Prologue | Part 1
“Would you hurry up?” Trix hissed. “We’re kind of trying not to die here!”
The Ugnaught fiddling with the hyperdrive paused to scowl at her and snort something in his own language, shaking the screwdriver he held in his fist.
“I don’t know what you said, but guess what? I don’t care. Get it kriffing running now!”
Unfortunately, he didn’t get a chance. The blaster fire that had been echoing throughout the rest of the ship had made it to the engine room, and mere seconds after the words had left Trix’s mouth the Ugnaught slumped and fell lifeless onto the floor. She whirled around, dirty blond hair flying in a ponytail behind her, daggers already out and ready.
Light streamed around a humanoid figure standing in the doorway of the engine room, creating shadows that hid their face and exact features. She flicked her eyes across the stranger. At least two blasters, judging by the holster slung around their hips, and their clothes probably concealed at least one more weapon she couldn’t see. And…kriff.
Those two blasters were being pointed straight at her face.
“Hands in the air!” ordered the stranger.
“Yeah, you’re not going to like this,” Trix said, “but I’m not really planning on doing that, so I’m gonna pass.”
The figure went strangely still. “A kid?”
Trix had known this would happen. Even pirates, such as the ones currently invading the ship, had moral codes, and most firmly felt that kids were not to be messed with or dragged into the thick of battle. Simply hearing her voice, she had learned, caught them off guard.
And that, she had also learned, left them vulnerable to attack.
Trix used that instant of momentary surprise to throw her daggers at the intruder.
The blasters clattered loudly to the ground as their wielder fell dead to the floor.
Calmly, Trix straightened up from the half-crouch she’d been bent in, and stepped over the Ugnaught’s arm as she moved towards the person she’d just killed, slipping one of the blasters into the messenger bag that was slung over her shoulder on the way. She stopped in front of the body and knelt down, flipping them over to retrieve her daggers. Dark skin and frozen eyes of a human man greeted her, but no remorse panged through her as she yanked the daggers from where they’d impaled his heart and right lung, wiping the blood off on his white-and-black striped shirt. Sheathing one of them into its hidden sleeve in her leggings, she kept the other tightly gripped in her hand as she stood back up.
Her comm buzzed. “Hey, Trick or whatever your name is, tell Guin to hurry the kriff up so we can get out of here!”
“On it,” Trix said into the comm. She didn’t bother mentioning that the Ugnaught—Guin—had been dead for almost five minutes now. It wasn’t worth the trouble; time was of the essence now. She was no mechanic, but she figured that she knew enough to get a hyperdrive back online.
Hopefully.
Picking up the screwdriver from where it had rolled across the floor away from Guin’s body, Trix found the panel that the Ugnaught had been messing with. She couldn’t read the labels, but she recognized the layout from the time she’d had to help fix another ship’s hyperdrive. She tried to recall what that crew’s tech had said. Something about the wires? She peered into the panel again, and spotted a few loose ones in the jumble. Though she had no idea if that was the problem or not, she shoved them unceremoniously into their respective places, and then screwed the panel back on.
Standing back up, she clicked her comm. “A pirate just shot Guin, but I finished it for him.”
There was a muttered curse, then indistinct shouting in the background over the pinging of muffled blaster fire. “The captain wants to know if it’ll work,” the voice relayed.
“I have absolutely no idea, but it can’t hurt to try, right?”
“He says if it doesn’t work, he’ll have to kill you.”
“That’s fine,” Trix said.
There was a brief silence, and then whatever crew member she was talking to apparently decided that they didn’t actually care about Trix’s fate. “Okay, then. Your head if it doesn’t. You should probably get out of there, just in case.”
“Going,” Trix said. “Over.” She slipped the comm into the pocket of her hoodie and slunk out of the engine room, picking up the dead pirate’s other blaster on the way.
She had made it halfway down the corridor when the ship rumbled. Please work, Trix prayed silently. Please work, please work-
The ship surged into hyperspace, the sudden force slamming her against the wall, and she lay there for a second, stunned by the impact.
Well, she thought dazedly, staring up at the bright florescent lights above her, looks like it’s working.
She could only hope that it would keep working.
