Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two

by Loren Rhoads

  Raena forbade the others to come along. “You can monitor us,” she suggested, “but Kavanaugh and I will have less to worry about if we go alone.”

  “Are you planning to kill Sloane?” Coni asked.

  Raena looked to Kavanaugh before answering.

  “I’m not planning to kill him,” Kavanaugh said. “That’s not to say he doesn’t deserve it.”

  “If he’s aged as fast in real life as he has in my dreams,” Raena added, “killing him won’t be necessary.”

  Just in case, though, Raena came to the meeting armed. She was glad to have Kavanaugh to watch her back.

  Stinger in her hand, she stepped warily though the apartment’s door. The room made her think of the featureless designer-furnished hidey-hole where she and Gavin lived on Brunzell. As it had there, all the furniture here came in a spectrum of shades of dirt, while the walls were an inoffensive tan. No one who had decorated this room ever intended to spend time in it.

  The room was unoccupied except for a figure lying on an oversized leather couch. A chocolate brown blanket swathed it from chin to feet. She didn’t recognize its shriveled monkey face.

  It stuck a withered claw out from under the blanket. “You came,” it croaked.

  “Gavin?” She said it like she wasn’t sure, but she was. It was all true. He had been killing himself with the Messiah drug. Somehow, to the very last minute, she had hoped he was not. She had hoped she’d been wrong. She slid the Stinger into its holster. Clearly, it was unnecessary.

  “Is this another dream?” he asked. “I’ve been trying to see you for so long …”

  “This is real, Gavin. I’m really here.”

  “Still so pretty,” he said. He closed his watery greenish brown eyes, as if he couldn’t fend sleep off any longer.

  “Dammit.” All the rest of her life, Raena had only recognized two states: dead or not a threat. This frail old man fit comfortably into neither category. She turned to Kavanaugh. “Is he too far gone?”

  Kavanaugh checked Sloane’s pulse and breathing and listened to his heart. “He’s dying,” Kavanaugh reported, “but not this minute. Soon. If you scare him, his heart’s liable to stop.”

  Raena nodded. She knelt beside the sofa on a carpet that looked like fat round worms writhing over each other. It was soft beneath her knees, expensive and welcoming.

  She studied Sloane. His skin was so dry that it looked clouded over, paler than paper. Brown splotched his face and scalp, irregular patches that looked like death spreading across his skin. His hair had almost completely vanished. A wiry green vein pulsed sluggishly at his temple.

  “Was it worth it?” Raena asked.

  Sloane’s eyes fluttered open. He smiled, but what teeth he left had gone shades of yellow and brown like the furniture. “Very worth it,” he echoed. “You’re here.”

  “But I hate you for what you’ve been doing to me,” she said quietly.

  “I’m sorry about that,” he wheezed. “But you already hated me.”

  She cut him off. “I left you, Gavin. I didn’t hate you.”

  He chose not to argue. “I thought going back into the past would be easy. I’d just tell myself, ‘Leave Kai a few days early,’ or ‘Get your ship fixed before you head for Nizarrh,’ or ‘Don’t take the elevator on the Arbiter.’ But it doesn’t work that way. Whenever I caught my own eyes, the timeline would break. I’d get kicked out of the trance before I could say anything.”

  “But the first dream, the one where you drugged me on Kai … ?”

  “I had to kill myself to get you,” he wheezed. “I didn’t want to do that more than once.”

  “Do you know how many times I killed you, Gavin? Shooting you or bashing your skull in or kicking you out the airlock … It was awful to wake up with those images in my mind, even if I hadn’t really done those things.”

  “Nothing to feel guilty for, then.” He chuckled, but it broke off into a ragged cough.

  Kavanaugh put a glass of water in Raena’s hand. She held it for Gavin to get a sip.

  “You were magnificent,” he said. “My avenging angel. I tried going to Thallian’s world ahead of you, killing him before you could get there. Then you arrived in the escape pod with Thallian’s son—and Thallian’s clones didn’t come to the surface to get you because I’d already drowned them all. I’m not sure what happened after that. Maybe the shielding prevented you from contacting the Veracity to rescue you. Maybe you banged on the secret panel until the boy let you out. Whatever it was, you were both dead by the time I located you.”

