The Cumerian Unraveling Trilogy (Scars of Ambition, Vendetta Clause, Cycles of Power) Read online

  “What?” she yelped, her heart sinking. Her computer screen was completely blank and the entire day’s work was wasted. The other juniors glanced around, stunned by her outburst.

  “Oops, was that your computer?” came a husky voice from the end of the desks. Raiden kneeled beside the outlet node, holding the plug to her computer and swinging it in his hand. “I was just going to plug in my electri-fry for a snack. It was an accident.”

  Sierra got up from her desk and opened her mouth, but the raging tirade got stuck in her throat when she noticed how everyone was watching her. No one was fooled by Raiden’s act, but it would take just one harsh phrase for everyone on the floor to pin her as a bitch for life. Exhaling, Sierra ran her hand through her shoulder-length hair and grinned.

  “You know what they say. Only accidents make accidents.”

  There was plenty of chortling among the other juniors, but the damage had been done. All the progress she’d made getting into their system was lost, and all she could do about it was start over the next day and move the outlet node right under her feet. But why was Raiden bothering to sabotage her? He came from a powerful family of steel manufacturers in the OrePlains and usually never lifted a finger unless Ralph was watching.

  The agony of wasted work continued to sting Sierra as she left to return to her apartment. It was bad enough that her father’s health and the pressure to cement her future suffocated her, but the sun had set and they were in for four twenty-five-hour cycles of unimpeded darkness. The city had an altogether different feel at night, as if the lights were the only thing keeping its seedier elements at bay.

  Sierra stalked with her head down along the sidewalk, trying not to make too much noise with her heels. The bland building she and countless other young professionals lived in waited ahead, but a harsh cry from down a dark alley she was passing stopped her cold. It sounded like a child gurgling and shrieking at the same time, but nothing stirred within the shadows.

  Traps to lure women out of sight weren’t unheard of, and everything told Sierra she needed to move on, but there was something about the cry that was too real, too inconceivable.

  Cautiously tiptoeing into the alley, she came along a frail old woman covered in blankets and hunched over near a wall. Alone and suffering from some chronic pain, this tan woman should’ve known that she could be beaten and exported for leaving the havens designated for the poor.

  “Was that you?” Sierra asked. The woman looked up and opened her mouth but said nothing. She either couldn’t understand Cumerian or couldn’t speak at all; she couldn’t have possibly let out the cry that still echoed in Sierra’s mind.

  Sulking, Sierra wondered how she’d been suckered. She reached into her bag and pulled out a few coins, reaching over and dropping about ten count into the woman’s lap. It wasn’t much, but it’d feed her through the cycle. Before Sierra could pull her hand away, something crawled up from behind the woman’s back and onto her shoulder. It was a small lizard, silvery and stony, and as Sierra gawked it spread tiny wings and emitted that cry from its little mouth.

  “Oh my! Is that…‌It’s a dragon!” Sierra stammered. The creature could easily fit in the palm of her hand.

  “Nemi,” the woman said, nodding.

  “But dragons are just imaginary. They don’t actually exist,” she said, staring directly at one.

  “Nemi,” she repeated, and Sierra detected a strange accent in her voice. Slowly, she reached out to hold the tiny creature, but in a flash it scuttled down the woman’s back.

  “But where did you find such a thing? How did you get here?” Sierra asked, but the woman merely returned a puzzled, pained expression. Hesitating in the hope that the beautiful creature would reappear, Sierra stood about awkwardly until she began to feel uncomfortable about being dressed so nicely in front of such a morose individual.

  Sierra gave the woman a few more count, straightened up, cleared her throat, and nodded at the woman before continuing to her apartment. Although her plan was to change into bedclothes, make a bowl of softgrain, and search for the Ma Ha’dere, she had to know more about whatever this Nemi was, as well.

  After attempts to discover more about her father’s attacker met with dead ends, she found herself researching Nemi. There were a few usages embedded in text she couldn’t read, pointing to places overseas that may have been brimming with dragons for all she knew.

