Leather-encased fingers exhibited more grip than bare metal. Glove fitted, the next stage for Braph was learning to mitigate his natural grasp. Thrice now he had broken eggshells, sending albumen oozing across the leather and yolk dolloping onto the bench-top. It was an improvement – without the glove he’d failed to pick up the egg at all – but far from perfection, and with no haptic feedback he was relying entirely on visual assessment.

  Braph curved the fingers around the fourth egg, magic coursing from the crystal into the device clamped to his stump, through his veins, to his heart, through arteries and back down his arm, back into the cuff and farther to the tiny pistons and pulleys that pulled the fingers closed. By now, his brain thought of the metal hand as his own. He didn’t need to move the left to get the right hand to mimic. It was just a matter of refining these movements so he didn’t spend his life crushing things he didn’t wish to. The fingertips of the glove depressed as they made contact with the egg. Too light a touch would see the egg fall from his grasp. Too tight a grip and he would crack yet another egg. He brought the fingers round a smidgen more, then raised his arm. The egg came up in his leather and metal grasp. He released the pent-up tension. He’d done it. Such a silly little thing, but it was a success, and now he could build on it.

  His cheeks ached, so unfamiliar an expression was a broad grin on his features. And no one to share it with. Orinia rested after a long and difficult labor and birth. At least she had willingly handed over the boy. She had little interest in bonding with the child of Turhmos. There was no way to tell this early if the child was merely Aenuk, or carried the extra Sy abilities, but that no longer mattered to Braph. What interest did he need to maintain in the Syaenuk line when he had an Immortal son willing to share his blood with his father?

  Several more eggs were sacrificed before Braph developed confidence in the new hand’s grip.

  He pushed his tall, caster-wheeled chair back from his bench and swiveled, pulling himself farther along for a closer look at his glass cabinet filled with vials of what would appear to the untrained eye as goop. To date, he had simply referred to it as a micro-organism. One of hundreds, thousands, maybe millions, that existed, but it was the only one, that he knew of, that had been manipulated so thoroughly by a person. One might call it domesticated. And domestic pets had names. It was time to bring it out into the world. It was time to name it. Should he share the glory with his brother and include their family name? His brother was the first full test subject, after all.

  The Vastergaard Bug? The Vastergaard Virus? Hmm. The alliteration tickled his fancy.

  Braph wondered at Jonas’s progress. He didn’t know the full extent of the micro-organism’s effects. He’d tested it on a few cells he’d isolated from himself. All had eventually perished, but there were too many variables to draw conclusions from such a result. He’d tested it on himself, of course, but he’d let it progress no further than to confirm that he felt weaker a day after inoculation. Jonas had weakened so far as to lose everything that made him Syakaran, even Karan, in a matter of days. While Braph had ascertained that the bug had no effect on mundane humans, he didn’t know if a powerless Karan counted as mundane. Orinia had been unable to heal Braph with a touch from the minimal loss he’d suffered. He’d still needed to inject her blood to direct its power himself. He surmised that even in the absence of his Karan power, the Aenuk-Karan barrier persisted.

  Glancing at the nearly black crystal in his cuff to check its luster – no longer high-gloss, perhaps half used – he pursed his lips as he considered another direction in which to stretch his power. Well, one never knew unless one tried, did they?

  Knowing his brother so well, it took little effort to conjure an image in his head. Closing his eyes and focusing on his breathing, he entered a meditative state, then stretched his mind out. He didn’t know in exactly which direction to go, but he surmised he could easily dismiss east, and likely south. He was almost certain they would head for the Ajnai tree in Taither, but he couldn’t dismiss Llewella’s pull to her friend in Brurun. North and west was a vast area to cover, and he did not know how much such a task would tax his power reserve, but Braph had never been one to quit before even trying. Besides, Orin found the extra rations allowed after he provided crystals reward aplenty, especially when offered a sweet treat, and Braph’s staff liked little more than spoiling the boy.

  Braph didn’t know what he was doing, but then, he had done plenty with his magic with little understanding of the mechanics behind it; a strange way for a natural engineer to work, perhaps, but so be it. He knew nothing of healing, yet he healed easily. He knew nothing of propulsion without the use of spinning blades to generate lift, and yet he had flown. An expensive exercise, but both time saving and exhilarating. Now, he stretched his awareness over miles, seeking his brother. It did not feel unlike when he had flown, minus the wind resistance.

