Shades of Allegiance

by Sandy Williams

  The words tugged on a string attached to the guilt obstructing Ash’s heart. That emotion wasn’t something she’d grown on Glory. It had developed sometime during her days on Caruth, maybe when her antics had caused the other anomalies to suffer through extra drills and sleep deprivation. Rykus had torn down the walls that had kept her alive here. He’d made her depend on others. Worse, he’d made her aware that they depended on her.

  “You can take him out,” Mira continued. “Chace has made sure that you still have connections here. The whole planet saw you jump the causeway. They know you escaped Scius’s dregs, and you’re a trained anomaly now. You can do this, Ash.”

  Ash righted the chair Chace had kicked over. She stared at the center of the breakfast table. If she took down Scius, it would start a war. Every boss would try to grow their power. The only reason it might have worked before was because she’d had a united Bedlam behind her. With Bedlam and Brightwater’s support, she could have held off challengers. She could have helped Mira with her work. She could have—

  “You’re an anomaly,” Chace said.

  Ash’s gaze rose as her stomach sank. Chace was focused on Mira. A V formed between his eyes. Ash needed to say something. She needed to laugh. She needed to call Mira delusional or do something else that would put a brake on Chace’s thoughts, but she couldn’t come up with anything that would prevent Chace from coupling the links together. He was calculating, subtracting years, adding events.

  “The loyalty training started five years ago.” Chace shifted his attention to Rykus, who leaned against the counter with his arms crossed. “Now you make sense.”

  Ash’s breathing steadied out. Her vision pinpointed on the threat.

  “Ash,” her fail-safe said. His voice tugged on her puppet strings, but she resisted the message to stay calm. He didn’t understand how Glory worked. Chace wanted her to take out Scius and to stay, and he believed that he’d just learned the obstacle that stood between him and his goals. Nothing Ash said would sway him otherwise.

  She had to kill Chace.

  “I should have figured it out sooner.” Pity shone in his eyes.

  “Ashdyn,” Rykus said.

  She released the back of the chair.

  “Ashdyn.” Chace snorted and turned toward her fail-safe. “I should have killed you the first time you called her that. You’ve mind-fucked her.”

  “Back out of the room,” Rykus said. “Slowly.”

  Her nostrils flared. Sudden movement wasn’t going to make a difference. Chace had to die.

  She had her Covar halfway out of the holster before Rykus slammed it back in.

  “Don’t,” he said into her ear. “You’ll regret it.”

  She jerked away from him, tried to draw her Covar again, but his left hand remained clamped over hers.

  “Why don’t you put some distance between you and her,” Chace said.

  Ash didn’t have to look to know he’d drawn his weapon. Her pulse pumped adrenaline-laden blood through her body like it was electricity. She felt overpowered. She needed to fight. To kill.

  “You’ll regret it,” Rykus repeated.

  “I won’t,” she said through gritted teeth.

  He ran his thumb back and forth over the knuckles of her hand. She didn’t want his gentleness. Didn’t want his reason or his calm, steady composure. She jerked away from him again. This time he let her.

  She pivoted to face Chace. She stood between his pointed Secca Nine and her fail-safe.

  “Get out of the way, Ash,” Chace said.

  Rykus was wrong. She wouldn’t regret killing Chace. She’d regret not killing him. She knew him, knew that he wouldn’t let anything stand between him and his goal, and he’d just acquired the ammo he needed to destroy her resistance. He was not a friend. He was not someone she could trust or care about. He was a dreg, and he was disposable.

  She drew her Covar.

  Chace centered his aim on her. “You’re a Caruth-trained anomaly. He’s your goddamn fail-safe. He’s controlling you.”

  Mira put her hand on his arm. “Put the weapons down. This isn’t accomplishing anything.”

  She needed to pull the trigger now. Get it over with.

  Chace frowned, then slowly lowered his weapon.

  Rykus’s hand rested on the small of her back.

  It would be a mistake to let Chace live.

