Nightchaser

by Amanda Bouchet

  “Tess, maybe I shouldn’t ask, but…you’re sleeping with someone?”

  Surral’s question snapped through me like an electrical shock.

  I gaped at her, my heart pounding. “What?”

  “There’s a bite mark on your neck, and the particular light from my instrument revealed recent…uh…evidence between your legs.”

  My face flushed hot. “No one. Not anymore.” My voice came out rough. To my horror, my eyes brimmed with tears.

  Gently, she asked, “Is he dead?”

  I shook my head and jumped off the table, wanting to run. “No, but he’s a lying fuckhead.”

  “Then I’m assuming it’s not Jax.”

  “What? No!” I gaped at her in horror again.

  She spread her hands, a small, helpless gesture that didn’t seem right coming from her. “I just thought for a moment…that maybe…”

  Surral didn’t finish, but I knew what she was thinking. What she wanted to hear. Gabe.

  I shook my head again. “No one you know.” As it turned out, I hadn’t known him, either.

  I started to move, but Surral’s hand on my shoulder stopped me, lightly pushing me back. My butt hit the examination table, and I crossed my arms over my nearly naked chest. I wouldn’t have gotten very far anyway without any clothes besides my underthings. Probably only to the curtain before I realized and stopped.

  I suddenly felt doubly exposed and looked around for a towel or something to cover myself up with.

  “I know you’re fully vaccinated, but remind me, where are you on contraception?” she asked.

  I wanted to protest the whole conversation, but that was just stupid. Surral taught us what we needed to know as we grew up, and she was the one who’d given me my birth control implant to begin with, when she’d seen how Gabe and I had started looking at each other when we were seventeen.

  “There’s about a year left,” I said.

  “In that case”—she turned back to her cabinet and rummaged around—“you need another ovulation suppressor. I don’t know if I’ll see you again before the year is out, and it’s sometimes less reliable toward the end.” She looked over at me again with the sterile packaging of the tiny implant in her hand. “Unless you want children, of course.”

  I did. Someday. I thought. Unless it was too dangerous. What did I know? I kept getting shot at, and there was a huge bounty on my head. But none of that mattered for the question at hand because…

  “I’m not sleeping with anyone,” I repeated—a little dully to my ears.

  “Maybe not now. Or again. But ten years is a long time. Let’s just replace it, yes?”

  I nodded and let my doctor do her thing. Out with the old. In with the new. I felt the slight pinch as she got the previous implant out from under my skin and then injected me with its minuscule replacement.

  “You can remove it at any time,” she reminded me. “Any qualified nurse can take it out.”

  I nodded again, but right then, I couldn’t imagine my life being stable enough for kids, which made me sad as hell. It wasn’t even stable enough for a boyfriend. A good, fun, steady guy. Not one who lied, and snuck around, and took his blood money from the galaxy’s most powerful and dreaded Dark Watch general.

  “I waited seven years after losing track of Gabe and then slept with the absolute worst person in the whole galaxy,” I blurted out. “Yesterday.”

  Surral arched her brows, taking in my confession. “Why did you choose the worst person?”

  I didn’t even try to hide my dejection. “Because I thought he was something else.” Shade had fooled me. He’d made me believe he was everything he wasn’t.

  “Did he hurt you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She sucked in a sharp breath. I glanced up and found Surral looking like a force of nature, ready to rip Shade up.

  “Not like that,” I hastened to reassure her. “Not physically.”

  I couldn’t help it. I rubbed my aching heart. I didn’t add any details. I didn’t tell her that he’d been about to act on the dead-or-alive bounty he’d been keeping a secret while he earned my trust. And I didn’t explain how he’d been waiting for the right moment to haul me in to the Dark Watch and claim his prize. All that had been next on his agenda—after the beautiful sex.

  She was quiet for a long moment and then finally asked, “No sign of Gabe, then?”

  I would have asked her the same question soon—her or Mareeka. Now I didn’t need to. If he still hadn’t checked in here in nearly a decade, he was either in prison, or dead.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Well, let’s not assume the worst,” she said, peeling off her surgical gloves.

  Her words came out forcefully enough to make me think they were more for her benefit than for mine. At this point, I was pretty resigned to the worst.

  “I lost my cat.” While I was confessing things, there was also that.

  The ache in my chest grew. Poor Bonk. I hoped he got off that platform somehow. If he did, would he go feral on the streets? Fighting for scraps? I had all that food, the fancy litter… He would have had such a good life.

  “I’m sorry, Tess.”

  I bit my lip. “Yeah. Thanks. And I have no clothes,” I added, curling in on myself.

  Surral turned to another cupboard and pulled out a pair of candy-pink scrubs with lime-green trim. I didn’t know where she got these things. It was as though color elves wove them during the night and then delivered them to Starway 8.

  Or maybe her contacts in New India provided them. As a rich and established group with a colorful culture they’d held on to for eons, the Sector 15 planets were strong enough to get away with some snubbing of the Overseer’s drab example.

  I put on the scrubs. They fit like a box, but at least they were almost long enough. My bare feet didn’t bother me. The floors here were never cold.

  “I’d better go,” I said. “There’s a massive price on my head.”

