Page 16 of The First Spark (Dynasty of Fire #1)

“I suppose he hasn’t introduced me?”

Vega removed the soaked stack of gauze and snatched the last few squares. “He didn’t have to. You’re Princessa Hannover. Grab some saline, too.”

Kalie’s cheeks burned.

Cybel stalked away empty-handed, making a garbled noise like a synthesized chuckle.

She inhaled deeply and forced her irritation away. There were hundreds of planets in the Federation, each with their own ruling class, and she was one princess from one world. It wasn’t fair to hold Vega’s indifference against her.

As the aibot rattled through cabinets behind her, Kalie yanked open the top drawer and grabbed a bag of gauze, a bottle of saline, and an expensive vial of okul salve.

She raised her eyebrows. Okul only grew on four planets in the Federation, and the healing salve produced on Dali went for a thousand credits per ounce.

Mira’s didn’t appear to be a knock-off, so the okul would eradicate Wells’s infection in minutes.

She handed the supplies to Vega, and her blood ran cold. A bandolier of gleaming knives coiled around the woman’s thigh.

Kalie stumbled back and glanced at the uncovered hatch, but Wells was right. Dropping from a ship, while in a stargate route flinging them forward faster than the speed of light, was suicide.

She was stuck here.

“Since you know who I am, it’s only fair I know who you are.”

Vega poured saline on a square of gauze. “I’m Mira.”

“Mira Vega?”

“No last name.” Mira flashed a smile, but it seemed strained. “I used a cybermod. New tech. Allows you to adopt someone’s appearance. I borrowed the real Sergeant Vega’s for a bit, but I’d rather be myself.”

“You two know each other, I take it?—”

“Dammit, careful!”

Wells’s face twisted, and he jerked his arm away from where Mira’s saline-soaked gauze had touched it. Kalie flinched. The bleeding wound looked awful.

Mira snickered. “You’re complaining about a pulser wound? Weak. You cut me open in a filthy bar, and I didn’t complain.”

“That’s because you passed out,” Wells muttered, digging his fingers into the cushion.

“But I did manage to walk four blocks with a chest full of shrapnel. After I fell three stories from a hovercraft.”

“I still don’t know how you survived.”

“You’re lucky I did.” Mira brushed his grimy hair back, smiling fondly .

Kalie pursed her lips, trying to reconcile the wounded man lying on the couch with the arrogant drunk who’d blackmailed her on the Chimaera .

It didn’t line up, unless Mira was his girlfriend, but she doubted that a woman who made killing a competition would tolerate a lover who made out with strippers in bars.

She cleared her throat. “Did he tell you I was on the Chimaera ?”

“No.” Wells winced as Mira dabbed at the blood crusted around his wound. “Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t break our deal, not when you promised me Avington.”

“A city in Avington,” she said. If he wasn’t so infuriating, she would’ve agreed to give him his father’s whole barony back, out of gratitude for the sacrifice Baron Wells had made for Aunt Calida.

It made no sense that she hadn’t done so after she’d defeated Grandmother Madeleine. “It’ll take time.”

“Don’t take too long.” Wells tried to pull off a smirk, but with Mira cleaning the wound, it looked like a grimace. “I just risked my life to save you. You’d better get me my money.”

Mira tipped the vial of okul salve onto a fresh square of gauze. “Remember me when you’re rich, playboy. This contract’s only half a mil for me.”

“This contract?” Kalie stumbled back, glancing at the pulser holstered at Mira’s hip. Ice flooded through her veins. “Where are you taking me?”

“One sec. Cy, have you found that regenerator?”

Cybel grunted, and Mira sighed. “I was hired to find you before Carik did. I picked up your signal when you sent a message to your uncle at the spaceport—that was stupid, by the way. The first time the Chimaera dropped to pick up a connector, I teleported on. I kept an eye on you from a distance. I was coming to help you in the mess hall before this one caught the legionnaires’ attention?—”

“That was her, not?—”

Wells yelped as Mira touched the oozing gauze to his hissing red wound.

“Oh, stop acting like a child, playboy. Anyway, I saved the idiot over here and offered to split my score if he helped me get you. Little did I know he’s making a few hundred times what I’m getting. ”

Kalie narrowed her eyes. “Who hired you?”

