Orion's Price

by Owen R. O’Neill

  Drawing a deep breath, Mariwen took the plunge. “You could tell me how to meet Admiral Caneris.”

  Surprise blanked Sonja’s expression. “Mara! He’s Lord OverHallin! You can’t meet him!” Twitching her head as if shaking off a daze, she swallowed. “There wouldn’t be any point to it, anyway.”

  Icy tendrils began to coil around Mariwen’s esophagus. “Why not?”

  “He doesn’t have them.”

  The four words, at first incomprehensible, dropped softly into her consciousness like the seeds of nightmare, leaving her momentarily confused. “But . . . he did. That’s not . . .” Biting her lip hard against the blundering words, she tried again. “What . . . happened?”

  “Heydrich went to Jerome for a writ. To force Caneris to hand them over.”

  “And Jerome approved it?” The question was wholly unnecessary, except as a pause before the fall.

  “Of course.”

  Cataclysmic events should be accompanied by a terrible noise, but this one wasn’t. Instead, a vast white terrible silence detonated, blotting out everything but one thought, at once frail and final, as immutable as words carved on a headstone.

  I’m too late.

  “What did you say?” There was light shudder in Kat’s voice.

  At first unaware she’d uttered the words aloud, Mariwen stared into her hands, laying open in her lap, as if she didn’t know whose they were. Then she found her voice again. “He already has her. I’m too late.”

  Sonja gave her head a brief shake. “No. Maybe not. Caneris didn’t give them to Heydrich.”

  Mariwen lifted her head, trying to force her mind to work. “I don’t understand.”

  “Caneris returned them to the POW system before the writ was served.” Kat sounded unsteady, shaken by the look on Mariwen’s face. “Heydrich was furious. There was a ‘system crash’—as many as a million POW records were corrupted—and now no one knows where they are. Of course, we all know Caneris was behind it but unless he has proof, Heydrich has to be really careful about accusing him. Caneris is better with a saber than he is.”

  In her lap, Mariwen’s hands curled around each other. “How do you know all this?”

  “Heydrich had to report it to the Council. It made a scene—Nigel heard about it while we were still traveling. Jerome gave Heydrich a direct order to find Rafe and sequester him under consular supervision. He wants Rafe too and Heydrich ‘losing’ him is a perfect excuse.”

  Of course he does. Rafe was a bargaining chip of enormous value. But Kris wasn’t. “So they haven’t found him yet?”

  “No, Nigel would’ve said something.”

  “Would Nigel know if he found Kris?”

  “The order doesn’t say anything about her.”

  Then he wouldn’t know. But there was still a chance they hadn’t found Kris—especially if they were being held together. Would they be held together? If Caneris set all this up, he had a plan. Would his plan be better served by keeping them together or splitting them up? He’d want to keep track of them, although . . .

  Stop it. Just stop. There’s a chance he doesn’t have her. A chance—any chance—is all the matters.

  But Kat had said they learned about this while they were traveling. Before she’d even left?

  “How long have they been looking for her . . . him? For Rafe?”

  “They’ve been at it for weeks. Everyone in his organization is working on this.”

  They must be getting close. All their plans—the whole script and its variations Paavo’s people had worked out, everything they might do to persuade her husband to cooperate before compelling him—collapsed, leaving a single stark imperative, painfully etched across the raw surface of her conscience.

  “Thanks for that. For telling me. But, you see . . . it’s not just—what you might think. It’s Heydrich.”

  Kat’s brows pinched together. “Heydrich?”

  “Kris”—she used the name unconsciously—“was the recon pilot that discovered what was going on at Asylum.” Close enough. “Where his brother was killed. If he gets her, you know what he’ll do to her.”

  “Mara, you can’t . . . just because . . . I know what they say, but—”

  “Kat, we recovered recordings from Admiral Heydrich’s files on the Ilya Turabian. Hundreds of recordings. All of women he’d personally tortured. Going back years. His brother was in a lot of them.” Sonja’s full-lipped mouth formed a small round O. “I can’t let that happen to her. I won’t . . . Do you understand?”

