by Sara King
20th of May, 3006
Uncharted Jungle
Fortune, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
“All I know is there’s a crash in the jungle out near the South Tear and the foliage is way too thick to get a good look. Can’t even land nearby—ship fell into one of the mini-canyons. Totally engulfed by rocks and trees. Gotta hike in.” Drogire Myr had been one of the first pilots to volunteer in Silver City, and he was one of their biggest assets in the sky. At least, that’s what Jersey told her. Magali still wanted to flee to Mezzan and hide from this mess she had made.
“But you’re sure it’s one of ours,” Jersey insisted to Drogire over the comm. He was seated at the pilot’s seat across the cockpit from Magali, who was huddled against the copilot’s console. The Nephyr gave Magali a quick look before he turned back to the link. “You think it was part of that firefight over the North Tear?”
“It’s not issuing a distress call, so probably one of ours,” the guy on the other end said. “But too far away. They were in a real huff over at Rath, saying there was a colonist fleet descending on them, fired off the soldiers and everything, bunch of Bouncers and operators going nuts and shooting at anything that moved. Might’ve been part of that.”
“Somebody jumping the gun?” Jersey asked, sounding concerned. “We aren’t ready to take Rath.” He wore Magali’s father’s necklace around his glittering neck—an Aashaanti hieroglyph that looked like some form of soaring hawk, or maybe a winged bug. Jersey had tried to give it to her, but as much as she had wanted it, Magali hadn’t felt comfortable taking a gift from a Nephyr. Nephyrs were made from people like her sister, and with Anna, there were always strings attached…
“If it was, they didn’t get the orders from me,” the pilot on the other end said. “It’s weird—nobody saw anything on radar, but they were still really stirred up about it. Could’ve been Joel. He has a habit of making that shit happen.”
Jersey glanced at Magali. To her, he said, “You got any idea what Joel’s been up to?”
Magali shrugged.
“Joel would make sense, though,” the man on the other end continued. “Patrick’s been trying to reach him for several days. Kept calling on the universal band for Joel and Jeanne, looking for Belle.”
“On the universal band?” Jersey cried.
“Yeah, not too bright, but he never was the smart twin,” Drogire replied, with a rough chuckle.
Magali saw Jersey glance back at her over the comm. “How close to Rath did you say the wreck was?” he asked the other pilot.
“Maybe forty minutes out,” the voice on the encrypted link said. “Saw it by accident doing a recruiting run to Border’s Reef. You can still see smoke coming from the nose. Here, I’ll send you coordinates. I only saw part of the tailfin, but it was fresh, and I swear it looked like Belle.”
“We got anyone who can check it out?”
Drogire snorted. “The way Rath’s in an uproar right now? No. We’re lucky we still have pilots on our side. They’ve been importing everything they’ve got from the Orbital. It’s a beehive in the South Tear right now, and nobody wants to get stung.”
“What about you?” Jersey pressed. “You done with that recruiting run?”
“Yeah, right,” Drogire made a derisive sound. “The jungle outside Rath was the epicenter of the jaguar release, back when they were going after those big meat-eaters. There are more jaguars in the South Tear than people, and it’s a half-mile walk, at least. I say screw that shit—anyone dumb enough to crash in the jungle deserves what’s coming to ’em.”
The Nephyr grimaced. “We’ll take a look. I’ll get back to you when we know more.” Jersey shut off the feed and changed course, then turned to face Magali. The Nephyr was dressed in all black, his glittering skin still covered with a turtleneck, but the movement still made Magali tense.
Seeing her flinch, Jersey remained motionless on the pilot’s chair for several minutes, sea-green eyes much too empathic, too understanding. She had to look away, fidgeting with the leg of her pants rather than face him.
“You doing better?” the Nephyr finally asked.
Magali made a bitter sound. “Aside from the fact I blew eighty heads off and spent the last day and a half in a fetal position?”
“You just needed some sleep,” Jersey said.
“I needed a bullet in the brain,” Magali said.
Giving her an unhappy look, the Nephyr said, “Look, Mag, I’m gonna tell you something I’ve only ever told a couple people, okay?”
