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

by Loren Rhoads

  When Mykah rang the dinner chime, Kavanaugh came out to find Raena already in the passage.

  Doc would tell her, Kavanaugh decided. Doc believed in regretting the things you did, not the things you didn’t. “You should go and sit with him,” he told Raena.

  Her face was unreadable. “I’ve said everything I have to say to him.”

  “He has things he needs to say to you.”

  She considered that. “I don’t promise to like them,” she said finally.

  “Fair enough.”

  Raena let herself into her former cabin as Kavanaugh went on to dinner.

  Raena pulled her desk chair over to the bed and let its magnetic feet seal to the deck. The sound woke Sloane.

  “Really here?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Kavanaugh said you had something to tell me.”

  He chuckled. It was a weird, dry, alien sound. “Not gonna apologize to you,” he said. “Didn’t apologize to Ariel, and I shot her.”

  “I’m not going to apologize to you either, Gavin.”

  “I expect no less.”

  He closed his eyes and seemed to drift off to sleep again. Raena watched his face and tried to see the man who’d kissed her on Nizarrh, back when she was young enough to believe there might be such a thing as love at first sight. In her tomb, she’d convinced herself that he’d come onto the Arbiter to release her from Thallian’s torture machine because he had loved her, not because losing her to Thallian had hurt his pride, or because the Coalition had offered him a bounty for her.

  How to explain his desecration of the Templar tombs for her? Gavin had paid so many bribes, bought so much equipment and dragged it out to that rock, hired the men—but why? He hadn’t expected to find her alive. Why would he do all that for her corpse?

  He couldn’t have really loved her, Raena told herself. Before she came out of her tomb, he hadn’t ever spent an entire day with her. He picked her up on Nizarrh and lost her to Thallian’s men, then freed her briefly on the Arbiter before she was captured again. Then he’d spent all the years of her imprisonment learning as much about her life as he could …

  She couldn’t understand it. All her life, Raena thought she’d loved people—her mother, Thallian, Sloane—only to find that she’d been wrong. She’d mimicked love, sensed how they wanted her to feel, but in the end, love was just ashes in her hands.

  She didn’t mean to start crying, but when the tears filled her eyes, she didn’t move to wipe them away.

  Sloane opened his eyes again. Without a word, he held his withered and trembling hand out to her.

  Raena wove her fingers around his.

  As if that was what he had been waiting for, Gavin’s breathing began to lengthen out. The exhalations grew longer. The intervals between breaths grew longer still.

  Raena thought about calling for Kavanaugh, but there wasn’t anything more he could do. Sloane seemed at peace at last.

  Raena thought she understood Ariel a little better now. Sloane could pull the grandest gestures, then follow them with petty cruelties. He could make you feel like the center of the universe, then say the most heartless things. Kavanaugh and Ariel both loved him, so he hurt them time and time again. And they forgave him time and time again. Maybe that was why he couldn’t love them back.

  When Kavanaugh came back to check on them, Raena said, “He’s gone.”

  “I thought it was getting close. You okay?”

  She offered him a smile. “I’m sorry I hit you on Kai. I didn’t want Ariel to have to face Thallian again. I didn’t want anyone to be able to follow me. I thought I was going to my death, but that it would be worth it, if I could take Thallian down. I was angry and scared, so I lashed out at you. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. I’m sorry.”

  Kavanaugh gazed at her. So many thoughts left shadows on his face, but all he said was, “Thank you.”

  Raena nodded. “Leave me alone with him a little longer.”

  After Kavanaugh left her, she sat with Sloane’s body, thinking over the good times. It didn’t matter what Sloane had done or why, only how it made her feel. There had been that kiss on Nizarrh, when every fiber of her body lit up. There had been the crazy escape from her cell on the Arbiter, when she would have done anything to thank Sloane for getting her out of Thallian’s torture machine. There had been the night on Brunzell, when Raena made love to Sloane for the first time, searching desperately for a reason to live.

  Now Gavin Sloane was just one more corpse in the army of corpses on Raena’s conscience. As selfish and misguided as Gavin had been, he had given her the tools to make it right in the end.

  She went to get a tarp from Vezali’s stores, then brought it back to her cabin. She lifted Gavin’s body and set it carefully in the middle of the tarp, tucked in the edges around him, and bundled him up. Then she carried him back to the cell where she had been staying.

  It was quick to gather her few things and return them to her cabin. Then she placed Gavin’s corpse on the cell’s bunk, secured him with the restraints, and left the room. Once the door was locked behind her, she rerouted the room’s life support. It should refrigerate him effectively until they knew whether they’d need to turn over his body for evidence of the Messiah drug’s return to the galaxy.

  Outrider didn’t make himself difficult to meet. Still, Raena didn’t like the warren of buildings through which they walked on Verwoest. There were too many shadows, too many alleys, too many nooks in which someone could hide. If she had been traveling through this neighborhood alone, she would have drawn her pistol.

