Thea

“Okay, but if you had to choose, like if somebody put a gun to your head and made you do it.”

I was leaning back in what I understood was the co-pilot’s chair with my feet up, while expertly aiming a finger gun at the side of Daelin’s head.

“I could hardly imagine somebody would threaten to kill me because they wanted me to marry one of the demon princes.”

“And fuck one and kill one. It’s just how the game works, you have to choose.” I started counting them off on my fingers. “I’d fuck Oraz, because intelligence is sexy. Kill Tenebris because she’s terrifying, and I’d marry Orrid so that I could send Malvoch to his room without dinner.”

I held out three fingers and smiled towards Daelin.

“See, it’s easy. You just have to think about it a bit.”

Daelin played with the well-groomed hair on his chin and made a face like he was deep in thought.

“Okay, how about this? I would kill—”

Both of us stopped and looked towards the elevator as we felt Bryce’s shields drop.

I immediately got out of the chair and stomped out of the shuttle.

“Salinthea, you don’t think that something happened to Bryce, do you?” Daelin followed me into the main hangar area.

“Yeah, I do.” I stopped walking and clinched my jaw shut, letting Daelin walk past me. He walked about half a meter before freezing and spoke without turning towards me.

“What was she doi—” Daelin stopped speaking to hold the hole in his neck, and I lowered my right arm as blood dripped from my sharpened nails.

The elevator arrived around the time that Daelin’s body fell into a heap. Bryce stopped a short distance away.

“Thank you, Thea.”

“Don’t mention it.” I mumbled the words, but Bryce must have heard me because she nodded in response and turned towards the pile of crates. I followed her while she started sorting through the boxes.

“You were sure, right?”

“I was. Daelin had been the one to poison me, and from the logs it seemed like he had continued to poison me while I was unconscious.”

“Wait, while I was in the room? Wow, fuck that guy.”

Bryce continued to dig through the crates until she pulled out a box about the size of my head.

“He was afraid of you. He kept refusing to kill me directly because you were in the room.”

Okay, that made me feel better than it probably should have. Daelin was an old human man, of course he was afraid of me.

Not to mention he saw firsthand what I could do to that massive door. He would’ve been an idiot if that didn’t scare him. Hells, it would have scared me, and I was basically fireproof.

“I mean, I wasn’t there the whole time. I went to the kitchen once or twice. Speaking of which, you really need to either learn to cook or hire a chef or do something. All you had was a bunch of bars that tasted like shit.”

“I’m not sure why he didn’t just kill me while you were gone. The logs didn’t say, but he probably thought that if you came back and my throat had been slit, you’d kill him.”

I mean, that wasn’t wrong. If Daelin had killed Bryce, even if by accident, I probably would’ve killed him on principle.

I had plans for the elf, and her being dead wouldn’t work for me.

“Maybe. Guess we’ll never know how I would’ve reacted.”

Bryce just shook her head and carried her box to the elevator. I followed, because what the fuck else was I going to do?

“So, what are we doing?” I asked.

“I’m going to use this to blow up the station.”

“Oh. Uh, cool.” I responded intelligently.

There was a half breath of awkward silence before we arrived on the fifth floor and disembarked.

We were standing in front of the experiment chamber and Bryce was just staring at the melted door, while holding what I imagined was a very destructive bomb.

I poked her in the ribs and she let out a squeak before dropping the box containing the aforementioned station-destroying bomb.

I couldn’t really appreciate the cute noise because I was busy diving to catch the damn thing. Thankfully, I caught it and saved both of our lives.

The look on her face made the whole thing so incredibly worth it. Her eyes were open nearly as wide as her mouth, and I could see the heat pooling in her cheeks and ears.

“Thea, what in the nine hells? Don’t do that!”

I smiled up at her. “It’s okay, I got it. We didn’t explode.”

“It’s not a bomb. It’s an empty mana gem, a rather large one. There’s no risk in it exploding unless I were to overfill it with a massive amount of mana.”

I opened the lid to peer inside. Sure enough, there was a dull opal that took up nearly the entire box.

“How about that?” I handed the box back to Bryce. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to overfill it with a massive amount of mana.” I instantly regretted handing the box back to her.

I wanted to object, but honestly, I wasn't even sure how to at that point. Instead, I followed her and positioned myself by the door. To guard it, definitely not to run away at the earliest sign of an explosion.

Bryce gently set the gem in the center of the chamber and created a massive spell formation.