  The cooling unit clicked on. The overhead lighting suddenly felt bright and judgmental.

  She tightened her grip on her Covar.

  Chace holstered his gun and held his arms out slightly to his sides, palms facing her. Chace wasn’t innocent. There were a thousand reasons to justify his killing. She wouldn’t just be protecting the man behind her, the man whose hand remained steady on her back, waiting for her to do the right thing.

  Damn it.

  She blew out a breath and lowered her weapon.

  Chace’s mouth tipped into a tight smile, one that said he knew exactly where they stood now.

  “You should go,” Rykus said quietly.

  “Yeah.” Chace didn’t take his eyes off Ash. “I’ll go.” He held her gaze a few seconds more, then turned to the open door.

  Disaster thrummed through her bones when she let him leave the room, Mira trailing after him. The dining hall was mostly empty now, but a few Seekers sat at the tables visible through the doorway. When Ash stared them down, they quickly found other things to look at.

  “You okay?” Rykus asked.

  “No.” She moved out of view of the dining hall and sank into a chair. Rykus sat beside her. “I shouldn’t have let Chace find me. I shouldn’t have found Mira.”

  “It sounds like she might have been killed if you hadn’t.”

  She stared at a smear of syrup near the center of the table. “The old me wouldn’t have cared.”

  “Really?”

  “The really old me,” she said. “Mira was a target. Nothing else.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “I robbed her clinic.” She smiled at his raised eyebrows, then added, “Repeatedly.”

  “Sounds like a great way to start an acquaintance.”

  “It was easy, and Mira was stubborn. I had a scheme go bad when she was setting up the clinic. It wasn’t open yet. She should have sent me away, but I was hurt and her medical supplies had just arrived. She patched me back together, told me to get some sleep, and as soon as I was alone, I grabbed a bag and loaded it with meds, bandages, diagnostic tools, everything I could fit and carry. I lived off the profits from that haul for months. Then a new shipment of supplies arrived. For fun, I paid her another visit, feigning illness. She should have at least tried to kick me out. Instead, she gave me food, vitamins, and an immune booster. Didn’t say one word about the theft.”

  “So you stole again,” Rykus said. He’d turned his chair to face hers.

  “Of course. Three or four more times. I have no idea how she talked the aid organization to keep sending her supplies, but they did, and one day, another dreg tried to move in on my scheme.”

  “Couldn’t have that.” His knees bumped hers.

  “Nope. I ran them off. Then I walked into the clinic to check on her and do my own stealing, but a kid came in there before I could leave. She couldn’t have been older than five, maybe six. She was sick and too skinny. Wasn’t anything unusual about that, so I turned and started to walk out. That’s when Mira asked me to wait. I hesitated at the door. She walked over, grabbed an injection from the bag I was carrying, then she walked back to the kid and gave her the meds.”

  Rykus leaned forward, resting his arms on his thighs while his clasped hands brushed against her leg.

  “I dropped the bag on the floor and left,” she said. That was the first time she could remember feeling guilt. The emotion hadn’t existed before, and she’d done her best to erase it, but it had lingered just under her subconscious mind, simmering there every time she looked at a sick kid or a dreg days away from his or her death.


  “The next time a dreg tried to steal from the clinic, I killed him. I killed the next one too, and the next one. Mira wasn’t happy about it, but it was effective. People learned not to mess with her. Eventually I started taking dregs to the clinic for help. It was for personal gain. They owed me, and I used that to protect the clinic and eventually to run schemes stealing supplies from the oligarchs and their exclusive hospitals.”

  “That’s how you became a boss?” Rykus asked.

  “It helped.” She watched his hand slide over her knee. Did it matter that they were sitting too close now? That his touch was intimate? “If I don’t take out Scius, Chace will leak your name to every boss on the planet.”

  “We won’t be here long,” he said.

  “I’m okay with a target on my back. I’m not okay with one on yours.”

  “I jumped the causeway with you. I’m already in the crosshairs, Ash.”