  Raena frowned as something not quite a memory flickered through her mind. She remembered waiting, trapped inside the gutted communications console, until she was past thirsty, until she was racked with cramps, until she was starving. Then Jain, under the same stress, broke into the console. She’d had no room to maneuver, no leverage, and no way to escape. He only had to hit her until she couldn’t see any more. She opened his throat with her teeth. They had died covered in each other’s blood, lying in each other’s arms.

  Raena shuddered. She had struggled to subscribe to Ariel’s philosophy: life was a game. Ariel believed you could sometimes control the bumpers. Raena had always felt that, while occasionally you might be able to slow your fall, the game was inherently rigged. Gravity always won: eventually you always had to take the drop, plunge down that hole. In the meantime, you slammed around, trying to assume some kind of control over the path of your life.

  It was horrible to discover how easy it was for someone who claimed to love you to purposefully crash into you, tilt you out of your true trajectory. And to do it over and over and over again.

  Raena hadn’t thought she could feel horror any longer, but she felt it now. How could someone who claimed to love her proceed so cheerfully to warp her life like this?

  Because his love, like Thallian’s, was a lust for possession. It didn’t see her as real or autonomous. It didn’t grant her free will, except the will to submit. She was an object in the game, not its subject and certainly not its player. She was the prize to be won, but no one cared what the trophy thought about moving from one shelf to another. Its job was to stand still and settle for the pleasure of being admired.

  “How could you do this to me?” she whispered.

  “I was trying to rescue you,” Gavin protested. “I knew your life had been absolutely hellish, from the moment it started until the day you set Thallian on fire. I wanted to spare you.”

  She sat back on her heels, hands balled into fists on her thighs. She tried to keep in mind what Kavanaugh had said about scaring Sloane to death, but she wanted to hurt him so badly it made her tremble. “Gavin, by what right did you decide my life was hellish?”

  “You were orphaned. A slave. And Thallian …”

  She interrupted the tirade. “It’s my life, Gavin. It made me who I am. I don’t want to have it taken away from me. I wouldn’t want to change any of it. It’s mine. It’s all I have. How fucking dare you?”

  “It’s made you the woman I love,” he argued, “but I wanted to save you.”

  “It’s made me the woman you can’t have,” she corrected. “You wanted to improve me.”

  He gaped at her, then offered her a lopsided grin. She might have fallen for it once, when they were both younger, but now she was too enraged.

  “Did you ever win me?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Gavin said. “I was only aware when the past begins. Once the split occurs, things get blurry.”

  “You’re lying,” Raena accused. “You know very well what happens. The Messiah lets you stay in the moment, doesn’t it? But making a change is really hard, which is why the drug is so addictive. You have to keep going back, keep trying to make the change you want to see.”

  He shook his head, but didn’t meet her eyes.

  “As far as I’ve seen, you mostly got killed,” Raena told him. “I didn’t recognize you. I was paranoid and broken. There was no way I could trust you.
So I killed you, over and over and over and over. It was awful, Gavin. It had to stop.”

  “Is it too hard to kill someone you love?” he asked.

  “You were killing me, chipping away at me like that. That wasn’t hard at all, was it?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “You didn’t answer mine, either. But I don’t love you, Gavin. I can’t. I stopped believing I might the night you had the argument with Ariel about what made my being her slave any different than my being Thallian’s aide. I can’t forgive you for hurting her like that. I’m not sure I ever loved you, the real Gavin Sloane. I never really knew you, until you got me out of that tomb. All the affection I felt for you in those years of darkness, the whole relationship I lived in my imagination before you freed me from that tomb: that makes it hard to wake up with the image of your blood on my hands, time and time again.”

  “It was hard for me, too,” he protested.

  “Did you ever stop to think about what the Messiah drug did to the addicts’ targets, back during the War? Did you care what you were doing to me, in the galaxy here and now?”

