Shades of Allegiance

by Sandy Williams

  Memories returned. Toman attacking. Her failing to defend. She’d threatened to kill Mel, and Toman had…

  Ash sat up, lungs still burning. Her head hurt, throbbing with each heartbeat, and her thoughts were so sluggish and scrambled she had difficulty putting them together.

  Toman had said he was there because of Tahn.

  “Damn it.” The words scraped out of her chest. She crawled to Toman and pushed the dead man over to lie on his back. No fewer than six bullets cratered his torso. Rykus hadn’t been playing around. Toman hadn’t had a chance to survive.

  She unhooked his comm-cuff. She could break through its security. She could pry into Toman’s life, find out how he knew Tahn, then use the cuff to contact the crime lord. She could—

  “What did you do?”

  Her gaze jerked toward the door. Gram stood there, wide-eyed and staring at the body she knelt beside. Another Seeker appeared behind him. Then another. Rykus had fired more than six shots from his Covar. The whole House would be there soon.

  “He attacked me.”

  Gram entered the room, his gaze shifting between her and Toman. When he reached Toman’s side, he knelt and pressed his fingers against Toman’s very-not-there pulse.

  “Seriously?” Ash said.

  Gram looked at her. “Bian made it clear you were to follow all rules.”

  “Is one of his rules not to defend myself?”

  “You walk through a room and leave the dead behind you. I should have—”

  “We’ll be gone within a day,” she said. She didn’t need him to mention Denn, not with Rykus behind her.

  Speaking of Rykus, he was surprisingly silent. She looked over her shoulder, saw him staring at the spot on the floor where Toman had almost killed her.

  “We’ll clean this up and get out of here,” Ash said.

  Gram’s face darkened. “Just like that? He is a person, a child of God, deserving of respect and reverence.”

  Gram didn’t know Toman at all.

  “Okay. No problem.” She took the sheet off the nearest bed and draped it over the body. “We’ll clean this up respectfully.”

  “This isn’t something to make light of,” he said.

  “I know.” Ash stood. Then swayed. She bit her lower lip, willing the room to level out and the queasiness to go away. She managed to find Gram’s arm, held on even when he tried to pull away.

  “Talk to Bian,” she said, pulling him toward the door. “Tell him to come talk to me.”

  She let him yank his arm free.

  “He will come with officers.”

  “Fine. They can arrest me. Just go.” She gave him a shove, then shut the door. “I hate dealing with the Devout.”

  When she was confident Gram wouldn’t reenter, she turned back to Rykus. He still hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t moved from that spot on the floor.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  Finally he raised his gaze to hers. “I can’t do this again.”

  Her already unstable equilibrium pitched hard enough to make it feel like she was falling.

  She gripped the door handle behind her back, using it to stay still and upright. It wasn’t exactly his words that knocked her off-balance; it was his tone and that desolate look in his eyes.

  “Do what?” she forced herself to ask.

  “I can’t lose you.” He put his hand on his knee and rose. It felt like the world tilted with the weight of his words. “Valt took over your consciousness two months ago. Then your heart stopped at Ysbar Station. You weren’t breathing just now. I-I can’t do it again, Ash. I can’t watch you die.”

  She tried to keep her hands relaxed, tried to force her bruised throat to loosen. “Good thing I’m planning to live forever.”

  His expression darkened. “You’re dismissing this.”

  She swallowed a little easier. She could deal with his anger better than his anguish. She could regain control of the moment, right the situation.

  She shrugged. “You keep forgetting I’m immortal.”

  He stepped toward her. “This isn’t a joke. What do you think would have happened if I’d taken a few more minutes to get here?”

  The loyalty training twanged through her body. She ignored the hook of every puppet string. “I’ve almost died a dozen times without you around. I’ve survived just fine.”

  He took another sudden step that seemed to cave in the atmosphere. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  “It’s supposed to make you back off.” The sentence slipped out, a verbal attack to fight off a pressure that was choking her as effectively as Toman’s hands.

