{Lukemore}
When the silo’s remnants crumbled in an explosive cloud of shrapnel and dust, Pehton’s heart stopped.
Oleen was still inside.
“What do you think you’re doing, Pehton?!” Miy shouted over the roaring destruction.
To be honest, the orange-feathered Lyrik wasn’t sure. Even as Pehton burst from the plateau and soared on orange gliders to the collapsing structure, her instincts screamed for her to retreat.
More of a frenemy and not at all self-sacrificing, Miy stayed behind, guarding Lukemore’s entire slave force, freshly liberated from Imminent’s design. Blow-back from an explosion swayed through Miy’s orange and black feathers as she grimly declared, “There’s no way she survived!”
“I have to try.”
How very Shadow of Pehton. Guess she was fully integrated into the hive mind now, because all she thought about—all she wanted—was to find Oleen alive and safe.
Pehton’s kerosene blood boiled with it until the surrounding air shimmered and rolled with a smoke of her own making. A ball of fire engulfed her. An integration of ignited nanites formed a forcefield around her that combusted incoming shrapnel.
The Siren’s Gale.
Pehton was one of only two Lyriks in their history with this gift. And she mastered it. This was an entirely new and untested use of it. No time for weapons testing. The former Executive Warden of Gait barreled into the explosive cloud, determined to recover a teammate.
Flames and fractured silo billowed in a spiraling arc that hindered her descent. Hot. Sweat dripped from her pitch-black skin as this badass Lyrik fought fire with fire. It occurred to her—so very much to Pehton’s own irritation—that her courage would impress a certain gorgeous white-haired half-Aegis, half-Icarus.
But that was the anxious desire to distract from her disastrous thoughts talking. Coping mechanisms were nifty because not for one second would she allow herself to believe Oleen was dead. That would mean giving up on her.
Teeth clenched, Pehton finally breached the lower levels of the silo, deep beneath Lukemore’s surface. Imminent’s trap buried any evidence of the bases below the slave apartments. They nearly buried the slaves with it.
Abresson’s pre-recorded image had projected from the Tantamount with barely enough time to warn them the weapon was hidden below. Not that it was intentional. No. The indigo Tritan tuned in for a gloat session with only fifty seconds left on the countdown.
“Shadow, say farewell to your understanding of mercy. No haven will shelter you. No name will pass your lips that we won’t hunt the owner and leave them for you to find. You will learn how much mercy we’ve granted you, for only in its absence will you see. Your lives are ours.”
Thank Elden for dumb, smug Tritans. His lack of impulse control had saved their lives and the lives of the people Imminent enslaved. He bought them fifty seconds. Fifteen survivors of the great female race constructed by the Tritans led six million workers to freedom from the Wrong Side of Eternity. From exhaustion, from starvation, and from pollution, they escaped with or without wings thanks to Xelan.
The Traitor Prince of Cinder borrowed from Enki tech to create massive skids and programmed them to ferry across the silo fields where Sagan left conduits. Conduits that opened to all over the Vast Collective. Caedes guarded Kyle as he screened the workforce for memories implicating Imminent involvement. After which, the former slaves selected their destinies and received hundreds of thousands of credits each, courtesy of hacked Emporium accounts. Once again, a gift from Xelan, who established the accounts for Razor.
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Freedom.
Or at least closer to it than these people ever knew. Some abducted, some sold by their families, but all of them endured more than enough suffering for three lifetimes.
So had Oleen.
The Lyriki existence wasn’t all misery, but they never lived for themselves. First, they guarded the Tritans and answered their every whim. Eventually, they came to serve Gait as its wardens. Their numbers dwindled when their leader, Gale, set the Pantheon on fire during a spontaneous combustion episode. As punishment, the Primaries ordered decommission of all non-Warden Lyriks. Terrified, the female race sought strength in their newly designated leader and Executive Warden, Triss.
Fucking Triss.
Corrupted and selfish, the first Executive Warden infected the others with her malignancy like a vicious cancer. Before long, the fourteen Lyriks under her leadership committed terrible atrocities and forgot shame.
Pehton took it upon herself to reeducate them. She forfeit their volition to Razor and donned the mantle of Executive Warden, unaware it was another of Imminent’s ploys. With their will under his command, the Pain Curator subjected the women to the same horrors they inflicted on the prison’s slave labor force. Poetic justice? Absolutely. But Pehton still wrestled with the moral dilemma.
Oleen was special. She was warm and gentle. The Lyrik showed the most compassion when Pehton rescued them from Razor’s control. Eventually, she brought the others around in time to help the Shadow with this grand stratagem. Even Miy, who stubbornly refused to admit her complicity in the torture of innocent children. But Oleen started to crack that thick skull.
Pehton wasn’t ready to lose her voice of reason. Her second-in-command. Pehton believed Oleen when she claimed to know an alternative way out of the silo. The woman insisted on pressing the Tantamount’s countdown to retrieve the damning evidence that linked Imminent to the catastrophe. Evidence Kyle discovered when he memory walked with the silo’s chief operator. Pehton tried to assure Oleen that six million witnesses were enough. But off she went.
Pehton must find her.
Tectonic plates shifted beneath her and disrupted the charges set around the silos. Fire blazed around her, and only her nacre, converting the smoke into oxygen, kept Pehton breathing. Hopefully, it kept Oleen breathing, too.
“Oleen! Oleen, where are you?!”
In a ball of flames, Pehton spun into the bottom level of what remained of the silo and circled it. Hard to see with no light. Even her built-in night vision struggled in these depths with this much smoke. Desperation choked Pehton until her voice broke with it as she screamed, “Oleen! Please!”
Korac’s Verse was playing on the airwaves by now. They had been listening to it before they discovered the Tantamount. He spoke of the lost Lyrik. Of how she tamed his temper and his need for control. At the time, it made Pehton chuckle to imagine that the most gentle Lyrik once educated the Icarean General in BDSM, but in some ways, the Vast Collective proved actually quite small—
The train of distracting thoughts ceased, crashed, and derailed.
There was no alternative way out, and Pehton supposed Oleen realized that. Or knew all along. She tucked herself into a flexible duct. It rode out the worst of the tectonic activity, but it did nothing to deter the flames.
Tears spilled down Pehton’s cheeks. They evaporated with the heat before they could mingle with her sweat. Contained in her fire shield, she glided from the silo’s center to the interior wall and crouched into the duct.
The smell…
Pehton would not gag, but she’d choke on the raw emotional lump in her throat. There wasn’t enough of Oleen left to bring back and bury. Only her yellow eyes remained like stones amid the char. Hard as gems, Pehton collected them with hands that shook. Raw, she rasped, “I’m sorry, sister.”
As she made to leave, the ash succumbed to Pehton’s Gale and revealed something. It shined. Alloy? Glass?
Holy. Shit.
The amber hue of nacre glass nestled in the curve of Oleen’s shriveled remains. The brave Lyrik found the evidence exactly as Kyle described. Oleen guarded it even in death.
Fresh tears fell, but the instability of the fault below grew more violent. There wasn’t enough time to honor her with Eternity rites. Squeezing the eye-stones in her hands, Pehton said goodbye. “Thank you. We will never forget you.”
The flight challenged her sanity, but she eventually broke free of the fallout. On the way to the others, she hoped the home team welcomed a funeral. Although by now, Andrew, Lamassau, and the others expected casualties from the battlefield. But it seemed no matter how many times they lost soldiers, they never expected to lose someone close to them.
Pehton and Caedes now had one more thing in common. They both lost a friend to that arrogant, bloated, scarred shit of a Tritan.
Abresson would pay.