It took ages for Bryce to finish casting, and by the end of it; she was sweating and barely able to stand. I rushed over and helped steady her.

“Are you okay?”

Bryce somehow made nodding look difficult. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she lied. “I probably shouldn’t be casting right now.”

“What was that spell?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

I could feel energy being drawn towards the center of the room. A faint blue light encircled the mana gem and I could already see it glowing with power.

“It’s a mana engine spell I developed about thirty years back. It'll gather mana from the surrounding area and store it in the gem.”

“Neat.”

Bryce laughed. “Yeah, neat. It should destroy the station sometime tomorrow night. Let’s get out of here. I think I can unlock the hangar without ending the lockdown, which should lend more credibility to the idea of an accidental explosion.”

I helped Bryce into the elevator, and we rode it back to the hangar on the second level.

“Hold on a second.” Bryce stopped near Daelin’s corpse and started rummaging through his pockets.

“Not much point in looking,” I said. “I already won all of his money in a card game.”

“He probably let you win.” She kept rummaging.

“No fucking way, it was all skill.”

He probably had let me win, but it’s not like it mattered. I’d been cheating, anyway.

Bryce pocketed something and continued onto the shuttle. I gave the old man a kick in the kidney before following in after her.

“Strap in. We’re going to want to loop around the planet and come in from the opposite direction. I don’t want people to see Daelin’s shuttle leaving the station.” Bryce took the pilot’s seat, and I grabbed the co-pilot’s.

The seatbelt was a little complicated, but I managed it before we lifted off.

Bryce plugged some numbers into the console before pushing the control stick away and leaning back in the chair, content to let the shuttle do the flying.

“You doing okay, princess?”

Bryce laughed, but it wasn’t a fun laugh. “It’s been a long day and now you’re the only person I have left. Not that I’m complaining. If you’re only going to have one friend, it might as well be a powerful demon.”

It seemed like the gravity of the situation was finally setting in for her. It made sense; she hadn’t really had a chance to breathe before now.

“I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that the people who poisoned, tortured, and tried to kill you were never really your friends.” It wasn’t the most revelational thing I’d ever said, but I continued anyway. “Dealing with betrayal is never easy, and it’s always going to hurt, but the alternative is giving up on trusting people. I’ve seen that happen enough times to know that it’s the quickest way to a very sad and lonely life. Definitely not worth it. Oh, also I’m a devil, not a demon.”

Bryce sat up in her chair and turned towards me. “Okay, if you’re going to keep insisting that you’re a devil and not a demon, then you’re going to need to explain the difference to me.”

She was definitely focusing on the wrong thing, but I let it slide. If she wanted to change the subject, then I’d let her change the subject.

“Demons are born, whereas devils are created as celestials before moving to the lower planes, because they fell or got orphaned. It’s actually a pretty important distinction. Most demons won’t give two shits, but if you misidentify a devil like that, we care, and I care less than others. Most would sooner kill you than correct you.”

Bryce processed what I had said before responding. “I hadn’t realized that it was so important. I’ll remember that in the future.”

I shrugged. It really wasn’t that big of a deal. Some of my best friends were demons, so I didn’t find it all that insulting.

Okay, it was a little insulting. I had spent nearly a century living as a celestial and calling me a demon felt a little invalidating.

“It’s fine. Really, I just didn’t want you to go pissing off another devil because you got used to calling me a demon.”

Bryce hesitated for a moment, but after a little urging, she asked her question.

“You said devils could either be fallen or orphaned. If it’s not insensitive to ask, which were you?”

The question took me by surprise, but not because it was offensive. I just hadn’t thought about it in a long time.

“First one, then the other, and I don’t mind answering, but that’s not really a question you should ask a devil. Most are pretty sensitive about it.”

“But you’re not?”

I shook my head. “Nah, I’m not. Fallen is a bit of an all-encompassing term and my leaving was pretty amicable. Plus, it made the whole orphaned part easier. Don’t get me wrong, I was upset when dad died, but it didn’t break me like it did some of my siblings.”

When Dad died, I had cried and holed myself up for nearly a decade, but that was nothing compared to the ones still connected to him. Aris had undergone a complete aspect shift. It had gotten so bad that the local lords in Tartarus had put out a substantial bounty for his death.

When you’ve been so evil that demon lords tire of your shit, that’s how you know you’ve fucked up.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

I waved off Bryce’s apology. “What about you? What’d you do before killing a solar system?”

