Planet Athion: The Complete Series by Angel Lawson

5

Dimka

Proceed to the Eastern Border

I swipe a finger over the communication, clearing that I’ve received it, and head across the facility toward the crime scene. My explicit order had been to get Mercy Ladd to the medical clinic safely and I’d done as instructed. Kai is well aware of my hesitation to be alone with the woman.

She unnerves me.

He thinks it’s hilarious—that a strong warrior from the Southern Tip can’t handle being around a midwife from Earth. It’s just that she smells so good and her features are so soft. There’s a tug that I feel from her and it’s wholly unexpected.

I’d spent my youth playing hard with my brothers. We lived near the coast and our days were filled with swimming, running, climbing, hunting. That was where I learned to have no fear, diving from the cliffs into the ocean below. We were competitive and a bit wild. As much as we fought, we loved one another as well.

All of that ended the day I was hunting in the jungle near my home and I fell into a Fatau’s pit, plunging to a deep hole, ankles dangling from ropes made of vines.

I didn’t know it was the Fatau at first, I assumed it was a basic hunting trap, but when the men arrived, their faces wrapped in dark cloth, I knew my fate was sealed.

Growing up, the Fatau were almost like a myth, a scary tale whispered after dark. These Trads, cloaked in black, would sneak into homes, villages, forests, and snatch able-bodied boys and men out of thin air.

I never fully believed they existed until that day. By then it was too late.

I was shoved with others from my island into the bottom of a rusted ship, starved, shackled and beaten. We arrived on the dusty moon a month later and taken to The Pits.

There I spent the next two years fighting for my master’s pleasure, for sport, and for my life. It was there that I honed my skills as a killer. I lost sight of the world outside. It was just this tiny hole on the moon, a place of death for sport. I didn’t make friends because I’d have to kill them. I shut out my memories of the past and assumed I’d die at the hands of another, my corpse rotting on that Laird-forsaken moon.

Until the raid.

I was in the ring when it happened, pummeling an Athion from the Northern Realm. A surge of Athion soldiers—or what I thought was soldiers--swarmed the pits, arresting the workers and seizing property. The fighters were corralled and taken on another ship, this time with food, although we were still prisoners.

When we docked, I was taken to a medical clinic, given a physical and psychological exam and put through a series of tests and challenges. Two years before, I would have fought back, but by then I was exhausted. I did everything they asked with the ultimate desire of being left alone.

To my surprise, the people testing me saw something they liked—in fact, they’d been searching for me the whole time. Apparently, I’d been on the Athion radar since childhood and when I went missing, they started looking across the planet, the moons, and galaxy.

The Custo.

They wanted me for their Elite unit. Me. A wild child. A prisoner. A fighter. A killer.

I accepted and ultimately found myself on Kai’s squad at the transition facility, guarding the most precious and vulnerable. Women that had sacrificed their homes to restart their lives on Athion. Women like Mercy Ladd, who gave up everything for our society.

When we signed up for this mission, there was only one question they’d asked us. “Would you give your life for the women you’re assigned to protect?”

The answer, obviously, was yes.

I hasten my movements to get across the grounds, eager to know what Kai found. The thought of a breach angered me to the point of rage. How dare someone enter this sacred place?

I pretended my upset was over the breach alone, but I knew it was more than that.

At the time I accepted this position, I knew I believed in the mission, but what I didn’t understand was how I would feel about Mercy Ladd. That I’m not just willing to die for a cause, but I’m willing to die for a specific woman.

Because she’s just that damn important.