Page 35 of Silver Slayer

I stood alone in the cage.

The chains binding my wrists pooled heavily against the floor. The single torch guttered. In the dark beyond the bars, something moved that was only shadow, only the mind making shapes from nothing, only the long, bad hours of an infinite darkness.

I pressed my back against the bars of the cage and focused on my own heartbeat. Steady and strong, the beat of a warrior's body that had endured more than it had any right to endure.

Something shifted.

I did not notice it at first. The tremor was so faint it might have been the cage settling, or the floor beneath it, or the long, slow exhale of a world that had forgotten I was inside it. But it came again, and this time I knew it was not my prison. It came from within me.

I placed my palm flat against my sternum.

Not the steady, measured rhythm I had come to know as my own. Not the primary heart that had carried me through every fight, every rotation of captivity. This pulse was different. Deeper. Slower. More insistent. A second heartbeat, layered beneath the first.

My ancillary heart.

"Vennox.”The female’s voice cut through my nightmare. Not Uri's voice. Not any sound that belonged to this cage or this palace or this world.

My ancillary heart recognized it with a surge of adrenalyne before my dreaming mind had finished untangling the sound.

My spirit mate.

She was speaking, but I could not make out her words. They slipped through my grasp before I could catch them. But the cadence of them reached me. The warmth underneath them. The simple fact of her voice, soft and deliberate, as though she was trying to call me back from a distance.

"Vennox."

I held on to her soft voice, and when I did, the cage dimmed. The collar's phantom warmth ebbed. The torchlight wavered. It had been the only light I had known for too many rotations to count, and now it faded behind my closed eyes into ordinary darkness.

Her voice continued. The steadiness of it. The warmth. The fact of her existence somewhere beyond the dark and the distance and the bars of a cage on a world I had already left behind.

She was real. She was out there. This was over.

I had killed Uri. I had waited in the shadows of her chamber with Tyrk's blade in one hand and his blaster in the other, and when she came, I had made it swift and certain, the blade first and then the blaster to finish what the blade began, because I had promised myself I would not leave that room until she could never touch that bracelet again.

Dark, viscous fluid had coated my hands as I stepped over her broken carcass and moved without hesitation to the conveyor tunnel, the alarms already screaming through the palace walls, her guards flooding the pupa chamber as Tyrk had predicted they would. I had walked out into the cold air of Gorka's night, and I had known with a certainty that still lived in my bones that it was done.

The Queen was dead.

She was already dead, and her cage was nothing, and her collar was nothing, and the strange-hued torchlight was nothing, and the stone floor dissolved beneath my knees as Quin's voice threaded through the dissolving dark and reached what it was looking for.

My ancillary heart steadied.

The dream went quiet, then still, then gone. Not ripped away the way nightmares sometimes ended, but eased out slowly, like a tide withdrawing from shore, leaving nothing behind it but clean sand and the ordinary sounds of the ship settling around me in the dark.

I did not know if she was truly speaking. I did not know if her voice carried across the distance between us, or if my sleep-addled mind had built the sound of her voice from its own need or from the memory of her face filling my vision. When Quin'shands had framed my face, and her voice had cut through the madness of the spores and brought me back.

Vennox. Look at me.

It did not matter which it was.

Real or dreamt, I held on. I let the sound of her carry me somewhere the cage could not reach, somewhere below waking where the darkness behind my eyes was simply the darkness of sleep, and nothing moved in it that did not belong there.

I had spent too many rotations in a cage refusing to break, convincing myself that the war against sleep was one I could sustain indefinitely, that vigilance was the price of survival, and I would pay it without end.

But Quin's voice had found me in the dark, and Uri had dissolved. Perhaps the Gorken queen only held the dark when no one else was in it.

Warmth shifted along my side. A presence slow and careful at the edge of the world I occupied between sleep and waking.

I did not open my eyes, but my spirit recognized her before I did, and I eased closer, bringing the heat of her within reach. My arm settled across her with the same instinct that had put me between her and every threat on this deadly planet.