Talent For Trouble (15 page)

Jana thought about his words, feeling the truth of them in her soul. “You’re right,” she agreed at length. “It’s just hard for me to be pushed around now that I’m free of the collective. I have these ideas about what I’m doing and where I’m going, and for a few moments, I feel in complete control. Then, something happens, and I realize it’s all an illusion. I have no control over anything.” Her frustration came out in her voice, she knew.

“If I was a more philosophical man, I’d say something like, we are all merely leaves driven by the wind. All of our best-laid plans are merely illusions, and it’s that way for everybody. You’re not alone in feeling that you aren’t in control of everything. You can’t be. Nobody is.”

“The Voice is.”

“Voice?”

“That’s what I call it. The Voice of the collective. The one that whispers.” She rubbed her temple, right around one of the smaller glittering bits of crystal. “In here.”

Darak moved closer. “You hear them still?”

Jana scrunched her eyes shut. As if that would help. “Sometimes,” she admitted in a broken whisper.

It was her deepest fear exposed—that somehow she would be sucked back into the collective. She would rather die than let that happen. The fact that she could still hear them murmuring in the back of her mind, no matter how hard she tried to block them out, petrified her.

“That’s why you turn on the reflective field when you’re in here,” Darak said quietly, figuring out why she hid away whenever she could.

“It’s the only thing that shuts them out completely.” She decided to just come clean. He had to know that she was the weak link on the
Circe
. If anything happened… “Promise me one thing.”

“Anything.” Darak’s quick response lifted her heart a tiny bit.

“Don’t let them take me again. If they try…” She trailed off, unable to put her fears into words.

“It won’t come to that.” Darak moved closer and took her into his arms. His embrace offered comfort, and she took it gladly.

“But if it does…”

“I won’t ever let them take you again,” Darak swore it like an oath, and she believed him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

After the change of course, the mood on the ship changed, too. For one thing, the pleasure cruise feel of the voyage took on a much more serious tenor. For another, Jana was put through her paces by Agnor, under Darak’s supervision. She was given the first test of her Talent, and Agnor assessed her at Mage level.

It was quite a coup, as she came to understand things. Apparently, nobody passed first test at Mage level unless they were particularly gifted in specialized areas. In such cases, the Talents almost always turned out to be Specitars at their first rank assessment and excelled only in one or two main areas.

But Jana didn’t have any of the limitations associated with most Specitars. She did seem to have more proficiency in healing and telekinesis, but she also had moderate telepathy, though it was untrained, and a few other skills. Each day, she spent a few hours with Agnor and Darak—mostly together, though, at times, only one of them would act as her teacher for the day. They trained her relentlessly in the use of her Talent, and little by little, she began to gain skills.

It also became easier for her to use and focus her Talent. There had been pain associated with using it while she was healing, but it seemed she had healed fully now and was able to use her Talent again without fear.

She stayed away from some of the more sexual situations on the ship, opting instead to spend a lot of time alone in her room. The reflective field she invariably put on when she was in there was a blessing. It cut off the murmuring of the collective, which seemed to be getting louder, the farther away they got from Geneth Mar.

Or maybe that was just her imagination. She didn’t mention it to Darak or Agnor. They were already watching her a little too closely. She was either in her cabin or in training with one or both of them. In between, she took her turn on bridge watch.

They also spent a bit of time trying to figure out what effect the blue crystals had on her Talent. Agnor had already done some diagnostic tests and come to a few conclusions. The three of them were sharing a meal while they discussed his theories.

“I think it was Jana’s strong healing Talent that caused the crystals to fuse to her skin,” he said, startling her with the radical idea. Darak nodded, seeming to agree. “Her Talent flowed through the crystal, and the collective’s power flowed back toward her from it, as near as I can tell. I think it was the fact that her Talent was so closely linked to the crystal—was being siphoned off by her close proximity to the crystal—that when it hit her body, her natural defenses thought the crystals were part of her. It carried her energy, so her body decided it was part of her body and incorporated it into her skin when her Talent for healing flared out of control in those first few moments after the crystal shattered.”

