Sora

“How is she?” I asked Ithnaa after she appeared across from me.

“I can’t find the token that I gave Bryce. Which means it was probably destroyed.”

I nodded as I handed her the nearly empty tequila bottle. “I thought it would be something like that, but you didn’t really answer my question. How's Thea feeling?”

“Definitely not better than before, and still a terrible liar, but…” She finished the tequila as she trailed off. “I don’t actually have a ‘but’ here. It just felt like I should add one.”

“Well, I appreciate the effort.” I chuckled at her before remembering what it was we were talking about. “I’ll check on Thea when we get back. Although you might end up having to cook for the next few days.”

“And by that you mean…” She raised an eyebrow at me and I laughed.

“Pick us up something from somewhere nice, and preferably far away. Everything is absurdly expensive here.”

“Now, that I can do.” She let out a relieved breath before suddenly looking embarrassed. “But I might need to borrow a few credits first.”

“Wait, seriously?” I sat up with way too much excitement. “Ithnaa, the Slayer, needs to borrow cash from little old me?”

“You’re not going to make this easy on me, are you?”

“Absolutely not.” I gave her a wide, toothy grin. “I’ll be extracting quite the price for each and every credit.”

“You know I don’t actually need to eat, right?” She pouted, which just made my grin widen. “I could just sit around and watch you three starve.”

“Yeah, but you won’t do that, will you?”

“No, I won’t, but Sora, I need support here. Not a sexy power tripping paladin.” Her pouting turned to pleading, and I nodded as I leaned back into the booth.

“Right, sorry. Anything you need. Of course.”

“Thank you, and I don’t need much. I just never really had a chance to get back on my feet financially after everything that happened.”

“Hold on, you told me that you didn’t need credits when we first met. In fact, you said credits didn’t mean anything to a ‘person in your position.’”

“I don’t think I said that…” She looked away sheepishly.

“Oh, no, you definitely did.”

“Okay, fine, but in my defense, the position I’m in has changed somewhat since then.”

“Fair,” I conceded. “What about all those weeks you were gallivanting across the network? You weren’t able to get any of your massive fortune back?”

“No, Azel didn’t leave me anything to get back, and I had more pressing priorities.”

“Azel? That’s the brother that betrayed you, right?”

“Yeah, he’s the one who handed me to Teolix on a silver platter.”

“Now, that’s definitely blasphemy. Consider him on the smiting list.” I smiled at her, only half joking, as a supernatural urge to kill somebody I had never met started to build. This time, I embraced it. “On second thought, maybe I won’t need to lend you anything.”

“What do you mean?” she asked reluctantly.

“Remember a few months ago when we killed Rajak?”

“I was trapped in a bottle at the time, but sure.”

“Well, while Thea was busy cutting off his head, I was clearing out his bedroom. Where I happened to stumble onto his vault key.”

“Really?” She blinked at me before leaning forward, obviously interested. “Did you open it?”

“No. I don’t know how.” I shook my head. “Hells, I only knew what it was because I’d seen Mother use hers. Bryce wanted me to offer you a share if you helped us get into it, but I figure since you’re Rajak’s closest relative, it probably belongs to you, anyway.”

“Rajak has an older brother. I’m not his closest relative,” she argued. “Besides, you killed him. Which means it’s yours.”

“You’re the closest to me, and I wasn’t the one who killed him. That was Thea, and trust me, she doesn’t need the money.” I leaned forward conspiratorially. “Plus, I might have taken a few mementos from Captain Leo after our little run in. It’s going to be a while before I’m hurting for cash.”

Ithnaa smiled at me as she shook her head, but then her eyes went wide as she seemed to remember something. “Oh, dammit. I forgot about Nora.”

She disappeared, and I laughed out loud as I leaned back into the booth. Honestly, she hadn’t been the only one to completely forget about the human, but in my defense, I’d been pretty invested in the conversation.

Now, though, I was sitting alone in a booth, staring wistfully at an empty tequila bottle. It was incredibly tempting to get up and go to the bar for a replacement, but the curtain around the booth would make leaving discreetly difficult. It just wasn’t worth the risk of being discovered, and I had learned my lesson with the bartender back on Drassun. So, I just sat there, leaning back with my eyes closed, relaxing. It was a strange place for it, sure, but there was nothing else I needed to do, so why not?

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Not even five minutes later, my relaxation was interrupted by an irritating beeping noise and a flashing red message spread across my vision.

Hey bitch, the guards should be awake by now. Hopefully, that means you’re long gone and just forgot to delete this alarm, but if not, then, well, good luck. Try not to get us killed.

I cursed my past self for the stupid message while I scrambled out of the booth. At a glance, nothing seemed out of place. Nobody was searching for the missing guards, or angrily stomping towards me, which I took as a good sign.

Maybe I had been wrong about the dosage or overestimated their nanites, but I had to be sure. So, I slinked over to the bathrooms and pulled open the nearest one. The second-to-last stall was still closed, but when I pushed on the door, it opened without resistance.

The burly orcish guard who I had left sitting on the toilet was now leaning against the wall. He was still unconscious, but someone had clearly moved him, and the second guard who I positioned on top of him was nowhere to be seen.

I knelt down to check the remaining guard’s vitals, and after ensuring he was still breathing, I pulled a small vial of black powder from one of the hidden pockets in my pants. I measured out a small amount before coating the tip of my finger and running it along the inside of the man’s lower lip.

Hopefully, that would keep him out for another twenty minutes, but that still left the other guard. She had been smaller than the orc, which meant I had to use less of the powder to knock her out, but not by much. If she was already up and walking around, then she’d have to be pretty groggy. I figured that if I could track her down before she could tell anybody what happened, then I still had a chance to get ahead of the problem.

