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The pain intensified and Patrick squeezed his eyes as he screamed again. He couldn’t break. He wouldn’t. Not now, not after a lifetime of struggle. An Insect’s sick trick wouldn’t break him now.
Patrick Smith. Battalion Four. Squad M.
She battered against his defenses. His nothingness cracked. She reached. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t hold the thoughts.
Fal’ran.
He could hold on to Fal’ran. He could hold on to the way his handsome face looked as he thought, the way he grinned when he triumphed, the soft smile he only ever directed at Patrick.
“Enough!”
The pain ceased, leaving Patrick reeling, shuddering, and shaking as he hung from the cord securing his wrists.
“You will break him with your brutal tools and simplistic thinking before he can reveal anything useful.” The Insect who had stood surveying the Interrogator and Soldier with her arms crossed stormed forward. “Wait until we are back on the ship. You do not even ask the right questions.”
“The right questions?” The Interrogator’s antennae fluttered, and her small mandibles clicked. She lifted the bullet again and waved it in the other Insect’s face. “These bullets killed our brothers and sisters, and you don’t care what it is?”
“I care what it does. I don’t care how it works.” The smaller Insect shoved the bullet out her face. “We need to know how they found us.”
The Soldier didn’t remove his mandibles from Patrick’s neck as he spoke. “They crashed too close. They got lucky.”
“You would bet the Nest on that?” the Insect asked sharply, and Patrick was thankful his exhaustion hid his piquing interest. They spoke freely only because they didn’t realize he understood. “What if what led them to us leads them there?”
“The Nest is not established.” The Interrogator flicked her antenna. “And civilians can always be evacuated to the Colony Ship, but if they assault us with—”
“Children cannot be raised on a ship!” The Insect’s chittering screech made Patrick wince. “They must be raised on a proper planet. And the Princess can hardly be expected to thrive without a proper Nest and if she cannot thrive, then this entire venture has been a waste of her life.”
Patrick hadn’t wanted to die. He hadn’t even had the time to accept his fate. He’d only acted to protect the lives of his team. But now, he realized, with a rising sense of panic, he had a duty to survive.
A Colony Ship?
A Nest?
The sector—the Qesh, the Klah’Eel, the Humans, Tava—needed this information.
“You think we don’t care about the Princess?” The Soldier hissed. Acid oozed from his mandibles and down the back of Patrick’s neck, making Patrick whimper as it burned across his already exposed muscle.
“I think you have one tool in your arsenal—” the Insect tapped the mandible that squeezed Patrick’s windpipe “—and all you want to do is use it.”
“I was using a different one before you interrupted.” The Interrogator elbowed the smaller Insect out of her way and planted herself in front of Patrick. She poised her antennae around his temples. “I should have known a Drone wouldn’t have the stomach for this.”
The searing agony that resumed when the Interrogator hooked her barbs into Patrick’s face drowned out the other woman’s furious chittering. But Patrick was ready for her this time. He met her thrusting assault with a shield of thoughts, throwing up memories of running through old drills with outdated tactics. She wanted information. He’d give her information.
She tugged the thread of his thoughts toward the rifles they wielded, and his mind moved unwillingly to the most recent model loaded with liquid-filled bullets, so he pivoted toward the gatlung he’d wielded for decades. He lingered on the carvings etched into the shaft, the labor he poured into maintaining each serration’s edge, the smoothness of the handle where his own palms had worn the wood down to a buttery softness.
A furious click echoed in his ears and fresh pain burst against his brain. He bared his teeth in half a grin and half a grimace. If she didn’t like what she saw, that was too bad.
His mind yanked to a memory of the ship as they’d flown down to Qesha, his eyes searching for the navigation panel and the coordinates they’d been following, but he pinned them on Fal’ran in the seat beside him.
Fuck, Patrick saw him so clearly.
His cocky grin tinged with nerves. His orange eyes sweeping over his teammates, calculating and assessing, but with an eye for plugging their weaknesses instead of exploiting them. His forefinger tapping away on his seatbelt, full of energy and ambition.
Catching onto his game, the Interrogator latched on and, with an overwhelming wave of pain and despair, unraveled Patrick’s feelings for Fal’ran in one brutal pull. She dragged into blinding relief the adoration for the younger man burning in Patrick’s chest. She exposed the love that hooked into Patrick’s heart as solidly as her barbs hooked into his skin and dragged out beside it all Patrick’s crippling doubts.
He wasn’t good enough for Fal’ran. He couldn’t be. Fal’ran had a future and Patrick had nothing but a pathetic past. He had nothing to offer Fal’ran but himself and his encouragement and his love, and what good was that? What good had any of that ever been to anyone? It had never been enough. Patrick had never been enough.
Because if he had been, everyone he’d ever loved wouldn’t have left him. His mother, Lar’a, Mal’ik.
