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Now, it’s Brennan’s turn. I know my leader trusts me, and I have to trust my own gut.

“We know Enforcement is after us,” Brennan repeats the words I’d telepathed. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt when you take us in for questioning. These are our coordinates. We’ll be unarmed, and you can take us in with no resistance.”

Brennan reads off the coordinates. Taggar’s eyes narrow. He seems suspicious, but he doesn’t press the issue.

“Very well. Be outside the building with your Orb-Blades ten feet away from you. Same goes for that nasty rifle Lazar uses. If there’s even a hint that you’re planning a trap for my agents, I’ll turn you and the building into glass with our Orb-Beams.”

“Understood,” Brennan nods, and abruptly cuts the feed.

Then, he turns to me, staring at me intently.

“What the hell was that? Our one chance was to plead guilty and beg for leniency.”

I shake my head.

“Something was off, Brennan. He should have accused us formally of the crimes for which we’d been accused – of kidnapping. You’ll notice he didn’t.”

Brennan’s eyes narrow.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” I admit, “but we need to be smart here. Trust me, Brennan. If there’s a way out of this, I’m going to find it.”

Otho strides up to me, clapping me on the back with his meaty palm. “I trust you, battle-brother.”

14

Brennan

The handcuffs around my wrists are forged steel. I flex, testing them – feeling the power of my Bond-Enhanced muscles. Natali may have taken away the sweetness of her aura from my mind, but she can’t take away the power that she’s imbued me with.

I tense – and for a moment, I think I might even be able to snap out of these handcuffs.

But it wouldn’t change the steel bars in front of me. Escaping from an Aurelian Law Enforcement Reaver, while confined to the brig, would be no small task.

Lazar sits across from me. He looks fine on the outside. We’ve all learned to hide our emotions from an early age. Yet, through our Bond, I can still feel the guilt in his mind.

“She said we set her free,” he mumbles, still stuck in that last conversation between himself and Natali. He can’t get over it. I can’t help him there. He should have told me what he’d suspected. He should have told me that he was worried Natali would abandon us.

The past is the past, though. I can’t change what’s happened. I can only hope that Lazar and Otho’s trust in Natali is warranted.

When we were taken in, the Aurelians barely said a word to us. No arrest. No charges laid. We were just thrown into the brig, and then the Reaver took off. Lazar suspects that something’s off about the whole thing, and I’m increasingly inclined to agree with him.

But, what it signifies, I still can’t fathom.

“We didn’t Orb-Shift, so we aren’t going to Colossus,” says Lazar, bringing himself to the present moment as he mules over our current circumstances. We’ve been traveling for at least an hour. I don’t have the exact count, because they took my smartwatch along with our weapons and armors when they captured us, but my sense of timing has always been good.

The young buck in charge of securing our surrender was quiet, but efficient. He was radiating competence, which isn’t common among trigger-happy Law Enforcement officers.

“We’re not going to Colossus,” Lazar explains further. “The Lieutenant himself will be the decider of our fate.”

Lieutenant Taggar. The man from the holo-projection. I’ve heard of him before. He’s renowned for his loyalty to the Aurelian Empire.

In that regard, things could go either way for us. He might be the sympathetic ear we need, who’ll accept that wehadto do questionable things to benefit our Empire – things that skirted the law.

On the flip side? I’m leaning towards the thought that Lieutenant Taggar will use us as an example to other Aurelians thinking of going Rogue; to clean the besmirched honor of the Aurelian Empire.

In truth? It all depends on how quiet Mr. Carani kept the kidnapping attempt. It could be interstellar news – or it might still be unreported.

It’s not headline news when a Rogue Aurelian takes captives – but when a government agent does it? It’d be an interstellar scandal. It would leave a foul taste in the mouths of still-loyal human settlements; forced to pay high taxes for the safety we claim to offer them, and yet kidnapping them when we don’t get our way.