“I can’t say much, but you have a powerful ally waiting to meet you.”

The sight of Mira’s gleaming pulser sealed her throat. She swallowed and lowered her eyes to the floor. “I don’t suppose you could just take me back to Dali?”

“Sorry.” Mira shrugged.

She breathed in deeply and glanced at Wells. “But you aren’t working for the Federation.”

Mira’s lazy posture went rigid. “Hell will freeze over before I ever work for those bastards.”

“If there’s a record for killing Feds,” Wells muttered, “she’s probably won it.”

A drawer slammed shut, and Cybel’s footfalls thumped against the vibrating floor. The aibot held out a regenerator to Mira.

Kalie’s brows shot up. The bulky handheld device, with an opening at the top and three buttons above a small glass screen, didn’t look like anything special, but the cost …

Mira had to be a thief. There was no way someone with a ship this dingy could buy a regenerator and okul salve, let alone a cybermod and a transporter.

“Hannover, there’s painkillers in the bottom left drawer.” Mira powered on the regenerator. “Hand me the bottle.”

“No,” Wells said sharply.

Kalie froze with her hand on the drawer.

“Zane, this isn’t a graze,” Mira chided, dribbling salve into Wells’s wound. “The blast tore right through your arm, and it’ll hurt like hell to mend?—”

“No. No pills.”

Given that Mira was the one with the weapons, Kalie took the pills from the drawer anyway. Wells’s glare could’ve frozen fire.

“We can’t wait until we get to the station?”

Mira huffed. “It’ll be twelve hours. Do you want to bleed out?”

Wells almost looked relieved. Kalie frowned.

Mira’s brows pressed down, and she opened her mouth as if to lecture him, then shut it. “Fine. No pills. Maybe this’ll convince you that you’re being stupid about it. ”

“ I’m being stupid? I’m not the one scared shitless by needles?—”

“That’s different.” Mira’s expression darkened. “Hannover, put the pills away and grab me that leather strap, would you?”

She pursed her lips. She had a new level of sympathy for her maids on Dali.

Bite marks creased the leather strap. Wrinkling her nose, Kalie pinched the corner between her cracked nails.

Mira rolled her eyes as she took it, but Wells didn’t comment.

His jaw was clenched tightly, and his body was rigid, as if he was focused entirely on bracing himself for the pain.

He opened his mouth just wide enough for Mira to slide the strap in, then he bit down and closed his eyes.

“Okay. Cybel, you have the regenerator and his arm. Hannover, hold down his legs.”

Wells mumbled something indistinct, then ripped the strap out of his mouth, scowling. “You’d better do that. She’s not strong enough.”

Mira’s lips twitched downwards. “Fine. Hannover, you take his hand?—”

“No,” Kalie said, at the same time as Wells.

Tipping her head back, Mira inhaled deeply. “Would you two please grow up? Zane, you’ll need to hold onto something, and Hannover, he’s right, you can’t hold him down.”

Kalie exchanged a wary look with Wells, but she sank to the floor and slid her hand into his sweaty, calloused palm. At least he’d washed the grime off. Her hands were clean, but the phantom feeling of sludge under her nails was driving her mad.

Handing Cybel the regenerator, Mira pinned down Wells’s shins. “You’re sure you won’t take?—”

“No.”

Mira sighed. “Whenever you’re ready, Cy.”

Cybel leaned over the wound. The aibot’s metal eyelids lowered over its orange optical sensors. Its thin metal fingers probed at the skin around the wound, earning a hiss from Wells and a glare from Mira.

“Humans,” Cybel clucked, pinning Wells’s arm to the couch. “So breakable.”

Kalie snorted and disguised it as a cough .

“Now, now. Play nice, Cybel. I know the medical programming I installed taught you better bedside manner than that.”

“Whatever you say, Mistress. Wells, brace yourself. Ninety-eight percent of weaker life forms like you humans reported that exponentially increasing the process of stem cell generation was excruciatingly painful.”

“Just do it, wire-brain,” Wells growled, sliding the strap between his teeth.

Cybel pressed a button. The regenerator’s purple light shone on the ugly red wound.

For a few moments, nothing.

