by Lauren Esker
*You would both be welcome to stay for dinner at the village, if you like.*
"No, we—we have to get going." Claudia glanced at him. "I think Skara really wants to go."
Claudia, on the other hand, had to be spilling nervous can't-talk-about-it on a wavelength even Lyr's careful circumspection about non-telepaths' privacy couldn't block out. Best to get them apart as quickly as possible.
"So yeah, we just ate, and we're going to do our pre-flight checks and then take off," Skara said. "And yes, we are taking our bounty hunter friends, thanks for asking."
*What are you planning to do with the second ship? Will you be taking that too?*
".... um." He was really off his game. He had forgotten there were two ships.
And even more than that, he had forgotten that he'd taken the Discordia to Rhuad the last time. It was a fairly distinctive ship, sure to be recognized if he brought it back into the Rhuad system.
"Yes," he said, extemporizing on the fly. "Yes, we're actually going to be taking the other ship. We'll leave the Discordia here for now."
*Are you sure that's wise?*
"I'm sure I don't have a choice, since we have two ships and one pilot."
*I could come, if you need a second pilot.*
Dammit. That was exactly what he didn't want. "No. We can rendezvous with you and the Discordia later. Feel free to use the ship if you need to. You're already keyed into the controls."
*And where will you be?*
"Here and there," Skara said. "I'll be in touch."
*You're up to something, aren't you?*
"You know me. I'm always up to something."
*Yes,* Lyr said heavily. *I know. Please be careful.*
"Always."
The connection broke. Skara turned to finish cleanup, then noticed Claudia's expression of wary unease. "He's not still listening," he said.
"How can you tell?"
"You can just tell. It's hard to describe. But it doesn't matter anyway, because thanks to Lyr's honor-before-intelligence code, he'd never listen in on a private conversation without permission." Skara winked at her. "Telepathy is wasted on some people."
"I can tell it's a good thing you don't have it." She gave him a sharp look. "And before Lyr interrupted us, we were talking about—"
"Planning," Skara said briskly. Just keep moving—it was the principle that had allowed him to survive everything that he'd been through. Don't stop long enough to think about the past; just keep moving, and tomorrow will take care of itself. "We've got a heist to prepare for. We'd better get to work."
And he tried not to notice how his hands were starting to shake again, as he scraped the cooking things hastily back into a drawer and dumped the dust of leftover spices into the recycler.
Sixteen
Claudia had never dealt with a person as frustrating as Skara, and that included two unpleasant bosses, a half-dozen impossible teachers, and her sister during the time when they'd had to share a bedroom while their parents were getting divorced.
Okay, so she'd never hit Skara in the face with a hairbrush for borrowing her clothes without asking and ripping her favorite skirt.
At least not yet.
But he could infuriate her more than her sister on their very worst days. Every time she thought they were starting to make a genuine connection, he'd duck away. It was like trying to grab hold of a handful of Jello.
And yet, she'd seen enough glimpses of the person underlying Skara's glib exterior to know that his hidden depths went down and down. No matter what excuses he made, this was a man who had been risking his life for months to supply a refugee colony, asking nothing in return. He really did care: about Lyr, about the villagers, about ...
Me?
The way he'd touched her cheek in the meadow—the gentleness and warmth in his eyes ... she wasn't imagining that, damn it. There was more to Skara's feelings for her than mere sexual attraction. A lot more.
Even if now he'd closed himself off again and was bouncing around the ship in hyperactive preparation mode.
"We'll be taking the other ship, because mine is too recognizable," Skara said over his shoulder as he swept handfuls of drugs from the medbay into a suitcase. "Grab your bag, unless you want to leave it here just in case anything happens."
Having already started down the hallway, Claudia turned back. "Happens? What might happen, exactly?"
"Oh, the ship blowing up, that kind of thing."
Screech! Stop. Turn around. "I thought this was going to be mostly talking. Like, the worst that could happen is we get arrested."
