Page 9

Watching Menace take the fall is devastating. It’s the perfect Titan trap: a fallen brother—even if it is a cheap replica with no internal components—and a Titan crying out in pain, coming from an opening too narrow to see much through the top.

I have failed Menace.

I used to be something important. I had a family to protect. Now, I just protect pieces of families and a few Titans as needed. It’s difficult to not feel like I am incapable of my sentinel duties when I was so close to Menace and still let him become the next victim in whatever maniacal plan this is. I’m not as strong as I expected I would become.

I’m far more broken than I ever feared.

But I’m a lot angrier.

All Menace has done for the last day is protect and care for me. He’s not the monster I thought he was.

Menace fell for the trap just as someone had hoped because it’s ingrained in him to not leave a Brother behind. Whoever they are, they know Titans.

I have to go get him.

I want to scream in rage, but I can’t if I want to keep my cover. So I bottle it up to use later and steady my gun in my right hand as I scan the area for the actual access shaft that Solcrue are likely using.

As I walk through the forest around the trap access, I notice a section with a few crushed leaves and broken branches. I slow and track the lightly worn path between bushes to a crack in the mountain.

The rock is dry inside, and the air carries the scent of starship fuels and hot plastic out of the depths. A Titan sensor in the walls swirls in green lasers over the passageway.

If I trip it, they’ll find me, and I’ll never reach Menace. There’s a tiny hole between boulders to my right. I peek through and push my bag to the other side. I climb up and slide myself in feet first, so I land upright. Collecting my things, I weave back into the mountain, following the corridor until I encounter a junction.

It’s rather quiet, almost too quiet. I try to think about which direction would get me closer to where Menace has fallen, but all I’ve done is head further away from him. Taking the passage to the left leads me to a door. Through the window, I see a hangar and a large, familiar, bounty hunter’s ship. Either Hunter Kuthar is working for the Solcrue again and not trading with rebels, or he finally lost a battle, and someone took his ship.

“Hey!”

A scaly green soldier calls out an intruder alert over his radio and then fires off a shot at me from his rifle.

I dart down a crack in the rock that looks like a servants’ passageway, something too small for most Solcrue because they’re taller than the average human. He no doubt knows where it dumps out. I don’t, but it’s my best option for now. There’s no one down here but me.

He doesn’t follow, so when I find myself in an intersection with a drain grate in the floor, I take the opportunity to escape a predictable path. I slip under the metal panel and drop into a creek that the Solcrue likely use for handling sewage. I follow the murky water, knowing it has to dump out somewhere with a larger exit than where it entered.

The water crashes into another channel with periodic drains overhead. Hearing voices, I climb onto a rock and listen through a drain grate as best as possible.

“There’s a human in the servants’ corridor near the hangar. Make sure she dies there.”

“Sir, there are only three of us left and five exits there. Our other two teams are at the outpost waiting for Titans. Reinforcements keep getting shot down.”

“I don’t care what you have to do. Make it work.”

“Send me with two of Tachner’s crew.”

“No. His squad stays with me. We’re not letting this one get away either.”

The Solcrue’s shadow passes over the drain. I get down and follow him as he walks along the outposts’ corridors.

I track him to a dead end. He enters a room that doesn’t stay with the creek. When he opens the door, I hear the sound Menace and I detected from the access. Except it isn’t just any Titan. Now, it’s coming from Menace.

My heart stutters at the sounds of him in agony, and I fear more time has passed in my search for him than I realized.

I’m in the right place. I just have to find a way to get up there.

“We’ve got intruders, Quris. Get the information we need so we can blow this place. We don’t need to hand over any more tech to those metalheads. They’re already breathing down our necks.”

The Solcrue officer’s words always linger a bit too long on the S sounds for my preference.

Damn snakes.

He turns and leaves. “We’re prepping to launch back to Marst.”

I track the waterway to the next topside drainage, then climb up onto the rocks and lift the grate in the dark room. Sliding it aside, I raise my gun, expecting someone to come over and look inside. When no one comes, I haul myself into the room.

