She snorted. “And have you kill me before I took the first bite? Hard pass.”
“It’s nothing personal.”
“It felt very personal to me.”
She gingerly probed a bruise on her right cheek, the same spot where she had cut my face by hitting me with the stormsword hilt. That bruise was especially vivid, as though a puffy blue butterfly was trapped underneath her skin. I had been so certain Vesper was an enemy plant, and so angry that she had tricked and trapped me into the bond, that I had been willing to do whatever it took to break that connection, even kill an innocent person.
I truly was the monster everyone said I was.
A dim spark of unexpected remorse flickered in my chest, but I snuffed it out. Most people might dream about having a truebond, but it was nothing but a death trap for both of us. Something Vesper would realize if we were forced to spend any length of time together.
She glared at me a moment longer, then spun around and started searching the cabinets and drawers in the corridor on her side of the ship, as well as the adjoining rooms. She found several blasters but no food and no water, not even in the bathroom.
“It seems you chose poorly when you locked me in the cargo bay.” I took a long, deliberate gulp of water.
Vesper’s left eye twitched, and her fingers flexed, as though she wanted to strangle me. Couldn’t blame her for that. If I’d been in her position, I would have already followed through with her plan to suffocate me.
“How long has it been since you’ve had some water?” I asked. “I would guess several hours. You won’t last more than a few days without it.”
“I know that,” she snapped back. “But we’ll reach another planet by then, and I can have all the water I want, without fear of being murdered the second I take a drink.”
“Touché.”
She huffed in annoyance and continued her search, but she didn’t find anything edible, not so much as a pack of protein crackers. That silver lining was slowly growing larger and brighter. I wouldn’t even have to kill Vesper. Her own stubbornness was going to be the death of her, along with dehydration.
Another one of those annoying sparks of regret flickered inside my chest, but I snuffed it out just as I had snuffed out the other one. You either used people or they used you. There was no real give and take, no true partnerships in the galaxy. Not in my experience.
Vesper slapped her hands on her hips and looked over her supplies, such as they were, which she had laid out a counter. She glanced around as though she had forgotten something, and her gaze landed on my sword, which was still lying on the floor. She scurried over and scooped it up. Her hand curled around the hilt, and my chest tightened, as though she was wrapping her fingers around my heart.
Every muscle in my body tensed. “Don’t touch that.”
“Relax. I’m not going to break it. I just want to look at it.” She held the sword up to the light, then turned it around and around, studying the weapon from all angles.
Compared to others, my stormsword was rather plain, with only a single sapphsidian jewel shaped like an arrow set into the silver hilt. The crossguard was a bit fancier, with curls of silver that stretched out in opposite directions, as well as others that arced up and cupped the base of the lunarium blade.
Vesper waved the sword through the air, and the lunarium’s silvery, opalescent sheen took on a pale blue tinge, hinting at her psionic abilities. The sword also began to hum, like a cat purring in response to a welcome touch, although the sound was so soft that she didn’t seem to hear it.
“A real stormsword,” she breathed in a reverent voice. “It’s so beautiful. Sleek and light and perfectly balanced. Nothing like that clunky version we have in the R&D lab.”
So she was a lab rat. Well, that explained the white coat she’d been wearing on the Imperium ship, although it didn’t tell me whom she worked for. Just about every House and corporation was trying to mass-produce some version of a stormsword, along with cracking the genetic code of psionic abilities.
Vesper squinted at the hilt. “What are these sigils? They look like spearheads . . . and eyes.” A frown creased her face, as though she found that last revelation particularly troubling.
“Those are arrows, not spearheads. They are the sigil for House Caldaren. And they’re nothing important. Just decorations.”
She shot me a disbelieving look, but I wasn’t about to reveal that those sigils had appeared the first time I had touched the stormsword, when the lunarium’s innate power had bonded with my own psionic abilities. The arrow symbolism had always been obvious, since my parents were Arrows and they had given me the weapon for my thirteenth birthday, but I’d never known what to make of the eyes. Even my parents had been puzzled by the eyes.
“Put it down,” I growled.
Vesper rolled her eyes, but to my surprise, she laid the weapon on the counter. Those tight fingers clutching my heart retreated, and my muscles relaxed.
She went to the other end of the counter and picked up one of the blasters. She quickly, expertly disassembled the blaster, then did the same thing to two more weapons. Just as quickly, she put the disparate pieces together, her fingers flying over the parts as skillfully as a musician playing a pianotronic as she bound them together with some wire.
Vesper held up her creation, a new, larger blaster that was far more than the sum of its previous parts, and gave it a critical once-over.
“What did you do to those blasters?” I asked.
By this point, I’d eaten my fill of protein bars and had propped myself up against the bottom of the medtable, with my legs stretched out on the floor in front of me. With all the food and water on my side, I was content to wait and watch—for now.
“I took the solar magazines from the two Kent blasters and hot-wired them to the one in the Takahashi blaster to give it more juice,” she replied. “I need a better weapon to defend myself, so I made one.”
She shot me a nasty look. Ah, she was referring to my murderous tendencies.
“Going to shoot me the second you get the chance?” I murmured. “Not a bad plan, but it’s still destined to fail.”
Vesper sat down on the floor opposite me, cradling the supposedly better blaster in her hands. “And why is that?”
I shrugged. “Because I’m a psion. Most energy blasts are no more bothersome than static electricity to us.”
“Really? Because that green energy blast on the lava field cut through your psionic shield and then your side like you were a toy soldier.” Vesper jerked her chin at me. “That energy blast was specifically meant for you. Lots of Black Scarabs attacked you during the battle, but that person waited until you were alone, exposed, without any other Arrows or Imperium soldiers around—and then they shot you.”
I sat up a little straighter. “Did you see who fired the blast?”
“No, there was too much smoke for me to get a good look at them. Although . . .”
“What?”
She shook her head. “They didn’t seem to be wearing any Techwave armor. In fact, if I had to guess, I would say they weren’t wearing any armor at all.” Her gaze drifted over to my helmet, which was still sitting on a counter on my side of the ship. “Just a helmet.”
Understanding sliced through my gut, the sharp sensation as familiar as it was sickening. It was exceedingly likely that Zane Zimmer had tried to eliminate me. The two of us had never gotten along, and House Zimmer had always been a rival to House Caldaren, especially back when my parents had still been alive. But I couldn’t discount Julieta Delano either. Despite her cheerful, friendly demeanor, she was a killer, just like I was, just like all the Arrows were.