by Megan Derr
"Climb on top of the ship here," Lark said, and went on to explain in great detail how Einn could get inside the ship and to the engine room, where he'd be able to hide.
Einn listened carefully, memorizing everything and more than a little impressed, as ever, by Lark's knowledge. Whatever flippant things Lark said about himself and his colorful past, he deserved to be more than a criminal waiting for the inevitable day the law caught up to him. "What are you going to do?"
"Tag along with the Hero Brigade and keep them from realizing you're long gone until too late," Lark said. "We're caught, anyway. Maybe cooperating now will reduce my sentence later."
"And Karmikel is very pretty."
Lark shoved him, and then put away his datapad. "Just remember to stay in the engine room, because otherwise all their fancy scanners will pick you up. I don't know where they're headed after this, but eventually they'll return to Zero. You'll be able to tell when you've arrived there; the landing procedures take a good hour and the ship is heavily searched before anyone is allowed off. They won't find you, however, not if you stay where I told you."
Einn nodded. "I know when to do as I'm told."
Grunting, Lark continued, "After the ship is empty, but before they lock it down completely, go out the way you came in. From the docks, you shouldn't have trouble getting to the public areas of Zero. No one there watches the docks nearly as well as they should. The codes Jade gave us should still work for a bit, so you'll be able to get to the private estate areas, I think. If not, I'm sure you'll improvise. I don't know where the Alexander Estate is, however—"
"I can figure it out from there," Einn said. "Cyan will hopefully be able to get us off Zero again. Thanks, Lark."
Lark shrugged the words aside. "Just don't die or get arrested."
"I won't," Einn replied. "Be careful not to do either yourself. Watch that group; I trust them less than a Bangkok sharp."
"Smart man," Lark laughed. "Get going, I'll ensure they don't mark your absence until too damn late."
Einn nodded, and neither of them bothered to mention the poison still in their systems. What was the point? As Lark ventured off, he took a different door out of the storage room, going down a hall that bypassed the main living room, slowly finding his way back to the hangar. He paused as he passed an office and slipped inside to snatch up a few things that looked as though they might be useful: an old datapad, an extra stunner charge, and a knife that looked to be Rehab issue. That would make Cyan laugh.
Tucking it all away, he ventured on to the hangar. He finally reached it by way of a door that was at the opposite end of the one he'd used before when Pyotr had arrived. Closing it quietly, he immediately turned and began to climb up the wall, hands sticking easily to the smooth, metal surface. When he reached the top of the ship, he gingerly leapt from the wall, landing smoothly. Crawling across the ship, he reached the innocuous-looking hatch Lark had described.
Prying it open was as stupidly easy as Lark had promised, if one knew what to do. Lowering himself inside the ship, Einn pulled the panel back in place, secured it, then slowly climbed down deeper into the ship.
From there, it was roughly an hour of nerve-wracking crawling, climbing, hiding, and nearly panicking when he barely avoided being caught by three guards. He wondered if Lark knew how much tension was involved and scowled when he decided Lark was probably laughing himself silly. Finally, finally, he reached the engine room. Bypassing the main power coils, he entered the room just beyond it. Lark had said it would hold the back-up coils, but unless Einn was mistaken, those were warp coils.
The door to the engine room should have been locked. It was standard procedure even on civilian ships to keep certain parts of the ship restricted, a safety feature that the crew of the Commander's ship should have been following. But the arrogance and laziness of such men had always been a pirate's greatest weapon, and Einn was more than happy to take advantage of it.
In the warp coils room, he once more climbed a wall, and then across the ceiling to the panel directly over the almost too-warm coils. Einn wanted badly to poke around, because he'd heard of ships that did not need gates to light jump, but the cost was preventative, and the IG made a lot of its money on the light gates. The engineering that must have been involved with designing such a thing—
Shaking his head at himself, he pried open the panel directly over the coils. Tucking the screws he'd removed into a pocket of his shirt, he swung the panel aside on its remaining screw, then crawled up inside. He could barely fit; how in the world did anyone else? As promised by Lark, there was a crawl space for someone to lay in, a leftover from when the ship was being constructed.
