ElyriasEcstasy by Amber Jayne and Eric Del Carlo Page A

pushed its poorest residents to the
literal margins. Border towns were technically a part of the Safe, but they
weren’t safe . Everybody knew that.
    Lavinia stood next to him as the seconds ticked down. Though
she was a head shorter than Rune in those flat little shoes, her poise made her
seem taller than her height. Shoulders back, chin up. They waited,
professionals together.
    The alarms were still wailing.
    “It’s a guard,” Rune said. Again he had no idea why he
bothered, but suddenly he wanted to share something with her, even if it was
only a scrap of information, before she was sent away from him. He half
expected her not to respond, was mildly surprised when she looked up at him.
    “How do you know?” she asked. She sounded genuinely curious.
Maybe even after all this time she still didn’t quite believe in his abilities.
All the others in the program could only aspire to what this Shadowflash could
do.
    “Boots,” he replied. “The guards wear boots with treads on
the soles.” If it had been Urna here, Rune could’ve said which toes were
wriggling inside those boots.
    “I don’t hear anything,” Lavinia said.
    The shadow of the guard appeared under Rune’s door, stopped.
Lavinia glanced at Rune again, not hearing the tiny beep and click that Rune
detected perfectly as the guard swiped his ID through the card-lock. If he’d
been trying a bit harder, he could have identified the individual guard based
on the coded tonality of the card.
    It was a man who Rune recognized, but only from having
glimpsed him in the halls on his way back and forth from his room. A regular
security agent, not an officer. So what the hell was he doing opening Rune’s
door? He made his displeasure known by narrowing his eyes, but the guard was
nonplussed.
    He regarded the Shadowflash and the woman for a moment
before speaking, not surprised to see them standing and obviously waiting, not
wary of Rune’s countenance.
    “The Toplux requests your immediate presence,” he said. He
looked at Lavinia, seemed uninterested in meeting her eyes directly. “You too,”
he said to her ample chest.
    “Me?” Lavinia blinked rapidly, her smoky lashes a dark blur
above round cheeks. “Why?” Not a very professional question to ask.
    Rune almost smirked. No one asked why the Toplux did
anything. But he couldn’t deny the order was an unusual one. Especially at this
hour, with the compound’s alarms still going. Clearly, something wasn’t right.
Probably Urna had been summoned to the Citadel, too…and that thought—damn
it—quickened Rune’s heart a little.
    Moments later, as they crossed the open ground heading
toward the Citadel building itself, the alarms finally wound down into silence.
    * * * * *
    Aphael Chav surveyed the small assembly in his private
receiving chamber, appraising them with no small amount of contempt, not all of
it warranted. His mood was foul. He didn’t like being woken, particularly by
alarms. But he didn’t let his emotions interfere with his cold calculations.
    His eyes passed over the Shadowflash first. This was Rune,
or at least that was his code. But the random four-letter designation that
represented each Weapon and Shadowflash seemed especially suited to this one
somehow. Rune . It had a vaguely sinister sound to it. The Shadowflash’s
eyes, though glazed with the drugs meant to keep him and the others like him
docile through the night, betrayed a wisdom beyond the years that showed on his
exotically pale face, as if he were somehow connected to the ancient. To a time
erased by the darkness and the presence of the Black Ship.
    Were the Toplux to be honest with himself, the
Shadowflash—all of them, in fact—unnerved him more than any Weapon. Weapons
might be capable of phenomenal violence, but the Shadowflashes heard things. They saw things without actually seeing them, including that which they
weren’t meant to, and so he was careful with his facial expressions, careful
not to reveal