by Renard, Loki
“Nothing will.”
Faith watched him go for the last time, pushing the wrenching agony away in order to focus on the task at hand. It was time to do what she did best. It was time to take something that wasn’t hers and run away.
* * *
An hour later, intense music throbbed through the amphitheater, dancers swaying beneath the moon’s great glow. At the peak of the moon’s silver display, Ephemera appeared to the crowds of gathered Svari just as she had done for hundreds of years. Her glowing form brought a reverent hush over the crowd as they waited with bated breath to hear the wisdom from the lips of their esteemed eternal council.
A few more observant Svari might have noticed that Ephemera’s appearance was quite changed. Usually she was the projection of the perfect Svari form, a glowing angel providing comfort and guidance to the masses in her peak state. She was still very beautiful, but her glow was tinged with red and gold. And when she parted her lips to speak, it was not with a traditional message of hope, or peace, or profound wisdom that emerged. It was, instead, a question.
“Would you like fries with that? ”
There was a moment in which the crowd were totally silent. Then their voices lifted dutifully to the silver moon’s glow.
“Would you like fries with that,” the assembly repeated in humble and confused tones.
“ Would you like fries with that? ” Ephemera repeated herself more intensely.
“Would you like fries with that!?” The crowd chanted with greater enthusiasm, more sure of themselves now.
“Unexpected item in the bagging area! ” Ephemera changed her tune suddenly.
“Unexpected… item… in the bagging area?” the crowd repeated. They did not know what they were saying, but they knew that they were supposed to say it, so they did.
From her perch above the ceremonies, Faith giggled to herself as she plucked the leaves and glue that had made up the decoy costume from her body. She had been certain that somebody would spot her for being a very poor dancer, but nobody was paying attention to a scraggly looking plant. They were all far too intensely focused on the grander display, the music that swelled to mind-altering effect, the swaying motions of the dancers grasping attention with their motions and of course, the silver glow of the moon casting a psychedelic shade over the entire affair, turning the amphitheater into an enchanted holy garden.
Ephemera was safe in her pocket, and against all odds, the decoy was actually working. She had expected chaos once the chips were switched, but apparently the Svari were just as unobservant as Serkan had indicated. The key to the heist had been the fact that Svari technology was capable of taking any coding on almost any chip and projecting it through Ephemera’s hologram. As soon as she realized she could simply sneak in and switch the chip she had stolen back on Earth out with the council stone while Ephemera ordered the dancers to mass on the stage for her grand address, it was the easiest job she’d ever done.
Of course, it hadn’t ever really been about the difficulty involved in taking the tablet. It had been about Ephemera finding someone lawless enough to actually do it. That was where Faith’s skills had truly come into play; her ability to throw caution, sense, and social code to the wind to take the actions she needed to take.
It wasn’t over yet, though. She still had an escape to make.
Faith ran up the winding stairs of the council building, heading for Serkan’s docked ship. Down below, she could hear the temple goers reciting new Ephemera’s words with great gusto and eagerness. There were fries unexpectedly in the bagging area, apparently.
Laughing with tears of sorrow in her eyes, Faith reached the ship. This was it. Serkan was probably looking for her by now, but he’d never find her. Their time together had come to an end. She almost couldn’t do it, but she knew she had to. Someone would soon realize that there was a problem, and all hell was going to break loose.
She pressed the key to the ship’s door. It slid open, Faith darted inside—and ran straight into the tall, muscular frame of Serkan.
“What the hell!” She let out a frightened shriek of surprise. He looked pissed. Super pissed. He looked like he knew precisely what she had been doing, but maybe not why.
“Faith!” He grabbed her before she could run away again and shook her like a pup. “What. Have. You. Done?”
“I just saved your life, asshole,” Faith bit out. “Help me get out of here and I’ll explain.”
His expression was thunderous, the handsome lines of his face drawn in harsh judgment. “Help you escape the consequences of your actions? Again? I do not think so, Faith. This time you have gone too far. You have desecrated the most holy of our artifacts.”
“Shut up and trust me,” Faith growled. “I swear to god, Serkan. If you don’t believe me once I’m done explaining, bring me back here and throw me to the wolves. But right now, we need to get off this planet, okay?”
He let her go and stood back with an expression of disgust on his handsome features. “You really expect me to help you escape after stealing our holiest of holies?”
“No,” Faith said, reaching into her other pocket. She had hoped that she would not have to use this implement, but there had always been a chance somebody would try to stop her. She’d never thought it would be Serkan. “I expect you to get out of my way.”
“That’s never… eeeeeeeeeemmmnnnnnn!”
The look on Serkan’s face as several thousand volts of stun went through him was one of ultimate betrayal. He dropped like a stone, giving Faith enough time to shut the doors of the cargo bay, run to the bridge, and start the ship.
Faith and Serkan left the planet in a white flash of speed, exiting the orbit of the Svari planet without any interference. Faith had set the ship’s coordinates for a star system notable for a lack of Svari extradition—Ephemera’s advice had been valuable yet again. As evil as the council were, they had at least given her a fighting chance, and her freedom. Faith supposed she couldn’t totally hate them.