  “Wonderful.” Surral sighed. “Let’s check on Coltin first.”

  I followed her to Coltin’s bed, a mix of hope and dread churning in my gut.

  “It’s working!” I whispered. I could tell. He had slightly more color, and his breathing was less labored.

  I felt his forehead. Still hot—but I hadn’t been expecting an instant miracle.

  Relief settled my stomach but left a jangling impatience in its wake. I wanted him to be better now, really better, before I left. I wanted him to open his eyes, smile at me, and promise to be here the next time I came back.

  I curled my hand against my middle to keep from selfishly waking him up.

  Surral looked at him, and then all around her. “Great Powers, I can practically feel the life coming back into them.”

  She checked Coltin’s vitals and wrote on his chart.

  “Better.” She looked over at me, beaming. “Everything’s better, Tess.”

  I felt like crying again, but they would have been happy tears. I leaned down and lightly kissed Coltin’s forehead.

  “Should I wake him up?” Surral asked. “He’d want to see you.”

  “No. Let him heal.” Rest was more important than a goodbye.

  I wished I had something to leave with him, though. Coltin was the one who should have gotten my precious copy of Tales from the Dark. “Tell him I’ll bring him a book next time. And to work on his math.”

  Surral chuckled. “Maybe coming from you, that’ll work.”

  I figured he’d be charging around the Dark one day. I wanted him to know how to navigate.

  Surral held out her hand, and I slipped mine into hers. She squeezed, and I thought it was a thank-you.

  “To Mareeka,” she said.

  “To Mareeka,” I echoed, and we left sick bay to the sound of the first groggy, weak child waki
ng up.

  She was asking for food, of course.

  Chapter 25

  “Annalee’s nose is on the wrong side of her face.”

  Surral and I stopped, both of us turning to a boy with luminous ebony skin, an abundance of tight black curls, big nut-brown eyes, and what looked like a magician’s wand in his hand. He was wearing a cape and seemed a little panicked.

  “Hi, Tess,” he added hastily.

  I greeted him back. I’d seen him before, but he was a little young for me to know in particular, although he appeared to know me.

  “Excuse me, Thomas?” Surral asked.

  He shifted nervously, his eyes darting around so they wouldn’t really land on either of us. “We were playing—running—and she tripped and hit the wall. She’s crying, and her nose is on the wrong side of her face.”

  Shit. That sounded dire.

  Surral kept her cool, as always. “Lead the way, then, Thomas.”

  He turned to go, but Surral stopped to give me a quick hug before leaving. “Stay safe. Send news when you can.”

  “I will.” I squeezed her back. “Thank you.”

  “No, thank you. You did so much good here today.”

  “It wasn’t only me. I wouldn’t have had anything without my crew.”

  “Then thank them for me, too.” Surral smiled softly in what looked like wonder. “The Mornavail… You can’t imagine the questions going through my head right now.”

  “Believe me, I kind of can,” I said.

  She started to follow the boy, walking backward to still look at me. “Isn’t it strange how you never seem to get sick?” She glanced at my arm. “And I know you didn’t inject yourself.”

  I froze and stared, a surge of blood ratcheting up my pulse. How did she always know everything? It had always been like that. Was she some kind of psychic? Or was I just an open book?

  Surral made a locking motion over her closed lips and then threw away the imaginary key. I trusted her with my life, but I also had no doubt that if there was any blood left over after the kids got what they needed to heal, she’d run every test imaginable on it. She could also take samples off my ruined suit—and would—if there was nothing uncontaminated to use instead. Would she find something that Fiona hadn’t? Something that could be useful to me?

  I’d find out on my next visit, I supposed—assuming I lived.

  Surral turned and hurried after Thomas, who was already well ahead of her. I continued toward the office level alone, accepting hellos and giving them back until I’d cleared the residential floors. It was closing in on dinnertime, and there was no one left upstairs. The cupola was empty and quiet and, to be honest, a little eerie without the usual administrative staff and workday noise.

  Outside the windows was pure Dark, broken only by lone twinkles and the occasional cluster of stars. Sector 8 was pretty empty. There was hardly a habitable planet, and the orphanage orbited a barren moon in an equally barren and totally atmospherically challenged planetary system. It was a spacedock, like Flyhole, only without the brigands, extortion, and endless supply lines. Just like Flyhole, we were close enough to the system’s star to draw power from it and have light, but not close enough to instantly fry under its harmful UV rays. Perfect—with the added help of the protective filters on every window. Right now, we were on the far side of the moon, though, and it was pitch-black outside.

  When I turned down the final corridor to Mareeka’s office, everything changed. Color blazed, and the crowning glory of Sector 8 came into view. The Rafini Nebula painted everything outside the long hallway in swirling sprays of purples, pinks, blues, and golds. It was massive and magnificent, and my breath caught, just as it always did.

  There was something magical about the nebula, maybe even holy. It went beyond being a cloud of dust and gases. I couldn’t get on board with the Sky Mother, but when I saw Rafini’s sprawling burst of color spread out like an arm in space, its hand nearly cradling Starway 8, something washed up through me, a wondrous feeling I couldn’t explain.