She flinched at that, and I instantly regretted my choice of words. I had just wanted to change the topic, but like an idiot, I chose the worst way to do it.

“I was an academic. The sole arcane magic professor at the most prestigious school in the quadrant.”

“If it’s so prestigious, why was there only one magic professor?”

“I was the only arcane professor. Techno-magic, ritual magic, and sorcery are all far more common. Arcane magic requires casting, which means memorizing formations and maintaining concentration for the entire duration of the spell. It takes a lot of time and study in order to rival the other schools. Even then it can be a gamble on whether you’ll be able to expand your personal mana pool to a level that it’s even practical.”

I barely understood any of that. Devils and demons were both natural casters. I had never met anybody who used magic the way Bryce did. I was getting the feeling that she was pretty unique in that regard.

“Apparently somebody thought that your kind of magic was practical, since they recruited you.”

Bryce scoffed at that. “Yeah, ‘recruited me.’ What a joke. I had to fight for my position every year and they still kept cutting my funding. Towards the end, it got to where they wouldn’t even give me a classroom. I had to teach from one of the extra storage rooms in the basement. Honestly, I was really enjoying working as an executive. At least I didn’t have to fight for every dime that the colony needed.”

That last part confused me. She was talking like she wouldn’t keep her job, but I thought that was why she was blowing up the station. I asked her about it.

“That was before I found out Daelin was the one who tried to kill me.” She must have recognized my confusion, because she explained further. “It’s complicated, but a part of my agreement with EVI Corp was that they would keep me safe and my identity a secret. Daelin made me realize I can’t trust them to do that.”

I thought I understood. “Okay, so you’re going to use the station to fake your death and then just sneak off on the next flight out of town?”

Bryce made a wishy-washy motion with her hand. “Sort of, but it’s not that easy. I don’t want to risk getting recognized on public transport and New Eden is a corporate colony, which means nearly everything and everyone on it is owned by the corporation. So, we can’t just jump on any ship and fly out of here. We’re going to need a privately owned ship with a navigator we can trust.”

That made a kind of sense and I could appreciate caution when you’re being hunted by somebody more powerful than you. Gods knew, I’d been in a similar position more than a few times. But why did we need a navigator? Wouldn’t adding more people to the equation just increase the risk of us being caught?

I asked Bryce, and she went into full teacher mode. I had to admit, it was kind of sexy. All she was missing was a pair of glasses and a ruler.

“Ideally, we wouldn’t need a navigator, but we can’t stay in this system and in order to travel to another, we’ll need to go through the Aether. So, we need a ship with a functioning Aether drive and a navigator who is attuned to it. Besides, I’m a decent enough pilot, but nothing compared to a navigator with a properly attuned ship.”

“Okay, so where do we buy a ship when the corporations own everything?”

We must have been getting close to the colony because Bryce took control of the shuttle and we descended.

“There’s only one person who I can be sure has no corporate attachments, and that’s Teolix. He’s the de facto leader of New Eden’s underground, and he also happens to be a red dragon.”

Immediately, I wondered if my newly empowered fire spells could burn through a red dragon’s scales. They were supposed to be fireproof, but Bryce had said that the experiment chamber door was pretty much indestructible. I bet I could probably kill a red dragon.

“Any idea how old he is?” I asked. “If he’s young enough, then we might be able to just threaten him into making a deal.”

Bryce shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve heard that he’s pretty powerful, but what does that mean? I’ve never heard anybody call a dragon weak and I know that he’s not the head of whatever organization he belongs to, so he can't be all that powerful.”

That surprised me, and I narrowed my eyes at Bryce. “How do you not know what organization he belongs to? Isn’t this your colony? Shouldn’t you at least know who you’re taking bribes from?”

Bryce laughed. “I wasn’t taking bribes from him. It was easier to just work together to maintain control over the colony. He was surprisingly easy to work with, for a dragon, and as long as we didn’t step on any toes, he kept the violent criminals in line.”

The city skyline spread out in front of us. The colony was sprawling and made from a combination of prefabricated structures and more permanent buildings. There were even a few respectably sized high-rises towards the center.

“That means we need to go into a meeting with a crime lord of unknown power, who also happens to be a fucking dragon, and buy a ship that we desperately need, with no leverage at all?”

“Well, you do have a sword.”

I could only really smile at that. Because, well, I did have a sword.