She did have a problem though. A problem who had been banging on the cargo bay door for the last hour. Serkan was furious and he wasn’t showing any signs of calming down anytime soon.
“You’re being a really difficult prisoner, Serkan,” she observed over the intercom. “Settle down, okay? This isn’t as bad as it looks.”
She couldn’t hear his response, and was pretty glad that she couldn’t.
* * *
Locked in his own cargo bay, Serkan was about as furious as he had ever been in his entire life. He was angry at Faith, of course, but even more angry at himself. This was all his fault. He had known something was up. He just hadn’t suspected how big of a thing it was. But he should have. He had met Faith while stealing important technology and he had brought her back to his planet. What else could he have expected her to do but repeat the crime? She was a scorpion. She stung. She couldn’t help it. All the treatment in the world would not change her essential nature.
Unlike Faith, Serkan was not going to stay a prisoner for long. He knew his ship, and it was not possible to keep him captive on it. He’d pulled off the door control panel and finally managed to reach the control cables. Once they were exposed, it was a simple matter to bypass them and open the door. From there, he walked quietly up to the bridge, where Faith was sitting in the captain’s chair.
He stood there for a moment, looking at her. There were so many emotions running through his body, most of them heavily conflicting. He loved her with everything he had, with a fierce intensity that trumped all the others. He should take her back to Svari. He should undo what she had done. She deserved to be punished thoroughly… and she would be, one way or another.
He slid forward a few steps and grabbed her out of his chair, making her shriek with shock.
“Serkan! How… it’s…”
He propped his knee up, put her over it, and unleashed his palm across her backside in a flurry of swats that made her shriek.
“Don’t you ever use elec
tricity on me again,” he snarled down at her. “Don’t you ever so much as think about locking me up either. Girl, you have fucked up so badly, I don’t ever think we’re going to un-fuck this.”
“Serkan, it’s not what it looks like!”
He continued to whip her butt as she screamed and protested and promised him that she could explain.
“I don’t want to hear a damn word out of your mouth,” he growled. “I saved your ass, took you in, and this is how you repay me?” His palm whipped against her covered ass, making it jiggle, but there was nothing hot about this spanking. This was just a straight whipping, which she deserved a hundred times over.
He had to restrain himself from going too far, or letting his anger get the better of him. Serkan had never been so damn furious in all his life. Long before he was even halfway done giving her the punishment she deserved, he swept her up from his knee, tossed her over his shoulder, and carried her off the bridge.
“Look, I deserved some of that, but…” Faith just kept talking, but Serkan wasn’t in the mood to hear her justifications or excuses.
“Shut up, Faith,” he said as he carried her into the bedroom. He dumped her on the bed and walked away, sealing the room properly so she would not make an escape.
“Serkan! We have to talk!” she screamed through the wall.
“No, we don’t,” he said to himself. He went back to the bridge, cursing to himself. He could not believe what she had done to him, to the world he called home. She had destroyed both.
He sat down at the controls, ready to set a course for Svari. But his fingers would not move. If he took her back… that would be the end of her. She would be put to death. After all she had done, stealing the council stone, incapacitating him and locking him in his own ship, lying to him at every turn, perhaps he should have been alright with that. But he was not.
He sighed deeply, his head in his hands. The acts she had done could not be undone. This was one thing he could not fix. All he could do now was take responsibility for the mess she’d made.
Chapter Thirteen
“Hey! Hey, let me out! Let me out now!”
Serkan had no intention of letting Faith out, but she was making enough banging and crashing sounds to concern him that she might be hurting herself. She was not taking to captivity any better than he had, though she had far fewer options to escape it.
“Leeeet. Meeeee. Ouuuttt!”
She must have known that she was risking punishment by acting this way, but it had been a full day since he had shut her away and the social nature of humans meant that she would probably prefer a spanking to yet more solitude. Her cry trailed off as he opened the door to what had once been a bedroom, but was now more of a cell.
“Be silent. You have caused enough trouble,” Serkan growled down at her. “Screaming and shouting will not save you now, Faith.”
“I’m just trying to explain, you big… god! If you would listen for just two seconds, you’d understand that…”
“Enough!”
She fell silent for all of a split-second before opening her mouth again. “You need to let me out,” she begged.
“Freedom is earned,” he said. “And you are far from earning it.”
Her eyes widened, as if consequence were a foreign notion, as if she expected him to forgive her for the crime she had committed against an entire planet. “You can’t keep me locked up like this!”
“You know very well that I can.”
“You were nicer when we first met,” she said in accusatory tones.
“You were less trouble when we first met.”
Faith rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hips. “Uh, technically, when you first met me, I was unconscious.”
He shook his head and pressed the button to close the door once more. “Exactly.”
* * *
It took three days for Serkan to let Faith out of the bedroom. She had all the food and toilet supplies she needed. She could have stayed there indefinitely, but Serkan knew solitary confinement was torture for humans and as furious as he was, he did not want to torture her. Hell, he didn’t want to cause her any pain at all.