"That's the most likely thing that might go wrong, sure," Skara said over the clatter and rustle as he quickly packed medical supplies. Claudia tried not to notice just how many little vials of drugs he was putting in there. "But the Rhuadhi really don't like unwanted visitors, especially ones that come in and steal their symbionts. There's no telling how many new security measures they've put in place since the last time I was there. They might, for example, require all incoming traffic to provide a security code, and shoot them down if they don't."
"You never mentioned this!"
"I thought it was assumed." Skara closed the case and turned around. She had expected glibness, and in fact if he'd been smiling at her, she might have been tempted to slap that smile right off his face. Instead he looked troubled. "I didn't realize you weren't aware of the danger. You can stay here, Claudia. The villagers will treat you well. Lyr will make sure of it."
"Oh yeah, living in a primitive village for the rest of my life," Claudia grumbled, following him down the hallway. "That sounds exactly like the way I want to live out the rest of my days."
"Lyr can take you home in the Discordia. If you ask him, I'm sure he will."
Claudia stopped with her hand on the door of the cabin Skara had given her. Did she want that? She hadn't even realized it was a possibility.
She could go home. No strings attached.
"And you'd let me do that."
"You're not a prisoner," Skara said seriously, turning around. "Anytime you want to leave, you can. I'll even do a run to your planet to drop you off before hitting Rhuad, if you want me to. It just means you'll never get the symbiont out."
Claudia didn't answer. She flexed her hand on the door of her cabin. It was still hard to believe that there was something alien underneath her own skin and bone and sinew. Now that the headaches had faded, she didn't feel any different.
The gold bracelet gleamed on her wrist. With those, she could cut down trees, stun people—even blow a hole through a solid wall, if what Skara had told her about the cuffs' capabilities was true.
Could she really turn her back on all of that: on spaceships, on aliens, on the power that she'd felt coursing through her? How could she go back to a life of digitally touching up bowls of fruit and packages of toilet paper after this?
"Skara—" she began, turning around just as he opened his cabin door. It slid open onto an absolute disaster.
"Yeah?" He sounded hopeful.
"... What in the hell did you do to your room?"
"Uh ... things shifted when we landed," Skara tried to explain, kicking a pair of dirty underwear out of the way of the door.
"Shifted from where to where? How can you even tell?" The room smelled like a boys' dorm room. The rest of the ship was kind of messy, but it hadn't made her think his room was going to be a total sty. "Did your closet explode, or what?"
"I've been busy! Housekeeping wasn't a priority." He pulled a rumpled bag with a lot of dangling buckles out of a pile, unceremoniously dumped its contents onto the bed, and started stuffing things into it. How he could figure out where anything was in all that mess beat the hell out of her.
"You know, I'm not the world's best housekeeper either, but I'm afraid to even step in here." She gingerly poked what looked like some sort of squashed food wrapper with her foot. There was definitely still something in it. "I can't believe I was worried about you judging me for what my
place looked like."
"I was going to suggest you throw your bag in my room if you don't want to take it with you, since Lyr might use the ship while we're gone—"
"Oh, hell no. I'm not running the risk of picking up space bedbugs in your locker room from hell."
"—or leave it there, if it makes you happy."
"Nope," Claudia declared, and marched off to get her bag, which was still in the medbay, kicked under the bed; things had been happening so fast there had been no opportunity to retrieve it or move it to the cabin that was allegedly hers. She marched it back to Skara's room, where he'd just finished packing.
"Gonna bring it?" he asked, shouldering his bag.
"Yes, on the grounds that if I do get blown up I'm not going to care about the whereabouts of a few pairs of underwear—"
"—I was thinking we'd be off the ship before it blows up; I'm just pointing out that losing your stuff is a possibility—"
"—and anyway, I trust you not to get us blown up."
"You ... trust me."
"Not to get us blown up," Claudia stressed. "If there's one thing I've learned about you, Skara, it's that you're awfully good at getting out of tight situations. Plus, I can teleport, remember?"
