The Prodigal Sun by Sean Williams, Shane Dix Read Free Book Online

flickered out, but not before scoring an ugly black line across the floor of the bay, terminating in a rough interrogative just short of Roche’s toes.
    Cane’s momentum carried him up the ramp and out of sight into the lander, his feet soundless on the metal deck. Roche lingered for a moment to ensure that the transportee had not been unduly harmed. An Eckandi prisoner on a COE ship was rare enough to be treated delicately under any circumstance. The elderly man—perhaps over a century in age, middle-aged, but not infirm—had fallen awkwardly onto his side. His respiration was even, if a little slow, and his staccato pulse regular. Although no expert in Exotic physiognomy, she suspected he would recover before long.
    With a grunt, she rose to her feet and went to run up the ramp to see what Cane was up to. Barely had she taken a step when something dark and cold thrust itself into her mind.
    She stopped in her tracks, reeling with panic and confusion as the force squeezed her entire brain in an invisible psychic fist, sending a retching wave of sickness and self-hatred deep into her gut, where it blossomed into a bitter flower of bile.
    The muscles in her hand relaxed involuntarily, and the gun clattered to the floor.
    A reave.
    She wasn’t sure if she spoke the words or thought them. The mental intrusion had caught Roche unaware, not allowing her to employ the epsense resistance techniques she had been taught at Military College. She slipped to her knees, clutching first at her stomach, then her head, wanting desperately for the intrusion to cease. This was different from anything she had ever experienced before— much more intense.
    Her vision greyed, became cluttered with images that confused her: the inside of the lander, and huddled within its shadows the reave—a Surin, not more than fifteen years old by the sheen of her fur. She was small of stature and, cowering, looked deceptively vulnerable. And frightened, Roche noted through her own suffocating anxiety. The girl was terribly frightened. Which perhaps explained the intensity of the intrusion.
    And her face—
    A narrow, stained bandage wrapped about the girl’s head hid her eyes from view. Fully developed reaves “borrowed” the eyes and ears of the people around them rather than using their own senses, and communicated purely by thought. Roche sucked air sharply in sudden revulsion as she recalled that some fundamentalist factions of the Surin Agora actually forced their latent psychics to do so by a mutilation ceremony that accompanied the completion of their training. It was either that or go mad from sensory deprivation. This Surin girl, Roche guessed, was eyeless behind the bandage—probably declawed and a deaf-mute as well.
    Despite her own discomfort, Roche couldn’t help but feel pity for the girl. The ritual mutilation usually occurred in the very last stages of the transition from latent talent to full-fledged epsense adept—a process that often took decades. Yet the Surin in the lander was less than half Roche’s age. Power at such a price had to be a dubious gift.
    “You’re reading my mind,” said a familiar voice, disconcertingly nearby. It belonged to the reave’s primary subject.
    Cane, Roche realized. The voice belonged to Cane!
     The reave’s words reached Roche’s mind as thoughts rather than sound. She could feel the creeping tendrils of the Surin girl deep within herself, holding her at bay, their very presence aching dully. Yet the will that had so incapacitated her hardly seemed to be affecting Cane.
    “Why?” he said, taking a step closer, his eyes—and thus Roche’s—fixed upon the girl. “You have no reason to be afraid of me. I have no wish to harm you.”
    
    Roche winced as the Surin’s grief twisted at her mind. “Your friend fired upon us first. My companion was merely defending herself.” Roche felt the reave’s tentacles tighten a little at that, searching