Lindsay Buroker - Encrypted

Rias put his back against one of the launches and stood where he could see the movement of the other ships.

“ I can hide here alone if you want to find the captain.” She hated the idea but could tell Rias felt he could do something.

“ No, he wouldn’t appreciate my input, and he’d chuck me back in the brig. Besides, the Nurians are looking for you.”

“ Yes, and I should mention they have ways to find me. They went straight to the wardroom earlier, and I’m sure it wasn’t a coincidence they showed up in the brig when I was there.” Tikaya looked up at Rias, though darkness hid his face. “It’d probably be a bad idea to be standing next to me if a psi wave is launched in my direction.”

“ I’ll risk it.” Rias rested a hand on her shoulder. “Keep your back to me in case they’re invisible again.”

She sandwiched between him and the other launch, with the smokestack guarding their right side and his sword ready on the left.

“ The sand,” Rias said, “is for throwing at the invisible attackers? Will it disrupt the spell?”

“ Possibly, if I catch them by surprise, and their concentration lapses, but if nothing else it’ll outline them for a few seconds until they compensate.”

His rumbled, “Ah,” sounded pleased.

On the rear horizon, a third Nurian ship floated into view.

“ Rust,” Rias spit. “He needs to take down one of those ships before the reinforcements arrive. Come on, Bocrest. Think. Don’t be so stodgy and predictable.”

A fiery projectile the size of a cannon ball arced toward them. Tikaya tensed. It clipped the yard closest to their smokestack, and shards of wood rained upon them.

She gulped.

“ You all right?” Rias dusted splinters off the top of her head.

“ Yes, but it’s inconsiderate of these Nurians to muss my hair. I’d at least like to look good when your people toss me on a funeral pyre.” Her attempt at nonchalance might have worked if her voice had not cracked on the last word. When she had been fleeing the Nurians, she had been too busy to worry about her mortality. Standing here gave her too much time to think, to wonder if she might very well dodge the assassins only to fall to a random cannonball.

“ Don’t worry,” Rias said. “No funeral pyres at sea. We just wrap your body in your hammock and toss you overboard. Only the fish will judge your hair.”

“ I’m vastly reassured, thank you.”

Rias chuckled.

Oddly, his blase attitude did reassure her. If he was not worried, maybe she did not need to be. She leaned back against him. If not for the guns roaring and the lightning streaking the night, she might have noticed the heat of his chest against her shoulders, the lean hard muscles beneath his clothing, and the gentle breaths stirring her hair. Actually, she noticed them anyway.

“ Rias?”

“ Yes?”

His murmur was soft, close to her ear, and a thrum warmed her body. Focus, she told herself.

“ Do you want to escape or not?” she asked. “If you don’t… Well, that’s your prerogative, but it’d help me to know. I’ve mentioned it a couple times tonight, and, even though I chanced upon you breaking out of your cell, you seem to be more interested in what’s going on with the battle than getting out of here. I can’t help but think that it’s handy how we’re standing next to a couple boats, and the marines are all preoccupied.”

“ It’d be suicidal to launch a boat into the middle of the Nurians,” he said. “Besides, based on the knots-per-hour average of this ship, the days it’s been since you were brought on board at the Kyatt Islands, and our northeasterly direction, I estimate us more than a thousand miles from the mainland. There aren’t many archipelagos in this part of the ocean. It’s likely we’d die of thirst before making land. Also…”

“ What?”

His long exhale tickled the back of her ear. “The fact that the Nurians are trying to kill you makes me believe we really need you.”

“ We?”

“ The empire. Bocrest’s family has been personally loyal to the throne for a long time. That Emperor Raumesys picked him over brighter men suggests this is a very sensitive mission. My people may have unearthed something that’s put them in danger. If the Nurians have found out, well, they’d be the first to help us on our way to the black eternity.”

Tikaya pressed her hand against the cool wooden siding of the launch, dread curling through her gut for a new reason. If the Turgonian emperor had walked onto her plantation and asked for her help, she would have told him to shove sugar cane into his anal orifice. But Rias asking her to stay and help…

She shook her head. She hardly knew him. And he was one of them. Surely, she owed him nothing.

“ How can the empire’s fate even matter to you?” she asked. “After they condemned you and left you to die?”

“ Strange, isn’t it? By the emperor’s decree, I’m dead to my family, my friends, everyone I ever knew, but it was the emperor who cast me out, not them. I still care that they are well, and I’m not sure the orchards where I grew up will ever stop being the place my mind conjures when someone says home.”

Tikaya cleared her throat and tried to sound offhand when she asked, “Family?”

“ Parents, brothers.”

“ No children?” No wife?

“ My wife didn’t want them.”

So, there was a wife. The intensity of her disappointment surprised her.

“ Ex-wife,” Rias said, as if reading her thoughts. “I know you owe nothing to me, Tikaya-in fact, I owe you a couple favors. But if you would stay and decipher the language and help-I can’t believe I’m saying this-help Bocrest solve whatever problem my people have gotten themselves into, I’d…”

The request she had dreaded. She swallowed and waited.

“ I have nothing I can offer you.” He sighed. “Not even my protection since I’m even more a prisoner than you. All I can promise is that I’ll do everything possible to ensure you escape and can return to your island afterwards. I imagine you have family you miss, people who are worried about you.”

“ Yes.” If she died out here, would anyone even tell her parents what happened?

“ Children?” he asked in the same offhand tone she had used.

“ No.” Then, feeling the need to lay everything out, she added, “My fiance was killed on a science vessel that went down near the end of the war.”

“ Oh.” A long beat passed, probably because he did not want to know the answer to the next question, but he asked anyway: “How did it-who sank it?”

“ Your people.”

She felt his shoulders slump behind her.

“ I’m sorry,” he said.

A twinge of guilt wound through her; it was not as if he had done it. If he had been on that penal island for two years, he would have missed the last year of the war, the year when things unraveled for the Turgonians and their people stopped paying attention to Kantioch Treaty dictates. Yet she could not bring herself to say it was all right. It wasn’t. It never would be.

The attack had slowed, and Tikaya felt a stirring of hope, but then another set of lights appeared on the inky horizon. Another ship, bringing the total to four. The captains had probably just paused to confer-deciding on a final strategy-through communications practitioners. The attack would resume with all four ships joining in, and even the sturdy ironclad would sink under that assault.

“ How come none of your people know about this shindig going on in the middle of the ocean?” Tikaya asked.

“ I don’t know.”

A great swirling gust of wind tugged at her dress and whipped loose strands of hair into her mouth. She looked up at the stack. The smoke was not affected, meaning the disturbance was localized.