cuffs would be nothing to her.”
“The ice mares eat people, Gilly,” Breck said. “Not metal.”
Lira sighed. If only the cuffs on their wrists were made of rope. Then she could burn her way out of them and tear through the barrier of Patrolmen below with her bare hands.
She winced as her scales heated to a boiling point.
“Lir,” Gilly said, the light from Lira’s scales illuminating her worried face. “It’s okay. We’ll figure this out.”
“She’s right,” Breck added. “Just...calm down, before you exhaust yourself. The last thing we need right now is to lose you, too.” She plastered on a smile. Her teeth glowed a ghostly purple from Lira’s light. “Andi will be fine. She’s smart. And Dex is...”
“An ass,” Gilly said with a wicked little grin.
Despite everything, Lira laughed.
Lon would love this child. If they ever got out of this, maybe someday Lira would introduce the two of them.
“So what now?” Breck asked, drawing Lira’s attention back to her. The gunner’s nose dripped blood from both nostrils. One of the Patrolmen had gotten brave and slammed her face with a rifle butt. He was now unconscious, thanks to Lira’s rapidly bruising fist.
“We wait,” Lira said again, as her skin cooled, as she locked the anger back into herself and buried it deep. “There is no plan other than patience. Because if we move, Dextro’s men will put a bullet in Androma’s brain. And then we will be the cause of our own captain’s death.”
It had taken everything in Lira not to dive down the stairwell and stick a blade in Dex’s back as he led Andi away through the halls of their ship. Even his posture had been smug. Lira couldn’t fathom—save for the possibility that he might have a stick up his backside—how or why anyone would walk that way.
“We wait,” Breck said.
“We wait,” Gilly echoed.
And so the girls waited.
And waited.
For hours, it seemed, until Gilly, sufficiently bored, fell asleep, her snores echoing through the hallway. Until Breck’s stomach began to growl and Lira stopped counting the minutes since Andi had been gone. A thousand scenarios ran through her mind.
A thousand solutions, too, soon followed by reasons why they wouldn’t work. They bit and tore at her as her scales lit up, dimmed, then ignited again.
Useless. So incredibly useless, this ability.
Lira nearly succumbed to the exhaustion of wasted energy. Her eyes were just beginning to close, sleep tugging at her like a poison, when a voice pierced the darkness.
“Ladies?”
All three of them snapped to attention.
The ladder below them clanged as someone began to climb up.
“Protect Gilly first,” Breck whispered to Lira.
“At all costs,” Lira agreed.
Then a creature appeared, stopping about halfway up the ladder. It held a lantern in its fist, the light casting a strange, otherworldly glow on its face.
Its body was made up of metal and gears and blinking lights behind a clear casing, like a skeleton clock. Its face was stark white, with strange, unblinking eyes.
An AI.
“Who the hell are you?” Gilly yelped.
“My name is Alfie,” the creature responded, his voice clear and clipped. Diplomatic. “I am the personal assistant to General Cyprian Cortas, an Artificial Lifeform Intelligence Emissary, Version 7.3.” As he pulled himself the rest of the way up the ladder and into the hallway, Lira noticed a shining silver key clutched in his other fist.
She could make her move now. She could set the girls free with the help of this strange new arrival, this fateful turn of events. The creature’s white face turned to Lira. “Captain Androma Racella has agreed to a deal with the great General Cortas.”
“A deal?” Lira asked, not taking her eyes from the key. Her body tensed, ready to spring. Andi hated General Cortas. He was the only person she feared in all of Mirabel. “What are the terms?”
“Soon to be discussed, Lira Mette.” The AI tilted his head, as if staring at something he could not quite understand. “But first,” he said, lifting the key, the movement strangely smooth, “my orders are to set you all free.”
“Well...hell,” Breck said. “That’s unexpected.”
Lira could only stare as the strange AI stopped before her, dropped to a metal knee and slipped the key into her cuffs.
NOR
XEN PTERA WAS DYING.
Queen Nor Solis had known it for years, had witnessed her planet’s pain with her own eyes—but knowing the truth didn’t make facing it any easier.
For years, she’d known it was coming.
She felt it in the tainted air she breathed, the sting of pollution scraping its claws against her lungs as she stood on the balcony of the Nyota Room, overlooking the once-beautiful remains of her kingdom.
She and her advisers had tried to restore beauty to Xen Ptera since the end of The Cataclysm, but radiation had left the ground barren. Crops withered the moment they tried to sprout from seed. Streams dried up. Creatures became extinct, while others mutated, their blood becoming acidic, impossible to eat.
Xen Ptera was once a prosperous planet, rich with varillium mines that brought trade and wealth to the Olen System. But as more mines were exhausted and sealed up, the future of Xen Ptera began to look bleak.
Businesses collapsed. Trade between Olen and the other systems ceased as the varillium ran out. Xen Pterran homes fell to starvation, which gave way to weakness, which allowed filth and disease to spread more with each passing year.
Nor’s father had turned to the other systems for help, but the Unified Systems refused to offer enough.
And so The Cataclysm began.
Now, fifteen years later, the fighting had long since ceased, but despite everything she had done, Nor was out of options.
Until recently, Xen Ptera had been relying on food and water sourced from Iv21, a small neighboring planet. But Iv21’s resources were far from sufficient to sustain the population of Xen Ptera for an extended period, and the limited food stores harvested from that planet had run out months ago.
Death filled the void left behind.
Mechanical noises hummed across the bustling city. From her vantage point miles above the ground, Nor had an unobstructed
