“And is still doing it,” Crash added. “Because there’s a tear in the Earth out there that probably would be filled with lava if Yellowstone had actually gone off.”

Khayu lowered his voice again. “The great rage of Burkan is held back by the force of Pharaoh’s will, the power of her slaves, and the blood of her enemies.”

“Fuuuuuck,” Crash said. “Travis isn’t going to like this.”

“Not many do,” Khayu said sagely.

“No, I mean he really isn’t going to like this. He’ll shit. Or throw something,” she added, wincing as she thought of her fish tank. “Probably throw something.” Hell, she probably couldn’t even get him to believe it without some stars aligning or extradimensional help. While the Commandant generally bowed to the wisdom of experts, he wasn’t a scholar, and he generally didn’t have the first clue about ancient history. Crash knew she’d have an uphill battle convincing him that the Pharaoh might, indeed, be preventing a world disaster just by sitting on that volcano, especially since he saw her directly responsible for the death of his father and the loss of eight spaceships and an entire exploration party thirty-three years ago.

Looking the prisoner over, Crash decided that if she was going to get anywhere with Travis, she needed to get Quad on her side so they could, with their powers combined, wheedle him down until he caved enough to accept that, gee, human scientists of the ancient past had discovered a great volcano percolating under ancient North America right before the Fall, and based on what Crash had read, it was an absolute fucking miracle it hadn’t gone off when the continent got ripped in half.

For this one, to convince a guy as hard-headed as Travis about something as intangible as ancient science and geology, Crash knew that she would need Quad. And some dumb savage was about to try to sacrifice the kid to a volcano.

Crash actually wished the dude the best of luck in that endeavor—in Crash’s personal experience he would have more success trying to sacrifice the Moon than get the kid to leave someone alone for ten full seconds once he glommed on—but it gave her a good starting point in finding the annoying little dweeb again before Travis decided time was up and drowned her best resource on evolved twenty-first century speech patterns in the ocean because his brother was a murderous cockhinge.

“So New Cairo is literally built on the lip of a volcano?” Crash demanded. “And your city hasn’t gotten wiped out yet because your Pharaoh has been keeping the volcano from erupting for the last sixteen hundred years?”

Khayu nodded.

“And Sabbaht isn’t going to go directly to the Pharaoh because he wants to keep the advantage and she would take the ship from him… He’s going to draw her away from New Cairo so he has a straight shot at the volcano because he thinks he’ll be granted some divine boons for murdering a bunch of people…” She hesitated. “How would he do that? What’s the best way to get the Pharaoh’s attention? What’s she most afraid of?”

“Rebellion,” Khayu said softly.

“Of course she is,” Crash said. She flicked some lint at him as she cleaned the smooth steel floor by her knee with a hand. “Rebellion where?”

Khayu gave her a look like she were slow. “Here.”

Crash’s brows tightened. “In order to have a rebellion, Khayu, one must control the country supposedly rebelling…”

“Pharaoh owns the world,” Khayu said, with the simple truth of someone who had believed it his entire life.

…And why not? If what he said about Yellowstone had even a hint of truth, she had not only saved the world, but could kill it, too, so she’d garnered some major street cred in the ownership department.

Yeah, Travis was not going to like this. Crash could see the conversation now: She, standing between a pissed-off Pharaoh and a pissed-off Commandant, and Travis telling the Pharaoh to give back Quad or he’d blow up her whole country with advanced weaponry with the flick of his finger and having enough energy to nuke a burrito afterwards and the Pharaoh laughing and telling him to get off her land or she’d just stop…keeping them all alive. It had the potential to be the infamous Cold War all over again.

“We need to get that annoying shithead back,” Crash muttered, starting to use the sleeve of her elbow to buff the floor.

“Who?” Khayu asked, cocking his head curiously.

“Quad,” Crash said. “Where would Sabbaht go to stage this rebellion? Where would he feel safe while he figured out how to lure the Pharaoh away from her precious volcano?”

Khayu seemed to consider that. “There was a place he liked, many years ago, when the Pharaoh went on an excursion into the Wastes to see a new city her scouts had found. She said it wasn’t the one she was looking for, but she was pretty shaken by the way one of her Skymancers got assassinated and wasn’t thinking straight. Sabbaht liked it, though. Wanted to stay longer. They call it the Blue Star…”

Crash nodded, notating that down on the patch of metal she had buffed. It took longer than usual due to the rudimentary writing implement the Commandant had forced her to use because he had stubbornly withheld pen and paper. “What was she looking for?”

Khayu, who had been watching her scratch markings on the floor with the tweezers one of the medical techs been using on Travis’s wounds, blinked. “What?”

“The Pharaoh,” Crash said, pausing with her tweezers. “What was she looking for in these old cities?”

“Oh,” Khayu said. “A ship.”

“A…ship…” Crash said, as she etched it into the floor.

“Are you sure you’re not a prisoner here?” Khayu asked.

