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    Repeat: The Complete Series
    Repeat: The Complete Series
    Repeat: The Complete Series
    Ebook602 pages9 hours

    Repeat: The Complete Series

    By Odette C. Bell

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The complete four-episode series of Repeat in one volume.
    When the Guardians face their greatest threat yet, salvation rests on the shoulders of one woman with a secret.
    Mina’s been dreaming of one thing her entire life – killing the Guardian called Keiran. When he plucks her off a slave station and trains her, she finally gets close to him.
    She knows what’ll happen if she doesn’t kill him, knows just how much destruction he’ll bring. But now she’s actually found him, she’ll start to learn more.
    Together, they’ll be thrust into a wild tale that twists through time and brings them right back to the same point.
    Keiran will have to pray it’s not the point of Mina’s blade. And Mina will have to decide one thing: what’s more important – fate, or the man she’s fallen for?
    ...
    Repeat follows a desperate guardian and the man she’s destined to kill fighting against time. If you love your space operas with action, heart, and a splash of romance, grab Repeat: The Complete Series today and soar free with an Odette C. Bell series.
    Repeat is the 5th Supreme Outer Guardian series. A massive, exciting, and heroic sci-fi world where the day is always saved and hearts are always won, each series can be read separately, so plunge in today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOdette C. Bell
    Release dateJun 27, 2024
    ISBN9798224236022
    Repeat: The Complete Series

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      Book preview

      Repeat - Odette C. Bell

      Prologue

      Mina

      It was now or never. I knew that, but….

      I tightened my hands on the sword, letting my fingers slide down the hilt. I could feel it talking to me, promising me that I’d finally reached this moment. The same moment I had dreamed of for the rest of my life combined.

      It was time to save the multiverse.

      The word multiverse clanged in my skull, so loud there was nowhere to get away from it. I swear that calamitous roar beat through every other memory and belief I’d ever been stupid enough to have. There was no point to them now. I had reached the culmination of my life.

      I pressed my back against the wall behind me, hiding further in a nook, my raggedy breath rocking my shoulders forward and back. I felt like I was about to tear my lungs in two. But I wouldn’t do it until I finally stabbed this sword all the way through Keiran’s heart.

      Keiran….

      Stupid of me. I shouldn’t have used his name.

      He didn’t need a name. He’d never had a name back when I’d dreamed of him. He’d just been a face, a task, a mission, a goal.

      Something to kill. And a way to save everyone.

      Now I’d stupidly gotten to know him ….

      I felt this twang in the back of my neck that told me it was time. I could hear the same noises, smell the same scents, even feel the same subtle vibrations making their way underneath my feet through the pulsing engine core beneath.

      The prime Guardian station had been rebuilt. Zarpacs had almost destroyed it. Frost, somehow, had combined it with a living station she’d stolen off the Underside. It was a long story but would be nowhere near as long as mine.

      My entire life I’d dreamt of killing the same man to save the multiverse. And I was finally here at this moment.

      I’d imagined this exact incident thousands of times, maybe even 10s of thousands of times. I knew every sound, knew every detail.

      I was just a level above the entertainment deck.

      I could hear the sounds of ribald laughter down below.

      They were having so much fun. The Guardians had just pulled off an incredible mission. Why not let their hair down? These last few years of Guardian history had been filled with nothing but dire destruction and death.

      And I was about to add to it.

      I squeezed my eyes shut. No. You’re about to save them. And this is the only way.

      Pulling the sword around, I threw it into my other hand.

      No one saw it, no one heard it, and no scanner – no matter how advanced – would ever detect it. It was hidden in phase time.

      All that mattered now was shoving this sword right through Keiran’s chest and ending it before he could end everyone else.

      The sword glowed in my hand. Power leapt up around it. It fidgeted across my skin. It practically threw itself around my shoulders in a cloak. And yet nobody I passed saw it. They might have seen my hand held at the side at an odd angle, my fingers squeezed around something that wasn’t there. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared.

      The sword was invisible to them.

      It wouldn’t be invisible forever.

      I reached the ornate stairs that led down in a sweeping manner toward the entertainment deck below.

      It was huge. It had been redesigned when the station had been rebuilt. It was bigger. There were more bars, more restaurants, more stores. The Guardians needed more fun, not less.

      The noise was almost too much from the clinking of glasses to the lilting of laughs. I could hear my friends and colleagues having fun. Fun they deserved. They also deserved to live.

      That made my mind up for me, and I shoved my free hand down on the smooth railing beside me, letting it drag over the polished white-blue metal. I took the steps two at a time. I reached the bottom. I jumped off the last step.