Or so I hoped, but that hope was crushed not even thirty seconds later when I opened the door to leave the bathroom and was met by the exact person I was looking for, along with four startled pirates.

“That’s them! They’re the one who drugged me!”

I took a frantic step back and tried to pull the door closed, but one of the pirates reached forward to hold it open. Then they all filed in as I continued to step backwards. “Now, hold on a moment. I can explain.”

“Shan, check on Dion. Make sure they didn’t hurt him,” the largest of the bunch, he looked like a half-giant, commanded.

“Got it,” a half-elven woman in the group confirmed before carefully stepping past me to get to the sleeping guard. I tried to say that he was fine, but the large man cut me off with a glare. We stood in silence until Shan stepped out of the stall. “Still sleeping, not hurt.”

“Grun, help her get him to our infirmary. Let me know if there are any complications,” the large man ordered, and an orc nodded before stepping forward to help Shan move Dion. I stayed quiet until they were gone, but finally spoke up when it was just the oversized pirate, his human friend, and the woman who I had drugged.

“Look, Dion is fine, alright? He’ll wake up in twenty minutes with a bad hangover, and that part won’t even be my fault. Your boy was already drunk when I found him.”

“For fuck’s sake, Tee, please tell me you two weren’t drinking while you were supposed to be protecting your captain.” The big guy glared at the human and she shrank back.

“Um, Captain’s orders?”

“She ordered you to get drunk?”

“Sort of?” Tee tried. “Captain Nora ordered us to lighten up and have a good time. We thought she sent this asshole to help with that.”

I smiled sweetly at the woman. “You weren’t calling me an asshole earlier. In fact, I seem to remember something about you wanting to run away with me.”

“Shut up! What did you do with the captain?” she demanded, but the big guy put a hand on her shoulder to pull her back.

“Who are you? And why did you come back here?”

“A name for a name,” I countered. “Give me yours, and I’ll give you mine.”

“Seems like a fair trade.” The half giant crossed his arms with a prideful smile. “This here is Jax, my first mate, and I’m Captain Darrius Penn.” I blinked back at him, not entirely sure what to say.

“Come now, you can’t tell me that left you speechless,” Jax, who up till now had been silent, joked. “You just kidnapped a captain not twenty minutes ago.”

“Hold on, this was never a kidnapping,” I argued, then explained when Captain Penn gave me a disbelieving look. “Why would I still be here if we wanted to kidnap Nora? This is a negotiation tactic.”

“It’s Captain Nora. Use her damn title,” Tee demanded. “And seriously? A negotiation tactic? You expect us to believe that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t care what you believe, and I’m not about to start using a stolen title.”

Tee looked incensed, but Captain Penn spoke before she could tell me off. “That’s a serious accusation. It’s common knowledge that Leon was in the middle of a civil war with Nora when he was killed. What makes you so sure she wasn’t the one who did him in?”

“Because I killed Leo, and I did it on behalf of my captain, not her.”

Time seemed to slow around me, and my senses sharpened unexpectedly. I had no idea what was going on, but when I saw that Tee had been clearly reaching for the gun on her hip, I didn’t even stop to consider the consequences before tossing a conjured dagger towards the woman. The blade impacted her shoulder, and I raised my hands in the air as I released the spell, returning to the normal flow of time.

Tee pivoted to her right before falling to the ground and Captain Penn took a step back while Jax pulled a pistol and leveled it at me.

“Relax, she’ll survive. I just didn’t trust her to point a gun at me.” I glared at the human, who sheepishly looked up towards Penn.

“Captain?”

Penn silently sized me up before nodding. “Jax, check on Tee. Make sure she’s okay.”

“The fucker just stabbed me, of course I’m not okay,” the woman in question shouted from the ground.

“Got it.” Jax ignored her protests as he put his gun away to kneel down beside her. “It’s lodged in the bone, but there’s not much blood. I think they missed anything important.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call what I did ‘missing,’ but sure, we’ll go with that.” I lowered my hands now that it seemed like I wasn’t about to get shot. “If I wanted her dead, then she’d be dead.”

“I believe it, which is the only reason you’re still alive.” Penn narrowed his eyes at me, and I felt a chill run down my spine. “Now, if I’m not mistaken, you still owe me a name.”

I considered lying, but then decided that the truth was more intimidating. Besides, any lies would come out during the next step of Aoyama’s plan. “I’m Sora. An ex-syndicate agent trained by Mother herself. Now I’m working on Captain Virra’s crew.”

“Captain.” Jax looked up at Penn, who nodded.

“I know.”

“I take it my reputation precedes me?” I asked with a smile.

“No, that's not it. Your captain left a shuttle in one of our hangars,” Jax explained. “When she didn’t come back for it, I went searching. My search led me to Captain Aoyama, who told me in no uncertain terms that change was coming to Paradise, and that Virra would be the one to bring it about.”

“We can discuss Aoyama’s foretelling later,” Penn interjected. “Let’s focus on the fact that a sitting member of the council is still missing.”

“I wouldn’t worry about her. Either she’ll be back in a few moments to renounce her seat, or she’ll be dead.” There was really no way of saying that without sounding menacing, so I just embraced it.

Tee sat up while cradling her shoulder. “That’s… You’re joking… Captain Nora is going to die because of a mistake I made?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, sweetheart. If Nora dies, then it’ll be nobody’s fault but her own.”

“Be that as it may—” a whooshing sound interrupted Penn as a familiar djinn appeared in front of him with a very haggard, one-armed pirate. “Well, I’ll be damned. Nora, is there something you wanted to tell us?”