A journalist who doesn't believe in destiny — until it believes in her.
Fated Stars Book 1
On the planet Trevort, where twin suns rise over deep oceans and everyone carries a little metal where bone used to be, journalist Coreni Mekkans is very good at finding things people don't want found.
She's less prepared for what finds her.
A word she doesn't know. A Fraluma warrior who won't explain why he saved her life. A hidden city beneath the waves, and a prophecy that says she's the reason it exists. And somewhere underneath it all, the truth about who she really is — and what her body has been carrying since before she was born.
Below the Current is a story about a woman who wanted a story and got a destiny instead. About heritage hidden in blood. About trust built in the dark. And about the moment you stop running from what you are and decide to be it anyway.
series order
Fated Stars
- Below the Current
- Beneath the Storm
- Beyond the Black
excerpt
The loading dock smelled like salt water and bad decisions.
Coreni Mekkans had made the latter a professional habit over the years, so she crouched behind a cargo container and told herself this was fine. This was normal. This was exactly the kind of thing she did for a living.
The water sloshed against the plasteele platform in irregular surges, and every few waves found the gap between her boots and her trousers. Her feet had stopped feeling like feet twenty minutes ago. Now they felt like two cold facts she was choosing to ignore.
Amir had better be right about this.
She shifted carefully, keeping her head below the lip of the container. Her vid-recorder sat propped against the base of it, aimed at the alley mouth where the Chancellor and Senator Willa would appear — if her informant hadn't lied to her, which he had done before, twice, and survived both times only because he occasionally came through spectacularly on the third attempt.
Tonight was supposed to be the third attempt.
She pressed two fingers on the fake cybernetic implant above her left eye, an old habit. The metal was cold and smooth and slightly too perfect — no seam irregularities, no micro-scarring at the edges the way real implants always had. Anyone who looked closely would know. Nobody ever looked closely. People saw the implant and stopped looking, which was the entire point.
On a world where everyone had cybernetic parts, not having them stuck out too much.
Not a great thing, especially when she was trying to be incognito.
Coreni had never been able to wear real ones. Her body rejected the alloys in ways that no physician had ever satisfactorily explained, and she had long since stopped asking.
Her father had theories. She had a collection of cosmetic-grade fakes and a practiced expression that said nothing unusual here and between the two of them she'd gotten this far without anyone asking the wrong questions.
Twenty-six years old and fully functional. Some days that felt like an achievement. Other days, it just felt like luck.
Today might be luck.
The alley door between the two buildings opened.
She stilled completely — breath, movement, the cold — and pressed her thumb to the recorder's remote on her belt. The resolution increased with a soft haptic pulse she felt rather than heard.
Chancellor Migana stepped onto the dock first. Even at distance, even in bad light, the man radiated a specific quality of authority that Coreni had spent three years learning to be suspicious of. Senator Willa came after, shoulders high, head turning side to side like a man who expected the walls to start closing in.
Good instincts, Senator.
This wasn’t just a meeting of friends.
"I don't know about this, Migana." Willa's voice carried across the water, thin and uncertain.
"It will work." The Chancellor's voice did not carry so much as arrive, patient and absolute. "All of the previous attempts have been studied. This time, we know what went wrong."
Coreni tracked them through the recorder's display on her belt screen. They moved toward their individual transports. She needed thirty more seconds. Twenty. Just keep talking, you pompous jerks.
Then she saw the Fraluma appear.
They had been there the whole time.
Of course they were.
That was the thing about the Fraluma that official reports never quite captured — they didn't emerge from shadows, they simply were the shadows, until the moment they chose not to be. Two of them flanked the Chancellor, their silhouettes enormous and absolutely still, cloaks hanging in the wet wind without seeming to move at all.
Coreni's recorder kept running. Her lungs did not.
Do not move. Do not breathe. You are a crate. You are part of the dock. You have always been here.
"When we find the women," the Chancellor said, glancing at one of the Fraluma with a small nod, "we will find the key. That I promise you, Senator."
Women. She logged it the way she logged everything — fast, flat, filed for later when she could afford to think. What women? Which women? Why?
Then the wave hit.
It came from nowhere, or from the sea, which was the same thing. A full cold slap of water across her back that soaked her to the skin in one instant and drove the air from her chest in the next.
The sound she made was small and involuntary and completely unavoidable.
Even as she dropped flat against the plasteele and pressed her cheek to the cold dock surface, that it had been heard.
The dock went quiet.
The kind of quiet that isn't silence. The kind that means something very large is paying attention.