Magali shrugged again.
Sucking in a breath, Jersey quickly let it out and said, “I really don’t wanna go out into the jungle alone.”
Magali bristled. “Because you’re afraid I’m gonna steal your ship.”
Jersey laughed, the sound filled with raw nerves. “No, I don’t think you’re gonna steal our ship.”
And his response was so genuine that she believed him. Magali cocked her head, waiting.
Taking a huge breath, Jersey confessed in a rush, “Okay, I’m terrified of cats. Have been ever since I was a kid.” At her frown, he offered her a sheepish grin and spread his hands apart. “When I was a kid, a huge black jaguar attacked me at the farmstead and dragged me off into the woods by the shoulder. Had me for a couple days, dragging me around, not really hurting me, but not letting me leave, either. You know the whole cat playing with a mouse? Yeah, that was me. Damned thing eventually carried me two hundred and fifty feet up a tree and left me there, like food. Dad and the six other guys tracking me had to break out their forestry gear to get me down. I’d still have the scars, but, well…” He gestured to his glassy filigree. “You know.”
Magali peered at Jersey, several hundred pounds of high-tech machinery and impermeable energy fields. She thought of the hydraulic pressures he could enact on a jaguar’s skull, the stone-like fingers he could smash through bones. She squinted at him. “Seriously?”
“Wanna see me scream, drop a tabby in my lap,” Jersey said. He reached up and ran his glassy fingers against the back of his neck, looking embarrassed. “Thank Aanaho they never figured that out at the Academy. I’d’ve been screwed.”
Magali blinked at him, totally caught off guard by the image of a Nephyr being chased by a housecat. “Because you’re afraid they’re gonna bite you.”
He winced. “Something like that, yeah.”
Magali cocked her head at him, then, when he didn’t recant his words, stood up, picked up a long iron crowbar leaning against the wall, hefted it, turned, and swung it at his head as hard as she could.
The iron connected with a resounding heavy metal clang across the Nephyr’s temple, but Jersey didn’t even twitch. Instead, the reverberation made her arm go numb and she dropped the bar to the ground, cradling her palm. The Nephyr blinked back at her placidly.
Still cradling her hand, Magali repeated, “Because you think they’re gonna bite you.”
“Childhood trauma, okay?” It was almost a whine. “That thing dragged me around for two days.”
Magali blinked at him for several moments, then just started to giggle.
The Nephyr squinted at her. “What?”
“You,” Magali said, chuckling. “You could kill a jaguar with your pinkie finger.”
The Nephyr held one up and wiggled it curiously. “You think?” He grinned at her over the glittering circuitry, blue-green eyes dancing with amusement.
Magali laughed with him, feeling another glimmer of hope unfurl in her chest. Then Magali remembered Anna, and how she had been able to fake laughter, fake joking, fake everything…just like Colonel Steele. She immediately swallowed and took a step backwards, her heart suddenly afire at the idea that she was so desperate to let this Nephyr get under her skin.
“Hey.” Jersey lowered his hand, looking concerned. “It’s okay. I was just joking.”
But was he concerned? Really? Magali had never been able to tell. Not with Anna, not with Martin, and not with Steele. And Nephyrs wer
e all smart, all psychotic…
…weren’t they?
Not once in the three days since Jersey had taken her to his sanctuary had he hurt her, or lied to her, or called her a name, or even made her uncomfortable. He’d brought her soup and hot chocolate, let her use the only bed, and had offered her his own wardrobe to stay warm. He’d let her carry as many guns as she wanted, even after she had executed twenty of his companions in under a minute and eighty camp personnel in four.
And then she saw the glitter to his glassy skin and all those arguments faded under the simple knowledge that the man sharing the cockpit with her could do anything he wanted to her, should it ever cross his mind. Anything.
Magali swallowed hard again, remembering Steele forcing her to throw Benny over the cliff edge. “It’s a lot more fun when they don’t see it coming, isn’t it?”
Jersey’s brow furrowed for just a moment before his eyes widened. “Magali, I’m not going to hurt you. You think I’d spend this much time trying to help you if I was just going to turn around and hurt you?”
