Consciousness returned to Subhas in fits and starts – flashes of light followed by comforting darkness. By the time he had regained some awareness of himself and his surroundings, he had no idea how long it had been since he’d last been in his senses. Light and sound filtered through next, worsening his headache. Which made him realise that he had a headache in the first place. A concussion, he suspected.

With some effort, he peeled his eyes open, raising a hand to shield them against the sudden onslaught of electric light. The world was one huge, blurry splotch. The sounds came next – wood and metal shattering, concrete cracking. Had he not been a Hunter for a solid twenty years of his life, he might have wondered if he had been abandoned in the middle of an earthquake.

But whatever was happening now, he was pretty sure it wasn’t nature’s doing.

Rubbing a hand over his face – every movement a small agony – Subhas blinked, trying to force his eyes to focus.

The first thing he saw was Ruban, standing pressed against the jagged edges of a broken wall. Chin out, back straight, he stood like defiance personified, but Subhas thought he saw something like fear in the boy’s eyes.

Following that gaze, his eyes landed on Tauheen. She floated a few feet above Ruban, inches away from the wall herself. One hand held out in front, her fingers were enveloped by the distinctive luminescence of a half-formed energy-shell. She was preparing to attack.

Another Aeriel stood behind Tauheen, its hand held out in a way that reflected her own posture. Its sterling wings all but enveloped it, denying Subhas a clear view of its face. It too looked like it was about to attack, though he couldn’t be sure who the intended target was.

As Subhas watched, the shell coalesced and solidified around Tauheen’s fingers, the unearthly light intensifying. The other Aeriel was not as fast, or perhaps it had started late. Its shell wouldn’t be ready for a few seconds after Tauheen’s had detonated.

All of this Subhas knew with a single fleeting glance at the scene before him. It was like his mind had floated back to his days as an active field agent. A real Hunter. Or perhaps that’s what he had always been, really. Subhas had often felt that that was what he truly was – a foot-soldier playing at kingship.

He still remembered his last Hunt. It was the biggest he had ever been a part of, one of the most significant campaigns of the time. He had lost two of his team, but they had managed to fell their quarry. They had captured Reivaa.

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They had wanted to kill her, he remembered. She had been accused of a terrorist attack on the Zainian border – a fire that had killed over a hundred people. They’d been right, he saw that now. They should have killed her, auctioned her feathers to compensate the families of the victims.

But he had been young, zealous. Had wanted to do things by the book, to do them right. There had been some confusion over the evidence, and he had stayed the execution to clear it up. Reivaa had escaped.

Two days later, Misri was dead.

He had known, even then, that it wasn’t an accident that killed her. But he had been delirious, half mad with grief and pain unlike anything he had ever felt before. He had wanted to die, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that to Hiya. She was barely a year old when she lost her mother. He couldn’t bring himself to leave her behind, an orphan.

And so he had put the gun away.

And then, she’d come to him. Tauheen.

She told him that Safaa had killed his wife. In retaliation for letting Reivaa escape. To get her hands on the formula Misri had been working on. He didn’t even remember anymore. He didn’t think he had remembered then.

He knew now what he had done. Finally, he saw his life with a clarity that had eluded him for so many years. He had been drowning, dying, and he had clutched, desperately, at the first lifeline that had been thrown at him. The first thing that had given him a sense of purpose; that had given his existence some semblance of meaning, after he lost the one thing he loved more than anything else on earth.

He had believed Tauheen not because she had been telling the truth, but because he had needed a purpose. A reason to live. A reason to justify his continued existence to himself, and to the ghost of Misri that haunted him every waking second. And revenge was as good a reason as any.

Something wet streaked down the sides of his face and he gasped. It hurt. He must have cracked a rib when he crashed against the wall. The pain was almost a relief, a distraction.

A distraction from the memory of all that he had lost.

Because it wasn’t just the love of his life that he had lost when Misri died. He had lost himself. The man he had been. The man she had loved.

He had lost his humanity, and he didn’t think there was anything left to find anymore.

What happened next wasn’t so much a decision as a reflex. Ruban was his nephew, his blood. His family. The son of the brother who had practically raised him. The brother he had betrayed, killed, because of his own weakness.

He should have loved Ruban like a son, protected and nurtured him. Instead he had orphaned him, taken everything from him. And then used him, remorselessly, for his own ends.

Subhas wasn’t naïve enough to think that there was any forgiveness to be had, any redemption. But for once, it wasn’t about him. It was about the duty he had neglected all these years. That he should have fulfilled years ago.

Gathering every last fragment of strength that was in him, he dragged himself to his feet and darted across the hall to Ruban, pushing him out of the way less than a second before Tauheen’s shell hit the already wreaked wall, blowing it out of existence.