  Now Sonja’s hands were wrestling with each other. She slid around the side of the chair, her hands on the back. “Mara . . . there’s just nothing—Nigel can’t . . . You don’t understand what you’re asking us.”

  Mariwen straightened and looked up. “No . . . I do. I understand.”

  “Mara, go home.”

  Mariwen shook her head.

  “Please. Maybe he . . . Just go home.”

  “I can’t. Look, I understand about you and Nigel. But would he deliver a message for me?”

  “To who?”

  “To Caneris.”

  “What for? I told you—”

  “I know.” Mariwen cut her off. “But if you’re right about him being behind this, he’d know where Kris is. I heard he’s an . . . honorable man. Prisoners have accidents all the time. If Nigel told him—or if I wrote a note . . . about why Heydrich wants Kris, do you think he’d . . . arrange something?”

  “God Mara! You can’t ask me to do that! How could I—? Oh my god!”

  “Kat! There’s no one else I have!”

  “Mara—I’m so sorry . . . I really wish . . . but there’s—there’s just . . . nothing . . .”

  Mariwen sagged against the sofa’s back, utterly dry eyed, a terrible calm settling over her features. “Okay. I’m sorry, Kat. I’ll have my driver take you back to where your man can pick you up. You won’t be late. Don’t worry. No one will know.”

  Sonja stepped around in front of the chair. “Oh god, Mara. What are you gonna do?”

  Nothing changed in Mariwen’s face—almost nothing. Perhaps just a bare flicker in her dark changeable eyes, now turned as black as jet.

  “You should go.”

  Sonja glanced between Mariwen and entrance, weight shifting uneasily. “Umm . . . Okay. I—ah . . .” Four steps took her to the door; her hand touched the lock and sob broke free. “You’re gonna do . . . something, aren’t you? I know you’re gonna—” The thick hoarse whisper choked off. Her fingers fell away from the release as she turned back.

  Rising slowly, Mariwen crossed the two meters between them and slipped a hand into the curtain of shining hair that obscured Sonja’s face. Smearing away a tear with her thumb, she tilted Sonja’s chin up, bringing her quivering lips to within a centimeter of her own.

  “I told you to go”—the softest murmur as she brought their mouths together. Her tongue teased from Sonja’s an answering caress, tentative at first, then more brazen as their arms wrapped about each other in a crushing grip. Breaking the kiss half a hundred heartbeats later, Sonja jammed her face against the curve of Mariwen’s neck and shoulder.

  “Goddammit, Mariwen! I miss you—I still miss you.”

  Looking up, she found Mariwen’s dark eyes full on her and not so dry now. No more words, just a slow descent to the floor. The rug was the most meager possible padding, but neither of them cared, just as neither paid the slightest attention to Mariwen’s xel, sitting at an angle on the little oblong table.

  Chapter 25

  Docklands Quarter, Halevirdon

  Halith Evandor, Orion Spur

  “What are you going to do, Mara?”

  Sonja’s head was pillowed on Mariwen’s breasts and her platinum hair spread across Mariwen’s nude body in a glossy sheet that spilled over onto the cheap dingy mattress. Her white thigh was curled up and across Mariwen’s dark hips and she was tucked into Mariwen’s embrace as tightly as it was possible to be. Mariwen lay with her head against
the inadequate pillows, her left hand stroking Sonja’s back with an absentminded tenderness.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You must love her a lot.” The whisper was pregnant with tears. More tears. So many tears.

  “I do.”

  “I wish—” Sonja sat up, wiped her eyes with her knuckles and reached over to the little table that served for a nightstand, searching for something disposable to blow her nose on. There wasn’t anything. Mariwen picked a hand towel up off the floor and gave it to her. Sonja made a face.

  Mariwen shrugged. “It’s all the same. Shall I try to find something in the bathroom for you?”

  Sonja shook her head, her long hair swinging and catching shimmering brass highlights from the dull and ugly lamps. She blew her nose on the towel three times and dropped it back on the floor. “I want to be jealous of her, you know. You never loved me that way.”

  “For god’s sake, Kat. We were nineteen.”

