Sniffing at her prisoner, Drinta purred, “What did you see in her mind?”

  There was no immediate response, a thing highly unlike her mental spy. She knew it was trying to formulate deception, but his species lacked the skill. The laugh Drinta cackled was caught on close walls, distorted. This was too good. “You fear that woman.”

  “The Herald lies. Sovereign loves her, to the point it unbalances his actions. Every time he’s been near her, she’s felt his feelings burn too strong. The way he adores her frightens her. So she lies to herself—has lied to herself—for so long the being is incapable of seeing the truth of things. ‘Psychopath’ was not a strong enough description of what is wrong with her. Drinta, the abomination must never be allowed to leave this station. If you were to sense how wrong she felt inside, you would grasp the danger.”

  The backs of Drinta’s lacquered talons ran the length of a thin Kilactarin arm—an approving stroke.

  “Broken things like you are my specialty. Do you know your greatest flaw?” her hand pressed over the lanky creature’s lipless mouth when it parted to argue. “No, don’t answer. I don’t want to hear you speak.” A kiss was pressed where the Kilactarin’s sensory node lay behind his skull. “You see so much, but understand so little. That pretty human would fit much better in your cage. And the best part is, I can see the cage will be unnecessary.”

  Her Kilactarin was trying to argue, mumbled words struggling to work past the hand locked over his insufferable mouth. Mercy had never been much fun, but she wasn’t really in the mood for a bloodbath either. Instead she hooked one talon into the lean torso before her and ripped through flesh until the male’s organs spilled out on the ground.

  Smiling at her twitching work, Drinta felt better than she had in days.

  What she could accomplish with the circumstances infecting her home would be nothing short of godly. When every little detail came together, the universe would know never to cross the bitch-queen of Pax.

  ***

  Back to the wall, Quinn looked at the broken pipe in her hand, knowing what she had to do. Considering all that had been endured in her lifetime, she found it almost funny how she hesitated. Three deep breaths, a long swig of stolen wevd liquor, and she lined up the jagged tip with her abdominal wound. One quick thrust and she stabbed it in until everything she’d just swallowed came back up.

  The apartment she’d appropriated was clean, the previous occupants’ corpses piled in the corner. There were dried foodstuffs, a bathing cubicle, and plenty of Bailor clothing.

  The remainder of the wevd was sucked down, intoxication preferable to outright misery. Quinn knew what the sheep expected. The most plausible next step would be to destroy life support—subtly, systematically—so the armed menagerie on Pax might overthrow their mistress and reopen the byway in a panic.

  She wasn’t that stupid.

  Drinta had sided with the Empire; the whole station was against her now. Security checks required the removal of helmets at all key access points. Scans for human female bodies randomly executed down corridors and in domiciles.

  Places Sovereign or Drinta counted as vulnerable would be surrounded by an army.

  Good thing Quinn had a better idea of what the term vulnerable meant.

  Escape would require creative pressure, small actions that would set the station scrambling without drawing attention her way. She knew the patchwork wiring and maintenance of the station in a way no engineer slave in Drinta’s service knew it. There were weaknesses in the circulatory system of electricity, of the water pooling in forgotten cisterns on abandoned decks.

  She would poison with apprehension, certain Drinta’s collected mercenaries were already aware of tightened security but ignorant of the reason. She would scare them, let them create their own fictions as to what was going on on Pax—let the rumors become a beast.

  Her eyes were sticky, upper and lower lashes gluing together with each blink. The crust was rubbed away, the movement of her arm sending shocks of pain to her abdomen.

  Water—she needed water.

  Parched, Quinn stumbled to the sink and found she could not bend down to drink straight from the spout. Panting, looking around the room, she found a cup, filled it, and drank. Swallowing was a battle, her throat swollen.

  There was a building fever, the open flesh around the pipe red and puffed, horrid looking. But there were no mindless thoughts of stalking Sovereign.

