HUNTED BY THE VOID LORD

JASMINE

The hand over my mouth smells like cheap cologne and expensive whiskey.

“Don’t scream,” he whispers against my ear. “It’s me. It’s just me.”

As though those are comforting words.

He releases me, and I spin so quickly I nearly slam into the bookshelf.

There he is—my brother, my betrayer, the man who sold me to Enkor Sharru, sold the coordinates to the Kethral, then vanished from every frequency I tried to ping.

He’s thinner than I remember, a fresh scar carving through his eyebrow like someone tried to split his face in two and got bored halfway through. His eyes don’t stay on me for more than a heartbeat—too busy counting exits, windows, shadows.

Jack always did have the survival instincts of a cockroach.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Extracting you.” He grabs my wrist.

“Extracting me? You couldn’t extract yourself from a wet paper bag.” I dig my heels in.

“We don’t have time.” His grip tightens instead of loosening.

Alarms bleed through the palace, muffled by stone. The sound crawls beneath my skin.

Fantastic.

The night had already been spectacularly terrible. Apparently it wasn’t finished showing off.

“How did you even find me?” I demand, forcing him to slow down by sheer stubbornness. “How did you get through the Maze?”

“I’ll explain everything. I swear. But right now we have about four minutes before the patrols change, and if we’re still here—”

He drags me toward the staircase.

For one terrible second I’m eight years old again: his hand clamped around mine, our feet slapping cold pavement, our mother’s voice fading behind us—run, take Jasmine and run—and Jack didn’t stop. He kept running until we reached the abandoned house with the sagging porch and broken windows, where we hid for three days without food, water, or anyone to tell us what came next.

He didn’t let go then. He’s not letting go now.

I can’t decide whether that comforts or terrifies me.

◆━━━━━━━◆

The staircase should return us to the Maze.

It doesn’t.

Jack takes the first turn before the passage finishes shifting, then the second, then a narrow servants’ corridor hidden behind a wall panel I would have sworn was solid stone.

I needed a wayfinder keyed to tonight’s configuration to get through.

Jack has nothing in his hands. Which means someone gave him the route.

That bothers me more than the alarms.

“How do you know this?”

“I’ll explain later.”

“Later usually means never or after someone starts shooting.”

A door opens before he touches it.

Jack barely looks surprised.

My heart lurches hard enough for both of us.

Cold air punches through the opening, carrying fuel, ozone, and the distant metallic shriek of the docking station alarms.

The docking cradle beyond it is empty.

Jack pulls a small control from his pocket and presses his thumb to its surface. The air shivers.

A pod unfolds from nothing.

Black metal emerges piece by piece. Light slides off an invisible hull, revealing wrong, curling glyphs as the ship settles into reality—not appearing so much as permitting my eyes to see it.

I stop walking.

Cloaking technology exists. I’ve seen military versions, smuggler versions, cheap versions that leave half the engine glowing like an idiot waving from behind a curtain.

Nothing disappears this completely—no heat shimmer, no shadow.

This doesn’t exist.

The glyphs aren’t Lugra or Kethral. They seem older, curving in directions that make my eyes slide off them. The metal doesn’t reflect light so much as drink it.

The air inside tastes of ozone and a nameless charge that makes Khenor’s shard pulse warm in my fist.

“Where did you get this?” My voice sharpens.

“A friend.”

“You don’t have friends. You have creditors.”

“This one’s different.” His hands fly across a console covered in symbols I’ve never seen, and he navigates them like he’s been doing it for years. “Strap in.”

My brother is casually operating technology I can’t even identify.

Engines awaken beneath us, their vibration humming through my ribs. My clenched fist slowly opens.

“Jack. Whose ship is this?”

“The man who hired me.” He smiles.

I know that smile: he’s already chosen the lie he thinks I can’t prove.

“You said you were extracting me.”

“I am. He made it possible.”

The pod launches beneath its cloak.

◆━━━━━━━◆

Through the viewport, the docking station falls away.