"Yeah," he said softly, and gave her another long look, then closed the door on the goddawful mess in his room. "So how 'bout you teleport us over to the other ship?"
"We could just walk," she protested.
"You could use the practice."
"Fine, but if you start calling me 'grasshopper' or 'padawan' ..."
"Huh?"
"Never mind. Nerd humor." She visualized the bridge of the other ship and flourished her hand in the air. It was actually easy this time. She and Skara were already stepping through to the other ship's bridge as the afterimage faded in the air.
The more she thought about it, the more it gave her a startling feeling of power that she'd never had before. She'd been captured once because she didn't know what she could do. But now she was learning her own capabilities. She couldn't be cornered, couldn't be trapped. She need never fear walking home alone, or being hassled by a creeper in an elevator, or having some rando grope her on the bus.
Heck, forget buses. Why take public transportation when you could slip off into a handy restroom stall and teleport home?
"Excellent," Skara murmured, running his fingertips across the other ship's controls. "This is a decent ship—it's no Discordia, of course, but what other ship could be? It's a good quality chaser-class vessel. Heavy engines. Expensive." He glanced up at the bulkhead, where there was a large glob of darker gray against the light gray background. "They even patched the hole. Nice of them."
"So we're just going to steal their ship?" Claudia asked, leaning over to look at the control console. It was incomprehensible as the other one had been.
"They tried to steal ours first," Skara pointed out.
"Well, yes, but ... wait, ours?"
Skara flushed, a deep purple tint rising up through the white patterns on his face and blotting them to the color of his skin. "Ours, in the sense we were both on it. Obviously it's mine."
"Yes, of course, I knew that was what you meant," she said, obscurely disappointed.
"Anyway, let's go check on our passengers. I know where Kriff is locked up, unless they moved him, but I'm not sure where Kite put Mrs. Potato Head."
"Her name is Ilyx, you know," Claudia said as she trailed him into the corridor.
"I like your version better." He rapped on the cabin door. "Hey, you still in there?"
There was a sudden scuffling and a burst of profanity.
"Is that really how you want to talk to the only person who can let you out of there?"
"You bastard," Kriff snapped through the door. "Are you going to leave me locked up to starve? Did you kill Ilyx?"
Skara rapped on the door again. "If you behave yourself in there, we'll bring you some food."
"You didn't answer me, you son of a bitch! If you've killed her—"
His voice faded behind them as they went on down the hall.
"I actually feel kind of bad for them," Claudia murmured. "Ilyx surrendered when Kite threatened to kill Kriff." A sudden thread of memory returned to her. "Oh, I know where she is. Kite said she was going to put her in a stasis pod, whatever that is."
"That makes sense." Skara flashed one of those bright, careless grins that shivered in her bones. "It's what I would have done, and Kite knows me well, after all. She knows what my capabilities are. Locking up a shapeshifter in a way they can't get out of is hard."
He opened the doors of the other cabins as they went by. One of them showed clear signs of having a regular occupant (books, clothes, a rumpled bed) but there was no one in it now. One appeared to have been converted into a gym. The fourth seemed to be mostly storage. They went past the ship's tiny galley and its medbay—Skara pausing in the latter to carelessly toss his bag on the floor; Claudia laid hers beside his, unsure what else to do with it. Then she hurried to catch up, only to find him waiting for her before heading down a set of stairs that made Claudia think of the ones on a train, narrow and steep.
Unlike the crowded cargo bay on Skara's ship, this was nearly empty, an echoing dark space that stretched the length of the ship. There were a few lashed-down barrels and crates, and Claudia stopped to take a look at them, while Skara went on ahead.
"Aha!" Skara's triumphant shout echoed through the empty space. "Found her."
