I gripped the back of the adjacent flight chair. I couldn’t bring myself to sit down and strap in, not with Talen’s offer still ringing in my ears. Allow me to serve you. If I hadn’t dug my fingers into the chair, Kellee would have noticed them trembling. The dangerous kind of anger burned like acid in my veins. It was a trick. No fae would ever serve a saru. They didn’t know how to bow to anyone but their sovereign, and even then, it was begrudgingly.
“Are you going to demand I take you back to Calicto?” Kellee asked gruffly, his attention on piloting.
He had said he wasn’t keeping me against my will. But walking back into Calicto without a plan would get me killed. One fae at the head of Arcon and another in prison? A day ago, I would have laughed at the thought. If there were two fae in Halow, there might be more. I couldn’t tackle more alone.
My knuckles had bleached white. I loosened my grip on the chair. “You took me to a fae,” I said, training my voice to hide everything boiling inside me.
“You wouldn’t have gone had I warned you.”
Why? Why had he done this? All we had learned from Talen was that a fae may deliberately build up a resistance to tek. I already knew it was possible, and now so did Kellee. But that meeting had been about more than that.
An ache throbbed through my jaw, radiating from my clenched teeth. “You wanted to see how he would react to me. You didn’t just want answers about Larsen, you wanted answers about me.”
Kellee maneuvered the shuttle backward, away from the dock. The engines grumbled, vibrating through the floor. The marshal didn’t reply. Heated tension simmered around him. It didn’t matter. He’d shown his true colors and used me.
“Sit down,” he ordered.
I ignored him.
“Sit the fuck down,” he growled. The sound raised the fine hairs on my arms. Warring instincts spiked my veins with adrenaline. He turned his head to finally look at me. Whatever he saw on my face eased some of his fury.
He sighed and faced ahead, rolling his shoulders to work out the frustration. “Would you please sit while we maneuver away from the dock? It’s safer.”
I didn’t move. “It wasn’t about getting help at all. It was about you trying to figure me out.”
“Can you blame me? You’re not fae, but you wield their magic. What am I supposed to think?”
“You were going to take me in…”
“I was,” he admitted, still working the shuttle’s controls. “Until those intruders attacked you. They would have killed us both. That’s when things got interesting. Talen’s reaction to you confirmed it.”
“Confirmed what?”
“You’re someone important to them.”
A dry, humorless laugh barked free. “No, that’s definitely not the case.”
He flinched. “Whatever he told you, don’t listen. It’s misdirection. The first prison they had him in, he turned the entire staff against one another in three weeks. Now he’s isolated—for everyone’s safety. But I guess you know exactly how to handle a fae, right?”
So do you, Marshal.
I stared ahead at the blackness we cruised through. “I know you.” Talen couldn’t know me. He had been in prison too long to know me. Maybe he hadn’t meant it literally. He knew I had his people’s magic. He knew I was saru. In his lofty fae mind, that was probably all he needed to know.
I touched my neck, expecting to find the cool touch of iron, but only found my skin, soft and warm.
“You have the power to free me from this prison.
Allow me to serve you.”
Their word bound them, and Talen’s words had been explicit. He couldn’t know me, he couldn’t know what I’d done, but he could be mine, and that was no small thing. The thought alone set my pulse racing. The times I’d dreamed of being equal among them, being loved for the right reasons, not the wrong ones. Talen couldn’t make me fae, but having him beholden to me… his power as my own, his strength coursing through my veins. To a saru, there was nothing more seductive, not even freedom.
Better to push it aside for now. Larsen was the priority.
“Did you get your answers about me, Marshal?”
He glanced over. I expected to see a triumphant smile on his face but didn’t get that at all. If anything, the lines around his mouth made him appear tired. “Some. And a whole lot more questions.”
I kept my eyes on the nothingness ahead of us. I had questions too, like how the marshal had captured a fae some three hundred years ago. “You once hunted the fae?”
“No.” His quiet dragged on for so long after his denial that when he next spoke, his soft words bore the terrible weight of their meaning. “They hunted my kind. To extinction.”
The ride back to Juno passed in silence. I left Kellee to stew in his apartment on everything he’d learned from my encounter with his prisoner and ventured into Juno proper. Curved glass revealed the station’s spine and the catwalks wrapped around it, each one like ribs around the central cavity. Walking to the edge and pressing my hands against the glass, I peered down into the station’s cavernous middle until a hot wash of vertigo forced me back.
So much glass and metal. Dots of color streamed along the transparent ribs—corridors. People. Hundreds of them. Like ants in a hill. I looked up, following the central cavity to a black dome pricked by starlight. Not ants, more like goldfish in a bowl. Juno was so vast and beautiful, typical of human tek, but so fragile. Juno was exactly the kind of place the fae despised.
Doesn’t matter. None of this matters.
Using my coat’s cloaking abilities, I spun myself an illusion to blend in, exploiting the drab colors and altering my facial features enough to fool any surveillance that got lucky and noticed me among the crowds. Arcon may not be watching this far away from Calicto, but their tek was here.
I entered an elevator and rode it down a few levels alongside fifty or so others. All were well dressed and wealthy. They chatted about nonsense. Family, work, travel. All the mundane things people shared when they came together. I listened, absorbing their accents so that when I needed to speak, I would blend in.
Kellee had told me where to find the parts I needed. He hadn’t asked what they were for, although I’d seen in his eyes that he’d wanted to. He had wanted to ask about many things. I had no intention of telling him anything he didn’t need to know. Once Larsen was dealt with, I would disappear from the marshal’s life. Better for him to always wonder about the girl with her illusions. If he knew what those illusions covered, his sense of honor would force him to act. So, I would slip away, never to be seen again, and leave the marshal to his crusade against the fae. It was the only way we would both survive.
The store Kellee had directed me to glittered with electronic components. I dulled my magic and stepped inside. Many items on display cost more than what I earned as a messenger and some also appeared to be illegally modified, but like the marshal had said, there was no law this far outside Halow’s main systems.
I collected a few items I needed and some I didn’t. Sota would appreciate a few upgrades. It’s always best to keep a drone capable of microwaving your bones to ash inside your own skin happy.
After purchasing the components, I left the store and spotted the marshal rising from a bench. How had he seen through my illusion? I ignored him and slipped into the crowd. Sure enough, his reflection in the store windows confirmed he had fallen into step behind me. I had planned to return to his place, but now I wanted to know how far the marshal’s tracking abilities went. Playing cat and mouse would have been easier with Sota, but I hadn’t always had the drone. Dusting off old skills, I picked up my pace, weaving faster through the shoppers. Once I had a good distance between us, I veered into a restaurant, asked after the washroom, and slipped inside. In seconds, I’d switched my appearance, this time draping myself in male attire. The illusion would hold as long as nobody touched me. The marshal wouldn’t spot the change without biotek.
I left the restaurant and eased into a swaggering pace—nothing like Kesh Lasota’s purposeful stride. Juno’s smooth, shiny surfaces highlighted the reflections of those around me, and so far, the marshal wasn’t among them. Good. Knowing how to give him the slip may come in useful.