Panic started to overtake her.
Focus.
She stared at the base of the cargo container and thought about her father, which was what she always did when things went genuinely wrong. Not in a dramatic way. Just — his face. The particular expression he made when she called him late. The way he always answered anyway.
Hi Dad. I'm about to be killed by a Fraluma. I wanted you to know I was thinking of you.
He was all she had in the galaxy, and she was all he had. Now he was going to be alone.
She felt like an idiot. She was going to blame the water and Amir. Oh, she was going to haunt him for the rest of eternity.
Footsteps. Not heavy — the Fraluma didn't move heavily, which was somehow worse. Light and fast and absolutely certain of where they were going.
The container above her shuddered as something landed on it. Correction, someone.
Here it comes.
She made herself look up.
He was crouched on the edge of the container, looking down at her. His cloak pooled around him. His face was in shadow except for his eyes, which were not — blue-green and very clear and completely focused on her, the way things that were built to find and eliminate targets focused on targets.
She had one thought left, which was not particularly useful: He's young.
He didn't move.
She didn't move.
The wind moved between them, and the water moved beneath them, and the rest of the dock held its breath.
Something happened in his face. She couldn't name it. It passed through his expression the way weather passed — present for a moment, then gone, leaving the landscape altered in some small way she couldn't immediately account for. He raised his head and looked toward the other Fraluma.
She heard the Chancellor's voice, distant now: "What is it?"
The Fraluma above her dropped from the container in a single fluid motion, landing on the platform beside her without a sound — not the sound of boots on plasteele, not the sound of a cloak settling, nothing — and crouched there for one moment at her eye level, close enough that she could see the texture of the fabric at his shoulder.
Then he stood and walked back toward the Chancellor, each step as quiet as the last.
Words she couldn’t quite make out over the water’s noise. The waves quieted just enough so she could make out a tiny bit.
An urchin, she pieced together from the response. Just an urchin.
The words started to process.
Wait. Did he just hide her?
She lay on the platform and listened to the transports leave. She didn’t move, didn’t breath, her body freezing, and her fingers turning blue.
If she lost a finger…
She counted her own heartbeats until she ran out of patience for counting.
It seemed like a long time, but it probably really wasn’t that long, she finally convinced herself it was save to up and get out of there.
She got what she needed. She hoped, anyway. There was a story here, and she was determined to find it. Frozen fingers be damned.
She pushed herself up from the plasteele, palms flat against the cold deck, finally taking a breath.
Hands came from behind.
One clamped over her mouth. One locked her left arm against her body. She felt the press of metal implants against her cheek — low-grade, rough-edged, the kind that came from places that didn't ask questions — and the breath of someone who had been waiting.
Waiting. Drinking. And looking for a target.
Damn.
Damn.
Damn!
"What're you doin' out here all alone?" he said softly, and the softness was worse than shouting.
Her blaster was on her right hip, locked. She needed her left hand free. She didn't have her left hand free. She tried spinning, tried pulling, felt his grip adjust and tighten. He knew how to hold someone. He'd done this before.
Stop thinking about that. Think about what you have.
She had her right arm, mostly. She swung it back hard and low.
He folded.
Not enough.
His grip broke just slightly and she wrenched away and almost made it two steps before he caught her again — grabbed her arm, swung her around like she weighed nothing.
She hit the container with the full momentum behind her. Metal clattered against the ground.
The breath left her body.
The dock tilted.
She grabbed the container edge and told herself she was not going to pass out on a loading dock in wet clothes and that was absolutely final.
She reached for the weapon she carried.
It was gone.
She looked at her attacker.
He had her blaster.
She watched him raise it.
Everything slowed down.
Breathe.
The shadow fell across him from above.
The sound was brief. The outcome was not complicated.
Her attacker dropped, unconscious on the dock before Coreni had fully registered what had happened.
The figure who had produced that outcome straightened, and turned toward her.
The cloak and the eyes proved her savior was the same Fraluma who had decided not to kill her.
Several questions raised in her mind. Yet, when she opened her mouth, nothing happened.
He stepped toward her, and his expression was different now — neutral but something underneath it. Like he knew a secret. He reached out and his hands were very gentle when he touched her shoulders.
"It is time to take you away from here, Cremmilek," he said quietly.
She didn't know that word. She didn't know why it hit her the way it did — like something she'd forgotten she'd been waiting to hear. A door opening in a wall she hadn't known was there.
The cold, the wet, the adrenalin all slammed into her at the same time, overwhelming her system.
She registered that he still held onto her as the darkness overtook her.
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