Page 215 of The Space Between Stars

Fankalo’s skin prickled. Her Ghosts didn’t indoctrinate members below the age of seventeen. And at the age of fourteen, Calver had been behind Tera’thian lines… Hadn’t he?

“You had it redacted, eah?”

There was something wrong with this data. Mitek could have a bad source. Or he could be lying—this could be a continuation of the manipulation to frame Calver as their betrayer, but…

“Yeah. I did. That isn’t the issue, though. And neither are the age or the location. Brat, I’ve run the possibilities through my head a hundred times and can’t come up with an answer that doesn’t lead to more questions. It’s part of why I’ve been sitting on this for almost a week. I didn’t know how—”

“If there’s one thing that will make me bite your head off, chew it up, and spit it back down your neckhole, it’s withholding information.” He’d kept it from her for a week? Her ire flared like a torch. “Mitek, how could you—”

“Because I’m trying to protect you from yourself, Brat!” He looked at her like she’d grown a pair of fangs. “You’ve nearly lost your head over this sort of thing—when Calver’s involved—more than once since he left.” Since she’d forced Calver to leave, at Mitek’s insistence. “You can’t lead an army when your headspace is fraying at the—”

Her voice darkened. “I am the one who determines what I’m capable of and when I am to be given information uncovered by one of my operatives.”

There was fire in his expression as he stared at her. She met it with steel in her own. Then Mitek’s hands fisted and he looked away in concession.

“The medical report is dated seven twenty-seven post-cataclysm,” he finished.

Fankalo froze. That wasn’t possible.

“Smeared ink?” she asked.

“Clear as day. Dry as a slit fucking vein.”

Twenty-one years ago Calver had been five and still living like a young princeling on Kaidech’s Skywalk with their biological parents. And he certainly didn’t have the Ratka Cul’Mon had carved into him at twelve. “What does it mean?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Captain.”

Fankalo was too distracted to care about the cold formality in his voice. Calver had never told her he’d committed those atrocities: villages scoured, ships burned, innocents massacred. Some, yes. But she’d just assumed, based on his fractured account of his time enslaved by Cul’Mon, his scarring, and his skills, that he was the man behind the butcherings.

But now, and considering the inflated rumors of the Ratka—which stemmed back far before her Ghosts had started leaving it—she had to reassess the truth of things. As new possibilities clicked into place, something shifted in her psyche. It set frost into her bones.

“Mitek,” she started, “I think I messed up.”

Calver might have never been the Shadewalker. And if he wasn’t, the real one might still be out there.

And he might not be pleased with what they were doing.

CALVEROUS

Calver floated through the void. The nothingness pressed in on him from all sides, pulling him apart, pressing him together. It pulsed through his veins, filled his mouth, swelled his lungs. He could stay this way, pressed into nothing’s embrace forever. Or he could die at this moment. Both were agreeable.

Calverous.

He wasn’t alone. An impression shared the void with him.

It’s been a very long time since a conduit has passed through here.

It was not the Survivor.

No, not he, it agreed. Though in a way, you could say we are two sides of the same coin.

Creation?

The impression bubbled.

Where are we?

Where we are does not exist.