Page 72 of Ashes & Aether

The silence in the room is deafening.

Vessa exhales, dropping the syringe back onto the metal tray. She glares down at me.

“The sedative induces vascular stress,” she mutters, more to herself than to the guards. “I will adjust the compound.”

She turns her back to me, walking over to a secondary console across the room. The operatives lower their rifles, relaxing their posture.

I lie perfectly still, staring at the sterile ceiling.

The metal stylus burns against the skin of my thigh. I flex my right hand, analyzing the locking mechanism of the titanium cuff. It’s a mechanical catch. I could, in theory, manipulate it with the stylus.

Vessa Korvann wants to harvest my blood. She wants to dissect the child growing inside me. She thinks she holds the power in this room because she possesses the advanced technology and the armed guards.

She forgot to account for the human.

I begin to scrape the pointed tip of the stylus against the pressure pin of my right cuff, timing the microscopic clicks of the metal with the hum of the centrifuge.

Run your searches, Spymaster, I think, my eyes tracking the armed operatives by the door. Find the distress ping.

I will not wait for a rescue. I will not cower on this metal table.

When Orien breaches that steel door, he will not find a terrified specimen.

He will find Margaret Elmsleigh, standing over a graveyard of her own making.

24

ORIEN

Itear the orbital traffic logs apart line by line. Caden stands beside me, his hands blurring over the holographic interface, but the digital trail remains completely scrubbed. The silence in the primary command room stretches, thick and suffocating, broken only by the hum of the processors. Kairen paces the perimeter, his purple neural filaments blazing with a barely contained urge to murder someone.

My twin hearts hammer a frantic, erratic rhythm against my ribs. I am failing her. The most brilliant, ruthless woman I have ever known is out there, stolen from my own home under a forged seal, and I am staring at empty blue light. If Vessa extracts her blood, if she cuts into her to isolate the source of her immunity…

My nanites ping an alert. A microscopic anomaly registers on the secondary data stream.

I slam my palm down on the console, isolating the signal. “There.”

Caden leans in, his eyes narrowing at the flashing red code. “An unregistered cardiac distress ping. It spiked into the critical zone, triggered an automated medical alert, and stabilized a few moments later.”

I trace the origin. It doesn’t come from a hospital. It doesn’t come from a registered noble estate. It originates deep beneath the medical complex, in an abandoned subterranean sector that hasn’t been in use in long cycles.

A patient in critical distress doesn’t stabilize in a blink without heavy medical intervention.

“She’s there.”

I don’t wait for Kairen’s authorization. I pivot on my heel and sprint for the blast doors. Footsteps pounding behind me.

The flight across the capital blurs. I push the transport skiff far beyond its recommended safety parameters. We hit the eastern medical complex landing pad hard enough to buckle the landing struts. Sparks shower the stone as the metal grinds to a halt. Three of Kairen’s elite guards flank me, their plasma rifles drawn, but I outpace them.

My nano armor floods over my skin as I dive into the subterranean access stairwell, descending into the dark.

Steel doors block the lower corridor. No keypads. No access panels.

I ignite my plasma blade. The superheated energy hums, casting a glow against the damp walls. I carve a massive, glowing circle through the reinforced alloy and kick the molten slag inward. The heavy metal crashes to the floor, smoke billowing into the hall.

The smell of antiseptic and stale, recycled air hits my enhanced senses. Beneath it, the sharp, undeniable metallic tang of human blood.

Her blood.