Free Prince of Luster by Candace Sams

as she whispered down to the surviving hero of the day. “Do you hear me? I’m coming back. Don’t give up. Just keep breathing. Okay?”
    He barely nodded, but he’d understood.
    With new purpose and courage to go with it, Nova re-covered the stranger’s torso with his cloak and shirt. She gently touched his cheek one time before making her way back up the rocky hillside, over the dead, and through the garbage.
    She ran faster than she’d ever run in her life.
    Please let him be alive when I see him again.

Chapter 4
    Marcos lay in pain so deep that he began to imagine someone had come. That was the cruelest part. To lie there believing another soul said they’d help, only to really be alone, was worse than anything he’d ever experienced.
    He begged again to die.
    Every move he made pulled more loose skin from his body and drove him into a new round of torment. The rocks beneath him felt like glass wedging its way into his body. Every breath he took was worse than the last. He looked into the night sky and thought of home, his siblings and their families. And he thought of Darius’s two-year-old daughter, Cory, and all the other nieces and nephews in the castle nursery he wouldn’t hold again. The children he wouldn’t ever conceive with some woman drifted into and out of his tortured mind.
    The worst part was knowing his family would never have a shred of his body left to bury.
    Marcos began to cry, using the last of his body’s fluid in the process. The damage done to his torn, bleeding, and burnt form was nothing compared to what was being done to his spirit. It was as though someone had ripped who he was, and all he’d been, away. He reached up to the sky as best as he could and bitterly pled for his family to know where he was and to have them find some small remnant of his remains: a finger bone or a lock of what was left of his hair. Anything they could bury with the dignity that was now denied him.
    The whole thing was his fault.
    He’d wanted to save that elderly merchant, had gone off mission and paid the price. Anger over seeing an innocent tormented—and disgust over witnessing how a young girl was forced to beg for a man’s life—had driven him to open his mouth when he should have kept it closed. But no one else had stepped forward.
    Too late, he’d learned why.
    The entire colony had been so terrorized that no one would dare speak. He now knew what the scorch marks on the buildings meant. For every one of them, some soul had probably died; someone who might have stood for what was right, just as he’d tried to do.
    Look where it’d gotten him.
    He was lying among the refuse of Delta Seven with the dead and the garbage of a doomed world piled around his burned shell of a body. The pain was so great he could well wish himself dead a thousand times, but his stupidity in landing there would never be undone.
    At times his mind drifted to why he’d done it. Then he’d decide again that he’d had no choice. What did it matter? That girl, the elderly man, and scores of others would probably die anyway.
    Perhaps the slugs, who had to be working with consent of the governor, would kill everyone before they moved on to plunder some other world. Then what would his brave act mean? He uttered one croaking plea to the heavens.
    “Please …want to … see my family again … the pain … want to die … c-can’t be d-dishonored … n-not like this.”
    • • •
    Nova stopped at the top of a small rise, only a few feet from where Green Eyes slumped. She heard his plea, and her heart broke.
    For two years, she’d seen the result of public torture. Friends no longer knew friends. Longtime business adversaries no longer quarreled because there was nothing left to fight over. The Limaxian pirates and the traitor Adaman Forrell had taken everything for themselves. In that one small way, they were all united. Indeed, the citizens had two things in common: their hatred of the governor, and the loss of