“But I almost died. If my healing Talent kicked in, wouldn’t it have healed me completely?” Jana wanted to know.

“Your Talent was untrained, Jana,” Darak reminded her. “When Jeri brought you to the
Crice
, most of the shards of crystal had already fused into your skin. I couldn’t get them out without causing more damage, but you were bleeding from so many places, they were the least of my concerns. And then, when there was time to consider removing the shards, they were already so deeply embedded it would have hurt you much more to remove them than to just let them be, for now.”

She knew it went without saying that, at some point, if the crystal shards proved to be a problem, they’d have to consider cutting them out of her body. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it could kill her, but if the collective could control her through the shards, she would be better off dead, anyway. There were still a lot of unresolved questions around those blue sparklies in her skin.

“It makes sense that, if your healing Talent flared between the time you were impacted by the shards from the control crystal and the time Jeri got to you and brought you back to the
Circe
, it would have resulted in an imperfect healing. It fused the chunks of crystal into your body, as if they had always been a part of it, but because it was an uncontrolled burst, it didn’t do much more than that,” Agnor explained his theory further.

They had many such conversations in the days that followed as they made their way to the planet she had once decimated. Trini spent more time on the bridge as they approached her home planet. Her excitement to see Liata again was obvious, whereas Jana’s dread was something she tried to keep hidden.

When they finally made orbit around Liata, Jana could put off the confrontation no longer. She knew it was cowardly, but she really didn’t want to go down to the planet and see the scars of the devastation she had wrought.

But, as Darak had reminded her several times, the message from her sister had been addressed directly to both himself and Jana. She had been more or less ordered by one of the highest-ranking Talents in the universe to revisit Liata. Even though Jeri was her sister, the directive to go down to the planet could not be ignored.

And so it was that Jana stood next to Darak, ready to be translocated down to the surface. It was just the two of them. Trini had left hours before—when they first made orbit—eager to see her family. Jana, by contrast, had spent the time hiding in her room, dreading the moment Darak would request her presence. Thankfully, they had to wait a few hours, for the planet’s rotation to bring daytime in the region where their contact was located.

They had a name and a location, but not much else regarding the mysterious Zane they had been told to meet. Jana assumed Zane was male, but really, this Zane could be anyone.

Darak had greeted her with a smile when she finally dragged herself to the bridge. They would depart from there, leaving Agnor in charge of the
Circe
. Jana faced the viewscreen that showed one of the deep scars her armada had left on the planet below. Her gaze was glued to the visible evidence of destruction, her mind reeling with the undeniable proof of what she had done.

“Hey.” Darak’s deep voice sounded quietly near her ear. “It’ll be all right.”

Too late she remembered his empathy. She had no doubt that he was picking up on her emotions at seeing Liata for the first time as a free woman.

“I don’t want to go down there,” she admitted, feeling shaky.

“I know,” he crooned, in a tone one might use to soothe a frightened horse. “But I’ll be with you. Trust that Jeri wanted you down there for a reason. She’s a Sha now. She sees things that we mere Mages cannot fully understand.”

She looked up at him and gave him a lopsided smile. “You’re a Master.”

It was as if flames reached out and licked her from his gaze. “Glad you realize it.”

And, suddenly, she knew they weren’t talking about Talent, anymore. They’d roamed into uncomfortable territory, just like that.

“Shall we get this over with?” It seemed easier to get going, rather than deal with Darak’s unpredictable mood.

Maybe that had been his intent all along? If so, he was even more devious than she had given him credit for, but in a way, she was glad for his manipulation. Without it, she wasn’t sure if she could have found the courage to move forward with their assigned mission.

Darak gave her a formal half-bow and then turned to nod at Agnor. A second later, she was looking at the blue-green surface of Liata.

