Night Song (The Guild Wars Book 9) by Mark Wandrey (best ereader under 100 .txt) 📕

upward and let go to fly almost straight up into the corridor. The small projections gave her exactly enough leverage to continue her momentum, and she spun and pushed and ricocheted without thinking about it.

Small howls of appreciation followed her. In the utter joy of motion, she forgot she might have a destination. Barely in time, she caught a flicker of motion, and slowed herself with two hands and a solid boot in the wall.

An arm—a Zuul arm—thrust out again from an opening above, and she aimed for it without question. A hand clasped her arm, and another came to meet it, pulling her out of the conduit and passing her fully into the new hall.

“Well done, Sonya!” one of the five Zuul in the hall called, and they snapped their jaws in approval.

Not Earth pup? She’d take it.

She watched with interest as the lead Zuul darted into and out of the opening of the conduit. A bit like a dance—signaling the stopping point, getting out of the way, and then throwing out an anchor for the moving bodies to use.

“Conduit’s just for fun and exercise when we’re in zero G for a while,” a voice behind her said.

She turned her head, missing Rex’s arrival, taking in the large white and brown Zuul who’d spoken. Roughly the same size as Kuru, he had broader shoulders and deep scars across his muzzle and neck where no fur grew. His golden eyes regarded her with amusement, and she turned her head back to watch Drake bounce in. Drake missed the arm and sailed through, looking too delighted for it to have been an accident.

“That makes sense. I thought it wasn’t as practical as a lift.”

“Pups need a way to bleed off energy in hyperspace, and all of us need to stay in shape for what waits on the other side of a gate.”

“Are they all over the ship?”

“There are a few. They have different patterns and obstacles. You seemed well suited to this one.”

“It’s a little like a wraparound rock wall,” she said, before realizing he’d have no idea what that was. Sonya shrugged and glanced at him again. “Climbing you can do on Earth. We used to race.”

“Perhaps your Earth raising was not so different after all. Did you race for prey or prizes?”

“You chase prey on board?”

His laugh rumbled low in his chest. “My answer is dependent upon your definition of prey. The gym is this way,” he gestured behind them, “if you’d still like to join?”

Kuru landed last, with a neat flip that received a round of thrumming approval. She wondered if that ranked higher or lower than the jaw snap, or her siblings’ small howls. Probably higher, she acknowledged (if only to herself). The flip had been pretty good.

“That didn’t suck,” Drake said, shouldering against Sonya while regarding the other large Zuul. “You our sparring buddy?”

“You have rounds to go before you face me, Drake.” He dropped his scarred jaw slightly, and gestured them ahead.

“Everyone here is Insho’Ze?” Shadow asked behind them, though the now-crowded corridor filled with sound that made it hard to hear the answer.

Sonya’s translator gave up, with at least eight different conversations happening around her, and so she looked at Drake, knocking his shoulder back with hers.

“Make up for surfing?”

“Nothing makes up for surfing.” His voice had less snap to it than usual. “But I can do some conduit runs for awhile without getting bored. Kuru’s flip was ok.”

“Your speed was more impressive.” She preferred to needle Drake rather than offer him praise, but the latter seemed more fitting in the moment.

“Right?” He grinned, ignoring the chuff of either agreement or amusement from the large Zuul just behind them. “You took to it right away. Ripper, Sun.”

“Piece of piss,” she replied, and laughed with both her brother and the Zuul whose name she didn’t know yet.

A door opened ahead, a new swell of noise meeting the chatter of the hall, and Sonya might have paused to take in the space if there weren’t ten Zuul behind her. She’d never been in a large group of her own people before, and though she didn’t know the language, it both soothed her and sent her nerves jangling. She couldn’t make sense of the dissonance, so she shoved it away.

Tens of Zuul spun around a room nearly as enormous as the CASPer bay. Crates had been secured at various heights to provide cover and redirection points. Other Zuul lingered around the edges, banging fists against the wall or shouting encouragement to their fellows. A huge pipe went down the center of the room. Judging by the insulation, it was a fuel line, or maybe one of the main power pathways.

Unlike the conduit, Sonya couldn’t instinctively make sense of the rules or teams. It seemed more organized than a zero G melee, but she couldn’t have even said why she thought that. There were two balls involved, not just one. It appeared a team could only have one of the two balls in hand at a time, but could deflect the other or knock it around with precision, if possible.

There were niches and cubbyholes all throughout the space. A light would light behind one, seemingly randomly, and small howls indicated a ‘point’ for putting the ball into a lighted cubby, while nothing came of hitting an unlighted one. Strangely, it seemed to be more important to get the other team’s ball in a lighted cubby, possibly because the other Zuul weren’t grabbing it, only hitting to deflect it. There was a lot of hitting, blocking, and general trashtalk going on—that much was clear even without the translator’s help.

Oh, the boys back in Oz would love this game.

As if all that weren’t enough, there appeared to be a system for subsituting players, though she had no idea how