[LEGACY VERSION] The Emperor of Time (Book 1 - The Kaireyeh Chronicles)

Chapter 16.5 - Iuri

Franca fired three more rounds into the crowd. The gang members yelped, swore, and began a round of angry protests.

Iuri shook feeling back into his arm and reached for the knife a few inches away. He pushed up, but without turning, Franca spread her fingers for his attention, then gave the Armada hand-code for "wait." She stood braced in a firing position, pistol poised to fire again into the mob. Close-cropped gray hair spiked in odd angles, dripping water onto the floor. She was wearing a robe.

Franca had been in the shower. Goddess of the Void, he'd come while she'd been in the shower.

"He's my guest!" Franca bellowed. "Hospitality, you crats. There are rules of hospitality!"

"He's a top man!" someone shouted.

"Doesn't matter," Franca said.

"He cut me!" shouted the woman Iuri had captured. "Should kill him!"

Another man yelled, "Fran, just leave us his coat!"

Franca turned. "Give me your coat."

Iuri stared. After fighting for his life, the request seemed ludicrous.

Franca snapped her fingers. "Your coat, Iuri. Now."

Outside, the gang jeered. Iuri thrust the knife into his belt and stripped out of his stolen coat.

"And his shoes!" someone called.

"No," Franca said. "I keep the shoes for the trouble you all gave me." She tossed the coat out the door, and the gang fell on it like a pack of dogs on table scraps. "Now get! I don't want to see you here tonight!"

She slammed the door. The plastic made a dull thwunk, vibrating around the edges.

Franca methodically threw over four deadbolts. Not that any of them would have stopped an entire gang determined to enter.

"They're mostly harmless," she said, and turned farther into the house.

Iuri blinked in the dimmed light of the front room, then shoved himself up and followed. In the next room, mismatched counters lined one wall, and an ancient looking icebox chugged away in one corner. Franca filled a glass of water from the tap and handed it to him.

At the prospect of a drink, thirst flamed in his throat. Iuri raised the glass to his lips--then stopped.

"It's filtered," Franca said. "And you haven't had anything to drink for hours from the look of you." She set her pistol on a stained table and pulled out two chairs. "Sit before you fall."

Iuri warily took the seat across from her. He restrained himself from draining the glass she'd given him in one go, he didn't need the added queasiness of a stomach sloshing with water.

Here, in the hard yellow light of the kitchen lamps, he saw lines etched across Franca's face that weren't just from age. She was a few years older than him, but she looked twenty more.

He had put her here. His testimony at her trial sealed her conviction all those years ago. True, he had fought with Wycliffe to get her sentence commuted from execution to exile to the streets, but this was no place for Admiral Franca de Leoni. She'd been his friend.

Iuri gathered a breath and leaned forward. "Franca, I'm sorry--"

"I told you never to come here."

He sat back. He'd come to the streets fifteen years ago, a few months after her exile, to tell her they'd caught the real Resistance mole. She would be exonerated. She could come back to the Armada. Franca had stared at him across a table a lot like this one and told him to go Void himself.