Excruciating pain robbed Vy of any ability to draw breath. There was no air. Her saliva bubbled. Her mouth burned with frost. She saw a rocky landscape in the starry darkness of space even as her vision clouded.

Space.

This wasn’t the telepathy practice room. Judging by her plummeting sensation, she was in microgravity, which meant the rocks beneath her were not part of a planet at all. This was an asteroid.

Items from her practice room floated away from her. A glowing orb lamp. A rug. Some plush all-species chairs.

A terrified ummin.

Vy recognized Huchanu as one of her telepathy practice teammates. He was drifting away, beak open in a soundless scream, reaching out in futility. Frost blistered his exposed gray skin. His hand worked a blaster glove that might be frozen or jammed.

The Commander seized Vy by the arm and hauled her downward.

Vy wore two superluminal trackers, and she’d stored extra trackers inside her prosthetic leg. Thomas should be able to locate her.

But how long would it take? He would need to receive an alert across light-years and then convey the specifics to Ariock. And cosmic phenomena could interfere with superluminal signals. Vy needed a rescue right now.

The Commander towed her inside the yawning chasm of an airlock. Chrome walls gave them smeary reflections in the dim starlight.

A gate overhead began to slide closed.

Some metal alloys could block superluminal tracking signals. Vy’s skirt was stiff with frost, but she forced her hand past the material, tapping on her prosthetic with numb fingers. The compartment opened. Tiny metal cubes—trackers—floated out.

Vy couldn’t be sure if she’d grabbed one tracker, or all three, or none. Her body was a blaze of pain. She made a tossing motion overhead and hoped that her frozen hand had let go.

Something tumbled into space. Vy could hardly see through the fog of her frozen eyeballs.

She hoped she had sent a tracker away, like a wish. The tiny device might tumble for eons and never deliver. It was a tenuous connection. But in theory, the data stream should be able to cross the galaxy in an instant.

The gate slammed shut without a sound. Vy descended through a soundless vacuum, as lightweight as a bubble, tugged by the Commander. Down.

Into a hellish pit with reflective walls?

Everyone knew that mirrors deterred clairvoyants and teleporters. That might explain why Vy and the Commander had appeared on the asteroid’s surface instead of inside this mysterious facility. Did that matter? Vy was losing consciousness, too long without air…

An inner gate whooshed open below her.

Vy heard it whoosh right after her ears popped. She felt artificial gravity along with a rush of air.

She gasped. She couldn’t believe that she was still alive, let alone conscious!

Her throat tasted like sour raspberries. Pins and needles took over her skin as she thawed out. Her ears were ringing.

She landed on a steel grated floor along with the Commander.

Gravity was light and gentle here. Despite the long fall, Vy’s prosthetic took the brunt of the impact, and she was more or less unharmed.

She stood, ignoring dizziness. She wanted to be alert before the Commander could recover from hypoxia.

The stringy old Torth gasped on the floor. She had failed to raise her helmet before they teleported. It seemed they were both here by accident.

Well, it couldn’t be entirely an accident.

Someone had teleported them here, and it wasn’t Ariock or Garrett.

Vy backed away from her enemy, moving further into the gloomy corridor. She could only guess where they were. The Death Architect’s lair? That was what she’d been searching for. That was where the Commander had wanted to go.

Vy couldn’t be sure what had happened, since her mind was no longer harmoniously entangled with the Commander’s. But she could almost piece together what had happened. Back in the sitting room, she had dug into the Commander’s memories, seeking a route to the Death Architect’s lair. And the Commander had…

What? Panicked?

Panic might give someone superhuman strength, but not even Garrett had enough raw strength to teleport with passengers. This was far beyond the scope of power of a single Torth. Only Ariock was strong enough to bring passengers, and he would never do something this cruel and clumsy. Ariock was too well-practiced to be responsible for this mess.

Could the Commander have linked with someone extraordinarily powerful?

It must be someone whom she had not expected to boost her strength. She clearly had not intended to bring chairs and other things, like poor Huchanu, dying in the cold void of space.

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Thomas had hinted that humans might be power augmenters.

Was this what he meant? Vy realized with shock.

That meant she was the catalyst. Vy must have linked with the Commander somehow, and boosted her raw power in some astronomical way.

Torth, Alashani, and humans formed a peculiar triangle. Thomas had said they were all related, and that humans were some sort of augmenting factor. In fact, hadn’t Thomas invited Vy to join the Yeresunsa when they’d all linked in order to revive Ariock from his depletion coma?

At the time, Vy had thought he was just being inclusive. Now she wondered. Thomas must have suspected something about human power, but he hadn’t known how to test it, or how to unlock it.

Telepathy gas is the key, Vy realized.

Thanks to telepathy gas, she had drilled into the Commander’s mind, just like a Torth giving someone a mind probe. She had connected with the Commander in a primal way, mind to mind, self to self.

In an eerily graceful motion, the Commander stood. Her face was corpse-like in the dim glow of recessed light strips.

Vy still wore her blaster glove. She just wasn’t sure if it would shoot, after exposure to space.

Meanwhile, the Commander’s space armor included a blaster. In a show-down, the Commander would likely win. She had superhuman reflexes.

The Commander opened her thin-lipped jaw and uttered a syllable in a creaky whisper that sounded dead. “Come.”

She beckoned with bony fingers.

As if Vy was her slave.

