Dragon's Nemesis by Natalie Grey

Author:Natalie Grey [Grey, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-10-08T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

“They know about the ships.” It was her Uncle Nate’s voice.

“I know.” Ghost did not turn around from the window. This was the same place where they had met the other day, though someone had cleared away Ezra’s body.

She expected him to wait, or say something stupid, or eventually slink away like everyone else did, but instead he came to stand beside her. There were two sets of footsteps. She looked over to see both him and Aunt Gee.

“What do we do?” Nate asked her. It wasn’t despairing. He was asking for an order, and she did not miss his choice of words: we.

She got the sense that they were trying not only to stay on her good side—as they should, with any head of the family—but also to reassure her that she was not a terrifying monster. And it was an admirable effort, really, but both of them were terrified of her. She could see it easily in the way their pulse sped up every time she looked at them, in the way their pupils dilated, in the subtle tension in their muscles. She had known these things before, but it felt different to notice them with her enhanced senses.

And she truly was everything they feared.

“How did you know?” Aunt Gee asked, before Ghost could answer her uncle. “About the ships.”

Ghost smiled slightly. Her cheek had been repaired now and her expressions were less gruesome.

“I am in all of the systems,” she said.

They frowned. They still did not understand. No one seemed to understand why she had done what she had done. To be the head of the family was to rely on a network of spies and informers. One must always be aware. It was a great deal like running a government, and in her past life, Ghost had always been interested in the mechanisms by which the Alliance watched its citizens. She had learned a lot from that.

But there were limits to a human network—limits electronic surveillance did not have. There were always those who made bets that cameras couldn’t see them, or that the humans behind those cameras wouldn’t notice a slight disturbance.

Ghost was nowhere near so fallible. Since she had begun preparing herself to leave her human body, she had been testing the limits of her consciousness, upgrading herself and feeding her mind snippets of the raw streams of data she would need to take in.

She had headed off any number of family rebellions during those years. They were rebellions her sources hadn’t told her about, and it had been amusing to watch her family turn on one another, accusing their friends and even children of betraying them. It hadn’t been humans who betrayed them, but surveillance systems.

At the time, she had not told anyone the truth. Now she saw that she could have done so and they still wouldn’t believe it. Her aunt and uncle clearly didn’t.

She was the one who had first noticed the Dragons on the security cameras. It would have been cheaper to hire mercenaries to patrol the shipyard on Qaryat, but she had insisted on cameras.

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