Page 5 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

Her accuser met her with arms crossed, chest broad from the thickness of his flannel-lined coat more than muscle underneath.

Ice crusted his dark beard, a dust of snow on hair pulled into a messy bun.

A ruddy cast to pale cheeks suggested he’d been walking in the cold.

Always keeping an eye on things: his aurorabeasts outside town, the people inside it.

Always able to sniff Fi out like a foxhound, despite her best skulking.

She pulled her coat into a mock curtsy. “Good evening, esteemed mayor.”

His brow quirked. “Are you avoiding me?”

“Not successfully, it would appear.”

Fi crouched, feigning interest on the wheels of her cart. Thankfully, nothing looked loose, despite the hurried retreat. When footsteps closed at her side, she hid an eye roll behind the veil of her hair. She was tired , she just wanted to go home , she—

“Come on, Fi-Fi. Why the sour mood?”

“ Don’t call me that.”

“Or you’ll do what?”

Swift as a frost asp, Fi struck at the snow beneath her boots, packed a snowball, and hurled it at his face. He staggered, sputtering ice. Served him right. For anyone but her brother, that snowball would’ve had a rock in it.

Boden Kolbeck, mayor of Nyskya, glared at the smuggler crouched before him.

Then he dove for a snowbank.

The war was brief. Boden’s snowball glanced off Fi’s silviamesh.

She struck one more to his chest and a third to the back of his head.

When he kicked a drift of powder, she shouted and shielded her face, an opening for a tackle.

Two rolls across the ground, and Fi had him in a headlock.

Boden might be three years older, but he exercised by strolling his village, not swinging energy swords.

Fi had him beat in both grit and underhandedness.

He tapped her arm in surrender. Fi released him, and they collapsed against her cart, breaths billowing mist in the cold night air.

Boden punched her shoulder. Fi hit back harder, making him wince.

They broke into laughter together.

“Ice-hearted, Fi. I’ll have bruises tomorrow!

” As Boden rubbed his shoulder, Aisinay nibbled his coat.

An excellent judge of character. Their father had been a metallurgist, a craftsman of conduits and machinery parts, but Fi and Boden both preferred live beasts.

He patted the horse’s muzzle. “How was the Autumn Plane?”

Fi puckered her lips. “I never said where I was going.”

He reached into the Void-and-rainbow swirls of her hair, plucking out a crimson leaf like a magic trick. Fi gasped.

“Ugh. Leaves .” She flurried her hands through her hair, dislodging several more hitchhikers.

“By all the Shattered Planes,” Boden said. “I thought I wouldn’t see you for a week, after what you did to that bottle of whiskey last night.”

“Birthdays are meant to be celebrated, Bodie.”

His nose scrunched. “Why do you get to call me Bodie, but I can’t call you Fi-Fi?”

“Little sister rules. And mayor rules. You have to act professional. I don’t.”

He tilted his head, eyes dark as hers, warm in the tavern light. “What’s in the cart?”

Fi debated how to put it delicately.

“I think it’s a bomb.”

“ What? ”

Boden lurched to his feet. As if an extra meter would do him any good. Snickering, Fi grabbed a crowbar from her cart and slipped it beneath a crate lid, easing it open with a pop .

The inside glowed silver. A low, staticky hum. Energy capsules sat in cardboard cups like volatile eggs—glass spheres with swirling magic inside, several times larger than the capsules on Fi’s gloves. Not uncommon for powering lights or larger weapons, but dangerous to pile so many in one box.

Boden peered into the crate with brows raised. “Where to?”

“Thomaskweld.”

“ Thomaskweld? Who pays to smuggle energy into one of the biggest energy producing cities on the Winter Plane?”

“See Bodie, this is why you’re a mayor, and I’m but a lowly purveyor of illicit goods. You care about these things.” She closed the crate with a definitive thump . “I don’t.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Fi-Fi. You also rob taverns.” He cast a dry look at the soup and cookies in her cart.

“I paid for it!” she returned, indignant. “Speaking of which. How much do I owe you in back taxes?”

“You think I keep a tally off the top of my head?”

“I know you keep a tally off the top of your head.”

On principle, Fi would sooner throw herself into the bottomless pit of the Void than pay taxes of the income, import, or any variety.

Boden was the exception. She’d fled their childhood home first. He’d left three years later, when their father died.

They both wound up in Nyskya, away from the dust of that old house and the cooling ashes of their father’s funeral pyre, seeking a place to breathe.

Not a bad trade, trusting the mayor to let Fi come and go, in exchange for a cut of her profits.

She tossed him the box with Cardigan’s down payment. “Will this cover it?”

Boden flipped the case open. His pale face went paler . “The shit .”

