Page 61 of The First Spark (Dynasty of Fire #1)

“A temporary predicament.” As Iliana frowned, shivers crawled down Kalie’s spine. “No, Kalista, I’m calling to give you a chance to surrender.”

“Why would I do that?”

“We want the same thing, the welfare of Dali.”

“You expect me to believe that? You sold Dali! ”

“I would’ve done much worse to free myself from that horrid place,” Iliana hissed.

Fury contorted her features, but with visible effort, she reeled her emotions back in.

They vanished behind a troubled mask. “I’m trying to do right by our people.

In a few minutes, neither one of us will be able to protect them.

I’m not authorized to make this call, but I thought I’d give you a chance to stop what’s coming. ”

Alarms wailed. The catwalk rocked under Kalie’s feet as thunderous blasts burst from the cannons beneath.

What’s coming? she tried to ask, but no sound came out.

“Carik is doing all of this to kill you. He’ll slaughter everyone in your fleet, if that’s what it takes. Or you could turn yourself in. Give him what he wants, and he’ll spare your friends.”

Zane scoffed. “That’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard.”

“We have the upper hand,” Julian added. “How’s Carik going to kill us? With a crumbling destroyer?”

Kalie’s blood pounded in her ears. Words warbled around her—Julian said her name, and Zane touched her arm—but she was paralyzed. Her wide eyes shifted from the onyx destroyer to the swirling mass of blues and greens looming beyond it.

“This is a trap.” The words scraped against her dry throat. “Carik’s sending backup.”

Iliana’s grim smile confirmed it.

Zane swore. “We need to go. Now.”

“Officers,” Nadar barked, “prepare to fall back!”

“You can’t be serious!” Rage flashed across Julian’s face. “We risked everything to fight, and you’re going to abandon us to Carik? We have people down there, families. What kind of cowards are you?”

Zane went rigid. His face closed off, leaving a mask of quiet fury, and his fingers curled into tight fists.

He wasn’t looking at Julian. He was looking at something beyond them, with glassy, distant eyes.

He had to be back on Oppall, seeing it again, living it again.

Julian needed to shut up, but she couldn’t find her voice to chide him.

The ship rocked as Mira stepped in front of him. She stumbled, but kept her balance and narrowed her eyes at Iliana. “No one’s going anywhere. ”

Zane’s distant look vanished, and Kalie curled her fingers around his wrist.

A visible tremor ran through Iliana, and as she stared at Mira, hurt and rage warped her face into an ugly thing.

She quickly regained her composure, but the pain of betrayal lurked in her ice-blue eyes.

“That voice… so it is true. He broke hours ago, told me everything, but I didn’t want to believe… ”

Mira shrugged. “Nothing personal. Just business.”

Kalie’s pulse hammered in her ears. A vicious tremor heaved through the floor, nearly taking her legs out, but she clung to the rail. “Who?”

Blinding light flashed, and she threw her arms up to shield herself. When the light vanished and spots cleared from her vision, a maelstrom of rubble swirled where an Aquisian cruiser had been moments before. Kalie blinked. In that second, the space of a heartbeat…

Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. So many deaths. So many more would come.

“Sir, the jump’s calculated! Should we go?”

Julian was roaring, and Zane gestured madly. Mira lurched between them and Nadar.

She needed to say something, needed to give an order— stay or go, go or stay —but she didn’t turn away from Iliana’s shimmering holo. Dread churned in her stomach and slowed her racing pulse. “Who?”

Iliana crossed her arms. “My techs are sending you a video. Pull it up. Maybe this’ll make you see reason.”

Kalie tried to order the techs to stop, to bury it, but her throat sealed.

As the video sprang to life in a holoprojection between Iliana and Julian, she gasped.

Two legionnaires and one stocky Dalian— Wright , supplied some small, functioning part of her mind—prowled in a dark cell.

A long, lethal whip, stained with glints of carmine, hissed across the stone tiles as Wright dragged it along.

Crimson spatter glistened on the rocky walls.

A puddle of blood oozed across the floor, swirling with clumps of vomit that made her stomach revolt.

In the center of the dungeon, dangling by his hands from chains bolted into the ceiling, a shirtless figure with shaggy brown hair spasmed helplessly. Awful, anguished sounds ripped from his throat.

Beside her, Zane was a flurry of motion, raging at Iliana.

She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t take her gaze off Mylis.

“Your sister exposed him for the rat he is.” Iliana’s lip curled. “It’s unfortunate that dear Selene didn’t know who your allies were, but no matter. Rats have a way of overhearing things, and with the right amount of pressure…”

Kalie’s heart thundered as Wright set the bloody whip down and picked up a metal rod. As he flicked a switch, crackling arcs of electricity burst from the end of the staff. Wright rammed it into Mylis’s back. He convulsed helplessly, and his shrill screams sliced through Kalie.

“Stop!” she howled. She lunged towards Mylis, but her hand clawed through thin air.

“They break,” Iliana said, as Wright pulled the rod away, leaving Mylis spent and gasping for breath.

Blood dribbled down his shredded skin. Chains clinked together as he trembled, looking so lost and broken that a sob tore from Kalie’s throat.

“Let him go,” she pleaded. Her voice broke.

As Wright jabbed the crackling rod into Mylis’s back, Kalie’s blood ran cold, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

His agonized scream came again: desperate, terrified, alone.