  “If something goes wrong—”

  “We’ll handle it.”

  She shook her head. He didn’t understand.

  “Ash.” He gripped both her legs. “I know you’re worried about me, but I’ve been in worse situations. We’ve been in worse. You handled it better. Do you think you’d handle this better with a booster?”

  She opened her mouth to say no, then closed it. He might have a small point. In the heat of battle on Ysbar Station, she’d fought at his side. She’d watched his back then, but she hadn’t been overcome with the urge to hide him in a closet.

  “It hasn’t been that long,” she muttered.

  “But you’ve put your body through hell. You took a bullet at the platform. You crashed into the ocean—”

  “That was a very well-controlled crash.”

  “You spent a day sprinting between pillars, then got hit with a flash grenade. It’s a lot, don’t you think?”

  She crossed her arms. “You forget. I’m invincible.”

  A brief smile. “Of course. But maybe your body would appreciate a little help.”

  “I don’t know how long it will take to make contact with Tahn, and I only have one left.”

  His forehead wrinkled. “When was your last injection?”

  “When I left the Kaelais.”

  “Ash, that was almost a month ago.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Rykus just stared.

  “Really,” she said. “As soon as I get in touch with Tahn, I’ll take it.”

  He reached forward, tucked her hair behind her ear, then let his fingers slide down her thin braid.

  “Okay,” he said. “In the meantime, you agree that killing Chace is a bad idea?”

  “Killing Chace is a great idea.” She scowled. “Was this conversation a distraction?”

  His mouth stretched into a grin that made her stomach flip. “Did it work?”

  She didn’t answer because, yeah, it had worked. She wasn’t thinking about hunting down Chace; she was thinking about crawling onto her fail-safe’s lap.

  She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “You know, there’s a lock on that door.” She nodded behind him.

  Heat flared in his eyes. She almost thought he would take her up on the offer, which would have been shocking. His hands dropped to her knees, then slowly slid up her legs. His thumbs pressed into her inner thighs. He leaned forward and whispered into her ear, “When you take that booster, Ash, I’ll be waiting.”

  16

  Ash lost count of the number of times she almost broke. She even had the booster in her hand at one point. She would recover faster if she injected it, which was Rip’s point, but some gut instinct warned her to wait. When she’d been a prisoner on board the Obsidian, the withdrawal had weakened her. She was hurt now, but she wasn’t close to being that brittle, and there was something comforting in knowing she had the chem on her if she needed it.

  The thought of not having one nearby—most likely not even in the same star system—made her a little anxious.

  But, Seeker’s God, she wanted him.

  He stayed close the rest of the day. He made sure she rested, made sure she ate and stayed hydrated, and he was there when she un-quarantined a very convincing replica of Trevast’s comm-cuff signature. He helped her craft the message to Tahn. Tahn would know the file signature was fake, but it had enough finesse to get his attention. He would know Ash sent it, and he would know how to contact her.

  Around midday, Rykus changed her bandages. She almost broke his resolve then. She took off her shirt and leaned back on her bed—just to make it easier to apply the med-gel to her wounds.

  By late afternoon, she grew restless and not only because she wanted Rip between her legs. Waiting was a skill she’d never really learned. She needed to move, to do something. The longer she sat around, the more uneasy she became.

  “Something wrong?” Rykus asked, sitting across from her in a cushioned chair. He’d bypassed her invitation to sit next to her on a too-small couch.

  She fastened her comm-cuff around her wrist. “I can’t reach anyone back in Brightwater. Dampener is still up there, so I don’t know where Hauch is.”

  “You don’t trust Denn to find him?”

  “No. We should have gone back there. We’re not accomplishing anything here.”

  “Do you have control of the causeway yet?” he asked pointedly.

  “The only way to find out is to initiate the code I slipped in.” That wasn’t entirely true. She’d placed a fifty-hour trigger in the sequence just in case Scius moved the dampeners to Bedlam, cutting off her communication with the operations station. If she didn’t cancel it within the next sixteen hours, it would automatically shut down the tram.

