This is what keeps you alive. You breathe in the stale, bloodstained air—the smell of iron and sweat—and you press down with even pressure on her wound as you listen to her shallow breaths. You can already see the fever in her glazed eyes and flushed face. It doesn’t matter if you can’t actually smell the infection yet.
There were moments when all anyone could think about was the blood on their hands, their fallen team members—something not quite family but beyond mere friends—and their own willingness to go bloody themselves again.
The girl’s golden brown skin was coated in blood. It had splattered across her arms, her heathered green tank top and trousers, and the military boots she wore.
Her grey eyes were grim, her mouth a straight slash, but she seemed to catalogue the bodies surrounding her with mechanical detachment. The troop captain stared at her in horror. He’d been sent to extract a thirteen-year-old girl—not this.
She shrugged her shoulders, and something silver and shimmery poured out of her skin, covering her before flowing across the pile of bodies. It vanished, and with it, the dead and the blood.
She told herself she absolutely, one hundred percent did not have a crush on her father’s best friend. Absolutely not at all.
He was only the most good-looking man she’d ever seen and had ignored her existence for her entire life and was the best fighter in the Guard, possibly even better than her father and he was legendary, and watching the two of them laugh and train together with spears and total mastery totally did not make her mouth go dry and make her wonder why boys her age didn’t look like that.
It wasn’t right.
She watched anyway.
There’s nothing wrong with babies. Skylight likes them. When they aren’t hers and no one’s asking her when she’s going to produce one.
Her brother’s small daughter is sleeping in her arms, and Skylight’s busily going over reports for things her mother really doesn’t want to know the details of, whether or not she realizes it, when her brother walks in and pushes his glasses up to get a better look.
“You have a way with her.” He smiles. “You ever—?”
“No.” She doesn’t let him finish. She loves her husband, but they agree. They are not having kids.
Joenna Janine Browning stood in front of a viewscreen staring at her five-year-old son. He was bound at the wrists humanely—small consolations—his whole body hunched over as he cried and railed in words that meant less than the intensity of the pain behind them.
“He’ll be a legend, Janenna.” The father’s voice practically glowed.
He had done this to their son. He had delivered him to the Projects without warning or consultation.
Janenna had heard of the Projects, decided not to volunteer herself as a potential supersoldier, never dreamed they were taking children.
She turned to her husband, soon to be ex. “One day, I will kill you for this.”
Skylight was unusually warm when she woke up. She noted that Math’s arms had wound snugly around her sometime in the night.
They were undercover. This was an act. At least outside their closed door it was.
She didn’t bother to wake him before kissing him gently, trusting his instincts to be sensitive to the unusual.
It was a safe bet. He woke immediately, hand coming up to brace her. “Skylight?”
She drew back sharply at that, eyebrow raised. “Clearly, you need practice.” He shouldn’t have said her name.
“I guess I do.”
She leaned down to kiss him again.
Who do you think I am? the daughter of pain
Once upon a time I knew my name
You think I am the monster in the night
And never asked who taught me how to fight (more…)
“Sometimes I miss it,” the woman said softly.
She was short and blonde. The man beside her was dark, tall, and quiet. About ten feet away, a rock wall stood roughly ten feet tall and ran nearly the length of the park.
On paper, she was Cate and he was Jason. Standing there remembering, she was Shield and he was Quake.
He stretched out his hand. The ground trembled but didn’t break.
She lifted her hand, then dropped it without releasing her power. This wasn’t their wall where they had trained as children. It couldn’t handle them.
“Sometimes.” She shrugged.
Word came at dawn of the newly outfitted military station in Westerfields, that vast uninhabited territory between Glaston and Edyll, both kingdoms cities. A quick reconnaissance by interested parties (read: operatives) identified standard and, to them, quite familiar signs of Thorn Republic activity. Once upon a time, those operatives had been the source of those signs, and they knew their own, besides any other departments Thorn might tap to do their dirty work.
Shift promised him pain when she took him in, promised him her protection, but also promised that it would change everything he was. She hadn’t mentioned nearly putting a knife in him and showing him she could break his neck with her bare hands. Justus was bone-weary by the time he left the training courts and stepped into the shower in his private quarters.