Time is rarely my friend. As part of the Horizon Breaker’s crew, my life consisted of hopping from one crisis to another and the consistent thing about crises is they don’t tend to leave you with much time. Despite that, I was forced to be the voice of restraint in the planning session Ebele put together with Zyla and I.

“I think you’re right,” Zyla said. “With what little I can make out through the fate weave, it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to reach any more reinforcements until we deal with the Queen or she deals with us.”

“She’s got a lot more resources to deal with us than we have for dealing with her,” I said.

“Which is why we need to act now,” Zyla said. “She doesn’t know who you are yet, or what you’re capable of. Once she knows what she’s up against she’ll have the whole planet set against us.”

“She captured Captain Okoro and our medic Illya,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she already knows everything they do about Fari, Darius and I.”

“But that was recent, if she isn’t prepared for you…” Zyla started to say but I cut her off.

“If she’s not then Agent Riverstone will be,” I said. “I’ve fought her twice already. She doesn’t know everything I can do, but she knows the level I can play at.”

“You don’t understand what’s at stake,” Zyla said. “I am being perfectly serious and perfectly precise when I say that this planet, and everyone on it, will die if we don’t stop the Queen.”

“I thought you couldn’t cast any future viewing spells because of the fate weave?” Ebele said.

“I can’t now that I’m here,” Zyla said. “The weave here is so thick I’m blind and crippled, but I know what we saw when we set off for on this mission.”

“Can you fill me in, or have things changed too much?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Zyla said and sagged back into her chair. “With future casting, it’s very easy to fool yourself into seeing what you want to see and with how disastrously wrong everything went, I think that’s what happened.”

“Tell me what you thought you were getting into then,” I said. “It’s somewhere we can start. And, Ebele, see if you can pick out any elements that may have been planted as traps.”

“Why me?” Ebele asked. “I’m not particularly good at Aetherial casting.”

“You’re familiar with Abyz and you’ve spent time behind a Void shield so you may be aware of things that the Queen is blocking from the rest of us, especially from Zyla,” I said.

“You know I usually hate being around you,” Zyla said. “But under the circumstances I have to say it’s kind of a relief to have a break from the constant surge of Aetherial anima around us.”

“Check me on something though, we’re not fully cut off from all of Abyz’s Aetherial anima here right?” I asked. “Even within the Void shield that’s protecting this place, we’re still subject to the fate weave.”

“No,” said Ebele. “We cloak this place in the strongest shields we can.”

“Actually, I’m afraid Mel is right,” Zyla said. “The deep threads of the fate weave are still in effect here.”

“That’s not possible,” Ebele said. “We’ve tested the shield. The Queen definitely can’t work any magic past it.”

“That’s true too,” Zyla said. “But the fate weave is more than the Queen’s magic. She’s just one of the prime nodes in its skein. Every piece of the planet is bound by it.”

“So the rocks around us are radiating Aetherial magic?” I asked.

“And this desk and the people in here and their clothes, everything,” Zyla said. “That’s why the planet is going to die. It’s all connected, much too tightly.”

“That can’t be possible!” Ebele said.

“Have you had any formal training in Void casting?” I asked.

“Only from my mother,” Ebele said.

“That’s not uncommon, it’s a rare skill, and a lot of people go through life never even aware that they possess it,” I said. “I can show you a fairly simple trick with it though that’ll prove what Zyla’s saying.”

“Ok,” Ebele said.

“You know how to see through your Void magics right?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s one of the first things I learned,” she said.

“You’re lucky,” I said. “I had to figure it out the hard way.”

I thought back to the terrifying day when I’d first learned I had magic like everyone else, but that my magic was rare and deadly and going to get me into a lot of trouble. Good things had come from that revelation, not the least of which being Darius and Fari, but I don’t know that I would wish that experience on anyone else. Fortunately I’d had quite a few good teachers since then so bringing Ebele up to speed didn’t have to be quite so traumatic.

“Start by calling up your Void sight then,” I said and did the same myself.

“Ok,” Ebele said.

“You focused on the Physical anima in the room right?” I asked.

“Yes, was I not supposed to?” Ebele asked.

“It’s ok,” I said. “It’s a natural reaction here, there’s so much Aetherial anima around that you need to cut that out to see anything. Physical anima is easy to see, so it makes a simple choice when you need to filter the Aetherial anima from your vision.”

“Ok, I’ve relaxed back to see all the forms of magic,” Ebele said. “If I strip away Physical, Energetic and Mental I don’t see anything though.”

I did the same and found myself just as blind as she was.

“Try to focus on the Aetherial magic around us,” I said.

“I can’t, there isn’t any,” she said.

“For now, let your imagination fill it in,” I said. “You want to retain your awareness of the anima you’re looking for and let your sensitivity sharpen on its own.”

“How long is this going to take?” she asked.

“Not long at all,” I said as I glimpsed the first ghostly after images of an Aetherial thread.

I waited a moment to give Ebele a chance to notice the threads on her own. A few seconds passed and I was starting to wonder if I needed to work on a simpler exercise with her when she jumped out her chair.

“What the hell was that?” she asked.

“Faint flash? Looked kind of like a living creature?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, staring at a spot on the floor.

“Aetherial echo,” Zyla said. “It’s the magic of a future that might have been.”

“Why did it look so inhuman?” Ebele asked.

“It’s unformed,” Zyla said. “Probably an action that any of the three of us could have taken, but none chose to. So it’s a crumbling reflection of each of us.”

“That’s horrible,” Ebele said.

“More spooky than horrible,” I said. “The horrible things should be becoming clear about now if you keep looking.”

“Pale filaments? Is that the fate weave?” Ebele asked.

“Part of it,” I said. “I think. It’s buried very deep.”

“That sounds right,” Zyla said. “That’s how it manages to function so well. By tying in to the roots of the people and things here, it can affect vast changes by pushing on the smallest areas possible.”

“So does this mean the Queen has been directing our actions all along?” Ebele asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Zyla, this isn’t under the Queen’s control right?”

“Correct. To the extent of the Void shield, the Aetherial anima here doesn’t have any external influences on it except for the three of us.”

“Wait, Ebele and I are influencing the fate weave too?” I asked.

“I don’t think it’s a conscious thing,” Zyla said. “You’re kind of like a wrecking ball though. Your Void anima wants to snap and devour any Aetherial anima that tries to constrain you.”

“And that’s why you don’t like being around me, right?” I asked. I’d known that I was a black hole as far as Yael and Zyla’s future sight. I hadn’t known that I was unconsciously shredding their spells. I mean, usually I was all too happy to do that consciously since I wasn’t fond of people messing with my future like that.

“Yeah, that.” she said, but I caught the moment’s pause in her response that said there was a little more in play than she was willing to get into at the moment.

“Does that help us?” Ebele asked.

“Yes, and no,” Zyla said. “The Queen probably can’t use the fate weave directly against you, but she can certainly use it on the people and things around you.”

“Like what happened to my mother,” Ebele said.

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” Zyla said.

“It’s a limit, but we can work around it,” I said.

“Then let’s get to it,” Zyla said. “Guardian Clearborn and I came here because of a series of visions I discovered. So it’s my fault that we’re in this mess.”

“That’s extremely debatable, but what did you see in your visions?” I asked.

“They started pleasant enough,” Zyla said. “I saw Abyz as it appears now I guess, bright, beautiful, a paradise. I joked with Guardian Clearborn that we should schedule a vacation there.”

It didn’t escape my notice that she was referring to her partner as ‘Guardian Clearborn’ rather than ‘Yael’. With the family she’d grown up in, I couldn’t tell if she was simply too used to reporting her experiences in a stark and purely professional fashion or if she was still struggling with intimacy issues concerning the person she was closest too.

I made a note to talk to her about that later. One of the benefits of having brilliant and empathic friends was that they’d forced me to confront a lot of self-sabotaging strategies I’d picked up over the years. I wasn’t anywhere near as close to Zyla as Darius and Fari were to me, but it still seemed good to offer her a few things to think about.

“The visions reoccurred on their own and grew more compelling each time,” Zyla said. “My guess now is that it was part of a trap, a honeypot to lure in the people who might pose a danger to the fate weave.”

“Does that sound right Ebele?” I asked. “Do you know if any other Aetherial masters have been lured to Abyz for the Queen to capture or dispose of?”

“I don’t know of any, but with the Queen’s mental powers that doesn’t mean anything,” Ebele said.

“Guardian Clearborn assisted me in a focused fate viewing,” Zyla said. “That’s when we saw the cataclysm.”

“Did you both see it?” I asked.

“Yes,” Zyla said. “It grew clearer and stronger the longer we put off the decision to investigate it.”

“What form did the cataclysm take?” I asked.

“We saw the planet scorched by storms of raw magic,” Zyla said. “The last bastion on it was a citadel covered in Void anima.”

“So you couldn’t see into it?” I said.

“We didn’t need to,” Zyla said. “At the top of the citadel we could see the Queen of Abyz stirring the storms and absorbing the ghosts of a trillion of lost lives.”

“A trillion ghosts?” I asked. “That’s impossible…”

I wanted to protest that no one could possibly absorb that much power. Even the power of one life contains an unholy amount of energy and can do serious damage to the Void caster who steals it. I’d channeled a lot more than that on a few occasions and had needed months to recover from the experience. A trillion ghosts though would burn me up like the core of a sun.

Unless of course I had a place to store the energy and a control mechanism that was used to dealing with that level of power.

Like a Jewel of Endless Night.

The Ravager, Fari’s Jewel of Endless Night, had held an entire star’s worth of magic. I didn’t know what powered the Dominator but it was unlikely to be much less powerful than that.

“We have a serious problem then,” I said. “With that much power, the Queen might be able to challenge the Empress.”

“She could try,” Zyla said. “But that wouldn’t matter. The vision only showed what would happen to Abyz. Once the Queen was done drawing in the power, there would be nothing here.”

“No life?” I asked.

“No planet,” Zyla said. “Everything will be consumed. All the magic, all the life, all the energy and matter. Everything.”

“But that’s not all that you saw,” I said. “There had to be another future or you wouldn’t have come.”

“That’s the trap I fell into,” Zyla said. “I thought there was a bright future, one where Abyz was reborn as something new, a truly beautiful world, but that’s not to be. The future I saw has already been lost.”

It wasn’t hard to guess what had changed. Yael was gone and Zyla couldn’t picture a bright future without her.

“Maybe, but there’s something you not considering,” I said.

“What’s that?” Zyla asked.

“How large of a shadow does the Queen cast over the future?” I asked.

“It’s enormous,” Zyla said. “She blots out the Abyz’s destiny from every angle I could see, except the one that lead us here.”

“And what does my future look like?” I asked her.

“I have no idea,” she said. “You’re a cipher, just like you always are.”

“And Ebele?” I asked.

“The same,” she said.

“And Fari?” I asked.

“The same?” she said and I saw her starting to follow my train of thought.

“And Darius?” I asked.

“The same!” she said.

“And Kojo, and the rest? All the same I bet,” I said. “The Queen may have a destiny that blots out the future of Abyz, but she’s as blind to future’s that we can make as you are.”

“And if each person you interact is obscured by your power…” Zyla said.

“Then even if we can’t beat her individually, I think together we can craft a future that she’ll never see coming,” I said.

“Where do we begin though?” Zyla asked.

“With the people you came here to rescue,” I said. “I need to have a talk with some very old ghosts.”

Swearing to take down the Queen and actually doing it were two very different things. I had some ideas on how we could proceed, but I’d learned over the last three years that any idea I had could always be improved by knocking it around with other people.

I’m not different from anyone else in that regard. We all have blind spots and a limited amount of brainpower to put towards any given task. Working with the right people means there’s a much better chance someone will notice the problems that lurk in our blind spot.

It’s one of the things I think the Crystal Guardians get exactly right. We’re tasked with troubleshooting on a galactic scale, and due to our numbers we wind up working assignments solo a large percentage of the time. There simply aren’t enough of us to go around in large groups. Despite that we almost never work alone.

My relationship with Fari, Darius and the crew of the Horizon Breaker was unusual only in that I wasn’t a full Guardian yet. Normally as an initiate, I’d be paired with a senior Guardian who’d act as my mentor. Nominally, I still had Master Raychelle Blackbriar for that, but while she kept tabs on me, it was really Captain Hanq who served as my safety net and instructor.

The arrangement with Yael and Zyla was similar, though in that case I think the two of them were more of a safety net for each other, despite whatever legal fictions might exist as to Zyla’s parole.

Beyond those personal relationships though, there was the expectation of how we were supposed to interact with the people who were living in whatever situation we’d come to resolve.

“Don’t take offense at this,” Ebele said, “But I hoped there’d be more of you coming to rescue your friends.”

Darius and Zyla had walked off with Kojo to inspect the teleportation wards. Amongst his other talents, Darius had learned a great deal about enchanting and general engineering from his time about the Horizon Breaker. For example, we’d been called on more than once to break into places warded by teleport anchors so he knew a fair number of security holes to look for as a result.