They yanked the rod away, and Mylis slumped forward, thrusting all his weight onto his contorted shoulders.

Soft sounds of anguish slipped from his lips.

His toes brushed against the puddle of filth, but the millimeters between his burned feet and the stone tiles seemed like an impossible chasm.

Tears seeped from Kalie’s eyes.

“You bitch!” Zane snarled, storming across the catwalk.

“Zander Wells, is it? Selene told me about you. I’m more than willing to let Grant go, to let all of you go, if Kalista turns herself in.”

“No way.” As Zane shifted in front of her, a vein in his neck jutted out. “I won’t allow it. ”

Mira stepped to his side. “Not happening.”

Through the gap between their shoulders, Kalie stared helplessly at Mylis. Wright shocked him again. And again.

Iliana’s face could’ve been carved from stone. “Perhaps I should throw you in there with him. Let the traitors bleed together.”

Mira’s reply warbled around her, and something about her distant words made alarms sound in Kalie’s head. Her eyes were glued to Mylis thrashing in his chains, her thoughts were a muddled mess of horror, and what had Mira said, anyway? An offer of some sort, a trade, herself for…

“You’re of no interest to Carik.”

Mira laughed darkly. “No,” she said, in a hollow voice that didn’t sound at all like her, “no, I guess I’m not. But Hannover’s not going to turn herself in, so you might as well forget it.”

“Ah. I guess Grant is disposable. Perhaps…”

The video of Mylis shimmered and dissolved, but before Kalie could stammer a protest, another cell took its place.

The shadowy room was empty except for a pile of rags, lurking in the darkest corner.

None of the others were paying attention; Nadar had vanished, Mira murmured into her comm, and Julian conferred with someone outside his holo. Zane’s eyes were distant again. Frowning, Kalie turned to the empty cell.

The heap of rags shifted, and someone moaned.

The sounds reached her ears first—a screeching door, thudding boots, and pitiful shrieks.

Legionnaires entered the frame. A swollen, bluish hand emerged from the rags, as if to fight them off, then dropped to the floor.

A legionnaire tore a rag aside, revealing a bald figure with awful scars carved into its skull.

The exposed gashes were the color of rot. Infected.

Kalie cringed.

Then the figure looked up, and every part of her body seized.

Her lips moved, but no sound came out. A weight pressed down on her chest. She desperately tried to move, but her numb legs cemented her to the spot.

The woman’s blackened eyes were swollen shut. Inflamed gashes and vicious burns surrounded sparse patches of pale skin. Her lips were two jagged streaks of blood, and her nose was a smashed, bloody mess, but her heart-shaped face gave her away.

Kalie gasped in a breath of pungent air.

She tried to reach for her, but her arm was a limp, useless mass dangling at her side.

The cavernous bridge faded away, the alarms popped out of existence, the shouts vanished into nothing.

She alone existed in the world—she, and the video shimmering before her, and the woman whose face she saw every time she looked in the mirror.

“Ar… Ariah?” she croaked.

Utter stillness. The world might’ve been moving around her, but she wasn’t part of it. All she could do was stare. It couldn’t be Ariah. She’d watched her die. The face wasn’t enough to go on; the woman’s features were swollen beyond recognition, and they could’ve used a cybermod.

Iliana’s baffling ultimatum whispered in her memory: “You lost something very important to you… a piece of you… does the name ? —”

Kalie clapped a hand to her mouth and screamed. “Oh, gods, Ariah!”

The scream snapped something in her; her legs unlocked, and she staggered to the video, crumpling to her knees.

Her eyes widened as she traced the infected burns spiraling down Ariah’s neck, the missing chunks of skin, the vicious wounds criss-crossing her bare chest, and her leg, a rotting mass of black and yellow and putrid green.

Then she screamed, and sobbed, and pounded the metal floor, wishing her bones would break like Ariah’s.

“Ariah is dead,” Julian said coldly. The word echoed in her ears: dead, dead, dead…

“No. But I’m sure she wishes she was.” Iliana’s voice was low and haunted.

“I tried to give you a chance to free her, back at my coronation. I know what it’s like to be discarded, abused, abandoned…

If you’d agreed to let me have the crown, I could’ve convinced the Prime Minister to release her.

It would’ve been weeks. Not months. Not… ”

Iliana shuddered, and a fist gripped Kalie’s stomach. If Iliana, who’d endured twenty cycles in a cell on Titan, shuddered at what had been done to Ariah …

Bile lurched into Kalie’s throat, and she doubled over, retching on the catwalk.

Puke tangled in her hair. Someone swept the strands away, pinning them back as another wave spewed from her mouth.

It landed on the floor with a wet splat.

Kalie squeezed her eyes shut, shutting out the revolting sight.

Her strangled gasps for air tasted rancid, and nausea churned in her gut.

Someone was murmuring in her ear. A man’s voice, kind and familiar.

People were shouting. Roaring.

The hands holding her hair didn’t vanish, but the presence shifted. Where there was warmth was now darkness. Waves of ice slithered through her veins.

Snot and tears streamed down her face as she looked up.

An armada of darkness, only visible by the light of the distant stars, emerged from behind the planet. Too many shadows. Too many ships.

Kalie crumpled. Fear crashed over her like ocean waves, pulling her down, drowning her.

“You can end this, Kalista. He’ll stop if you hand yourself in. I’ll let all of them go, I swear on my soul.” Iliana took a hitching breath. “The fate of our people lies in your hands.”