Beyond the Shadows Read Free Page A

would win. Why did she like that feeling?
    He smiled again as he offered her a hand. “I’ll take you on, Commander.”
     
     
    YARA STOPPED BY HER QUARTERS AFTER AN AWKWARD FAREWELL PARTY hastily thrown together by some of her lesser officers. She doubted any of them would miss her. She was just another commander, and a new uniform would take her place. She suspected a third of the people there had never even seen her but were only there for the cold food and an excuse not to work.
    At least Tuz had fun. He took a good chunk out of some poor lieutenant’s leg.
    Her scout blissfully scent-marked her single bag of belongings with the side of his face. Clothes, weapons—they all stowed neatly in that bag. She double-checked the room as a force of habit more than anything. Empty, gray, it was as if the years she’d spent living in this room made no impact on it at all, just like it had made no impact on her. She felt nothing as she shut the door on what should have felt like a home.
    She’d been born, raised, groomed, and trained, her entire lineage preparing her for one single thing, the day she would take over the throne. She had no room in her life for anything else. Azra needed her now.
    With a sense of foreboding, Yara accessed the stored messages in her com unit and listened one more time to the warning from one of her closest allies on Azra. The message was encoded, and she wanted to be sure she didn’t miss anything.
    Palar was planning to light the fire in the temple. If she initiated a blood challenge, she’d probably kill the Grand Sister, and Yara and her supporters would have to fight her and her faction to the death for the throne. She had to return home and show Palar she wasn’t about to back down. She would inherit the throne peacefully once the Grand Sister decided to step down.
    She wondered if the Grand Sister knew of Palar’s plot and whether that was the real reason she was calling Yara back home. It made sense. The Grand Sister couldn’t be serious about sending her on a bloodhunt for some worthless mudrat traitor. She knew her training partner’s defection was a scandal, and that the Grand Sister was furious about it, but finding the traitor’s brother, Cyn, and seeking justice through him was pointless. It wouldn’t bring Cyani back.
    Yara wandered toward the Scum, unsure how she felt about returning home. No matter how much she had been pressured into her position as one of the Elite, something didn’t quite fit. She felt the weight of expectation, and it cut into her like binding straps tied too tight. But she didn’t want a bloody coup to tear the Elite apart, either. Her planet needed her to be what she’d been bred to be. A leader. She would maintain the peace and order of her planet. Azra didn’t need change; it needed consistency.
    Perhaps when she assumed the throne, the emptiness would ease. It was probably nothing more than a need to fulfill her purpose. Doubt crept into the dark corners of her mind. What if it was something else? What if she assumed the throne and the dark emptiness never went away? She tried not to think about it. It didn’t matter.
    Tuz stalked along behind her, occasionally leaping forward to tag the back of her heel with a paw. They passed fewer and fewer people in uniform as they found their way through the maze of endless halls toward the far end of the base. She knew to keep moving. Tuz tended to launch a full-scale attack on her boot whenever she stopped.
    The slick and polished halls of the Union base deteriorated to chipped slab floors with grimy walls as she entered the Freedock. The constant clatter of haulers shuffling shipping containers in the warehouses echoed under the large force shields. The shields arched like giant bubbles over the gravity generators on the rough ground below.
    She still didn’t understand. There should have been at least seven free-trade transports unloading supplies with hundreds of people milling through the halls on