I was faster than Basra this time. I flicked my fingers in his direction, and then the man was crawling in purple fire. He opened his mouth to scream, but the flames dove in before he could make a sound. His eyes fell away first, then the rest of him, until all that remained was black dust and silence.
“So that’s what happened to all the others,” Basra remarked without feeling, and then stepped over the man he’d killed.
No, woman. Her blank eyes stared at the ceiling as if in surprise. I wasn’t sure why I was surprised, other than the fact that most of the troops we had faced had been men.
The walls shifted around me again, and I leaned against one of them, trying to get my breathing under control. “That was a woman,” I said, mostly just to hear my own voice and make sure it was still there—that I wasn’t dissolving in Shadow like the man had.
“All the same to me,” Basra said, only pausing a moment while I regained my feet, and then he continued down the new stretch of hallway.
We had less time before the guards found us this time. Either they had heard the rifle shot, or they were responding to the much greater commotion far behind us. We hadn’t been too subtle with our entrance, after all. Five of them raced around the next corner.
“Down!” I shouted, seizing Basra’s collar and dragging him to the ground as energy blasts went zinging over our heads, crackling in the air and raising the hairs on the back of my neck.
I put out my other hand to brace my fall. One second, it was just my skin against the stone floor. The next, purple fire rippled around my fingertips and lanced down the hall. There were screams this time, and even Basra flinched at the sight of the inferno at the other end.
But when we passed the very spot a moment later, he stepped over a single charred boot and the fragile remains of a charcoal rib cage—all that was left of the five—just like he had the other guard, with his eyes straight ahead. Nor did he flinch away from me when I stumbled and caught his arm to steady myself. I distantly appreciated it.
There wasn’t much else he could do to help me, though, since the floor was shifting and splitting under my feet. Basra didn’t seem to be having problems with it, so it was obviously all in my head.
“How are you holding up?” he murmured.
“Not…well,” I gasped. “I’m hallucinating. I don’t know how much more I have in me.”
His cool, slender hand found my cheek, bringing my gaze to his. “Just a little bit farther, Captain. You can do it. I know you can.” His eyes were filled with so much warmth, suddenly, with belief in me. The gesture felt motherly.
I swallowed and nodded. “He’s close.” I took a shaky step away from him, and even closed my eyes. Behind my lids, I could see other shapes in the darkness, instead of only feeling them. The collection of light that was Arjan was only another few hallways down. But it was odd; there was interference, and not just from what remained of the citadel’s huge caches of Shadow. There were other lights, frameworks, like Arjan’s. They were weaker, but I could sense them.
I leaned up against a thick metal door that hid one of them. “Basra, I think there’s someone…someone like me and Arjan in here.”
“We’ll free them on the way back, if we can,” he said with barely a glance. “Save your strength. Arjan needs it.”
With a grimace, I straightened. He was right.
When we came to Arjan’s hallway, I stopped Basra with a hand. I didn’t recognize any other aspect of it; it looked the same as all the others. They’d moved him from wherever the both of us had been held before. These rooms were still intact.
“He’s…he’s here,” I whispered, without getting too close to Arjan in my mind. I didn’t want his pain to affect me. I needed to focus.
“Any guards?”
I squeezed my lids tighter shut. “I can’t tell. I can only see others like me. I would have to reach out with Shadow, use it as my eyes, and leave my body…and I don’t know if I’d be able to find my way back to myself if I did.”
Basra lifted his photon rifle. “Let’s try the standard approach, then.” Before I could stop him, he leaned into a crouch, aimed around the corner, and fired two rounds. There were shouts, and he pulled back, flattening himself against the wall. “Five outside the room—four now. I missed one.”
Several crackling shots, accompanied by the squeak of boots over the floor, answered his volley. They were coming.
This was it. I had to do this. I shoved Basra behind me and, acting on instinct, lifted my arms. A stream of fire rose between my hands, then flared into a wall that I sent ahead of me as I stepped around the corner.
Energy shots rippled against the flaming barrier like they were extinguishing themselves in strange, purple liquid. Then the wall of fire began to hit the bodies. Agonized faces shone through like specters—teeth here, flaring nostrils there, wide holes where eyes had been—before they vanished. When the flames dropped, we were alone in the blackened, smoking hallway.
Basra only coughed and wiped his watering eyes on a sleeve. I doubted he was crying over anything other than smoke irritation. My knees threatened to buckle.
“Think you can manage the door?” he asked.
We were close, so close. I could manage.
But it wasn’t as fast as I would have liked. The flames didn’t come as quickly when I reached for them, and for a moment, the line of fire flickered and almost winked out as I staggered. The door eventually caved in, a glowing, molten outline around it. Still, it took long enough that whoever was behind it was able to prepare themselves.
Rubion Dracorte II stood behind a table, from which he’d dragged Arjan. My brother was barely standing, still hooked up with needles and tubes to whatever equipment they were using to monitor him—only his restraints appeared to have been hurriedly removed. His one eye rolled in his head.
Basra made a strangled sound next to me, but I couldn’t turn from Arjan.
The sight of him still took my breath away, even though he didn’t look much worse than when I’d last seen him. I’d been drugged and half delirious then. Even if I was half delirious now, his wounds were perfectly clear, sharp enough to feel like cuts in my own skin. I actually saw my skin peeling away, but I didn’t think anyone else could.
“Arjan,” I rasped.
Rubion held a plasma pistol up to Arjan’s head. “We don’t have to do this, Miss Uvgamut.”
“Oh, we do,” Basra murmured, sighting Rubion through the doorway along his own rifle. “And she’s not the only one you have to worry about.” He took a step toward the doorway.
“And I’m not the only one you have to worry about,” Rubion rejoined.
Basra barely dodged the Disruption Blade that came singing along the other side of the door. I realized it hadn’t quite missed him when I saw red begin to seep along his sleeve. A little slower, and he would have lost an arm. He would have lost his head too, if I hadn’t engulfed the Bladeguard in flames.