According to Lark, such spaces were supposed to be eliminated when the work was finished, but lazy, underpaid shipyard workers seldom bothered, the general inspectors were only moderately less lazy, and the IG inspectors had better things to do with their time than look for work holes they probably didn't even know about.
Reaching down, Einn pulled the panel back into place and restored the screws. Assured it was as it should be, he withdrew into the crawl space and settled in for several hours of not moving. No one knew the crawl space was there since it dead-ended almost immediately behind him, and the heat and power emanations of the coils would keep anyone from registering his presence. All he had to do was not give himself away.
The passage was only just large enough to accommodate an average human, and Einn wondered how they dealt with it, given that in his experience, precious few people could endure such confinement. It wasn't really all that bad; it reminded him of home. Everyone remarked on the notorious cliffs of Fornar, but few people ever seemed to recall—or even know—that Fornar revolved as much around exploring the caves that riddled the cliffs as the cliffs themselves. The caves were endless complexes of twisting channels, dark holes, endless falls, pools of clear water, ice, wide caverns, and spaces too small for even a babe.
Twice in his life he had gotten stuck in places where he dared not move and could only hope that someone would come along and find him sooner rather than later. They always had, because that was how the systems worked—but there were still too many tragedies, and Einn had feared more than once that he might become the next.
Lying low in a ship was much easier than exploring a cave he could barely see inside of, even with his improved dark vision. The hard part was not going cave crazy with worry. His gut twisted all over again as he replayed that awful moment when Cyan had kissed him goodbye. The paleness of his skin, the look of resignation and fear on his face—the way that stars-cursed bastard had collared him.
Einn fisted his hands, aching to wrap them around the throat of that smug-looking bastard. Cyan shouldn't be collared like that, shouldn't be mistreated at all. Collars were for bottom dwelling scum like Jade and his henchman.
The screams had been the worst. He hadn't seen Cyan, but he'd heard those screams. He'd heard Cyan angry, happy, amused, hurt, and even scared. He knew every last whimper and plea and moan that Cyan made in passion. He would recognize Cyan's voice in a crowded room. He never again wanted to hear those screams of agony and pain. He closed his eyes, but that couldn't block the memory of those horrible screams.
Was Cyan okay? What was Jade doing to him? Stars, why hadn't he done something? Instead of acting, Einn had just sat there and let Cyan walk away. He'd let Cyan go back to that nightmare.
Would Cyan forgive him? Einn didn't know what Cyan had done to him, or how he'd done it, but Einn knew he was…well, taken, he supposed, really was the only word for it. Was that what everyone said Fornarians couldn't comprehend? He wasn't sure he wanted it: the fear, the anxiety, the addiction.
He sensed it would be much easier to be matched to Karmikel, despite the annoyance of being magically bound to an IA operative he did not know. He could understand the matching. There was science in that, rules and limits, reasons.
Einn's obsession with Cyan made no sense at all, and it made even less sense that he
would gladly die for a chance to figure it out.
Voices drew his attention, scattered his thoughts, and he looked down through the grating to just barely see a couple of engineers discussing something about the coils. One of them shifted, and Einn saw the markings of a master engineer on his left arm.
So he was probably right about the Shangri La's ability to light jump without a gate. He could not think of any other reason the crew would include a master engineer. The only thing more expensive in regard to ships was hiring a gremlin to design the damn thing.
Einn heaved a sigh of relief when they finally left and settled himself a bit more comfortably. They likely would not return again for a while; best to try and doze while he had the chance. Thoughts still on Cyan, Einn slowly fell asleep.
Chapter Seventeen
Planet 0000000 (Zero), The Palace of Eternity
Cyan hadn't realized he'd missed Zero. Not all of it—he certainly had not missed the way every word was carefully measure and calculated, the backstabbing, the politics and the games. 'Zero chess' was what they called it, the art of surviving the cutthroat environment at the heart of the IG.