Fari and Talib had ventured off to another area of the mine to review the info Ebele’s group had on the royal spell webs. Most of them were shielded or even kept completely disconnected from the general planetary spell web but there are always backdoors and other work arounds for gaining access to their information.

That left Ebele and I along together in their makeshift planning room.

“No offense taken,” I said. “I’d be happier with a squad of Imperial marines at my back now too.”

The aggravating part was that the Horizon Breaker had a whole bushel of extremely dependable combat troops, and the Queen had taken them off the board in one move. It was petty, but things like that really made me want to smack her in the face even more.

“We’ll have to be enough though,” I said.

“I’m not sure I can count on that,” Ebele said. “Understand, I can’t risk my people just because you’ve decided to help take down the Queen. Everything we know says that she can’t be defeated by any grand gestures or straightforward attacks.”

“You’re looking to the long term. Chip away at her power base until she’s vulnerable, then strike when you can be sure of victory?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Ebele said. “The fate weave isn’t perfect and no matter how good of a caster she is, the Queen makes mistakes too. The more we push on her, the more those mistakes will add up. Give her enough time and she’ll bring the whole system down herself.”

I looked at the map of Abyz that Ebele had projected onto the planning room’s wall. Red dots marked a series of points, each of which lay outside the major metropolitan areas.

“What are these?” I asked.

“The Queen’s mistakes,” Ebele said.

I tapped the projection of the map on one of the red circles to expand it so that I could  get a ground’s eye view of what lay at those coordinates. The image zoomed in and changed orientation until I was looking through a viewing window that showed an empty street in a dead cityscape.

I felt a chill run through me. Not the warning of danger, but the memory of it. I’d found the blasted deathscape I’d expected to see when I noticed the throng of ghosts on the arctic ice field.

“How many people lived here?” I asked, trying to do the math to determine if this could be the source of the ghost horde.

“We don’t know,” Ebele said. “These areas are shrouded by the same effect that keeps the Unseen hidden. Most people who wander into the cities forget they’ve ever been there with ten minutes of leaving.”

“How did you build this map then?” I asked.

“It’s a mental anima effect,” Ebele said. “Shield your mind and you can retain what you’ve seen.”

“I see.” I said. Establishing a static effect that covered areas that large and made people forget about the cities’ existence was a ludicrously impossible effect for any caster to achieve.

Unless they happened to be wielding a Jewel of Endless Night.

Only the Queen could be responsible for the red marks on the map and there’s no reason she would go to that much effort unless something happened there that she absolutely couldn’t let people remember.

“They’re difficult to explore even with shielding,” Ebele said. “There are all kinds of alarm spells in place in most of them. The rest are overrun by monsters.”

“Monster in paradise?” I asked, “I thought all the local fauna was kept docile by the fate weave?”

“That’s what they tell the tourists,” Ebele said. “An ecosystem can’t sustain itself like that though. It’s true that fate weave keeps the creatures of Abyz from harming any of the people or tourists but in the wilds they still hunt and kill the same as on any other world.”

“And the monsters?” I asked.

“They hunt and kill better than most other things,” Ebele said. “None of them are sapient, but they don’t need to be with the sort of powers they exhibit.”

“I guess I’m not surprised by that,” I said. “Abyz is drowning in magic. It would be implausible if the animals weren’t affected by it.”

“We think those towns may be instrumental in taking down the Queen, but they’re another avenue that we’re not ready to run down yet,” Ebele said.

“I understand where you’re coming from,” I said. “It’s impressive that you’ve managed to hang on this long in the face of the odds against you.”

“It hasn’t been easy,” Ebele said. “We’ve lost some good people over the years.”

“But never someone so critical that the resistance fell apart,” I said and watched her reaction. I had a couple of unpleasant theories forming in the back of my head and I needed data to confirm or discount them.

“We plan for everything,” Ebele said, her voice wavering just slightly out of sync with her lips. The muscles in her neck tightened as she spoke and I saw her fingers ball up into fists.

“That can’t be easier either,” I said, still watching her closely.

“It’s that or we let the Queen win.”

She was looking at me, but there was a distant quality to her gaze.

“Fari, can you do a remote scan for me?” I asked on our private telepathic link.

“Here?” she asked.

“Yeah, I need to know if Ebele’s under any specific mind affects at the moment,” I said.

There was a pause before she replied.

“None that I can see from here.”

“Damn,” I said. “I hate being right sometimes.”

“Do you need me to come back there?” Fari asked.

“Or me?” asked Darius.

“No, Ebele’s not a threat,” I said. “I think I just got confirmation that we’re alone for this one though.”

“How alone?” Darius asked.

“If I’m right, there’s not going to be anymore Imperial forces coming,” I said. “We can’t call in the cavalry, because we’re all the cavalry there is.”

“It’s funny you mention that,” Fari said. “Like creepy funny. I was just discussing with Talib how we might be able to get a message out to the Morning Rose.”

The Morning Rose was an Imperial Naval vessel. Specifically it was a Crystal Star. When I met Darius, he was living on a planet that turned out to be an ancient super weapon capable of razing other planets to space dust. A Crystal Star is the kind of vessel that can go toe-to-toe with weapons like that.

The only thing more serious than calling in a Crystal Star to solve a problem is requesting the presence of one of the Prime Guardians or, in the case of Universal Armageddon (yes, the Crystal Guardian’s handbook has a section on that), the Empress herself.

Needless to say, those were options which Crystal Guardians exercised with extreme care. A Crystal Star could solve a lot of problems very easily, but that much power concentrated in that specific of an area tended to attract a commensurate level of trouble and flat out weirdness, trouble and weirdness which generally dwarfed whatever problem they’d been called in to deal with.

Similar arguments are made about calling in a Crystal Guardian, and there’s a measure of truth there as well, but I hold only a tiny fraction of a Crystal Star’s power, and so usually draw only a tiny fraction of their trouble and weirdness along in my wake.

Then there are the times when I manage to land in an ocean of trouble and weirdness that was clearly not of my making.

“I’d love to be wrong about this,” I said. “And even if I’m not I’d say come up with your best plan of attack for contacting the Morning Rose. I suspect we’re going to need a whole slew of options on how we hit the Queen.”

“I’ll keep working with Kojo and Zyla then,” Darius said. “They’ve got some dangerous holes in their coverage here.”

“Do you need Zyla’s help fixing them?” I asked.

“Probably not,” he said. “Do you want me to send her back to you?”

“Yes please!” I said.

Our conversation had been quick thanks to telepathy, but even so it was a little odd to see how long Ebele was zoned out. The moment I finished speaking with Darius and Fari though, she blinked and continued on as though she’d never paused.

“I was 10 when they got my mother and little sister,” Ebele said. “You say you understand, but I don’t think you do.”

She waited for me to protest by I stayed silent and nodded for her to continue. We’re never more ignorant than when we protest that we know something without being willing to listen to someone else’s experience with it. It’s so tempting to try to appear intelligent by defending our opinions and beliefs but sometimes the truly smart play is to simply shut up and let somebody else speak.

“My mother thought we had to take risks sometimes,” Ebele said. “She swore that she was going to be careful and precise, and she was. I’ve reviewed her notes, gone over her plans, every detail, every movement.”

I watched the muscles in her neck unclench as the memories she spoke of washed anger away in a stream of old sorrows.

“Her plan should have worked,” Ebele said. “She should have escaped with my little sister and been able to tell the Imperials about what was going on here.”

She sat back in her chair and sagged into a frown.

“Too many impossible things happened to stop her though,” she said. “The fate weave bent over backwards, and despite everything my mother could throw at it, despite all the precautions and all the contingencies and all the people who were running interference, the Queen found them.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“So that’s why we’re not going to take any chances,” Ebele continued. “I’m not going to risk losing any more of my people unless you can find some power that eclipses both the fate weave and the Queen. There has to be no chance that she can survive what we do to her.”

“I don’t know if I can promise that,” I said. “I don’t know enough about the Queen or Abyz yet to offer you anything really, except maybe this; don’t you think it was kind of lucky that you were able to find us right before the Queen caught us, and right when we needed to look for some allies who knew what was really going on?”

“Yes…,” Ebele’s voice trailed off for a moment and I saw a spark of understanding flare in her eyes.

There was no such thing as “luck” on Abyz.

I’ve been on the edge of a global apocalypse before. Several times, thanks to my line of work. As a result, the sight of the ghosts flooding the ice field before us was one that I couldn’t quite process. They weren’t normal ghosts. I knew those. I’d seen the blasted hellscapes that produced massive quantities of restless spirits. Be it ash and glowing embers or cold lifeless gray, there was a characteristic otherworldly quality that served as a mute testament to the lives that were lost.

Abyz, even this frozen, desolate section of it, didn’t feel anything like that.  The planet was far from dead. It buzzed with activity. It held movement and laughter and people in endless varieties. For as barren as the land around me was, I could see the faint glimmer of life magic trapped in the ice. Tiny microbes suspended in time by the cold and down below, in the churning sea, there were tens of thousands of sparks. From sea plants too small for the eye to see to the vast behemoths that lurked in the deeps.  I didn’t usually let my vision expand that far because the sheer enormity of it all was difficult to take in, but I couldn’t help myself. The throng of ghosts around me were simply alien to the pulse of life that I saw running through Abyz.

And yet I couldn’t deny they were there.

The longer I watched the ice field, the more ghosts I saw. They weren’t gathering around us. They had been there all along. I just hadn’t been able to see them.

“What is happening here,” I asked. “How many ghosts are here?”

“We don’t know,” Zyla said. “I can’t see them like you do. I can only feel them calling out through the fate weave.”

“I’ve never been able to find a limit,” Ebele said. “The longer I look the more of them I see until it gets to be too much and I have to stop.”

“Why can’t I render them on an overlay?” Fari asked. “I can kind of make out what Mel’s seeing but something’s blocking me from translating that into the display spell.”

“It’s part of the spell that binds them here,” Zyla said. “At least that was Yael’s theory.”

“What happened with you two?” I asked. “The automated message you sent was a little short on details.”

“Before you answer that, let’s move to a more secure location,” Ebele said and beckoned Kojo over.

“Do you have any options for getting off world?” Darius asked.

“No,” Kojo said. “My range is strictly planetary.”

“And the Queen will have the regular traffic routes barred to us,” Ebele said.

“With two Void casters, I wouldn’t think that would be a problem?” I asked.

The rest of Ebele’s forces joined us in a tight circle and clasped hands with each other. At Zyla’s nod, Darius, Fari and I joined the circle and a moment later, after Ebele cloaked us all in Void anima, we were teleported again, this time to a large, artificially excavated cavern. Veins of shimmering material ran through the walls, glistening with pale green and bright silver light.

“Escaping the planet wouldn’t be a problem if the Queen didn’t have both her own cadre of Void casters and the fate weave on her side. Whatever exit point we strike at, you can be sure they’ll have a team waiting for us.”

“Oh! That’s why you attacked the Gala!” I said. “You knew Riverstone and the other Void casters would be there so the fate weave couldn’t engine an ambush for you.”

“Except that it did when you showed up,” Ebele said.

“You were murdering the police cadets,” I said. I was still waiting for an explanation for that, though I had a guess what they were going to say given that I hadn’t actually seen any bodies.

“No, none of them died,” Zyla said. “They were all simply injured and incapacitated.”

“Because the fate weave wouldn’t let you kill them, would it?” I asked.

“I can overcome the fate weave,” Ebele said. “But maybe not on that scale.”

“Why attack the Gala then?” Darius asked. “What did you hope to gain?”

“It was my idea,” Zyla said. “Aetherial casting is a nightmare here, but I was able to read a thread that showed that an attack there would have a significant chance of cracking open the Unseen Veil that hides the ghost of Abyz. It was our best chance to make people aware of what they’re not seeing.”

“Did it work?” I asked. “That was a pretty public spectacle but, with the Queen holding the Dominator, she might be able to make a cover up work.”

“The Queen is holding the what now?” Zyla asked.

“One of the Jewels of Endless Night,” Fari said. “The Dominator is one of the Mind Gems.”

“Why would the Queen need a gem to help her with mind spells?” Ebele asked. “She’s the most powerful mental caster who’s ever lived.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“We’ve lost people to her,” Ebele said. “Some of them come back on their own. Some of them we rescue. Every last one is twisted though.”

“Happened to me,” Kojo said. “They lured me into a building and ringed it with a teleportation anchor. Once the Queen had me alone to work with, she made me give up every safehouse I knew of, every person I worked, with and then set a trap for Ebele.”

“Could you resist her?” Fari asked.

“No,” Kojo said. “Once she got her hands on me I didn’t want anything except to serve her. The power she had? It was weaponized bliss. I never wanted anything more than I wanted more of that.”

“How did they break you out of it once they rescued you?” Fari asked.

“I kissed him,” Talib, a short man with twin braids, said. Darius had zapped him unconscious back in our apartment but he’d had enough time to recover while we were talking.

Kojo took his partner’s hand in his own and smiled.

“True love conquers all I guess?” he said.

“It can,” Fari said. “But in this case I think it had a helping hand.”

“The Dominator has a weakness I’m guessing?” I said. “Physical anima?”

