Bloodflower

“Help me.”

Jàden pressed against the glass. Green stasis serum held her weightless as a man with a bushy beard stared back. Gone almost as fast as he appeared, she screamed and pounded the glass, heavy grief clutching her chest. She had to get out. Even hypersleep couldn’t erase the most traumatic day of her life.

But waking jolted like the touch of an electric fence during a bad chest cold. The final pulse hit her heart with the grace of a hammer shattering glass.

Fully awake now, the system opened the cover. Liquid rushed out, and she dropped into a huddled ball. Her hands shook so hard she had to clench her fists to make them stop.

A bracelet circled her wrist, stone laced with a honeycomb of metal.

The electricity provided a barrier between her and the Violet Flame, the universal energy source used to fuel starships.

Except she’d been born with the ability to touch the Flame without the use of technology.

She reached for the well of liquid fire, but a static buzz blocked her. Jàden yanked on the bracelet, trying to rip it off. Too weak to pull it further than the base of her thumb, she slammed the walls of her pod in frustration.

Every inch of her body ached from those final horrifying minutes before the darkness and her last moments with the man she loved. An exploding fireball of twisted metal flashed across her memories.

“Kale!” She tried to scream her anguish at his death, green goo burbling down her chin. Her brain refused to believe he was gone.

Gripping the edge of the hypersleep capsule, Jàden squirmed onto the ground, a mire of rain puddles and thick mud riddled with footprints.

Someone had been watching her.

Before she could hold onto that thought, she heaved green ooze, clearing stasis fluid from her searing lungs.

Her hands sank into the chilled earth, and she gripped the mud until her fingers were frigid, sobbing her grief. “Kale.”

He’d been in the cockpit when his ship hit the ground, crushed under two tons of metal. A faint shout reached her ears, the sound far away but still sending a jolt of panic through her. The men who’d killed Kale would be close.

She had to run.

A difficult task with a tangle of plastic tubes dangling from the needles in her body. She scanned for the plumes of smoke from Kale’s ship, but silence and heavy rainfall pressed in on her from a forest of thick sequoias. Nothing looked familiar, and the man who’d been watching her was nowhere in sight.

Maybe she could figure out where she was and how to get out of this place. Jàden crawled to her pod’s control panel and wiped the mud-splattered screen until four red numbers stared back at her.

3,793 years.

That’s not possible.

A row of pods stretched to either side, the closest ones buried beneath crumbling stone blocks, as if someone had built around them before fading into history. Ghostly green faces formed the exterior laser illusion of each occupant’s features, a way for families to keep watch over loved ones who chose the long sleep between worlds.

Red numbers flashed on the exposed chambers: 3,654, 3,722. Each one was different, noting the passage of years since each occupant stepped—or was forced like her—into hypersleep.

No one survived that long in stasis. There must be a mistake. Jàden pressed her thumb to the screen’s bottom corner. Please still work.

Thin blue lines scanned her biometrics, tracing across the glass to form her personal welcome message. Jàden Ravenscraft. Bioengineering Guild, Class 3, Blue Sector - Hocker Hills. 1,365,480 days since your last login.

That number was too large to comprehend.

“Where am I?”

Maybe the central computers could tell her. The screen flashed blue with a single black ring in the center.

Hàlon, one of the last human starships.

But the image zoomed in on the orb in the center of the ring, a moon trapped in the starship’s theric energy web.

“Sandaris.” She couldn’t be on the moon’s surface. With her feet planted on its rocky surface, Jàden should have sensed its beating heart. Last time she’d visited, the entire landscape was rock and water and refused to be terraformed. The computer had to be wrong.

The data map stopped on the smallest of the three central landmasses. Nashéoné, “the forbidden zone.”

The only place on Sandaris no one could go without security clearance. She’d never been to this region of the moon, though Kale had many times over the years.

Jàden’s hands trembled with fear. If the Enforcers found her here, she’d be imprisoned or killed for the power that flowed through her veins.

If Frank found her…

Terror gripped her heart. She needed to get back to Hàlon where she had thousands of places to hide. But she couldn’t fly a damn starship to save her life.

Voices caught her ear again from a different direction, and this time they were closer.

Run first, she prodded herself.

