I’m working on a side project – urban fantasy set in space, heavy on the romance and betrayal. With a kick-ass female lead, magic, and lots of mayhem. So, pretty typical for me. My priority is Amplifier 4, but once the space opera has more … shape, I will likely start releasing it in weekly installments. Just for fun. Then it will be properly edited, proofed, formatted, and made available for sale. So … hopefully, the typos and grammatical errors won’t impede the read for now. FYI, for my American readers, deliberately utilized Canadian spellings and measurements abound.

Energy radiated through my bones, disintegrating flesh and compressing my very essence, flinging me forward through reality, then reforming me. Reassembling me.

But a tiny bit altered. Minutely different from who I’d been. On a molecular level.

Not a copy, exactly.

Still me. But reordered.

Close enough that our shoulders almost brushed, Ryanne and Trand appeared on either side of me. My front foot hit the metal landing pad of the Anaxa space station. The solid contact was momentarily disconcerting even as I took another step, clearing the gateway. My mind lagged a beat behind.

I blinked.

Five curved stairs descended to the upper causeway. The station orbited all of Vertex, but the gateway was exclusive to the province of Tor’valla. A shimmering energy barrier ran beneath the causeway — felt more than seen. By me, at least — sealing the upper section of the docks from the loading bays.

Directly below, a sleek ship baring the emblem of Pura swooped through the transparent barrier that sealed the entire dock from outer space, landing on an empty pad. Pura, a water-based planet, was only a single gate jump from Vertex. The Meridian system contained one inhabitable planet — Vertex — multiple minding colonies, and one naturally occurring gate.

Not that I’d ever been off world. Other than currently being suspended in the space above the planet, but that didn’t count. I really wouldn’t be on the space station now, if I’d asked permission from my regent, aka my brother Dar, or the elders.

The causeway led to a double set of interior doors that opened onto the seventeenth level of the marketplace. The doors were composed of two dark grey metal panels with sealing glyphs set at all four corners. The glyphs were more for show than for anything practical. The doors were carved in an exquisitely detailed rendering of the province of Tor’valla.

 The gateway’s energy — power pulled from the planet itself — clung to me, lightly coating my ankle-length navy cloak as well as the exposed pale skin of my neck, face, and lower arms. The residual stirred my own power, coaxing it to come out and play.

I ignored the impulse. As I did every time I travelled by gateway, to the orbital space station and otherwise. “Not right now,” I whispered. The energy settled, then abated reluctantly.

Not that I’d mention the reluctant feeling to anyone. I already had a reputation for being slightly … impetuous. Well, that was the kindest way I’d ever had it put to me. Getting caught talking to the raw power that radiated from the planet — and therefore through all of Vertex’s inhabitants in varying degrees — wouldn’t help.

My bulwark glanced at me, slightly disconcerted. “Your Highness?”

Trand, the newer of my two permanent guards, was clad in the deep green flexible armour of the castle guard. He was completely unshakable in any situation that required him throwing himself between me and danger. But somehow he hadn’t gotten used to me talking out loud, seemingly to nothing. Yet. Another month or two and he’d be blissfully ignoring me. Trand most often spoke in a low deep rumble, with consideration given to each word. But he’d broken up a bar fight with a few bellowed commands the first week I’d known him. Granted, it had taken him over two hours to track Ryanne and me to the bar, so he’d presumably been pissed off before he’d even walked in the door.

“Trea,” I said, correcting him for the umpteenth time.

He grunted noncommittally, then returned his attention to the causeway.

I took another couple of steps, completely clearing the landing pad but pausing at the top of the stairs. If I moved any farther before she had a chance to assess the immediate area for threats, I’d trigger my venin into poisoning everyone in a three meter radius.

Nothing deadly, of course. But Ryanne considered forceful and immediate incapacitation a legitimate first response. To just about any situation that even remotely bothered her.

And yes, I’d learned that the hard way.

Multiple times.

Admittedly, my impetuous reputation had also been earned in an exceedingly similar way, and at the exact same time. Unfortunately. Though the brunt of that usually fell on the person or people attempting to kidnap or kill me.

Cloaked in black from hair, to lips, to fingertips, to steel toed boots, Ryanne stepped forward to cast her sharp, purple-eyed gaze over the causeway and into the docks where attendants were unloading supplies from a large hover cart into a cargo ship destined for Or’gin on Vertex. The insignia of the Priestess was spray painted on the side of the battered, but sturdy-looking ship. The paint had been too wet when applied because, even from this far above, the drip pattern looked like eyelashes. And that was creepy, even on a scale that factored in the Priestess.

Nearer the main doors, passengers were loading into a transport shuttle. The gateway could be redirected to various locations around the province of Tor’valla, but most of our people accessed the station via transport shuttle. As did the denizens of the smaller provinces.

I fortified my mental shields.

Away from the clingy energy of the gateway, I could feel the press of the half-dozen or so minds currently occupying the causeway. People heading into the marketplace or waiting for transport back to the planet. If I shifted my attention to the docks below — the energy barrier beneath me barely impeding my reach — dozens upon dozens of minds brushed against my senses.

I normally kept my telepathic abilities tightly contained, but passing through the energy of the gate wore at my mental constructs. Not at all ironically, over the centuries that the Torval bloodline had reigned, more than one royal had been murdered within reach of a gateway.

My brother Dar hadn’t travelled to the station by gateway for easily twenty years. Though I knew he moved around the province via the ancient gates, mostly when he wasn’t supposed to be away from the castle. As the sole — viable — heir, the split second of vulnerability on either side of the transport had been deemed too easily exploited by our father.

I only traveled by gateway. My power was too unpredictable around technology. Even ships built by our metal mages, using only components sourced from the planet, were too risky.

I knew. I’d crashed a few myself.

Yes. Impetuous. I’d more than earned the label.

Well, before my father died, at least.

But now everything was different.