As soon as Jace heard bootsteps pounding on the rungs of the ladder above, he knew the scavengers were coming.

  Kinfild, pulling the scavenger’s poncho over his head, said, “I sense a Wielder. A Soul Circle-Forming Wielder, too. You will need to veil yourself.”

  “I—I don’t know what that means,” Jace said.

  “The Wielder will sense us,” Kinfild said. “He’ll sense the movement of Aes in your channels.”

  “So…I have to stop it from moving? But what about my core? You can detect that, right.”

  “He’ll only sense that if he gets really close,” Lessa said. She fastened a turquoise shoulder pauldron on, then tucked her burning tail beneath her poncho. Unless anyone looked too closely, they wouldn’t notice. “Or if he’s really powerful.”

  “Helmet on,” Kinfild reminded her. “Candlefolk aren’t common here, and I doubt a scavenger sect like theirs would have female guards.”

  She mimed a zipper across her lips, then flashed Jace a grin and pulled on the scavenger’s visored helmet.

  “So I just…don’t let my Aes move at all?” Jace asked.

  “You push the Aes with willpower,” Kinfild explained, “and your breathing techniques. Cut them off, stop them, and your Aes will no longer flow.”

  Jace started by holding his breath. Moving Aes had become natural, and he’d gotten used to it over the past few months, so that now, it was very difficult to visualize it not moving at all. He ended up willing it to stay in place. He drew it all back to his core cloud and pushed it in, then held it in place. It shivered, but it barely moved.

  “There you go,” Lessa said, the helmet muffling her voice. “Can’t sense you at all.”

  “I only sense dribbles of Aes,” Kinfild said. “But if I wasn’t paying attention, I wouldn’t notice it at all.”

  But Jace had been holding his breath. He drew in a whisper, then exhaled, and tried to keep it erratic and pattern-less. It was patterns that helped concentrate willpower and push Aes through the body.

  He couldn’t talk. He nodded, then, as the outside scavengers’ footsteps clanked on the landing platform outside, he retreated to the engine room, where he could watch, but was out of sight. And if they wanted to do a full inspection, he could climb up to the ceiling and hide among the piping.

  When he leaned back against the wall, Err-Seventeen rolled up to his side and chittered in his kyborg-speak.

  “I’ll be careful,” Jace whispered.

  But he hadn’t exactly done that yet today. He’d just gotten himself into a duel with a Wielder of some kind. Not immediately, but only with a month to spare. A month to catch up even slightly to Neikir’s level.

  Not exactly a good start. And the tenth level of the dungeon?If what Neikir said was right, he’d kill himself just trying to get down there.

  Or it’d be really good training.

  He didn’t exactly know if Neikir was bluffing, but Jace wouldn’t put it past the guy to just kill all his workers out of spite. Jace had to show up to the duel, or he’d be signing the death warrant of a handful of innocents.

  He rubbed his forehead. “Oh…what am I doing?”

  He was pushing himself. He was finally doing something with his life, that’s what. He just had to keep pushing, and he’d given himself the perfect kick.

  Perhaps if he got out of this alive, he could say it worked like a charm.

  Heavy bootsteps thudded up the boarding ramp, and Jace leaned out around the side of the engine room doorway to look at the approaching guests. Neikir and a trio of scavenger guards marched up the ship’s boarding ramp.

  “Good evening, sirs,” Kinfild said. He’d picked up an old clipboard and tapped it with his finger, as if waiting for someone—all while standing firmly in the center of the main hold. Lessa stood in the cockpit doorway, arms crossed to make her frame look a little bulkier.

  “Who are you?” Neikir demanded. “Why’ve you docked at this pier? This isn’t a test from my father, is it?”

  Kinfild shook his head. “No, sir, not at all. We’re contractors from the Karrasa system, brought in to help out with the offloading of goods.”

  Neikir leaned into the hold and glanced around. “Plants?”

  “We got the job because of our expertise with hauling flora,” Kinfild said. “Looking for some dungeon shrubs for the old man’s menagerie.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “So father did send you,” Neikir grumbled.

  “Well…indirectly,” Kinfild said. “We never spoke to the honoured Seik Tar, sir. Just received the job.”

  “Well, you’re a day early,” Neikir said. “Delving teams don’t come up until tomorrow evening.”

  “We prefer to be early,” Kinfild said. “It’s why we get jobs like this.”

  “We won’t pay you extra for it.” Neikir took another step deeper into the Wrath’s main hold, then peered around the corner and stared at the engine room. Jace tucked back into cover and held his breath. Had he accidentally moved Aes and given himself away?

  But Neikir said nothing. Err-Seventeen chittered softly, then trundled across the floor and picked up a trowel with his mechanical hand and scooped a shovelful of starcoals out from the bunker in the wall, then carried them over to the furnace and tossed them in. They blazed bright, but also let off a wave of spiritual power that Jace was only barely starting to detect.