Vy steeled herself and took aim. She was not, and would never again, be a slave. If the Commander wanted to use her as a battery pack? No. Vy would be willing to link with Thomas or Ariock, to enhance their power, but she would never voluntarily link with a Torth.

Vy thumbed the trigger.

A blast roared out and gouged a dent in the chrome wall behind where the Commander had stood. The old Torth had thrown herself aside, and now she was too close, coming at Vy like an alien nightmare.

Pain drilled into Vy’s head.

For a moment, all of the sickening hatred, terror, and helpless humiliation of slavery returned to Vy. She had to obey. She was nothing.

No.

That was wrong.

She was Lady Vy. She was the daughter of Elaine Hollander, friend to Kessa the Wise, sister of the Conqueror, and bride to Ariock Dovanack. The galaxy turned on her advice.

And she had power.

Her power might be locked away, but she knew it was there, no matter what an idiotic Torth thought about her “primitive” human heritage.

Vy suffered the pain seizure but followed it to its source. She could not read the Commander’s mind. She had no way to navigate, other than to blindly feel her way along a path that felt correct, after so many practice sessions with telepathy gas.

Ariock avoided practice. He hated the way reading minds felt. But Vy had been taking more and more sessions, in part to better understand penitents, and in part so she could help penitents adjust to their new lives. If the redeemed penitents were going to be called human, she wanted to be involved.

The pain seizure involved a mental channel. Vy sensed it.

She retraced it to the Commander’s mind and drilled in, throwing the pain right back at her.

For a moment, she thought she sensed (!) the Commander’s shocked surprise.

Vy stood tall as the Commander flinched. That gave her an opening to attack. Vy had heard enough battle lore—and soaked up battle memories through telepathy gas—to know that quick snap decisions mattered. So she aimed and thumbed the trigger.

The Commander deflected the blast with her scimitar blade.

The wily old Torth had drawn her super-durable weapon faster than Vy could track with her eyes. With such superhuman speed, the Commander could slice off Vy’s head within a second.

Vy searched for an advantage. Any advantage.

The Commander’s mantle made her too tall for the corridor. She had to crouch a bit. Vy knew, from late night chats with Ariock, that he would wreck a ceiling or knock down walls if he felt too enclosed during a battle. One could not be effective as a fighter if they had to crouch or if they had trouble maneuvering.

That was one problem with size.

Vy backpedaled. She ducked under piping. This corridor had industrial pipes everywhere, although many looked broken or corroded.

The Commander was forced to duck. She came at Vy, but Vy was quicker.

She took aim with her gloved palm, as a feint. Then she used her other hand to trigger her false knee.

It blasted a hole in the Commander’s shroud.

The Commander hurled her scimitar as though it was a spear. Vy did not know she’d been sliced until her braid loosened, coming undone. The ionic blade had lopped off the ends of her hair.

The scimitar returned into the Commander’s waiting grasp.

That was disconcerting. The Commander could have easily decapitated Vy just now.

One did not need telepathy gas to guess why she wanted Vy alive. The Commander was going to confront the Death Architect, and that was dangerous. She might want to re-tap her newly acquired incredible human power source.

Or she would do what Torth usually did when confronting a greater power: flee. In that case, she would want to bring Vy as a powerful hostage.

Not again. Vy was nobody’s slave or hostage or battery pack.

The ground trembled. Vy hardly noticed, since she was busy with her prosthetic. She jerked her knee up, then kicked out. That action sent a spray of inhibitor micro-darts towards the Commander. She might miss, but then again, the old Torth had forgotten to raise her helmet’s faceplate. Her papery skin was exposed and vulnerable.

The Commander spun, turning her shroud into a shield.

Vy cursed. Maybe she shouldn’t try to nullify the sole reason why the Commander wanted her alive. If the Commander lost her powers, that would render Vy useless to her.

They stared at each other across a distance.

The Commander’s jaw was set. That was a look of frustration.

The ground trembled like a train was bearing down on them.

Vy leaped to one side—just in time. Three knobby battlebeasts barreled out of the darkness, as fast and as heavy as speeding cars. Their enormous toothless mouths opened wide, trailing drool. Two more skeletal battlebeasts emerged from the opposite end of the corridor.

No time to figure out attack and defense. Vy began blasting.

She was lucky to have two guns. With her prosthetic in action, none of the beasts could get close enough to snap her up in their jaws.

They tried. Snarling and snapping, they climbed over the body of a dying pack member.

Vy used to marvel that such ridiculous looking aliens could be so deadly. Battlebeasts resembled toads, naked and usually bloated, without fur or armored skin or clothing. They didn’t have claws or spikes. But they were enormous, on the same scale as nussians, and a large portion of their size was their mouths.

This bunch looked particularly lean. Starved?

Vy peered around the heap of toad-like bodies she had blasted to death and saw the Commander still struggling to fend off one last enraged battlebeast. Judging by the blood splatter and the corpses, she had used her scimitar to fend off the rest.

Vy stepped on a beast corpse. Once her knee was propped in the right direction, she fired a cannon blast.

The last battlebeast died.

The Commander stared towards Vy. Her emotionless face was hard to read, but Vy imagined perplexed shock inside her mind. She understood that Vy could have killed her and the battlebeast at the same time.

Mercy was an alien concept for most Torth.

“I want to stop the destruction of the universe,” Vy said to the Commander. “Either help me, or stay the hell out of my way.”