“Yep,” Fari said. “It’s a device of pure Mind. It doesn’t work at all on mindless creatures and it’s bindings can be shattered by the application of pure physical force.”

“You can beat the mind control out of people?” Darius asked.

“Depends on the person and depends on how long the Dominator has to work on its target,” Fari said. “In most cases, the amount of physical force needed to break the Dominator’s bonds is more than enough to reduce the victim to a thin paste.”

“Talib can make me weak in the knees, but his kiss had a little less force than that.” Kojo said.

“Did you know he liked you before the kiss?” Fari asked.

“No,” Kojo said. “It was a rather pleasant surprise.”

“That’s all it would take,” Fari said. “Tell me if this sounds right; the kiss changed your world, it changed how you thought of yourself, and it did on a purely visceral, primal level.”

Kojo nodded slowly.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was a pretty big deal. It was like a whole different future opened up for us.”

“It did,” Fari said. “The ‘you’ that existed before the kiss had a whole different set of drives and priorities. That’s what any mind control spell hooks into. The Dominator’s scary because it has an impossible amount of power to throw around, but it still, mostly, works within the basic tenets of Mental anima casting.”

“You said you’ve had multiple people come back from the Queen’s clutches,” I said. “How did you untwist the others?”

“Each one has been different,” Ebele said. “I’ve done Void anima surgery on a few, we starved one back to sanity, and some we’ve haven’t been able to fix.”

None of us had to ask what happened to the ones who they couldn’t fix. Not everyone has access to wizard class healers, and not all fights are ones where you can afford to hold back.

“Let’s say you’re right and the Queen has possession of this ‘Dominator’, what does that mean?” Zyla asked. “Can we take it away from her?”

“The Dominator life-binds with its wielder,” Fari said. “It’s a safety precaution so it can’t be used against it’s master. It can only be separated from a master by killing them.”

“So that’s a yes then,” I said.

Zyla blinked, eyes going wide before a smile slowly spread across her face.

“That’s right, you’re not a full Guardian yet are you?” she asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “If Master Raychelle was here, I’m pretty sure she would say the same thing. The Queen has misused both her royal and magical power. I’m more than willing to stand trial if it means shutting down a monster like that.”

“It’s not going to be that easy,” Darius said, putting a hand on my shoulder. He wasn’t holding me back. Not literally, but it was one of the non-verbal methods of communication we’d developed that reminded me I was going a little too far.

I had a tendency to solve problems with my fists. I knew that, and I knew it wasn’t always the best solution to employ. Diplomacy, negotiation, subterfuge, and going through existing legal channels often turned out much better, more predictable results. I was capable of each of those tactics but sometimes the best plan really was to smash a problem until it was in smaller, more manageable pieces.

Taking the Queen out of the picture felt like one of those situations, maybe because I find mind control rage-inducing, but  Darius was right.

“The Queen is not a viable target,” Ebele said. “We’ve tried. She’s one of the central nodes of the fate weave, and even if you can get past that, we would need an army to take down her personal guard.”

“You’d need more than an army,” Fari said. “With the Dominator, the Queen could turn an army back against you, or have them kill each other before they even lifted a blade against her guards.”

“We have a more important task anyways,” Zyla said. Her tone was ice cold, daring anyone to disagree with her. I wasn’t a big enough idiot to either miss what she was talking about or challenge her on it.

“Yael,” I said. “We need to get her back.”

“Will she have been twisted by the Dominator, or could she resist it?” Darius asked.

“I don’t know,” Zyla said, a single hoarse catch in her throat clipping her words as she spoke.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said and almost earned a deathstrike from Zyla before I had a chance to continue. “We’re not going to leave her under the Dominator’s influence or lose her. If Void surgery can break the Dominator’s bonds then I will personally tear them out of her. Or give her the physical beating she needs if she tries to stop me.”

“I don’t want her to be hurt,” Zyla said.

“I know,” I said, softening my tone.

Around us, Ebele’s people had scattered to the walls of the cave and were tracing patterns over the glowing lines of minerals.

“Is there any exit from here except teleportation?” Darius asked.

“No,” Kojo said.

“And your friends are inscribing anti-teleportation glyphs into the walls, right?” Darius asked.

“Yes,” Ebele said. “It’s how we stay out of the Queen’s reach.”

“There’s also an void cloak outside the dimensional anchor circle,” I said. “So they can’t detect you or reach you at all here? Clever.”

“Here and other places,” Ebele said. “It’s how we’ve survived having our safe houses revealed.”

“How long have you been fighting against the Queen?” I asked.

“My whole life,” Ebele said. “My mother was a resistance fighter while she was pregnant with me. She said I’d kick whenever one of the Queen’s agents was near. I guess it saved her a few times.”

“How long has the Queen held the Dominator?” I asked.

“She’s always been powerful,” Ebele said.

“And what about the Queen before her?” Fari asked.

“Her mother was the same,” Ebele said.

“And her grandmother, and her great grandmother and so on?” Fari asked.

“Yes,” Ebele said. “The royal bloodline is uniquely gifted.”

“Or uniquely cursed maybe,” Fari said. “I don’t think you’ve had a succession of Queens.”

“It’s been the same one all along?” I asked. “Can the Dominator do that?”

“It takes years, but yes,” Fari said.

“What do you mean, it’s been the same Queen?” Ebele asked.

“Let me ask you this,” Fari said. “When a new Queen is old enough to take the throne, does the previous Queen die shortly thereafter?”

“Yes, but they’ve said that was due to extra power they carry placing a greater burden on them.” Ebele said.

“Maybe you should kill the Queen, Mel,” Fari said. “She been body-hopping into her own children, maybe for centuries now.”

“She’ll be incredibly powerful,” Zyla mumbled, memories pulling her away from the present and sending her tumbling back into old horrors that wore her father’s face.

He was a body-jumper too and had been so powerful that it had taken the entirety of the force in Fari’s Jewel of Endless Night and hundreds of thousands of ghosts to take him out.

This time we didn’t have a Jewel to draw on and the Queen did.

Up against that was the fact that I’d had my power for longer than a single day and I had Darius and Fari backing me up.

The Queen didn’t know it yet, but we were about to ruin her whole world.

Our time was running out. Each second we stayed in the apartment was a serious slice off the lead we had on Queen Metai’s forces. In less than an hour we’d lost our medic, our captain, our ship and our most direct connection back to the Imperial throne. With the Queen’s agents aware of who they were dealing with, I expected the kid gloves to come off. The answer to whether the hotel would be something other than a pile of rubble if they caught us there was something I wasn’t eager to discover. But I let a long moment hang in silence as I stared across the room at the two women who confronted us.

“Who are you working for Watersward?” Zyla asked. Her body was rigid as granite, struggling to hold back a flood of Physical anima and the tide of violence that drove it.

I blinked for a second and tried to understand the question. The surprise of seeing one of the two people I’d come to rescue, scrambled my brain long enough that Darius got to the obvious answer before I did.

“You’re worried the Queen’s gotten to us already,” he said.

“Right, mind control,” I said, catching up. “Sorry, it’s not a problem for me, so I wasn’t thinking of it. We’re on your side, Zyla. We came here to rescue Yael and you.”

“Void caster?” Ebele, the woman standing next to Zyla, asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Nice work on the invisibility cloak. Didn’t notice you even when I glanced over the room with Void sight.”

“It helps to use real shadows to hide in too,” Ebele said. “And you were distracted.”

“You didn’t kill any of them did you?” Zyla asked, her anger still barely contained.

“No,” Darius said. “Mild shocks only. They’ll wake up in minute and have a bit of a headache but I can help with that.”

“We don’t have a minute to spare,” Ebele said.

“I can wake one of them sooner,” Darius said.

“Get Kojo up,” Ebele said. “He can get us all out of here.”

“To where?” I asked.

“Neutral ground outside of town,” Ebele said. “We can talk there and decide what to do next.”

“You’re surprisingly calm for someone who just had over half her forces incapacitated,” I said.

“We entered your room without permission,” she said. “We knew the risk, if you came back. That you only incapacitated them suggests you’re still the people Zyla spoke of.”

“You knew we would be here?” I asked.

“I hoped you would be,” Zyla said, her demeanor finally softening. “When I saw you at the Gala and you were sitting beside the Queen’s agent…”

She trailed off but I heard all the words she wasn’t saying. The Horizon Breaker was their insurance policy, maybe even their last hope after their usual safeguards and backup plans failed. If the Queen got to me and the rest of the crew before we could help them, Yael and Zyla might wind up losing everything.

Or maybe Zyla already had? I wanted to ask her why Yael wasn’t with her, but her anger gave me all the answer I needed.

They’d been partners for three years. In that time, everyone except apparently the two of them had seen how much they cared for and loved each other. There was a power imbalance there with Yael technically being Zyla’s parole officer, which complicated things, but not (in my opinion) irrevocably so. In time I was pretty sure they’d work through all that. Until then though, they stuck together, even through some missions that sounded scary as hell. If Yael was missing, there was one thing I could be certain of; it wasn’t by her own choice.

“What hit me?” Kojo said as Darius brought him back to consciousness.

“She did,” he said, pointing at me as he laid a hand gently on Kojo’s forehead and brushed a healing wash of Physical anima into Kojo’s scalp to erase the damage I’d inflicted on the poor man.

“We need to be out of here as of two minutes ago,” Ebele said, helping Kojo to his feet.

“We just got here two minutes ago,” Kojo said.

“I stand by what I said. Can you handle seven of us?” Ebele asked.

“Eight actually,” I said. “We left a friend on the balcony.”

“Sort of,” Fari said, appearing in her translucent blue form. “Best not to leave the body there though. It still has a resonance to you and they could do some ugly things with rituals if we’ve annoyed them sufficiently.”

“The same is true with Illya right?” I asked. Since the doppelganger was configured to appear as either of us so it seemed wise to ask.

“Yes, though it’s a little harder from that end since the doppelganger’s a blend,” Fari said.

“I think we’re going to have to lose it,” I said. “It’s too much of a risk at this point.”

“You’re right,” Fari said. “I was hoping we could hold onto it for a little longer, but I guess without Illya to power it, it’s not that useful.”

“You have a fully formed doppelganger?” Zyla asked.

“Yeah, outside on the balcony,” I said. “We were going to use it to let me infiltrate the Central Police and see if they knew where you or Yael was.”

“Bring it with us,” Zyla said. “It might still be useful.”

“Can you provide enough anima to get it moving?” Fari asked.

Zyla closed her eyes, paused for a second to find the doppelganger and waved a hand. Shambling not entirely unlike a zombie, the empty shell opened the balcony door and entered the room.

With a little cheer, Fari disappeared and the doppelganger gained a sudden jolt of grace to its movements. When I looked into its eyes, I saw not a hollow shell but my friend staring back at me.

“We’re ready to go,” I said.

“Almost ready,” Darius said and stepped into the bedroom to grab a sack. “Anima blade pieces, combat armor for each of us and local currency.”

“I like how you pack,” I said.

“A police detail just checked in with the main desk,” Fari alerted us.

“We’re out of time,” Ebele said.

I felt an anima field rise around me and forced myself to suppress every erg of Void magic I was holding.

Like healing spells, teleportation spells were benign intrusions of someone else’s anima into a person’s body. For most folks, this wasn’t a big deal. The teleport spell hit them and they were safely and calmly transferred to another point in space instantaneously. The Void anima I carried wasn’t that great at distinguishing friendly magic from hostile spells though. I’d progressed a lot since the first time someone cast a healing spell on me and I nearly killed him, but I still had to be careful when receiving any kind of beneficial enchantment, especially if the person helping me wasn’t used to dealing with Void anima.

Probably from hanging around with Ebele, that wasn’t a problem for Kojo. I’d been worried I hadn’t warned him but he was well versed in being careful when teleporting Void casters. It took an extra couple of seconds for the spell to complete as a result of that though, which wasn’t entirely comfortable for anyone involved.

“Maybe having a body isn’t so great,” Fari said. “I feel like my stomach was pulled out through my nose.”

“I thought it felt more like someone stuffed a glacier in my ear,” Darius said.

“Speaking of glaciers, where are we?” I asked.

Ebele answered me with a nothing more than a silent smile. We weren’t at the trusting stage of our relationship just yet it seemed.

We’d landed at on the edge of an ice cliff. Behind Darius, Fari and I, a shimmering, sun drenched sea stretched out far below us and off to the horizon. Great blue-white shards of ice floated in the frigid waters, looking like a particularly pure and unwelcoming archipelago.

Beside us rose irregular walls of the same ice. They looked like they had suffered from several recent explosions and along their pockmarked bases, I saw nearly a dozen people crouching behind cover and carrying oversized bolt casters. Whatever else the location was, Kojo had teleported us to a moderately decent ambush spot. I could think of a few improvements they could make but it was hard to say what kind of time and resource constraints they were under and until the situation was clearer I didn’t think volunteering those kind of suggestions was necessarily a bright idea.

“So, you would like us to be a little more convincing about being on your side?” I asked, gesturing to the ambushers spread around us.