Thakor Garasme, Enkor’s father, commands the ring with the stillness of a king accustomed to obedience. Every order sends drunk guards scattering toward scanners, weapons, and empty sections of sky.

No one looks at us.

And then I see him.

Enkor Sharru.

Standing at the edge of the docking ring, veil-forged blade in hand, veins lit head to foot with blue-gold fire I can see from here. The Heart—the relic bound to his chest—is screaming. I can feel it, a pressure behind my ribs, a pulse that matches my own.

He doesn’t shout. That’s what makes it worse.

He cannot see the pod. I know he cannot. But his head turns.

Slowly.

Precisely.

Until he is looking directly at me. Like he can see through the hull. Like he knows exactly where I am.

The old panic closes around my ribs. Locked doors. Relic-cuffs. Enkor saying no like the word had been invented specifically for me.

Thakor tears a plasma weapon from one of them and fires it.

One shot goes wide. The next comes close enough to bleach the viewport white.

The pod convulses, flashing into existence as the cloak collapses for one terrible heartbeat.

The docking ring reacts as one. Guards turn, Thakor raises his weapon.

And Enkor—

Enkor's mouth curves. That terrible half-grin, the one that means he’s already planning exactly what he’s going to do when he catches me. Enkor’s shoulders settle.

The absolute bastard.

Behind Enkor, his brother Khenor stands with his hands clasped behind his back, regal and calm and utterly unbothered. His crystal eye pulses once, slow and bright, like he’s watching the final move in a game nobody told me we were playing.

He knows something. Or he wants me to think he does.

Both possibilities make me want to turn the pod around and stab him until one of us starts explaining.

Jack swears and slams both hands against the console. The cloak snaps back over us.

Thakor fires. Plasma tears through the space we occupied a fraction of a second ago, leaving nothing behind but scorched air.

Jack yanks the controls and sends us down.

Close to the palace walls. Close to the docking ring itself. Low enough that one wrong movement will turn us into a decorative stain across Thakor’s architecture.

Through the viewport, Enkor and Khenor sprint toward Khenor’s vessel. Its engines ignite, and the ship tears upward to begin the pursuit.

Every eye follows it.

Jack drives us beneath the outer ring and accelerates in the opposite direction.

By the time anyone thinks to search below them, we are already past the patrols, past the defensive grid, past the fleet still grounded and drunk on jade wine.

Gravity shifts beneath my feet, then smooths into acceleration.

Vessara, the palace city, falls away behind us.

◆━━━━━━━◆

I look down.

The amulet lies against my palm, delicate black stone cradled in silver. Beside it rests the ring, pale bone-white metal threaded with the same dark crystal. Both pulse so faintly I could almost convince myself I’m imagining it.

I remember the chest opening. Alarms. Jack’s hand over my mouth.

Then some deeply practical part of my brain apparently decided that if I was already committing several crimes, I might as well steal the objects an immortal tyrant had hidden inside his private study.

Efficient.

I slip the ring onto my finger before Jack looks away from the controls. To him, it is jewelry. Strange jewelry, maybe, but nothing worth stopping an escape over.

People watch your face when they’re lying to you.

They rarely pay attention to your hands.

The amulet disappears into the deepest pocket of my clothes. I close my fingers over the fabric.

His eyes flick toward the remaining object in my other palm.

The shard Khenor gave me is still caught between my fingers, black crystal warm against my palm.

“What’s that?”

“A rock.”

“Jasmine.” His eyes stay on the shard.

“A decorative rock.”

“Is that the Heart?”

The words strike harder than the alarms ever could.

My fist closes around the shard until an edge bites my palm.

The Heart. The thing bound to the chest of the man who bought me, caged me, kissed me, saved me. The thing that took something from me—something I know I gave willingly and still can’t name, something that left a hollow behind my ribs and refuses to explain what used to fit there. The thing that’s been whispering my name and calling me vessel.

Slowly, very slowly, I lift my eyes to meet his.

“How,” I ask, keeping my voice carefully level, “do you know about the Heart?”

Jack doesn’t answer immediately.