  Giving up, she crawled into her empty bed. Although she often told people she was in a relationship, it was all a lie. If anything she was married to her work, which always seemed to get in the way if she met a man more than a few times. But as unsatisfying as the day had been, she fell asleep thinking about the dragon, astonished that such a vibrant and unexpected example of life’s ability to surprise had sprung up just down the street.

  At her desk for the start of the next cycle, Sierra immediately got back to work infiltrating the Bolt & Keize network, but because she’d already used her best tricks, it took her twice as long—two full cycles—to get back to where she could view any of the manufacturing orders.

  Still, at long last she finally had a beat on something that seemed promising. After delving into the long-standing orders, which were largely secure, Sierra got the idea to search for new orders that had yet to be filled or even approved. It looked like Bolt & Keize were trying to get a hold of something called a transfer battery, which would complete their plans for a global grid of solar stations.

  Almost giddy, Sierra decided to grab a sip of water from the cooler in the copy room as a reward for her discovery. Who they were trying to order the transfer batteries from wasn’t clear, but she would find out and make sure Bracken got in the way.

  “Looking pretty confident there. You on to something?” Dwyre asked, swiveling in his chair to face her as she strolled past.

  “Of course I am.” She glowed. “It just took a little ass kicking, is all.”

  Entering the windowless copy room, Sierra filled a paper cup and turned to find that Raiden had entered the narrow room behind her. The door closed, and he straightened the cuffs on his gray suit—the color he always wore because of his family’s steelwork.

  “Doing some ass kicking?” He grinned. His eyes were always a little bloodshot and his pale cheeks were dry and flaky. “That’s some tough talk coming from you.”

  Sierra opened her mouth to blow him off and brush by him when his hand caught her by the throat and held her against the wall. His fingers squeezed, digging into her skin and making it impossible to breathe. He wisely stood a bit to the side to avoid getting a knee to the balls.

  “Not tough enough, apparently,” he said, raising his eyebrows at her. He was close enough that she could smell his breath and see something malicious hiding in his eyes. He let go just as she considered screaming. She rubbed her neck and glowered at him.

  “That’s the first and last time you ever touch me,” she said.

  “Is it?” he asked, slapping her across the face. He’d been too quick and Sierra hadn’t even seen it coming. The cup fell from her hand and spilled onto the floor. “Don’t make threats you can’t back up.”

  Raiden opened the copy room door and chuckled.

  “So confident she can’t keep from spilling water on the floor,” he said to the other junior partners, returning to his desk.

  Sierra used a towel to collect the water, needing a moment to regain equilibrium anyway. Her blood was boiling and she was ready to slit his throat, but she couldn’t do anything if others saw. She had no choice but to return to her desk and get back to work.

  Finding out who those battery orders were for took longer than she had expected. Chasing them all around Iyne, she finally realized that the manufacturer information was missing because it had been encrypted, not omitted. Carefully, she peeked at the encryption just long enough to see who they were ordering from.

  Sierra’s fingers froze on the keyboard. All it took was one word to tell her that the search had ended and she couldn’t
take another step forward: Dynasty. The Dynasty of Lu, located on the eastern end of the continent Plagrass, was the world’s preeminent information technology dealer. If it could be said that there was a winner in the wire wars, it had to be the Lu family, who still regulated everything on the wire. But it was strange that they were suddenly branching into the battery trade.

  Infiltrating their system to find out more about the transfer battery was an invitation for utter destruction, meaning the only thing she’d be able to take to show Ralph were the unfulfilled order forms. Not exactly a resounding victory over the junior partners—proving that solar makers were interested in batteries—but the knowledge that the Lus were involved might still make a difference for Bracken Energy.

  Again getting up from her desk and stalking to the elevator, Sierra searched the floors until she could find an empty space where she could call her father.

  “Are you already back at work?” she asked him. “You just had a heart attack!”

  “I’m taking it easy, and I’ve got some extra security now,” he said. At least his voice had its normal thick tone.