Time to pop the tubes free and yank the needles. She’d hide where no one would find her. Kale’s hidden ship. Their ship.

“Release hypersleep tubes.”

The screen went dark.

“No.” Jàden slapped the glass. “Please, just work!”

The image of a young man faded onto the pixels, his skin pulled tight around a distraught expression.

“Kale.” She traced the glass, leaving a streak of glowing mud on his cheek. 3,793 years.

How many lifetimes had he lived without her? She’d always wanted to share her future with him, to fly among the stars and travel to new worlds. Finding him in the next life should have been easy with the right technology, but twenty lives…

She pressed a hand to her mouth to suppress a sob.

Raindrops splattered against her hand and dotted the screen as a pre-recorded video of Kale played.

“I wish I could see your face,” he whispered, rubbing a hand across his buzz-cut blond hair. Kale’s thin-stretched voice was no match for the haunted pain in his eyes. “Do you remember what I told you? About courage and fear?”

She nodded, tears in her eyes as someone shouted again. That was three directions now, an invisible noose closing around her neck.

But she couldn’t leave Kale. Not yet.

Kale rubbed his head again, something he did when under a lot of stress. Even his pale complexion seemed dull with exhaustion. “I know what my father’s done to you, Jàden. It’s not your fault.”

She leaned her head against the pod. Frank—Kale’s father. Thanks to that asshole, she’d spent two years before hypersleep locked in a cage without so much as a glance at another human being. The lights on bright through day and night cycles. He’d tortured her with sensory deprivation to unlock the strength in her power while simultaneously making her weak.

So much time had passed. She could only hope Frank had suffered a long and horrible death, but some deeper instinct told Jàden she’d never be that lucky.

Kale’s voice pulled her thoughts back to the present as he pressed a button on his console.

“I’m going to get you back to our ship. It won’t be easy, but you’re not alone. I’ll be with you every step of the way.” An image appeared below his face—a zankata with its wings spread as if about to take flight. The bird’s black feathers faded to bright indigo fletchings beneath its wings. “This is your symbol now. Here is where you’ll find safety.”

“Not after four thousand years,” she muttered. Raindrops splattered against her cheek to hide the tears.

“No matter what happens, know this: I’m out there somewhere, reborn into a new life.”

A new body, a new face. How would she ever know who he was if she couldn’t recognize his features?

“I’ll find you, baby.” She needed a pilot to take her back home, to Hàlon, and he was the only man she trusted.

Kale pressed his hand to the screen. “Find your zankata and go back to the beginning. I’m coming for you.”

The bands of light disappeared.

“Kale?”

She smacked the empty transmission panel to bring it back to life as grief swelled in her chest. Glowing hypersleep serum smudged the dark screen as she slammed her shoulder against the glass.

“Don’t leave me!”

A surge of electricity frizzled across the screen, flames bursting through the metal welds and dissipating into wisps of smoke.

“No!” Jàden pounded the glass. “Don’t turn off. Don’t—”

She couldn’t handle his loss again, not so soon after his death. Clutching her head, Jàden screamed the ache in her heart.

“Come back, please.”

Sparks trailed through the connecting walls, and one by one, the other pods hissed open. Hypersleep serum splashed to the ground, followed by several waking sleepers crashing to the mud.

Voices shouted in the distance, and something pounded against the ground. It sounded like horses, the noise so familiar from her childhood that Jàden whipped around.

The last pod hissed open. An old man fell to his hands and knees, vomiting up stasis fluid. The others sleepers crouched, gagging up green ooze as if unaware of the danger.

“Run,” she whispered. Before Frank catches us.

She needed to move her ass too.

Jàden had barely stumbled a few steps when the pod tubes tugged at the needles still embedded in her skin. She winced in pain.

Midnight black horses charged across the clearing, riders in woodland browns and greens with hoods over their faces. One looked right at her, and she shrank against the smoking console. The other held a wooden bow with the arrow pulled tight. The weapon was legendary in the hands of Saheva, Guardian of the Breaking Sun, but Jàden had never seen a real person use one before.

As the rider fired the arrow, both hooded figures and their horses disappeared into the trees. Which was exactly where she should be headed—somewhere to hide.

