Take a beat. A memory of her daddy, his hand on her shoulder holding her steady. She took a beat. Breathed, drawing the air deep, holding it the pit of her belly, giving it time to saturate the tissues before letting it out. Head steady, she stepped into the shuttle's main cabin.
The airlock's inner door shushed shut on Subria's heels.
There were no windows in the Academy's old shuttle, but she knew when they dropped out of the shuttle bay and into the sky below Cumulus City by the lurch as they left the city's mag-net behind.
Subria gripped the nearest seat.
A row of hard seats ran down both sides of the cabin, enough for forty recruits, let alone the eight that were there.
A decade ago, before the new biodomes were built on Jørn's surface, the shuttle would have been crammed with recruits. The cities almost didn't need Riders to scout resources anymore; the biodomes had seen to that, freeing up resources for the engineers and scientists to do things like build better shuttles.
But it was Subria's dream. She didn't care about the credits, or the kudos. Jørn's surface was in her blood, and spending her life in the cities, floating kilometres above the ground, wasn't.
Her older sister thought she was mad, but then, anything that involved dirt made Husna cringe, and her mum…
Her mum had stared hard at the Morague Academy application, expression carefully blank, but she'd gripped the kitchen bench hard enough to whiten her knuckles and make the holo-chef flicker.
'A Rider,' she'd said, and there'd been something in her tone that reminded Subria of brittle plasglas a second from breaking.
Subria had straightened her spine. 'I need your signature.'
Her mum had looked up, and it'd taken every last bit of will not to step back. There'd been fire in her mum's dark eyes, an inferno of pain and pent-up rage, of old memories and newer nightmares, nightmares Subria shared. It was enough that it should have burned through her mum's pale gold skin and seared Subria's retinas.
She remembered the way sweat had trickled down her spine, the burning urge to shift her feet and to fiddle with the stylus she'd carefully placed beside her application.
'You know what it means if I sign this.' It hadn't been a question.
Subria had nodded. 'Yes,' she'd said.
Her mum's jaw had tightened, lips compressing into a thin line, and she'd stared hard at the stylus, as if she could crush it by thought alone. She snatched it off the bench. 'Anything but Farm Control,' her mum had said as she signed the application.
Anything but the job that had killed her dad, even if the alternative was the one responsible for the white lumps of scar tissue and the limp her mum would never talk about.
Subria could live with that.
She made her way between the rows to the back of the shuttle, pushing aside the plasglas that separated the main cabin from the smaller one behind, shutting out the soft whispers as she slid it closed behind her. The back compartment took up a third of the shuttle, but it was empty now, except for the small crate secured in the shelving of the bulkhead.
The crate was what she wanted. Subria deactivated the mag-lock keeping it in place, pulling it out and setting it on the deck.
It was heavy for its size, although most of that was the thick black plasform, reinforced with a super thin layer of steelcrete, the only material strong enough to resist Erberos' talons. Her thumb on the top of the crate activated the control pad, and eight digits disengaged the four steelcrete rods holding the door closed.
She held her hand in front of the crate, palm up, and waited.
The door stood open for several long heartbeats, and she thought Erberos had escaped again, somehow twisted his nimble little paws through the holes in the plasform and bypassed the thumb lock to tap in the code. How it was possible she didn't have a clue, but she'd seen the wan-adder do stranger things.
She was bending down, canting sideways to peer into the crate, when a shadow slinked out of its depths.
Light was needed to really see Erberos, to make out more than the slim, lithe outline of the wan-adder as he stepped onto her hand and wound his way up her arm. There wasn't enough of it in the shuttle – was barely enough under the full, blazing light of her sister's lab, where he'd been made.
His sleek, sharp muzzle kissed the nape of her neck before the last of him was out of the crate, the wicked claws on his nimble forepaws sinking into the thick nano-leather of her coat, tips pricking her skin. The claws matched the teeth crammed into his narrow, triangular head, sharper and deadlier than an animal his size had a right to, the gleaming white tips the only points of brightness in his otherwise black body. Even his eyes, all four of them, were dark.
'Pitiless pools,' her sister once said. 'As dark and merciless as his soul.'
Subria had scratched Erebos's head, finding the spot behind his right ear with the tip of her nail, causing the little flyer to close his eyes in bliss. 'He's a sweetheart,' she'd said.
Her sister, older than her by over a decade, had scoffed. 'He's the Devil little sister, and he'll steal your soul just because he can.'
She reached up and scratched that same ear now, smiling at the sibilant purr that vibrated through his throat. 'You aren't going steal my soul, are you?'
Erebos rubbed his head under her jaw, his scales warm and silken against her skin, and purred louder.
Subria smiled and, still scratching his ear, returned to the main cabin.
'Heads up, the shadow beast is out!' The words cut through the hubbub of conversation, said in the joking-but-not tone she'd come to expect