      There in front of me was the most popular watering hole of all. The Last Limits. According to the other Guardians, it was a tongue-in-cheek comment about our greatest enemy, the Limits. A shadowy force from a time long ago with the ability to reach through the past into the future.

      I stood in front of the bar. The door was low. The lighting within was sultry. They’d based the design on a real bar from old Earth history. I could just see the long mahogany bench and the bartenders behind it. Glittering rows of alcohol blinked like starlight beyond.

      Tables were interspersed in front of the bar with booths.

      There were several levels, and you could get to them with standard circular metal ladders.

      The Guardians liked this bar because it was bare-bones, because its design reminded them a lot of what they actually had to do. Regardless of the fact they were meant to have the greatest technology throughout the entire multiverse, it didn’t always work like that. Not when they were fighting the actual gods.

      But you didn’t care about that. And I didn’t care about that. The only thing that mattered was the sword in my hand and the mission in my heart.

      With one deep breath, I finally pushed into the bar.

      Music was playing, this low throbbing, bluesy affair.

      It had a sad tinge to it. It seemed appropriate.

      I knew every single note of that song. I’d heard them in my dreams, remember.

      Now my dreams filled me, and power filled my blade. There was no one on this station who could see it.

      I took a step toward one of the rowdiest tables right at the back of the bar. Longer than the rest, it had eight Guardians seated around it.

      One Guardian turned now. It wasn’t Keiran. He was right at the front, having the most fun. He stood, a drink in his hand. He went to salute.

      The Guardian who turned was Morpheus. A mysterious man by all accounts, he twisted. His gaze locked on me. It meant nothing. I’d just entered the bar. I was right next to the most powerful light source, which was the lighting making it in from the corridor outside.

      I would have looked as if someone had set me aglow from behind.

      Morpheus’s eyes narrowed.

      They’d done that in my dream of this moment. It meant nothing.

      His eyes drifted down to my left hand.

      For just a moment, I wondered if he could see my blade. But then he turned. He picked up his drink. He shrugged.

      And I took a step forward.

      I finally heard what Keiran was talking about. His joyous tones were loud, filled with alcohol and pride.

      To think, for a time there, his charms had almost worked on me.

      This is it. The beginning of a new day, Keiran said as he lifted his drink higher, his coordination leaving him as he sloshed the golden liquid over the side of the tumbler. It fell around his wrist, stained his uniform, then splattered onto the table in front of him. It would be a match for his blood, which would join it presently.

      I took one last step forward.

      Everyone should join me in saluting the Guardians. We’ve turned a corner. We’ve walked across a bridge. Tomorrow will be different.

      Because tomorrow is always different, I muttered under my breath.

      Keiran must have heard. He turned. He looked at me. Once.

      And I forced myself forward.

      I didn’t even stare into his eyes.

      There was no point. I was just here to kill him.

      I twisted the blade around.

      And I forced it right through his chest.

      Because I knew why I’d been born. I knew why I’d become a Guardian. And I knew why I couldn’t stop.

      Chapter 1

      Mina

      Two months earlier

      I woke with a start from a dream so powerful, my entire body buzzed with it. My feet tingled as if I’d been running for hours, and my chest felt like it had caved in from my heart beating too hard.

      I didn’t lift a hand underneath my gel blankets to wipe the sweat off my brow. What was the point? When I rolled over and went back to sleep again, I’d just have another dream exactly like it.

      I’d been dreaming the same damn thing my entire life. But something told me maybe I wouldn’t have to keep going through that dream forever. Something told me today would be different. It would be another step on my path. My path where?

      I went to say toward redemption. But what exactly did I have to redeem myself for?

      I hadn’t chosen to be born into the life I had, onto the planet I had, into the servitude I had.

      But most of us never get to decide what will happen to us. We are just thrust into someone else’s story.

      I went to roll over. The tiny gel mattress beneath me squeaked. I could feel the beads that made it up. When you lay down on them, they were meant to dissolve and give you a semblance of comfort, even though the mattress was all of a micron thick. But they were getting old. Because everything on this station was getting old.

      As they squeaked beneath me and I dragged my gel blankets over my body, a tingle at the back of my spine told me I wasn’t going to get back to sleep.

      I always had this sense, this ability to know when something was going to happen. Call it psychic. Call it luck. I didn’t care. But something told me to wait.

      A single moment later, an alarm blared through the sleeping quarters.

      I wasn’t alone here. About 20 centimeters to my left was another gel mattress and another worker sleeping on it, just trying to get through the haze of the night. Then again, people came here to live, not to sleep. I wondered if the rest of them, just like me, pinned most of their lives on their dreams.