“I’m reasonably convinced already,” Ebele said. “This is for their benefit, and in case someone decides to follow us.”

“Bolt casters won’t be much use against me,” I said.

“They don’t know that,” she said. “And if we came to it, they wouldn’t be the ones you’d need to worry about.”

“I suppose not,” I said. Ebele was standing still and keeping her anima completely internalized, just like me. Neither of us had any cues to evaluate how good the other was. It was a little maddening actually.

I felt Darius take my hand and only noticed after he did it that I had been rolling my fingers into a fist, in preparation for a fight.

“Sorry,” I said on our private, three-way link, “Not the time to go picking a brawl, I know.”

“It’s been a rough night,” Darius replied.

“Be honest though, aren’t you curious who would win?” Fari asked.

“If those two fight, I know exactly who would win,” Darius said. “The Queen.”

I bumped him.

“Spoilsport.” I said.

He was correct of course, but that didn’t do much to assuage my curiosity.

“Why don’t we get the main issue cleared up?” Zyal asked. “Why were you seated with agents of the Queen and why did you attack Ebele’s forces at the Gala?”

“Simple, the Queen’s agent sat with us, probably due to the ‘meet someone special’ field the Queen had layered onto the fate weave and I was trying to stop Ebele’s forces from killing or hurting anyone,” I said.

“Why were you special to the Queen?” Ebele asked. “Aside from being available to help her forces.”

“I wasn’t special to the Queen,” I said. “I was connected to Agent Bo Riverstone. We fought a couple days ago. She was looking for me, I was looking for her and apparently the ‘Someone Special’ field was happy to oblige us.”

“You both looked like you were in a very good shape for having fought a couple of days ago,” Ebele said.

“Well, she looked good because I barely laid a finger on her,” I said. “I looked good because I brought our ship’s medic with us, and she’s a phenomenal healer.”

“Where is she now?”

“Captured,” I said. “Along with our Captain and crew.”

“So the Queen has hostages to use against you,” Ebele said.

“Zyla, can you explain what happens to people who try to use hostages to coerce the behavior of Crystal Guardians.” I said.

“If the Queen attempts to use the medic, or any other member of Guardian Watersward’s crew against her, then Guardian Watersward will be required under Imperial law to remove the Queen from power by any means necessary,” Zyla said.

“Up to and including summoning the Imperial Navy,” I said. “If I could get a summons out.”

“That all sounds reasonable,” Ebele said. “But there’s no reason someone tied to the Queen couldn’t be a reasonable liar. Do you have enough from them yet to rule that out Zyla?”

“Yes,” she said. “There’s no fate bindings on any of them, and I can’t detect any mental spells in effect except for a shielded telepathic link between the three of them. Whatever their agenda is, it’s not being controlled by anyone external to them.”

“You notice our link?” Fari asked. “I’m impressed!”

“Mental anima isn’t my primary focus but I had very exacting tutors,” Zyla said.

“Any of them still left to hunt down?” I asked.

“No, we captured the last one four months ago,” she said.

“Nice work!” I said. “So you know you can trust us, perhaps you could give us some reasons to trust you?”

“That’s easy,” Ebele said. “How many people do we have here?”

“Not counting us?” I asked. “Looks like eleven, though I can see another three spots where people could be hiding that I don’t have a good view of.”

“Now look with Void sight,” Ebele said.

I switched my vision over to look for anima rather than physical forms and nearly fell off the cliff  in shock at what I saw.

“There’s about several hundred people gathered around us,” I said.

“Where?” Darius asked.

“Everywhere,” I said. “Fari can you give us an overlay of what I’m seeing.”

“Sure,” she said. “Or not. What the heck is happening here?”

“Guardian Watersward, meet the Unseen,” Ebele said.

“What are they?” I asked.

“Ghosts,” Zyla said. “These are souls of those that Abyz consumes to power the fate weave. These are the people who called us here in the first place.”

Sailing into the dark and welcoming sky, I knew we were safe from capture. Between Darius disabling the only two agents who could reasonably pursue us, and the cloak I cast to cover our retreat, there weren’t many options for Queen Metai’s forces prevent our escape. Despite that, I had to count the night as a total disaster.

“They’ve apprehended Illya already, haven’t they?” I asked, casting a glance back at the Grand Hall which was surrounded by a crowd of slack jawed but happy looking spectators.

“Yep, the whole carriage pool was locked down as soon as the first explosions went off,” Fari said.

“Do you still have a fix on her location?” I asked.

“For now,” she said. “If Agent Riverstone or any of the other Void casters they have on the Queen’s staff cloaks her though, the link will break.”

“Can they track the link back to us?” I asked.

“I have the link reporting to a secure node on the city’s spell web. They won’t be able to track it back any farther than that,” Fari said.

“That gives us another lead then,” I said. Specifically a lead that was incredibly unlikely to lead us to where Yael and Zyla were being held, and one that put one of my teammates in far more danger than they should be exposed too.

We discussed a number of scenarios before heading to the gala and “one of us gets captured by the local authorities” was one of them. We agreed on the strategy of allowing that to play out rather than enacting an immediate rescue, but I still found it hard to stomach. Illya was my responsibility. And my friend. If I couldn’t find a better plan than one that required sacrificing my friends then I needed to look for another line of work.

“We have a much bigger problem,” Fari said. “One of my ‘siblings’ is here. The Dominator.”

For as much as I thought of Fari as a regular girl, she had a few unique qualities, one of which being that where my psyche was housed in a body of flesh and blood, hers was housed in an ancient artifact. It was a unique ancient artifact but others of the same class had been forged over the vast millennia that people had sailed the stars. Together they were referred to as ‘The Jewels of Endless Night’.

When Fari’s jewel had been fully powered, it was capable of unleashing attacks that could scour an entire planet clean of life. The other Jewels of Endless Night had different functions but all of them were potent on the same scale.

Galactic society was largely spared from the ravages of their power because the Jewels bore several additional enchantments (layered on them over the years) which scattered them, hid them and defended them from would-be relic hunters. Despite that, they still turned up from time to time for one simple reason; the Jewels didn’t like to sit idle. The enchantments might bury them for centuries but the whole time the Jewels were working to return to hand of someone who would use them.

“The Dominator was the source of that psychic pressure we felt?” Darius asked.

“Yeah, I recognize her touch,” Fari said. “We worked together more than a few times.”

I tried to picture someone wielding the planet-killing Ravager that Fari had once been and the Dominator at the same time. With those alone, you could forge an empire that would span as many star systems as you cared to conquer.

“It gets worse then,” Darius said. “I saw Captain Okoro among the crowd. I don’t know what angle he was working there, but he was definitely hit by the Dominator’s memory erasure wave.”

I held a scream in. Hanq Okoro was more than my captain. He was mentor, and the closest thing I had to a father. Only long experience with how skillful he was kept me from asking Darius to turn around so that I could take the Queen apart with my bare hands. He would be ok. For the Queen’s sake, the fate weave had better guarantee that he would be ok.

“How did you two withstand it?” I asked, trying to take my mind off what was happening to Captain Hanq.

“I’d like to say it’s because I’m an awesome caster but the truth is I have built-in mental wards that exceed the design specs for any artifact ever created.” Fari said. “The people who originally created the Ravager were pretty keen that no one else ever be able to turn it against them.”

“Three cheers for keeping safety engineering in mind when designing a planet killing super weapon,” I said. “It’s nice to see that people have pretty much always been crazy like that.”

“It’s nice but I’d kind of like to go toe-to-toe with her too,” Fari said. “I mean she’s got millennia old hyper-sorcery backing her up, when else I am going to get a chance to flex my muscles against something like that?”

“I’m ok with ‘never’,” I said. “Never works just fine for me. How about you though?” I looked up at Darius who was still carrying us both as we quietly sped through the sky.

“Fari shielded me,” he said. “I mean, I’m good with mind magics but no way in hell am I going up against something that powerful if I don’t have to.”

“I already had a psychic link setup with him,” Fari said. “I just had to be in touch range to extend my wards to cover him.”

“Thank you both,” I said. “Without you, I’d be getting my teeth kicked in at this point.”

“How much do you think is compromised?” Darius asked.

“Depends on what the Dominator is capable of,” I said. “Can it do a deep read of Illya’s mind?”

“Easily,” Fari said. “But it may take them a little while to determine that she’s the one they need to target with it.”

“If it’s the Queen’s personal artifact, they may not use it for general police work like this either,” Darius said.

“Possibly. They seem to have a homegrown threat that’s focusing their attention away from us, maybe,” I said.

“What happened inside the Void bubble?” Fari asked.

“There were multiple combatants. Bo saved me from two of them, but the ring leader escaped, by teleportation I think,” I said.

“The scary agent saved you?” Darius asked.

“Broadly speaking,” I said. “You could say I charged in and created opportunities which she then exploited.”

“And then she tried to stab you?” Darius asked.

“Yeah, not fatally though,” I said. “She was trying to capture me, just like she was at that office building.”

“You could tell it was the same woman by fighting her?” Darius asked.

“That was part of it, but how she interacted with me spoke volumes too,” I said. “She knew what I was capable of and how capable I was. Otherwise she wouldn’t have let me charge head first into a Void anima field filled with enemies. Plus there’s the process of elimination. I mean how many combat trained, tourist, Void anima users was she likely to run across this week?”

“You are unique and wonderful,” Darius said and hugged me closer.

“Not unique enough,” I said. “This planet seems to have a surplus of Void casters on it.”

“It might be a natural reaction to the Dominator’s presence. If the fate weave isn’t a fan of the Jewel then it would reach out for the type of people who could stand against extreme mental magics,” Fari said.

“Given how powerful the Dominator is, I’m surprised the Queen used it in a situation like that,” I said.

“She had to know there was a chance you would escape,” Fari said.

“And since they caught you following Yael’s trail, they’d know you have an Imperial connection,” Darius said. “In fact if they’ve got Yael, they’ve got to assume that another Guardian will be coming after her and you fit that bill perfectly.”

“So the Queen wasn’t concerned about a Crystal Guardian discovering that she has a horrifically illegal artifact in her possession?” I said. “Anyone else thinking we should call in a Crystal Star now to flash burn the planet’s surface and save everyone a lot of trouble?”

“Is it going to surprise you that communications with the Horizon Breaker are down?” Fari asked.

“No,” I said, deflating at the news.

We’d made good our escape from the Gala, but we’d lost our crew and our passage off planet in the process. Despite the breathtaking altitude we were flying at, things were not looking up for my little team.

“Hmm, that’s interesting,” Fari said. “Someone just broke into our hotel room.”

“The police backtracked us that quickly?” I asked, wondering how they managed it and whether day could get any better.

“I don’t think so,” Fari said. “Our burglars teleported into the room. The police wouldn’t need to do that.”

I felt Darius shift course and send us streaking downwards towards the hotel.

“Burglars sound like our kind of people at the moment,” he said. “What do you say we have a chat with them?”

“It’s like you read my mind!” I said. “We’re not going to have a lot of time though, the Queen’s agents will figure out where we were staying and I’m not too keen to tussle with Bo again tonight.”

“That’s a little worrisome,” Darius said.

“Yeah, you don’t usually run from fights. How good is she?” Fari asked.

“Good enough that I’d be worried for my job if she applied to the Guardians,” I said. “That’s not why I don’t want to fight her again though.”

“You’re concerned she’ll slow us down long enough for the Queen to get serious with the Dominator?” Fari asked.

“Yeah. Or call in reinforcements,” I said. “I can handle fighting another Void caster, but a whole squad of them backed up by a cosmic super weapon is not my idea of a fun evening. Not when we’re looking for missing friends anyways.”

“So how do you want to handle our burglars then?” Darius asked.

I thought about that. If they were friendly then going in with a surprise attack would start our relationship off on the wrong footing. If they were hostile though doing anything but launching a surprise attack would give them time to teleport out and harass us at a later date when we didn’t have a specially warded room setup to fight them in.

“Non-lethal takedowns,” I said. “We can apologize later if we need to.”

“That’s three of us on how many of them?” Darius asked Fari.

“Two of you actually. This body I’m in went inert when Illya cut her link to it. I’m only detecting three of them in our suite though so you two shouldn’t have much trouble.”

“Dibs on any Void casters!” I said.

“Can you get us all in through the wall with a Shadow Step?” Darius asked.

“We’ll need to land on the balcony, but yeah, that shouldn’t be a problem,” I said.

“You can leave me behind for the fight,” Fari said. “I can manage the wards from outside.”

“I’m guessing you don’t have active defenses set in there right?”

“I was afraid they would arouse suspicion.” she said.

“They probably would have,” I said. “Can you give us an overlay of where our three targets are at though?”

“Yep, with structural highlights for the building too in case they run,” Fari said.

“Are any of them cloaked?” I asked.

“All three are visible currently. They’re searching our stuff too, not laying in ambush,” she said.

“That’s promising, but I still don’t think we can risk trusting them out of the gate,” I said.

“Agreed,” Darius said. “Let’s make this quick.”

And so we did.

