Ghost—Spectres by Nate Kenyon

Author:Nate Kenyon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books

THE PANIC ROOM

Nova didn’t know exactly how long she sat there. It seemed like forever, but it was probably only moments before the first marine in full combat gear thumped into the doorway, servos whining, rifle up, and scanning the room. The barrel found her and stopped, aimed at her head.

“You there,” the marine shouted. “Don’t move!”

“Agent X41822N, for the Dominion,” she said. “The emperor is secure.”

Then she passed out.

She ran through the courtyard outside her parents’ skyscraper, the sun beating down on her head and warming her scalp, water from the nearby fountain shimmering in the heat. Someone was chasing her—possibly her old nanny; it was a game they used to play occasionally when Nova was a very small girl, sort of like hide-and-seek, except she found that this game made the nanny quite cross.

Nova had always known when her nanny was happy or sad. She knew how everyone felt, all the time. Her father, Constantino, had called it her gift of empathy. She had inherited it from him.

She ducked into the building, heading for the elevator, as events clicked into focus. It wasn’t her nanny after all. She was too old for a nanny. Whatever was chasing her wasn’t a person but a feeling of terrible dread.

She had just turned fifteen, and her parents were shipping her off to a resort for spoiled rich children on Tyrador IX, to protect her from rebel groups who were targeting the Old Families on Tarsonis in retaliation for the attack on Korhal, and intent upon bringing down the Confederacy. Members of several families had been executed in horrific fashion, and her father’s hoverbike factory had been hit just days before. The other children on board had been mostly glad to be going on what they perceived to be a long, peaceful vacation, and they couldn’t understand why she was not. But she had left the ship in distress, because she had sensed her parents were being attacked in their home. This had been more than simple intuition; this had been as real to her as if she had been standing there witnessing it. She had to do something, before it was too late.

The building was too quiet, and as she took the elevator up to the penthouse her dread increased. She had been here before and had gone through this scene already. She knew what she would find.

The elevator doors opened onto a vision from her deepest nightmares: her mother and father, dead, her brother on his knees, and several servants lined up against the wall, a group of armed men around them, her mother’s trusted jig, Edward Peters, one of them. Edward had always been cold and boring to her; but how could he do this?

As she entered the room, her anger and fear grew into a living, pulsing monster clawing at her brain and begging for release, and when Edward ordered Gustavo McBain to shoot her brother in the head, and then Edward pointed his gun at Nova, she

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.