      When reality becomes nothing more than horror, every time you close your eyes at night, you have a chance to at least dream of something better.

      Every single other sleeper in the room lurched to their feet.

      The alarm was sharp and insistent, and it could only mean one thing.

      One of the engine cores was about to blow again.

      The leaders-that-be had clearly greedily taken too much energy out of it. They’d diverted it into one of the other cities about to go dark, and they’d left nothing for the workers who kept those cities running.

      I couldn’t turn off the cynical part of my brain. There was no reason for me to try, anyway. It was the thing that kept me alive, kept me going, kept me waiting until I finally became a Guardian.

      As I lurched to my feet, I kicked my old threadbare gray gel mattress, pushing it to the side so no one could trip over it.

      We all assembled. The door out of the sleeping quarters was locked. We weren’t allowed to wander around the station at night.

      I was the first in front of the door. Hands in my pockets, shoulders rounded forward, I stared up at the light just above the old steel gray doorway. It flashed to green.

      The door opened. All of us jolted outside into the corridor. Soon enough, a foreman walked along wearing blue armor that glittered like sunlight. It wasn’t hard. The rest of us were so covered in muck, having never washed ever since coming to the station, you could throw the dullest stone amongst us, and it would look like a diamond.

      The foreman’s visor was off. His face was stiff with anger. Obviously, it was a bad engine breach, then. You, you, and you, he picked people randomly, go right into the cores and try to stabilize them.

      That was a death mission. And he knew it. He could offer them armor. He could even do it himself. With his fancy set, he might even have a chance of surviving. But he didn’t care. His workers were just ants. Throw them at a problem until there was enough that they dammed some broken river, and he’d get his bonus.

      I hadn’t been picked.

      I stood at the front.

      As he gave orders, I stared at him.

      Life wasn’t fair. I knew that. My entire life had been teaching it to me over and over again.

      I lived on a corrupt world, not that I’d actually seen my planetary home for a long time. Ever since I’d been swept up in one of the poor purges, I’d come to this station and worked slavishly, day in day out. Waiting for the day I’d become a Guardian. Waiting for the day they’d finally come, pluck me out of here, and set me on the path.

      I believed so much in that path that I couldn’t even conceive of it not being real.

      The dreams that I had endured since childhood couldn’t be fake. They couldn’t be mere miss-firings of a twisted brain.

      They had to be real.

      You, the foreman growled. He looked right at me. Maybe he didn’t like my expression. It was blank, but not one of servitude. Maybe I hadn’t dropped down to my knees and licked his boots enough. You’ll go to the ore room. The mother machine is malfunctioning. He actually had a smile on his lips as he said that.

      He was sending me to my death.

      … He was sending me to my death.

      That fact echoed in the back of my head.

      If the mother machine that broke down ore for energy really was broken, then it was probably spewing dangerous levels of quantum radiation everywhere.

      Walking next to it would be a death sentence. It might take ten minutes for that death sentence to kick in. But….

      Now, he roared.

      We all dispersed.

      The corridor outside of the sleeping quarters was narrow, dirty, and simple. There was no technology, just bare-bone walls. You could see the power conduits, frayed here and there from misuse. You could even see some of the piping for heat and life support.

      They were cracked. There was one I always kept an eye on. It was just next to our door. All you would need was a little bit of electrical interference from, say, the light on top of the door, and you could create an explosion. It would take out the sleeping quarters, and it would kill us all.

      Not a single soul would care.

      … Because I was about to walk to my death. Sorry, run. Anyone who didn’t run soon copped an electro-prod to their side. There was a guy just behind me who was still vague from sleep. He yawned. He shouldn’t have done it in front of the foreman. The guy whipped his prod out of his belt so fast, he would have cracked his wrist if he weren’t in armor. He jammed the prod against the guy’s rib, right next to his heart.

      The poor guy couldn’t take it. He convulsed and fell to his knees. I twisted my head over my shoulder, glanced at him once, and wondered if he’d die. I’d never find out.

      … Because I was about to die myself.

      That fact almost pushed through the impenetrable wall of my dream world.

      My hands became a little sweaty.

      They were so covered in muck, I couldn’t see the skin beneath.

      I went to wipe them on my pants. Then I simply clenched them into fists instead. There was no point in indulging in this. The Guardians would come.

      For the Guardians would have to come.

      My dreams couldn’t possibly have lied to me. I was the chosen one. The one who had to kill Keiran. I was the one who had to save the multiverse.

      … I just had to be.

      A single tear, for whatever reason, gathered at the corner of my lashes.

      It shivered there, then trembled down my cheek.

