Chapter 2

  Nett wouldn’t stop staring at me like I was a rabid animal, while Marshal looked like he wanted to swallow his tongue.

  I didn’t care, though. On a different day I would have, but this was as close to being out as I’d come in the past… How long had it been? Weeks? Months? I’d tried to stick it out, but now that they were showing me the door, I was stepping through it, even if I had to widen it a little on the way out.

  I’d really come to hate cages.

  They wouldn’t begrudge me a couple souvenirs…

  Transfer to Spatial Storage? Y/N

  Transfer to Spatial Storage? Y/N

  Transfer to Spatial Storage? Y/N

  I crouched down and, one by one, the piled cubes of mystery metal went into my pocket dimension as fast as I could answer the prompts.

  So pretty. Whoever decided to make you into a prison had a sick sense of humor.

  As I sort of robbed the place, I finally relaxed the mental muscle I’d been using to restrain my aura, and a couple Exotic faces went a shade paler. Dr. Meechin seemed fine, though. She was busy recording me with her data pad and mumbling notes to herself as she observed from behind the others.

  “You’ve been trying to escape this whole time,” Nett accused, his voice all quiet fury. “It was all an act, wasn’t it?”

  “I’ve been as truthful as I can be with you, Inspector, but my patience has its limits. Every time I saw an actual person, they were there to poke me, interrogate me, or-” I paused to give him a hard stare. “-Assess me. You didn’t expect me to be on board with that forever, did you?”

  I held up one of the little cubes and turned it over in my hand. It was lighter than I thought it would have been, and it had a slight luster to it, a pearlescence that brought my mind to the inside of mollusk shells.

  “It could have been over any time if you’d have just come clean,” Nett fumed.

  “I just did, you dick! I could have been out this whole time, but I stayed! I let you have weeks… weeks?” I looked at Dad for confirmation, and he gave me a slight nod. “Right! Weeks of my life! I sat here in your stupid metal cube and let you stomp all over me, because I thought maybe you could help me!” Somehow, I’d crossed the room and was in the Inspector’s face, shouting.

  But you weren’t out to help me, were you, Inspector?

  I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, not because I didn’t want to, but because if I did, I might betray just how desperately I wanted that help. For Constance’s sake, I didn’t know what I was doing, and I had no one I could trust to just… tell me.

  Inspector Nett shook his head, staring into my eyes with his mouth in a tight line. He looked like he wanted to say more too, but he chose to leave, instead, quickly.

  After that, it was all over but the crying. Well, no one was actually crying, but Marshal looked stressed as hell as he and White talked quietly in the corner of the observation room. I saw him reach up to the tip of his ear to key his comms implant a couple times, but he and White’s conversation never got to a level I could hear over how awesome these cubes were.

  What are you? We’re gonna unlock your affinity first thing.

  I got maybe half of the wall into my Spatial Storage before everything was finally in order. Then Dad, White, and I found ourselves at the bottom of a ramp that had been wheeled into place to allow access to the containment cube thing they’d been holding me in.

  This was my first time seeing this place fully lit since Nett liked to fight in the dark. We were in a hangar or something close to it, more serious looking than the ones I’d ever been inside. It was cavernous and utilitarian, painted in Colonial Authority gray and brown. Little flex beams meant to absorb shock stitched their ways up the segmented walls which curved up and over our heads to preserve the structure during Proxis 3’s prodigious wind storms. My cell, such as it was, a white cube, hung in the center of it all suspended on thick cables. Why they chose this particular setup to hold me, I had no idea.

  Everything seemed better now that I was a free-ish man. I reveled in the scent of honest to Constance unfiltered air, wind blown dust, oil, and exhaust. The sound of people and machines being moved around echoed off the walls and brought my mind back to the machine yard back home.

  The big hexagonal metal wall segments flexed and groaned against one another, as a gale passed outside and pinged the building with airborne rocks.

  Hot damn I missed that sound. Trix would have-

  I quashed that thought before it fully formed. I’d open up that wound when I was good and ready. Now wasn’t the time with so many watchful eyes.

  And there were lots. Someone, at some point, had called the military.

  In a rough circle around my cell were uniformed CRF, some on the ground and posted behind what looked like hastily constructed sandbag barriers. Other soldiers were on the catwalks up above, along the apex of the hangar, their high powered, precision rifles resting on pintle mounts that could be swivelled anywhere but mostly pointed in my general direction.

  I gave them a little wave… slowly… non threateningly.

  The gesture wasn’t returned. The soldiers all watched me intently through their visored helmets, their faces unable to be read as anything other than ‘ready.’

  I did my best human impression as I picked my way between them, following Dad and White. No one shot me, so I guessed I was fairly convincing.

