Shattered Destiny: A Galactic Adventure, Episode One by Odette C. Bell Page B

immediately in front of us, or relying on his
intuition alone.
    When he eventually waved me forward, I was
so goddamn tense, if so much as a moat of dust landed on my
shoulder, I would have cracked.
    There was something about this place,
something eerily familiar.
    It spoke to some long lost memory buried
deep in my heart. The sensation was so intense, it almost felt as
if I’d have a heart attack.
    All I could hear – all I was aware of
other than the awful sensations pulsing through my body – was the
prince’s slow, deliberate footfall.
    W e continued down what looked like a
corridor.
    I had no idea what the
building had
been before.
    Now it was nothing more than an
interconnected set of tunnels. All that remained was
stone.
    If I had to guess, the building had
belonged to an unsophisticated race. As far as I could tell, the
stone had simply been mined from the ground. There were no metal
struts, no circuits poking out of the floor – nothing to suggest
this building had ever been more than a roof over somebody’s
head.
    So why the hell was the prince being so
cautious? Why was he so fascinated by this place? Because I could
tell he was fascinated. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I
could imagine it. Almost in perfect detail. Don’t ask me how, but
his visage – those crystalline purple eyes offset by that ice-white
hair – I could see it perfectly in my mind’s eye as if someone had
burnt it onto my retinas.
    I blinked several times, but I could not
dislodge it.
    We walked through several puddles, dank
brown and green, filled with a mixture of dead leaves and a
particularly virulent kind of moss.
    Plants had reclaimed most of the building,
large vines descending from gaps in the ceiling, twisting down the
walls, and pushing through cracks in the floor.
    The curiosity got the better of me, and I
took a forced step forward, drawing alongside the prince. Before I
could crack my lips open and ask him what the hell we were looking
for, he thrust out an arm and I walked right into it.
    “What the —”
I began.
    He slowly twisted his head and he stared
at me. “I told you, you remain one step behind.”
    There was something about his tone.
Something so goddamn officious. It spoke of his royal heritage. Of
a man who’d been brought up to believe he was better than
absolutely everyone else around him.
    I was goddamn sure he couldn’t
see my expression under my helmet, but maybe he could read my mind,
because he tilted his head to the side even further.
“ I've tolerated your insubordination thus far,
soldier. I will not tolerate it further. You remain a step behind
me at all times.”
    I waited for him to add that that was where
I belonged.
    He didn’t. Instead he turned around with a
stiff movement and motioned me forward with a dismissive flick of
his hand.
    Despite the fact his warning was still
ringing in my ears, it took me a full 10 seconds before I could
force my body to follow his.
    We continued down the dirty plant-covered
corridor until we found a set of stairs.
    The prince cautiously walked down them,
his fist raised the entire time.
    We pressed forward for God knows how many
minutes.
    Eventually my anger at the way the prince
was treating me abated, and in its place, fear churned in my
gut.
    Finally we reached what appeared to be a
storage room of some description.
    The prince told me to stay by the door.
And there I waited as he methodically checked through the room,
waving his armored hand over old, broken, contorted metal
boxes.
    Though I couldn’t see them in full, I could
tell they were worn with more than age.
    They looked like they’d been blown apart
by explosives. Powerful explosives. The metal wasn’t just
contorted, it had obviously melted and reformed.
    The prince didn’t say a single frigging
word as he worked methodically. Nor did he pay a scrap of attention
to me. It wasn’t until he’d checked the room so thoroughly it was
like he was looking for a needle in a haystack, that