“Right?”

“Are these daeyari energy chips?”

“ Right? ”

The chips would be an extravagance for Fi—more useful for Boden.

Energy to power the village, to keep houses warm through the endless winter.

Larger cities had central power factories, fleets of human workers to Shape energy into the conduits.

Nyskya ran on a smaller workforce, supplemented with chips charged elsewhere.

Most settlements turned to their ruling daeyari for such aid. That had been the pact between mortals and immortals for centuries, when the beasts came down from their trees and offered to stop hunting humans like wild game. Peace and partnership—in exchange for willing sacrifices to keep them fed.

Where Fi and Boden grew up, Verne Territory, the call for sacrifice went out every few years, whenever the town needed new parts for their energy conduits or better commissions for metallurgy.

Sometimes, volunteers came forward. Sometimes, meetings stretched long into the night to decide who’d have to go, their father returning silent and hollow-eyed.

She and Boden fled to Antal Territory seeking escape, a less vicious daeyari with an uncommon policy: the village didn’t need to send a sacrifice, so long as they didn’t ask for aide.

That meant repairing their own conduits.

Tracking down their own energy chips. Sourcing their own food and medicine. A rare cause worth supporting.

Boden closed the box. Spoke softly. “Thank you, Fi. This will help.”

“Of course.” She looked away from his sincerity, more comfortable with bristles. “Keep the people from freezing. Wouldn’t look good for your re-election.”

Fi owed him more than this. Much more than whatever numbers he kept in his ledger.

Void knew, she was a pain in the ass little sister, flighty as a Curtain, prone to cussing too much and parading bombs across his doorstep.

Here was one meager attempt to repay him for everything she’d put him through ten years ago.

For giving her safe harbor in a Plane full of claws. For being the only family she had left.

“This was your payment?” Boden said. “These chips are worth more than the capsules.”

“People pay more when they need something specific.”

Did the job smell off? Of course. Fi kept her margins tight through calculated risk, profit weighed against consequence. Twenty daeyari energy chips were worth a lot of consequence.

Boden, who inherited enough worry for both of them, scowled, but didn’t press. He never asked for names, details. Safer for both of them.

“Anything else you need? Other than pilfered soup.”

Fi gripped Aisinay’s lead. “Drop off is in two days. I’ll lay low until then. As usual, if anyone asks about me…”

Boden pressed a hand to his heart, his tone a tad too dramatic. “Fionamara? I haven’t seen that woman in months. Selfish thing never visits. Never thinks about family.”

Fi left him with a kiss on the cheek. A punch on the shoulder.

She and her horse and a cart of energy capsules left the village. Her home lay an hour’s hike up a snowy canyon, but Fi never took the long way. Once they cleared the houses, she stepped through another Curtain, off the Winter Plane.

The space beyond lay quiet. Snow-dusted. A meadow of silver grass and leafless poplar trees, ground crumbling into the Void within sight in any direction.

Far smaller than a Plane. Smaller, even, than the Bridge that brought her from Autumn. Shards were the tiniest, most numerous scraps of reality scattered through the Void.

Prevailing theory claimed a single world existed once, an age that far preceded flimsy human memory.

Then, that reality shattered like a dropped mirror.

Planes were the largest fragments, hundreds of separate worlds split from the whole, now scattered throughout the Void.

Bridges were smaller slivers, connecting one Plane to another.

Shards were dust around the edges, tinier pockets of reality that connected to no more than one Plane. On the surface, this might make Shards seem like nothing more than extra-dimensional holes to hide in—which Fi had done plenty of as a kid, avoiding chores or her father’s chastisement.

As she got older, Fi discovered the true advantage of Shards lay in how they distorted distance, compared to the neighboring Plane.

She walked Aisinay past one Curtain that would return her to the Winter Plane across the valley, at her favorite copse for hunting hare.

Another Curtain that, in two days, would take her a hundred miles away to Thomaskweld.

Where the ruling daeyari lived.

Fi huffed the Void-empty air. It was just a city. Just a job. She’d successfully avoided those beasts for a decade.

At last, she reached the Curtain to take her home. She stepped back onto the Winter Plane, onto a forested ridge two miles above Nyskya—traversed in a matter of minutes.

A short walk through sighing shiverpines brought her to a clearing, a cottage with shingled roof and dark windows.

Fi unhitched the cart. Finally free of the load, Aisinay cantered into the trees, off to forage dinner in the nearby river.

Fi crossed her porch, kicked the snow off her boots, then stepped inside, eager for a hot bath full of pomegranate bubbles, a warm bed piled high with furs.

She’d dream of ten more energy chips waiting for her in Thomaskweld.

Not of claws lurking in the trees beyond her windows.