SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The number sat over the table a moment, too big to take in all at once.

Mayla’s hand had gone to her belly without her noticing, her face soft and stricken. ”Two thousand,” she said quietly. ”That’s not just a mine. That’s a whole town.”

”It was a town, near enough.” Trafalgar picked his words with more care now, the easy edge gone out of his voice. ”Miners, their families, the people who kept the place running. Most of them never got the chance to understand what was happening before it was already on top of them.”

Cynthia set her cup down, all business. ”Start from the front. How did you even get pulled into it?”

So he told them.

He told them about Moses first, because the man was worth the telling. Valttair’s First Squadron captain, sent along to keep an eye on him, two horns and forty years of hunting the sort of things most people spend their lives praying never to meet. ”Dry as old bread, that one. Barely says three words, and two of them are complaints.” A corner of his mouth moved. ”But he knows his work better than almost anyone I’ve stood beside. I’d have him at my back again without thinking twice.”

”He got on with you, then,” Aubrelle said, reading the tone under it better than the words themselves. ”That’s rarer than you make it sound.”

”He got on with the work. Getting on with me came later, and grudgingly.” He reached for his cup. ”Alfred flew us out. Two days of the old man moaning about his knees and my table manners, and at the end of it, the city.”

He laid it out for them. A hard mining settlement on the far edge of Morgain land, built around one of the richest veins the family held, the sort of place that fed the whole house’s coffers and got looked after about as well as a tool left out in the rain. By the time we came down, the place was half-buried and furious. You could feel it the second you stepped off the ship, all that grief with nowhere to put itself. They’d lost fathers and sons and whole families down that hole, and they wanted someone to answer for it.

”And the monster?” Cynthia again, because Cynthia would sit through none of the scenery to reach the threat.

”Underneath it. Down in the old workings.” He turned the cup slowly in his hand. ”The whole mine had been hollowed out into a nest. Hundreds of the things down there in the dark, and at the center of it, a queen. Apex. Bigger than anything the settlement had the strength to touch.”

Mayla’s breath caught. ”Apex. And you went down there.”

”I went down there.”

”Alone?” Her voice climbed.

”Moses came, once it counted. But the queen was mine to handle.” He said it plainly, without weight, though the plainness said enough on its own. ”It took a while. She was fast, and mean, and grown well past her own strength on top of it. There was a stretch in the middle where it could have gone either way.”

Cynthia’s eyes narrowed. ”Grown past her own strength. That doesn’t happen by accident.”

”No. It doesn’t.” That was the part he’d turned over most of all on the way home, and the part he trusted least to say out loud, even here. ”Someone built that nest. Fed the queen, drove her past what she should ever have been, staked the ground for weeks to keep the whole thing fat. They walked into Morgain territory like there was no border there at all and set the entire disaster ticking.”

Cynthia’s jaw tightened. ”Could someone do that here? To Euclid?”

”They’d find it a great deal harder.” He met her eyes, because it was a fair question and she’d earned a straight answer for it. ”We’re watched better than that mine ever was, and I saw to that myself. But harder and impossible aren’t the same word. It’s something I’ll be turning over for a while.”

The table went quiet.

Mayla broke it first, her voice gone small. ”All those people. Because someone wanted to make a point.”

”Because someone wanted something, and two thousand miners were between them and getting it.” He didn’t soften it for her, because she’d never once thanked him for softening things. ”That’s the ugly heart of it. They died as a side effect of somebody else’s plan.” He turned his cup a moment. ”I made sure the ones left behind will be looked after. Compensation, out of the family’s own pocket. It won’t hand them back what they lost, but it’s a great deal more than that house would have offered on its own.”

Aubrelle had gone still through all of it, listening the way she listened, not to the words alone but to everything folded up underneath them. ”You said the fight could have gone either way,” she said slowly. ”It didn’t. So what changed?”

Trafalgar leaned back in his chair.

”I broke through,” he said. ”Right in the middle of it. Prime to Ascend.” He lifted a shoulder, as if it were a small thing, which it was anything but. ”Turns out there’s nothing like a monster trying to eat you to talk your core into cooperating.”

Three reactions crossed the table at once. Mayla’s hand pressed flat over her mouth. Cynthia let out a low breath that was half a curse. And Aubrelle, who could not see his face but had felt the change in him from the moment she stepped into the corridor, said nothing at all.

Aubrelle set down what she’d been holding, and a slow, wondering smile touched her mouth.

”Ascend.” She turned the word over as if she were weighing it in her hand. ”It’s astonishing, honestly, the speed you climb at. Most people spend a whole life crawling from one core to the next, and you take them like stairs.” Her head tilted toward him, and something in her shifted, the gentleness sliding aside to make room for the harder thing that lived underneath it. ”Which means it’s my turn, I suppose. To tell the three of you what I’ve really been doing this last month away.”