The Only One Read Free

Had she made a blunder that killed someone? Why had she let those explosives be taken before they'd received more lab testing?
    Her mind clouded with possibilities, scenarios. All the errors she'd ever made returned to haunt her.
    She was mostly deaf in her left ear, her eyelashes and brows had been singed off a half-dozen times, and once, the year before, she'd been flash-blind for a week. Consequences of honing her art. If one could call mass destruction an art.
    She, the legendary taskmaster for reducing accidents, had screwed up in that quest more than anyone knew. But the only one she'd ever injured was herself. People trusted her. Had her precarious track record just blown up in her face?
    Taj stared at the sweat glistening on the back of her hand but saw bones poking out of scorched flesh, bloody fluid oozing from a socket where an eye used to be, violent convulsions driven by a fatally swelling brain, accompanied by the last hoarse screams of agony before death silenced the suffering.
    Her mother had died silently, Taj was told, but the woman's battle with blood cancer, a disease curable in the long-ago days of tech and medical miracles, had gone on for the better part of a year. Taj had been two.
    Her father—he'd died valiantly, too, his fight to survive far shorter but no less heart-wrenching. Taj had been fifteen when it happened, and his pointless death had changed her life forever.
    Joren had been a raider—"the best of the best" according to Romjha B'kah, the current raider commander who had been then only a cocky recruit. The man's brisk, gruff statement at the death vigil had bemused Taj. All that had been required of him as a raider was to pay his silent respects to Joren's kin. But as a boy Romjha had idolized her father more than most, and so he must have felt obligated to console her.
    The community had reached out to Taj, too, but their wealth of kind words had only exacerbated her awareness of her loss.
    Grief. She hated it. More than that, she detested being afraid. Fear meant helplessness, and helplessness meant you had no say in your fate. But she'd found the antidote to that vulnerability—not in the protective arms of a mate, as was usual, but in her job: the manufacture of pyrotechnics.
    Frowning, she blew several long strands of hair off her face and reached for the beaker. Her hands were steady enough to resume pouring acid and filtering radites.
    There was another rumble, and this time the entire room shook. Great Mother. Another explosion. It sent stones and powder sprinkling down from high above, plunking onto Taj's head and worktable. She slapped her left hand over her beaker. A pebble bounced off the knuckle of her middle finger. Her stomach muscles clenched. Her pulse pounded in her throat. The beaker's cold rim bit into her palm. If she'd reacted a heartbeat later and the pebble fell into . . .
    Don't think about it. She manufactured explosives; solids, liquids, powders, pastes, she mixed them all. She took on death daily, face-to-face, hand-to-hand. She wasn't supposed to care if she lived or died.
    Sooner or later, she'd figure out how not to.
    The familiar and oddly comforting red haze of anger returned. She let her temper smolder, let it stamp out the unwelcome signals transmitted by her raw nerves. With banked wrath, she forced herself to concentrate on emptying the beaker of acid. Her brain screamed at her to hurry, but she gritted her teeth until her jaw ached and took the time to clear her worktable of anything that might kill her, now or later.
    At last, she abandoned the lab to see what horrific news awaited her in the Big Room.

Chapter Two
    Sprinting, Taj moved blindly through the shadowy maze of tunnels she'd memorized so early in her life that she had no recollection of doing it. The inner passages of these caves were neat, swept clean. Dust had a tendency to congest the lungs of the elderly, making the final years a chore for those lucky enough—or unlucky enough, as the