Blowing out a breath, she pushed herself to her feet. By pure luck, she hadn’t accidentally injured herself with the two very dangerous weapons she had been holding when the ship had tossed her aside: the safety on the pilfered blaster, which was still gripped tightly in her palm, had somehow flicked on, rendering the trigger useless and therefore had probably just saved her life. Her dagger, meanwhile, had skittered across the corridor instead of gruesomely impaling her leg or gut. Annoyingly, however, it was precariously teetered on the edge of the hilt, its silver blade having slid right between the slats of a rusty grate bolted into the wall. If the ship rumbled too hard at just the wrong moment, the whole thing would end up sliding inside, and Trix would suddenly have a much harder time retrieving it.
Which, of course, is exactly what happened.
“Oh, c’mon,” she groaned as the dagger disappeared before her eyes, just as her fingers had been about to close around the hilt. Dropping to her knees, she eyed the slats of the grate, sizing them up. The edges were sharp and rough, more than capable of cutting through her skin if her fingers moved the wrong way, but she didn’t have anything that could cut through the grate or unscrew it from the wall, and there was no kriffing way she was going back into the engine room with a dubiously repaired hyperdrive running in there.
With a sigh, Trix set down her blaster and reached inside. The slats were just big enough to squeeze most of her hand in there at once, if she curled up her thumb, and used the other four fingers on her hand instead. She leaned in close to the grate to try and see what she was doing, but the vent was too darkly shrouded and her body was blocking too much of the light from the corridor.
“I can’t kriffing see,” she growled, frustrated. She stretched her fingers, feeling for the hilt, but didn’t find it. “Where are you?”
She wiggled her hand, trying to shove it in farther, which turned out to be a mistake. The grate, apparently eager to prove her suspicions right about how blood-hungry it was, sliced jaggedly and sharply into the side of her hand.
Biting back her instinctive yell of pain, Trix pulled her hand back out to look at it, being careful as she did so she didn’t get cut again. Bright red blood had already streaked onto her palm and fingers, and more was dribbling out of the wound, but the cut was shallow and the bleeding would be easy to stop.
Trix cradled her wounded hand with her unhurt one and closed her eyes. The hum of the ship’s machinery and support systems dimmed around her as she focused, concentrating on her breathing. In. Out. In. Out.
Her posture relaxed as her breathing evened, and she unconsciously shifted her legs, tucking them up against her side, one laying on top of the other.
In. Out. In. Out.
She could no longer hear the ship’s hum, or feel the pain radiating from her hand. Trix had drifted into a white expanse, a sea of calming peace that surrounded her like a warm blanket. Here, she was safe. Here, nothing could touch her. Here, she could do marvelous things. Amazing things. Astonishing things that startled all who saw her make them happen.
She was nothing. She was everything.
She felt only peace.
Trix was slow to wake from the sort of trance she’d fallen into, blinking slowly as her eyesight adjusted back to the glare of the fluorescent lights above her, her legs aching from the cold tiled floor she sat on. She looked down at her hand, which no longer hurt, and found it tightly wrapped around the hilt of the dagger that had been stuck in the vent. She shifted her grip to peer at the cut, and felt no surprise when all that remained was a faint white line zigzagging down the side of her palm and some dried blood. She’d known it would heal, she just hadn’t expected to be holding the dagger, too.
“Bonus,” she decided, uncurling herself and stretching out her legs briefly before rising to her feet. She staggered for a second, feeling a bit wobbly, before steadying herself. She leaned down to pick up the blaster and felt it thump solidly into her palm when it was still several inches above the ground, and her eyebrows rose. That was one of the newer things she’d found she could do lately. It was an interesting ability, and it made Trix doubt her theory about being able to heal herself because of non-human genes in her DNA, though that was already pretty doubtful because she was clearly fully human. Maybe one of her parents had passed it down, or something, though Trix couldn’t remember either of them ever just summoning objects from across the room into their hand or healing her scrapes just by closing their eyes.
Not my main concern right now, she reminded herself. She didn’t know how, but she knew with a certainty that there was still fighting going on elsewhere in the ship. Though they’d jumped away from the main point of conflict, from what she’d heard earlier, the pirates they’d been attacked by were very well-equipped—so well-equipped that they had entire teams of runners (read: cannon fodder) that they’d sent on-board to thin out the initial crew, and apparently, had trained them to be able to actually defend themselves. And they had just kept coming, which was why there had been such a hurry to jump.
Gripping her weapons, Trix set off down the hallway.
There was still a battle going on.
And she intended to fight in it.