“Would you?” Magali whispered. She’d fallen asleep in his arms. She’d confessed her dreams to him. Her fears. She was starting to shake.
Jersey gave a nervous laugh. “You can’t seriously think—” He saw her backing away and quickly became solemn. “Magali, I would never do that to you.”
But they were just words. What were words? Words were what Anna used to make her puppets dance to her whims.
“But,” Jersey said, “since I can only tell you that right now, I’d like to prove it to you over time. Okay? Give me some time to show you. I want to be your best friend as long as you’ll have me. I want to watch your back, wherever you go, I want to smash your enemies’ heads in whenever you so much as flick a displeased finger in their general direction, and I want you to shoot any goddamn jaguars that happen to pop out of the trees behind me when we’re off gallivanting through the jungle, because, no shit, those things scare the holy bejesus crap out of me. Oh, and then, after you shoot the jaguars for me, I want you not to tell people how I screamed and ran like a scared little girl, because that is totally unbefitting a cyborg of my job description and I might lose all my street cred as a big, badass Nephyr. Deal?” There was a desperate compassion in his face that Magali knew Anna could never have faked. Anna’s compassion was confident, sickly-sweet. Jersey’s was anxious, unhappy, nervous.
Struggling to make the distinction in her mind, Magali allowed herself a timid grin. “Like a scared little girl, huh?”
“Oh yeah,” Jersey told her. “I might even pee myself.”
Magali tried to imagine a Nephyr peeing himself and had to laugh. Over behind the Nephyr’s shoulder, the pilot’s console began to beep.
“So, are you gonna be okay?” Jersey asked again.
Magali flushed and decided to avoid the question, because, grinning and laughing with a Nephyr, she wasn’t exactly sure where she currently stood in life. Everything had been turned on its head, and she was trying to put together the pieces. “What’s that sound?”
“We’re coming up on those coordinates,” Jersey said, without looking. “You gonna be okay?” he repeated, watching her carefully. “With me?”
She felt a little bit of her smile waver. “You mean am I going to lose my mind again and shoot you?” Magali asked, bitterness rising like a tide.
“No,” Jersey said. He got up slowly and, when she didn’t back away, moved toward her and gently took her hand in his glassy, gold-filigreed fingers. To her shock, he brought her knuckles up and touched them to his hard lips. “I mean…you think you could be good with me?” Jersey asked softly, holding her hand and gazing into her face. There was something deeper to the question, something desperate that tugged at Magali’s heart.
It was then that Magali realized Jersey had just laid his intentions out bare for her to see. Lifetime intentions. She squinted, because the idea that a man would be interested in her after she had slaughtered eighty people had been so foreign to her that she had completely missed the clues in his tiny gestures, his kindnesses…
“Let me put it to you this way,” Jersey said, flexing her fingers gently in his warm, unnaturally hard hands. “The only women interested in a Nephyr are going to be the kind who are interested for all the wrong reasons.”
“I’m not interested in a Nephyr,” Magali blurted.
He hesitated, his blue-green eyes scanned hers. “Could you be?”
“No. Never.” It came out in a terrified rush, the image of Steele slamming back into her mind.
“Not now,” Jersey said, “But maybe with time?” he offered gently. “Years?”
Magali shuddered, still finding the touch of his skin repulsive. “No.”
His face tightened and he looked down, but he didn’t stop gently massaging her fingers with his thumb. Jersey took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “All right.” He turned away, but not before she saw the misery on his face.
Magali swallowed, both repulsed at the idea of having a Nephyr nearby and horrified of being left alone to face what she had started. “But I told you you could stay,” she whispered, terrified of changing the status quo. She knew that somehow this cybernetic monster had become an anchor to her own sanity, which was a weakness, and if he was anything like Anna, he would exploit it and destroy her. On the other hand, if he walked away, the pressures of what she had done would utterly obliterate her.
Trying to lighten the situation without revealing her own need, Magali gave a nervous smile and said, “Hang around. I’ll protect you from jaguars.”
His grin returned, slowly, and there was genuine pleasure there. “And I’ll protect you,” Jersey said, obviously satisfied with her response. He kissed her knuckles again, bringing his rigid lips to her fingers with surprising gentleness.
