Free Divided: The Alliance Series Book Four by Emma L. Adams

a dozen new bruises, and faced Jeth. “She’s not dead,” I said, my voice hoarse. “I need your help.”
    The Fletcher family stared at me. As I expected.
    “I have a tracker.” I coughed, my ribs aching. “I can trace her even if the Alliance can’t. They… won’t help me. I need your help.”
    A long pause. I mentally braced myself for another blow. Nell watched me for a moment.
    “If you’re lying,” she said. “I’ll kill you next time.” And she turned her back and went into the house.
    Jeth blinked a couple of times.
    “Guess that wasn’t an invite?” I said, coughing again. I wiped blood from my eyes with my left hand.
    “Come on in, you need to clean up,” said Jeth, turning his back.
    I was acutely aware of intruding in their home, even as I pressed a damp cloth to my forehead to stem the bleeding. Ada’s family were my last hope, short of involving others at the Alliance in illegal activity—but I was on my way to doing that already. I braced one hand on the kitchen table. Maybe Ms Weston was right, maybe I was in shock. But no way would I sit on the side lines while the Alliance ignored Ada’s plight.
    I looked up as a person entered my peripheral vision. Jeth watched me from the doorway. Wary, like he expected me to light the house on fire.
    “You have computers with offworld tech, right?” I pulled the tracker from my pocket, which was crusted in dried blood.
    Jeth stared at it. “That’s a tracker, right? Whose blood is that?”
    “Mine.”
    “Jesus Christ.”
    I’d forgotten about that. I wiped the tracker on the outside of my coat as Ada’s brother shook his head.
    “Was it the same people who took Ada?” he asked.
    “Yeah. Someone saved me. But the door closed.” I pressed the cloth to my temples, and told him about our final fight on Vey-Xanetha, the Vox, and the stone-skinned people who’d attacked us and taken Ada. “I was stranded there,” I said. “The world-key is back at Central, and it was only linked to one world.”
    Not that it would do any good if I had no idea which world she was on. Each world required a certain symbol. I knew the base set, but not the individual ones for each world—except Vey-Xanetha, seeing as I’d been there. And I was willing to bet even Ambassadors weren’t allowed to see all of them. The council probably had even the darkest corners of the Multiverse on record. Just in case.
    Nell and Alber both stood behind Jeth. They’d come to listen in.
    “You know how to find her?” asked Alber. He and Ada could easily have been blood relations. Nell, too. They had the same soft facial features, the same shade of tan. Alber’s eyes were purple, with the tell-tale glint of a magic-wielder. Nell’s were blue, but they might have been contacts. Like Ada’s.
    I couldn’t say, I don’t know. “I think so.”
    “Whoa, slow down,” said Alber. “You took her into the Passages, right?” I didn’t miss the accusation in his voice.
    “Ada and I decided to check out the hidden Passage after the mission. On Vey-Xanetha, we found out someone was creating doorways to Cethrax, and we realised the hidden Passage was the one place we hadn’t checked. And we found a doorway that shouldn’t be there. Those Stoneskin creatures were using it as a shortcut. I don’t know if they’re on Cethrax or where, and anyway, it’s swarming with vox-kind and wyverns—I can’t go there unarmed and alone, without knowing her location.” I looked at Jeth, who nodded, slowly. “I need to make another world-key. And I need to hack into the offworld communications to send out a signal to her, let her know I’m coming. Most worlds have some kind of base point.” Even Cethrax did, from the days before missions into the swamp had been stopped on the basis of safety. And bases were close to the Passages.
    “I’ve no clue about world-keys,” said Jeth. “But cross-world communications—maybe. I’ll have to think. She has a standard communicator,