  Only Rykus’s jaw moved, clenching in that way that was so familiar to her now. His viselike control over his emotions had always driven her to antagonize him, to find that little nuanced glance or tone that would smash his barricades down.

  “You want me to back off,” he said, not one syllable of inflection in his voice.

  She was cold. It was a sudden realization, a yank of her awareness that made her shudder. Her skin was still damp from the fight with Toman, her muscles fatigued, but this chill went deeper than the surface. It iced the walls of her veins and froze her to the core.

  “You know what I mean,” she said, trying to find her strength. She turned toward her bed, stepped over Toman’s body. This weak feeling had to go.

  “Do you know what I mean?” he asked in that same emotionless tone.

  She couldn’t do emotionless, not right now, not when she was on the edge of breaking. She reached for the pack under her bed.

  “You laugh off your near-death experiences like they’re minor,” he said. “Like they’re nothing. You treat your life like it’s insignificant.”

  “It is.” She pulled the pack out.

  He caught her arm. “How can you say that?”

  She met his gaze. “I’m one person, Rip. It’s a big universe.”

  “That’s the loyalty training talking. It’s brainwashed you into disregarding your life.”

  “You’re wrong. The Coalition gave me a purpose. I’d fight for it without the loyalty training.” She turned her back on him and unzipped her pack.

  “Ash.” His voice softened. “You’ve already done more for the KU than any other soldier in the Fighting Corps. You’ve made an impact. You matter.”

  She rummaged in the pack. Her booster was in there somewhere. She’d slipped the case inside when she’d showered.

  “You matter,” he repeated. “And you don’t have to continue risking your life to make a difference. There are other ways to protect the Coalition.”

  “You mean boring desk jobs.” Her knuckles knocked against something. That’s right. She’d put the case in the outside pocket.

  “Jobs that make a difference,” he said. “You don’t have to be on the front lines.”

  “You’re on the front lines.”

  “I wasn’t going to be,” he said.

  She slid the case free from the pocket and looked up.

  Rykus’s shoulders went slack. He sat on the edge of her bed.

  “The Obsidian was going to be my last high-threat assignment. Assuming I survived, I would have remained the commanding officer of the soldiers assigned to Admiral Bayis. I wouldn’t have taken an active role in future operations.”

  Genuinely surprised, she sat next to him. “I can’t picture you behind a desk.”

  “I tend to see myself in front of it,” he said. “Building team cohesion. Overseeing drills. Designing training scenarios. I’ll make sure the soldiers get the instruction they need not just to survive but to excel.”

  “I didn’t know you missed being an instructor of Caruth that much.” She tried to coax a smile from him, but the corner of his mouth barely lifted.

  “I hate the loyalty training, Ash. I wish I could undo it.”

  She shifted to face him and took his nearest hand in hers. “We’ve got this. I know what I’m doing. I know I’d stay in the Fighting Corps without the loyalty
training just like I know I’d stay with you.”

  He squeezed her hand. “If you keep risking your life like you have, you’ll be dead within the year. I can’t watch you die.”

  The weakness skimming the surface of her body completely permeated her. Her skin turned clammy; her stomach twisted in visceral pain. She focused on a smear of blood across the cement floor. It felt like Toman was punching her again, breaking ribs, breaking her.

  Rykus cursed, then released her hand.

  Another moment of weakness, of panic, gripped her. He was going to walk away.

  Instead, he took the case from her, leaned forward, and kissed her.

  The firmness of his lips, of his hand on her waist, and his presence rending the atmosphere… He grounded her. She felt alive again, like she could take on the universe without being singed by the stars.

  Her body reacted to his kiss, turning to fire as if she’d already injected the booster. She loved him—God, she loved him—but she couldn’t step back and let others take her risks. And she couldn’t lose him. They were two incongruent things she had to find a way to make fit.