Crash stopped, looking up at him confused. “Yes, why?”

“Just curious.” He squinted at the floor, then back up at her. “Why did they not allow you papyrus and a brush?”

“Oh, Travis took it from me because he thought you could take it from me and stab me in the brain, so I stole his med assistant’s tweezers when she had her back turned.”

There was long silence as he watched her continue her work. It was hard making notes on metal. Definitely harder than Crash had planned when she swiped the tweezers the medic as they were doing the stiches.

“To be fair,” the man on the floor said, eventually lifting his head to look at her, “Your friend is not wrong. My kind are very dangerous. He’s right to keep you at a distance.”

“Oh yeah?” Crash asked, still etching the floor, now a smiley-face doodle because note-taking was hard and her mind had wandered because she was almost done with her verb list. “How’s that?” She cocked her head, grimacing at the lopsided O she was making because the point of the tweezers were sticking in the metal.

“Well, certain members of my kind can’t be efficiently suppressed, especially if they’re purebloods or very close to purebloods. Like that asshole Ptahmohtep—keeping that self-righteous prick under control was a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on a purveyor of venereal disease.”

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It was the second time he’d mentioned a Skymancer called Ptahmohtep. “Who’s Ptahmohtep and why did you have to keep him under control?” Crash asked, idly trying to scratch the second ‘eye’ into her doodle. She’d already gotten most of the stuff she needed from him and was starting to get bored again. The more she got him to talk, the closer she got to completing her lexicon and once again not having anything fun to do. It was always anticlimactic when she got this close to completing a project, and her mind was beginning to rebel, despite herself.

“Ptahmohtep’s the real Skymancer prophesized to take over for the Pharaoh. Him and a barbarian from the south. The Skymancer my brother has will be convinced by a very famous linguist to kidnap her and her eighth fish tank and a puppy with cybernetic legs back to his home planet with him to stop a greater threat from eating the universe a second time because he needs help translating ancient alien languages no one else can read and she won’t leave without her fish and her dog.”

Crash felt the tweezers slip across the metal, streaking a scratch across the floor. Very slowly, eyes narrowed, Crash glanced up at the Rifter. He didn’t retract his words, just watched her in a knowing, foreboding silence.

Meeting his sincere yellow eyes, Crash thought, There is absolutely no way he could know I’m on my eighth fish tank… Even the news crews still thought it was seven.

“You can understand some of what the men have been saying around you,” she realized slowly, glaring at him, feeling played. “You’ve been playing dumb.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. Then he caught himself, looking sheepish. “Well, not to you. To the Pharaoh, yes. I have kept it quiet because I despise the Steward and don’t want to become his apprentice, but I, too, have walked the soulscape, and I have seen you there. You are very important. You help save the world. You don’t live long, though. Not like the Skymancer. He and another girl stop the plague, but only at great cost. You give them what they need to succeed, and in doing so, you save Earth a second time. Convincing Ptahmohtep to take over for the Pharaoh will be the first.”

Crash laughed, but it sounded like a nervous macaque. He had to be lying. She started looking for the lie. “You said you could kill me?” she asked, trying to figure out where he could have heard about her fish tank. She remembered thinking about it earlier in the conversation, but she had never spoken the words aloud…

…had she? She hadn’t been sleeping well, that was for sure, and sometimes she talked to herself…

“And now,” the Rifter said softly, “I’ve put my life in your hands. If Pharaoh finds out about this, she will dedicate me to the Steward, and I hate that man with the fires of Burkan Himself and will kill myself rather than serve him.”

Crash was still scowling at him. He hadn’t shown a hint of any of the usual lying indicators, but that was just ridiculous, and she was clearly being played.

“You don’t believe me,” he said, his yellow eyes unhappy.

“Of course not,” she scoffed. She had put the tweezers aside and was tapping her fingers against her cheek as she scowled at him, trying to figure out how he had been lying to her without her catching it.

He sighed. “My brother didn’t believe me, either.”

Crash kept tapping her fingers on her cheek, her mind once again completely zeroed in on all of his linguistic markers—both audial and visual—and scowled.

Almost reluctantly, the man said, “Must I prove it to you?”

She laughed. “Oh yes. Yes, this one you will definitely have to prove.”

“Okay,” he took a deep breath, then sighed. “Amongst my kind, those who can access the soulscape are also less likely to be suppressed by things like this collar your friend put on me.”

“Uh huh, that’s nice, I don’t see you getting out of it.”

He gave her a wry grin, then glanced sideways at the soldiers. “The chains are a nuisance, but look at my hands.”

Crash’s eyes flickered to his big, dark hands and, once he was sure she was watching, he moved his palm down, only a couple inches from the floor. Underneath it, out of sight of the men standing along the wall, a little ball of green energy began to glow.

