“The kids were in bad shape. My sister, too. Some kind of lung infection had gone around the DT moons and hit their household harder than most. Those vaccines saved them. Four people are still in my life thanks to you.”
The shock of heat that seared my eyes from behind took me by surprise. I blinked away the burn. I didn’t know what to say, but I was glad Jax and Fiona could hear this. “I’ve got a great crew. It’s a team effort—every time.”
Ahern acknowledged my words with a slight dip of his chin. “Then you can thank them for me also.”
A white-hot stab of grief speared me. If only I could. Half my crew was gone. Miko and Shiori weren’t listening in from the ship. Miko would never hear anything again, and we had no idea where the Overseer had locked up Shiori, or if she even lived.
I inhaled and exhaled with deliberate evenness. Emotion in. Carbon dioxide out. We needed to get to the point of all this. “I hear I can maybe help you again.”
Ahern’s cautious green gaze darted around the restaurant. No one was paying attention to us, but his voice stayed barely audible in pitch. “It’s not a transfer, like I thought. That already happened days ago, and I just found out. That’s why I was late. But I know where she’s being held. I’ve got someone on the inside who can help.”
A bad feeling sank through me. Interrupting a transfer would be easier than breaking into a prison. There was potential chaos in movement. It didn’t require sneaking into a lion’s den. “Where?”
His features tensed. Lines bracketed his mouth. “Starbase 12. Somewhere on the lower prison levels.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. He couldn’t be serious.
In my ear, the tiny com transmitted someone’s soft curse. Jax’s maybe. Shade’s eyes met mine for a startled split second. Both of us looked away fast. Reena Ahern was in the most secure place in the known universe. This was an impossible task. A death sentence. No one broke into Imperial Headquarters and lived.
I’d been there before. Of course I had. It orbited my birth planet, and the Overseer had shuttled us back and forth between Alpha Sambian and Starbase 12 all the time. Mom had hated it—said the place stank like doom. At the time, I didn’t understand what she meant. I’d liked the trips up. They got me out of our prison of a home with the basement lab where the man who was supposed to love and protect me strapped me down and stole my blood.
A boulder of sheer dread pinned me to my chair. For the first time in about eighty minutes, I stopped fidgeting and stared. “We’re supposed to break her out. How?”
Ahern drifted closer, his crisp white shirt nearly hitting the rim of his untouched coffee mug. He drummed long fingers against the table—a sound that went straight to my nervous system and exploded there. “Ten days from now, my contact will deactivate the plasma shield alarm on Landing Platform 7 at nineteen hundred hours, universal time. Slip in, slip out. The alarm will reactivate three hours later. Be out, or you’re done for.”
I gaped at him. We ran stolen food around the Dark. We pilfered cure-all vaccines from the military to give to children. Sometimes, I stole books. We’d rescued a few rebel prisoners from the Dark Watch, but that had mostly been dumb luck!
Panic surged up with an acid burn of half-digested soup. I’d made the decision to bring the enhancers to the Fold. I’d spouted off about free will and choices, trying to make sure the rebel leaders didn’t force the body-altering serum on anyone like the Overseer had. A few days later, they handed us a suicide mission. What the fuck?
My voice shook. “There must be a crew more qualified for this.”
“You’re here. I’m here.” Daniel Ahern dropped a few coins on the table for his coffee and stood. “Someone chose you, and I’m counting on you to get my wife back.”
I stared at him in utter shock. Had I condemned us all? Were the people I’d believed shared my values and ideals really no better than Simon Novalight? Ready to flatten any bump in their road without a second thought?
Ahern adjusted his suit jacket, his back to the room, his voice hushed, and his grass-green eyes cutting into me like chips of glass. “Break into Starbase 12. Bring Reena back to me. She’ll save Demeter Terre, and the Outer Zones will be free again.”
With that bold statement, he turned and strode out the door while I choked on my own dry throat and my heart pounded like the drums of war.
Chapter 2
SHADE
I walked across the crowded restaurant toward a shell-shocked Tess. Her pale face reflected the stiff, cold panic echoing in my chest. Could Nightchasers say no to missions, or was the rebellion like the Dark Watch—you took your orders and shut up?
When I reached her side, I held out my hand. Tess slipped her fingers into mine. “Time to go.”
She gave a jerky nod as I drew her up, her blue eyes huge and haunted. From day one, everything about her had struck me as younger than her twenty-six years—her faint freckles, her heart-shaped face, her stubborn hope that justice still existed—except for those eyes. They’d seen too much to stay innocent.
The restaurant staff threw us confused looks as we left. My almost-too-friendly waitress narrowed her eyes at me over the top of her menu tablet, and the women still sitting at the table next to mine glared at Tess.
A quick pause at the door revealed no obvious danger outside the restaurant. Jax and Fiona were already on their way back to the Endeavor. Their presence had been a precaution, just in case the meeting with Ahern turned into something we weren’t expecting. We headed out a little behind them.
The moment we hit the street, sunlight beat down on us from two stars, one redder than the other. Tess squinted and angled her face away from the heat. Not me. I liked it. Air as thick and heavy as the inside of a steam sauna clung to my skin, making perspiration pop out and bead along my hairline. The sweltering humidity reminded me of the full-blown summer I’d left behind for the Dark, although Albion City rarely got this hot.
My nostrils flared on a breath that smelled of baked pavement and mild pollution. The atmosphere back home was better. It didn’t leave this chalky aftertaste.
Images of Albion 5 flashed through my head, so vivid and intense I could almost reach out and touch them. A hollow feeling spread through me, and I bit down hard, stopping it. Missing a place I could never return to didn’t help me any more than thinking about my dead parents, or regretting the questionable choices I’d made over the last ten years—all for nothing.
My docking towers were gone. I’d lost them, and now there was no buying them back. I’d wanted Tess safe and hopefully with me more than I’d wanted the urban empire my family had built from the ground up. People were more important than buildings. The sorry state of the whole fucking galaxy was more important than buildings. Once I figured that out, there was no going back. Now, I was a rebel, an outlaw. The only thing I truly had left was universal currency, and sometimes, when Tess looked at me with wary eyes that couldn’t quite let go of the past, I wished I didn’t even have that.