Under Different Stars

by Amy A. Bartol

  “Yes,” The male voice responds.

  “I’m heading straight to Sequelle’s and eating an entire venish.”

  “No one can eat an entire venish.”

  “Is that a challenge, Jax?” The swaying beneath my cheek gets more pronounced.

  A stern voice next to me says, “Watch the road, Wayra.” Peeking through my eyelashes, long legs in tailored pants stretch out next to me in the backseat of the limousine. I recognize his voice. It’s Trey’s, I think, feeling the blood leave my face.

  “I’ll take that wager. No Etharian can eat an entire venish,” Jax replies. “I’ll lay thirty-two fardrooms on it. Are you going to get in on this, Trey? Wayra’s giving away his money.”

  “No.” Trey sounds bored.

  “C’mon. You have more money than the Regent. That’s probably why you’re here now. He probably despises royalty with wealth.”

  “I’ve seen Wayra eat an entire venish before and Manus didn’t send me to do this mission. I volunteered,” Trey replies evenly.

  “You volunteered for this? Are you cracked?” Jax asks.

  “I’m getting there,” Trey says with a sigh.

  “Why would you volunteer to leave Rafe? Was Charisma pressuring you? You know, all those girls want one thing: a commitment ceremony,” Wayra says the last part like they’re dirty words.

  “No, they all want a title,” Jax counters.

  “I’m not the one to inherit. Victus will. I’m minor royalty. I get invited to the swanks, but no one seeks my favor,” Trey begins to explain.

  “No one but the ladies seek your favor you mean,” Wayra cuts in. “I’ve been with him to a few of his obligatory parties. His military status goes over well with the blushers.”

  “Hey, you have to take me to a swank when we get back. I could use a few blushers hanging on to my every word,” Jax says excitedly.

  “Just make sure that’s all they hang on to, Jax,” Trey responds. “Anything else will get you a commitment ceremony in those circles.”

  “I’m just a Jarhead. They’d probably string me up before they allowed a commitment ceremony to take place,” Jax replies, not sounding too concerned about it.

  “What’s a Jarhead?” Wayra asks.

  “Oh, that’s what the humans call Cavars. It’s their military soldier—a marine.”

  “Where did you learn that?”

  “Their internet,” Jax says. “You didn’t think I was working the entire time we were here, did you?”

  “If you had been, maybe we’d have bagged her months ago,” Wayra replies, sounding irritated. “I could’ve been eating venish by now.”

  There is silence for a few moments until Jax says, “What do you think they’ll do to her?” My heartbeat increases, knowing that he’s talking about me.

  “Not this conversation again, Jax,” Wayra growls. “They’re gonna do whatever they do. It’s not our concern.”

  “Yeah, I know, but…”

  “But what?” Trey asks quietly.

  “But, she’s just so…small and alone. You read her human files…they read like some grim tragedy. Maybe she’s already paid for her desertion,” Jax says with a note of concern.

  “Maybe you should represent her, Jax,” Wayra teases him, making my heart twist a little. “You can tell Skye she’s been punished enough—that because of her, we weren’t all thrown into a global incident.”

  “Maybe I will,” Jax says. “Maybe I can get her a proper representative. I can hire a wigg for her.”

  “Where are you going to get the money for a wigg?” Wayra laughs.

  “I’ll start by taking yours, chester,” Jax counters.

  “Don’t call me a chester. I’ve never forced myself on a woman in my life…although, I have been with a couple of westers,” he replies, sounding like he’s grinning.

  “When have you been with a wester? What woman would try to force herself on you? I’ve seen more attractive faces on sloats,” Jax laughs, and Trey joins him.

  “I get plenty of blushers,” Wayra replies, not sounding as irritated as I would have thought. Silence fills the car for a few moments.

  “How many circas of vista did you give her, Trey?” Jax asks, sounding concerned again.

  “Two.” Trey answers. “Why?”

  “Because, she should be awake by now. She’s so little…maybe two was too many,” Jax says slowly.

  Feeling a gentle hand rest on my neck, I try to remain calm, but my heart is racing. “Her pulse is rapid,” Trey says. “Can you hear me, Kricket?”

  I remain silent.

