“But now you’re trying to keep Emile away from Ophion? Having doubts about the cause?”
“Never about the cause,” Cormac said quietly. “Only about the people in it. After the heavy hits to the bases this year, Ophion has about ten thousand members left, controlled by a team of twenty in Command. Most of them are humans, but some are Vanir. Any Vanir affiliated with Ophion, Command or not, are sworn to secrecy, perhaps to stricter standards than the humans.”
Ruhn angled his head and asked baldly, “How do you know you can trust me?”
“Because your sister put a bullet through the head of an Archangel and you’ve all kept quiet about it.”
Ruhn nodded toward a pocket, but missed his final shot. Yet he said calmly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Cormac laughed softly. “Really? My father’s spies learned of it before the Asteri shut the information down.”
“Then why treat her like some party girl?”
“Because she went back to partying after what happened last spring.”
“So did I.” But they were getting off topic. “What do you know about Agent Daybright?”
“As much as you do.” Cormac’s ball went wide by an embarrassing margin.
“How do I make contact? And what’s the process after I receive information?”
“You pass it to me. I know where to send it in Command.”
“And again, I’m supposed to simply … trust you.”
“I’ve trusted you with information that could land me in the Asteri’s cells.”
Not just any prison. For this kind of thing, for someone of Cormac’s rank—Ruhn’s rank—it’d be the notorious dungeons beneath the Asteri’s crystal palace. A place so awful, so brutal, that rumor claimed there were no cameras. No record, no proof of atrocities. Except for rare witnesses and survivors like Athalar.
Ruhn again lined up his final shot and called the pocket, but paused before making it. “So how do I do it? Cast my mind into oblivion and hope someone answers?”
Cormac chuckled, swearing again as Ruhn sank his last ball. Ruhn wordlessly grabbed the wooden triangle and began to rerack the balls.
Ruhn broke the balls with a thunderous crack, starting the next round. The three and seven balls landed in opposite pockets—solids, then.
Cormac pulled a small quartz crystal from his pocket and tossed it to Ruhn. “It’s all hypothetical right now, given that we’ve never worked with someone like you. But first try to contact Daybright by holding this. Daybright has the sister to this comm-crystal. It possesses the same communicative properties as the Gates in this city.”
The comm-crystal was warm against Ruhn’s skin as he pocketed it. “How does it work?”
“That’s how our radios reached Daybright. Seven crystals all hewn from one rock—six in radios in our possession, the seventh in Daybright’s radio. They’re beacons—on the same precise frequency. Always desiring to connect into one whole again. This crystal is the last one that remains of our six. The other five were destroyed for safety. I’m hoping that if someone with your powers holds it in your hand, it might link you with Daybright when you cast your mind out. The same way the Gates here can send audio between them.”
Cormac’s gaze had gone hazy—pained. And Ruhn found himself asking, “Is this crystal from Sofie’s radio?”
“Yes.” Cormac’s voice thickened. “She gave it to Command before she went into Kavalla. They gave it to me when I mentioned I might know someone who could use it.”
Ruhn weighed the grief, the pain in his cousin’s face before he softened his tone. “Sofie sounds like a remarkable person.”
“She was. Is.” Cormac’s throat bobbed. “I need to find her. And Emile.”
“You love her?”
Cormac’s eyes burned with flame. “I don’t try to delude myself into thinking that my father would ever approve of a union with a part-human—especially one with no fortune or name. But yes. I was hoping to find a way to spend my life with her.”
“You really think she’s here, trying to meet up with Emile?”
“The mer didn’t rule it out. Why should I?” Again those walls rose in Cormac’s eyes. “If your sister knows anything about whether Danika found a hiding place for them, I need to know.”
Ruhn noted the faint hint of desperation—of dread and panic—and decided to put his cousin out of his misery. “We suspect Danika might have told Sofie to lie low in the Bone Quarter,” he said.
Alarm flared across Cormac’s face, but he nodded his gratitude to Ruhn. “Then we will need to find a way to secure safe passage there—and find some way to search unseen and undisturbed.”
Well, Ruhn needed a drink. Thank Urd they were already in a bar. “All right.” He surveyed his cousin, the perfect blond hair and handsome face. “For what it’s worth, if we can find Sofie, I think you should marry her, if she feels the same way about you. Don’t let your father tie you into some betrothal you don’t want.”
Cormac didn’t smile. He observed Ruhn with the same clear-eyed scrutiny and said, “The witch-queen Hypaxia is beautiful and wise. You could do far worse, you know.”
“I know.” That was as much as Ruhn would say about it.
She was beautiful. Stunningly, distractingly beautiful. But she had zero interest in him. She’d made that clear in the months after the Summit. He didn’t entirely blame her. Even if he’d had a glimpse of what life might have been like with her. Like peering through a keyhole.
Cormac cleared his throat. “When you connect with Daybright, say this to confirm your identity.”
As his cousin rattled off the code phrases, Ruhn made shot after shot, until only two balls remained and he blew an easy one and scratched the cue ball to give his cousin a chance. He didn’t know why he bothered.
Cormac handed the cue ball back to him. “I don’t want a pity win.”
Ruhn rolled his eyes but took the ball back, making another shot. “Is there any intel I should be asking Daybright about?”
“For months now, we’ve been trying to coordinate a hit on the Spine. Daybright is our main source of information regarding when and where to strike.”
The Spine—the north-south railway that cut Pangera in half. The main artery for supplies in this war.
“Why risk the hit?” Ruhn asked. “To disrupt the supply lines?”
“That, and Daybright’s been getting whispers for months now about the Asteri working on some sort of new mech-suit prototype.”
“Different from the mech-suits the humans use?”
“Yes. This is a mech-suit designed for Vanir to pilot. For the imperial armies.”
“Fuck.” He could only imagine how dangerous they’d be.
“Exactly,” Cormac said. He checked his watch. “I need to head toward the Black Dock—I want to know if there’s any hint that Emile or Sofie have been there. But contact Daybright as soon as you can. We need to intercept the Vanir suit prototype to study its technology before it can be used to slaughter us.”
Ruhn nodded, resigned. “All right. I’ll help you.”