The air was tense, despite Charly’s boisterous entrance. The fragrance of spices, drinks, and earthy food wafted into the room with her. Charly handed a cocktail to Shiro before beginning to pace in front of the windows.
“Where’s my drink?” Darius asked, attempting to lighten the mood.
Charly looked back at him. “Oh, you wanted a drink too? Crap, Darius, you should have told me.”
He waved her apology away. “Not really. Messing around.”
“We don’t have a lot of time. So I’m going to dive right into this. My niece’s friend, Charm, a—” she hesitated, and caught herself, “Yasoan, was kidnapped. She was last seen by her parents when she went to school. She never returned from school, but she was at school all day. So we know that she must have been taken on her way home.” A gloom settled over the room. Odeon seemed to have wilted visibly as the day had progressed.
“Ixion’s ghost, Holly, I’m sorry,” Charly said, coming to stand behind Holly. Holly felt Charly’s hands on her shoulders. She gave them a squeeze and then walked away. “How’s Lucy handling it?”
“Not great, I don’t think. But she was still asleep when we left Meg’s.”
“Drake, isn’t your sister a detective or something?” Darius shifted on his seat and began tapping one of his many screens.
“She is. I’m sure I’ve mentioned to you guys that there are some shady and shitty things happening in their precinct. Meg and Gabe don’t know the allegiances of the corrupt individuals. They’re extremely reticent to bring the girl’s parents in and turn it into a case that involves any party that could leak what’s happening to the Shadow Coalition.”
“So Meg believes it’s the Shadow Coalition?” Shiro had positioned himself where Holly could see him. His drink was poised in front of his mouth, one arm crossed somewhat gingerly over his stomach to avoid his bandaged wound and, propping up his drink. The gold chain strung over his gray vest winked and refracted the light from the stylish overhead lights.
“She does. And so do I.”
Odeon spoke up, rising to his feet from his reclining position. “Holly, if I may?” He’d produced his Ousaba club and was moving it back and forth in his hands, spinning and twirling it like he was anxious for a fight.
“Of course, Odeon.”
“As far as the Yasoan know, there have been none of their children taken in this way. For whatever reason the Shadow Coalition stick with human and Constie children. I believe, and I think that Holly does as well, that this was meant to hurt Holly, to hurt us. Warn us away. Because Meg Wolfe and Gabe Bach never leave Lucy alone, so they could not take her.” He paced as he spoke, using his club to worry out his internal turmoil.
“Oh shit, guys. That makes sense,” Charly said. “We can’t just let the bastards get away with this.”
“No Charly Stout.” Odeon paused, gripping his Ousaba club suddenly, a ferocious look on his face as he squared off and looked at them, his hands gripping the club so hard that his knuckles had turned pale violet. “They will not. We will not let them.”
“Damn, Odeon. You can be one scary bastard, you know that?” Charly said.
“Yes. It is better to never piss off a Yasoan.” He smiled, a devilish look in his eyes.
“That’s almost all that we know. It isn’t enough to just screw their money up now, team. We have to save Charm and we have to do it quick. Let’s get our heads in this game right now and figure it out. What the hell are they doing with the kids? Where do they take them? How can we find out and how can we get Charm back, and hopefully a few other kids?” Holly stood up. Her body was teeming with energy. She needed to move. Seeing the crew move, working out their own frustrations just made it worse. Odeon had his club to spin. Holly’s hands were empty. She went to the table where the kasé maker was and picked up Shiro’s lionhead cane where he’d left it. The weight seemed perfectly balanced in her hands. She gave it an experimental spin, then swirled and slashed it like she was fighting with a sword. There was something pleasant and reassuring in the action. No wonder Shiro kept it with him at all times.
She glanced at him and caught him watching her, his cocktail poised in front of his mouth, a glimmer in his dark gaze, a slight smile pulling at the corner of his lips that was visible around the glass. “Addicting, isn’t it?”
Holly slashed the sheathed cane-sword through the air in answer.
“What tools do we have at our disposal?” She asked the room at large. “Do any of you have contacts with Shadow Coalition members?
“I don’t know that any of us would, Drake,” Darius said from behind her where he sat working furiously at his bay of screens. He’d put on a set of over-the-ear headphones, but kept one ear out. “The SC is a bit more dangerous than any of us softly crooked people.”
“Yes, were dabblers. Chaps that have a line of demarcation.”
“You know that the worst I’ve done is blackmail, Holly. The SC does really bad shit.”
Holly laughed. “All right, I get it. So that won’t work.”
“Holly Drake, you met with ‘Dave,’” Odeon said, making air quotes with his fingers. His club was on the sofa. Now he stood at the windows, his arms folded, a pained look still in his face. “Did you find out anything?”
Holly kept the cane in her hands and the conversation continued. “Just that he’s going to try to help. Maybe he’ll listen to their comms and something will come up.”
“Sucks that we don’t have access to that stupid tap that I nearly died placing. What a dickhead,” Charly said, pounding her fist into her hand. “I need a drink. Anyone else? I’ll put it on your tabs.”