  “Kricket?” Jax asks a little louder than necessary.

  “She’s awake,” Trey says derisively, and a moment later a hand comes down hard on my butt, making my eyes jerk open as a squeak escapes from me.

  “Don’t touch me, chester,” I hiss, turning to Trey and narrowing my eyes at him. His violet eyes narrow back at me. Wiping the back of my hand over the corner of my mouth where drool has collected, I straighten in my seat. Glaring at Jax, who’s in the front next to Wayra, I test the handle of the car door, but it won’t open. Pushing the switch of the automatic window, it won’t open either. My head crashes against the window as dizziness overwhelms me.

  “Whoa! Easy now!” Jax says from the front, looking like he’s about to crawl over the seat to get to me, but there’s little chance of him fitting through the narrow space. Jax is almost as big as Trey, at least 6’5” and all brawn.

  Leaning back against my seat, I hold up my hand to stop him from coming to me. “I’m fine,” I lie, closing my eyes for a second and trying to regain my equilibrium.

  “You don’t look fine. You look like you’re about to boot,” Jax replies. “Stop the car, Wayra. I want to get out and check on her.”

  “She looks fine,” Wayra says, peering at me through the rearview mirror. I hold up my middle finger to him and he just stares at me, like he doesn’t know what it means.

  “Yeah, but it’s my job to make sure that she is fine. I’m the medic,” Jax says adamantly.

  “Ah, c’mon and admit it. You wouldn’t be half as concerned if she had a face like a sloat,” Wayra counters with a smirk.

  “Wayra, if she turns up dead, they’re not going to send you to face Skye, that’ll be me because I’m the medic. I’m trained to patch up combat wounds…this should be simple,” he grumbles. “I’m responsible for her health—let me do my job.”

  “Pull over, Wayra,” Trey orders. The car immediately slows, pulling to the side of the road. The door locks click open. Opening my door on the passenger side, Jax crouches down by my side as cold air seeps in around him. I can’t tell what time it is, because it’s gray and overcast outside, but it’s definitely daylight. I must’ve been out for a while.

  Opening a case, Jax withdraws a set of glasses that look like something someone would wear after eye surgery—grandma goggles. Trying to put them on me, I fight off his attempts, pushing the glasses away.

  “These don’t hurt…see,” he demonstrates, putting the glasses on and looking like a complete tool. “They just check your vitals—synapse firing rate…dendrite chemical composition…reuptake rates…just standard stuff,” he explains, grinning and taking off the glasses.

  “All that and they’re so fashionable,” I reply sarcastically, continuing to pull back as he attempts to put them on me. “Let me just break it down for you, Jax. My head feels like one of you smashed it with a rock. I need some water and maybe an aspirin and I’ll be super. Oh, and if you could just let me off at the next town, that’d be even better.”

  “Water I can do…aspirin is…what’s aspirin?” A small smile touches his lips as his eyes scan mine.

  Seeing that he’s being truthful, that he really doesn’t know what aspirin is, my breathing increases, choking me. “I…can’t,” I manage to say, as I begin hyperventilating. Looking around wildly, I feel like the walls of the car are caving in on me.

  Trey’s warm hand goes to the back of my neck
, making me bend forward, while he murmurs, “Breathe slowly…calm…even…” He strokes my back gently, his voice soft and silky. Jax jumps in the car, having to duck his big body as he goes to the bar on the side.

  Slowing down my breathing, I accept a glass of water from Jax. Sitting up and sipping from the heavy barware, my hand comes up to touch a tender spot that is throbbing behind my ear.

  “Careful.” Jax warns me as he touches my hand and directs them away from the small bandage my fingers felt. “Your incision is still healing.”

  “My what?” I feel like I might be sick.

  “I inserted a translator implant into your temporal lobe,” he smiles at me until he sees my ashen expression. “It’s okay,” he explains quickly, holding up both of his hands. “It’s just a translator. You’ll be able to understand a host of languages now without any difficulty. Some words may still be foreign, but it will work well for the most part. Now I don’t have to speak English for you to understand me.” He smiles, like he did me a favor by shoving something into my brain.

  “Take it out,” I whisper, feeling my hands shake as I raise my fingers to the bandage again.