  I shivered with it, but it was a warm shiver. It felt like hope.

  My bare footsteps made almost no noise, but Mareeka still called out to me before I rounded her door. “Is that you, Tess?”

  She got up from her desk when I entered the office, smiling at me.

  I moved forward, inhaling the scent of something slightly cinnamony that Mareeka always kept in here. I didn’t know what it was exactly, only that it was her scent, and that smelling it brought me home.

  “Where’s Surral?” she asked.

  “She had to take care of a little girl named Annalee. Playing capes and wizards and running in the hallways seem to have led to a broken nose.”

  “Ah.” She nodded. Just another day on Starway 8.

  Luckily, that laser instrument in sick bay was a real-life magic wand. Annalee would probably be fine in time for dinner.

  “I have a dilemma,” I said immediately. We both knew I couldn’t stay long.

  “What is it?” Frowning, Mareeka crossed her arms and half sat on the edge of her desk, the nebula framing her in brilliant color through the window.

  “I have in my possession something that could be considered a weapon. It could potentially turn a good fighter into a great one, a nearly indestructible one.”

  “Potentially?”

  “That’s the thing. I’m not really sure what it would do to a person, short term or long term. Think…enhancer.”

  Mareeka nodded, her expression turning contemplative and a little worried.

  “My problem is this: do I turn it over to people who I think—hope—would use it to fight for things I would approve of, or do I destroy it, so that no one has it on either side?”

  “Does the Dark Watch have this?”

  I shook my head. “Not anymore. I don’t think so.” If they’d had more of the serum somewhere, I didn’t think they would have been quite that desperate to get their lab back. A potential problem, though, was how many goons they’d already enhanced.

  “So, you would be giving the rebels something that could possibly help them to gain the upper hand?”

  Upper hand seemed like a bit of a stretch, but I nodded anyway. And it appeared we wouldn’t be talking in euphemisms tonight. “But like I said, I don’t know what it would do to a person. It could corrupt them—physically, mentally… I don’t know.”

  “Do you believe the rebel leaders would impose this enhancer on their fighters?”

  I shrugged. That was essentially my problem. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’d take issue with people deciding to try it on their own, but I would have a hard time living with knowing I’d provided something that got forced on anyone.” And the rebel leaders were just as capable of fanaticism as anyone else. I didn’t personally believe that the end justified any means. I wanted the same thing they did—the fall of the Overseer’s imperial regime—but a pendulum that swung too hard one way could also swing too hard in the other direction. I wanted no part of that.

  “Could you control the distribution?” she asked.

  “If I take it to the leaders, they’ll confiscate it. It’s what I’d planned on doing, but now…I just have these doubts.” I grimaced. “I’m not sure what to do.”

  “You have a good head on your shoulders and don’t take unnecessary risks—with yourself, or with others.” Mareeka’s blue eyes were steady on mine. “Do you believe this is a necessary risk?”

  I wasn’t sure what constituted necessary or unnecessary, but I thought Mareeka was probably giving me too much credit. I could think of a few risks I regretted deeply. One had sent Gabe and me running in opposite directions. Another had gotten me a lab full of super soldier serum and an enormous price on my head. The latest had landed me in Shade Ganavan’s bed.

  I ignored the sudden, sharp twist in my chest and thought about what she
’d said. Do you believe this is a necessary risk?

  That was it; I couldn’t decide. I’d given my blood to the kids here because I knew it was pure, undiluted with anything that could hurt them. I was healthy, and contrary to what my father and his lab technicians had constantly made me believe, I wasn’t a freak of nature, or anything truly alien. I was only slightly different. The enhancer, though, was a possibly dangerous piece of chemical engineering made to stick to and mess with a person’s insides. Maybe the result would be good, fine. Maybe it wouldn’t.

  “I believe we’re losing this fight,” I answered. “I believe this could make a difference.”

  “And what else do you believe?” she asked, clearly sensing there was something I wasn’t saying.

  I hesitated and then coughed up the other fear that was making this a very hard decision. “That suddenly not losing could cause years of unparalleled bloodshed.”

  Mareeka uncrossed her arms, stood, and stepped toward me. “What about winning?”

  I scrubbed my hands over my face, wishing I could wipe away the perpetually icky feeling I had about the serum. “I’m not sure winning is possible, even with this enhancer.”

  She put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed. “I’ve never told you what to do, Tess. You were always much too grown-up for that, even at eight years old.”

  “I know, but…what would you do?” I asked. “I’d like to know.”

  Her pause was very slight. “I would hand it over.” She didn’t offer a why, or any explanation to support her choice.

  “But what if it drastically alters people? What if the war spirals out of control?”

  “Right now, there technically is no war.”

  “Fine. What if the current not-war we’re fighting spirals out of control?” I asked.

  “There’s always a turning point. And no war is won without sacrifice.” She squeezed my shoulders again and then dropped her hands. “What if this is the turning point? Where would we be if no explorer had ever dipped his or her toes into the unknown?”

  Probably extinct. On a dead planet. Because, well, nuclear holocaust.

  “Make your position clear—that it should be volunteer-based. You are a leader in that world, Tess. You have influence.”