ANDROMA
THE LAST TIME Andi saw her home planet, she’d been a fourteen-year-old girl with tears in her eyes and her best friend’s blood on her hands.
By sheer mercy, she’d been able to escape her death sentence. After that, she’d made her way out into the galaxy and traveled through worlds she’d never known, unsure of who she was, where she was going or who she would have to become to survive.
The only thing certain was the whisper of death, a monster made of fear and fury that followed her no matter how far she tried to go. Many nights, Andi stayed awake, looking over her shoulder, terrified that General Cortas would send men from her planet to come and lock her away.
They’d never found her.
Instead, she’d found a bounty hunter with a lust for life and a bag full of Krevs, and he’d helped her rediscover her strength. He gave her a reason to keep going, and later, replaced that with a broken heart.
In return, she’d stolen his ship, filled it with the fiercest females in the galaxy, and together, the girls had made it their own.
The Marauder was Andi’s true home, a spear that was capable of tearing apart the skies.
Now it was a junker. Her pilot, who had succumbed to the exhaustion of her emotions, was still unconscious. The medics had injected her with adrenaline when they disembarked from the ship, but Lira had yet to wake.
And Andi was pissed.
She sat on the upper deck of an Adhiran transport wagon, the strange, tumbling roll of the massive wheels below her churning her stomach into a state of unease. The animals stank like dung, to no one’s surprise, what with the person-size piles of it they left behind.
And Andi’s ship, her blessed, beautiful Marauder, was currently being dragged behind the wagon, balancing precariously on a wooden sled of sorts.
One of the beasts dropped another pile of steaming, stinking dung.
The Marauder’s sled slipped right over it with a squelch that splattered green on a ruined viewport.
Andi had to look away.
“Is it dead forever?” Gilly asked, wide eyed. She sat across from Andi on the wooden floorboards of the wagon, waving her hand as winged bugs the size of her fists fluttered around her, flashing different colors each time they dodged her swings.
“Not entirely,” Breck said, staring past Gilly at the Marauder’s sad, corpse-like form. “It just needs a little love.”
Valen, still unconscious, was with Alfie, wrapped in a clean moss blanket on the lower deck of the wagon. Dex, blessedly, was up at the front, chatting happily to the Sentinels as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Andi had a feeling that if she heard him speak right now, she’d rip his throat out with her nails. She still hadn’t sorted through her feelings since their fight in her quarters. But right now, allowing her anger to overwhelm her was easier. To even consider forgiveness, to consider anything when her ship was so destroyed...Andi couldn’t fathom it.
“We can fix the ship,” Lira said in a weary voice.
Andi turned to her, surprised, and glad to see that their pilot had finally awoken.
“Are you alright?” Andi asked.
“I feel terrible, but I’ll survive,” Lira replied, sitting up and glancing back at the Marauder. “The repairs will set us back a few days, but Adhiran ship workers are capable of getting us back in the air.” She sighed. “And connections, of course. I’m in for a world of trouble.”
“That you are, Lira,” Breck spoke up. “But don’t worry. We’ll be there to pick up the pieces.”
Andi knew she should be more concerned about Lira’s issues. Her pilot’s past with Adhira was muddled and painful, a constant struggle for Lira to overcome. But Andi’s mind was ragged, stripped free of the pieces that made her mortal. In this moment, she felt as if the veil of the Bloody Baroness was still stuck to her eyes.
“General Cortas will fix the ship, as he should have before,” Andi said with a heated growl. The eyes of her crew went wide at the sudden rage in her voice. “If he doesn’t, I’m going to tear the sagging skin from his face.”
This whole mission was the general’s fault. If he hadn’t allowed Xen Pterran spies to come in and steal his son, the old man would never have sent Dex after Andi and her crew. Then they wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place, and the Marauder would still be up there in the sky, doing what it did best.
Smuggling. Thieving.
Not rescuing a privileged, somehow-still-unconscious general’s son with a mysterious, unknown pathogen in his blood, nor with Dex, sharing all his terrible truths about the past.
Andi couldn’t help remembering that smile they’d shared just before the Marauder crashed... What did it mean, that she was still able to share such a moment with him?
What is happening to my life? she wondered. It was out of control. She was out of control.
There were a million questions in Andi’s mind, none of which could be answered.
“There’s nothing we can do right now,” Lira said. She reached out, and Andi felt the warm flutter of Lira’s fingertips on her shoulder. She stiffened at the touch, and Lira pulled away. “A calm mind is a decent one.”
“Not now, Lira,” Andi growled. “Save your Adhiran proverbs for another time.”
Lira sighed and turned to look at the others. “Your home may be the ship, Androma. It’s all of ours, too. But Adhira is the planet that gave me life. I just lost control of myself before I could stop our ship from crashing into one of its most profitable crop fields. When Queen Alara finds out...”
Andi didn’t answer.
Lira’s eyes narrowed. “You are not the only one suffering today, Captain.” She scooted over to sit with Breck and Gilly.
Andi slumped back into her seat, hating the action as soon as she’d done it.
She was tired. She was also hungry, and—for some hellish reason unbeknownst to her or her crew or that ridiculous AI the general had sent with them on this death mission—she may have just lost her damned ship.
She needed to be a leader. She needed to talk to her crew and devise a plan. She needed to apologize to Lira. She needed to sort out how she felt about her conversation with Dex.
But right now, she simply wanted to sit and not be bothered.
So she did.
With her mind reeling, her hands balled into fists at her side, Androma Racella, the Bloody Baroness of Mirabel, stared out the back of the wagon as her ship slid over another pile of fresh green dung and allowed herself to pout like a child.