Claudia wasn't sure if she wanted to see what he'd found, especially when she got closer and discovered he was standing in front of what she would have taken for a tall, glass-fronted storage locker. A panel of lights beside the glass door glowed soft blue and gold. Claudia steeled herself and took a quick look through the glass, just enough to confirm that Ilyx was indeed inside; she caught a flash of purple skin and closed eyes.
"This is one of the pods from my ship," Skara said, patting it. "Kite must've had it brought over here rather than leaving the prisoner on the Discordia during all the unloading. She was always thorough." He looked wistful.
"Are you going to say goodbye to them?"
He didn't answer. Instead he turned and went back upstairs. Claudia came with him, glad to leave the dark emptiness and the lights glowing over Ilyx's serene, sleeping face.
"Skara—"
"We should feed Kriff. Help me find some food in their joke of a galley."
It was, indeed, much smaller than Skara's, with no cooking facilities, just some cabinets, a small counter, and a sink. They collected some wrapped food bars.
"So if you can just put them on carbonite," Claudia began. "—which, please don't ask me to explain that, it's another reference to a movie on my world, but anyway, why don't you do that with Kriff too?"
"Hmm. Tempting ... but probably not. It's not a bad idea to have one of them mobile in case we need ship codes or the like—"
He broke off on his way out of the galley, and leaned a hand against the wall for support.
Claudia moved without thinking to take his arm, propping him up. He leaned into her for a moment, and it was nice, not just the touch of his body but also his unthinking acceptance of her support. And then he remembered himself and stepped away, detaching his arm gently but firmly. The moment of weakness was put away as if it had never been.
"How are you doing?" she asked quietly. It was easy to forget that he was sick, but in that moment she'd felt him shivering; she'd felt the chill in his hands.
"As good as I need to be," was his unhelpful answer. He rapped on Kriff's door. "Hey! I'm opening this up to feed you. Keep in mind, my shields are powered up and you don't have cuffs. If you make a move, this is the last food you're going to get."
"Fuck you," was Kriff's muffled reply.
Skara shrugged and gave Claudia a wry grin. "Last warning, buddy. Step away from the door and stand against the back wall. Make a move and get stunned."
He gestured Claudia behind him. She saw the green glimmer of
his shields going up, and concentrated on her own. The cuffs warmed against her wrists and a flutter of sensation tingled across her skin, raising the fine hairs on her arms. Just for added insurance, she summoned the mental image of the Discordia's bridge, in case they needed a fast exit. She held it in her mind but didn't go ahead and open the portal.
The door slid open onto a room that had been completely dismantled—the mattress torn off the bed and propped against the wall, the chair dragged under the air vent, panels pulled out and wiring dangling. Kriff was standing against the far wall as ordered, scowling at them. His big hands flexed, but he didn't move their way.
"I see you got out of my knots," Claudia said.
"You need to tie better knots," Kriff growled.
Skara laid the food bars just inside the door. "You've got water in the bathroom, so this should keep you for awhile."
"What are you going to do with me?" Kriff demanded. His stance was tense and hostile, ears flattened. Claudia thought he sounded afraid. "Sell my ship and me with it? Push me out the airlock?"
"Don't tempt me," Skara said, and shut the door.
Claudia blew out a breath and let her shields drop. "What are we going to do with him?"
"One problem at a time, okay?" There was weary resignation in his tone, but then he seemed to make a visible effort to pull himself together, straightening and brightening as he turned toward the bridge. "Let's get off this rock. We have places to go, symbionts to steal."
"Without a plan?" she asked, dizzied by the speed at which everything was moving.
"We'll plan on the trip. Rhuad is a three-jump trip from here, and I'll stop after the second jump to recharge the drive, so we'll be going in with the ability to jump back out. Plenty of time. Strap in."
He dropped into the pilot's seat and plunged his hands into the forearm-engulfing pilot controls. Claudia pulled down the seat harness with a feeling of dazed unreality. They were really doing this. Right now. Her last chance to back out was vanishing quickly in the rear-view mirror.