  “I searched for the Ma Ha’dere but couldn’t find a single trace. They must exist entirely off the wire,” she said, and his sigh had to mean that it came as a disappointment. “But I did find something that might help against Bolt & Keize.”

  “Really?” he asked, sounding surprised.

  “I found orders for a new battery system to be deployed with the remote solar stations. But guess where they are placing the orders. The Lu Dynasty.”

  “You’re kidding. But Sierra, I told you to stay offwire. If Angela Lu found out you were poking around…”

  “Don’t worry, I was careful,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

  Another sigh. Sierra could sympathize with the predicament. The Lus were not to be dealt with carelessly.

  “Any kind of espionage or sabotage is out of the question. It’d be impossible to fake any communication, as well. If the Lus are starting to make batteries, our only choice is to get a lock on buying them first. But even communicating with them is tricky. Simply placing a call or sending a message could mean every bit of information at Bracken gets compromised. We can’t have that,” he said.

  “So?”

  “We’ll have to send someone to make the deal in person, someone without any electronic devices that could be captured, someone who doesn’t even know all that much about Bracken Energy. And we’ll have to keep this a secret.”

  “Like who?” Sierra pondered, wondering how someone could manage doing Bracken business without knowing anything about it.

  There was a pause on the line. Obviously Dad had trouble identifying a good candidate, or else he had one in mind and was reluctant to say.

  “We’ll send Tris.”

  “What, Mom? Are you kidding?”

  “It’ll be fine. We’ll put her on our jet to Plagrass, hand her a blank check, and tell her to pay whatever it takes. I’m sure we’ll get looted in a bad way, but if Bolt & Keize desperately want these batteries, so do we. In the meantime, I’ll need to distract them.”

  Sierra rubbed her temple. She couldn’t figure out what was more unsettling, that Dad had picked his ex-wife to drag into this mess or that she’d be sent to the lawless countries with a huge sum of money. But there was no way Dad could actually get her to agree to do this, right?

  CHAPTER 3

  When Jim Bolt saw Lowell Bracken’s name in his schedule, he nearly fell out of his chair. He rubbed his eyes, blinked, and smiled when he accepted that he would come face to face with one of the titans who held up the world. He pulled his two-year-old daughter, Toria, onto his lap and bounced her on his thigh.

  “Look at how far we’ve come. Mommy would be so proud,” he said, glancing at the picture of a ravishing brunette—his departed wife, Maura—which sat on his desk. It had been a long time since he was the tinkerer that Arnold Keize had pulled out of his backyard in the mountains and brought to the Seasand desert. They’d come so far, but it had cost him dearly.

  Toria toddled away toward the toys covering his office in a pink, plastic, one-piece suit that sealed tight around her neck.

  A man of a cheerful disposition with parted hair and dimples, he wore a collared shirt and slacks but no jacket or tie. Jim left his desk to follow his daughter around the expansive office, passing dolls, picture books, puzzles, and big stuffed animals. In the center of the office was a plush miniature model of Iyne that Toria loved to trample over. It had little flags positioned for all of the solar stations Bolt & Keize was building around the globe.

  “Ah, it’s the Torian invasion,” Jim yelped in a childish voice over his daughter’s squeals. “First she’s marching through Cumeria, narrowly avoiding her home of Rock Shield and swinging wide of the Claws and the OrePlains, on her way to Lyria and the northern Cetaline Mountains. Can anyone stop her? No!

  “But it’s too cold up there and she breaks west for the Still Sea on her way to Plagrass and the untamed lands. She stops to pay her respects to our new partners in the Iron City, nearly falling onto her butt before moving on to check on our construction farther west. Is this a business trip? No, she’s rampaging toward the Gossamer Lakes, the clan states, and the Boiling Sea. Wise move to skip the irradiated range on the Didjubus continent to the south. But she’s running straight off of Iyne! What’s going to happen? Will she fall into empty space?”