  She wrapped her hand behind his neck. He used his grip on her waist to anchor her close, but he slowed the kiss, drawing it to an excruciating end.

  He pulled back, held up the booster case.

  “You need this.” His voice had returned to that cool, emotionless tone.

  Clenching her teeth together, she nodded.

  Rykus opened the case and withdrew the last syringe. He took off the protective tip and pushed the needle into her upper arm.

  Ash barely noticed the prick or the needle sliding free. She stared at the floor, counting down the three short seconds before the drugs hit her system. Before she reached zero, the door banged open and Chace stalked in.

  “I’ll kill her,” he snarled.

  Ash stood, but Chace didn’t look her way. He stalked across the room and yanked the bloodstained sheet off Toman.

  “I’ll fucking kill her,” he said again.

  “She—” The single word came out mangled. Ash tightened her hands into fists. The chems burned through her veins, erasing her aches and pains, but the instant hit of energy made the room too small. Her skin too tight. She needed to move, to run, to engage in a very strenuous activity.

  “You all right?” Chace asked, suddenly in front of her.

  “It wasn’t Mel,” she responded, trying not to bounce on her toes.

  Chace’s brow wrinkled. His gaze shifted from her face to her feet. “Toman doesn’t do anything unless she orders it,” he said.

  Ash forced her hands to relax. “He does if it’s on Tahn’s orders.”

  Chace’s focus shot back up. He stared for what seemed like a thousand orbits around the sun before he cursed.

  “You just had to skim that asteroid field.” He turned his back to her, paced away, then paced back immediately. “What the hell, Ash! Are you suicidal?”

  “Aksel pretty much asked the same thing.”

  Chace’s mouth couldn’t get any thinner. He shook his head, looking ready to explode.

  “That’s what you’ve been doing here. You’ve been talking to people. Screwing with his businesses.”

  Bad timing on this conversation. It had been too long since her last booster. This one was hitting her hard.

  “You should go find Mel,” she said. “Smooth this over with her.”

  A vein plumped up on his forehead. He turned his wrath on Rykus. “Is that why you’re here too?”

  Rykus stood beside Toman’s body. He leaned down and drew the sheet back over his face.

  “No,” he said.

  The short response tugged something inside her. She didn’t like this version of him, the quiet, solemn man who looked as if his world had crashed down around him.

  His world has crashed, she reminded herself. She couldn’t fix who she was and what she had to do, but she could make sure he wasn’t caught in her spiral. That’s what he wanted anyway. He didn’t want to be around when she put her life at risk, and she didn’t want him to be around. In fact, it was very important that he wasn’t.

  That’s what she needed to focus on, getting him to the capsule. As soon as he was off-planet, he’d be safe, and he wouldn’t have to see her confrontation with Scius or Tahn or the next person who threatened the lives of the people she cared about.

  “Chace,” she said, her voice as steady as her body now felt. “I’ve got this. I’m fine. Go take care of Mel. I’ll take care of everything else.”

  That vein relaxed some. He glanced at Rykus. Glanced back.

  “You sure you know what you’re doing?” he asked.

  “I always know what I’m doing. Go.” She nodded toward the door.

  He frowned but shoved his hands into his pockets and left.

  “Tahn sent Toman?” Rykus said.

  She faced her fail-safe. Nodded.

  “He wasn’t a telepath?”

  Her brow wrinkled. “No. He wasn’t. He was…” She thought back to that itch she’d felt before Toman had attacked. It had been familiar. “I think he was like me. Like War Chancellor Hagan. It was different than what I felt from Valt and the man I chased on Javery. Different from what I felt on the Fortune’s Citadel too.”

  His expression didn’t change, not even when she mentioned the Citadel, the capsule they’d taken from Caruth to Meryk, the Coalition’s capital planet. They’d spent their days and nights in bed, wrapped up in each other until Ash felt something in the corridor outside their room. She’d woken from a heavy sleep and chased the phantom to a dead end.