With our approach shrouded by a veil of invisibility and our attack originating from outside the building, the three burglars didn’t have much warning before we struck. Darius managed to take down two of the three by means of a low grade shock spell that zapped them into unconsciousness. My target took a little longer to knock down and was going to wake up with a less-than-pleasant headache but like the other two was more or less undamaged.

That’s when we learned that there weren’t three targets in our apartment.

There were five.

As I gently laid my target, a tall, light-skinned man, onto one of our puffy reclining chairs I saw two women emerge from beneath the cloak of invisibility they’d worn the whole time they were in the room. I charged up my reflexes but pulled myself up short before I could launch an attack.

“Zyla?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”

The worst moment in a fight is the instant that you know you’re going to get get your head handed to you. The worst sort of fights are the ones where that moment comes right as fight begins.

It wasn’t hard to see that Bo was going to win. She was armed, I wasn’t. I can fight armed people without using a weapon myself, but that’s because I’m totally willing to cheat. Spells are an unreasonably powerful weapon and my training means that even without magic I’m never lacking in options for disabling, injuring or killing people.

Bo’s training was as good as mine though and she had the same spells I did, at least as far it mattered in a fight like the one we were about to have.

With our skills and capabilities being equal, the long, razor sharp, hunk of steel in her hands was more than enough to be the deciding factor in our battle.

So I didn’t fight her.

Not like she thought I would anyways.

She expected me to go for a weapon myself (which would have been the smart move) or flee from her (which would have been the smarter move), so, when I sparked a flash of anima through my nerves to give myself a jolt of hyperspeed, she matched me.

Before I could launch an attack of my own, Bo’s sword speared out in a straight, blinding lunge.

There was a table behind me. There were chairs I could have retreated over or used as a weapon.

I didn’t.

When Bo stabbed at me I slipped an inch to the side, letting the sword run along the fabric of my armored formal gown. That would have cost me the use of my left leg if I was paranoid about wearing combat clothing at all times.

Before either of us had time to process that was happening though I stepped into her lunge and pressed myself body-to-body against her.

Being in that close limited my attack options, but foreheads can make a terrible mess of noses if you’re tall enough. I was, but Bo was good enough to see it coming. With her free hand she blocked my head strike.

Neither of us could risk a burst of strength to overpower the other, but I was able to drain the enchantments out of my gown to act as an extra reserve of strength to draw on. That was more or less my plan in getting them in the first place, but I was careful not to destroy the enchantments in the process. I can cast great shields, but there are plenty of situations where being passively damage resistant is handy. Also, I don’t have many nice gowns, so it seemed a shame to let this one get wrecked if I didn’t need too.

“You are assaulting an agent of the Queen,” Bo said as we struggled against each other. “By my appointed royal authority, I order you to stand down, and remove your shields.”

“No,” I said. “Not while there’s a wizard-class mind spell blanketing this area.”

We continued to struggle for a long pair of seconds, seeking either a safe escape or opening to attack.

“The Pacifism Spell is sealing the breach in the fate weave,” Bo said. “Stand down and submit to its effects.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not allowed to do that.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Someone who knows that area mind control spells are explicitly forbidden by Imperial charter except in cases of imminent danger to sapient life.” I said.

Technically, I was legally obligated to resist mental control spells even in those situations. Crystal Guardians are chosen for a number of reasons, but common to all of us is skill in one or more magical disciplines that’s an order of magnitude or more better than standard casters. I barely qualified with my mastery of Physical anima casting, since I had strength but not experience or versatility yet. My Void casting skills though were what really put me in the same league as the other Guardians, and that was mostly due to how rare they were.

In short, I was dangerous, and would only grow more so as I gained experience. Losing control of that power could be a disaster for a lot more people than just me, and there were plenty of people inside and outside the Empire who would be happy to see the “right” kind of planetary disasters take place.  That’s why the Crystal Empress had a policy on people of my skill level and higher ]falling under outside control; she frowned on it. Over two decades ago, she also frowned on the Galactic Warlords who were painting the stars red with blood and you can see how that worked out for them in their near total eradication from the galaxy.

In my case, my Void casting abilities complicated the issue too. If I allowed a mind control spell to affect me, I would be held responsible for anything that I was forced to do while under its control. The same wasn’t true for someone like Darius who might resist the spell but be overwhelmed by it. That wasn’t his choice, and he was a victim in that scenario. I had the option to simply shut the spell effect off for myself though and that made it my responsibility to remain in control of what I was doing.

“Don’t think the fate weave will protect you,” Bo said. “I’m empowered to inflict whatever injuries are necessary to force you to comply. Even lethal ones.”

“That sounds familiar,” I said, thinking of my own legal privileges.

Bo dropped her sword and tried to sweep me into a throw. I let her toss me, but twisted to land on my feet, hoping to put her on the ground. She countered by spinning as well and we both landed with our arms still locked together.

Which meant our struggle become a foot battle.

I’m ok with kicks, maybe even a little better than I am with punches, but fighting against Bo was like fighting against a six legged woman. My poor legs took a brutal pounding but I managed to protect the all important knee and ankle joints.

Bo didn’t make it out of the exchange uninjured either. Close quarters fighting isn’t the kind of thing you do without getting all kinds of bruises that are hard to explain where they came from later.

“Where did you learn to fight like this?” I asked after I managed to wrap my left leg behind her right one and restrict our movements even further.

“I had a good teacher,” she said. “Where are you from?”

“No idea,” I said. “Orphaned too young to know.”

“That’s sounds familiar,” she said.

“Call off the Pacifism Spell and we can work this out,” I said.

“Not my call,” she said. “That’s the Queen’s decision.”

“Then your Queen is violating Imperial law,” I said.

“The Queen protects the people of Abyz,” she said. “She’s not for someone like you to pass judgment on.”

“You might be surprised about that.” I said.

As a Crystal Guardian I didn’t outrank a Queen, but there were a few narrow circumstances where I was allowed to pass judgment on one. There were also a much broader range of circumstances where I could sic an Imperial Auditor on one, but I was rarely in a mood to be that cruel. I could beat people to a pulp, but an Imperial Auditor could retroactively ruin their whole life if the situation warranted it.

“You’re allies are being arrested now,” Bo said. “If not for yourself, then stand down for their sakes.”

“You’re threatening my friends?” I asked.

“I am empowered to do whatever it takes to control this situation,” she repeated.

I looked around us to find Darius or Fari and saw instead the effect the mind control spell had on the attendees. They were standing up and staring vacantly ahead. Each of them had a dopey, pleased smile on their faces which suggested the Pacifism Spell was implanting happy memories in their mind.

That was terrifying given what I knew of Mental anima casting. Altering even one person’s memories was extremely difficult. Mass memory alteration required more power than any one caster should be able to possess. Even Fari, whose limits were a lot broader than a regular caster, didn’t have that level of mental magic to draw on.

“If you hurt them, I will burn you Queen to the ground.” That would be a highly questionable abuse of power. There was even a good chance that doing something like that would get me kicked out of the Crystal Guardians and into an ultra-secure prison. If Queen Metai seriously hurt the people close to me though, I wouldn’t hesitate for even an instant in making good on that threat.

“You won’t be hurt, if you comply,” Bo said. “We have no need to hurt you.”

She managed to pivot her weight enough to throw me again and this time I wasn’t able to get my feet under me before I landed. My head hit the granite floor and only a purely internal bit of anima casting let me retain consciousness.

Laying on the ground gave me leverage I hadn’t had a moment earlier and I used it to reverse the grip I had on Bo’s arms and drive the farther apart. Foreheads can make a mess of noses and, unfortunately, in that position she had a better shot at my face than I had at hers.

My vision went black for a split second and came back to stars. I was able to twist out of the path of her second headbutt though she still smacked the side of my head pretty good.

The impact stunned her a little too, which let me shift my weight and displace her center of gravity. She was better at strikes, but grappling was my speciality. Before she knew what was happening, I’d spun around her and put her right arm into a submission hold. She could struggle all she wanted to from there but her options were extremely limited, where mine included “break arm”, “break arm in multiple places”, “cause arm agonizing pain” and several even less pleasant choices.

“That’s enough,” I said. “Don’t make me wreck you, it takes forever to fix the kind of damage I can do from here.”

She stopped struggling, but I saw a smirk of victory spread across her face. I followed the line of her gaze to see her junior agent standing about a body length away from us with Fari and Darius by her side.

They were both looking up with dopey, happy smiles on their faces.

“Do what you want to me,” Bo said. “You’ve lost.”

I sagged. She was right. Even if I took Darius and Fari out of the equation, Bo’s junior agent could join the fight and simply kick me into unconsciousness while Bo kept me grappled.

“You are making a mistake,” I said and grudgingly released my hold on her.

She rotated her arm to soothe out the strain I put on it and we both got back to our feet. The sword she carried into the battle lay between us, but I let her pick it up without trying anything. Fari wasn’t in danger from physical damage to the doppelganger’s body but it wasn’t worth the risk to Darius.

“Drop your shields,” Bo said, raising the blade to point at me again. Her meaning was clear. If I didn’t drop the willingly she’d injure me so badly that I’d lose consciousness and they’d drop on their own.

I readied myself for what I was pretty certain was going to be an impossible fight. Bo was within arms reach of her partner, which meant I could possibly hit the two of them at once, but in reality I knew that when I tried, the other agent would block my strike and Bo would would put me down hard and fast.

I cleared my mind anyways and imagined the move working out right.

I had one shot to make it happen. I had to be perfect.

I gathered all of my energy for one insane burst and then…

Watched as Darius lit the two agents up like a thunderbolt.

Void anima is awesome at devouring magic. Darius has worked with me for over two years though, which means he’s learned all kinds of tricks for dealing with Void casters. Like using his immense skill with Energetic anima to summon natural electricity and letting it conduct in a purely non-magical fashion along the length of a sword blade.

“We need to leave right now,” Fari said, stepping in close enough to me that Darius was able to grab us both.

“On it,” he said and instant later we were blasting out of Grand Hall through the shattered windows like a rocket.

Running into a fight with an enemy right beside you is, under most conditions, a pretty terrible idea. Under the current circumstances though, it was the best option I could think of for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that I was working from an information deficit and of all the people I could risk in order to learn the things I needed to know, I was by far the happiest with risking myself.

There was also the slight issue that I was potentially one of the few people who could survive the combat arena that was being spread throughout the Grand Hall. Void anima is nasty stuff, it’s essentially a toxic form of magic in that living tissue exposed to it tends to get dead in a hurry. It also consumes other forms of magic voraciously, including fate magic.

The fate weave on Abyz was unthinkably powerful but on a local scale it was possible to snap the bonds it laid on you, if you were sufficiently shielded in Void anima. That’s how managed to fight against the woman who attacked me on the roof of the office building without the fate weave say “No” to the violence we inflicted on each other. It was also how the people attacking the gala were able to assault the security and ruin the “Happily Ever After” field the Queen was (theoretically) projecting.

“Stay in sight of me,” the senior agent said. It was a reasonable request. Unless I missed my guess, she was the same woman that I’d fought with earlier, so she had every reason to be wary that I was associated with the attackers.

For my part, I wasn’t sure whether the attackers or the agent or both or neither were in the right and, regardless of that, which of them might be responsible for the disappearance of Yael and Zyla. Whatever was going on though, people were being injured and possibly killed and that wasn’t something I was going to sit on the sidelines and watch.

“Who are these people?” I asked as we plowed into a wall of Void anima.

For most other casters that would have been a problem. Both the agent and I were encased in our own Void shields though so neither of us so much as slowed.

“The woman you’re with is named Bo Riverstone,” Fari said, shooting me the information on our telepathic link before the Void anima swallowed me up. “She’s a member of the Queen’s personnel retinue. I’ll scour the spell webs to see what else I can find out about her.”

“Thanks!” I shot back before the wall of anima cut us off.

On the other side of the wall there was more darkness, which wasn’t surprising, but it wasn’t a field of pure Void anima either, which kind of was unexpected.

If the attackers wants to kill a lot of people, a wide area Void anima field would have been a great weapon to use. In fact on Abyz it might have been the only thing that could get the job done. Instead of that though they’d gone for a sheltering dome of Void anima to prevent anyone from reaching them and then had filled the dome with a simple darkness spell (and the smoke they’d initially deployed).

That suggested one of two possibilities. Either they weren’t here to kill people, or they weren’t strong enough casters to overcome the full power of the fate weave. The screams that brought Bo and I running into the fray suggested it was more likely to be the latter option, but I reminded myself that I needed to keep an open mind still.

Not that having an open mind saved me from the attack that came out of nowhere. Fortunately, keeping my ears open did. Thanks to that purely mundane form of situational awareness, I heard someone step up behind me an instant before they tried to bash my head in with a very hefty spiked club.

Void anima shields are awesome at protecting you from magical attacks. Purely physical damage is another matter entirely though. Normally, I have wizard-class Physical shields to deal with that sort of thing but the mix of Void anima that was being thrown around made those impractical. It was exactly the kind of extremely aggravating situation that I usually delighted in inflicting on others, and I saw why it produced the rage that it usually did.