  His search ended in blackness. The abruptness almost sent him scuttling back to his local reality, but his breath hitched on his first assumption that Jonas was dead. He had to know for sure. He lingered, finding a calm in the dark, which was not so absolute once he acclimatized. Dizziness washed through him. He held firm, both in his head and with a hand on the edge of his bench. Should he reach some finality, he wanted an anchor to draw himself back.

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  He probed. Again, not fully knowing what he was doing, he mentally jumped and twisted, throwing his consciousness around like a bouncy ball inside Jonas’s head. Light temporarily blinded him. He blinked, and the image flickered before him. Peering into the light, he could only see hazy blobs, no detail. Something slid across his vision, blocking out all else. He blinked again, seeking clarity.

  He had access to more than vision, though. He lay on something soft; a bed, he presumed. On his back, looking up at a white pressed tin ceiling, as was becoming popular in many places across Turhmos. A house of some quality, then. There wasn’t much noise. Breathing. His own, and, yes, a light snoring from across the room. He turned his head to find Llewella seated in a chair, her head hooked back over the top of it, eyes closed, mouth open.

  Pain lanced through his knee. A throbbing pain, deep in the bone. He lifted his right leg, thinking that applying pressure might dull the pain enough to allow him to keep gathering information, but when the leg came up, there was something wrong. Where the knee should have been, there was … nothing.

  The horror sent Braph scuttling back, returning to his own body still sitting before the vials of goop, his heart hammering. He reached out instinctively for his right knee with his right hand. Only, his right hand wasn’t his, not really – oh, it belonged to him, but it wasn’t him – and while his knee sensed the hand land on it, the hand gave no real feedback, not enough to confirm the knee’s existence, and he already knew his brain could fool him into believing the knee could feel even when it wasn’t there. He’d experienced pain in his missing forearm several times over the past few months.

  He reached across with his left hand to confirm the permanence of his right knee. Only then did Braph breathe a sigh of relief. He was as whole as he had been before his experiment. His brother, though …

  For a fleeting moment, Braph was deeply concerned at Jonas’s predicament. The Great Syakaran of Quaver missing a limb? A leg, at that. No more racing to the rescue for Jonas. No, indeed. Without Braph’s gift for engineering, Jonas would be relegated to clumsy crutches, maybe a wheeled chair – though, those were rare and who would bother with Jonas now he was so useless?

  Jonas lived.

  Braph sat for a moment with that, trying to resolve the unusual sensation in his chest. He supposed it wasn’t contrary to reason to feel some pleasure at the continued existence of his brother. Family, after all. And, of course, Braph had always been drawn to the idea of being the one to kill Jonas himself. Preferably in a fair fight, which clearly was off the table now. That was a disappointment.

  Jonas lived, was weak, and had received medical treatment. That he had received that treatment within Turhmos wasn’t entirely surprising, but where was he?

  Curious as he was, on balance, Braph was in more of a hurry to reach the Taither Ajnai than he was to chit chat with his brother. Jonas could wait, clearly. He wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.

  Braph had garnered no further information regarding any effect of his micro-organism beyond what he’d already observed. It shouldn’t matter. The micro-organism removed Karan powers. To what extent neither negated nor enhanced its potential. And it didn’t break the Karan-Aenuk barrier. Perfect.

  Dead Kara. Weakened Kara. Either would decimate the Quaven military. Peace would be assured.

  Braph reached out a finger and touched one of his curled up mechanical critters with an empty glass globe on its back. He sent a jolt of power through his finger and the critter unfolded eight legs beneath it and a thin post above that held two pairs of blades that folded out on horizontal planes, slighting offset. The blades spun, clockwise and anti-clockwise, lifting the spider-like device into the air. For years, he’d used similar automatons in the collection of Aenuk blood. Orin had learned to tolerate them of late, happy to aid his father. It helped that Braph allowed the boy to keep one of the non-flying critters as a toy. This new version had a new purpose.

  The critter hovered in the air, sensing its surroundings. Rotating to face Braph, it paused. Then it came at him. Braph swatted it off course, then mentally built a shield to hide his Karanness from the machine. Once righted, it hovered a moment more, then moved off slowly, tasting the air.

  Braph summoned it back with a gesture and zapped it once more to return it to sleep. It curled up like a dead spider, innocuous. The fingernail-sized black crystal atop its “head” reflected in full luster, plenty of power still contained within.

  Flexing his metal fingers in the leather glove, Braph concluded it was time to agree to the appointment with the Turhmos president.