Page 33 of Stars in Umbra (The Sable Riders #8)

His eyes searched hers, and she gave him a slight nod and stroked his arm.

He took strength from this and turned to face the music.

In slow, halting, timbred sentences, he outlined the situation and his past as a ghost assassin, an elite gun runner, and mercenary forged in the underworlds of Pegasi.

He shared how he got shackled to a neural controller implanted years ago after being kidnapped and drugged.

He described how his every step was manipulated by invisible hands until the very people he protected became his assigned targets.

The heft of that revelation lingered in the Data Nexus, casting long shadows across the room even as the Riders’ holo-presences remained suspended in crisp clarity.

‘So when we bumped into you at the Justice Center, you were battling the command to kill us?’ Zane drawled.

Mo hung his head, shame spreading color on his ruddy cheeks. ‘ Naam .’

The disclosure of his past as a trained assassin responsible for the deaths of figures like Vesk Tyran was chilling.

As was the brutal fact that he’d been moments away from eliminating his friends.

The truth hovered over the gathered group like an unspoken storm cloud.

Kainan huffed, then glanced toward Rina. ‘Do you trust him?’

‘I do,’ she replied, steady and without hesitation, her palm, still encircling her man’s upper arm, tightening.

‘Despite being coerced and threatened, he chose not to assassinate you. That has to count for something. While I might not have known him for years, I’ve seen who he is at his core.

What he clings to isn’t hate. It is honor.

Mo isn’t just a weapon. He’s a man of integrity and kindness, node or no node. ’

The room went still.

Kainan’s jaw ticked. Then, after a long breath, he gave a single nod. ‘He resisted orders to kill us. Torture didn’t break him. That’s ample reason for me to believe in his loyalty to us.’

Zane moved first, prowling forward within the holo display’s boundaries.

‘May I?’ he asked. ‘I need to probe you.’

He didn’t have to utter the reason, but certainty was required as well as a truth check.

Mo met his gaze, then offered a nod. ‘Not too deep now. You don’t want to eviscerate us all.’

Zane jerked his chin in assent and closed his eyes.

His psi-signature, potent enough to reach from Eden II, where his physical body stood, to Dunia, expanded in a gentle hum.

It brushed against Mo’s consciousness.

Even Rina sensed it, a tingling force creeping along her spine. Mo’s expression tensed, but he held steady.

The psionic pass was light.

Zane took great care not to trip any embedded traps or push past Mo’s willing threshold. When he opened his eyes, he spoke with certainty.

‘He’s telling the truth. On the conscious level, at least. His pain is real. His story checks out.’

Kainan’s face was unreadable. ‘What about the neural controller?’

Zane shook his head. ‘That node’s buried too deep. However, if he were going to turn on us, he would have already done so. He resisted, which matters.’

With that, the tension in the room eased, and Rina let out the exhale she’d been holding.

‘However, the surgery could go either way,’ Zane said, arms folded as his psionic gaze lingered on the Faraday cage. ‘Extracting a node that entwined with the roots of his base neural pathways is risky; he might not come out the same.’

Ki’Remi’s voice was calm and clinical. ‘Leaving it in isn’t an option. The node’s signature isn’t just command-linked. It’s destructive. Reactive. If it activates again, we may not get a second chance to stop him.’

‘He’s Sacran-touched,’ Issa added. ‘You all experienced his raw power. An ancient Sacran energy, of the Ssignakht, all-seeing and Ssukigrat all-searing, paradigm, flickers within him. Both are working together to guard and heal him. That’s likely how he fought back.

He needs that node incised in entirety so as not to kill him, but the Sacran forces in him will protect him for now. ’

Kainan jerked his chin and turned to Mirage. ‘Proceed, but if anything goes wrong, we shut it down fast. Understood?’

Mirage nodded, already prepping. ‘Remi, I’ll need you to walk me through the lattice protocol.’

‘I’m patched in,’ Ki’Remi replied. ‘I’ll guide you step by step.’

Mirage deactivated the Faraday cage and brought Mo out.

His eyes locked with Rina’s, churning and roiling with emotion.

She held his gaze as Mirage activated a translucent shield that fell over the Mo’s form.

Zane stepped in, closed his eyes, and strengthened the transparent bulwark with an invisible psionic sheath of his own.

Control panels rose from either side of the hover bed, which would keep a close watch of his vitals.

Mirage’s nanites bloomed from her hand, creating a lattice over Mo’s head to help map and pinpoint the surgery locations in his brain.

Meanwhile, Mo’s hands gripped the edge as if bracing himself for war.

‘You ready?’ Mirage asked.

‘As I’ll ever be.’

A soft hum filled the room as her synth fingers danced through the air, sending key data to the nanite network, forming precise holographic incisions over Mo’s skull.

