Chapter 21

  Perhaps Rosma sabotaged Akkama’s slider after all. Perhaps her bumpy transit through the dry coral forest jarred something loose in the engine. Either way, when Akkama began her journey out of Prax, she did so on foot, forced to abandon the useless slider and the telescope in a thicket of stiff coral fronds before setting out.

  She tried not to think about what had happened as she set out through the hot coral. She had seen it all: the windstorm, the gathering creatures of Prax, her plan gone horribly wrong. Akkama had mentally touched something which defied description and had paid the price. A migraine, for one. Losing control of Anthea for another.

  She hadn’t stuck around for the finale once Derxis cut her off. She was glad that he did; it had enabled her to drop the mind stone. The windstorm had dissipated soon after. Akkama wondered how things had turned out, but it didn’t worry her. She’d find out soon enough. For now, she only had to clear out. If Rosma lived, Akkama would always have another chance.

  She paced herself through the dry coral forest. A long way to go, and little water. She would call Lex if she had to, but only as a last resort. Lex was a compromised resource. The creatures in the area were restless. Three times within the first half hour she was attacked by the monsters of Prax: once by a manta ray that pummeled her with concentrated sonic blasts, once by a rolling spiny urchin with purple spikes the size of spears, and once by an airborne eel whose huge jaws dripped acid that corroded stone. Besides this, she’d had to deal with undetectable pools of slicksand and aggressive coral growths.

  She paused for a rest in the shade of a blooming red coral structure after decapitating the eel. She watched its glaucous eyes roll wildly from a severed head as large as herself while the great yellow and brown spotted length of its body thrashed on the sand beyond, spraying greenish bile-looking blood over the lichenous coral. She took a gulp of water from her canteen and grinned. Prax was great. Everything here wanted to kill her. She’d have to return when she wasn’t tired, weak, and suffering a serious headache.

  She saw the glint of sunlight on the blade, but could not react before it pierced her left shoulder. That arm dropped the canteen, leaking its precious contents into the turquoise sands. She rolled behind the coral bloom as another metal star chinked into the coral where she had been. Throwing star. Acarnus.

  Akkama grinned up at the blue sky and hissed through her fangs. The fool. He really wanted to pick a fight? He would get one. They all would. They could come one by one, or all together. It didn’t matter.

  “Akkama.” His voice was neutral, as always. Or was it? Did she perceive a slight tremor in his unshakeable cool?

  “You got me!” she shouted from behind the bloom. His voice and blades had come from directly behind her on the other side of the bloom, but she kept alert, checking left and right in case he tried to circle around. Best to keep him talking. “How did you find me?”

  “Scent,” he replied. Of course. That nose of his.

  She leaned back against the rough coral and tried to flex her left arm. The entire limb had gone numb. She could twitch the fingers and move it from the shoulder, but it was essentially useless for combat. Also, it hurt. She gripped the metal star, noted its fine craftsmanship, and yanked it from her shoulder with a hiss of pain.

  “So tell me,” she said, “what happened?”

  “Anthea is dead,” he replied simply. Try as he might, he could not keep the emotion from his voice.

  Akkama’s eyes widened. She would never have guessed. Anthea? Dead? Surely not. But she had to keep him talking. And make him mad, if possible. “Aww, your girlfriend? Bummer. Bet you didn’t even meld yet. Am I right?” It was vulgar; it was insulting. But he wouldn’t fight well if he was enraged, and Akkama already knew this would end in a fight. There was simply no other way. Not that she wanted one.

  “We did not,” he said simply.

  “So why are you here? Vengeance, right? Just kill me? Doubt that’s what the Fivemind would do.”

  “You are correct,” he said. “That is not what the Fivemind would do.” His voice had changed. It had regained its cool. Back to the Classic Acarnus: zero emotional content. Like talking to a damn computer. The important thing was, it didn’t sound like he’d moved. He sounded only a few paces on the other side of the coral bloom. If she was quick enough and caught him off guard, she could be in killing distance before he could muster a defense. Strike like a serpent.

  “I am not here to kill you,” he continued.

  “Oh? To, uh, bring me to justice, then?”