But he had missed the beauty of Zero, the wonder of it. If Zero had possessed another name before the IG claimed it, no one ever knew it. Until Zero, the IG had not had stationary headquarters, but had travelled the stars on a ship of legendary size. As the IG continued to grow in strength and numbers, however, that had become inadequate, and so the IG had begun to look for a real home.
They had found it on a planet that had clearly borne life at one point but had been left barren when a plague had wiped out everything. The IG had the barren planet thoroughly scouted, and a full decade later, had claimed it as home. It had not been long before Zero was the epicenter of the IG; the dividing lines for the Quads began at Zero, and it was where anything of star-changing importance took place. Because of the Star Assembly, which required two representatives of every race to be present at all times, only on Zero was one guaranteed to see every single race in the IG. They were the only legal exception to the rule that magics capable were not allowed to hold government positions.
In Cyan's eyes, though, the true marvel was how the IG had worked to restore Zero to a place of beauty. The images in the archives showed a place of rock and dust, but Zero in the present day was lush with greenery, with pieces of hundreds of other planets brought in to create a planet of unparalleled beauty and luxury. The private areas were on one section of the planet, the public areas another, and crowning everything was the famous Palace of Eternity.
The Palace was enormous, made of gleaming white stone and towering higher than every other building on the planet. The twisting towers were capped with colorful globes and spires. Fountains, parks, the star mazes, the outbuildings, the Hall of the Star Assembly, the Great Archives—the Palace itself was a maze to newcomers and veterans alike.
The most famous part of the Palace was the floor of the great hall, where all visitors entered. All new arrivals, no matter how well-prepared, were not prepared for walking across the glass floor so well made it really did seem as they though walked on the water below. The Eternal Pool beneath the glass floor was so deep it was difficult to see clear down to the bottom, and it was populated with more creatures than anyone could count.
Cyan was given very little chance to appreciate all that he had missed of his homeland as he was quickly dragged along through the Palace to Jade's office. He endured greetings, expressions of relief that he was safe and that it was good to have him home again, all the while biting his tongue against trying to get someone to help him.
As much as he hated it, hated pretending that all was well, being stuck in the Palace was better than the moment he was dreading: when Jade finished his work and they went home. Cyan didn't want to see home again, no matter how much part of him missed all the good things about it. His mother had loved flowers, had spent so much of her personal funds filling the yard with Vrill and Mars roses. The house itself was several generations old, built by the first Alexander to move to Zero after taking a position in the Star Assembly with ambitions for Grand Chancellor—ambitions he had achieved. Since that long-ago ancestor, no Alexander had managed higher than Lower Chancellor, but his father had been poised to change that.
Once, Lower Chancellors had not been allowed to become High Chancellor, on the grounds that a Lower Chancellor would be too biased toward the quad that had once been under his command. That law had eased over the years, but it was still mostly preferred that High Chancellors not be pulled from Lower Chancellors.
Cyan knew everyone expected Jade to be High Chancellor someday. It just proved that no one really knew Jade; he had far more freedom, power, and control as Lower Chancellor. Climbing any higher up the ranks of the IG would only impede him.
He sat quietly on the couch in Jade's office, biting back an urge to scream, run, anything, but sit there quietly and endure. He could feel Rall's eyes on him from where he lurked on the opposite side of the room. Cyan's skin crawled, but he ignored it. No one liked Jade's First Assistant, and both Jade and Rall thrived on that knowledge.
When finally they were ready to leave, Cyan walked along quietly, not saying a word as they boarded a shuttle that took them to the private sectors, not looking at anyone as a second shuttle took them to the Alexander Estate.
