memories with my now-escaped subject, who must be one of Azarii’s rebels. How a nightfolk managed to sync her memory with dayfolk technology, I have no idea, but this is undeniable proof that it happened.
“Your own people hate you,” Kori growls. “Do you want to validate their fears by murdering me in cold blood?”
“I wonder what your people would think, if they knew their heiress spent her private time slithering through the shadows.”
“We all have our secrets.”
I crack a smile despite myself. “And now you’ll be mine,” I snarl, twisting to clamp my teeth around the heatshot pistol’s muzzle.
I feel the surge of awful distilled heat, like a brand against my lungs, but a fresh breath of radioactive power is already in my throat and swallows the shot. I hurl the pistol aside. It clatters to the stone ground, out of reach, and lands alongside the fallen sphere. I spit blood and ice and bits of charred flesh, retching. Both hands now around the trespasser’s throat.