“Should we go back out there with Trip and place our own tap?” Holly asked. “Seems kind of extreme, but I’d do it. And yes, Charly, I’ll have a beer. Thanks.”
“Well, we might not need to go that far, Drake,” Darius said.
She turned to look at him. He still had the headphones on and was filtering through screens and tapping shit on the surfaces. Everything was moving too fast for Holly to see what he was doing. “What do you mean, we may not need to?”
“I tapped it at the same time. Piggy-backed it. Been listening since you got back.”
Charly stopped at the entrance to the stairwell. “Darius, you animal. You clever genius.” Her cackling laugh could be heard after she’d vanished down into the stairway.
Holly glared at him. “You didn’t think to tell us?”
“Didn’t think you’d approve.”
“Were you ever going to tell us?”
He tilted his head to one side, “Probably. When it became imperative. Like right now.”
“And so have you been listening to them?” She put the cane back on the table and went to stand beside him.
“Yes.”
“And? Have you done anything about it?”
“Well, for everything I heard, ‘Dave’ sent us in, so I didn’t need to. At least we know he’s not double-crossing us or something, right, Drake? Or did you never wonder about that?”
“There’s that. Would have been nice to know earlier. But glad to know it now. And I’m going to owe you for saving our asses.” She considered it further staring into the middle distance above his desk, relief flooding through her. They had a way to access information now, thanks to Darius. Maybe they could move and move quick. Maybe the hurdles weren’t so high that they couldn’t surmount them, thanks to Darius Jackson and his devious nature. She was finding more and more that even though he didn’t go out in the field, he was earning his keep.
She moved to the kasé maker and poured a cup from the carafe. “What do you need for this, Darius? Can I do anything to help?”
“I’ll just keep listening. I’ll flag anything that goes through about Druiviins—sorry Odeon—or Yasoan. And . . . any other words like that. I can also try to establish where the signals are coming from the most. They all have an identifier. That will take longer to decipher, however.”
“Great, do it. We’ll thr
ow everything we’ve got at this. If something sticks, we can move on it.”
Charly had returned with a drink for Holly. She took a long pull and sighed. Just when they thought things were getting easy, ironing out, settling into a pattern, the shit hit the fan.
14
The night was darker than usual. Only a sliver of Ixion hovered at the horizon in Kota’s slow rotation around it. Holly kept the shades open as she busied herself around her condo.
She needed a break from the team, from the stress that this shit was all her fault.
It was good to have a place of her own. But for a moment her muscle memory lapsed into the sense that Graf was going to come home and make her life hard. Her body tensed as she stood at the counter making a salad. The ingredients were spread along the bar, washed and cleaned, waiting to be added to the bed of greens inside the large Centau style bowl.
The long knife made hypnotic, pleasant noises as it clicked against the bamboo wood, slicing through the dark beets. A nearly obsidian color of purple oozed onto the cutting board, reminding her of gruesome things. It took a few moments before she realized that her cheeks were wet as she watched the dark liquid spreading out slowly along the grooves that her knife had made. She’d only had the board a few days, but it was already scored from the blade and the salads she’d been making for dinner over the past few nights at home.
She put the knife down and took a few deep breaths.
I am in control. I do not have to think about the past. I can’t control the world. I can only control my reaction to it.
It was a mantra a therapist had taught her when she’d been forced to see one during her time in prison. The women inmates often joked about the therapy visits. It was one of the farces the Centau forced upon the Consties. Not even the humans, let alone the Consties, cared one way or another about the mental health of prisoners. After all, they were prisoners. But every woman had been required to have their psychological well being assessed after a month in the penitentiary. And so Holly had done hers. She hadn’t expected to learn much. The mantra stayed with her, however.
She resumed her preparations and scooped the beets onto the flat of her blade and dumped them onto the greens. Next she sliced through the soft texture of a thin baked tofu and draped the strips over the greens. Strawberries followed, then roasted nuts from Centaurus called umeo. She’d roasted and salted them herself. She topped the salad with the oil of the ikebosu seed, lemon juice, and pepper and put the salad on the small dining table next to the glass of her new favorite beer, the Kotan double IPA.
Before sitting down, she went into the closet of her bedroom and found the box of letters that Meg had salvaged from Holly’s condo before it had been emptied and rented out to someone new.
Back at the table, she opened the box and sorted through letters, bypassing the notes from her former school children that even now tugged too tightly at her heart, tearing it open until she had no choice but to cry.
Holly wanted to be done with crying. She needed some clarity. So she hurried past the memorabilia that hurt too much as she rummaged through the contents.
The letters she looked for were at the bottom, tied into a compact pile with jute string. A sigh escaped her lips when she found them.
There was something both silly and precious about the letters. Their very essence was based squarely in a romantic, worshipful devotion to a time long gone, when lovers communicated in pen or pencil scrawled across paper. The paper itself was like parchment, frayed at the edges, yellowed for style, obtained at the sort of shops in specific parts of the city devoted to antiques from the old worlds—there were shops like this for all the races, Centau, Druiviin, and even the Constellations.