      It would have looked like a pretty strange sight. That tear was the first water I’d splashed on my face in a long time. It would have looked like somebody had taken their finger down a muddy pane of glass to finally reveal the translucent material beneath.

      I got to the right lift.

      I threw myself in. There was a jagged chunk of rusted metal sticking out at a 45-degree angle. It caught my tunic pants and my leg beneath. Blood splattered down onto the equally rusted floor. I looked at it like you might blood that didn’t belong to you.

      It looked an awful lot like the pattern of Keiran’s blood. The same pattern that would splatter over the table of the Last Limits when I finally dispatched him for good.

      I could see his face now. The smile. The emptiness in his eyes, too. He was the one who was going to jeopardize everything.

      He was the one.

      All I had to do was repeat that, focusing on it with all my might, and then I didn’t need to pay attention to the sting as blood slid down my leg.

      This rickety old lift took an age to get to the ore room.

      It shook. At one point, I actually thought it would break.

      Something snapped deep in the wall. There was a powerful shudder. The sound of ancient, half-broken gears momentarily filled the lift.

      Then the lift started to drop. No warning. No nothing.

      My brain couldn’t keep up.

      A drop from this level would be certain death.

      But I couldn’t die. Not yet.

      Something slammed into the side of the lift. There was no warning.

      The wall puckered behind me.

      Something was ejected from it. I didn’t think, just couldn’t. I flattened myself down, using the intuition that had kept me alive, that had kept me sane throughout my servitude.

      Something powered into the front of the lift and blasted the doors open. I saw the shaft beyond.

      Saw the shaft as the lift hurtled down through it.

      I screamed.

      I fought against the effects of the fall. I tried to hold on to something, anything, but I couldn’t.

      I was hurtling down to the bottom of the shaft, to certain death. My dreams hadn’t been real… after all.

      I struck the base of the shaft.

      But just before I could be killed, just before I could be crushed in this lift for good, something shimmered out over the floor.

      I’d only seen that kind of technology once or twice. It was a shield.

      It had to come from a different section of the ship.

      I don’t know how or why it had been deployed in the lift, but it was the only thing that could save me.

      It cut out the momentum of the fall. I fell against the shield, and fortunately it wasn’t energetic enough that it killed me.

      My face was flattened against that blue sheet of pure crackling power. My eyes opened wide. A single tear trailed out of my left one.

      It was joined by sweat raining off my brow.

      But the ceiling above me chose that moment to crack, and I rolled. I headed forward. There was no way out of here, until there was, until the already embattled doors just gave way, crumbling like a tower someone had thrown on top of a world that had just been swallowed up by a star.

      I struck the corridor outside, and it was chaos. Slaves were running to and fro. They had burns all over them. One guy’s face had pretty much been taken out.

      He couldn’t even open his mouth. But he could still run. And he ran into the wall beside me. There was a clunk as his skull struck it. Then he jerked down to his knees. Twitching, he soon fell to his side.

      I didn’t even bother to reach down and pluck the guy up. There was no time.

      A structural alarm began to blare.

      I’d heard it a few times. Remember, this station was so badly run that the powers-that-be barely looked after it. They did what they had to, and even that wasn’t often enough. Sometimes whole floors had to be blocked off because they were too dangerous, because they were so badly maintained, that even breathing wrong might affect the outer whole.

      But this was different.

      This felt like an attack.

      Scarcely had the word attack echoed through my head did something smash into the wall beside me.

      I always had a good feel for where I was on the station. Call it luck. It was a deeper sense than that, though. I could always orient myself. Maybe it was simply because with my dreams, I always had this sense that I could go forward through anything. And if I could go forward, I could always chart a path.

      Or maybe it was just my inherent spatial ability. Did it matter? The point was I knew that we were close to the outer hull.

      And sure enough, we were.

      Something suddenly breached the hull. I finally realized why one of those blue shimmering shields had been erected in the elevator.

      It must have glitched. It had presumably been there to protect the outer hull from the thing that suddenly sliced through it.

      I stared in gobsmacked surprise as the tip of a pointed ship blast right through the wall.

      It got that guy who’d fallen to the side, whose face was burnt.

      I wouldn’t describe to you how it got him. You could use your imagination. At least it put him out of his misery.

      For one single second, there was silence in the corridor. People just stared.

      We were slaves. We knew how we were meant to die. Either at the hands of our masters, or in accidents. Not in an attack.

      It had been so long since I had kept up with the news of the empire that I didn’t even know who our enemies were anymore. And even before I’d become a slave and I’d freely been allowed to access news, I still hadn’t known who our true enemies were, because the empire had controlled information a long, long time ago. Turn on the news, and all you’d get was regurgitated propaganda.