I had one last advantage to call on though. Though I wouldn’t have believe it at the time, spending over a decade with no ability to cast magic had been a good thing in some ways. The primary benefit at the moment was that it forced me to learn to fight without without relying on magic. I’d spent years on the streets of my homeworld and had gotten pretty good at fighting without spells to sustain me. Over the last two years with Captain Hanq had ensured that even as I mastered  my spell casting skills, my mundane martial talents hadn’t atrophied either.

Putting all that together, plus being alert for trouble, meant I managed to dodge the few inches necessary so that I got clipped by the blunt part of the spiked club instead of one of the sharp and fatal bits at its end. The blow was still hard enough to send my sprawling over a table though and left me seeing stars because heavy metal clubs are no joke to get hit by.

With the thick smoke, I could barely see the person who attacked me until he was swinging the next blow at me. I was slow from the effects of the first blow, so I rolled backwards off the table to buy myself distance and time to recover.

Bruiser McClub-To-The-Head, or whatever his name was, came right over the table at me though, determined not to allow me the two seconds I needed to get back on my feet and ruin his day. For his trouble, he took a chair to the front of the kneecaps, which Bo wielded like she’d special ordered it from a melee weapon supply catalogue.

He crashed onto the table, shattering it beneath his weight and rolled off into the smoke as I leapt back to my feet.

“Thank you,” I said.

“That one wasn’t a Void caster,” Bo said. “We need to find their leader.”

“The screams sounded like they came from police recruits,” I said and started running over the tables to get there.

In my Void sight, I saw the people at the tables suffused with sparks of light which matched the anima they carried. That I was still seeing colored sparks dancing in them told me the attendees were still alive. Corpses have residual anima in them, but it’s a very distinct look from what a living body possesses. From their body postures though, it looked like the people in the affected area had all been rendered unconscious. Probably by something in the smoke that I wasn’t breathing in.

A stab of danger hit me and I dove to the floor to escape the attack. As I rolled beneath a table, a microburst of staccato explosions rang out.

“They’re using bullet throwers?” I asked, anger mixing with genuine fear. I couldn’t see Bo’s expressions, we were just shadows to each other again, but given how sharply she looked over at me, she was more than a little surprised that I knew what those were.

Most modern military weapons use an anima-enchantment system that launches conjured bolts backed by enough force to punch through a typical caster’s shields in a single hit. Because the bolt casters are enchanted to provide most of the magic needed for the attack they are reliable and cheap to use once they’re created.

A weapon that hurls physical projectiles, by comparison, is more likely to break, or jam and suffers the glaring problem that it can run out of ammo. By any measure a bolt caster is a superior weapon to a bullet thrower. Any measure except one.

If you’re planning to hunt a Void caster, purely physical weapons are the perfect tool to shred their defenses with. Whoever was attacking the gala had brought weapons intended to kill me and people like me.

I wanted to be mad about that, but if I had to fight someone like Bo, I’d want to make sure I had the upper hand too. That didn’t make the prospect of being shot more palatable, just more understandable.

“I’ll distract them,” I said. “Find out if the new recruits are alive and if they need help.”

I didn’t wait for her to agree with my plan. We didn’t have the time, and her actions would be enlightening no matter what she chose to do.

I tried to emerge from underneath the table, only to have a pair of shots shatter stone chips off the floor in front of me. With the darkness spell and the smoke that seemed like a difficult trick to pull off until it occurred to me that whoever was responsible for the darkness spell would be able to see through it with Void sight the same as I could. Add a True Seeing spell to that and they’d be able to see through the smoke too.

All they would need from there would be enough Mental anima to form a mindlink like I regularly had Fari do and they’d be able to coordinate the entire force that they brought.

On the bright side if they were using spells that didn’t rely on Void anima, then I could too.

I sprinted out from under the table and another four shots rang out.  Each of them hit me dead on, and each of them bounced off the Physical anima shield I had in place.

I let the shield drop the moment the last bullet hit to ensure its energies weren’t stolen from me. I’d had more than enough of being beaten to a pulp with my own power already and I had my danger sense to warn me when I needed to recast the shield.

Maneuvering while blind is less than fun, but it was yet another skill that Captain Hanq drilled into my head despite my whiny, teenage protests.

Sound and touch are you friends when you can’t see, and utilizing them efficiently makes all the difference when someone’s trying to kill you. The bullet thrower was loud enough that I couldn’t echo locate anything else in the room aside from it, but with brief caresses to guide me, I was able to tumble and slide across the remaining tables and skid onto the open terrain of the central parade aisle.

I burned a quick spike of Physical anima the instant I landed there and launched myself at the shooter’s position. I was fast enough that they only got off one shot, and that bounced off a hastily conjured Physical shield.  It wasn’t until I closed to within about ten feet of them though that I was able to make out three figures, all covered in shadows, waiting for me with weapons drawn.

I got in one anima assisted strike before they were aware that I’d reached them and used it to hit the two figures who were in front of the gun wielder. They went flying in opposite direction, propelled more by the carefully chosen angle of my attack than any superhuman strength. That left me briefly alone with their leader.

She didn’t waste any time with banter or threats. She simply emptied the bullet thrower’s ammo bin into me. My shield held but keeping it up against the onslaught put me totally on the defensive.

Bo once again appeared to “rescue me”, though this time she did it with a razor sharp length of steel in her hand.

Unlike Mr. Club-to-the-Head, the gun wielder sensed Bo’s approach and vanished before she could land a killing blow.

The moment the gun wielder vanished, the Void dome that sealed us in popped like a soap bubble. I expected to feel Fari’s mental link re-establish itself, but someone very different began to press on my mind.

It felt ancient and alien and indescribably compelling.

I wrapped my mind in an extra layer of Void anima, cutting off all outside contact. I had no interest in being taken over, even temporarily, by an alien intelligence.

“I can’t let you leave here,” Bo said, our two shadowed forms standing no more than an sword’s length apart.

“What’s with the mental assault,” I said.

“Turn off your defenses and I will explain,” she said.

“That’s not going to happen,” I said. “Explain now, while my mind is still clear, or we’re going to talk this out the hard way.”

The stab of cold that signaled an attack was all the response I needed.

It was going to be the hard way.

One of the tricks to a successful infiltration is not to admit that you’re caught even when you clearly are. Confidence and simply looking like you belong where you are can cover a wide variety of tells that you’re an intruder. Generally I use invisibility to cover the rest but, when the people looking to capture you are seated directly to your left and directly across from you, disappearing into thin air can look somewhat suspicious.

“So do you get motion sick too?” Darius asked the women as he took his seat and completed our little dining table foursome.

“Motion sick?” the senior agent asked. Technically the two women were probably here posing as a couple, but their body language did not say “romantic evening” at all.

I saw alertness in both their eyes and a deference from the younger woman towards the older one that could have been shyness except for how she examined me when our eyes met.

A shy person will often look away when presented with direct eye contact. The younger agent didn’t flinch from my gaze though. She looked me up and down, blinked in exactly the manner I do when I’m taking a quick peek with magical vision, looked me in the eyes again and then glanced away only when I failed to present any aggressive signals.

That took all of three seconds. Time enough for someone trained in evaluation to do a quick scan and get a reasonable sense of the person they were evaluating, at least in terms of whether they were a threat.

A paranoid or anxious person might have done the same thing, but the young agent’s gaze had been clear on another point too. Whether or not I intended to threaten them, she wasn’t afraid. I knew that feeling. I also knew the broken bones that came with that kind of arrogance. I was lucky enough to enjoy the services of some galaxy-class healers though so I hadn’t yet learned my lesson about treating everyone as a potentially serious threat.

Plus, to be honest, it was kind of fun to dismiss big aggressive guys as not worth my time. It inevitably annoyed the hell out of them and the brawls that followed were usually short and extremely one-sided. As someone who’d been threatened by big aggressive guys everyday when I was growing up, I still got a kind of childish glee from feeding them their own front teeth.

Neither of the women seated across from Darius or I seemed like people I would be feeding anything to though.

“A lack of motion sickness is one of the benefits of these tables. We can eat while staying nicely on the ground,” Darius said.

“They’ll also offer a better view of the new recruits,” the senior agent said.

“Isn’t that why the flying tables will be flying though?” I asked. “To see things better?”

“What most people want to see is Her Royal Majesty,” the senior agent said. “So the table’s flight path is set accordingly.”

“You sound very familiar with how this is arranged, you must be locals?” I asked. Questions were safer than statements since questions could never be lies. Without any anima spells on them, I knew the agents couldn’t personally be under the effects of a true seeing spell, but I also knew that Royal Security wouldn’t be working an event like this without support. The agents at our table might not know immediately if I lied, but when they reviewed the logs of the evening I’m sure our conversation would have all sorts of annotations on it.

That didn’t mean that I couldn’t lie of course. Regular people lie all the time. I just had to be careful and clever with the lies I told.

“I take it you’re tourists then?” the senior agent asked, playing the same game I was.

“Fari, want to come pretend to be me for a while?” I asked on our telepathic link. I could be careful and clever with my words but I could also be impatient and I was pretty sure that if I gave into the urge to punch either of the agents in the face and make a break for it, we’d be swarmed by enough of the Royal Security Forces that they’d need a mop and a bucket to take me into custody.

“What’s up?” Fari asked.

“We’re sitting with a pair of women who I’m pretty sure work for Her Royalness,” I said.

“Have they started interrogating you yet?” she asked.

“They just started,” I said. “But Darius is deflecting it with small talk.”

“Good,” she said. “I’ll see if I can set something up with Ilya then. We’ll need to be careful not to raise their suspicions though.”

“That’s going to be tricky,” I said. “They’re going to think to ask why the fate weave sat them next to us sooner or later.”

“Well sure, tricky is why they send us in isn’t it?” Fari asked. In her own way, my best friend has just as much hubris as I do, which is probably one of the reasons I love her so much.

“We’re here on business travel,” Darius said. “But we’re kind of making it a well deserved vacation too.”

“You have good timing,” the senior agent said. “The Review only comes once per year.”

“Is that why there are so many guards here?” I asked, gesturing to the men and women in the beautiful and pointless armor. “I thought Abyz was the safest planet in known space?”

“It is,” the younger agent said.

“Safety comes at a cost though,” the senior agent said. “The more mundane precautions we take the less we risk overconsuming the natural Aetherial magics that provide us with our little piece of paradise.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Darius said. “Is that a problem with large natural disasters though? My home planet was subject to megaquakes a few years ago and after seeing them, its hard to imagine any amount of Aetherial magic keeping everyone safe.”

“We don’t have a problem with such things on Abyz,” the senior agent said. “We have plenty of resources for our needs today, but as good stewards, we try to make sure they’re preserved for the next generation as well.”

“That sounds very enlightened,” I said.

“We try to set a standard for galactic society,” the senior agent said.

“How did a philosophy focused on consequences arise on a planet where people don’t need to fear the results of their actions?” I asked.

“We didn’t always have the weave to fall back on,” the younger agent said.

“Yes, it’s a modern invention,” the senior agent said. “Just under a century old. Our society developed its traditions and values in a much less forgiving age.”

“And you’ve managed to retain those values across several generations of prosperity?” Darius said. “That’s an impressive achievement on its own.”

Impressive wasn’t the word I would have chosen for it. More like “unnatural” or “constricted”. Cultures change and grow over time. It’s the reason that despite millennia of violence and bloodshed across the stars during the era of the Galactic Warlords, we’re starting to see real progress across the million worlds of the Crystal Empire in just over twenty years of peace.

The Crystal Empress united the galaxy as much as she conquered it. The popular narrative paints an image of the Empresses as an unstoppable force sweeping aside the legions of warlords who stood against her. As Captain Hanq is evidence of though, many of those Warlords simply joined her cause, and hundreds of thousands of other worlds joined the Crystal Empire out of the belief that they’d benefit economically from the transaction.

Abyz had been one of those world. A “quiet convert” where no fighting had been required to bring it into the fold. Partly that was because the Queen of Abyz signed the treaty as a direct act of royal will. No debates had been necessary, or requested, or allowed.

In exchange for joining the Empire, the Queen was required to restructure her advisory council into a parliament that provided representation to all of the people of Abyz. A check like that on royal authority didn’t go over well on most planets but the Queen had pledged her firm belief in it at the time.

The cynic in me noted that the Empire had fought a brief war in a neighboring star system and broadcast the whole thing for everyone in a three jump range to see. Daimos, the neighboring system to Abyz, was the strongest military power in the immediate region. The Imperial forces had allowed Daimos the opportunity for a sneak attack, and had pre-published their entire battle plan. Despite those advantages, Daimos was utterly disarmed, without casualties on either side, in under an hour. I was pretty sure that had an impact on the Queen of Abyz’s thoughts on resisting Imperial rule.

“We’re an ancient civilization,” the senior agent said. “The fate weave is just one benefit that we gain from that. A stable society is another.”

“Is that why tourists can only stay here for so long?” I asked. “They would make things unstable?”

“There’s no danger of that,” the senior agent said. “As you see with the new police recruits, we can keep things well under control.”

“Do you ever have tourists go missing here?” I asked. “I’m guessing there’s got to be a temptation to stay longer since everything is so nice?”