  Sonja’s eyes, amethyst and almost as hard, stabbed hers accusingly. “We weren’t nineteen the last time Nigel and I were in Nemeton. Or at that conference in Toronto. Or when you and Lora made that visit to Vehren.” The small white hand with its tastefully pink nails that shaded to a delicate salmon where the subtle holograms started balled into a fist. “That week we spent in Alexandria? Do you even remember?”

  Mariwen closed her eyes. Remember? It was a little room in the historic quarter, near the Athenaeum, not much bigger than this . . .

  Walls, a mottled sunbaked yellow, heavily figured with rough swirls of plaster. The ancient door painted turquoise and hung on real bronze hinges. To one side, a short oval table, sheathed in beaten copper; to the other, a shelf with two blue vases, a lily in the right one: an enormous, grandly open slut of a flower, with a deep purplish-pink throat and a cluster of stamens drooping under the load of burnt orange pollen on the swollen anthers. It had been thrust upon her that morning by a tubular naked child, no more than six, and when she knelt to receive it, the child threw thin brown arms around her neck and whispered in her ear “Blessings be, Kirishanna”—a folk name for the city’s mythical deity. She’d murmured “Be thou blessed” into the small shell-perfect ear guarded by ringlets of black hair that smelled of cardamom and turmeric and other spices from the open-air kiosks that dotted the crowded street.

  Later, those market scents on Kat’s skin as they made love on the hard bed beneath the window, the noonday sun, burning in a hot pearl sky, making a bright oblong on the terracotta floor; the oblong growing narrower as the day wore on, unheeded.

  Air, heavy with the tang of sea salt and musk—the taste of salt on Kat’s cheeks where her tears had dried—too hot to move . . .

  Rising finally at 7 PM, laughing and stumbling about in the newborn gloom, the first breath of evening puffing through the open window, as soft and sweet as an overripe peach. The glow in Kat’s lavender eyes as she slipped her hands into Mariwen’s damp heavy hair. “My god! Six more days of this? You think we can make ’em last forever?”

  Mariwen stirred, eyelids flickering. “Those were all years ago.”

  “Years,” Sonja muttered bitterly. “What the fuck do years matter?”

  Years—nothing. Lifetimes, everything. But she’s here. And I’m here. And we’re still fucking . . . A tear seeped past the dams of her lashes.

  Sonja saw it. “Oh shit, Mara. I’m sorry. I’m being such a bitch.”

  “No. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  With a cautious movement, Sonja stretched out alongside Mariwen again and Mariwen’s arm enclosed her almost without thought. Almost.

  “You know, I feel sorta stupid saying this after how I treated you over Rafe, but I do love Nigel. We’re good together.”

  Staying silent, Mariwen nodded.

  “Life here is—I’ve gotten used to it. It was better when we could travel. I like most of his friends. You have to entertain all the time here. It’s like a ritual. One mistake and . . . But some of these parties—they’re such boys! All they wanna do is line up and dance with the blonde with big tits who used to fuck girls . . .”

  Used to?

  “ . . . being on display all the time—being an exhibit. You have no idea! Oh—” She nuzzled her smooth cheek against Mariwen’s breast in apology. “Sorry, Mara. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It was better when we could travel,” she repeated. “Before he got a seat on the Council—you know, I was so happy when that happened? I was so proud! I thought we’d really made it. I didn’t understand then why they call it the Aquarium.”

  “The Aquarium?”

  “Yeah. That’s what they call the Council. It’s their little joke. Once you’re in it, you can never get out again. Unless you die.” She moved restlessly against Mariwen’s side. “That’s the sort of thing they think is funny here.”

  “Kat?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because—because this . . . can’t happen again.”

  Don’t worry, Mariwen thought, it won’t.

  “Whenever I’m around you, I just lose it. I know what we’ll do and how I’m going to feel later and everything that might happen and I still can’t . . . can’t—” Her head moved a desperate twitch. “I get so lost and I can’t ever find myself in you. So—”

  “So?” Mariwen ran her hand down the fine hair that flowed through her fingers like a river of silk.

  “So . . . I want you to go home. Please. I can’t ever see you again.”

  “I can’t go home yet, Kat. You know why.”

  “I do.” The slender white fingers clamped on her biceps, the pink nails bit. “But if you stay . . . if they find you . . . You can’t do anything for her!”