There was sealing wax on the envelopes, and the letter E in a curled elegant script impressed into the clump of violet wax. Some of the seals had never been broken—an avoidance that Holly adopted when the guilt grew too large for her to shoulder in addition to the burdens she carried already.
She put the box aside and sorted through the letters, the paper crinkled beneath her hands. Dust that smelled of a mixture of her old condo and the faintest fragrance of what she recalled of Elan wafted from the pile of memories. Holly stared at the two stacks of letters and took a sip of her beer.
Am I ready for this?
There was too much silence in the room. It weighed down on her. She was stalling, but still she went to the v-screen panel on the wall and programmed it to play some music—jazz fused with Druiviin instruments in a genre being called cosmic jazz by aficionados. It was mellow and relaxing without being overbearing in any single direction.
Back at the table, she opened the first letter she’d ever gotten from Elan and read it as she slowly ate her salad.
His voice was distinct. The way he articulated sentences carried the traditions and culture of the Druiviin people. He wasn’t self-centered and the subject of his thoughts was Holly and her well-being.
The letters, of course, came after they’d developed a friendship. They taught the same grade and had shared responsibilities for a committee that worked to integrate cultural learning for the different races. Elan was attentive and kind, in the somewhat aloof style that formed the base characteristics of most of the Druiviin Holly had ever met.
There was never a sense that Holly needed to alter herself to maintain his interest. Neither had she been interested in changing him or turning him into a human. She’d grown to appreciate the deliberate way he spoke, moved, and the way he approached her. That approach had always been one filled with a willingness to enjoy the process of discovery, to find the things they shared in common, while never being threatened or insecure about their differences or the ideas that challenged their respective world-views. I am me. You are you. Let’s find the place where we meet and enjoy it.
He was everything that Graf had not been.
The letter she now read contained Elan’s thoughts about what he had observed about her. She remembered reading it for the first time, curled up in a silly reading seat that had been in the corner of her classroom. The children had all gone home. Elan popped into her room and smiled at her. His pale lavender cheeks were a shade darker than normal. His silver hair hung loose around his shoulders.
“Holly. I’m glad you’re still here,” he’d said, holding the letter out. “I wrote this for you.”
“What is it?”
“Read and find out.” He smiled at her over his shoulder as he walked away, his pale violet gaze awakening something in her gut.
And so she did. He’d written to her of how he admired her work for the students. Her easy manner with them, making them laugh, wrapping them up into the process of learning. She bit her lip as she’d read his words, her stomach doing pirouettes. That letter was a lifeline. She’d not even realized at the time how much she needed it. It had been a long time since anyone had told her something beautiful about herself.
There were other letters like it.
Before the letters, before the friendship with Elan developed, Holly had been at the lowest point in her life. She had wanted to die. Living for her work—for the reward of seeing the children develop and grow—had reached a plateau in the internal world where she sought a reason to live. For many years the prospect of seeing them grasp a new concept or round out some aspect of their personality . . . well, it had been enough. During the dark times at night, alone in bed after Graf had raged at her like a storm, hitting her, pushing her, and then running out of the condo to cool down somewhere out in the half-darkness of the city, the thing that sustained her had been her work and purpose with the children.
But even the grandest mountain is worn by time.
The flame of hope that Graf might change, that the children mattered more to her than the sorrows of the bad times with Graf—it had gone out. The tiny warmth it gave her vanished. The light was extinguished. Holly no longer even loved herself enough to fight the insistence from Graf that no one would ever want her but him. And because
she had finally accepted this, there was no longer even warmth left within her for herself.
Until Elan.
Before Elan, Holly lay in bed at night, often wishing that she wouldn’t awaken in the morning. That she would go silently. That she would be one of the lucky ones that achieved some type of end to consciousness. And she didn’t care how it came about. Just that it would. There was no kindness in the world. The kindness that she had known came from herself, and some of it had been for herself, and when that died, Holly had wilted.
And then she was put on the committee with Elan. A Druiviin? Not in a million years. They were too different from her. And plus, a Druiviin would never want a human.
But Elan was kind. For months they worked together, learning about each other in ways that were important for their committee, and then, eventually, important for Holly. It was through him that she discovered that a man could be patient and kind, that a partner could be gentle, and that he didn’t have to use anger to control her.
Elan wanted nothing from her at first. Everything they said to each other was about the curriculum and the ways to design meaningful lessons that would help the children learn that the “other” was a label, an artifact of tribalism, and it had been an important thing once upon a time, long ago. But now it was detrimental to progress. As Holly learned more about the ways that she could help the children appreciate the other races, she discovered a profound respect within herself for Elan and the Yaso people in general.
And then he began writing her the letters.
Eventually she found herself waiting for them. Longing for the words that would awaken the sleeping parts of herself that had gone into hibernation, that she had shut away from the world.
But soon enough, reading them only brought her the most poignant sadness she had ever known, much deeper than anything she’d experienced with Graf, and sharper than even the loneliness she felt in the cover of darkness, alone in bed beside her husband.
The Colossus Collection : A Space Opera Adventure (Books 1-7 + Bonus Material) Page 36