  “Yes. But not Rosma’s justice. Lawful justice.”

  “Which is…?”

  “The Majesty. You killed his princess.”

  Akkama rolled her eyes. “You’re really not going to talk about Anthea? How I killed her? You are a cold bastard.”

  “You did not kill her, not directly.” His voice still even, damn it. Cool and smooth like steel. The monks of Nazkhar supposedly had unshakeable self-control. Well Acarnus was shaken, but he didn’t seem like he’d be losing his grip any time soon.

  “What did, then?” she asked, genuinely curious.

  “Rosma killed her.”

  Akkama barked a laugh. “Rosma? Well guess what? I’m not—” She flowed around the coral and lunged toward the sound of Acarnus’s voice.

  He was not there. A tiny grey orb hung in the air. Akkama just had time to begin to swear before a metal star took her in the hip. It was intended to disable that leg; it only halfway succeeded.

  His true location was fifty feet back and to the right, up a slight rise with a clear shot at her.

  She charged. He threw two metal stars simultaneously. One of them flew wide, an easy miss. Ha! And she’d heard that he was dangerous in a fight. She swung Nemesis in a simple parry, deflecting the one that had been speeding for her chest.

  The other curved impossibly in the air, slipped through her block, and bit deep into her knee. Another precision shot. She fell before she could stop herself, right foot suddenly useless. She swore loudly. Stupid mistake. One she would not have made had she been thinking straight, not exhausted.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Acarnus did not relent. Two more stars flashed in the sunlight, their targets indeterminable. Akkama relied on pure instinctive reaction to swat one out of the air, but the other clipped the wrist of her sword hand. She barely maintained her grip.

  “Fuck this,” she hissed. She dove to the side, dropped the sword, and struggled with her functional hand at the latch of the case at her side.

  Acarnus must have guessed what she was doing; he was sprinting now, trying to stop her. Akkama smiled to herself as she worked the latch free and slipped her hand into the case. She touched the mind stone, activated it, and struck out at Acarnus with the first thing she could think of: forget Anthea.

  She put everything she had into that blow; it struck Acarnus like a sledgehammer, heavy and powerful though inexpertly wielded. He collapsed into the hot sand not two paces from where she lay.

  She watched it all happen through the mind stone, stricken with a horrified fascination. The energy of the mind stone was like a consuming fire that flashed through Acarnus’s mind. His memories of Anthea evaporated, passed from any significance, lost all meaning. He had loved her; Akkama saw it there. But his love withered away to nothing. The strings of attachment and emotional connection crumbled like charred twigs.

  It was done in moments. A rough job, no doubt. She awoke from the daze that overcame her whenever she used the mind stone and checked to make sure no creature of Prax was creeping up on her. She was in the clear for now. Acarnus lay unconscious in the sand beside her, exactly as he had been before except that he now had virtually no connection to or memories of Anthea. The power of the color priests, Akkama reflected, was astonishing. Why did they not rule the world?

  She held the mind stone up for inspection. A network of hairline fractures decorated one half of the stone. Maybe they resulted from that business back at the radio tower, or maybe the memory erasure had done it. Either way, she couldn’t rely on this stone forever.

  She sat up and pulled the metal stars from her body. She used spray-on sealant from her bag to stop the bleeding. Her left arm and right foot were still useless. She had underestimated Acarnus.

  That thought gave her an idea. She glanced at his unconscious form. He could be useful. And he would have a void, most likely, after losing Anthea. He’d sense something missing. Something important. A commitment.

  Akkama took up the mind stone again. Experimentation upon Lex had shown that the mind stone could destroy memories and the like with ease, but that constructing them proved challenging. Something as elaborate as a friendship or a traditional bond of loyalty would be nearly impossible for her to engineer in someone’s mind, especially someone as observant and analytical as Acarnus. But because of who he was, a whole history was not necessary. Only a single mental object was required. One clear memory. A promise.

  She concentrated into the mind stone. The erasure of Anthea could be brute-forced, but this required thought. She was not good at this, but with Acarnus that hardly mattered. His belief in the memory was the only crucial point. And why wouldn’t he believe? Wasn’t he supposed to have perfect memory?