In their wake were half a dozen more riders in black leather uniforms closing in from all sides, a silver emblem on their shoulders but not one Jàden recognized. One of their company fell to the ground, an arrow buried in his neck.

Fear gripped her, but Kale’s voice echoed in her head. Go back to the beginning.

Of what?

She’d figure it out later. First, she had to get out of this place before she was captured again. Jàden yanked a hypersleep needle out of her arm, wincing at the sting.

“Dalanath san drapo!” a rider shouted and pulled back hard on the reins. His companions wrangled their horses around and raced back into the clearing.

“Shit, shit, shit.”

All of them carried weapons and looked meaner than an angry pilot with an itchy trigger finger.

A uniformed rider fired an arrow into the old man still coughing up fluid. His withered hands clawed the shaft, and he fell to the mud, lifeless eyes staring at Jàden.

If they tried to capture her, she couldn’t defend herself, not without the Flame. She pressed her back against the empty pod as the uniformed man strung another arrow and turned it toward her, his companions spreading out to corral her and all the other sleepers in.

She jammed the needle between the seams of the bracelet to trigger it open. But the metal shaft snapped. The stone was too hard or the needle too thin.

A black horse charged into the clearing. The hooded figure on its back unsheathed two long daggers and crashed into the bowman.

The arrow loosed and plunged into her shoulder.

Pain ripped through Jàden as she crashed to the mud. The long, thin rod wedged into her body like a giant rock into her joint. Hot agony seared in her arm as she cried out in pain.

She grasped the shaft to yank out the arrow, but a dagger sliced to the ground next to her hand.

The hooded figure stood amid uniformed men who circled him with their horses. They drew their swords, and he raised his hands in surrender. His eyes met hers, filled with a deep-seated anger masked by strong determination.

It was the same man who’d stood outside her pod before it opened. Maybe he wanted to hurt her too.

Or to help.

Clinging to that thought, Jàden grabbed the dagger and dug the blade into the bracelet’s seam until the circlet sprang open.

The Flame’s light rushed into her veins like unbridled fire.

Breathing in her power as the hooded figure pulled a man off his horse, she dropped the knife and gripped the empty pod.

She hesitated, not entirely sure how strong her power was anymore, only that it had grown during her years in captivity. A hand went flying past her head and smacked the smoking console, spraying blood against Jàden’s cheek.

Without another thought, the Flame’s energy surged through her arms into the metal, sparks shooting in a dozen directions until the tubes holding each sleeper burst from their seams, releasing them from their pods.

“Run,” she blurted out, her voice faltering when a muscular woman in Enforcer grays attacked a rider.

Four silver petals lay against her shoulder around a red orb.

The bloodflower. An emblem of peace and protection.

Except every Enforcer on Hàlon had orders to kill Jàden because of the power she wielded. Terror seized her heart as other Enforcers yanked out tubes and scrambled to their feet, their hardened bodies healthy and muscular. One woman with short-cropped hair yanked a dagger off a rider’s hip and shoved it into his back.

Power surged through her, riding the wave of fear and pulling enough of the Flame’s energy to power a starship. White light crackled along every vein and capillary until she could no longer keep it contained.

Oh, shit.

Too weak to fight like the others, the more blood she saw, the harder it was to control the Flame. She clenched her eyes shut.

Please don’t kill them.

The ground rippled beneath her feet. Metal hypersleep pods shattered, tearing along the wall and shaking loose wires into the mud. Horses screamed and pounded away as fountains of rock burst from the ground, swirling up to jagged points.

Jàden opened her eyes, for one single moment her body free of all pain.

Dust rained down over bodies scattered in the mud, both uniformed men and the sleepers they’d killed.

The last from her world had swords buried in their chests.

Only one uniformed man remained, a silver ring around his arm below his emblem, likely their leader. He swung his sword at the hooded figure, who barely ducked the blade in time. The two men circled one another, feinting attacks and dodging each other’s blades with the occasional punch to the face.

The Flame’s power swirled in her veins as she leaned against twisted metal and shattered rock, pulling needles out of her skin.

The leader roared in pain as the hooded figure clutched his wrist.

In half a breath, he had the black-clad figure on his knees with a giant knife buried in his throat.