  The quiet was getting to me. “So, what are we-”

  “Not now,” Mr. White cut me off harshly before switching to a quieter volume. “What matters right now is speed. We need to get you off planet.”

  “Off planet?” Dad and I exclaimed at the same time. In answer, White gave us a disappointed look, followed by a quick scan of all the CRF currently watching us.

  This wasn’t a subject to be broached in mixed company, I guessed. White only spoke again once we were all the way to the back of the building and through the airlock doors.

  “Get your things and keep moving. Seconds count,” White continued as the doors hissed closed. Dad went right to one of the lockers against the wall and grabbed a pair of goggles and a jacket, shiny, like they could have been in their packages a moment ago. Unfortunately, the jacket was too small by about a handspan in the sleeves and uncomfortably tight in the shoulders. I gave Dad a little grin and posed. I looked like I’d stolen a kids’ jacket off the rack.

  “Guess it came prewashed,” I smirked

  Dad wasn’t amused. “You’re too old for growth spurts,” he growed. Then he handed me a well worn black synthetic leather replacement with crash reinforcement in the elbows, chest and back meant for hoverbike rides out in the elements. He’d had this thing for pretty much my entire life and wore it almost every day. I wasn’t about to take his jacket.

  “No, Dad. I’m fine- Hey! Wait!,” I said as I tried to hand it back, but Dad had already slapped the door release and the wind drowned out whatever protests I had. He just looked at me that way Dads looked at their sons when they weren’t in the mood to argue. So, I slipped into Dad’s jacket and was shocked to find that it fit.

  How about that?

  One step outside, and we were plunged into the stinging wind. I was expecting that. However, what I’d not readied myself for was the sun. I felt the warmth on my face immediately, delicious, golden, and beautiful. If I had a heart it would have skipped a beat.

  It was a funny thing to be surprised by. I mean, who in their right mind forgets that the sun is a thing? Someone that had just spent six months in the perpetual gloom of Ralqir, that’s who. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed sunlight.

  Proxis 3 was in the middle of spring, slightly chilly, the clear blue sky showing the hazy outline of Proxis 2, the gas giant we spent our lives orbiting, peaking just over the horizon. The morning light shone off a landscape of gold banded rock and hardy scrub brush taking refuge in their shadows. Overhead, a formation of flat bottomed, military hover ships, banked away from us and started a lazy circle around our location, their directional thrusters flaring to full as they fought the wind.

  The paved lot where we’d come out was full of gray brown military vehicles, the light skimmer kind with squat frames and angular armor bolted to upscaled hover-platforms. One such hover vehicle waited for us, its engine running with the uniformed CRF pilot leaning against the open hatch. As we approached, I could feel the weird vibrating itch in my teeth from the active stilling fields.

  “Can I offer you gentlemen a lift?” the pilot asked through the voice amp on his flight helmet. He gestured invitingly toward the door.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  A thrill passed through me. This was the closest I’d ever gotten to one of these. I was a bumpkin mechanic, all tractors, rovers, and hand tools. This was two full tiers of awesome ahead of anything I’d ever touched.

  White was right there to burst my bubble though. “No, thank you. We have our own ride,” he replied tersely, just loud enough to be heard, already stepping past the pilot and around the skimmer. I tried not to let my disappointment show as I followed.

  I leaned over until I had my lips right up to Dad’s ear to be heard over the wind. “Got a second?” I asked.

  Dad took my cue and slowed down a bit until we had some distance between the two of us and Mr. White. Then, in Outers fashion, I lowered my voice but made sure he could see my lips when we talked.

  “Do you trust him?” I asked, overenunciating so he could read my lips.

  Dad shrugged. “I understand him, I think. If he says we have to hurry, we should.”

  “And he’s not screwing us over?”

  I couldn’t see Dad’s eyes behind the protective goggles, but his worried frown communicated enough. “Maybe. He got you out, though.”

  Past the lines of precisely parked military vehicles, White led us to a rough looking civilian model rover, a four seater with old fashioned rock scaler tires instead of a hover platform. Our driver was already waiting in the cab, a stocky woman with tanned skin and very defined muscles on her tattooed arms. She was reading a book, her stubby fingers running over the words slowly as she mouthed them to herself. The act wouldn’t have been out of place on Ralqir,(I was doing that a lot lately, comparing things to Ralqir. I needed to stop that.) but, here, having a real book made out of real paper set her apart as someone extremely wealthy or…

  Another Exotic.

  “Ryan, this is Wing,” White told me from the front passenger seat.

  Wing didn’t respond right away. She let her finger trace all the way to the end of a long paragraph she was working through then sighed and dog-eared the page. I took a peek at the front. There was a man on the cover with red skin and yellow eyes, his shirt open and exposing impressive pecs. To his side, a petite brunette looked up at him adoringly.