It’s a stock room with a wash basin that reeks of polish and the sweet funk of gilkyworm cakes. The scent makes me gag, but I ignore it as I close up the grate and steal a towel from a storage rack to dry off my boots so I don’t leave a path others can follow.

Then, I creep toward the nearby door. Easing it open, I peek out. When I can’t hear any voices, I pull the door open and slip out.

At the end of the hall, I peer through the cracked door into a lab. A Titan shape floats in fragments inside a cylindrical container that looks like it’s been made from an old engine cooling tank from Earth Minor’s manufacturing plants. Vapor clouds drift away from it in little streams.

Beside the large cage is Menace, strapped to an almost vertical hexagonal metal panel. His arms and legs are stretched out, and he’s held in place by an array of thick metal bands. Around him are workbenches filled with parts, fluids, and tools.

He tugs hard on his restraints, calling to his Brother in the chamber. I can hear his desperation even through the glass.

“Fracture? Can you hear me? Fracture!”

“Stupid mistake, falling for such a pathetic attempt at a shell of a Titan,”

a man in a Creator’s long gray and blue robes remarks to Menace as he lifts a tablet near Menace’s forehead. His face is a strange translucent pale color, and his eyes don’t seem quite a human blue.

As his sleeve slides back, I see the embedded tech all Creators had in their forearms. It’s liquid black, not white, and it’s filled with green light instead of blue. If he was a Creator, he’s been tainted by Solcrue tech.

“Not again, please,”

Menace begs.

Again? Menace knows this guy? But despite that, I’m more bothered that the welvir slayer is begging for anything from anyone. Dread squeezes the breath from my lungs.

“Aren’t you happy to see your old Creator, SM-8301?”

Menace jerks angrily in his restraints. “I have a name, now!”

“You had a name. I am Creator Quris. You were Sergeant Rigel. Now, you are a machine. And machines have purposes, not feelings.”

“Deny reality all you want, human,”

Menace says, eyes rolling back. “It doesn’t change it. But since you’re like KillStar now, technically, that makes you a—”

“WreckTank, yes,”

Quris says it like he’s proud of such an accomplishment. “But a far more efficient one than any of you Stealths ever were. But I never wanted you to be pain-free.

“Pain keeps you in check, makes you get things right the first time to avoid more. It also makes you obey orders without hesitation to avoid consequences. Pain is the perfect power.”

I ease back from the door and realize why Menace and the others like Morbid are different. Their Creator was a piece of shit. But I said something similar to Shifter about letting survivors feel fear, and it makes me feel sick to my stomach.

I guess that makes me a piece of shit, too.

My insides twist. This whole time, I thought that the Creators were some sort of angels, building the saviors of humanity. But my father wasn’t in the end. He lost himself in the advancements that eventually took his life. In his quest for solutions to survive, he became corrupt.

Have I become like him?

Hearing voices down the hallway, I slink back into the shadow of a support beam. Two guards stalk toward the door, talking about the escape the Titans have planned.

“There aren’t enough of them to overpower us. We just have to pick them off one at a time. With the range extender we found in Bone Valley Outpost, we’ll know right where they all are.”

“I think we’re underestimating them,”

the other solcruean soldier remarks as I wrap my hand around the zembi I borrowed from Kelta. I’ve watched Menace use his, but this is my test. There’s no room for error and no time to practice. I have to cut down as many of the enemy as fast as possible before they know what’s happening.

I step out of the shadow, opening the blade. It reaches full length as I pierce the first soldier through the back. The blade ignites red as it punches into the second. They both gasp and slump as I draw the blade out.

The cauterized punctures leave almost no trace, save for a few droplets of blood as I drag one at a time into the storage room. I steal a radio, keycards, and a med kit. Then I drop their bodies into the drainage creek.

More voices echo down the hallway. I hear the same words call over the radio. “Tacler, Acerphus, report.”

I frantically search for a place to hide. A narrow ladder climbs into the ceiling across the room. I run to it and hike up as fast as I can. My legs burn under the weight of the gear I’m carrying. But I can’t get caught, and I don’t want to confront an unknown number of soldiers. Two by surprise was risky enough. I can’t take on a whole squad without a grenade or a decent shooting distance, and I have neither.