Rall took his arm once they were inside and led him upstairs to his bedroom, Jade following right behind them. Cyan stilled as they entered the room he had not seen in more than a decade. It was like looking at the room of a stranger, even if it all looked familiar: his old clothes, expensive, ornate, and carelessly thrown about; his old training equipment and weapons; books and datapads, childhood toys he'd never been able to part with until forced to leave his whole life behind. He bent and picked up one of the books, turned it on, and saw it was a collection of manuals for Auth training.
He had nearly forgotten that, immersed in Rehab. He'd wanted to be an Authority, the only respectable job that he thought his parents might let him take and would make him happy. Except his parents had not been even remotely pleased. He'd been arguing with them the night they'd died. Defiant, he had fled their side the moment they had arrived at the Palace, sneaking off to make out with a boy his own age.
Stars, they had just been children, but so stubbornly sure they were adults. He'd been mad at his parents, jealous of his twin, angry at the whole world for being so unfair. Shaking his head, Cyan turned to Jade, and said, "So here we are again. Do you think you'll manage to keep me this time? Because you won't. Eventually I'll be gone ag—"
He screamed and dropped to his knees as Jade triggered the collar around his throat. Cyan tried to claw at it, but Rall had cuffed his hands the moment they were out of the public eye, and he could only scrabble futilely until the pain finally abated. "Where will you go?" Jade asked. "To yet another faraway planet to start another new life? You could, I suppose, but will you? Thanks to you, all your friends are dead, or will be shortly. All I need now is for Sean and Mendel to lead Auths to the research facility to catch Cohen in the act."
Cyan felt as though he'd been slapped. "Cohen?" But—but Cohen had been exonerated. Cohen was their friend. Cyan wanted to scream, wanted to hit something. "Cohen killed our parents," he said dully instead.
Jade's cold smile was all the answer he needed.
"All of this was to get to Cohen," Cyan said. "Sean and Mendel are part of your plan. How will the Auths know where to find them?"
Jade only smirked and settled in the window seat on the far side of Cyan's room. "Your friends aren't stupid; they'll ensure there's a way they can be traced. If not, distress calls are useful things."
"I do not see how this is getting revenge for murder," Cyan said flatly. "Will he even realize you've set him up?"
Jade threw his head back and laughed. He stood up and moved closer to Cyan, laid his orange nails gently against Cyan's cheek. Cyan tensed for pain and did not relax when the nails slowly slid away wit
hout scratching him. "My, my, dear brother. You have been out of the loop. Don't you listen to the gossip at all?"
"I'm too busy working to listen to gossip, and I'm not interested in gossip about you anyway," Cyan retorted.
Ignoring the taunt, Jade replied, "I guess you never heard that dear Gary and I have been good friends for quite some time. Of course, I want to help him in his quest to bring back the Temperast and restore his family's honor." He smirked again, and added, "Though I think the loss of income interests him more than honor."
Cyan knew he would pay for it, but could not resist taunting, "You're fucking Cohen? He's nearly as old as our parents—but I suppose you did always have a thing for older men. Why Cohen? Did Pyotr turn you down?"
He screamed when Jade triggered the collar again but managed to stay on his feet. Jade smiled his poisonous smile, and said, "I would be more careful of what you say, dear brother."
Panting, trembling with pain, Cyan just said, "You'll hurt me no matter what, so I may as well say whatever I please. Our family hates the Temperast, Jade. Cohen would never believe you'd betray our parents by helping to bring them back."
Jade smiled and tilted his head, the very image of seduction. Cyan wondered how many men and women had fallen for him over the years—and how few of them had come out unscathed. "Men will believe whatever I want them to believe because they like believing I want them."
Cyan made a face, not bothering to argue that. People had always fallen at Jade's feet, had brushed past Cyan to fawn over his more perfect twin. He'd hated it. He could work hard all day for crumbs of praise, screw up his courage to speak to someone, and Jade would still get praise and gifts and attention just because he was beautiful and possessed of a too-clever tongue.
"So you've been fucking Cohen so he'll never notice you've betrayed him until too late," Cyan said. "What happens after the Auths catch him?"
"He will see his work destroyed a second time and his family ruined forever."