  Kavanaugh had point, while she and Mykah hung back. Somewhere behind them walked Haoun, Coni, and the journalist Mellix. Since they couldn’t pass for human, they were pretending to be unaware of the first trio. Since he was the fastest, Mykah was supposed to run away at the first sign of trouble and bring the law if he could.

  “We’re here,” Kavanaugh said softly.

  The door looked as decrepit as everything else around them. There was nothing special about it, except for the scarred palm lock installed outside. Kavanaugh put his hand on the lock and let it ID him.

  After the door ground open, a voice said, “Come in, Mr. Kavanaugh.” The room inside was as shadowy as the one in which Raena had first seen the Messiah drug, all those decades ago. This one did not yet reek of unwashed bodies, but Raena was certain that would come in time, if Outrider had his way.

  “Show me your payment first,” Outrider said from somewhere in the room.

  Mykah put the case on the floor and nudged it open. A pile of Templar artifacts glimmered in the dim light.

  “Tell me again how you found me,” Outrider said, not moving from wherever he stood. Raena wondered if he was really in the room with them, or if it was a speaker.

  “I worked for Gavin Sloane,” Kavanaugh said. “I led the team he’d hired to open the Templar tombs. We rediscovered the Messiah drug in one. I didn’t know what it was, but Sloane did.”

  “How is old Sloane?”

  “Dead.” Kavanaugh managed to say it coldly, without a hint of the fury Raena knew he felt.

  “Did he get what he wanted?”

  “In the end, yes. That’s why we’re here.”

  Shadows shifted in the back of the room, but not clearly enough that Raena could make out a target.

  “The media said the tombs were looted by the Thallians.”

  Raena was glad she’d persuaded Mykah to shave his beard to distinguish himself from the man in the documentaries.

  “The Thallians were there, too, after Sloane packed us up and we left,” Kavanaugh said. “Some of their men died there.”

  “Did you set the booby trap on the Templar Master’s tomb?”

  “I did,” Raena said. She wore Revan Thallian’s coat, which hid the fact that her boot heels were so tall, and a wide-brimmed hat of Coni’s that shadowed her face. “I’m also the one who released the video of the Thallians on the ground there. No evidence remains to connect Sloane
to the tombs any more.”

  The shadow moved a little closer. It moved strangely, reminding Raena again of a spider, sidling forward, halting. “Your voice is familiar,” Outrider said.

  “Don’t know how that can be.”

  Someone darted in from the side, snatching at her hat. Raena heard him coming a half second before he touched her. She turned toward the sound and grabbed the outstretched wrist.

  She heard Mykah and Kavanaugh moving behind her, going separate directions. She spun inside her assailant’s reach. He was stronger than she expected and she couldn’t get him off balance.

  He knocked the hat from her head with his free hand. Their eyes locked. He was still a puffy, slightly overweight human with thinning red hair and bloodshot eyes.

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” Raena said.

  “Nor have you.”

  She got the stone knife out of her sleeve sheath, into her free hand, and stabbed it hard into his arm as he brought the pistol up from his thigh holster. He didn’t drop the gun, so she twisted the blade, sawing its jagged edge against what she thought was bone.

  Shots were exchanged behind her, but Outrider didn’t flinch. Raena couldn’t afford to either. She exerted all her strength to keep his gun pointed away from Kavanaugh and Mykah.

  “Stun doesn’t work,” Kavanaugh said grimly. “That was point-blank.”

  “I’m okay,” Mykah said, but he didn’t sound it. He obviously hadn’t gotten out like he had been supposed to. Raena wondered if they had been locked in, if this had been a trap from the start.

  Outrider tangled his foot between Raena’s. She used his shift in balance to kick up hard over her shoulder. Her boot heel took out one of his eyes. That revealed what she should have suspected as soon as she realized he hadn’t aged: Outrider wasn’t human. Something writhed inside his skull, mechanical worms crawling over each other in a hypnotic clockwork motion.

  “He’s an android,” Raena said. She spun sideways, flinging herself into a flip that launched her away from his grasp. He still had the gun, though, and that was a problem. She drew her own Stinger and dropped into a crouch.

  He helpfully shot at her from his new position. Raena nudged her pistol out of stun with her thumb—the motion was second nature—and fired at the android’s gun, rather than at his body. As she’d expected, the gun was less well shielded. It exploded, raining burning plasma everywhere.

  She shut her eyes tight, but the flash and the resultant fire still burned bright inside her eyelids. She rolled sideways, and aimed blind at the place where the android had been.

  And then the fight stopped being a sequence of events that followed logically in her mind. Kavanaugh fired off wildly from behind some kind of cover, which allowed Raena to see there were two sources of fire coming back his way. She launched herself at the nearest one, nothing like a plan in her head.

  In the end, they collected pieces of all three Outrider androids, enough to prove that Outrider had not been human—or at least that he wasn’t any longer. The pieces kept reaching out for one another, trying to reassemble themselves into one working copy. Raena made sure Mellix got some good footage of that. No one doubted it was Templar tech.