I tried to be clever with that question since I needed information on what had happened to Yael and Zyla. My explanation would show up as a lie to any truth seer since I didn’t, in truth, believe there would be many people who would risk permanent expulsion when leaving and returning on a new entry visa was relatively straight forward. It was the kind of lie that someone might use to cover up their own curiosity about staying longer themselves though so I thought it might be safe.

And, of course, I was wrong.

“No one goes missing here,” the younger agent said and looked me in the eyes. I could almost see the wheels starting to turn in her head as the questions about who I really was rose to her awareness.

Her senior partner, perhaps due to greater experience was a step ahead of her though.

“Interesting that you bring that up though,” the senior agent said. “We had a disruption just yesterday and we’re still looking for the person responsible.”

“A disruption?” I asked.

“Yes,” the senior agent said. “While they can’t harm us, there are those who seek to cause chaos anyways. They’ll engineer elaborate jokes like replacing all of the whipped cream on the desserts with shaving lather or replacing the evening’s music with an illusion of donkey’s braying.”

“We’re trying to find someone like that,” the junior agent said.

“Who would do something like that?” I asked, thinking that it seemed like a pretty childish manner of protest.

“Misguided off-worlders perhaps,” the senior agent said. “One’s who might have fallen in with the wrong crowd and been misinformed as to the penalties for such acts here.”

“That sounds like you take stuff like more seriously than other places do?” I asked.

“We do,” the senior agent said. “But we’re more interested in who is ultimately responsible for those sort of acts. If the other people involved cooperate, their sentences are usually very minor.”

I thought back to Halli and the scam they had worked out to sell convicts into virtual slavery. Would that count as “minor” in the eyes of the agents here? It seemed an unlikely prospect for explaining Yael and Zyla’s absence if only because I would expect them to be able to break out of a jail in less time than it took for someone to put them into it.

“I can’t imagine anyone wasting their vacation on silly pranks like that,” Darius said.

“Some of the ‘pranks’ can be more serious than others,” the senior agent said.

“Are we actually safe here then?” I asked, wondering how they would chose to lie to me.

“Of course,” the senior agent said. “Just because someone has decided to try to disrupt things, doesn’t mean they can succeed.”

“We have all plenty of guards covering every corner of the building,” the younger agent said. “And the Central Authority building was planned with security in mind. It’s the perfect venue for tonight’s Review.”

I’ve made the mistake of saying things like that myself. It’s called tempting fate and as soon as the words were out of her mouth I saw the younger agent become aware of the roll that fate had bound her to play.

I wasn’t in any danger from the explosions that triggered right on her final syllable so the slow ache of cold that gathered in my chest felt odd.

The rest of the guests, barring my fellow crewmates, reacted poorly to all of the glass on the lower floors blowing outwards from the room. The explosions that caused the shattering glass also left the air filled with a noxious, though non-lethal, smoke that I had to cast a quick Physical spell to avoid breathing in. From the coughing and wheezing that I heard all around me, I guessed that most people didn’t have the same survival training that I’d been given.

The next round of explosions triggered the same sort of panic and screaming, but this time they came with a more definite stab of danger.

“Protect the guests!” both the senior agent and I said at the same time.

I turned to look at her and saw that she’d done the same thing I had. Both of us were covered in Void anima shields, and she looked a lot more familiar as a result.

In the smoke I heard voices calling out other orders. Then I heard the screams.

Whoever set off the bombs wasn’t any more restricted by the fate weave’s prescription against violence than I was.

“You are under arrest,” the senior agent said.

“Trust me, you don’t have the authority,” I said. “There’s people being hurt right now. We stop that, then we work out what’s going on here.”

I saw her hesitate for a moment but another scream decided the issue and with a nod from her, we plunged into the smoky center of the room to face whatever it was that fate hadn’t had in store for us.

We arrived at the Honji Royal Review and Charity Gala late enough to be stuck in crowds. Wall to wall people from dozens of different worlds and twice as many species were massed in front of the Central Authority Building waiting for their chance to storm the doors and enter the Grand Hall where the “event of a lifetime” awaited them.

While the advertising for charity events can be a bit overblown, this particular occassion had a decent chance of living up to its billing. Normally the fate weave that permeated Abyz was focused solely on preventing injury and violence. As a “royal” event though, the Review and Charity Gala enjoyed the privilege of an enhanced version of the weave. The presence of Her Royal Highness meant that fate would go above and beyond “keeping you safe”. People thought of it as the fate weave giving you a “Happily Ever After” but that was out of reach even for the weapons grade magic Abyz was drenched in. What fate would actually do is conspire to “bring you together with someone special” at the ball. For some reason a lot of people thought of that as being a good thing.

Most royal events were for open only to select members of the Queen supporters, but each season there was at least one event to which the public could purchase tickets. When I asked Fari how much she’d paid for the three tickets we had, the price she quoted made me gulp.

My formal attire was an expensive luxury, especially with the “extra durability” enchantments that were woven into each piece. On a planet where everyone was protected from harm every hour of the day, the need for armored gowns was pretty much non-existent. I was able to find a shop that could manage to craft one on short notice only because the wealthy people who lived on Abyz occasionally had to travel off-world and were ten times more paranoid about such flights than the usual interstellar traveller.

The dependable thing about shops that specializes in providing rare clothes for desperate clients on short notice is that they don’t really have fixed prices for their ensembles. Usually they don’t even specify what the pricing is. If you care to ask, you’re probably not rich enough to afford it.

Despite that, my ticket to the gala was still more than the cost of my entire outfit by an order of magnitude.

“We should make sure we have our pictures taken,” Darius said as he took my arm. For a crowd of the ultra-wealthy, they were behaving not unlike drunken sports fans so becoming separated was a real possibility unless we clung to each other.

“Only if we can send them to your Dads,” I said.

Darius had an odd fascination with seeing me dressed up, while at the same time thinking that every formal suit he wore looked terrible. The crazy thing was, as far as I could tell, every suit he ever dressed in made him look smolderingly hot.

Granted I’m biased, but we don’t get to that many formal balls and it takes more than all my fingers and toes to count the number of times someone has tried to “cut in” and steal a dance with him. I joked that someday I would need to get into a knock-down, drag-out brawl just to fend off his overly eager admirers, except I wasn’t entirely sure I was joking about that.

For my own part, I never felt that comfortable in gowns or dresses but, when the mood struck me, they could be fun to wear for a bit. A formal gown is like a costume for me. It’s not who I am, or even who I want to be, but it’s still nice to pretend (and blend in) some times.

“They would love to have more pictures of you,” Darius said, and steered us a couple of steps forward as the crowd filtered into the Grand Hall.

“They’re very kind,” I said. I got along with Darius’ dads, Hector and Osgood, very well with despite having virtually nothing in common with them. They’re politicians with years of service on a world that had been beset by warfare for longer than any of us had been alive. I’m an orphan, street rat who managed to get recruited into one of the most prestigious peace-keeping groups in the galaxy. We literally come from different worlds, but despite that we agree on a shocking number of things.

Like how wonderful Darius looks in formal wear.

“They’ll be happy to have pictures of me, but you’re the one they miss,” I said.

“I send them a letter every week!” he said.

“Somehow I’m thinking that’s not quite the same as having you at home.” I said and guided us into an opening in the crowd that got us a whole three feet closer to the door.

“I wasn’t at home much before though,” he said. “I was in the field three weeks out of every four as a scout.”

“Yeah, but they still felt like they knew what was happening with you,” I said.

“I suppose they did see the troop distribution reports each day in the Council meetings,” he said.

“Right, so they knew when you were safe, and if you’re team was heading into danger they knew to worry extra hard.” I said.

“Not that extra worrying does much good,” he said.

“It gave them a sense of being in control,” I said. “Even knowing that it was crazy, they said it still helped them.”

“It’s hard to accept that my parents are that crazy, but I guess the evidence kind of supports it,” he said and guided us into one of the entry channels that led to the Grand Hall.

“People will do a lot to feel in control of their lives.” I got my ticket ready for inspection as we finally got close to the ticket takers.

“This from the girl who’s dressed in a blast proof gossamer gown,” Fari said over our telepathic link.

She was strolling around in our doppleganger body, looking like Ilya’s identical twin. Ilya, meanwhile. was waiting in the chauffer area after dropping us off. In an hour she was going to step into the back of the rented carriage we’d arrived in. Twenty minutes later Fari and I would join her in the carriage and once we finished dressing, they would emerge together with the doppleganger configured to look like me. I would exit at the same time, but I would be cloaked by an invisibility spell and wearing my proper battle attire (since Fari would be wearing my dress and Ilya would be wearing the one Fari was currently robed in).

The logistics of getting changed in the back of a carriage were a little tricky but it offered us the best chance of passing undetected since Fari and I could veil our subterfuge pretty easily as long as we out of direct sight of anyone.

That gave me about an hour to scope out the crowd and determine the sort of security that was in place for the event. In a sense, I was courting disaster with that approach. With the Queen attending the event, security was extremely heavy all around the building. In practice though that almost made it easier.

An event like the seasonal appearance by the Queen wasn’t put together in an afternoon. There had been heightened security on the Grand Hall for weeks leading up to the event and for the last three days the place had been in a constant state of high alert. The arrival of the Queen had intensified that but it had also focused it. The entrances were watched, and the Grand Hall teemed with armored security troops. They were almost all focused on the Queen herself though.

Two hundred guards and I had to laugh when I saw them. Their armor was beautiful and ornate and practically worthless. The police of Abyz still have all sorts of criminal matters to attend too, from burglary to fraud to arson and vandalism. Abyz even had a standing space navy, since the fate weave didn’t reach much beyond its atmosphere. What the planet was lacking though was any sort of domestic force that dealt with violence among or directly against its people.

On other planets, that would have been one of the prime roles of any governmental security force, but yhe security on the Grand Hall wasn’t in place to safeguard the Queen’s life. They were there to preserve her dignity at all costs. Anyone who tried to harm the Queen would find the most ridiculous of events occurring to foiling their plans thanks to the fate weave. Magic is finicky though. Dropping a paint balloon on the royal brow might be unpleasant but, as it posed no danger to the royal health, the fate weave would remain blissfully ignore it.

The current Queen enjoyed a fair amount of  popular support, but no one, not even the Crystal Empress, is beloved by everyone. With regicide being off the table on Abyz, the opposition was limited to attacks that were little more than pranks, though from what I’d read it wasn’t a good idea to underestimate how nasty a non-lethal prank could be.

It also wasn’t good to overestimate the effectiveness of the fate weave. Abyz billed itself as a paradise world thanks to the safety provided by the magic that surrounded it. From what I could see, there were a lot of wealthy people, locals and off-worlders, who bought into that. The Queen however was not one of them.

Evidence to that fact came from the presence of a second, less obvious set of guardians. These weren’t garbed in beautiful and ridiculous armor. They wore simple servant uniforms which Void sight showed me were devoid of enchantments. Not even a simple “Stay Clean” cantrip.

“There’s a whole lot of wait staff here who are primed and ready to fight Void anima casters,” I said on our telepathic link.

“Is that going to be a problem?” Darius asked, also silently.

“Only if they catch me,” I said. “And only for them in that case.”

“I just put your organs back in place,” Ilya said. “Could you please try to keep them there?”

“I always try,” I said.

We reached the ticket takers at last and were waved through without delay. It’s always nice when you can use legitimate credentials in situations like that, though if Fari had been forced to counterfeit us a set of tickets the results probably would have been  the same.

“We’re in,” Darius said.

“Same here,” Fari said. “How’s the drain on the animation spell Ilya?”

“Not bad yet,” our medic said. “I’m resting in the carriage now, so I can manage it for as long as you need. If you get into a fight though, or have to wander farther away, I reserve the right to change my answer.”

Inside the Grand Hall was a space that more than lived up to its name. The Central Authority Building was a sixty story tall skyscraper. The bottom twenty floors though were dedicated to the Grand Hall and it’s support offices.

I flicked my vision over to Void sight briefly to see the rich latticework of Physical spells that made the hall possible. In place of proper walls, the Grand Hall was built on graceful, curving swirls of a colored glass filigree. During the day, the hall was flooded with natural light, but at night it truly came alive. Thousands of tiny lights rested in the air above us with thousands more casting light into the vast room from outside.

I’ve traveled in space and seen nebula from afar. I’ve been inside several of them too, but the Grand Hall captured the essence of being surrounded by brilliant points of light that stretch into the vastness of the universe far better than any natural phenomena ever could. If there was a spot for finding your Happily Ever After, it was easy to imagine why people might mistake this for being it.

I looked over at Darius and then searched for Fari in the crowds. Surprisingly, I saw that Captain Hanq was in attendence as well, which meant some of the rest of the Horizon Breaker’s crew was probably here too.  Without any prompting, Darius chose that moment to hold my arm a little closer and I felt a warm blush radiate through me. If I had a Happily Ever After waiting for me, something told me I didn’t need Abyz’s fate magic to find it.

“I think the tables will be lifting off soon for the Review,” Darius said. “We should probably stake out our seats sooner than later.”