  He glances at Trey who shakes his head. Jax looks back at me, “I can’t.”

  “You can’t or you won’t?” I ask in growing panic.

  “He won’t.” Trey answers for Jax.

  Jax frowns. “You need it, Kricket. Everyone has one. See?” He turns his head and folds his earlobe away so that I can see a tiny scar behind his ear. “All it does is translate. That’s all. I promise.”

  “Who told you that you could do that to me?” I ask as anger is replacing distress.

  “I did,” Trey says beside me. Lifting my eyes to Trey’s and seeing how exquisitely the shade of violet fits with the darkness of his brows and sun-kissed skin, I manage to whisper, “Thank you for telling me the truth.”

  His eyes soften a little at the corners right before I hit him in the side of his head with my heavy water glass. As water and glass shatter outward, I hurl myself through the open door of the car, striking the ground and running across an open field covered with a thick blanket of snow. Stumbling a couple of times, I manage to stay on my feet by putting my hands into the drifts.

  Trying to increase the length of my strides, I nearly fall on my face when my feet are kicked out from under me. Trey’s arm snakes around my waist, catching me up and hoisting me over his shoulder. He jogs back to the limo, shoving me inside and shutting the door behind us. He pushes me onto the seat beside him. The doors lock immediately as Trey barks out the word, “Drive!”

  Feeling the car pull away again and breathing in shallow gasps, I swallow hard, looking at Trey in the seat next to mine. The side of his face is bleeding from a cut near the hairline and his brow is already beginning to turn an ugly shade of purple. A little of his blood has dripped onto his dress shirt, marring the crisp, white fabric. Jax extends a cloth to Trey, who presses it to the side of his face while he watches me coolly.

  “Kricket,” Trey says my name like a warning and I flinch. “Every choice you make will affect you. So, think hard before you make your next move. There will be consequences to your actions.”

  “All actions come with consequences,” I murmur, attempting to mask my fear.

  “Painful consequences,” he restates his meaning.

  “I’ll shoot for the other kind,” I reply, raising my chin a notch and trying to look aloof.

  “You won’t escape,” Trey says sullenly, leaning forward in his seat. Opening the small refrigerator and pulling out an ice tray, he dumps a few cubes in the cloth, pressing the cold compress to his face.

  “Fortune favors the brave,” I reply with a rise of an eyebrow. Leaning forward, I take one of the remaining cubes of ice from the tray. I touch it to my tongue and watch him watch me.

  “That sounds like an argument for doing whatever you want,” Trey growls.

  “It’s cause and effect and…I’m just saying,” I let the melting ice cool my tight throat as I try not to pant from the exertion of my last failed attempt.

  “You’re just saying, what?” Trey scowls at me, not letting it go.

  “I’m just saying that when there is little left to lose, the consequences of one’s actions don’t carry the same weight…painful or otherwise.”

  “She has you there, Trey,” Jax replies, grinning at me.

  A smirk crosses my lips. “And maybe you should worry more about the consequences of your actions, chester,” I add, nodding toward the television screen mounted near the front of the limo. An awful, grainy photo, taken of me when I was around fourteen flashes up on the small screen as a scrolling marquee runs beneath my photo. “That’s an Amber Alert, making you officially wanted perverts.”

  Trey doesn’t seem to flinch, watching the screen as my hideous, unsmiling face stares back at us. “That doesn’t even look like you,” Jax says, and my heart sinks a little. “It looks like a mug shot.”

  “It’s me,” I mumble, remembering being processed back into the system after another failed foster home. Quickly, I stuff that memory back down, looking out the window as snow-covered cornfields slide past.

  “HO! Did you see that?” Jax bursts out, scrambling in his seat for the remote to turn the volume up on the television. “That was—”

  “Kyon!” Trey finishes for him, sitting forward in his seat, riveted to the screen.

  “WHAT?” Wayra calls from the front, the car swaying a little.

  “It is that knob knocker, Kyon!” Jax swears under his breath, as the newsreel replays me approaching the bar in Lumin before I begin backing up and running. Then it shows Kyon leaping over the bar to follow me. The footage from the camera behind the bar must’ve been turned over to the police and news agencies. The image freezes on Kyon’s face as the anchorman implores his viewers to report any information to the FBI or the Chicago Police Department.