      The empire could have 1000 different enemies out there, but you’d never find out. Until they finally knocked on your door and rammed their pointed ships through your walls.

      I just stood there. I just freaking stood there staring.

      I had to move. My body begged me to move.

      A shimmer chased across the nose of that vessel. Then it started to open.

      It prized the wall further apart. I saw more of those blue sheets of energy. They were outer structural shields.

      They were attempting valiantly to protect the station, but they probably didn’t even have the energy to try.

      The sound of metal groaning and shrieking filled my ears.

      But then one brave, smart slave added their own shriek to it and ran. It was like prodding cattle with fire. We all moved.

      For a few short seconds I stared at that ship, and I wondered if it could be them. The Guardians. No. Another voice rose up. I didn’t just dream of killing Keiran. I’d dreamt of other things about the Guardians my entire life. I knew some of their training. Not all of it. I couldn’t escape here with that knowledge, but I knew what their tech looked like. This wasn’t a Guardian ship.

      It was… there was a word on the tip of my tongue. I couldn’t quite get to it, though.

      I thought that the ship itself would open – then our enemies would jump out of it. I was wrong. In a sheet of power, a guy with a gun appeared right in front of me. He just walked out into the corridor from a point of light that manifested out of nowhere.

      The other slaves to my side screamed in shock and horror.

      One of them cried about demons and fell to his knees. He took up a supplicating position.

      I could have taken up the same supplicating position if I hadn’t seen this technology in my dreams. That was a transporter.

      But it wasn’t a Guardian.

      The guy I stared at looked as if he had rolled off a genetic experiment assembly line. There were different parts of him that had simply been added together. His left arm just looked like my arm. Sorry, the shape of it looked like my arm. His right arm was half tentacle, half pure muscle.

      His face was an amalgamation of different features. I could actually see the lines where he had been sewn together.

      He wore a thick, crackling breastplate but no visor. It meant I could see his expression. Or complete lack thereof.

      One of the other slaves went to run past him. He just shoved his tentacle arm out, grabbed the guy by his throat, and threw him against the wall so hard, the guy broke every single bone in his body.

      I became cold with dread. Cold with fear. And cold with something else.

      The writing was on the wall. I was going to die. And if I died here, I’d never kill Keiran. If I died here, my dreams would never come true.

      The genetic experiment took one lurching step toward me, then grabbed something from his belt.

      He looked at me, right at me as if he knew me, as if he’d come personally for me.

      And I looked right at him.

      Some things aren’t fair. That was a lie. Almost nothing is fair. You get born into a culture you do not choose at a time you do not choose with a body you do not choose in circumstances you have no power over.

      But some things are just a little unfair. Other things are so unfair that you will spend your entire existence fighting them.

      I wanted to bottle up every single dream I’d had, every single promise that had told me I would make a difference. And I wanted to shove it into the guy’s face.

      He lifted a gun from beside him. It didn’t look anything like the guns the foremen used. It looked as if it was light years beyond, as if it had gained access to technology so far out of the empire’s grasp, we probably shouldn’t recognize it. But I recognized the shape and, more than anything, the intent in his eyes as he toted it.

      All we slaves were cattle, cattle ready for the kill.

      But that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t damn well fair.

      I found myself lurching forward, found my feet moving, found my heart begging me to do something.

      I couldn’t sit still.

      Not to die.

      I didn’t think about my dreams for the first time ever.

      I twisted to the side.

      The guy got off a shot.

      He didn’t even have to aim at one of the slaves behind me. She was to the side, but it didn’t matter. The bullet bounced out of his gun, ricocheted off the wall, and struck her in her back just as she tried to run. She wasn’t a threat to him, shouldn’t be a target. She was either fun or practice or both.

      And that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t freaking fair.

      This pulse of rage and need ricocheted through my body in time with another bullet. The guy just let a smile pluck at his lips as he fired at the wall. He watched the bullet zigzag and strike another slave.

      The slave was torn down, and a good chunk of his torso was simply ripped out from the side. The blood that splattered over his brown tunic somehow made it look cleaner than dirtier.

      But he died. Because that’s all he was good for. Because when you hold all the cards, all the weapons, and all the power, you get to decide how other people go.

      It wasn’t fair. One last time, that promise echoed in my head. It was sharp.

      Don’t ask me how, but it seemed to lead me forward, lead me up, lead me out.

      I couldn’t tell you what was happening. All I could do was focus my fist on that guy’s face. All I could do was act.

      As everything came down to a head, I twisted to the side. All the guy did was lift a foot. He went to knee me, but it was almost as if I knew what he was going to do a second before he did it. I compensated for the move, fell down to my knees, rolled, and came up sharply beside him. I elbowed him in the stomach. I grabbed his gun. I twisted it to the side, and I fired on the wall.