  He smiled at her. “You’re strong,” he said. “You’re young. You always survive.”

  The hair stood up on the back of Raena’s neck. In other words, he didn’t care what he did to her.

  Kavanaugh stepped in before she hit him. “Where did you get the Messiah drug, Gavin?”

  “It was in the stuff your team hauled out of the Templar tombs. There were three crates of it, like the Templar had been warehousing it. I can’t understand why they stored it there—there were Templar storehouses across the galaxy much more centrally located—but they must have thought nothing was as secure as their tombs. Since they allowed no one on their tombworld as long as there were Templar alive to guard it, no one could discover they were the ones destabilizing the border governments. Humanity made the perfect scapegoat, which must have amused the bugs endlessly.”

  “Where’s all the Messiah now?” Raena asked.

  “I sold it back to the pusher.” He coughed, a horrible wet sound that wracked him until he was bent double.

  Raena rubbed his back, trying to calm him. When he had settled back at last, she asked, “You sold it to Outrider?”

  He nodded. “He’d gone all legit, lying low, working as a pharmacist, so you can imagine how surprised he was to see one of the old runners getting back in touch. Took a while for him to believe what I had.”

  Raena’s heart plummeted inside her. She couldn’t begin to envision the damage that crates of Messiah could do, wild in the galaxy. The worst scenarios she could envision were probably nothing as bad as what was to come. Her first inclination hadn’t changed after all these years; there was danger ahead and she should run. But where could humanity run to? If the whole galaxy banded together and blamed humanity for the havoc this drug could do, there would be no defense. No safe hiding place. Humans were scattered across the galaxy now. They had no central government, no army, no place to hide. They were too vulnerable. They would be hunted down, rounded up, and exterminated.

  Gavin fumbled at the black rubber bracelet hooked around his left wrist. With difficulty he managed to tug the prongs out of the socket and pull the thing off. He held it out to Raena.

  “What’s this?”

  “Tracking program. I bugged the crates before I let them out of my sight. All of the packets have tracers, too, in case Outrider decided he didn’t like my packing job and recrated everything.”

  She took the bracelet and handed it to Kavanaugh. “Thanks, Gavin. We’ll check it out.”

  “There’s more.” He pointed a trembling finger at a twist of metal on the shelf near the dining table. “Camera. I got footage of Outrider. So he can be identified. And my computer has the contact codes for him.”

  Later, maybe, she’d be stunned by the layers of Sloane’s betrayal of the pusher, but now she was simply grateful for it. They still had a long way to go to capture this guy.

  “What did he pay you?” she asked.

  “He showed me how to build the vaporizer. He told me how to use the drug. And then he made a huge anonymous donation to the Shaad Family Foundation.”

  That was the name of Ariel’s charity, the one that bought human kids out of slavery and found them homes. Raena was horrified by the sick irony of Outrider, future assassin of the human race, helping Ariel save its children for the coming slaughter.

  “Why?”

  “Because Ariel deserved something out of this. This damned drug taught me what it was like to love someone who couldn’t love me back. I finally felt sorry for her.”

  “Did you hear all that?” Raena asked the comm bracelet on her left wrist. “We need to go after Outrider now, before this stuff hits the galaxy.”

  “Yes,” Coni said. “Mykah’s on his way over to get the tracker.”

  Kavanaugh said, “I’ve hired a med transport to get Gavin onto the Veracity.”

  “Are we taking him with us?” Raena asked.

  “We can’t leave him here to die alone.”

  Raena met Kavanaugh’s eyes.

  “All right, I can’t leave him here,” Kavanaugh corrected. “I will nurse him on the Veracity.”

  “If you could get him to the Templar tombs,” she suggested, “you could keep him alive—”

  Gavin fastened a bony hand on her arm. “You’re not shutting me in there. I don’t want to stay alive. I got nothing to live for in this universe. I fucked everything up so badly …”

  “Look, Gavin, I don’t pity you. You made your choices. I didn’t bewitch you. I didn’t ask for you to obsess over me. I owed you for getting me out of that tomb, but we tried living together and it didn’t work.”

