Her voice flickered out, and the entire system went dark as a last final screech and groan exploded from beneath them.
Another lurch, like the ship was teetering on the edge of a cliff, followed by the sound of something cracking.
Then it all stopped, as quickly as it had begun.
Silence, pure and simple, so sudden that Dex wondered if maybe he was dead. He groaned, and tried to stand, but his legs wouldn’t hold him. His teeth were still vibrating, and his head, holy hell of all hells, felt like it was going to explode.
“Not exactly my idea of fun,” Dex said, stifling another groan.
No one answered.
Maybe he’d survived, and they were all dead.
Then, somewhere in front of him, a whimper, a rustle, the pop of a harness coming loose. Andi’s disembodied voice came from the captain’s chair. Dex’s heart leaped at the sound. “Is everyone okay?”
Gilly and Breck answered in a soft chorus as the Marauder settled to stillness around them.
“Help me with Lira,” Andi commanded. The pilot was still hunched over in her harness, the scales on her skin finally dimmed but still smoking. As if she’d been aflame moments before.
A horrible pop sounded, and then a flash of light blinded them as part of the Marauder’s metal shielding actually fell away from the viewport.
Like a piece of flaking skin.
Dex stared through the new opening. They’d stopped a mere wing’s length from a row of stone houses. People flocked outside, all of them wide-eyed, most of them looking furious as hell.
Adhira, like most capital planets, had a melting pot of citizens. But despite their dizzying array of appearances, the villagers all had the same look of hatred plastered on their faces as they glowered at the Marauder.
Dex was a little impressed. Anger and hatred were incredibly rare emotions on this peaceful planet.
He loosed a sharp exhalation as the ground trembled beneath the ship.
In the distance, beyond the row of homes, the edge of the rainforest loomed. Already, he could see the cause of the shaking earth.
A set of two monstrous, black-tusked creatures emerged from the tree line. They were ugly as sin, with scaled, rough hides and curling tusks that stretched up toward the rainforest canopy. The beasts pulled a two-story wagon double the size of the Marauder behind them. Its wooden wheels were as tall as most of the village homes, and painted on their axles was a golden spiral with a horizontal line jutting through the middle, the symbol of Adhira.
Sentinels. The queen’s personal, private guard.
The waiting crowd split like a river to allow the wagon to pass through as it headed straight for the wreckage.
Dex took it upon himself to break the silence.
“I hate to break it to you, loves,” he said, finally managing to stand up from his chair on unsteady legs.
“Then don’t,” Andi told him as she and the girls gently unstrapped the unconscious, still-steaming pilot. “Please don’t.”
Dex spoke up anyway. “We are so dead.”
Andi sighed as she looked out at the oncoming wagon. “For once, Dextro, you have no idea how right you are.”
Chapter Forty-Four
* * *
ANDROMA
THE LAST TIME Andi saw her home planet, she’d been a fourteen-year-old girl with tears in her eyes and her best friend’s blood on her hands.
By sheer mercy, she’d been able to escape her death sentence. After that, she’d made her way out into the galaxy and traveled through worlds she’d never known, unsure of who she was, where she was going or who she would have to become to survive.
The only thing certain was the whisper of death, a monster made of fear and fury that followed her no matter how far she tried to go. Many nights, Andi stayed awake, looking over her shoulder, terrified that General Cortas would send men from her planet to come and lock her away.
They’d never found her.
Instead, she’d found a bounty hunter with a lust for life and a bag full of Krevs, and he’d helped her rediscover her strength. He gave her a reason to keep going, and later, replaced that with a broken heart.
In return, she’d stolen his ship, filled it with the fiercest females in the galaxy, and together, the girls had made it their own.
The Marauder was Andi’s true home, a spear that was capable of tearing apart the skies.
Now it was a junker. Her pilot, who had succumbed to the exhaustion of her emotions, was still unconscious. The medics had injected her with adrenaline when they disembarked from the ship, but Lira had yet to wake.
And Andi was pissed.
She sat on the upper deck of an Adhiran transport wagon, the strange, tumbling roll of the massive wheels below her churning her stomach into a state of unease. The animals stank like dung, to no one’s surprise, what with the person-size piles of it they left behind.
And Andi’s ship, her blessed, beautiful Marauder, was currently being dragged behind the wagon, balancing precariously on a wooden sled of sorts.
One of the beasts dropped another pile of steaming, stinking dung.
The Marauder’s sled slipped right over it with a squelch that splattered green on a ruined viewport.
Andi had to look away.
“Is it dead forever?” Gilly asked, wide eyed. She sat across from Andi on the wooden floorboards of the wagon, waving her hand as winged bugs the size of her fists fluttered around her, flashing different colors each time they dodged her swings.
“Not entirely,” Breck said, staring past Gilly at the Marauder’s sad, corpse-like form. “It just needs a little love.”
Valen, still unconscious, was with Alfie, wrapped in a clean moss blanket on the lower deck of the wagon. Dex, blessedly, was up at the front, chatting happily to the Sentinels as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Andi had a feeling that if she heard him speak right now, she’d rip his throat out with her nails. She still hadn’t sorted through her feelings since their fight in her quarters. But right now, allowing her anger to overwhelm her was easier. To even consider forgiveness, to consider anything when her ship was so destroyed...Andi couldn’t fathom it.
“We can fix the ship,” Lira said in a weary voice.
Andi turned to her, surprised, and glad to see that their pilot had finally awoken.
“Are you alright?” Andi asked.
“I feel terrible, but I’ll survive,” Lira replied, sitting up and glancing back at the Marauder. “The repairs will set us back a few days, but Adhiran ship workers are capable of getting us back in the air.” She sighed. “And connections, of course. I’m in for a world of trouble.”
“That you are, Lira,” Breck spoke up. “But don’t worry. We’ll be there to pick up the pieces.”