Even as Crash’s eyes widened, the glow immediately went out, and the man quickly raised a hand in peace and said, “I offered myself in truce. I’m not fighting. I’m here to help the Pharaoh, and I believe that means talking to you, and convincing you to let me get back to New Cairo and tell the Pharaoh my brother has gone rogue, and, somewhere in there, perhaps round up that arrogant bastard Ptahmohtep and get him to take his place as the next Guardian so the Pharaoh may rest.”

Crash glanced again at the man’s hands, which were just as obsidian black as before, with absolutely no unearthly shine. She lifted her gaze to his yellow eyes once more, considering how he could be bypassing all the usual giveaways. Reluctantly, she picked up the tweezers again. Then, into the metal, she etched, Very good at lying.

He watched her until she was finished. “What did you write?” he asked, as she put the tweezers down with a sigh.

“You’re suppressed,” she said, lacing her fingers across her knee companionably—because it was either that or reach for his throat. “And I really hate liars. It’s all over your face.” It wasn’t, of course, but she didn’t have to admit that…to a liar.

He frowned at her. “I’m not suppressed.”

“You are, because you allowed yourself to be chained to an engine block.”

“…yes?” he said.

“…an engine block that we could dump into the ocean.”

“Also yes. I needed to gain your trust with a show of faith that I am not my brother.”

Chase squinted at him. She didn’t detect even a hint of unnecessary tension in his glottal execution. “You’re really good at that,” she said finally. Through her teeth. Because her fingernails were digging painfully into her kneecap.

“Good at what?” he asked.

“Lying,” she snapped, getting even more irritated.

“But I’m not lying,” he repeated. “If your friends shoot me, it will make no difference—my mind can channel Burkan to negate the mass of the bullet. And I’m pretty sure I could dissolve the chains and get to you before they could get you away, but obviously I haven’t tried. And I won’t. Because I am loyal to my Pharaoh, and she told us not to harm anyone on our mission here.”

He showed absolutely no indication of being a lowdown dirty liar in his speech or mannerisms. Crash started to feel her face heat with the mental strain of backtracking and checking every twitch, every muscle movement, every verbal fluctuation, every tiniest inflection. It all checked out as one-hundred-percent truth, so the man was clearly a psychopath. “You need to stop doing that,” she said, shaking herself. Every word coming out of his mouth now felt like a slap to her cerebellum.

He frowned at her. “But I showed you my hand.”

“Travis warned me that in the old days, some alien hybrids could even make things glow or heat within a few inches of their skin even with a suppressor, if they were really good. Hence why he’s telling those guys,” she jabbed a hand over her shoulder, “to keep me at a six-foot distance and put a bullet in your brain if I get a little too excited by the morphology of your prepositions and hug you by accident.”

He squinted at her, but didn’t dare argue again, which was good, because Crash didn’t have her squirt bottle, and she was pretty sure that Travis would use it as an excuse to teach him to swim if she embedded the tweezers in someone’s pectoral.

Getting herself slightly back under control, she went back to tapping her chin. “So this Blue Star place. How do we get there? Could you show us on an old map?”

“Yes,” Khayu said. “I have been trained in such things.” Again, with the smooth, confident ease of a total psychopath.

“That’s nice, you liar.” The last came out as a blurt, and Crash ground her jaw against the rest of what wanted to follow. “You probably don’t know anything about maps at all, do you?”

He blinked at her. “No, I was taught to lead a division of Pharaoh’s army, should the need ever arise. Like all Jackals, I was trained to—”

“What else are you lying about?” Crash interrupted. She was twitching inside, every single smooth, easy syllable like a nest of ants boiling out over her brain.

He cocked his head and squinted at her like she had something wrong with her face. Crash felt like she had something wrong with her face. She felt like her brain was overheating and squeezing out her eye sockets.

“I’m not—”

“Don’t you dare say you’re not lying!” Crash snapped, jumping to her feet and pointing a shaking finger at him. She forgot to grab the tweezers as she stood, so she bent down and snatched them up and jabbed them at him in warning. “You are a liar, I know you’re a liar, I just can’t figure out how and that’s killing my brain I will stab you if you do it again.”

The man’s mouth fell open in a little O. Very slowly, he said, “The soulscape showed me you were…different…but I never imagined such…passion.”

“Don’t call it passion you ball-eating bullshitter it’s fucking lie-detecting genius and you know it!” Crash shrieked. Behind her, a couple of the dudes with guns were rushing from the wall, listening to someone shouting orders in their ears. One of them got Crash wrapped in a bear-hug and she started kicking out and trying to stab him with her tweezers. “No!” she shrieked. “I’m not done with the subjunctive conjugations yet! Put me down!”

“Ow, who gave her fucking scissors, ow ow!” The guy holding her, however, did not let go. They started dragging her backwards and towards the door. Crash was screaming all the way out the cargo hatch and down the hall beyond, unable to see anything except the liar’s beady little yellow eyes and smug face as he thought he was getting away with it…