“What a shame, Cyra,” Eijeh said softly in my ear. “I didn’t want it to come to this.”
I twisted free as Eijeh walked out, and backed away, breathing hard. I had no weapon. But it was better to go out this way. By not giving me a currentblade, Ryzek had just shown everyone in this arena that he wasn’t giving me a fair chance. In his anger, he had shown fear, and that was enough for me.
Vas started toward me, his movements confident, predatory. He had always disgusted me, since I was a child, and I wasn’t sure why. He was as tall and well built as any other man I had ever found appealing. A good fighter, too, and his eyes, at least, were a rare, beautiful color. But he was also covered with accidental bruises and scratches. His hands were so dry the thin flesh between his fingers was cracking. And I had never met a person so . . . empty. Unfortunately, that was also what made him so frightening in the arena.
Strategy, now, I thought. I remembered the footage from Tepes I had watched in the training room. I had learned the lurching, unsteady movements of their combat when my mind was sharp. The key to maintaining control of my body was to keep my center strong. When Vas stepped to lunge, I turned and tripped to the side, my limbs swinging. One of my flailing arms hit him in the ear, hard. The impact shuddered through me, sending a wave of pain through my rib cage and back.
I winced, and in the time it took me to recover, Vas had swiped. His sharpened blade carved a line in my arm. Blood spilled on the arena floor, and the crowd cheered.
I tried to ignore the blood, the stinging, the aching. My body pulsed with pain and fear and rage. I held my arm against my chest. I had to grab Vas. He couldn’t feel pain, but if I channeled enough of my currentgift, I could kill him.
A cloud passed over the sun, and Vas lunged again. This time I ducked, and reached out with one hand, skimming the inside of his wrist with my fingers. The shadows danced over to him, not potent enough to affect him. He swung his knife again, and the point of the blade dug into my side.
I moaned, and fell against the wall of the arena.
Then I heard someone shout, “Cyra!”
A dark figure hoisted itself over the arena wall from the first row of seats, and dropped to the ground, knees bent. Darkness crowded the edges of my vision, but I knew who he was, just by watching him run.
A long, dark rope had dropped into the center of the arena. I looked up to see, not a cloud covering the sun, but an old transport vessel, made of an array of metals, honeyed and rusty and as bright as the sun, hovering right above the force field. Vas grabbed Akos with both hands and slammed him up, into the arena wall. Akos gritted his teeth and covered Vas’s hands with his own.
Then something strange happened: Vas flinched, and dropped him.
Akos sprinted to my side, bent over me, and wrapped an arm around my waist. Together we ran toward the rope. He grabbed it with one hand, and it jerked up, fast. Too fast for Vas to grab.
Everyone around us was roaring. He shouted into my ear, “I’m going to need you to hold on by yourself!”
I cursed at him. I tried not to look down at the crowded seats below us, the frenzy we had left behind, the distant ground, but it was hard not to. I focused instead on Akos’s armor. I wrapped my arms around his chest and clamped my hands around the collar of it. When he released me, I gritted my teeth—I was too weak to hold on like this, too weak to support my own weight.
Akos reached up with the hand he had been using to hold me, and his fingers approached the force field that blanketed the amphitheater. It lit up brighter when his fingers touched it, then flickered, and went out. The rope jerked up, hard, making me whimper as I almost lost my grip, but then we were inside the transport vessel.
We were inside, and it was deadly quiet.
“You made Vas feel pain,” I said, breathless. I touched his face, ran a fingertip down his nose, over his upper lip.
He wasn’t as bruised as he had been the last time I saw him, cowering on the floor at my touch.
“I did,” he replied.
“Eijeh was in the amphitheater, he was right there. You could have grabbed him. Why didn’t you—”
His mouth—still under my fingers—twitched into a smile. “Because I came for you, you idiot.”
I laughed and fell against him, not strong enough to stand anymore.
CHAPTER 30: AKOS
FOR A TICK THERE was only her weight, her warmth, and relief.
And then everything came back: the crush of people in the transport vessel, their silence as they stared, Isae and Cisi strapped in near the nav deck. Cisi gave Akos a smile as he caught Cyra around the waist and picked her up. Cyra was tall, and far from dainty, but he could still carry her. For a while, anyway.
“Where are your medical supplies?” Akos asked Teka and Jyo, who were coming toward them.
“Jyo has medical training; he can take care of her,” Teka said.
But Akos didn’t like how Jyo was looking at her, like she was something valuable he could buy or trade. These renegades hadn’t rescued her out of the goodness of their hearts; they wanted something in return, and he wasn’t about to just hand her over.
Cyra’s fingers curled around the armor strap on his rib cage, and he shivered a little.
“She doesn’t go anywhere without me,” he said.
Teka’s eyebrow lifted above the eye patch. Before she could snap at him—which he got the sense she was about to—Cisi unbuckled herself and made her way over.
“I can do it. I have the training,” she said. “And Akos will help me.”