Magali squinted when he didn’t finish his sentence. “From what?” she asked, uncertain.
The Nephyr just gave a little grin and dropped her hand. Then, turning to the console, he said, “Okay, so we’re here.” Upon getting the viewscreen showing the crash site, he whistled. “Damn, it hit the ground fast. Look at the way it impacted those trees. Broke off even the old growth.”
Magali looked, saw the swath of huge trunks snapped in half, then swallowed. People rarely survived a crash like that.
“I think I heard a jaguar,” Jersey said, nervously glancing behind them. And, after several hours of the badass Nephyr scanning the jungle like a hunted mouse, Magali was almost convinced it wasn’t an act.
“Jaguars are predators that rely on stealth to stalk their prey,” Magali reasoned. “They don’t make twigs snap when they move. It would scare off whatever they planned to eat.”
Jersey stumbled to a halt, his face going slack. Though his skin glittered, she knew he would have been paler than a sheet. “That’s not funny,” he managed.
“It’s true,” Magali said, gesturing at the canopy overhead. “The only way you’re gonna know a jaguar’s hunting you is when it drops out of a tree and chomps on your skull.”
Jersey swallowed several times. “I think we need to go back to the ship.”
She crossed her arms over the bandoliers of explosive rounds crisscrossing her chest and gave him a flat look.
Jersey let out a nervous laugh, glanced back the way they had come, then in the general direction of the crash site, then up at the dark jungle canopy above. “I hate the jungle,” he managed. “Bracketts are placer miners, farmsteaders, and gun-makers. We’re not supposed to be stalking around in the dark and the damp and the bugs and the—”
“The bugs,” Magali said, slapping her arm and flicking several dead ones aside, “as annoying as they are, can’t puncture matter-phobic, liquid-energy sheeting.”
“Okay, but the jaguars…” He turned and started scanning the mottled forest canopy above them with total concentration. “I hear something up there, in the forty-second branch up. Decent-sized heat signature. Could be a bird, but it’s moving rea
lly softly. Could be a stalking cat.”
“It’s not a cat, Jersey.”
“It could be. I think I can make out paws. Yeah, definitely paws.”
Magali backed away, unslung her gun, inserted a cartridge of explosive rounds, and shot the Nephyr a few times in the back.
Jersey blinked, turned, and looked down at the smoke drifting from her gun. “What was that for?”
“This may come as a surprise to you,” Magali said, “but jaguars can’t hurt you.”
Jersey made a nervous sound and glanced back at the canopy.
Magali shot him again. When the Nephyr jerked and turned back, she said, “Say it with me. ‘I am the most dangerous cyborg the Coalition can make. If a jaguar tries to eat me, not only will it break its own teeth, but I can rip its jaws apart with my bare hands.”
“Not true,” he babbled. “The Tritons had these really big cats called the ganshi that they sicced on the AlphaGens in the war and the ganshi sometimes managed to kill them…”
Magali frowned. “The AlphaGen genetics company?”
Jersey turned from his constant scanning of the jungle to face her. “Huh?”
“Dad said that AlphaGen was a genetics com—” Magali began, then she shook her head. “Jersey, your skin is impermeable to attack. I just had a psychotic break and yet I somehow feel like I’m the most level-headed person on this expedition. Please stop being a chickenshit.”
Jersey wasn’t listening to her. His green-blue eyes had flickered back to the forty-second branch on the ancient blackwood tree ahead of them. “The Tritons gave those things hypodermic claws and teeth that can inject neurotoxin,” Jersey said, obviously having read up on the subject. “And they’re super smart. All it would have to do is pin me down and puncture one of my eyes…”
Magali sighed, deeply. “I said I’d protect you from goddamn jaguars, okay?”
“And you’re a pretty good shot?” Jersey said, eying her like a nervous little kid. His hands, Magali realized, were shaking, and his breath was coming too quickly.
He’s got an honest-to-gawd phobia, Magali thought, stunned. And, she supposed, after being dragged around by a cat for two days as a kid, maybe it was justified.