  “You could.” Please Kat . . . please . . .

  “No . . .” The vowel trailed off into sobbing. “If I say anything, he’ll know! They have people everywhere—Nigel has people . . . He’ll know. This isn’t Nemeton or Toronto . . . we have to survive here. Don’t you understand?”

  “Yes. I do.” I’m sorry, Kat. But it’s you who has to understand . . .

  Sonja pushed off Mariwen’s body and stood by the bed, looking for her clothes in the mess on the floor. “I really need to go now. It’s way too late.” She started to pick up one article after another and put them on haphazardly, stumbling as she did so. “Fuck! How am I going to—”

  “It’s not too late,” Mariwen interrupted. Her voice far too calm and unnaturally smooth. Not cold, but not exactly human either. Struggling with her bra, Sonja didn’t seem to hear.

  “Listen to me.”

  Sonja froze at the tone, then slowly finished fastening the expensive bit of custom-made lingerie.

  “Listen,” Mariwen repeated. “You had dinner at Su-Pynsenti and then decided to take a short walk through the Voskeritchian Gardens. You sent a message to your driver and bodyguard to that effect. You met an old friend—me, though you don’t have to say that—and we went to the An Lushan Pavilion to talk.” A nice convenient trendy nightspot at the garden’s center—just the place to spend an evening with an old friend you used to fuck. “We spent the evening there and you had a little more to drink than you should and lost track of time. In fact, we’re still there talking now.”

  “But my driver—my bodyguard?”

  “Message them as soon as you get back and ask them to pick you up at the Pavilion. They’ll be very happy to see you.” Overjoyed actually, since they got a little careless and had a little accident. When they come to and check their logs, and see you’ve been out drinking all night at the Pavilion, they’ll bless their lucky stars. And neither will ever say a word . . .

  “The messages are on your xel and their logs will show we did exactly what I just said. You’ll have receipts for our drinks on your account and a copy of your tab on your xel. Our waitress will remember us and so will half-a-dozen patrons who saw us there. None of them recognized me and you didn�
�t introduce me to anyone, of course. We got a private booth—the number is on your tab—and the internal surveillance video will show us there. Out of consideration for who you are, they turned the audio off. So you have proof we just talked. You didn’t even try to kiss me.” That last spoken with the edge of a bitter smile.

  Sonja watched Mariwen big-eyed and shaking. “I don’t understand how . . . how you could’ve done—”

  “I didn’t.” Mariwen’s voice was too harsh, but she couldn’t do anything about that. “Rafe’s father set everything up.”

  Sonja bent down slowly and retrieved her underwear from the pile at her feet. “He did—you did . . . all that . . . for—” Her head swiveled as she straightened, eyes almost shell-shocked as she took in their clothes strewn about the floor, the wreckage they’d made of the bed, Mariwen nude in that bed, legs crossed at the knee, arms folded across her full firm breasts, her face perfectly beautiful, perfectly composed, utterly shut.

  “Fuck.” She repeated it under her breath and then again, low and savage. But the yearning—and the fear, and shadows of the hurt waiting behind it—were heart-wrenching to see. “If you did all that . . . if you could do all that for her . . . could you make another hour for me? I can’t—can’t leave it like this. Can we please have just an hour for us? No one else? Just us?”

  Mariwen swallowed hard. Oh fuck— What possible difference do you think an hour can make? How can you possibly think this will make anything better? It couldn’t. She knew it couldn’t—felt the wrongness of it in her bones; a dense leaden ache. Stop doing this to her. End it.

  But she uncrossed her legs and opened her arms, anyway.

  “Sure. We can. C’mere . . .”

  Chapter 26

  Docklands Quarter, Halevirdon

  Halith Evandor, Orion Spur

  Alone in an aching dark haunted by memories and fears and—most of all—what she’d just done, Mariwen made her way into the kitchen niche and felt beneath the edge of the counter until she found a spot that yielded slightly when she pressed it. With an inaudible click, what appeared to be a defect of workmanship opened slightly. From the recess behind, she teased an innocent-looking vial of clear liquid, about the size of her little finger, and a small envelope of plastic strips, both courtesy of Paavo’s people.