  Standing in the bathing cubicle under the cooling chemical spray, all the grime, the blood, ran down the drain. Clothing was acquired from what lay scattered in the room. The smaller species’ padded jacket much easier to move in than Sudenovan plate mail, now that she was skewered by a metal rod.

  The black even did a decent job of concealing the blood and pus that leaked out her middle.

  Grabbing fistfuls of her hair, she began to slice it off. When left with nothing but mismatching tufts, the edge of a very sharp knife was dragged over her scalp. By the time it was finished she was covered in sweat, and desperate for more water.

  Bald as an egg, she braced her hands to the wall, took a deep breath, and slammed her face against it hard enough to break her nose. Blood came thick, caught with a stolen length of towel. She needed no reflection to know her face was different, the flattened nose and subsequent swelling masking a portion of her identity.

  There was more work to do to see her though the plague she was about to bring, every last potential container in the room had to be filled with water. Once it was done she slouched into the halls.

  Little attention was paid the lurching passerby.

  Blood loss was slow but continuous, leaving Quinn breathless in her journey. She made it past three checkpoints, to find the corridor she needed and the subsequent access panel. Subsection B-46 no longer hosted life on the station. A radiation leak long before Quinn’s arrival had made the area unsuitable.

  It was forgotten, even Quinn had never entered.

  Until now.

  In that region water had sat stagnant, irradiated, and cut off from the main supply. But, there were still drainage pipelines—small ones that had not been demolished—where behind shored up valves waited a trickle of poison. As the station’s segments were identical in design, if she was fast, she could race through crumbling tunnels and redirect the clogged drainage. It would not be an immediately noticeable change. But eventually it would run through inadequate filters, until recirculated into the main supply for consumption, poisoned with radiation Pax’s purification system could never remove.

  Drinta’s little army would grow ill. Swelter would grow vacant. Gangs would seek their ships for clean water... and grow bored as they sat hanging on the dried up tit of a black hole—because, just like her, they would not be able to leave until the byway was open.

  Bored mercenaries did interesting things, finger pointing being one of the best.

  Laughing under ragged breath, Quinn put her weight against the first rusted wheel and turned until metal groaned. The sound of the pressure, of the flow once released, was unmistakable. She ran to another, finding it would not turn, and abandoned it for the last valve before the radiation caused more harm than her body could mend.

  She was starting to see double, to feel the ache in her head from an accumulation of exposure and infection. That had to account for why she saw the pretty one, the golden emissary standing in the shadows watching her.

  He couldn’t be there.

  It didn’t stop her from shooting at him. But there was nothing, no reaction, no sense of emotion. No blood.

  A shaking hand holstered her weapon, Quinn turning away to finish her work before hallucinations got her killed.

  The wheel would not turn no matter how she attacked it or how hard she pushed. Screaming into the dark, seeing the phantom imperial in another, nearer corner, her footing slipped and the wheel won.

  One leaking pipe of poison would not be enough; the contamination would take too long. Looking to where the blurry Herald waited, she pulled herself up, ready to try again. But the Herald was no longer there, because the ghost was across from her bracing the lever. It gave, water flowed, and Quinn ran.

  Dodging debris, bleeding from the exertion of the run, Quinn made it out, sealing the exit so no nightmares could follow. Finding herself on the ground, leather sticking grossly to her sweaty body, she found no imperial minds hiding in her headache.

  All of it had been her fear working on her. There had never been anyone there.

  Chapter 10

  The lights flickered again, disruption of the electric system ushering rolling brownouts through key sectors.

  “Sigil.” Sovereign said the name with pride. Looking to the unsmiling Lord Commander Karhl, he added, “How clever she is.”

  All four of Karhl’s warriors stood at data panels, breaking down information at inhuman speed in an effort to pinpoint their prey’s latest disturbance. They had no answers, the grid sparking in too many places to signal where the heart of the infection lay, or what the point of it was. Her latest attack did nothing to truly upset the system; all life support functioned at prime levels.