He keeps his attention on the controls, fingers moving across unfamiliar glyphs with an ease that makes my stomach tighten.

“Kethral chatter,” he says at last, far too casually. “They’ve been tracking Sharru’s relic hunt for months. The name came up.”

He says it too easily, too smoothly, the exact cadence of a man who rehearsed the sentence before he needed it.

I know that cadence too. I grew up on it.

“You’re lying.”

He exhales through his nose, something halfway between amusement and surrender, but he still doesn’t answer the question.

Which tells me more than an answer ever could.

I close my fingers around the shard instead. The crystal is warm.

“It’s not the Heart,” I say quietly. “Just an old piece of Veil glass.”

That part isn’t technically a lie.

Not the whole truth either.

I’ve discovered that survival usually lives somewhere in the middle.

I slide the shard into my pocket.

“Good,” Jack says too quickly.

He’s relieved. Not curious.

He was asking because he was afraid of the answer.

I file that away beside every other uncomfortable question currently taking up residence inside my skull. At this point they’re going to need bunk beds.

◆━━━━━━━◆

Kurrhala shrinks behind us, its black sun dimming with distance.

The void releases us with all the ceremony of someone dropping a body into deep water.

One moment the stars are stretched into endless silver threads, every constellation pulled thin enough to snap.

The next, they settle back into themselves so abruptly my stomach protests the transition.

The engines quiet. The vibration beneath my boots fades until only a low, steady thrum remains somewhere beneath the deck.

I keep waiting for something inside me to loosen—for my lungs to remember how to fill properly, for the knot between my ribs to unravel now that Kurrhala is nothing more than another distant star disappearing behind us, for the constant awareness of him to finally evaporate like a fever breaking.

The place where Enkor’s hand always settled against the small of my back has become so obviously, humiliatingly empty.

Apparently my nervous system has unionized and decided the tyrannical alien glow-lord is now part of standard operating procedure.

“It’s withdrawal,” I mutter.

Jack glances over. “What is?”

“Nothing.”

Because there is absolutely no version of this conversation where I explain that I’ve become accustomed to seven feet of glowing constellation standing too close to me.

The mark on my neck has faded to little more than a whisper beneath my fingertips.

He shouldn’t be able to find me now.

Shouldn’t.

I press two fingers harder against the dissolving lines, as though skin can explain the rules of relics, trackers, and obsessive glowing warlords.

I should feel relieved.

Instead, the hollow beneath my ribs aches before my mind has the chance to celebrate it.

That feels...

deeply inconvenient.

◆━━━━━━━◆

Outside the viewport, something enormous emerges from behind a drifting field of fractured moons.

Ships have edges.

Angles.

Thrusters.

This...

doesn’t.

Its hull curves like the ribs of some impossible creature sleeping beneath black water. Dark metal folds over itself in layers that look grown instead of forged, every surface threaded with pale glyphs drifting beneath the skin of the vessel as though the ship itself possesses veins.

It is larger than the Eclipse Crown, Enkor’s floating palace of a starship.

Larger than anything that has any business existing.

For one irrational second I wonder whether planets get nervous when they see it coming.

“Jack.” My voice comes out quieter than I intended.

“What is that?” I whisper.

“Second chance.” Jack’s voice is too steady.

My stomach drops before the rest of me gets the message.

Every useful instinct I own finally reports for duty, late enough to be insulting.

The docking bay blossoms open beneath the massive vessel, swallowing our pod without so much as a tremor. There are no welcoming lights. No chatter over the comms. No crew rushing across the hangar.

Only silence.

The kind expensive places seem to cultivate on purpose.

The pod settles onto the deck with a soft metallic sigh.

The engines die.

The hangar stretches farther than I can see, its ceiling disappearing into darkness where strands of pale light drift like suspended constellations. Every footstep echoes once before vanishing into silence so complete it almost feels manufactured.

Someone is waiting.

Tall.

Perfectly still.

He isn’t surprised to see me.

Jack will not look in my direction.

And suddenly the shape of the night becomes clear.

I didn’t escape Enkor Sharru.

I was stolen from him.