‘Ki’Remi, aligning neural graph now.’

‘Good. You’re within .002 deviation.’

‘Beginning extraction sequence.’

The laser-guided beam appeared from the nano-matrix and sliced through using non-invasive lasers, steered by projected overlays.

Rina observed, heart in her throat, as Mirage’s tools pierced layer by layer, disrupting none of Mo’s vital functions, slowing his breathing but keeping him stable.

Mirage worked with clinical precision.

Ki’Remi’s voice throughout was calm and exacting.

‘Node cluster detected. Begin containment net.’

A sudden surge of golden static leapt from Mo’s temple, his glyphs pulsing.

‘Stabilizing resonance, Remi, I need a harmonic.’

‘Focusing now. Hold the conduit steady.’

A few more moments of silence passed before Mirage murmured, ‘The neural controller is free.’

Mirage extracted it through Mo’s nasal cavity and caught it in a confinement field, guiding it with trembling hands into a small Faraday cage built for handling dangerous micro-technology.

She slammed the case shut and locked it.

‘It’s done,’ Mirage murmured as the lattice and shield went down.

Everyone exhaled.

Mo suddenly woke and then slumped back into the hover bed, breathing hard, but alive.

Rina surged forward and reached for her man’s hand.

Mo’s fingers curled around hers, firm and tight, his eyes glistening with emotion.

With effort, he propped himself up on one elbow to study his found family gazing back at him.

‘ Sante , Rina, Mirage, Ki’Remi, Issa, Zane, and Selene,’ he growled. ‘I owe you my life.’

‘Oh, we intend to make you pay,’ Zane drawled with a gleam in his eye.

‘Thank goodness,’ Selene breathed, locking eyes for a moment with her best friend, who raised her chin.

‘ Sante sana ,’ Rina mouthed back.

Kainan huffed in relief. ‘Mirage, Rina, take care of him, and Mo, we’ll speak when this freakin’ mission is over. I assume you’re strategizing how to take the kinais down who tried to snuff us?’

‘We are,’ Rina confirmed. ‘Mo and I will work with Mirage on it.’

‘You have carte blanche. Given ‘em hell,’ Kainan growled.

MOLAN

Mo sat still, the light inside the Faraday cage dimming around him, though it couldn’t hide the storm crackling beneath his skin.

His physique now betrayed flashes of an older, more vast force.

The removal of the node had somehow unleashed more of his inner force. A thin gold current flickered up his forearms, radiant like liquid lightning.

It spread, his body rejecting the restraints of mortality.

Mirage circled him, tablet in hand, her brow furrowed as layers of real-time cellular data streamed across her screen.

Issa, via holo stream, floated behind her, her eyes shadowed with dawning awe.

‘There’s no doubt now,’ Mirage murmured. ‘His cells are riddled with fragments of divine code. This isn’t enhanced physiology, it’s Sacran in origin.’

‘What does that make me? Mo rasped.

Issa stepped forward in the projection. ‘Your cellular makeup and the sigils on your chest prove one thing. You’re a god-scion. A direct descendant.’

Mo blinked, tension bristling in every inch of him. ‘What the fokk does that even mean?’

‘It means,’ Issa said with care, ‘that you are the child of a Sacran high deity.’

He flinched. The room tilted.

Heat spread across his back and under his skin.

His jaw clenched.

‘So what my mother told me all those years ago, the stories I thought she made up?’ His timbre cracked. ‘They were true?’

Issa nodded, eyes narrowing as if piecing together a thread of a long-forgotten recollection. ‘What was her name?’

Mo swallowed. The memory of the woman he adored and lost left a bitter and ashen residue in his mouth.

‘Her full name was Sayonna Ikjhaol Mithandri Iqal.’

Issa’s holo flared with sudden static.

She gasped, her breath catching so hard her mate Ki’Remi reached out from behind, placing a palm on her spine, steadying her.

She waved him away after a beat and straightened.

‘She was Sulfiqar’s concubine,’ Issa whispered. ‘One of many who disappeared during his reign. You’re his son, Mo. One of the many heirs of Sulfiqar, the Most High God of Sacra.’

The heft of her words hit him like a thunderclap, then sank instead, cold and leaden, into the hollows of his bones.

‘The same freakin’ Sulfiqar whose name is popping up in strange messages and mutterings in the fringe and DarkNet message boards?’ Zane drawled.

Mo shrugged. ‘Sounds like it, but we can’t be sure until we have proof.’

‘ Fokkin ’ wild coincidence,’ the psionic Rider rasped, eyes narrowing. ‘I might need to conduct a telepathic sweep of Pegasi to locate whoever the hell this Sulfiqar is.’

Kainan huffed in agreement. ‘Soon, brother, it appears necessary; however, right now we stand with Mo.’

The Sable Rider’s khan turned to his security specialist.