Page 60 of Silver Slayer

Jakkar's grip on my forearm tightened briefly. "You are here. That is enough for now."

He held my gaze for a moment longer than necessary, his silver eyes reading something in my face I hadn’t meant to show, and then he nodded once and moved on. Others came in his wake. Aggar was broad and steady, his forearm grip as solid as the male himself. Sia Nekko and Alexxon spoke over each other with the chaos of males who had never learned to take turns.

Every greeting was the same. Welcome. Relief. And then the eyes dropped to my chest, lingering on the shawra, the unspokenquestion hovering in the air. Why was my spirit mate not by my side?

By the seventh or eighth clansman, the mark felt like it was burning through my scales. I could feel that Quin was somewhere in the palace. The distance between us was measured in steps I could count, and walls I could not breach, and every male who looked at my shawra and then at my empty hands was measuring that distance with their eyes.

Vallon must have seen it. The discomfort building in my posture, the way my shoulders had drawn inward despite my efforts to keep them square. He stepped forward, inserting himself between the next approaching clansman and me with the smooth confidence of someone who had learned to redirect attention.

“You weren’t here long enough to see the Gretolic crafts we acquired,” he said, loud enough for the group to hear. “Tech you need to see to believe.” He grinned. “Come. I’ll show you.”

Vallon led the way down the path with the easy stride of a male who knew exactly where he was going and what reaction he was about to get. I followed, the sounds of the city fading behind us as the path curved toward the training field.

I came to an abrupt halt. “What in Helios?”

The training field had always been open ground, flat, hard-packed earth, where warriors honed their skills with Valosian steel from the time they were old enough to hold a blade.

Now, it held rows of vessels I had never seen before. Dozens of oval, seamless craft arranged in neat lines across the field's northern edge. Adjacent to them, the familiar silhouettes ofrovers and the broader, heavier frame of a hauler sat in their own row, dwarfed by the craft beside them.

"Told you you'd have to see it to believe it," Vallon said. "Sia Jakkar's orders. Learning to fly them is part of warrior training now. Aggar oversees the program.”

"Aggar was always good with tech," I said.

We moved toward the field, following the path as it straightened. A row of solaris orbs were set apart at even, regular intervals. Beyond them, the oval Gretolic craft floated in their neat rows, silent and motionless above the hard-packed earth.

I moved ahead of Vallon, my gaze fixed on the rows of craft, and then the world stopped without warning.

"Watch out—" Vallon called.

Something solid connected with my front at full stride. I rebounded, the ground coming up to meet me. The impact drove the air from my lungs in a single punched-out grunt. Above me, Vallon’s laughter rolled across the field, deep and unchecked and entirely at my expense.

“—we marked the spherical craft with stones,” he finished, extending a hand to haul me upright.

“Spherical craft?” I brushed the dirt from my backside and looked around at the empty field. “What spher?—”

I swung my arm wide, and my hand connected with solid air, the jolt traveling up through my elbow.

“What in the Spirits?”

Then it came to me. The Moktian cloaking bracelets Tyrk had snapped onto my wrist before Truxxet and I slipped through thetorn hull to scout the four heat signatures on the scanner, the ones that had turned out to be Vala and three human females picking their way through the vegetation. The same principle. Light bent around a solid surface until the surface ceased to exist to the eye.

I pressed my palm flat against the empty space and felt the smooth, cool hull beneath it.

"The females call them bubble craft," Vallon supplied, running his hand along the invisible hull, gesturing for me to follow as he began to walk in a circle. “Zaku explained how the hull refracts light around the craft’s surface, making it visually undetectable from the outside unless you run your hand along it until you find the door.”

The door whispered open, barely wide enough for one of us at a time. Inside, twinkling lights covered every surface of the craft’s interior, the walls, ceiling, and console alive with quiet illumination that had no visible source. And the hull from the inside was gone entirely, the training field visible all around as if the craft simply did not exist.

"We have to go through sideways." He turned sideways and wedged himself through, then turned back to face me from inside. "As you know, the Gretolics were built nothing like us."

“I never saw a Gretolic,” I said. “I didn’t wake until after we were aboard the Gorken craft.”

“Count yourself lucky.”

“The Gorka were no party either.” I held up a hand before the question in his eyes could reach his mouth. “And no. I do not want to talk about it.”

Vallon looked as if he wanted to argue until I crossed my arms and gave him a hard stare. He put up his hands in surrender, then turned to a console embedded with a glowing array of buttons and a single ball set into its surface, wedging himself into the narrow seat behind it with his knees nearly at his chest.

“These crafts come in useful for hunting and scouting. Also, they’re undetectable by wetlocks when we travel to and from the Trisess Forest. We’ve even begun setting up small settlements on the islands in Caspeen and Haydien Seas.”