The upper level is narrow and weaves around the rough exterior of the large room Menace is being held in.

“What the hell? Where did they go? I swear they were just here,”

someone remarks.

The door slams, and I relax a little as I creep along the upper level. Periodic towers of rock support the ceiling but leave gaping openings between. I can hear everything: Menace’s strained breaths, the buzzing of equipment, and the ting-ting-ting of a metal blade tapping the edge of a workbench while the fucked-up Creator admires the nanosolution draining from lacerations on Menace’s body.

My hope drains like Menace. He’s killing him!

There’s something uncomfortably familiar about the man’s face. Little of him is human, but there’s enough skin between the augments and cybernetic parts for me to know he was once one.

“I told you I would turn you into something special. I did. You’ve always been different. You can heal yourself. You can stop your Brothers from using their skills against you. No one else will ever control you again. You are the perfect Titan.”

“Except you,”

Menace growls.

“Naturally.”

What the heck is he talking about?

“Why do you do this to me?”

Menace rasps like he’s begging for death. The horrid sounds make me gasp in empathetic pain. Memories flash to the front of my mind of a past I’ve long pushed away. But they have found me again, clawing their way through Menace’s prime—now lacerated—body to get to me.

I know this madness, this destruction.

I felt it long ago.

“Of all the Titans, you suffered the worst human death, being ripped apart piece by piece. And still, you crawled your way out of that cave with one arm, didn’t you? Why?”

Quris challenges.

Menace jerks on the restraints.

“Because of that girl, the one who became Mintaka.”

Menace roars with fury. “You do not have the right to say her name!”

He moans in agony and hopelessness.

“You…”

Menace chokes up. “You killed her then. You killed her as a human and a Titan!”

Quris tucks his hands behind his back and walks a casual circle around Menace’s torture cell, seeming all too comfortable with the pending death of someone else. “So many times, yes, because I saw potential in you and your brothers. Her too, but— We all have a price we are willing to pay for what we covet most. Your price is much lower than others, and yet you endure what they can’t.”

“Why side with the enemy?”

Menace asks as Quris taps a knife just beneath the digibadge on his chest.

Come on, there has to be a way to kill this dickhead and get Menace out! But I don’t know how to kill a Creator because I’ve never in my life considered it until now.

“I loved the idea of winning as an underdog until I couldn’t see it happening anymore.”

Quris shrugs and flicks the blade across Menace’s synthskin, slicing it open.

Menace’s muscles tense into sinewy threads. He strains for breath and groans.

My stomach feels weak and shudders at the sight, but I can’t tear my eyes away.

“Then I did the sensible thing and sold my services to the enemy because that quality of life was ironically better.”

Menace shakes his head and chokes out a sound of angry disbelief that makes my throat ache. Quris is mostly cybernetics. I’ll need a voltstick to tame him, something worse to break him.

As I search the room for a weapon that can do that, a gun barrel taps the back of my head. “Well, aren’t you the perfect little surprise? I think it’s time you come with me.”

Shit.

I turn slowly to face the soldier and instantly know he’ll pull the trigger without hesitation if I disobey.

“Sef, long time. Can’t believe you’re still alive. Thought Hunter Broknis would’ve sold you to Captain Hert by now.”

I lost sight of my surroundings because I was caught up in Menace’s pain, and now I’m stuck with a mutinous butcher who weasels his way onto every ship, then plants seeds of chaos so they don’t notice him stealing right from under their noses. I could not have made a worse mistake. “Sythius. What are you doing here?”

He licks his teeth and grins. “Doesn’t matter why I’m here, only that I am. And now I have you without anyone else around to stop me from taking what I want.”

He presses the gun barrel into the side of my neck. “Make a peep, and I’ll fire. You know I will.”

Digust squeezes my throat as he bonds his mouth to mine and grinds against me, crushing me against the rocky tunnel wall. He tastes of gilkyworm cakes and booze mixed with suracco, solcruean tobacco. I endure it because I have to if I want to keep my life.

He grabs me by the vest and slings me down a nearby hallway. “Walk.”