Jules ignored the inconsequential Beta, choosing instead to tower over Svana’s pretty bleeding corpse. “After some recent thought on the subject, I disagree with Shepherd. I don’t believe we need you alive to take Greth Dome. We only need parts of you to bypass scans—a hand, some blood, maybe an eye. The rest of you is garbage that we will harvest at need. Enjoy your legacy.”

Reaching down, he hoisted the woman across his shoulders, hesitated when her body brushed his face. He crinkled his nose in a deep sniff, and growled once the trace of fading scent registered. His face contorted and he looked as if an ocean of profanities were rising up to his tongue.

As quickly as the rage began, he shut it off.

Jules swallowed, and once again became an empty, hollow thing. Svana bleeding all over him, he glanced once to where Corday grew pale, slumped against the roof’s retaining wall. The Enforcer was dismissed with one derisive glare before Jules climbed down from the roof with his prize.

He left Corday alive.

12

The grand doors of the Citadel wide open at his back, the city in shambles at his feet, Shepherd looked over his dying kingdom. Sun sinking over a broken wasteland, aging light stretched shadows atop the sea of Thólosen men and women desperately trying to reach their tormentor. His men had done well disrupting pathways by destroying bridges and hastily constructing barricades. The unwise who approached, had only one plausible path to his doorstep.

To his loyal Followers armed on the overlooking fragmented causeways, he ordered, “Fire at will.”

A wave of gunfire erupted, an upsurge of enraged citizens falling under the stampede of their rabid neighbors. More protestors climbed over the growing hill of the dead—like locusts they kept swarming, hour after hour.

All Shepherd could do was clog the path, and keep the masses, and Svana’s bombs as far from the Citadel as he could.

He had broken down the odds, added up all known variables. Soon those desperately trying to climb over the dead would be hungry and thirsty. If he were lucky, they would make it until nightfall, where violent winds barreling through the Dome might drive Thólosens to seek shelter in the Undercroft, as every COMscreen under the broken Dome suggested. But the colder it grew, the more arrived in mass to shout and throw things across the divide separating the Citadel from the city.

There was a greater unresolved issue beyond the insects gathering at his doorstep: Svana.

She was yet unaccounted for. The ships that had already launched would be stuck hovering out of range of their intended target until they had their key to Greth Dome in hand. His men, his mate, would be trapped out there just as he was trapped in here, if Jules failed to find her.