#atticus javan

    You got to be kidding me.

    There were days Bite wished he'd stuck with surveying asteroids and left the treasure hunting to the movies. The movies did it better: you always got the last word, and when you nearly died you woke up in a medbay surrounded by relieved, exultant faces. You weren't robbed at a toll-road trap and dumped face-down in a drainage sewer after the pack of vultures picked over your unconscious body for anything they could sell. He could almost hear Verin's mocking voice in the back of his head: there's a reason they don't make bucks like you hunters, Yazarakh.

    The big draken stared up through the sewer grate. The processing warehouse was dimly lit and empty, but he could just make out the ceiling tiles overhead. They were all the same size. That was good. That helped. He had drawn the rune by sight alone a thousand times, but without his pistol, there wasn't any room to get sloppy. The last thing he needed was to escape from a trash gutter just to translocate half his body into a duracrete slab.

    Bite was still shaking the water out of his velvet when the human found him. He heard the footsteps before the voice -- there's a reason they don't make bucks like you hunters, Azarakh -- but it was still too late. He froze where he stood, stripped to the waist, barefoot and reeking like sewer water. Little sparks of magically-induced electricity were still popping in the air around him. Two of his claws were broken. There was trash in his quills.

   "I'm going to need you to stop right there and show me your hands," the voice began, "if you would in fact be so kind."

   At first he complied, slowly raising both clawed hands palm-out in surrender. It bought him time while he looked for an exit. Instead he saw only the human's shadow sprawled out ahead of him. Not so tall, but bulky, armour-clad, and carrying a sword?