“Of course I found it!” Kit opened her pack to display the metallic gleam of the Core Analytica.

“Then, let’s get out of here.”

He glanced at the two soldiers—the woman lay unmoving, but the other one was feebly struggling to rise. Gyre sheathed his sword and reached for the trigger arcana, only to find Kit pressing against him again, rising to her toes to kiss him with desperate energy. It was a moment before Gyre found the presence to pull away.

“I thought we weren’t … whatever I thought we were,” he said. “What happened to a moment of weakness?”

“Fighting makes me horny,” Kit said. “So do explosions. Do it!”

Doomseeker. Gyre suppressed a sigh and flipped up the metal grille, pressing his finger against the second crystal. Moments later, another bomb went off with a crump and plume of smoke and dust. A section of the garden’s outer wall vanished in the haze.

“And there’s our exit.” Kit looked in the storehouse, then at the two Legionaries with their armor and blaster rifles, and heaved a sigh of her own. “If only we could carry more of this stuff.”

“We don’t need the money,” Gyre reminded her as they ran toward the billowing smoke.

“I know,” she said, giving him a bright grin. “But it’s the principle of the thing.”

Chapter 22

It had been the most frustrating two weeks of Maya’s life.

She’d known, from the moment she explained to Beq that Tanax would be coming with them, that his presence would make things difficult. While Tanax himself had been scrupulously correct in accepting Maya’s authority, Beq stiffened up automatically in his presence. Maya wasn’t able to find any time alone with her during the first day’s walk, and by evening they’d reached Uqaris, a dusty little city that had grown up around the Auxiliary garrison for this section of the border.

They’d been fortunate in their timing, and a caravan was leaving for Grace the following morning. The caravan master, an expansive, portly woman named Kerchwite with a magnificent thatch of green beard, was happy to accept Maya’s thalers and offer the three of them a place among her party. Maya had expected a string of small wagons, like the one she and Jaedia had traveled in, but Kerchwite’s were six-wheeled monsters pulled by four thickheads apiece, practically rolling houses. When night fell, she and her caravanners erected large, comfortable tents, in which she’d generously offered Maya and her companions a spot. Maya couldn’t think of a good reason to refuse, and so they spent every night among laughing, drinking merchants, listening to stories and bawdy songs and with no privacy whatsoever.