  Neikir would sense that instead of Jace, even if Jace had let his veil slip slightly. Hopefully, the flame aspect of the burning coals wasn’t any different than the hyperspace aspect of his Aes and core.

  “Is there a problem?” Kinfild asked. “It’s just our stoker kyborg, keeping the furnace hot.”

  “You can idle on starcoals?” Neikir asked.

  “We get paid well, and we’d like to keep the inside of our ship temperate.”

  It seemed counter intuitive, but as Jace had learned when they visited warm planets, the Wrath had built-in air conditioning. Or something like it. But it required the furnace to burn and the turbines to spin, generating electricity for some of the extra systems.

  “Maybe seal off the door to your furnace, then,” Neikir grumbled. “You’re leaking furnace heat into your main hold.” He turned around and motioned to a pair of scavenger guards who still stood on the landing platform.

  Before they left, though, Neikir asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have seen a boy running along this way? Nineteen, maybe twenty years old. He was a Wielder, best I can tell, though not a very strong one.”

  Jace tilted his head, then leaned back out around the corner of the engine room. Why was he asking? If there was a duel, Neikir would surely be honourable about it? He had no need to hunt Jace down.

  What was Jace thinking? Of course Neikir wouldn’t be honourable about it. He was a scavenger, and a young master living under the shadow and security of his father’s reign. There was no need for honour, except for what would be seen by the public. If Neikir chose to send an assassin after Jace, then he would.

  Yet another complication, but Jace would deal with it. It just meant he had to get into the dungeon sooner than later. And start killing stronger beasts and advancing. He rubbed the straps of his backpack and considered the rest of the accumulator nodes.

  They’d be an asset, but alone, they wouldn’t get him to Neikir’s level.

  “I haven’t seen anything,” Kinfild finally answered Neikir after a few seconds of feigned thought. “But I’ll keep an eye out, sir.”

  “And…whatever your name is,” Neikir sneered, “you don’t refer to me as sir. It’s ‘young master’ or ‘my lord’.”

  “Apologies,” said Kinfild. “I wasn’t aware of the sect’s newfound decorum rules, but I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Neikir rolled his eyes and walked down the boarding ramp. “Outer stars scum. Keep it in mind. Others may not be so forgiving. By the split, I might not be so forgiving next time, old man.”

  As Neikir stopped at the end of the boarding ramp, Jace chewed his bottom lip. He still didn’t know where or how to get into the dungeon, and they couldn’t just sit around waiting for someone to tell them—let alone bring plants to them, or whatever else Kinfild had gotten them into.

  Jace, keeping out of direct sight of Neikir, stepped into the doorway of the engine room, then caught Lessa’s eye. Beneath her helmet’s visor, the outlines of her eyes widened.

  It’s fine! Jace mouthed. It’s fine!

  She shrugged and spread her arms slightly, as if to say, What is it?

  Where? he mouthed. Where do we go?

  She tilted her head.

  Scrunching his face, Jace pointed at the table with the holographic map, then again mouthed, Where do we go?

  Finally, she nodded, then reached up and flicked a switch on the back of her helmet. The fabric of the helmet tightened around her neck. She flinched, then said, “Young master, where should we retrieve the cargo?”

  At first, Jace winced. Female scavengers would’ve been rare, if not completely uncommon, but she’d activated some sort of voice modulator, and it turned her voice genderless and mechanical. Probably for the benefit of some kind of alien species, but Jace couldn’t explain it. For now, it worked in their favour.

  Neikir stopped a few steps away from the Wrath’s boarding ramp. “Where?” He shook his head. “They didn’t tell you?”

  “No one told us,” Kinfild said. “It was a relatively last minute contract.”

  “Yet you still got here early.” Neikir paused, then pointed away from the piers and off to the ocean. “They found an entrance few miles inland, just past the strips of beach that stay dry even in high tide. You won’t miss it. They’re setting up a telesignal beacon right outside the entrance.”

  “Thank you,” Kinfild said. “We’ll be there tomorrow morning.”

  “They’ll bring the loot back here on skiffs,” Neikir said. “For cargo pilots like you, you don’t need to venture out.”

  “You trust your men to handle delicate dungeon flora with care? Those are thousand-year-old plants, and they’re very picky. Move them too fast, and you’ll destroy them.” Kinfild shook his head. “We’ll go there ourselves, if you don’t mind, and collect your father’s cargo ourselves.”

  Neikir narrowed his eyes, but didn’t protest. “Fine. Just don’t get in the way. Plants are hardly the most valuable cargo we’ll be pulling out.” With that, he stormed across the landing platform and climbed back up the ladder to the main pier.

  Jace grinned. Now, they had everything they needed. Tomorrow morning, they just had to sneak into the dungeon, and they’d be set.