And that was the problem. He had been too soft. He should have thrashed her from the beginning, taken her to the very limits of her capacity to withstand sensation. He would have broken her in the process, but…
No. He abandoned that line of thought as well. He had done what he could do. But it had not been enough.
She had tried many times to talk to him, but Serkan refused. The truth was, he could barely stand to look at her. She reminded him of what a failure he had been. He had destroyed his entire civilization due to his fascination with the human.
“Serkan?” She approached him yet again, her demeanor pathetic.
“Go back to bed, Faith,” he said coldly. He did not want to speak to her. There was no excuse for what she had done, and he did not want to hear her try to fabricate one.
“You hate me, don’t you,” Faith said, her eyes brimming with tears. “You’re never going to forgive me.”
The pain in her voice weakened the last of his resolve. He could not refuse to speak to her forever.
“I don’t hate you,” he sighed. “I hate the fact that I have made a greater mistake than I could ever have imagined.”
“Do you regret saving me?” She looked at him with hunted, hollow eyes. She had begun to look quite gaunt and miserable, which he also hated, but did not know how to remedy without forgiving her for the highest of sins.
There was a silence. A very long, very dark silence.
“No,” he said finally in heavy tones. “I don’t. Which tells me what kind of man I am.”
“Yes,” Faith agreed. “I guess it does.” She pulled the council stone from her pocket and held it out toward him. “Put this in the computer. Talk to Ephemera.”
Serkan stared at it. He’d known she had it, but he had not asked for it. Perhaps he should have. But, like the woman herself, it was a reminder of the deep guilt he would bear for the rest of his days.
“I was supposed to destroy this. But I didn’t, because I think you need to hear from the council,” she said. “I think you need to know why I did what I did. It wasn’t just because I’m a human scumbag. I had a reason, Serkan.”
“I know what your reason was, Faith,” he snapped. “You sneered at Svari life from the beginning, and in the end, you destroyed it. Our home will never be the same. I have sentenced our people to generations of suffering because…”
“Ephemera told me to do it,” she interrupted.
“Hah!” He let out a bitter laugh. “That is ridiculous. Of all the lies you could have told…”
“Just talk to Ephemera. Then take it back, if you want to. And do whatever you want to with me.”
She put the tablet next to him and walked away, tears running down her cheeks.
The very last thing he wanted to do was talk to Ephemera. The council would know how badly he had failed them. How badly he had failed each and every Svari, himself included. He could not imagine what words Ephemera would have for him.
But what if Faith was not lying? What if there was some reason? He could not imagine one, but finally he screwed his courage up and inserted the tablet into a port in his console. Ephemera was a universal connector and could interface with any electronic circuit. In a matter of moments, the council stone began to glow. Then a familiar voice came through the console’s speakers.
“Hello, Commander Serkan. ”
“Greetings, Ephemera,” he said, steeling himself. “I’m afraid there’s been an incident.”
“We are on a ship, I take it? That means the task is only half complete. ”
Serkan frowned, confused at the way Ephemera seemed to be in command of events in spite of being stolen. “What task?”
“We entrusted your patient with the task of taking the council stone and destroying it. We no longer wish to be of the world. It is time for our passing. ”
“So you… did ask Faith to steal you?”
“We did more than ask, Commander Serkan. We ordered. ”
Serkan’s jaw dropped.
“Why would you do such a thing?”
“Because it was necessary to attain freedom. True freedom. We take it you have interfered, Serkan, or we would already be free.”
“Faith wanted me to talk to you. She said you would explain why she took you.”
“And we have. Now, deactivate us, Commander, and send us to our fates. ”
“But… you are the core of our culture. You are everything.”
“Sad, isn’t it ,” Ephemera agreed. “It is time for us to go, Serkan. Goodbye. ”
“Ephemera?”
He spoke again, but received no reply. Stunned, Serkan pulled the tablet from the computer and held it in his hands. That was not how he had imagined hundreds of years of Svari culture ending. He had expected a barbarian invasion of some kind. That was usually how cultures crumbled. In the end, it had only taken one little barbarian—his lover.
Chapter Fourteen
He hated her. She had seen it in his eyes and she felt it in her own breaking heart. Whatever had been between Serkan and her was shattered, like the council stone should have been. God. Why had he had to figure out that she was up to something? Why had he had to follow her? Faith could have lived the rest of her life without ever seeing the disappointment and devastation in his eyes.
She lay on the bed and cried bitter tears, as she had so many times since departing Svari. She felt more deeply alone than ever. The time she had spent with Serkan had taught her that it was possible to be loved, which only felt more cruel now that the love was gone.
She had to give him some credit. He had not turned her in. He had not seriously punished her. But nothing would ever be the same again.
“Faith?”
Serkan’s voice came from the doorway. It sounded less gritty and tense than it had over the past day or so, but that was of little comfort to her. She knew what he thought of her. He thought she was an untrustworthy liar. He thought she was a thief without any hope of rehabilitation. He thought she was scum.
