Page 64 of The Edge of Dawn

It was obvious.

He went like a trained varhund because he had no choice in the matter. He’d swapped one exacting master for another.

But at least these masters allowed him to know things other than servitude and pain.

As he walked down the corridor, assuming a leisurely pace—he didn’t feel the need to rush on account of the general and the Silent One—he crossed paths with several of the station workers. Lean, efficient, clad in dark uniforms and hurrying somewhere or other, they studiously avoided him.

Citizens of the Empire. Born and raised in the Capital, no doubt. These were the kinds of Kordolians he’d rarely had the opportunity to encounter, and when he did, that person tended to end up on the receiving end of his silent dagger.

Dragek sensed their uneasy auras, bristling with suppressed curiosity and a hint of controlled fear.

He pretended to be indifferent, but he couldn’t help but wonder what his existence would have been like if he’d been born without the Talent—without the trait marking him as katach.

Would he have been like them, living an ordinary life of service? What did they do once they were freed of their official duties?

How did they think?

So many things about them were a mystery to him. Perhaps he had more in common with the human, Jade, than his own kind.

A sliver of tension danced through him as he thought about her—away from his protection, in the care of Noali and whoever else Tarak had assigned to watch over her. She was a prize, a rare gem in a bucket of dull stones, brimming with the Talent and yet having no idea of how to use it. She had no idea how precious she was.

Or how alluring her presence was becoming to him.

It wasn’t just her wild power that attracted him.

It was her softness, her endearingly human vulnerability and innocence wrapped in a fragile veneer of toughness. How could such things coexist within her?

How had a human like her—so powerless—even tolerated existing without getting mentally crushed underneath the weight of the entire Universe?

Well, at least she wasn’t powerless anymore.

What she would become once she realized her true power…

Only time would tell.

At last, he reached the chamber where Ashrael and Tarak were located. He didn’t bother to mask his presence—he just strode in through the Qualum doors, which melted away as he passed, obviously programmed to allow him entry. In the past, if they were locked, he could have opened them by using his ka’qui to project the bio-sig of another, but that was very, very draining. The times he’d done it, he’d been left with only a small amount of energy to kill his target.

“Now that you’ve attended to your pressing business, it’s time to put you to work.” It was Ashrael who greeted him, speaking aloud out of deference to Tarak.

The general sat in a high-backed chair alongside a holo depicting an intricate starmap. Half his attention was on the Universe outside, seen through a transparent window that spanned from floor to ceiling. The other half was on the starmap—a dizzying array of slowly moving glowing specks.

“Your former Mistress controlled more Silent Ones than you.” As Tarak’s attention landed on him, Dragek went still, suppressing his involuntary reaction to the general’s intimidating aura. “We suspect there were at least a dozen or more held under her thrall. Did you know any of them?”

“We encountered each other rarely, but I did know some of the others in the cluster. She pitted us against one another.” He remembered being praised for his kill-count; for the speed at which he’d carried out his missions, the statistics flaunted before the others like some blood-drenched badge of honor.

He’d always been one of the best in his cluster, but he wasn’t always at the top.

There was another.

Kashiel.

But he was too unpredictable; too volatile. Kashiel would miss an easy target, then score half a dozen near-impossible kills.

That’s why Dragek had been more favored by the Mistress. Some of the others in his cluster had deeply resented him for it, especially the sisters. Although they were exceptionally rare—a female Silent One was almost unheard of—the Mistress would treat them far more harshly than the males. He didn’t know why, and the one time he’d tried to intervene, the sisters—Sanek and Jisha—had reacted with fury.

So he’d kept his distance after that.

“As you are well aware,” Tarak continued, “when your Mistress was killed, your comrades were all released from the mindbond. I want you to help us build a profile on each and every one of them, especially anyone you think could be problematic. We don’t know whether all of them will be as pragmatic as you when it comes to choosing sides.”

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