Someone else came into focus then, leaning over me: a man with close-cropped dark hair, a clean face, and a dark blue lab coat over a sleek black suit. Other than the lab coat, he could have just come from the ball. His silver-gray eyes reminded me of scalpels. They were already cutting into me.
“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Captain Qole Uvgamut,” Rubion Dracorte said in a too-smooth voice. “I apologize for your treatment. I didn’t mean for this to happen. You and I were supposed to meet for testing tomorrow, and those tests wouldn’t have involved any of…this.” He glanced down at my restraints with a regretful expression. Still, his eyes were curious, eager. “Your guards panicked. Really, I regret it, and I hope you’ll let me make amends.”
His eyes didn’t linger on me as he said this but glanced somewhere above.
A strangled, terrified laugh escaped me. “Amends? Should have thought of that before you strapped me down.” I sounded drunk, but I couldn’t make my words any clearer.
“This doesn’t have to be uncomfortable.” Again, Rubion glanced over the top of me. I tried to turn my head in that direction, but, at his nod, bright lights blinded me. All I could see was him, looming over me on a background of glaring white.
I flinched and squinted, my fear spiking. My heart felt like it was trying to leap out of my chest and run, like I couldn’t. “This isn’t comfortable.”
“We’ll find you better accommodations soon. In the meantime, how about we get rid of these?”
To my surprise, my arms and legs suddenly came free, and a pair of hands found my bare shoulders, helping me to sit up. For a second, I was so relieved I almost didn’t care that they were Rubion’s.
I didn’t trust my legs to stand. I perched unsteadily at the edge of the table, bracing myself to hold my body upright. The lights were behind me now, and Rubion looked a little less threatening without the glare surrounding him.
He rested a hand on my arm. “There’s no need to be afraid. Like I said, this was all unintentional.”
I shrugged off his hand and tossed my head at the ringing lights, the lab. A wave of dizziness swept over me at the sudden movement, so I squeezed my eyes closed and said through a clenched jaw, “What’s with the setup, then? You accidentally have a place like this? Looks pretty intentional to me.”
“This lab is used for our research, yes, but you were never meant to be here. As for the lights, I prefer to meet your eyes while we talk.” He tapped my chin to get me to look at him again, smiling apologetically. “I’m sure you understand.”
He wanted to make sure he didn’t see any Shadow there. He wanted me defenseless. “Oh, so you want to talk before the knives come out. How civil.”
“My aim is not to hurt you, I promise.”
“Right.” I let out another choked laugh. “You’re just like the other royals. You Dracortes like to pretend you’re not, but you’re the same as everyone else.”
“No, we’re far beyond everyone else,” Rubion said, pulling away only to lean next to me against the edge of the table. I wished I could scoot away. “Our research has far surpassed the Treznor-Nirmanas’.”
I hadn’t meant the research, exactly. He must have been deliberately misinterpreting me. Either that, or he was crazy.
“They still imagine it’s possible to beat us,” he continued, “but we’ve simply been feeding their spies false information, with just enough truth to keep them occupied. Unbeknownst to them, we’ve had the formula to bind Shadow as a more stable, organic form of fuel for some time now. The grand reveal tomorrow will be real, of course, but serves double duty as prelude to something else.”
I shook my head, my thoughts stumbling to keep up. “If you already have what you need…why do you need me?”
He smiled in a genuine way that I found more frightening than his eyes. “Don’t you know? You have a Shadow affinity like nothing anyone has ever seen. You have abilities that could be far more valuable than anything to do with fuel.”
I leaned away from him even at the risk of toppling over. “That’s exactly what the Treznor-Nirmanas thought.” It didn’t matter that Rubion had let me up from the table and wasn’t exactly coming at me with knives; I wasn’t close to reassured.
“They think that because we thought of it first. Again, we’re much farther in our research than they’ve guessed. Of course, we’ve already been testing others with milder affinities,” he clarified, as if I’d asked, “from other nigh-uninhabitable planets near smaller Shadow harvesting areas. They’ve taken us far, but not as far as we need. Either the levels of Shadow in their systems were too low, or they were mad already, rendering them less optimal subjects. But your family line has undergone more generations of Shadow exposure than anyone else’s we’ve yet found, and you’re still alive for our tests to analyze—for a while yet, we hope. Your kin go mad and die early, yes?” He paused, as if actually waiting for an answer. When my mouth only dropped open and nothing came out, he continued. “All the more reason for haste. We hope to learn as much from you as we can.”
“But…I don’t understand.” I shook my head again, trying to clear the fog still in my brain, the blinding light, the rising panic. It didn’t work. “Even if you want to study me for something other than fuel, there was no reason to bring me here before the conference. For the ball.”
“The timing is distinctly beneficial, though not crucial for our experimentation as I led Nevarian to believe. It’s more for…how shall I say…the presentation. Our adaptation of Shadow into a mass-market energy source is already enough to keep our family afloat and to satisfy our investors and the public when announced tomorrow. But we needed an edge, a deathblow to our competition. The Treznor-Nirmanas needed to comprehend what we were doing so that they, and everyone else, understood our triumph. We let slip enough for them to grasp your importance, once Nevarian found you.”
Rubion was the reason the destroyer had come after us. He hadn’t only put his nephew in danger, he’d orchestrated the danger.
He rubbed his chin almost ruefully. “We let slip too much because they acted faster than anticipated, and it nearly cost us you. But, no matter, what’s done is done, and our victory will be all the more triumphant for it. Tomorrow, amid the celebration of our revolutionary new fuel, I’ll plant the news in a few choice ears that we’ll shortly have the capability to engineer superhumans. Now that they know we have you, and have even seen you with us, on shining display”—he tugged at the skirt of my gown almost playfully—“they’ll have no doubt. It was brilliant to bring you to the ball, actually. Nevarian has been so useful in this and many other things. Thelarus didn’t believe he was up to the task, but with a bit of misdirection, my nephew can be quite capable. I would thank him, but…” He shrugged that graceful, nonchalant Dracorte shrug. “It’s just a pity he couldn’t have kept you at the ball.”