Read Online ElyriasEcstasy by Amber Jayne and Eric Del Carlo - Free Book Online

leaped, caught the sill and drew himself up. The lock was far easier to
force than the last one. This one wasn’t even electronic. No alarms had sounded
when he’d disabled his room’s door. Power fluctuations happened occasionally,
even here on the Citadel’s grounds. No doubt some trooper sitting bored out of
his mind at a monitor screen had seen the interruption of the card-lock on
Urna’s room and made note of it. A repair would be scheduled. But that
unconscious guard would be discovered long before then.
    Urna slipped out through the high window, jumping, landing
and rolling easily, as if he weighed nothing. He’d gone out headfirst and now
came up in a crouching position. He took a deep breath as he surveyed the
grounds. He was at the Citadel’s periphery. Above him was the night sky, a
clean black sheet pricked with icy starlight, so different from the glow of the
Black Ship’s underside.
    Enormous solar panels stood on the tops of the buildings and
were scattered at intervals throughout the huge yard. These Lux-owned arrays
were all over the Safe, gathering what precious energy they could to be
distributed throughout the Safe proper, then more sparingly through the
surrounding border towns.
    Looming in the night was the Citadel building itself, as grand
and imposing an edifice as just about anything Urna had ever seen crumbling to
dust out in the Unsafe, and certainly the most palatial structure in the Safe
itself. There the Toplux and his council presided. There the Lux jealously
nurtured their power. They were the political force that domineered the Safe,
using both the Guard and the military to keep themselves dominant. They had the
wealth and the technology. With a wrench Urna tore his eyes away from the
sight.
    Only a few hundred feet worth of training grounds routinely
scanned by camera drones and searchlights now stood between him and the
perimeter fence. He would have to take down a few more men once he reached that
barrier, beyond which lay the city surrounding the Citadel. He still had the first
guard’s pistol, but using it wasn’t his first choice. His own gun would have
been more comfortable anyway, but that and his sword were always handed over
before debriefings. He would not fire his commandeered firearm. Nothing
announced trouble quite like a gunshot.
    Good thing he was such a brilliant Weapon.
    A light swept by, just past the tips of his fingers, which
were splayed on the ground, followed by the buzz of a camera high over his
head. He was still as a stone, waiting, but could not deny the grin that crept
across his sharp features. For all his periodic fantasizing over the years
about this night, this escape, he had never imagined it being so much fun. Or
maybe this was just adrenaline translated into giddiness. He’d felt this way
sometimes on missions, cutting through swarms of Passengers.
    Go. Rune’s phantom voice again. Urna was sure—well,
almost sure—this time that it was indeed imagined. Something in the mental
timbre was off. Some instinct told him not to trust the voice’s authenticity,
even though he had to admit it’d been providing him with good advice so far.
Shaking off whatever lingering feelings the presence of the voice had planted
in his mind, Urna pushed off the ground and sprinted across the yard.
    Rune, the bastard, was determined to be a part of this, it
seemed, if only an imaginary part. The voice had to be some subconscious
concoction of Urna’s own mind. Maybe the drug withdrawal was already affecting
him. Maybe he was panicking on some level about leaving his longtime lover and
antagonist behind.
    He gained speed as he went, a built-in benefit of running
full tilt. Weapons were trained so that no living creature could catch up with
them should the mission require a quick retreat. Another skill not imparted to
the Shadowflashes, who were always supposed to keep their distance from the
violence.
    Twenty yards from the fence he would be in full view of the
two