  Side by side, two powerful creatures capable of very dark things looked on and saw what the quasi-humans missed—her game with the power was only a message. It wasn’t in words, it was in deeds.

  She’d held out five full cycles, brought havoc to Pax. In that time, the water had been deemed undrinkable; a great many had been poisoned from something as innocent as an ice cube, making potassium iodide the hottest rare commodity on Pax’s trading floors. But there had been a flaw. Sigil had purposefully only polluted the free sectors. Slaves’ poor quality water was separate and unaffected.

  Though many of Drinta’s guests had left to seek solace on their ships, the less scrupulous hadn’t. Instead they pushed the most vulnerable aside, unconcerned with the suffering of the slaves to commandeer their drinking water.

  “She will grow angry,” Karhl had said when slave quarters were overrun, a great deal of young and old thrown out into the vacuum of space. “Our female will act out at this.”

  But she had not, and that in itself was telling. Her guerrilla attacks were pinpoint, precise—moves based off assumption, almost childlike. Through it, Sigil was hidden away outside of her revenges with no real notion of the spectacle that played out on her Pax. And it was her Pax; Drinta was only a custodian, though the Tessan female did not quite understand her place.

  Sovereign looked around the command station they’d set up in Sigil’s rooms, eyes roving over rusted walls and the bowing ceiling, and saw her in the shade of her linens, in her scent in the air.

  They’d had her once. She’d been so frightened. How little she understood her pursuers, or why they chased. How little she understood herself.

  Karhl had tried to explain, he had tried to be gentle, careful. Sigil wasn’t capable of listening; not yet. But it had given her perspective to consider. With their help, her natural impulses could be curbed, untwisted from Commander Demetri’s conditioning.

  Sovereign knew exactly what she’d lived through, had forced himself to watch every last recording found in Condor’s archives. Even knowing the extent of Dimitri’s depravity, they all had assumed she lived the same austere training and upbringing they had. Never could they have anticipated what was going on during those years. Sovereign watched the little girl’s suffering, a black hole and something far more horrific than guilt left where a heart should have been. Her screams had been his anthem, the music of his enemies’ cries never loud enough to drown hers out.

  “Arden has failed to establish contact for two cycles. He purposely evades my seekers. The little bastard even disabled his communicator.” It wasn’t Pax’s flaring circuitry that held Karhl’s concentration, it was the strategy he’d enacted and the lack of response from the Herald sent on the mission.

  Amongst their brothers, alive and dead, there had never been a greater infiltrator than Arden. None more cunning.

  Sovereign was unconcerned. “If she had killed him, Sigil would string the corpse up for us to find.”

  But Karhl was not contented, not after so many cycles with no signs of Sigil except her pranks. “Disobeying outright orders—disconnecting—endangers her. I want her back here. I want her safe.”

  Warning flashed in eyes full of violence. “No one wants that more than I! Arden is doing exactly what he was ordered to do. He is building rapport with our antisocial runaway. His silence we must bear.”

  The Lord Commander demanded an explanation for his leader’s acceptance of insubordination. “Excluding us assists how?”

  Unlike the Lord Commander, Sovereign understood exactly why they were kept waiting. “He knows we lack the restraint to stay away if we knew where she was. What he does, he feels is best for the ultimate outcome.”

  “Pax already trembles from the weight of too many inhabitants, the lack of sufficient resources, and no water. It is only a matter of time before the entire system fails, unless Drinta opens the byway and relieves the burden.” The Lord Commander went on. “What if Sigil has captured Arden? What if his death was days ago and she seeks dramatics in the display of her kill?” Karhl stepped nearer, meeting the terrible eye of his strongest brother. “What if she uses his body to mute her conditioning?”

  That was a possibility Sovereign had already considered. “Arden has three more hours until I order a full-scale occupation. If he’s failed, once Pax is ours we’ll rip the decks off piece by piece until we find her.”