  It required minutes, a dangerous expenditure of time in Prax, but soon enough Akkama thought that she had succeeded. When he awoke, Acarnus should remember promising loyalty to her. And it was bound deep in the very fabric of his being that he would never break a promise. Would it last? Not likely. But that was fine. Next time he tried to bring her to “justice,” she’d be ready.

  He didn’t wake up for a while. That was how it had always been with Lex as well. The brain needed time to recover after a major restructuring. Lex reported bizarre dreams and confusing nightmares, followed by a terrible headache upon waking.

  Akkama dragged the both of them into the shade and waited for Acarnus to wake up. She disarmed him to pass the time, removing the carbon-alloy bracers around his arms. She figured out how to make them spit out the throwing stars. It turned out that Acarnus always went around loaded; he could carry up to twenty of them. She replaced the ones he had thrown at her after carefully cleaning off her blood.

  Akkama laid Nemesis casually at her side and sat a calculated distance away from him when at last he stirred. If the mind stone hadn’t worked, then this would be goodbye for Acarnus.

  He awoke with a start. He sat up, clutched his head in pain, looked around in confusion. “Whe…?” His voice broke from thirst. She tossed him her canteen. He nodded at her in thanks before taking several gulps.

  “What do you remember?” she asked him. Her right hand almost touched the hilt of her sword.

  It was annoyingly difficult to read his expression with those big stupid goggles on, but now he was clearly perplexed. “I…I’m not sure. It is all… I suppose I was the victim of some mental attack?” He inspected the numerous lacerations on his body and his shredded cloak.

  She nodded. “And I saved your ass. You’re welcome.”

  He nodded again in thanks.

  Akkama tensed in excitement. Was it working? Had it really worked? “Do you remember that you are sworn into my service?”

  He nodded again, once. A simple affirmation. “I do not forget promises,” he said. Akkama struggled not to snort in laughter. She was pretty sure he and Anthea had shared a promise or two.

  “Would you explain what happened?” he asked. “Your wounds appeared to have been inflicted by…me.”

  The lie came smoothly. “Mind control, Acarnus! Yeah, we fought. I won.”

  He scanned the area. “Where is our foe? Defeated?”

  Akkama shrugged. Making up a whole fictional scenario sounded like a pain. Anyway, he would just consult the records in his goggles and—

  Shit.

  “Acarnus,” she said. “Give me your goggles.”

  “Why?” he asked. But he reached up to remove them.

  “No questions. Now.”

  He pulled at the goggles. He tried again.

  “What’s the holdup?”

  “It seems that they are adhered to my face. Derxis is likely responsible.”

  “Did I ask about Derxis? I need those goggles. Now, Acarnus.”

  Without further hesitation, Acarnus tore off the goggles. He handed them to her, shading his eyes against the suddenly bright salt and sky of Prax. Silvery grey blood beaded and ran around his eyes where the skin had torn. The goggles were surprisingly heavy. She slid them into the case next to the mind stone and breathed an inner sigh of relief. That had been a close one. She made a mental note to delete his comm logs.

  She stood, stretched, flexed her left arm which only now was regaining its full usage. She slid Nemesis halfway into its sheath. “Well, Acarnus,” she said, “You’re going to go back to the radio tower and tell them I got away. I caused some trouble there, in case you forgot. Apparently Anthea died.” This was the one. How would he react?

  He didn’t even blink, though she watched him closely. Anthea, dead? No big deal. Not for him. Not anymore.

  She continued. “So you won’t tell them about our meeting here. You just couldn’t find me. I’ll contact you with more orders soon. Take your stuff.”

  He nodded, gathered his things, and stood. He looked odd without the black goggles. He paused to figure out how to find his way back to the tower, then sniffed the air and began tracing his own scent. He disappeared through the coral.

  Akkama bounced in glee. That had worked so well! It wouldn’t last. He’d figure it out. But for now, he would do anything she said, and he bore her no ill will.

  The others would still come for her. She just had to be ready. And if things got dicey, maybe she’d have a certain surprise for those fools who assumed Acarnus was on their side.

  She called Lex and ordered her to come pick her up.