  It could have been a nightmare.

  It hadn’t been.

  “Do you still think he was an anomaly?” Rykus asked, staring down at the bloodstained sheet covering Toman.

  “Definitely,” she said. Her throat and every bruise and sore muscle agreed.

  “Hagan was an anomaly,” Rykus said.

  Her brow furrowed. “What?”

  He finally met her gaze. “Tersa mentioned it. The information was buried in his sealed records. That’s not the type of thing a politician wants to get out.”

  Of course it wasn’t. “You think there’s a correlation?”

  “I think it’s a possibility.”

  “What about Senator Hahn? Was he an anomaly?” Valt had been a legislative assistant for the Rimmerian senator. Soon after Ash had been charged with treason, Hahn had been assassinated.

  “I don’t know,” Rykus said. “I can look into it.”

  He’d be able to do that soon. Just as soon as she got him away from Glory and back to the Coalition.

  She swallowed. She didn’t want him to go, but he couldn’t stay.

  “I’ll take care of the body,” she said.

  “You should rest.”

  She let out a short laugh. “Rest is the last thing I need to do right now.”

  He looked like he was about to argue. Instead, he put on his soldier face and nodded. “Fine. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He left the room. It felt like he’d left her life. That hurt. She wanted to call him back, to go after him, but it wouldn’t change the way things had to be. He had to go.

  She pulled Toman’s comm-cuff out of her pocket and tapped in a message.

  21

  Rykus didn’t know how he was going to do it.

  He didn’t know how he was going to walk away from Ash. Every minute he was away from her was a war. He wanted to check on her, to hold her, to kiss her. He wanted to make sure he could still feel her breath on his lips, her heart beating against his chest. He needed to know she was okay.

  It doesn’t matter. That’s what he told himself. Even if she was okay now, she wouldn’t stay that way. She’d rush off and test her supposed immortality.

  He couldn’t do it anymore.

  He launched the crumpled piece of scrap metal at a drone flying overhead and clipped its wing. The kids cheered when it spun out of control, then crashed into the quad’s g
ate.

  But it wasn’t the drone’s light Rykus saw wink out; it was the light—the life—in Ash that vanished.

  He couldn’t get the image out of his head.

  The kids rushed to the drone to try to fix it for the third time. They were resourceful and clever, figuring out ways to barter or steal small parts and electronics from the two transports resting behind the House or from Emmit’s garage. They were barefoot and skinny but apparently lucky because they’d had work at the break yards.

  He despised this planet.

  He broke away from the smaller kids still gathered at his side and headed to the garage. Emmit hadn’t slept last night. Rykus knew that because he hadn’t slept either. He’d tried, staring up at the ceiling in the room Emmit had originally given to him and Chace, but every time his eyes shut, he saw Ash unconscious, Toman’s hands wrapped around her throat.

  Attempting yet again to shove the image from his mind, he stepped into the garage.

  “Is it ready?” he asked the Seeker.

  Emmit’s gaze jerked away from the panel he shut. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. She’ll get you there. The fuel is loaded, and Chace already has people applying a layer of stealth varnish to the 220. You should make it to the capsule.”

  “Ash assured me her distraction would provide a smooth exit.”

  Emmit nodded, his jaw tight. Rykus kept his gaze level and locked on the man.

  “Yeah. Everything will be fine.” Emmit shifted, then his gaze focused behind Rykus.

  Maybe it was Ash approaching. Maybe she really did believe Tahn was on that capsule. Maybe she would keep her promise and leave.

  He turned.

  Chace aimed a pistol at his chest.

  Rykus didn’t feel one tendril of surprise.

  “Chace,” he said.

  “Rykus.” The man matched his tone.

  “You don’t need a weapon to make me get on the transport.”

  “Ash isn’t leaving with you.”

  It felt like a rejection, like she was choosing death over a life with him.

  “I know,” he said.

  The pistol dipped a millimeter. “She told you?”