The Rifts of Psyche by Kyle West (popular e readers txt) 📗

her unblocking him had been intentional. It was her way of showing good faith, so it was on him to match that.

Lucian watched her from across the fire. “What do these wyverns look like? I found a steaming pile of crap up the trail, so they must be big.”

That got her attention. “Quite early for them to be active, but it’s not unheard of. They have big wings, big teeth, big claws. Trust me. You’ll know one when you see it, and there’s a good chance it’ll be the last thing you see altogether.”

“Lovely.”

She watched him. This was Lucian’s first real conversation in months. Did people always stare like that when they talked? Perhaps they did, and he had just forgotten.

“Is there something in my teeth?”

She broke into a smile that seemed a bit too wide. “What do you mean?”

Maybe that idiom didn’t exist on this world. “You’re staring.”

“I know,” she said. “Just sizing you up. If you lost that beard and got some meat on you, you might even be passable.”

Passable? What was she getting on about? Lucian decided that comment was best ignored. Her poking him just showed how little she thought of him as a threat. That alone was humbling.

He cleared his throat. He had to admit she was a good-looking woman, but besides their obvious differences, that skin of hers freaked him out a little. She claimed to have her mind still, but of course, she could just be saying that. Normally, fraying began its work by rotting skin and organs before spreading to the brain itself. It was hard to tell whether her eccentricity was due to the fraying, or from living alone. And why did she live alone, for that matter?

Whatever the case, he couldn’t ever forget that she had manhandled him like a child. Or rather, woman-handled. Whatever happened, he needed to avoid going toe-to-toe with her.

“Quite the conversationalist,” she observed. “Who are you? Where are you from? How’d you come to be here?”

Lucian warmed his hands a moment, considering his response while ignoring her jibe. “My name is Lucian. I’m from Earth. I . . . attended the Volsung Academy and failed out. That’s why I’m here.”

“Volsung,” she said. “Never been there.” She gave a short, somewhat bitter laugh. “Then again, I’ve never been anywhere but Psyche.”

He was right about her being a native. “What’s your story, then? And your name?”

“I’m Serah. Serah Ocano, if you care to know my family name.” She looked him over. “You’re the first off-worlder I’ve seen in a long time.”

“Are there a lot of Psyche natives?”

“Well, there was a colony here before the Mage War. And the other Worlds have been sending their own trash here for a while, along with the mages. And of course, people have needs, and those needs make more people. Not a lot of folks live here in the Riftlands, but go to the Golden Vale in Dara and you’ll find cities so big they’ll make your eyes pop out.” She shrugged. “Or so they say. Never been there myself. But they say Dara has a population of one million.”

That had to be an exaggeration, but Lucian didn’t want to openly disagree with her.

“My mother and father were both mages,” Serah went on. “I guess that’s where I got it from.”

What were the odds of that? Being a mage was supposed to be random, or from the Manifold, or whatever one wanted to call it.

“Why’re you looking at me like I’m strange?” she asked.

“It’s nothing. I’ve just always been told genetics had nothing to do with magical ability.”

“Genetics?”

Maybe that was a word she didn’t know, either. “The bloodline. You said your parents were mages, and that’s the reason you’re one, too.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s . . . different from what I’ve been told.”

“You’ve been told wrong. Children of mages aren’t always mages, but they are more likely to be.”

“And that’s . . . common knowledge here?”

She gave a lopsided smile. “What, they don’t let mages couple off-world?”

Lucian was about to protest, before he realized that they didn’t. Well, the Volsung Academy didn’t, at least. Could that be the reason? If the League didn’t want extra mages on their hands, they would certainly discourage mages coupling. Or force sterilize them, but that wasn’t a practice as far as Lucian knew.

There was something more to it than that. Vera herself had acknowledged magical ability had nothing to do with genetics. There was a missing component, but it wasn’t worth arguing about.

Of course, if Serah knew something that everyone else outside Psyche didn’t, that knowledge would be useless. No one left this world.

“I guess you know a lot about surviving here, Serah.”

“You don’t live to be my age without that.”

“You can’t be that old, though. You seem close to my age.”

“About that. Maybe a bit older. Fifteen or sixteen.”

Lucian looked at her blankly. There was no way she was that young.

“Psyche years,” she said. “Sorry. We don’t go by the Earther calendar here, but I understand the years are shorter there. I’m not even sure what I’d be in that. Twenty-five or twenty-six, I guess.”

“And you really live on your own?” He watched carefully for her reaction.

She poked the fire with a stick, her expression unchanging. “No. I’ve got a friend in the back of the cave there. He’s asleep, so no need to worry about him. He’s got the fraying bad, but it makes him melancholy. He’s not a Burner.”

“A Burner?”

“Wow, you really do know nothing. That’s what we call the ones who go crazy. They burn up all their ether, trying to kill everyone and everything. Until they kill themselves, at least. That’s maybe a quarter of frays. The rest just sort of . . . lose themselves, I guess. Slip through the cracks of sanity.” She sighed sadly. “That’s Ramore right there.”

“Ramore’s your friend’s name?”

She nodded. “I know, it’s a weird name. Don’t really know where it comes from. Me and him go way back. Both exiles from the Deeprift villages. I’m from Kiro,