Then Wells’s body spasmed. His pinned leg thrashed upwards, and his hand crushed hers. His clenched teeth stifled his scream.

Flinching, Kalie glanced at the hole in his arm. The ripped muscle stretched and knit together; the tissues surrounding it mended, cleansed of infection by the salve. Bile burned Kalie’s throat. She swallowed convulsively as Cybel withdrew, letting Wells catch his breath.

Kalie mustered up her most encouraging smile and squeezed his hand, but his glistening eyes hovered on Mira.

“You’re almost there,” Mira said softly, patting his shin. “Just a little longer.”

Cybel pressed a button, and the purple light flared again. The severed blood vessels snaked towards each other and fused together. Wells screamed again, louder this time. He threw his head back into the pillows and bit into the strip of leather.

“I’m sorry,” Kalie whispered, but no one heard her.

Another break, another dose, another scream. She’d had the same procedure before, but she’d been numb through the whole thing. If he was able to bear it without any relief, he had to be far stronger than she’d assumed.

“Done,” Cybel said. Fresh pink skin stretched across the wound.

As Wells ripped the leather strap from his mouth, the aibot’s monotone voice took on a sarcastic edge.

“It is simply astounding that a lesser specimen like yourself managed to endure the whole process without any outward signs of stress. ”

“Give me a minute,” Wells panted, looking anywhere but Mira. The color had drained from his face. Sweat and tears soaked his pale skin. “Go, please.”

Please wasn’t a word she’d ever thought she’d hear from him.

Mira sidled around the couch and brushed a gentle hand over his arm, but Wells turned away.

Kalie cleared her throat. “I’d love to take a shower, if you could show me where it is. And if you have a change of clothes, I’d greatly appreciate it.”

Frowning at Wells, Mira sighed and rose to her feet. “Come on, then. I’ll let you raid my closet.”

Wells mouthed, Thank you . Kalie nodded and followed Mira across the room.

Whoever did Mira’s decor seriously had to be fired.

The rugs in what passed for a living room looked like they’d been salvaged from a scrap yard, and the wall decorations were just bizarre.

Old posters and strange signs, green placards with the names of random towns, maps and brochures, a dented sign with a hazard symbol on it.

Mira lifted a low-hanging cable. Kalie ducked under it, wincing as sparks flew from the frayed cord.

A flickering light over the kitchen’s cracked wooden table cast eerie shadows on the door closest to the kitchenette. Above the door hung a hovercraft’s dented license plate: V3STA.

The door slid open, and Mira sauntered inside.

“Come on in.” Mira kicked a shirt under the bunk on the far wall. “Don’t mind the mess.”

Kalie drifted through the door. This room had to be where all of Mira’s credits went.

Unlike the dingy main cabin, the room was high-tech.

Heavy-duty assault rifles were suspended in an open hatch beside the bunk’s rumpled sheets.

Holographic surveillance feeds hovered over a table.

Screens with diagnostic scans covered an entire wall.

Something whirred, and a glowing display case detached from the wall opposite the screens. The top-of-the-line weapons inside disappeared as the case rotated.

Kalie stumbled back, tripping over a canister .

Racks of clothes spanned the wall where the display case had been.

“Pretty neat, huh?”

Her mouth went dry. Dark outfits filled the closet. As Mira seized a black jacket and offered it to her, flashes of smoke and blood rushed her in a vicious surge. She squeezed her eyes shut at the memory of Ariah’s crumpled body.

Tossing the jacket across the room, Mira held out a brown sweater. “There was a time I couldn’t wear black either.”

“Because of them?” Kalie croaked, seizing the sweater. It was baggy and soft, not trim and stiff like Ariah’s lost jacket. Her insides hollowed out at the thought of that crumpled uniform, stuffed in a purse, abandoned in a supply closet on the Chimaera . Her last link to Ariah, gone.

Mira’s jaw clenched. “The legionnaires did to my family what they did to yours. And I swore I wouldn’t stop until I made them burn.”

“Did you? Make them burn?”

Darkness lurked in Mira’s eyes. “Yes. The ones who were there. But it won’t be over until every last one of them is dead.”

“No,” Kalie said lowly. “It won’t.”