      The guy grunted.

      He went to discharge some kind of neuro pulse down his arm. I didn’t know that. Yet I knew it. I knew it with the same instincts that had been driving me forward all these years.

      I released him and jolted back as the neuro charge developed up over his arm and across his face. But it discharged into the floor without striking its target.

      Then I snapped back toward him.

      Screw this. I would not die like cattle, and neither would the rest of us.

      I screamed. I punched the guy.

      It did nothing.

      Taking my fist to his face was like taking a petal to a brick. So I punched him again. And it did nothing. The guy finally grew bored of me.

      He lurched forward, and I just knew he went to grab me by the throat and lift me up. He’d throw me against his ship and kill me on the spike.

      Or maybe he’d just trample me to death. Because when you’re big and you can do what you want, you just do what you want.

      Life be damned.

      As everything came to a head, as my brain promised me this was it, it was almost as if I could feel another part of me opening out, as if I could feel another promise rising. Rising from somewhere deep inside, rising from a place I’d only ever glimpsed but never touched. Rising from there. Sorry. From then.

      I couldn’t slow myself down and explain that. I didn’t have to.

      Out of nowhere, a sheet of energy appeared right behind me. It was another transport beam.

      The slaves that hadn’t run yet now spun and jerked back as fast as they could, muttering about demons. Screaming about retribution for their sins.

      But my enemy didn’t spin. He stiffened, and that told me the light of that transport beam was different.

      The light was blue, was almost otherworldly.

      Hell, it almost had this godly feel to it.

      It took a single second for it to manifest.

      And then someone stepped right out of it.

      Someone…. They were wearing armor, head to foot, their face was covered, and I could see nothing except for the symbol that glittered on their chest.

      Symbol.

      The symbol that glittered on their chest.

      The Supreme Outer Guardian symbol.

      I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Supreme Outer Guardians.

      I thought I knew everything there was to know about my mission.

      But I’d never once dreamed of the exact moment that I would meet them, never once dreamed of the exact moment that I would join them.

      But it was here. It was finally here.

      I stared in slacked-jawed amazement at the Guardian.

      The enemy soldier beside me stared, too.

      I was close enough to his face that I could see the moment it pulsed with fear. It was violent enough that I was worried he would rip the different parts of his face apart.

      He jolted. He twisted. There was something on his belt. No, something beneath, within, around. Direction suddenly didn’t make sense. I just got the impression that this guy had access to a different pocket of space. He was hiding something in there.

      If there was one thing my dreams had taught me, it was that regardless of the Guardians’ power, they weren’t perfect, couldn’t fight everything, couldn’t hope to be able to defeat every single enemy out there.

      Especially not since the Underside had risen.

      I couldn’t think of that though, just had to act. There was something deep inside me that couldn’t be stopped.

      The Guardian lifted a hand. The guy, and I was assuming it was a guy, said in an artificially enhanced voice, You have attacked another universe. You have violated the rules of the multiverse. You will be stopped.

      Maybe the guy was arrogant. Maybe he just thought that he had this in the bag. But he didn’t watch my enemy close enough, didn’t move fast enough. I could.

      My enemy finally clutched whatever it was he wanted to remove from that pocket of space. I saw something shimmering.

      No, that wasn’t quite right. I felt something shimmering, something moving through space in a way that other things could not copy.

      It was such an unformed thought.

      I didn’t have the technological prowess to understand what was going on. I didn’t have the vocabulary. I didn’t have anything but this. This pulsing need to join the Guardians now that I’d finally found them. And to do that, I needed this guy to live long enough to recognize what I could do.

      I knocked into the genetic experiment.

      I scrabbled, trying to go for the guy’s gun, knowing I needed to kill him as fast as possible.

      But he’d already pulled that thing out of that pocket.

      Two words caught me. I don’t know where they rose from. I don’t know what pocket of my subconscious they climbed out of. But I could tell you this. They were so damn powerful, I couldn’t ignore them. I didn’t think anyone could ignore them.

      They roared right through my head. Phase time. That guy had just pulled that thing out of phase time.

      And the Guardians couldn’t access phase time.

      All of those thoughts smashed together in my skull.

      But action at least smashed together in my fingers.

      I twisted and grabbed the guy’s gun. Run, I screamed at the Guardian.

      He was clearly confused.

      He lifted his own gun, but damn it, he wasn’t fast enough.

      The genetic experiment finally deployed his weapon.

      If it was a weapon.

      It looked like nothing more than a tiny box. It was so small you could probably fit an ant in there or a very cramped spider.