  Jim scooped Toria up and swung her around, the two of them laughing and laughing. She was a sweet girl who would grow up to look just like her mother. Together they toppled back against a large inflatable cushion.

  “How about we sing the time rhyme? For twenty-five hours a cycle, the clocks go out to run. Through four cycles a day and four cycles a night, eight make a week, but the clocks’ run is never done,” he sang, and Toria garbled most of the words.

  Sometimes he was able to spend all day in his office playing with her, watching the sandstorms blow by out the window and hiding from the mundane tasks of running an energy company that Keize seemed to love so much, but today was not one of those days.

  “Fifteen minutes until you’re to head down and meet with the engineers. I’m sending in Andressa,” his secretary said from his desk in the hall.

  Setting down his daughter, Jim went to the intercom on his desk as his heart palpitated.

  “Only fifteen minutes before I’m supposed to leave? I don’t want Toria to think I’m dumping her off on someone else,” he said, refusing to voice the real reason fifteen minutes weren’t enough.

  When the door cracked open and Andressa, Toria’s nurse, entered, he engaged her in the normal pleasantries. Like most of the locals, her hair was so saturated with sand it would never change color, and her skin was slightly lighter. Jim found her to be a reasonably good babysitter for Toria but hardly a nurse, and he considered her one of the few people around the office he could actually stand to talk to, though he wanted more than anything to bury his face in her big breasts. When she bent over to lift his daughter, he could see all the way to her navel.

  “So have you been doing anything new lately?” he asked.

  “Literally just waiting around until you need me to watch Toria. That’s all I do.” She shrugged.

  But unless she gave him some firm evidence that she shared his attraction, he was frozen in his tracks. Those low-cut shirts were just the way young women dressed and weren’t suggestive of anything, right? She always responded politely, never seeming irritated or annoyed with him or Toria, and that composed a more intractable puzzle than anything he’d encountered in his life. Considering what they were paying her for such simple work, he couldn’t imagine her feeling obligated to do any less.

  “Oh, come on, you must be doing something exciting,” he pressed, tilting his head slightly to the left.

  “I used to go dune surfing with my friends, but it’s been a while since I’ve done that,” she answered. She seemed to look at him as one might a nice plant, some
thing drawing her attention for a moment and then forgotten about the next.

  How does one go about taking advantage of an unequal relationship? All around the world, there must’ve been thousands of executives getting sex out of their assistants, interns, gardeners, and what-have-you, but he couldn’t figure out how to even bring up the subject without creating an awkward work environment or potentially harassing her. She had no family to speak of or skills; she owed everything she had to him. In his fantasies, he imagined walking up to her and saying, “I’ll buy you a house,” and then feeling fully licensed to tear off her clothes and plow her right on his desk.

  Trying to avoid staring too much, he went back to that desk, moved some papers, and glanced again at the picture of his beloved Maura. How could he even be thinking these thoughts about another woman when it’d only been one year since her passing? She’d meant the world to him, still did, and they’d told each other they would stay true to each other no matter what happened. The guilt of betraying her already racked him. They’d been together even before their Crossing, never going a day without seeing each other for eighteen years.

  “I’d better get going,” he said abruptly. Something in his head would burst if he kept thinking about this.

  “Daddy, no!” Toria yelped, rushing over to him and clamping onto his leg. “We’re playing.”

  “I wish I could stay and play,” he said, smiling at Andressa, who had that same blank, beautiful look in her eyes.

  Once he pried his daughter off his leg, he went for the door.

  “Mr. Bolt.” At the sound of her voice, Jim spun in place. Rarely did she initiate any conversation with him. “Have a good time.”

  “Thanks,” he said, his cheeks burning with shame at how much disappointment he felt about such a minor exchange. If she really wanted him to have a good time, there were so many things she could do.

  A walk down the hall and a set of stairs brought Jim to the underground facility Bolt & Keize used to house their engineers and develop prototypes. As stunning as their successes with solar cells and the power grid in northwestern Cumeria had been so far, the most exciting developments were finally nearing completion.