Tikaya kicked her in the gut. The woman doubled over, clutching her stomach and gasping for air.
Lancecrest forced Tikaya to the ground, leaned a knee into her back, and shoved her face to the floor. She tried to twist free, but he wrenched her arms until she gasped with pain. Her cheek smashed against cold rock.
They were too strong. Her fate was unavoidable.
Gali’s hand came down on the back of her head, nails gouging skin. Tikaya felt the other woman’s annoyance, not just in those tense fingers but in her mind.
Images from the last month were dragged into her surface thoughts. Tikaya tried to fight it. She thought of cutting cane on the plantation, her family, school, childhood escapades, anything but-
Rias.
The foreign presence in her mind focused on him, tearing into any thought related to him. And there were a lot. Tears formed in Tikaya’s eyes at the pain the invasion brought, the disdain she felt through the woman’s link. The experience was bad, maybe worse than Ottotark’s attack back in Fort Deadend. For the first time in her life, she regretted not studying the mental sciences. A practitioner would have known how to block a telepath.
After minutes that felt like hours, the presence in her mind dissipated. The hand left Tikaya’s head.
Awareness of her surroundings returned. The weight on her back. Her labored breaths. Gali’s boots before her face. Parkonis’s silence. A hot tear ran down her cheek and splashed on the floor.
“ Well?” Lancecrest asked.
“ You can’t trust her. They’ve duped her into working for them.”
Tikaya focused on their words, groped for equilibrium. And she frowned. Duped? What in her thoughts had suggested that?
“ They must have known she would never willingly help Turgonians, not after they decimated our islands in their war. Admiral Starcrest made her believe he was a prisoner, too, and gained her trust.” Gali snorted. “He tricked her into thinking he loves her, and-this is lush-that the two of them are going to destroy the weapons together. Dear Akahe, Tikaya, I’m embarrassed for you. I could see it if you were eighteen, but you’re not young enough to be that naive.”
Stunned, Tikaya said nothing. The woman had been in her head, read all her thoughts, and that was the conclusion she had come up with? How could she possibly think Rias’s friendship-his love-had been a ruse after all they had gone through?
The weight on Tikaya’s back lifted, and she pushed herself to her knees. Gali stood before her, arms across her chest, pity and annoyance wrestling for room her on face.
“ Love?” Parkonis asked in a soft, stung tone.
Tikaya winced. She would have told him about Rias, but not like this. Maybe the woman would have the humanity not to share everything. But she was shaking her head.
“ You would lecture me on my oath when you’re sleeping with that man?” Gali looked over Tikaya’s shoulder. “Sorry, Parkonis, but your faithful fiancee has been sheet wrestling with Fleet Admiral Starcrest.”
Tikaya remembered an earlier thought where she had lamented having no females to talk to out here. She decided to rescind it.
When Parkonis said nothing, she risked a glance at him. He was staring at her, mouth hanging open, eyes bulging. Not angry, not yet. Still in shock.
“ Parkonis,” she said quietly, trying to ignore Gali’s cold stare. “As far as I’ve known, you’ve been dead for more than a year. The Eagle’s Spirit went down at the end of the war. You never wrote, never sent word. I had no idea I’d ever see you again.”
He closed his mouth, turned his back, and walked away.
“ Leave us, Gali,” Lancecrest said.
The woman shrugged and headed for an empty stretch of cavern. Between one step and the next, she disappeared. An illusion shrouding a camp, Tikaya guessed.
“ Come.” Lancecrest offered a hand.
Tikaya eyed him, surprised he had not simply grabbed her and yanked her to her feet. She got up on her own, but she did follow him as he walked away. He led her past bat guano piles and to a portion of wall engraved with a column of symbols.
“ I’ve only been here a few days,” Lancecrest said, “but I gathered from my little brother that Parkonis wasn’t as good of a translator as he’d hoped. Atner actually wanted you on his team from the beginning. Can you tell me what this says?”
Tikaya hesitated, but it was such a basic sign that she saw little reason to withhold the information. “Lights.”
“ What?”
“ It’s a panel to control the lighting level.”
“ The lighting? You’re sure? Parkonis thought these panels might have something to do with the web.”
Tikaya slid one of the symbols up, and the lighting level in the cavern increased. Down and it decreased.
“ Damn,” Lancecrest said.
“ What’s the web?”
Lancecrest turned toward the invisible camp. “Lork, show her the web!”
A gaunt, wispy-haired man appeared. He lifted his gaze toward the ceiling, and Tikaya felt the tickle of the mental sciences being used. A bat flapped down from the shadowed stalactites and soared toward the weapons room. Before it flew anywhere near the glass, a small explosion lit the air like a miniature star exploding. The bat did not have time to squeal in pain. Its charred body fell, causing three more explosions on the way down. Nothing but ashes remained to trickle to the floor.
Tikaya stared at the fine pile.
“ The kill zone starts about twenty feet up,” Lancecrest said, “and extends to the walls. You see that door in the chamber up there? And the symbols by it? My brother has- had — goggles that make it easy to see them. He got in once by randomly pressing them with that wizard shit he learned on your island.”
“ Telekinetics?” Tikaya suggested.
“ Yes. He lowered a rocket out, but the code changed before he could get back in, and he wasn’t able to find another combination that worked.”
“ How could you let him use that weapon on the men in your fort? The men who trusted you to command them?”
Lancecrest’s jaw clenched. “I didn’t know. Atner just sent a note to get out of the fort with my best men and meet him at the canyon. I still can’t believe he-I know why he did it, but I can’t believe he made that choice.”
“ Why’d he do it?”
“ Keeler.” Lancecrest waved toward the camp, and she guessed he meant the practitioner who had come out to bestir the bat. “Keeler can see what’s happening elsewhere. He found out Starcrest was coming and my brother panicked, figured he had to do anything to delay you all.”
“ Rias isn’t even in charge.”
“ Doesn’t matter. He’s there. And the other man-a captain, isn’t he? — doubtlessly had orders to requisition half the fort to help flush the archaeologists out of the tunnels and get the weapons. Atner probably figured I wouldn’t disobey those orders, even for him.”
“ Would you have?”
“ I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now. Come.” Lancecrest led her to another panel. “What’s this one say?”
“ Temperature and…” Not water, but similar to water. “Humidity,” she realized. “Controls for modifying the cavern atmosphere.”
He sighed. “I was hoping for more from these panels.”
“ I doubt the instructions for disabling the security system are going to be on the wall in the same room as the security system.”
Lancecrest grunted and strode to the last panel of symbols, this one on the backside of the butte and situated fifteen meters from a tunnel entrance. Tikaya did not have to ponder long, for she had translated these exact symbols just a couple days earlier. Her stomach clenched. Rias was not here with his acidic concoction this time.
