Dragon Pearl: Chapters 23–29

The man at the table and the other two captives wore matching plain dun shirts and trousers. I wasn’t sure whether those were their uniforms or our prisoner outfits.

Something about his manner of speaking bothered me. I mulled it over while eavesdropping, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Watching the holos had led me to believe that all pirates were ruffians who solved their problems by shooting them, and my experience on the Red Azalea had borne that out. But this prisoner spoke with the measured accents of a scholar.

Had he gotten my brother embroiled with not only angry ghosts but also pox spirits?

I fidgeted and did my best to look penitent. Instead of using Charm, I’d settled for trying to persuade her that I’d messed up rather than taken an intentional detour.

“You almost look worse than Sujin here. Are you sure you don’t need a stint in a healing pod yourself?”

“Oh, right,” I said, feigning dizziness. It wasn’t much of a pretense.

I could get Jang’s permission beforehand. It might assuage my guilt a little.

Red fire splashed the wires and the recess beneath the warped tiles.

Sparks sputtered as the wires melted, and a noxious vapor rose from them.

I wasn’t used to being so tall, and it took an effort to imitate his confident gait.

The guards snapped to attention in a way that would have been funny if the situation hadn’t been so fraught with danger.

“I’m here to see the prisoners,” I said, discomfited by the low growl of the captain’s voice emerging from my throat.

The man had a dour, unshaven face and the breadth of a bear. I made a note not to get close to him in a fight.

I couldn’t help feeling nettled. I was standing there with a blaster and she thought I was going to use my teeth? Besides—and it’s not like I would ever do such a thing—I bet she’d taste revolting.

Acceleration slammed us sideways as our ship veered hard to starboard, then rolled.

I had thought the pilot would harangue the engineer to hurry up. Instead, he kept silent.

As we plunged through the silent cacophony of missiles exploding off our starboard bow, the Gate bloomed open before us, a hole of whirling pearly blue-violet light in the black depths of space.

Through the viewports all we could see was that uncanny white light. Shadows were hard-edged, shapes reduced to riddles. It was so bright I could barely distinguish colors from each other anymore.

We’d been hit. I was sure I was dead. I’d made it almost all the way to the Fourth Colony just to be smudged into oblivion by a missile.

We got out of our seats to retreat from the billowing smoke, but we couldn’t escape it entirely.

As much as I wanted to be involved in the decision-making, I had to defer to their judgment. I didn’t know their ship’s layout, so they’d have a better idea of how to defend it.

Instead of capitulating, though, Chul signaled to his two comrades, and they raised their blasters.

Sujin’s expression was stubbornly impassive.

We reached a bleak, empty room with a shimmering force shield for a door.

Magic swirled around me as my bones changed and my flesh condensed into a fur-covered shape I immediately felt at home in, even if I rarely used it. Smells became sharper, the cold of the deck beneath my paws more acute. I sat back on my haunches and twitched my whiskers as I looked up at the captain.

I refused to grovel on my belly. He might be a predator among predators, but I came from a long line of foxes. He hadn’t defeated me yet.

A burning sensation surged through my body, and I was surprised that I didn’t smell smoke or the stink of charred flesh. My limbs convulsed.

“Ouch,” Sujin said plaintively.

I admired Sujin’s deftness more and more.

“I swore loyalty to the Space Forces and the Thousand Worlds, but what Hwan did, coercing you by threatening your brother, isn’t right. We have to get you out of here.”

“I thought of that,” Sujin said smugly. “I downloaded a map of the mine locations on the sly. We’ll be able to navigate around them.”

Sujin and Haneul fell quiet, not wanting to distract me. I was grateful for a respite from the conversation.

The next moment, we collided into something—a great overgrown copse of trees, from the crazed impression of branches and leaves and broken twigs that I glimpsed through the viewport as we turned topsy-turvy.

The other thing I noticed was the gravity, significantly lighter than what I was used to on Jinju or what was standard on starships. It gave a bouncy feeling to all my movements, which would have been fun under less harrowing circumstances.

Given our precarious position, I didn’t dare experiment with it yet.

“Let’s all take a look at the map,” Haneul said, recovering her poise, “just in case something happens and we end up getting separated.”

This took more finagling, since we couldn’t cluster together without risking the pod tumbling down.

From Haneul’s dour expression, I knew she thought the snacks were too sugary. I normally liked sweets, though, and I wasn’t about to complain.

She raised her chin and turned until she was facing into the wind. As she did so, it grew even stronger, buffeting us with fallen leaves and snapped twigs.