  ***

  Successfully tainting the water required decontamination of her body. Quinn had run the shower, chemical spray rinsing over her for over an hour. Her clothing had been left in a garbage chute, her skin scrubbed over and over—even eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. There were hardly any burns to show for her time in the irradiated corridors, the only side-effect she’d come away with, a dry cough and the same steady fever. But at least there had been no more hallucinations—only the one that refused to leave. But the Herald wasn’t there. She’d shot at him enough times her blaster was out of plasma, gaining nothing more than leave tiny holes in the wall. So she began to ignore him.

  Golden eyes stared at where the pipe protruded. “You are in pain.”

  Quinn disregarded the apprehensive imagining, working to steady her shaking hand so she might twist more wires together over the circuit boards she’d pilfered. There were five more to go, five more hours of tedious distraction. Quinn dug her nails into her palms in an effort to keep her momentum moving forward. Between the nausea and the throbbing inside her skull, it was almost easy to ignore how Pax’s air was practically saturated in the smell of Sovereign.

  She made a noise in her throat—a starved groan at slipping thoughts that wanted to see if he tasted as good as he smelled—and twisted the pipe to the point she almost blacked out.

  Warm breath ghosted over her ear. “Don’t do that.”

  Wheezing, using the table for support, she threw one of her circuit boards at the image. “I’ll do anything it takes to get to Que!”

  “You wouldn’t do anything...” The Herald gave her a playful look, standing incongruously beside her water supply. “You would not submit to Sovereign for Que.”

  Chuckling hurt. In fact, it brought agony to her torso, and ended in dry, wheezing coughs.

  The circuitry was finished. Ignoring the lurking phantom, Quinn ate what she could find in the cupboards, drank as much water as she could hold before the need to vomit became overpowering, and left her newly acquired rooms to install damaged regulators randomly throughout the station.

  Trying to find them would keep Drinta’s goons busy, and it would upset those who lingered onboard.

  By the time she was finished with the last one, Quinn could do little more than lean back against a crumbling corridor. When the lights began to flicker her lips twitched, the dirty hallway looking far more comfortable dimmed.

  She just needed to rest for a minute.

  Her head lolled back, sweat dripping through the stubbled new growth on her skull. Fever had proven useful in curbing her conditioning, but brought with it blurred vision, the illusion of walls melting, and her mind playing endless tricks on her. Closing her eyes to the distortion was easy, exhaustion dragging her into perilous slumber right there out in the open.

  She dreamed of the smell of heaven, of cool water down a parched throat, of painless breaths that enriched her.

  Muttering to the air, speaking to Que, she assured him she was coming for him. In answer he brushed cool cloth over her forehead. “Tell me of Sovereign.”

  She was lying upon a bed, unsure how she got there. “I hate him.”

  “Why?”

  When vertigo ended, her eyes watered. “He bit me and I couldn’t move. Sovereign made me like it.”

  Fingers smoothed over the fuzz on her scalp. “You felt forced. You were frightened. It was a terrible thing.”

  Sigil registered that she was out of her mind to be talking with the hallucination. “You’re not real.”

  The Herald held a cup to her cracked lips. Quinn refused it, turning her face to the pillow,

  The dark grew silent. She found the ghost gone, and agony-drugged sleep returned. She burned amidst great shivers, full of anger and fear, and the constant voice of a phantom she wished would shut up. Rage came so strong it filled her to the point her skin was too small, too tight against it.

  There was a smell in the air.

  Sovereign. Sovereign was so close—so ripe for the killing.

  She woke, skin slick with sweat and a sharp weapon already in her grip, Snarling, squeezing the filth smattered pipe in her fist, Quinn decided it would make a lovely shiv. That gross matter already clung to it, that it was rusted and jagged, would only cause Sovereign more pain when she drove it into him over and over.

  The hallucination of the Herald was gone.

  Too bad...

  It would have been fun to spear him first, wear his beauty like a coat when she confronted his brother.