  “That means Kyon got away, doesn’t it?” I ask Jax, not taking my eyes off of Kyon’s shadowy image.

  Both Jax and Trey turn and stare at me. “What happened?” Trey demands, his ice lying forgotten on the seat next to him. “Did he try to hurt you?” He quickly scans me for anything out of the ordinary. His concern throws me for a second.

  My eyebrows pull together. “No, he was super nice—we’re besties now. In fact, Forester and Lecto are my new BFFs, too,” I reply, watching Trey’s face turn from concern to a scowl.

  “They’re no friends of yours. You’re Rafe and they’re—” Trey grinds his teeth, looking very muscley all of a sudden.

  “Knob knockers?” I ask, trying to fill in the blank he left with what I had heard earlier.

  “Alameeda,” Trey hisses. Turning to Jax, he says, “Please refrain from teaching Kricket things she shouldn’t be learning.”

  Jax frowns. “She should know a knob knocker when she sees one—it’s a life skill.”

  “What exactly is a knob knocker?” I ask Jax, seeing that it’s really irritating Trey. “Shouldn’t your translator tell me what it is?”

  “Kyon is a knob knocker,” Jax replies, a grin of approval on his lips. “And I’ll upgrade you with slang later.”

  “No you won’t,” Trey says abruptly. “Kricket doesn’t need to know that.”

  I scowl at Trey before turning to Jax. “I see. So a knob knocker,” I emphasize the words to irritate Trey, “is a liar who accosts women for his own gain?” I ask. Jax’s grin grows broader as he nods his head.

  “What did Kyon say to you? What did he want?” Trey grasps me by my upper arm so that I’ll look at him.

  I clamp my lips and Trey’s frown deepens. “You refuse to answer me?” he asks, his voice quiet—deadly. Goose bumps rise on my arms. I know that I’ve just crossed some invisible line with him; I know it because I’ve crossed them many times in the past and usually end up paying heavily for it. Stiffening, I straighten in my seat, bracing myself for the consequences that’ll probably be very painful.

  “How
far are we?” Trey barks out the question as he drops his hands from me.

  “Fifteen—twenty fleats maximum, sir,” Wayra answers in a clipped tone of a military soldier.

  “Any sign that we could’ve been followed?” Trey shoots back.

  “No sign, sir.”

  “I could’ve taken care of Kyon here,” Trey murmurs to himself, his hands balling into fists.

  “I take it you two aren’t friends,” I surmise. Trey’s unfocused pupils contract as I interrupt his thoughts. When his eyes meet mine, it’s clear by his intense expression that he’d been plotting something deadly.

  Jax laughs mirthlessly, “That’s an understatement—”

  “No one answers her questions,” Trey orders, his stare pinning me to my seat. “Our information is more valuable to her than hers is to us.”

  “Ooooh, I guess I’m going to have to put on my anthropologist’s hat for this one then.”

  Trey ignores me, sitting back in his seat and watching the news on the television as it replays my flight from Kyon. The newscaster breaks in, announcing that there is new information to this story. An interview featuring Enrique with a microphone shoved near his mouth begins rolling. He’s describing the scene at the diner last night.

  “It’s Enrique!” Jax grins, causing my head to snap in his direction. “Wayra, that reminds me—you still owe me 12 fardrooms for Enrique. He led us right to her.”

  “I didn’t say he wouldn’t. I just didn’t think it’d be so fast,” Wayra counters over his shoulder.

  “That wasn’t quick. If one more male asked me to dance last night, someone was getting hurt,” Jax mumbles.

  “You must’ve looked at them too long,” I state absently, hearing Jax’s comment.

  Both his eyebrows rise. “What?” he asks.

  “Usually, a man will only ask you to dance when you’ve made the appropriate amount of eye contact,” I answer. “If you make eye contact for three seconds or longer with a man, you’ve basically invited him over.”

  Trey and Jax both stare at me like I’ve unlocked a mystery. “But, then again,” I continue, eyeing them both, “I bet they’d ask you to dance even if you only look at them for a couple of seconds.”