  As she talked, Kavanaugh moved around the apartment, gathering clothes and medicines—liquid for his cough, lotion for his thin skin, painkillers for his twisted joints. Raena put what food Gavin had into a cooler. There wasn’t much. Apparently, Gavin had barely attended to the minimal needs of his body while he lay on the sofa, chasing dreams.

  “Why don’t you love me?” he asked quietly.

  Raena turned to regard him, the sad, shriveled old thing.

  “Gavin,” she said thoughtfully, “you don’t even like yourself. For a long time, I didn’t like myself either, but being locked up alone for so long changed that. Maybe we could have had a chance, being broken together, but I want more from life than that. I’m willing to be alone until I can find someone who respects who I am and what I’ve been through—and doesn’t want to take that away from me or change me to make himself more comfortable.”

  “I’ve given up everything for you,” Gavin argued. “I spent a fortune and wasted years to rescue you from that tomb. Now I’ve wrecked my health and used up the rest of my life …”

  “Did I ask you for any of that?” she said quietly. “You chose to make those sacrifices—and I respect the power of the emotions behind those choices. But they don’t obligate me to anything.”

  How, she wondered, could he know so much about her life, all the details, all the turning points, and not understand her at all?

  “If I was looking for someone to give me every material thing I could possibly want in the galaxy,” Raena said, “I would still be with Ariel. If I wanted to feel lives in my hands, I could have stayed in the Imperial Diplomatic Corps. All I want now is freedom, Gavin. I want to belong to me. We might have been friends some day, if you’d just given me some space.”

  “Being friends was not enough.”

  “Did you ever think that it was so hard to change things because they weren’t supposed to be changed?”

  “See, that kind of negative thinking is why I adore you,” Gavin purred.

  After Kavanaugh got Sloane delivered to the Veracity, Coni had seen him settled comfortably in Raena’s cabin. She was already prepared with her surveillance system to interview Sloane as extensively as she could, teasing out all the details of the drug and its dealer.

>   Raena shifted into the cabin Vezali knocked together for her in the hold. It was configured more or less like the cell the Thallians had meant for her when she first came aboard the ship. The room wasn’t elegant or very comfortable, but it would do.

  The Veracity’s crew differed on whether they would release the interviews with Gavin to the media or if they’d take the recording straight to the Council of Worlds and screen it for the government first.

  The crew seemed to understand that chasing Outrider was more dangerous than anything Raena had gotten them into yet. They could easily be accused as pawns in the dissemination of the Messiah drug, or worse, as terrorists working toward the overthrow of the galactic status quo. Since Mellix was with them, public opinion could swing either way. There were still powerful forces out there, looking to do Mellix in.

  Even Mykah was torn. He had the sense to be afraid to confront a pusher who knowingly dispensed a drug that would kill not only its users but hundreds, thousands, millions more who had nothing to do with it or him. If Mykah had had any kind of official government contacts, anyone with a paramilitary troop who could have captured Outrider in his place, then he would have gladly stepped aside.

  In the end, Mellix persuaded the crew that they had a duty to the truth. Raena made it Mykah’s job to ensure the journalist survived the confrontation.

  Kavanaugh contacted Outrider, posing as an old war buddy of Sloane’s—which was true, if the pusher cared to check. He delivered the Humans First! rant Raena wrote for him. Outrider agreed to come to Verwoest to discuss how he could aid Kavanaugh’s work.

  Nursing Sloane fell to Kavanaugh. He was the only one who had any idea what to do and, anyway, Raena refused to spend much time with the old man. She didn’t see why Sloane should get what he wanted. She was not going to forgive him.

  So Kavanaugh and Sloane talked over the past. Kavanaugh finally told the older man how much he had looked up to him, how grateful he was for all the times Sloane bailed him out of trouble, all the adventures they’d had when they were young.

  Sloane mostly listened. He drifted in and out, sleeping a lot of the time.