  The Dragon Who Slayed Me.

  Then Wing turned around to give me a perfunctory once over, the picture of unimpressed. “Good to meet you, younger Kotes.”

  “If you’re quite done, we need to be away quickly,” White said impatiently.

  “Was at a stopping point anyway,” Wing replied business-like, already working the controls in fluid, practiced motions, booting the electronics and kicking the machine into drive. The gears ground together briefly in a way that made the mechanic inside of me cringe. Then we were off, the rover suddenly tearing out of its spot and skidding through a turn that brought us in line with the exit to the lot, only missing other vehicles by inches. The torque forced us all back in our seats as Wing accelerated onto a wide road that ran between two lines of thruster-scorched launch pads.

  The way Wing handled the vehicle was… forceful. She seemed allergic to gentle maneuvers, straining the rover to its limits with every turn, her foot never actually leaving the accelerator. We practically blew through the open checkpoint where CRF soldiers had to scramble out of the way to let us pass. As we sped by, White simply pressed some kind of data plate up against the window.

  Then we were on the open road, and I noticed something. In the distance loomed a sight I hadn’t seen since we… Since I was a kid.

  It was Proxis’ capital city, all towering skyscrapers and flashing lights. It was a towering forest of pointed highrises that seemed to grow around and out of each other like a cluster of crystalized humanity that had somehow burst out of the rocky crust of this dustball of a planet. Stacks upon stacks of people, so many you could never possibly meet them all, lived their lives in that city, on the very spot our ancestors made landfall

  We were coming at it from the west, it seemed, with the half risen sun casting us in the city's shadow. Tiny flickering lights danced in the sky on the tips of whip towers that caught the wind and converted it into electricity. Rows and rows of them stretched off into the distance and over the horizon in what I knew were concentric circles around the city with more layers being built every year. As I watched, invisible gusts of air blew through the generators like blades of grass in a prairie. On a day like today the massive underground battery banks would be fat with stored energy ready to be burned through as the city went about its day.

  “I didn’t realize we were so close,” I said, breathless.

  “Colonials think the whole world revolves around their city,” Dad replied sourly. “Why build an airbase anywhere else?”

  “And, generally, we are unable to take demons alive, so there hasn’t been much need for a prison such as yours,” White added. “Honestly, it was impressive what the Marshal’s came up with on such a short notice.”

  Well, you didn’t have to live in it, buddy.

  “So, what’s the hurry?” I finally asked now that we were out of earshot of the CRF.

  “We need to get you off planet, Ryan,” White said. “And we need to do it now.”

  My shoulder slammed hard into the rover’s window as Wing took a hard right onto another road. “Ow. So I gathered, but why?”

  “I have invoked my right to send a candidate to Sabium. That has secured your freedom for now, but we are relying on very old law. In fact, I was surprised Dolan Marshal even knew of its existence. I was prepared to cite the code if I had to,” White explained, looking out of the rover’s window to watch the skies. Did he expect the military to follow us or something? “Unfortunately. If Dolan knows the code, he’ll know how to counter me. That is the hurry.”

  “So that wasn’t a ploy? You really plan to send Ryan off world?” Dad asked, his tone bordering on dangerous. “You were just supposed to be a character witness, White.”

  The rover took another turn, shifting the view of the city until it was on our left. My body slammed into the side of the rover again, hard enough that I lost a singular point of HP. I reached over to finally put on my straps, doing my level best to ignore how they felt against my skin. I tried not to imagine hanging from them-

  Breathe. Breathe.

  Wing grunted. “Sorry, people, Just crosswind. Hate tidally locked planets.”

  “White, say something. The plan was for a character reference,” Dad repeated. His hands were clenched into angry fists.

  “Oh, I would say sending him to the most prestigious school in the galaxy for new Chosen is quite a character reference.”

  Dad gave the back of White’s head a look that said he wouldn’t mind shooting him again. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. I’ve held off until now, but I’m gonna need some explanation.”

  “For one, Mr. Kotes, I believe it was the only way to secure Ryan’s release. That became clear during the hearing.”

  “They did seem keen on keeping me locked up,” I observed.

  “Your little stunt with the wall didn’t really do much to calm their fears either,” Dad chastised.

  I made a rude noise with my mouth. “If that little display freaked them out, just wait till they see what I’d been doing to the floor. Besides, I wasn’t going to sit around and leave my fate up to those people. Nett’s a paranoid asshole, and the doc would dissect me if they’d let her. I wasn’t about to bet my life on them just letting me walk.”

  Dad pointed an accusatory finger at the demon hunter in the front seat. “He was going to step in and tell them about a Brand or some such thing, and that was going to put the whole thing to bed. Then he pulled this shit.”

  “A brand?” I asked. “What brand?”

