“Why they took him? Is he alive? What do they want?”

She looked at the ceiling. I could see it in her face: she realized that she screwed up. It wasn’t the first time, and I could tell it was getting old for her.

“Have you ever seen Sean fight?” I asked her.

“Fight? No. I barely got to talk to him. The first time, he threw me out of your inn. The second time he came out to get the guy with weird teeth and told me to stay out of his way.”

I flicked my fingers. A screen appeared on the wall. On it, a battle raged across the barren hellish landscape. Armies clashed, vampires in black syn-armor, otrokars in battle suits, and the Merchant mercenaries in tactical gray.

“Nexus,” I told her.

A clump of fighters burst on the right and a single figure tore out into the open. He was seven feet tall and clad in obsidian black. The armor coated him like a second skin, flowing over his muscular body, completely seamless. It turned into clawed gauntlets on his oversized hands, into boots on his feet, and into a hood on his head. Inside the hood was darkness. Ink-black darkness that looked back at you.

The fighter ripped into the soldiers, moving with insane speed. The two green-edged blades in his hands sliced, stabbed, and cut with relentless, controlled fury.

The werewolf woman stared, open-mouthed.

“Nexus killed all of Sean’s predecessors. Every Turan Adin before him died,” I said.

Nuan Cee had given me this recording after the Peace Summit. I never knew why. It just arrived one day to the Baha-char door, a small datacube inside a little box with Clan Nuan seal on it. I had watched it twice so far, and I’d cried every time. A familiar heat warmed the back of my eyes. I had to hold it back until I got my point across.

“Consider the kind of willpower required to wake up every morning and fight through hell, then heal your wounds, and do it again. And again. And again.”

The vampire and otrokar warriors moved as one, their blades slicing, creating a deadly whirlwind with Sean at its center, their own fighting forgotten. Blades flashed, and then the ring of weapons and fighters broke, and he was through, splattered with blood. He didn’t feel like Sean. He felt like a force, as if the rage and the bloodlust that emanated from the fighters had coalesced into a humanoid form and tore through the battlefield.

I wiped the tears from my cheeks.

“Why are you crying?” she asked me, her voice quiet.

“Because he is inside that.”

“I don’t understand.”