“We don’t have weeks,” Ren reminded him. “Unless you’d like to stay here and enjoy the fascinating smells.”
“We could always bring her,” suggested Solvay, “and let them test her at the training house in Aqa.”
“And if she’s useless, what then? Are you going to bring her back here?”
Solvay glanced at Nova. “I imagine . . .” she said hesitantly, “she’d prefer not to return. She could find work in Aqa if it came to it. Why not? We’ve space aboard, and too few prospects to fill it.”
Antal gave a deep sigh. “It is not our job to transport girls away from their dreary lives, Solvay.”
“It is our job to find the strong, of whom there are fewer all the time. And with a mother and a sister like hers, what are the chances that she’s weak?”
They all paused, glancing to Skathis, who had yet to express an opinion. Through everything, he had simply watched, his gaze crawling over Nova—like the flies on the beach, she thought, inwardly cringing. They seemed to be waiting for him to weigh in. They also seemed...on edge.
“Skathis?” Ren prompted, and Nova couldn’t breathe, so afraid he’d say just to leave her, that she wasn’t worth the trouble. She was holding Kora’s hand with her own ungloved one, and she clenched it hard.
The smith straightened up from his slouch against the wall. “There’s another option you haven’t mentioned.”
“No,” said Solvay at once.
Skathis raised his eyebrows. “Pardon me?”
She looked conflicted to be arguing with her superior officer. “It’s against protocol.”
“This is my ship. I set the protocol.”
“You do not set imperial protocol,” persisted Solvay, breathless and flushed. “You are subject to it like everyone else.”
“I am not like everyone else,” said Skathis in a voice like the smoldering of embers.
A brief silence fell before Antal, clearing his throat, suggested, “Why don’t we try again in the morning before we consider...other options.”
“I think the girl would like to find her gift now.” Skathis turned to Nova. “Wouldn’t you.”
It wasn’t a question, and Nova didn’t know how to respond. She was desperate to find her gift, but why did the others look so troubled? “I don’t...” she began. “What...?”
“Good,” said Skathis, “it’s settled,” though she had agreed to nothing. “Wait.” Kora stepped in front of her sister. “What are you going to do to her?”
“To her?” asked Skathis with a smile. “Nothing at all.”
And the first hint Nova had of what he intended was when her sister’s hands flew to the godsmetal collar around her neck.
Kora gave a gasp. She felt it constricting and tried to fit her fingers under it to stop it—as if she could, as if the godsmetal were not impervious to everything but the smith’s will. It was beginning to bite in. Her gasp shallowed, turning into a choke as her windpipe flattened under the collar’s pressure. She didn’t even have time to draw a last breath before it closed her throat and cut off all air. A tortured sound dragged out of her. Her eyes went wide with panic.
“No!” Nova cried, lunging to her sister, to claw at the necklace, too. It was futile. She already knew she wasn’t a smith. She spun toward Skathis. He was watching them with unnerving unconcern. “Let her go!” Nova cried. “You’ll kill her!”
“I hope not,” said Skathis. “Astrals really are very rare. It’ll be a shame if she dies. It’s up to you to save her life. Do you have power, or don’t you? Show me.”
Nova rushed at him. She wasn’t thinking. To try to strike a Servant of the empire—a smith, no less! It was grounds for immediate execution. She didn’t reach him anyway. He took a neat step back, and the floor beneath her feet warped and turned liquid, drawing her down all the way to her knees before turning solid again and trapping her. She struggled, looking wildly between Kora’s face— gasping mouth and panicked eyes—and Skathis’s placid one. The other three Mesarthim stood rigid, such expressions on their faces that it was clear in an instant that they feared their captain, and were powerless to stop him.
Only he could end this, and Nova saw plainly—from all their faces—that he would not, that he would take it to its bitter end, even if it cost Kora’s life.
It was up to Nova, then. If there was a gift in her, she had to find it. She had given up looking. Now, frantic, she tried again to...to feel, as Ren had instructed, but all she could feel was her pounding heart. Kora was on the floor now, her struggles growing feebler. Nova saw that she was dying. She stopped plundering through herself, pawing for a gift as she might paw at beach sand in hopes of finding a shell. This wasn’t about hope anymore. It was about desperation—
—which was just what Skathis was after. In a matter of life or death, the body and mind will flood with chemicals and trigger even the most stubborn gifts. This was his method, cruel, violent, effective. It was like blowing up a door when you couldn’t find the key. It worked, in its way.