For one moment, she considered what it might feel like to have his knife in her throat. To end her pain and the anguish of Kale’s tragic death.

Nothing but peaceful bliss until her next life started.

But Kale might already be in his next life with no memory of their shared past. If she died now, she could lose him in the seas of the afterlife and forget all they were to one another.

The hooded figure yanked his weapon out of the leader’s throat and twisted the knife against the flat of his arm, speaking words she couldn’t understand.

Jàden scrambled backwards along the line of pods, now shattered metal and glass with rain-soaked sparking wires. The discarded dagger lay on the ground, but maybe she could rip the arrow out and use it to protect herself.

He advanced cautiously toward her as she grabbed the wooden shaft.

“I don’t want to die. Not yet.”

Quick as lightning, he closed the gap between them and opened a hand in surrender, his blade dropping to the ground. He pushed the cowl off his head and held up a hand for her to stop.

“Ekki.” His voice was deep, guttural.

She glanced toward the Enforcers and uniformed men, unmoving on a mat of dirt and pine needles. “Are they…”

“Herana.” Eyes as dark as rich tree soil stared back at her from a tan, weathered face.

Blood leaked from Jàden’s shoulder as he wrapped his hand around hers. Warmth flooded from his gentle touch into her skin as he lifted her face to meet his.

He whispered a few words, his tone gentle despite the harsh dialect. “Herana, sanda le.”

Then pain sliced through her neck as he snapped the arrow shaft in half. She cried out, gripping the bearded man until the sharpness eased.

The stranger cupped her chin.

Jàden froze under his grip, a gentle warmth she hadn’t felt in nearly four thousand years. None of her captors had ever touched her, a thick barrier of glass always dividing them. And that didn’t include her long millennia in hypersleep.

Their shared heat triggered a longing in her heart, like coming home to a lost family after years in exile.

“Please, don’t let go.” She clutched his hand, pulling it against her forehead.

Flecks of blood splattered the bracer on his arm. He’d killed those men with barely a scratch on his cheek, and he hadn’t harmed her.

A man like him could kill Frank before the bastard had the chance to capture her again.

And Jàden didn’t want to be alone anymore.

She couldn’t bear another day with no one to talk to.

Desperation won out over fear of the stranger as she gripped him tighter, sobbing against his dirt-stained fingers. For the first time in years, she had someone to touch. A voice to hear that wasn’t on a computer screen or spouting useless data.

“I need your help.” She grabbed the stranger’s forearm, his muscles solid beneath the soiled garment. A small voice in her head warred against what she was about to do, but she needed protection. Just for a little while.

Don’t leave me.

The Flame’s energy crackled along her arm and illuminated her fingers before the light absorbed into him.

“Forgive me,” she said. The guilt was already there, taking the choice away from another, but she had no way to communicate with this stranger. Without his help, she had no doubt she’d die. “I promise I’ll reverse this and untie the threads of energy.”

“Melin oné. Herana, ekki.”

The rest of his words were a garbled mess to her ears, but his features hardened. Jàden sensed he was trying to stop her from using the Flame, but she’d been forced against her will for far too long.

She hated forcing another, but desperation squashed the tiny voice in her head. “I won’t hurt you.”

Guilt tugged at her chest as a current of energy threaded through her skin, carrying a wave of strength she’d never possessed. Luminescent trails lifted from her arms, digging into his neck and binding the core of her essence to the stranger.

His strength flowed back, shielding her like a suit of armor.

Jàden savored the feel of him, a connection nearly as strong as the fire surging through her veins.

Wincing at the pain in her shoulder, she wrapped her other hand tight around his wrist and leaned her forehead against his chest.

Warmth, the touch she craved, beat rhythmically underneath his thick clothes.

Jàden breathed him in and twisted her palm skyward. Flecks of light and shadow swirled together above the deep-cut lines in her palm.

“I tied your energy to mine,” she whispered.

A forbidden bond, but she was no longer under the jurisdiction of Hàlon’s laws, and she needed help.

Pushing aside her guilt, she lifted her gaze to the stranger. Just a few days, she promised herself. Long enough to find food and water, and get her wound bandaged. Then she’d release him. “Please, help me.”