      I had no idea what I was looking at, no words, no concepts. Just this feeling that if it was properly deployed, we would all die, that Guardian included.

      I couldn’t believe I’d doubted myself, couldn’t believe I’d doubted my dreams.

      They were true. And I would reach that bar. I would get there. I’d get my sword, and I would save everyone.

      Long before I’d become a slave, back when I’d been so-called free but poor, I’d read an influential thinker from hundreds of years ago.

      If you want to live a good life, apparently all you need to do is align yourself to a higher purpose. You will be challenged. People will try to pull you off your path. But that’s life. All you have to do, all you freaking have to do, is turn yourself back around to the right path every single time you’re pushed down. You don’t have to win. Because that’s winning – picking yourself up and aligning yourself with the truth is the only kind of victory that ever matters.

      I threw myself forward. I didn’t really think.

      The Guardian finally recognized whatever it was my enemy had deployed. But the Guardian didn’t have time to do anything. I did. I knocked into the genetic experiment’s shoulder. And this time I grabbed the guy’s gun. I used the kind of strength you get when you’re a slave. When you’re forced to work every day, but beyond that, when you’re forced to reach your body’s limitations and simply push back. Maybe soldiers thought they could do that, too. But they weren’t as desperate as slaves. And it was the sheer power of desperation now that made my hand snap down to my enemy’s gun fast enough. That made my fingers prize it out of his grip.

      I could have fired on that box. Maybe I should have fired on that box. Something told me to turn around and fire on the little pocket it had come from instead.

      I didn’t think. I couldn’t think. Thoughts were now so far out of my head, it was like someone had transported them to the furthest reaches of the multiverse.

      I fired on that pocket, and a line of some kind of light blasted out of the gun. Maybe I accidentally activated a different power level. Maybe it instinctively knew how much force it needed depending on what target it had. The point was, nothing could stop me, and nothing could slow me down. The bolt blasted out of the gun, and it struck the guy’s subspace pocket.

      That word, subspace, jumped into my head. It was just before the subspace pocket ruptured.

      It twitched. Then it pulsed wide. It was this black crackling veil.

      The genetic experiment screamed at me then swiped toward my throat.

      He had some kind of gauntlet on. Long claw-like appendages appeared out of it, glowing like mere pictures. They sure felt real to me though.

      As they went for my throat, that Guardian finally moved.

      He swept toward me from the side. Time seemed to slow down, and seconds became years. I swear they did. They were packed with so much information, it was like reality was inviting me to pause on the most important precipice I’d ever face. Pause before I fell off.

      The Guardian’s arms wrapped around me, and the guy pulled me to the side. He lifted his foot and kicked the genetic experiment. He tumbled back toward his rupturing subspace pocket.

      The break in it grew wider.

      It suddenly surrounded the guy.

      He tried to move. He could not.

      His arm was ripped off.

      He roared and fell to his knees.

      The Guardian lifted his wrist, tapped something on it, and created a shield.

      As the genetic experiment exploded, the shield protected me. And it gave me time. Time to do what? Time to take one single breath, settle it in my stomach, then turn and stare.

      I faced my first Guardian.

      And he faced me back.

      There was still chaos around me.

      The alarms were still blaring. Slaves were still running. And further ahead up the corridor, I heard more of those genetic experiments porting in.

      The fight was still raging. But for a few seconds – and that’s all I got – everything stopped and slowed down.

      You know that influential thinker I’d told you of only a moment before? He’d always said to trust your intuition and to trust time. When it slows down, it’s there to tell you something, there to tell you you’ve reached an important moment in your life. Be careful where you turn next.

      I didn’t turn. And maybe that was the point. I continued to stare up into the Guardian’s face.

      He looked down into mine before jolting back.

      I got the impression he was talking through wireless comms.

      I was right. A moment later, another transport beam appeared in front of me.

      Two more Guardians stepped out of it.

      They wasted no time in rushing forward to save the slaves.

      That should have afforded me a few more seconds to stare at my Guardian. But that didn’t happen.

      He simply unwrapped his arm from around me.

      And he jolted forward.

      I knew why. Guardians were told to interact as little as possible with lower-level civilizations.

      You were only there to save them if other universes interfered with them.

      Otherwise, you just let them get on with things.

      Everything I had told me that that Guardian would not turn around, would not speak to me. But the guy did. He twisted over his shoulder. He snapped a salute, and he grunted, Thanks. I owe you one.

      That statement echoed in my ears. It wasn’t nearly as loud as a bang that sounded out from behind me. I twisted. It came from that ship that had pushed its way into the station.

