“ Hate that man,” Parkonis muttered.
Tikaya rubbed her face and tried to clear the wooziness from her brain. Another cavern stretched around them, this one with cracks and buckles marring a floor decorated with bat guano. Its pungent smell tainted the air. Stalactites hung from a ceiling far overhead. No sign of a camp or recent habitation marked the cavern, but her spine tingled with the telltale sense of nearby practitioner work.
A fifty-foot-high butte rose in the center, a natural formation with a steep, jagged face. A single chamber with transparent walls took up the space on top. Lit from within, the bright interior revealed dozens, maybe hundreds, of bristling rockets. Similar to the one in the fort, they stood upright, their outsides loaded with dense strings of colored cubes. Larger black cylinders stood in the middle, and Tikaya had no idea what they might do, but she doubted anything up there existed for a purpose other than devastation.
There was no obvious way to get to the chamber. Two broken pillars and the remains of a ramp had crumbled and collapsed. A cool draft whispered against her cheek. If bats were living in the cave, there must be access to the outside nearby. Several tunnels led from the cavern.
“ Thank you for your help, Gali,” Parkonis said, addressing the woman. “I thought that sleeping gas would be enough, but you were right: one of their guards was too alert.”
“ Tatkar was my colleague for years.” Gali turned icy green eyes on Tikaya. “You better be worth it.”
How nice. Tikaya had found people as amiable as Bocrest to be her new captors.
“ She is.” Parkonis rested a hand on her shoulder.
A thousand questions for him burbled in her mind, chief among them how he was alive and what he was doing with relic raiders, but she would wait until she could get him alone to ask. As long as he was here to vouch for her, she might have the freedom she needed to investigate those weapons and plot their demise. Maybe she could even destroy them before the marines showed up.
Colonel Lancecrest returned, his face composed, though frustration still tensed his body. “You Starcrest’s ally or his prisoner?”
“ She’d never ally with that monster,” Parkonis said.
Tikaya climbed to her feet, pushing back dizziness. She touched her temple. Whatever Parkonis had used to render her unconscious was gone.
“ Captain Bocrest is in charge.” She decided to give them information that didn’t matter. Maybe she could gain their trust if she seemed to hold nothing back. “He kidnapped me from my parents’ plantation and threatened to kill my family if I didn’t translate these runes for him. I have no loyalty to him.”
“ And can you?” Lancecrest asked. “Translate this gibberish?”
Parkonis turned curious eyes toward her.
“ Some,” she said. “I’m learning more every day.”
Lancecrest jerked his chin at Gali. “Test her, witch. See if she’s telling the truth.”
Gali scowled but stepped forward. She cracked her knuckles and flexed her fingers. Lancecrest closed in on Tikaya.
“ Test?” she asked.
She had never failed an academic test in her life, but somehow she doubted these people wanted to assess her ability to categorize vowels. Lancecrest stepped behind her, reinforcing her supposition by taking her arms in a viselike grip. An inkling of what they meant to do stirred in Tikaya’s gut, and she tried to pull away from him. He held her firmly.
“ Telepath?” Tikaya asked Gali.
“ Yes.”
“ Just in case the oath you took matters to you, I do not grant you permission to poke around in my thoughts.” Numerous people on the Kyatt Islands had a knack for telepathy, but it had never concerned Tikaya since back home there were strict laws against intruding without permission.
“ We’re not on Kyatt,” Gali said. “No one here to enforce oaths.”
“ That’s when they matter the most, then, isn’t it?”
The woman stepped forward without answering and raised her fingers. Tikaya tensed. Cursed sea, she did not want someone rooting around in her mind, reading her memories, maybe replacing them with more acceptable ones.
“ I’m sorry, Tikaya,” Parkonis whispered behind her.
In other words, he was abandoning her. He must not have much power in the group. She could not help but think about how Rias had started out with no power amongst the marines and he had never failed to fight for her. She pushed thoughts of him from her mind. They could only get her in trouble here.
Gali’s cool fingers prodded Tikaya’s temple. Something itched inside her mind, like stitches being pulled out. Panic gripped her. These bastards had no right to her thoughts. She yanked her head back.
“ Hold her still,” Gali growled and reached again.
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.