Rage pulsed up from Nova’s core like the shock wave of a blast, ripping through her fear, her worry, even through her conscious thought, so that she stopped feeling for her gift, stopped wondering what it was, and just... became it.
A lot of things happened at once.
Kora took a drag of breath.
Nova climbed out of the floor that had trapped her, as easily as though it were water.
Shock registered in Skathis’s eyes in the split second before the godsmetal under his feet lurched like a yanked rug and sent him flying. His head hit with a crack. The other Mesarthim stared, agog, at Skathis on the floor, Kora breathing, Nova free.
“She’s a smith after all,” breathed Solvay.
But Ren went where the others couldn’t, into Nova’s mind, and when he felt what was there, he said, horrorstruck, “No, she isn’t.”
And then he wasn’t in her mind anymore. He was thrust out of it and she was in his, flensing it like an uul hide with her inarticulate roar of rage. His hands flew to his temples, his face contorting at the assault of her voice, her wrath, her power. It invaded his mind, which felt, suddenly, fragile as glass that would shatter if the onslaught did not cease. He dropped to his knees, still holding his temples. His face was a rictus of pain.
Nova’s hands were fists at her sides. Her stance was wide, head dropped, chin almost to her chest, and she was peering up through slitted eyes, her breath hissing out through bared teeth. Words hissed out, too.
“Leave. My sister. ALONE!”
Kora was on her knees now, the collar in her hands—in two pieces, as though it had snapped in half.
Skathis rose, unsteady, his eyes bleary. There was blood on the floor and on the back of his head. He fixed on Nova, struggling to focus. A snarl of incredulous anger turned his plain face terrible.
He had brought this out of her. This method seldom failed. As Solvay had said, it was against protocol, because it was dangerous. But Skathis had never feared it, because he had never met anyone more powerful than he.
Until now.
He lifted his hands to conduct the mesarthium, to retaliate, to end her.
And nothing happened. It was like reaching for a sword and finding an empty sheath. Skathis’s gift was gone.
“She’s not a smith,” he said, his voice thick with loathing, outrage, fear. “She’s a pirate.”
A pirate. The word penetrated Nova’s red haze, but it didn’t make any sense. Pirates were murdering thieves of the seas. She was not that. She was only trying to save Kora. She looked to her sister, who was out of danger, but she couldn’t calm down. Power was rampaging through her, new and loud, unleashed and huge, screaming through every vein, every nerve. She didn’t know even what power it was. It was just spilling out of her, grabbing whatever it could.
If astral was a rare gift, pirate was rarer still.
But where astral was a welcome gift, pirate was anything but.
It was the term for those whose gift was to steal gifts. It had seldom ever arisen, and was a kind of Mesarthim bogeyman story that sent chills down Servants’ spines. Imagine a person who could reach out with their mind, snatch away your gift, and use it themselves. Such was Nova, and her magnitude was shattering.
In his outrage, Skathis was hideous, his countenance mad-dog vicious. He took a step toward her and she acted on instinct. Gods-metal surged up around him with neither elegance nor control. It reached his neck. It formed a collar.
The collar tightened.
“Stop her!” Skathis choked.
And the others tried. Well, Ren could not. The telepath was still holding his head with both hands as though it might burst apart. His face had gone violet. His eyes were squeezed shut. The chaos of Nova’s mind amplified in his.
Solvay and Antal both tried to subdue her. Antal’s gift was control of kinetic energy. He could take it away, depriving subjects of mobility, or amplify it, to make them faster, stronger. He tried to immobilize Nova. Solvay was a soporif, able to put people to sleep at will. Both were chosen for this duty for their ability to stop a subject whose gift went wild, and keep them from doing harm. But when they sharpened their minds toward Nova, they found their gifts snatched away and redoubled on them—freezing Antal in place and sending Solvay instantly slumping to the floor.
She was only asleep, but Nova, seeing her fall, thought she’d killed her, and cried out. Whatever was happening, she couldn’t control it. The Servants could neither help her nor stop her, and the more her panic grew, the more her power did, too.
Outside in the village, the people of Rieva drew back from the wasp ship as it began to buck, wings scissoring—deadly godsmetal blades lashing out, skinning the roofs right off the nearest houses and swatting two children off their feet to land in a tangled heap. There were screams of horror. Villagers fled. The wasp lurched, crushed a house, and foundered halfway through the village before finally slowing and falling still.