To complete the illusion of being adrift amidst the stars, some of the dining tables (meant for the more adventurous of the gala’s attendees) were enchanted to float  about the room as the parade of new police cadets made their journey to the Queen’s throne for their formal presentation to her.

The idea appealed to me, but since floating in mid-air would make it hard to wander around and inspect the facility, we had to make sure that we got seats which would remain boringly anchored to the ground.

As I expected those weren’t the first ones to fill up and we were able to find a nice little table with four seats that was towards the edge of the gathering space. I was about to suggest that Fari head over and join us when I heard someone step up behind me.

“Are these taken?” a tall woman with skin a few shades darker than mine asked, referring to the two open seats. Another woman, who looked to be a few years younger, stood beside her watching me as well.

“Not yet,” Darius said and stepped to the side to allow the two women easier access to the chairs.

“Thank you,” the tall woman said and moved to take the seat that was opposite from me, while her companion took the seat to my left.

Out of reflex, I flicked my vision over to Void sight for a second to check them out as they sat down.

There were no enchantments on them. Not on their expertly coiffed hair. Not on their radiant and lovely gowns. Not even on the sparkling jewelry they wore. If we were in a low class bar on Halli I wouldn’t have been surprised. This venue however was packed with people who had so much money it wasn’t anything more than a cute number to them. All of the attendees were enchanted in some fashion.

Except apparently for the Queen’s special line of defense.

The Gala was reputed to connect you with someone special. I hadn’t considered that might mean I’d be connected with exactly the people I was looking for.

Falling asleep immediately after a fight leaves you with a good chance of not waking up again for a variety of reasons. My first thought after opening my eyes therefor was a little cheer of gratitude that luck had been on my side.

The I remembered where I was. Abyz didn’t believe in luck. Here everything was governed by the fate casting and no one was allowed to die to violence or accident.

For that matter no one was supposed to be able to commit violence against another either, but Shadow Lady had done a pretty thorough job of pounding me into mulch. It seemed weird to argue for the beating being unfair when I’d at least received the benefit of not dying, but given how things had gone I wasn’t in a generous or reasonable mood.

At least not until I noticed that I was resting on a very comfy bed, in a pleasantly dark room. If I’d been captured, it was by the nicest jailers in the known universe. In fact, if the bad guys were offering rooms like this, with soft downy blankets and gentle warming spells hugging me lightly, I’d have to consider asking them for an job application form. I mean my bunk on the Horizon Breaker was nice, but even in the dim light I could see that the room was far beyond nice and well into opulent.

Of course it was lacking in the “cuddly young man” and “translucent best friend” departments, which made it significantly less appealing than my bed on the Horizon Breaker, but I was content for the moment with it. I figured if I had fallen into someone’s clutches they’d be along soon enough to gloat and make me an offer I’d have to seriously consider if I wanted to refuse.

I rolled over gently onto my back and slowly pulled myself up in a sitting position. Something seemed oddly wrong with that, but the smell of fresh coffee waiting beside the bed drove all other thoughts out of my mind until I drained a long sip.

The flavor of the coffee was exquisite. Nice and strong, but with with a complex mix of components that worked together rather than one overwhelming bolt of bitterness that some brews hit you with. There was also a light sparkle of magic on the lip of the cup that had kept it at the proper temperature for me. I drank the magic in too and it was delicious. Feeling the anima coursing through my system left me warmer than coffee itself did. Part of that warmth though was probably because I recognized the enchantment, having woken up to it most mornings for the last two years.

“You look like you’re feeling a little better,” Darius said, pushing the door to the room open and letting in a few rays of early morning sunshine.

“Can’t talk,” I said. “Enjoying heavenly coffee.”

“We have breakfast waiting for you too when you’re ready,” he said.

“I love you,” I said. “Seriously, I will make babies with you right now.”

“It’s good to see a patient fully recovered so quickly,” Ilya said, following Darius into the staggeringly large bedroom.

I finally noticed what seemed wrong. My body wasn’t a shattered mass of pain. There were remnants of healing spells still working on me, but sometime while I’d slept I’d received the kind of top quality medical care that only psychotically overtrained medics could provide.

“I love you too,” I told Ilya. “Babies for you as well.”

“Aww, I almost feel like I’m missing out here,” Fari said, joining the other two in her ghostly blue form.

“You get double babies, with a side order of cute pets,” I told her. “Seriously though, where are we, and, not that I’m ungrateful, but why are you here?”

“Sorry, kind of my fault,” Fari said.

“She put a medic alert spell on you,” Darius said. “So when your vital signs went haywire we knew you were in trouble.”

“It was just a variant of the signalling spell I gave you,” Fari said. “I figured if you were conscious and still hidden, the alert effect wouldn’t escape your cloaking spell and if it did, well, then you probably needed us.”

“I was right about the double babies,” I said. “How did you get here though?”

“Grabbed a shuttle and flew here as soon as we could,” Darius said.

“We got lucky,” Fari added. “I didn’t even need to scramble their schedules. There was one waiting when we got to the shuttleport.”

“That probably wasn’t luck,” I said.

“Yes, the planet’s fate magic, we thought of that,” Ilya said. “But that was even more reason for us to go. If the global fate weave was pulling us to you then we were probably your best hope of surviving whatever situation you fell into.”

“Isn’t it going to look suspicious that you traveled here though?” I asked.

“A little, but we improvised a cover story,” Darius said.

“You two had a vicious verbal battle,” Fari said.

“I think Black team has been corrupting our good Tactical Chief,” Darius said. “You should have heard the things she made come out of your mouth.”

“Actually you probably will need to hear it, just in case anyone questions you on it,” Fari said.

“A little later I think,” I said. “So how did a big fight cover coming here?”

“You stormed off after saying you wanted nothing to do with him,” Fari said. “Ran right to the shuttle port to get away.”

“I managed to hop on the shuttle at the last moment and then tearfully declared my undying love for you in front of all the passengers,” Darius said.

“It was very moving,” Ilya said. “But the tears were a bit much.”

“One of his concessions was to take you to see the sights in Honji,” Fari said. “You’re more cultural than he is, since you’re more obviously a galactic.”

“Hence the reason we’re staying here now rather than Raddox,” Darius said.

“And the reason we’re staying at such a nice hotel,” Fari said.

“How did you find me though?” I asked.

“We got here fast enough that you hadn’t been discovered, so I was able to home in on the location I sensed the medical alert originate from.” Fari said.

“She showed me where to go and I carried you back here after doing some basic first aid,” Darius said.

“I hate to think what you looked like if what I worked on was after a round of first aid spells,” Ilya said.

She was one of our company medics, so I knew she’d seen worse but I didn’t envy her that knowledge. My awareness of my injuries amounted to little more than “Oww, that hurts”. She got to see exactly what had happened thanks to her diagnosis spells and that couldn’t have been pretty at all.

“So what army beat you to hell like that?” Darius asked.

“No army, just one woman,” I said.

“That’s not good,” Fari said.

“Oh, it’s worse than that,” I said and proceeded to tell them what I’d discovered about Yael and Zyla’s disappearance, including the trail that led out to the office park.

“So you think Yael left that trail for you to follow and this shadow lady just happened to be waiting for you at the end of it?” Ilya asked.

“No, I think the trail was meant to lead me to the shadow lady,” I said. “We’re so covered in Aetherial anima here that I can’t tell for sure if there’s any from Yael or Zyla clinging to me, but I’d bet next months paycheck that’s the case.”

“You did part with Yael on good terms right?” Darius asked.

“Yeah, she’s even sent some letters, so I think she keeps an eye on my career,” I said.

“So she wanted you to know there were other Void casters here then,” Darius said. “And give you a chance to evaluate how good they are.”

“I think she gave me another clue too now that you mention it,” I said.

“She’s letting you know that there’s Void casters on both sides of whatever conflict is going on here,” Fari said.

“How do you get that?” Ilya asked.

“I came out of the fight with a lot of information,” I said. “The shadow lady called for support, so she’s part of an official agency of some kind. She’s damn skilled and she’s used to fighting.”

“I believe you’ve just described both yourself and Guardian Blackbriar, not to mention five or six casters on Titanus and my evil former boss.” Ilya said.

“Actually, your evil former boss is a good example of this,” I said. “He was a Void caster but I beat him because he wasn’t used to fighting other Void casters. The shadow lady I fought knew exactly how to fight other Void casters though – quick bursts of anima only, no shield spells and you maintain a constant void sheath so that your opponent can’t drain your life energy out.”

“It sounds like she was ready and waiting for Mel too,” Fari said. “If all the other Void casters on the planet were on her side then she wouldn’t have been looking for someone approaching the investigation site under an invisibility veil.”

“Speaking of invisibility, how did you folks get me back here?” I asked.

“You’re not the only one who can manage an invisibility spell you know,” Darius said.

“Technically with Energetic anima it’s more of a camouflage field than true invisibility,” Fari said. “But yeah, our good Blue team leader valiantly snuck you back to us leaving no one the wiser.”

“Our Tactical Chief is omitting that she left a wide area mental distortion field over the site too so that any postcognition spells will be disrupted.” Darius said with a tip of his head in Fari’s direction.

“For spur of the moment work, that’s very impressive,” I said.

“We had a lot of motivation,” Fari said.

“Now we need to turn that motivation towards finding Yael and Zyla,” Darius said.

“I’ve got an idea there,” I said. “I think the shadow lady was more than a warning from Yael, I think she was clue.”

“It’s very likely that whatever organization she’s a part of either has Yael or knows who does,” Fari said.

“She was covered in shadows though right?” Ilya asked. “How do we find her or the organization she works for?”

“We start with the people who are working for her,” I said.

“You want to raid the central police bureau?” Darius asked.

“Well, ‘want to’ is a strong sort of phrasing,” I said. “Let’s say I think we’ll find some useful information there, and that I’m pretty sure I can manage to stealth in and out if I go at the right time.”

“That sounds insanely dangerous,” Ilya said. “Doing it surreptitiously at least. Can’t you walk in there as an official Imperial agent and demand their cooperation?”

“In theory, yes,” I said. “But given that two other official Imperial agents came here and are missing-in-action, I’m inclined to think that there’s a significant and dangerous fraction of the local power structure who isn’t that impressed by Imperial credentials.”

“The Imperial ambassador here hasn’t issued an official call for help either,” Darius said. “So there’s no telling how extensive the corruption is.”

“Captain Hanq is working that angle for us,” I said. “If we run out of leads to follow, we can break cover and check back in with him. Until then though, it’s going to be safest to assume that we don’t have any friends on Abyz, except, maybe, the two who are missing.”

“Maybe?” Ilya asked.

“We don’t know for sure why they’re missing,” Fari said. “It’s unlikely that they’ve turned against the Empire but it’s not impossible.”

“I think I liked it when the enemy was always a scaly lizard,” Ilya said.

“Except that was never true,” I said, thinking of the Garjarack families I knew. I’d been put off by their lizard-like appearance at first, but after working with them for over half a year to found the new colonies on Titanus I found it impossible to see them as anything other than regular people.

“Don’t remind me,” Ilya said with a rueful smile. She’d changed a lot since her days as an interstellar terrorist, but I knew she still carried a lot of guilt over the things she’d done. Working with us was a little about making amends and a little about running away from the people she hurt. I knew she’d go back there eventually, but there was a still a lot of healing she needed to do first.

“So how do we break into the central police bureau?” Darius asked.

“We could let Mel wander in there alone, without immediate backup again,” Fari said. “Or, and I know this is a crazy idea, there is an official charity ball being held in the Grand Hall there tonight.”

“You already have tickets for the four of us don’t you?” I asked.

“No,” Fari said. “Just for the three of you. If I’m going to pose as you while you sneak off under an invisibility cloak, we can’t show up together.”

“How will we get my doppleganger in though?” I asked

“I can change it to look like me,” Ilya said. “When you arrive, Fari will speak for me. When you need to disappear, Fari can walk outside, meet me and we can walk back in with the doppleganger looking like you.”

“That seems elaborate and complicated,” I said. “I could just sneak in in the first place right?”

“You could,” Fari said. “But this buys us two benefits. First, you can scope the location out before you begin your infiltration, and second it gives me a chance to speak to people twice without them realizing it. I think I may be able to root out a little of what’s going on here in the different answers the people give to a Galactic like you compared to someone who could pass for a local like Ilya.”

“That make sense. Why do I have the feeling that you three had this all planned out before I woke up?” I asked.

“Because you’re naturally brilliant,” Darius said and gave me a kiss on the forehead.

“Also, we had a lot of time to kill while you healed, so this is just one of about forty plans we had waiting for when you woke up,” Fari said.

“What’s the next stage of your plan then?” I asked. “After breakfast and a shower that is.”

“Our luggage is being sent over from Raddox but you don’t actually own any formal clothes anymore,” Darius said. “So, the first order of business is to fix that.”

I grinned. A shopping trip sounded delightful and doing it in the line of duty meant I got to expense everything I bought!

Somewhere, on a planet many star systems away, an Imperial Accountant heard my terrible laugh and began to weep for the Empire’s bottom line.