  This time, White turned around and gave me a pitying smile. “You’re a demon slayer, like me. Branded. And you’re right, Myron. I was going to do that, but an opportunity presented itself that I had to take. I didn’t have time to consult you. The important thing is that Ryan is free.”

  “Bullshit,” Dad growled. “You went off script because you’ve found a way to use this.”

  I nodded, finally willing to acknowledge that old familiar feeling, the feeling of being railroaded. “Thanks for everything, Mr. White, but I’m kind of getting a ‘prison transfer’ vibe from all this. You use the word ‘free,’ but I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”

  White shrugged, not bothering to deny the accusation. “An expeditious prison transfer, I suppose, but one with tremendous benefits,” he acknowledged. “As for why I did what I did: I found Representative Marshal’s desire to keep you interesting. The Marshals should be more than ready to be rid of you and pass you along to the CA for study or release, which I believed he would do. From there I could have simply pulled rank and freed you. However, he made a play I didn’t expect. Of all the experts Dolan could have assigned to your case, he brought in two specialists that were almost guaranteed to remand you.”

  “I did get the subtle feeling the odds were stacked against me,” I agreed wryly.

  “Quite so, and for fine and legitimate reasons, I might add,” White mused. “Both Meechin and Nett’s records are impressive but also predictable. The problem was their assignment to your case in the first place. It’s far out of character for the Marshal Family to go outside of their house for local matters, especially Rogues born in their backyard, but they went even further and brought on Colonial Chosen like those two.”

  Dad worked it out before I did. He rubbed his beard thoughtfully as he spoke. “Think what he’s saying is that the Family going out of their way to reach out to the CA is weird, like they’re trying to lend legitimacy to something crooked. It wouldn’t stand up to heavy scrutiny, but it would at least slip you under the radar for a time.”

  “A very adept assessment. It would have looked good on paper, but they hadn’t counted on me being in the room and sympathetic,” White replied, looking rather impressed. “You’re beyond your years, Myron. You’d do well playing Family politics.”

  The Outers Headman just huffed in reply.

  I shook my head in disbelief. “So, Marshal has an ulterior motive for keeping me locked up? Was the demon thing not enough?”

  “I believe so, and unless I miss my guess, we have about an hour left to get you off planet before he counters me. Your release was slow walked, I’m afraid, and we’re working on a pessimistic time table.”

  The wheels in my head started grinding together. The Marshals pretty much owned Proxis 3, being the only Exotic bloodline that had successfully taken root here. Why couldn’t they just do what they wanted?

  White seemed to pick up on my confusion.

  “They need an official order from Central. To get it, they’ll have sent a very high Level courier through the jump point the moment I invoked my authority. Once that courier arrives back on Proxis, you will most likely find yourself a fugitive again.”

  I felt my eyebrows knit together hard. “So this school you’re sending me to is a big enough deal to… what? Make them forget about the whole thing?”

  “It’s more of a delay on procedural grounds. Ranking Colonial Chosen such as myself have the right to invoke the government’s authority to send students to this school, and there is only one seat per class. You have it.”

  “The way they talked about it, it sounded like it was hell,” Dad said. “Might be better off hiding him here. The clan would do it.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not bringing down the Marshals on our clan, Dad. Besides,” I began, wincing internally, knowing how Dad would feel about this next part. “I… have a quest.”

  White turned almost all the way around in his seat, giving me his full attention. “A quest?”

  “Yeah, and the way it’s worded… I can’t explain it. I feel like I need to go.”

  “What? Bullshit. Why you? Didn’t the System just dangle you out there over a rift? Was that not enough?” Dad asked, his mouth in a tight line under his beard, his religious veneration of the System at war with his parental instincts.

  White shook his head. “The System doesn’t just give out quests, Myron. If I wasn’t convinced something big was happening before, this certainly would have done so,” he said before speaking directly to me. “I want you to keep your eyes open for anything strange.”

  I shot him a dubious look. “I am fresh out of my tutorial, and the tutorial itself was supremely unhelpful. Everything is strange to me.”

  The demon hunter’s expression darkened significantly. “I’m serious, Ryan. Watch your back, and don’t underestimate how much power these people have. The Marshals aren’t done with you, and other Families will catch on quickly that you are a hot commodity. It’s going to turn into a feeding frenzy.”

  “And that benefits you, doesn’t it?” Dad growled.

  The demon hunter bowed apologetically. “Yes, but Ryan as well.”

  “I’m getting tossed to the wolves,” I grumbled. “And it’s up to me to come out of it alive, isn’t it?”

  ”Like a grenade, yes,” White said. “Tossed like a grenade.”

  Hey. Thanks for giving In my Defense a chance. New chapters will be posted Tuesdays and Thursdays, eventually ramping up depending on the amount of interest we can generate here.

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