  She sorted out the best of the Outrider heads and wrapped it and one hand—separately—in some of her Viridian slave cloth. As she’d hoped, the pieces went quiescent once they no longer sensed each other directly.

  Mykah had been shot, but he would live. Luckily, Kavanaugh had plenty of experience dealing with battlefield wounds and got him stabilized enough that Coni could get him safely to the hospital.

  Haoun searched the rest of the building and located one crate full of the Messiah drug. The others were nowhere to be found. Raena hoped that they could be hunted down using Gavin’s trackers, but feared that they would find the crates separated and moving away from one another. How many Outriders could there be?

  Raena pulled out a brick of Messiah and cut a slab off with her knife. She wrapped it in more of the slave cloth and handed it to Mellix. Without a vaporizer or dosage information, it was mostly harmless. Besides, Mellix—not being human—couldn’t get high off it himself.

  She and Kavanaugh gathered as many of the Outrider pieces as they could and threw them into the crate of Messiah, burying each piece deep into the packets of the drug. When she felt confident they had collected up all the biggest bits, she pulled the thermeon from a pocket in her coat.

  “Have you recorded everything you need?” she asked Mellix.

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Go out to the street now.” She nodded for Kavanaugh to go along and keep the journalist safe. After they left, she triggered the timer on the thermeon, pitched it into the crate, and sprinted for the door.

  The resultant explosion brought the building down in the most satisfying way.

  Raena was watching the building burn when Mellix swung the camera from the inferno toward her. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Messiah was a trap set for humans by the Templar. That seems like reason enough.” Raena turned away from him and started to walk.

  “Hey, I would like your company,” Mellix called after her.

  She stopped and waited for him to catch up. “I will only speak off the record,” Raena said, not looking at him. “By the way, it’s not safe for you to walk around with that camera on the street. Too much of a temptation.”

  “Oh, right. Thanks.” He disassembled the camera quickly, tucking its pieces into his tunic pockets.

  Once they’d started to walk again, Mellix said, “Will Mykah be okay?”

  She nodded toward Kavanaugh. “Both of us have survived worse. He’ll be fine.”

  “He was my student,” Mellix said, “one of my favorites. You can teach technique, but you can’t teach passion. Mykah was one of the few who saw things wrong in the galaxy and wanted to have a hand in changing them. It didn’t make him a good candidate for a standard news job, but he seems to have found his calling.”

  “He’s been a good friend,” Raena said. “It’s been an honor and a pleasure to travel with him and his crew.”

  “Aren’t you part of the Veracity’s crew?”

  She hadn’t really thought about it, but she supposed it was true. “I’ve served on ships before, but the Veracity is the first place I’ve ever felt I’ve belonged. I feel more at home there than I have ever been anywhere else.”

  Mellix’s next question took her by surprise. “Would you say you’re fascinated by history, righting historical wrongs?”

  “I would say that I’m finished digging through history.” Raena paused, surprised by a sudden rush of emotion. It had been a long time since she’d felt free to look forward, instead of reacting to her past. “It’s the future that interests me now.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The first draft of this novel was written during Nanowrimo 2013. Of all my many attempts at finishing 50,000 words of fiction over the course of the annual National Novel Writing Month, this book (then called No More Heroes—now the title of Book Three in this series) was the first time I succeeded. Hurray for Nanowrimo and the hundreds of thousands of novelists it supports and inspires each year!

  Thanks again to Martha Allard and Mason Jones, who held my hand and cheered me on as this book expanded from a rough Nanowrimo draft to the novel you hold in your hands. Their encouragement and careful eyes were a huge help. Any errors that remain are my own.

  Thanks to Brian, Paul, and Kelly, fellow members of The Chowder Society, who were there with the Star Wars links when I needed my love for this genre to be re-invigorated.

  Thanks also to Susan Holtzer and SG Browne, who read the first chapter cold when I was having a crisis. You said exactly what I needed to hear when I needed to hear it.

  A special shout-out to Nick and the crew of San Francisco’s Mercury Cafe, where I have spent many hours reading, writing, and editing. A good cafe is a blessing.

  Finally, thanks to my champion, editor Jeremy Lassen, who
believed I could write a trilogy and is helping me prove it. His questions and thoughtful reading helped flesh this book out to its current dimensions.

  Thanks also to Jason Katzman and Cory Allyn, my knights at Skyhorse, for again being patient with my questions.

  On to Book Three!

  Photo courtesy of Ken Goudey

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Loren Rhoads is the co-author (with Brian Thomas) of As Above, So Below. She’s the author of a book of essays called Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel and editor of The Haunted Mansion Project: Year Two and Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues. Her science fiction short stories were collected into the chapbook Ashes & Rust. She remembers the Christmas there were men on the moon and looks forward to the New Year’s Day there will be women on Mars.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author