* * *

Zane was most definitely male. And he was only half Liatan, or so the pale indigo of his skin seemed to indicate. He was definitely part pink and part blue, which made for a stunning purple sheen to his skin that intrigued Jana on some basic level she didn’t care to examine too closely.

Darak seemed to get along well with the other man. They had greeted each other with wary suspicion, at first, but over the past few minutes, they had been talking, each seemed to relax by small fractions as basic information was shared and evaluated. They were rapidly building a rapport while Jana watched, intrigued.

She didn’t have those kinds of interpersonal skills. In the collective, one simply followed orders. She had never had to think independently about whether or not to trust someone. In the rare moments her own mind was free, she had been too frightened to do much more than just keep it together, without screaming herself hoarse.

As a result, Jana’s social skills were next to nil. She had been learning since being freed, but this kind of interaction was well beyond her. She still wasn’t sure why Jeri had insisted Jana go down to the planet, but she had to trust that her little sister had a good reason.

Darak and Zane were both built on the large scale Jana associated with warriors. Both were muscular and both moved with smooth, controlled motions. Darak’s physique held her rapt attention, but she could appreciate Zane’s form, as well. From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, she assured herself.

“You are the Star Killer,” Zane surprised her by saying as he finally spoke to her directly.

“The what?” Jana was nonplussed by the title she’d never heard before.

“Jana Star Killer. Your exploits are well known among Wizards. You destroyed Plectar’s second sun.”

“I did what?” Jana had no true recollection of her years in slavery to the collective, but some of the words Zane spoke brought back fragments of images to her confused mind.

“We heard about Plectar on Geneth Mar,” Darak said, standing quietly at her side. “The binary star system was failing, and the second sun would have destroyed all life in its solar system. We’d heard the collective had solved the problem, but we didn’t know exactly how. Nobody has destroyed a sun before. It was thought impossible, though there seemed to be no other explanation for what happened there.”

“I was there,” Zane stated. “My mother is Plectaran. I was visiting her family, trying to figure out how to get them away when the armada arrived. We watched from the surface as best we could, while the Star Killer organized an effort the likes of which I may never see again. She and her twenty ships did a job no one thought possible.” Zane looked at her with something like awe. “We still don’t know exactly how you did it, but the results were undeniable. Within a week, the planet and all its people had been saved. Plectar went from a desert world to something a lot more comfortable. The changes are still ongoing, even after a decade of work, but the people are prospering as never before. My mother’s family, and all those on Plectar, sing praises to the Star Killer.”

Zane floored her by bowing his head. Jana didn’t know what to do. She looked at Darak for guidance, but he merely shrugged. She looked at him again, more emphatically, and he seemed to finally understand that she had no idea how to deal with something like this.

“Does that mean you’ll help us?” Darak stepped in, saving her from having to respond to Zane’s outrageous story. “Where do your loyalties lie, Zane?”

She didn’t really remember any of it, though vague memories were stirring in the back of her mind. It was as if Zane’s words had conjured up images of her past life that even she hadn’t known had been in her mind.

Zane straightened from his bow. “I was raised on Liata. I am a Council soldier. My loyalty is to the Council, but my heart lies with the Plectarans, also. I’ve heard their tales of the Wizards Tithe, and I’ve seen the way their world is controlled by the collective. If I had been raised there, I would have been part of the Tithe—given to the collective because of my Talent. I am ranked Dominar.”

Darak nodded in understanding. “I see.”

“No, you don’t. Not fully.” Zane smiled to soften his words, focusing on Darak. “For all the evil of the collective and the way they subjugate weaker minds, they also do good things from time to time. Saving everyone on Plectar was probably the greatest thing the collective has ever done.” Zane’s violet gaze shifted back to Jana as if expecting her to say something.

“I don’t remember it,” she admitted finally. “I’m sorry.”

But Zane’s reaction was unexpected. He stepped closer to her and took her hands in his.