Page 192 of The Space Between Stars

{This is the power you claim as yours. Is that truly what you desire?}

Calver sucked in a breath, trying to stay at the surface. He couldn’t void the Survivor. He couldn’t submit to non-feeling either. He had to suffer through.

{Just let go.}

Good thing he’d had years of practice. If Calver had a gift for any one thing, surely it was suffering. No.

Long moments passed. Calver endured the spike of pressure and panic until it lulled. Then he slid back to the door and signaled for Dex to join. When the boy sidled into the room and threw the lock behind him, he stole a glance around.

Yes. Too easy was the description for the creeping sensation in the pit of Calver’s stomach.

They wound their way up several spiraling flights of stairs, ascending to a trap door. Muted voices echoed in the room above. A light sifted through the cracks around its rim in a square of gold against the pitch. Calver squeezed his eyes shut. Of course the enemy wouldn’t leave the tower—where the remote activator was supposedly located—vacant. This was a good thing. This meant they were still ahead… didn’t it?

Dex asked.

The boy swallowed. The part of Calver still clinging to consciousness understood. He nearly suggested that he didn’t wet his blade. That he stay back if he wanted. But he had warned Dex going in. Calver had not been given time to mull over the decision of taking his first life.

A sudden pressure spiked outward from the center of his head. Calver gasped, knees nearly buckling.

Dex suggested, his voice giving Calver an anchor to cling to.

Calver shook his head to clear it. An Azadonian in Tera’thian uniform in a fully-lit room might buy them ten seconds before those with half a brain recognized it for the trap it was.

Luck…

Dex unhinged the door and passed through, leaving it open behind him.

There was a pregnant pause in the voices above. Then a question posed in Tera’thian. “What are you doing here?”

Dex spoke calmly in Nelfinden. “Three.”

Three opponents.

Calver burst through the opening, dowaga unlatched, and let the Survivor do what it did best.

The confusion ripped an opening in the soldiers’ defense. Calver moved like an awl through leather. Two rapid slashes met with a soldier to his side before the man had even stood from his chair. By the time he hit the ground, the remaining men had raised dowagas—one bearded and tall, the other clean-shaven and squat.

Both came towards him at once, the squat one high, the bearded one low. Calver swerved as far sideways as he could in the tight space, the rush of the first’s blade whisking past him. He lashed at the bearded man with a backhanded swipe. It sliced across his neck and dropped him to the stone. Then Calver caught the squat man’s overhead strike with the dowaga’s claw. He flipped the pommel to clip him in the chin. That sent him stumbling back before Calver sent his dowaga through his gut. The Survivor purred in satisfaction.

Dex’s mouth opened and then shut. “Glad I could help,” he managed, before his face took on a yellow hue. He turned from the bodies and sat, gaze determinedly out the window. Vomit was the appropriate reaction, wasn’t it? When you weren’t a seasoned killer. When you weren’t possessed by a mind djinn.

{It would be your blood soaking into the stone without me.}

Calver searched the room. A small glass sphere sat in a metal stand. That would be the activator.

He approached and palmed it. It wouldn’t move. It had been welded into the stand, which had been set into the floor.

“That’s it?” Dex asked. The simple question from the usually pragmatic boy revealed his state of shock.

They wouldn’t be able to take it with them. Until Calver located the new stratum and disabled it, they were stuck in this tower like fish in a barrel.

The faint green glow of morning sat on the skyline. Calver set to work.