Free Valley of Fires: A Conquered Earth Novel (The Conquered Earth Series) by J. Barton Mitchell Page B

showed her, adopting their suggestions.
    She shut her eyes as violent static filled her mind, but she held on, holding onto both the entity and the woman under it, guiding them into each other, helping them to merge, and as she did, it all became clear. She knew what to do, and … it felt amazing, she discovered: wielding the power. Zoey adjusted the radiance and the vibrations of the entity and the woman, absorbing some of the heat and energy as the conversion occurred, redirecting it, slowly allowing the two consciousnesses to blend and burn into one unified whole …
    And then it was over. Zoey collapsed onto the floor, her head full of pain and static.
    When she opened her eyes, the blue and white entity was gone. As she watched, the woman in the chamber slowly rose, pulling tubes and wires from her body, sitting up weakly. Her eyes were no longer black. Instead, for one brief moment, they flashed in a kind of golden color … then it washed away, as quickly as it had appeared.
    The woman looked down at Zoey on the floor … and smiled.
    “Mom…?” Zoey asked in disbelief.
    Then the exertion and the pain finally overtook her. She passed out amid hundreds of thousands of projections of joy and elation that echoed up and down the massive structure she was in, bouncing inside her head until everything went mercifully dark.

 
    7. FLAGS
    RAVAN WALKED ALONG THE DECK of the Wind Rift, trying to hide just how hard it was to balance on top of the giant, accursed ship. Why would anyone build something so silly and huge, nothing but a giant moving target? She missed her old dune buggy, a Boston-Murphy style she’d restored herself, something reliable that ran on real things like gas and sweat, not artifacts and giant sails made of parachutes.
    The Wind Rift had branched off to the south and left the rest of the fleet to deal with the buzzing Raptors and the giant Assembly army a day ago. Most likely Currency had been flattened and the rest of the Landships were all destroyed now, burning like the Wind Star, the ship the Freebooter had been on.
    It would have been easy to say the idiots got what they deserved, but Ravan’s thoughts were conflicted. She could still hear Holt’s mournful wail as she pushed him to the deck and kept him from leaping off. That was more than a day ago, and she hadn’t seen him since. He’d retreated down to the lower decks, to a cabin Olive cleared for him, which was probably a good thing. Holt had lost everything once. Ravan had been, at the time, the only person he’d ever told that story to, but, she thought with a slight sense of bitterness, it had been Mira and that little girl who had brought him back, made him believe in something again.
    Ravan didn’t hate the Freebooter. She kind of liked her, really. The two of them had had their share of tension, but Mira had moxie and a brain, one of the few. It was sad that it usually worked out that way. Why was it that the people who actually had something to contribute to the universe always seemed to be put in its crosshairs?
    Ravan sighed. The real question was, what kind of mode Holt would be operating in now, if at all. She had never seen him as distraught as when that ship exploded. One thing she’d learned in life: getting dragged back into a darkness you’d crawled out of before didn’t make it any easier the second time. Usually, it made it permanent. Most people didn’t have the energy to do it all over again.
    Holt wasn’t most people, though … and he had her.
    Angrily, Ravan shook the thought away as quickly as it formed.
    Thoughts like that were weak. They made her weak. She’d never loved Holt, Ravan told herself. She’d just been stung by his betrayal, that was all. It cut deep because she let him inside. Chalk it up to a life lesson. It was like Tiberius said, “Trust is no path to power.”
    But, still, the feelings stirred within her, and her insistence that she felt nothing only seemed to make them stronger.
    The