Xantoverse Shadowkill

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Book: Xantoverse Shadowkill Read Free
Author: T. F. Grant
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hundred year reign of terror. Reasonable didn’t cut it.
    But again, her inner voice told her to shut the frek up and wait.
    “Here,” the Wraith said to Reaper as he tossed him a small pouch.
    Reaper snatched it out of the air with one of his arms, weighed it, and did his species’ version of a smile. He blinked his black eyes and whistled his thanks. With that, he scrambled up the left most pillar until he came to the ceiling. He smashed the butt of one of his sickles against a ceiling panel, exposing an exit into a dark level above.
    Sonofabitch . Sneaky bounty hunter is sneaky.
    Kina filed away the location of this panel for future reference if she ever needed to hide out here in the future. Lanat joined Dzagnev. They both stared at her.
    Fed up with waiting, and finally getting her breath back, Kina spoke. “Is… this done? I mean, I passed, right? I survived.”
    “No,” Lanat said, resting one hand on her hips. Her fingernails were long and sharpened, strengthened with graphene fibre to provide capable melee weapons. She tapped them lazily against her body. Kina waited for her to expand on her point. “The kronac would have taken you out if we hadn’t stopped proceedings.”
    The word bullshit formed on Kina’s lips, but Dzagnev stopped her.
    “He wasn’t reaching for the shock-stick, Kina, he was reaching for his detonation device.”
    “We thought it better you both survive,” Lanat added.
    Kina slumped to her haunches and dropped her head.
    She had failed.
    She didn’t even bother to check, despite the MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction—devices being common among the more brutal bounty hunters on Haven .
    How could she forget?
    “It was the battle frenzy,” Dzagnev said as though reading her mind. “You got too far into it. Lost objectivity. Wraith’s have to remain passionless throughout.”
    “I know,” Kina said. “I didn’t learn well enough. I don’t deserve this.”
    Just as she was considering going back to work in the farm levels doing menial and deadly work maintaining the ancient and often-malfunctioning machinery, Lanat approached her and handed a piece of paper rolled up into a scroll.
    “There’s still a chance for you,” she said.
     
     

CHAPTER 2
    Failure did not come easily to Kina . The oversight of the MAD device had nearly ended not just her career prospects, but her life. She walked through the oil and blood stained corridors of Haven, clutching the paper scroll on which was scrawled the name of the contract, fuming at her stupidity.
    She placed the paper inside her solan-leather jacket and zipped it up. The jacket extended below her hips, concealing her weapons. She didn’t want any undue attention.
    Weaving her way through a line of eager Havenites, mostly of the human variety, dashing busily from one level to another on business of both the legit and shady sides, Kina ducked her head down and assumed the hunched aspect of a usual downtrodden member of the station.
    Attention did not befit a future Wraith, and to be found holding paper would have her ejected out of an airlock by a Drift—the walking shrub-like creatures that ruled over the Great Library as the Scholars Guild. To say they had a ‘thing’ for a paper was the biggest understatement in the entire system.
    A particularly loud-mouthed and obnoxious member of the Blackmarks—a two-bit criminal organization made up of the lowest of the low when it came to crime syndicates on the station—bustled his way though the throng of Havenites, pushing and bellowing at the old and infirm. Kina’s hands moved to the bottom of her jacket, ready to pull her blades, but she resisted the temptation and remembered her status. She turned away. She was no longer the Kina who dealt with scum like that whenever she came across them. She was on Wraith business, which was too important to be derailed.
    She waited for the line of people, including the gangster, to pass by, all the while she keeping her head low and her

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