  “It will work.” His reassuring smile said he was one hundred percent confident in her abilities. “If we need to use it to find Hauch and get off this rock, we will, but he has orders to keep track of you. He’ll get beyond the dampeners’ reach soon.”

  Maybe.

  “Who gave him his orders?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Hauch needed something to do while he healed.”

  “Oh yes. Distractions are good when you’re recovering. Very good and very needed.”

  He laughed. It erased the last of the gravity from his face and loosened the knot of anxiety in Ash’s chest. She echoed his smile, and another sensation sparked inside her. It shouldn’t be possible—she shouldn’t be able to feel this happy on a planet overflowing with so much misery—but Rykus had altered her view of the universe. He’d changed her definition of a well-lived life. It wasn’t something she could force and manipulate; it was only something she could have when she was with him.

  He took her hands and pulled her to her feet. “You need a distraction.” His fingers found the thin braid half-hidden beneath her long hair.

  “Mm-hmm,” she said.

  “Let’s go to the break yards—don’t scowl.” He chuckled. “It will get us closer to the capsule.”

  “The capsule isn’t what I want to get close to.”

  He slid a hand behind her back and guided her away from the couch. “Emmit sent me directions to the SG-220. It’s in a warehouse on the coast, less than an hour away. I want to make sure it’s functional in case we need to scuttle out quick.”

  “We could make sure it’s comfortable.”

  “Ash,” he admonished with a smile.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll behave.”

  He snorted at that.

  Almost an hour later, they stepped off a hired skimmer onto a cracked and potholed street. A wasteland of metal lean-tos and shanties separated them from a beach turned black with chemical waste. Five separate giant scaffolds rose from the ocean waves. Dregs—tiny specks from this distance—swarmed three of the massive structures and the huge spaceships dead-docked to them.

  Beside her, Rykus coughed. Ash cleared her throat too, adjusting to the familiar, scratchy feel of the polluted air in her lungs.

  “This is an environmental ruin,” Rykus said.

  “This is why Glory is
part of the Coalition.” She stepped over a metal beam that must have been pushed ashore by the semifrequent coastal flooding. “We have a poor, oppressed population that will risk our lives to strip apart old ships.”

  “You worked here?”

  “When I was a kid.” A strong wind battered the hood of her longcoat, threatening to whip it off. She adjusted the stiff but pliant edging around her face, making sure it remained in place and kept her hidden. Rykus wore a longcoat too, but it was obvious he wasn’t a Glory native. He didn’t slink across the broken pavement; he strode across it with a confidence built from surviving the roughest military operations in the Known Universe.

  “The craft should be in that warehouse.” He didn’t point, but Ash’s gaze locked on the tarnish-green building. A fence topped with barbed wire encircled it. It would be easier to get over than a knockout fence if they could find a discreet location to cut through.

  “It looks like there’s only one guard,” he said. “Is that unusual?”

  Ash looked at the ramshackle guard post built at a break in the fence. A man sat in a chair, playing around on his comm-cuff. He paid no attention to the occasional worker who walked past. He was a token defense, someone thrown out there to say the place was under someone’s protection.

  “People know to stay away,” she said.

  The slight change in Rykus’s stride suggested he’d turned to look at her. “Because it’s dangerous?”

  “The person who controls it probably is.” She should have asked Chace who that was, but then that would have required talking to Chace. Checking out a small craft to see if it was space-worthy wasn’t exactly a gesture that said she was sticking around.

  “Should we change the plan?” Rykus asked.

  “Nah. Let’s go have a chat.”

  “I don’t like that tone.”

  If her face hadn’t been concealed by the hood, she would have thrown a grin his way.

  They crossed the pavement. The guard glanced up eventually, but his gaze didn’t linger. He was younger than he’d appeared at a distance, and he was bored. It took three more glances before he realized something wasn’t right. They weren’t veering away like everyone else.