      I still had the gun I’d stolen from my enemy. I didn’t wait.

      Not for a single freaking second.

      I fired on the ship.

      It was probably stupid.

      This ship was embedded in the outer hull. If it exploded, I would probably create the kind of destruction that would rip through this corridor and destroy it.

      Then I’d never become a Guardian.

      I shouldn’t have worried. I fired on the ship. Then a Guardian shield appeared in place.

      It saved us.

      Because that’s what the Guardians were meant to do. But who was meant to save the Guardians?

      I knew that answer. You knew that answer. My heart knew that answer. It bled with that answer.

      It pushed me forward. It made me twist. It made me follow those Guardians. Because I wasn’t done yet. I’d only just gotten started.

      Chapter 2

      Keiran

      Another day, another mission.

      That’s what you got as a Guardian.

      There was very rarely any cooldown time. Because if you cooled down, other people died. Especially during this murky period of history. The Underside were pushing into Guardian strongholds more and more. Every damn week in fact. At least it had stopped a little ever since Frost’s wild adventure with Morpheus. Now the Guardians had a new station. A better station. A station that was less likely to be attacked.

      It was good to have a stronghold. It did not mean, however, that the Guardians had finally defeated the Underside. And it certainly did not mean that the Underside had given up. If anything, they were now trying harder, more desperate than ever. Because their masters, the Limits, had tasted victory only to have it pulled back by Harvey Brink and Rae.

      There was a time to think of this. It probably wasn’t during a mission.

      I had to focus.

      We’d tracked the most recent multiversal criminals down to their new target.

      Sometimes powerful civilizations from one universe figured out how to break into the multiverse. When they did that, they often encountered the Guardians. And they often learned how to be good multiversal citizens. That wasn’t always the case.

      Sometimes they broke their way out of their universe with a certain kind of attitude and a certain kind of skill set, and they started to break into other people’s universes to steal what they could. Case in point.

      My current enemy was the Paracs.

      A nasty bunch. Their entire point was to break into any universe they could, gain as much technology and as many slaves as possible, then head home with them.

      Their own civilization now spanned their entire universe. It sounded impressive until you realized that there was a civilization that spanned every single universe. That had seeded every single corner of the multiverse, in fact. The Higher-Ups. But that was a story for another time.

      I had to move. I could only do that, because the girl with the bright brown eyes had saved me.

      I said girl. She was probably a woman. It was really hard to tell. She was so covered in muck and she wore such dirty, large clothes that she looked like a defiant chunk of ore that had rolled down a mountainside after a lightning attack.

      I said lightning attack, because the lightning was still trapped in her eyes.

      She’d saved me. She was good. She could even make a good Guardian.

      But if I wanted to be a good Guardian, I had to move. Had to stop the Paracs before they started stealing folks for slaves.

      There was a shudder beneath my feet. My sophisticated Guardian armor told me that another Parac ship had arrived. They were porting in using a version of universal gates. The Guardians used the same technology to punch through multiversal space into any universe they wanted.

      The technology wasn’t perfect, though. The Underside had gear that could stop it. They could throw something called a veil around a universe – then no one would be able to get in.

      But the Paracs weren’t that sophisticated.

      It kind of felt strange fighting them while knowing that our real enemy, the Underside, was still out there. Waiting. But the Underside never waited for long.

      Move fast. I do not have a good feeling about this, my direct superior said as he appeared in a transport beam only several meters ahead. He was Fastion.

      He was the second-in-command of Commander Frost. And who was she? A legendary Guardian and the leader of my station.

      She wasn’t here personally. Though she did go out on missions. Only when the entire multiverse was at stake, though.

      And this was just a small mission. This was just—

      The floor buckled. But not for long.

      Fastion leaned down, placed his hand on the floor, and called to his Peacekeeper energy. Peacekeepers were symbiotic, energetic beings that inhabited Guardians. They gave Guardians access to their armor, to raw power, and to information. Peacekeepers in many ways were Guardians. Guardians were just hosts.

      I’d be nothing without my own Peacekeeper.

      He rose now. And yeah, he was a he.

      I called him William.

      Not the most Peacekeeper-like name. But it was the name of a teddy bear I’d once had.

      I’d punched up. A long time ago now. I couldn’t really remember it. I couldn’t even tell you that much about my old civilization. I could just tell you this. I’d always been driven. Driven to head forward, driven to save, driven to do whatever I could.

      It was often what others couldn’t.

      Fastion turned. Stabilize the station.

      Why?

      Because I fear this is just the tip of the Parac invasion. I think there’s something here they want. Stabilize the station.

      Aye, sir. I snapped a salute and spun.

      I headed back down the same section of

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