by Kris Delake
But if Jack was right, then Zvi had been assassinated: deliberately targeted with the idea of deposing him, and changing an entire system.
Not the kind of assassination that the Guild usually did. The kind of assassination, in fact, that the Rovers were heading toward, the kind that Jack wouldn’t do.
The unethical kind. If, of course, you could call any assassination ethical.
Maybe illegal might be a better term. The kind of assassination not sanctioned by all those agreements between all those governments. The kind that occurred when one government tried to influence another.
“So,” Skye said slowly, “you think that the members of the Guild who had been disciplined are doing this?”
“Disciplined and disgruntled.” He rested his hands near one of the screens. “Has anyone ever tried to recruit you?”
She hadn’t expected that question. “How would I even know?”
“You probably wouldn’t or you would have answered me immediately.” He was talking as if this were normal. Maybe in his world, it was.
She felt shaken. She had to concentrate to focus on what he was saying.
“You would have had conversations with someone—or a bunch of someones—about how much you disliked the Guild or how the current ruling body isn’t working well or what you were willing to do to get out of your contract.”
“Oh, hell,” Skye said. “I’ve had conversations like that all the time.”
Only she hadn’t had conversations. She had the openings of conversations. She had shut down the topic, usually because she figured her opinions were no one’s business but her own. Besides, most of the people who talked with her weren’t people she liked much.
No one she liked had ever had a conversation like that with her. Was that just her gut? Or had she forgotten the conversations with people she liked?
Or was she seeing everything in a paranoid way now? Was Jack right? Were all of those conversational gambits just a way to feel her out, just to see if she was interested in joining a conspiracy? To see if she was willing to be a traitor to the Guild?
She had hated the Guild so much that she never saw herself as part of it, so she never rebelled against it in an organized way. She was so against any attachments that she never even thought of the other people who were having similar issues.
If she had thought of them, would she have banded together with them?
“Skye,” Jack said gently. “Has anyone tried to recruit you?”
She couldn’t answer that, not definitively. And she was an information person. She believed in definitive. Definitive made sure the right target got assassinated, not the target’s twin brother or the person that the target tried to slip his guilt onto. Definitive meant that innocents went free and the guilty got punished, and no one got falsely accused.
She was all about definitive.
So no matter what, she couldn’t answer Jack’s question. She hadn’t thought she was being recruited into a band of traitors, so to be definitive, she would have to answer no. But she was also oblivious. She hadn’t even realized that such recruitment was possible, that people would want to conspire against the Guild.
If someone didn’t like the Guild, then they could just wait until the end of their employment or repayment contract and leave. She hadn’t thought there would be any other way.
But Jack’s theory made sense to her, in that gut way that she trusted.
“Skye?” he asked again.
She got up and went to his side of the table. She tapped on one of the screens, making the list that he had compiled holographic. She hit one other part of the screen so that the hologram included images of the people who had been disciplined.
Her mouth fell open. She closed it, then bit her lower lip.
He had twenty names on that list. Sixteen had spoken to her at odd times. Sixteen. And a few of them had done so in such a way that she remembered thinking afterward, That was weird.
Jack watched her. She could actually feel his patience, as if it were a live thing. He was waiting for her to figure something out.
She had one more thing to do. She opened another holographic window and tapped on it, looking up vacation days from five years ago.
Fifteen of the names had the same date. And then again, each year. She didn’t have information for this year because that would be in the Guild’s current records, and to get those records, she would have to hack into the system.
She closed the screens, sat back down, and put her face in her hands. She was shaking.
The Guild hadn’t been a safe place for her, but it had been understandable—at least, she had thought it had been understandable. Everyone in their place, everyone with their assignments, people who had moved out of their place had either succeeded or screwed up. She had never thought of anyone cheating or gaming the system, because she hadn’t believed it was possible.
She figured all of the bad people would get caught. And those with questionable skills or a questionable commitment to the Guild, like she had, would get shunted aside in favor of better candidates.
Jack placed a tentative hand on her back. Then he rubbed gently, not in a sexual way, but in a soothing one. He probably thought he knew how upset she was.
Oddly, she was upset about the broken rules and about the misunderstandings. Not that these people had formed a conspiracy against the Guild.
The Guild didn’t treat everyone well. It was only a matter of time before someone rebelled.
Someone other than her.
But she had never expected the rebellion to take this form.
People from within, killing to obtain their desires. Surely, the Guild should have foreseen this? How had it missed the conspiracy?
She raised her head and tapped the screen one last time. Jack’s hand remained on her back, soothing and warm. She didn’t try to shake him off, which was unusual for her. His touch wasn’t a distraction at all, and she found his nearness comforting.
“That’s it,” she said to herself. “They control the information.”
“What?” Jack asked.
She looked at him. “You’re right. There’s a group and there has been for years. They set this up a long time ago, and they meet off-site at least once a year. But the key is that a lot of these people got demoted into what’s called The Office. They handle routine things, like the security for Guild members and vacation days and financial transactions. They do some investigating, mostly background of potential candidates for the school, and they have their fingers in a lot of the Guild’s management.”
“Do you think this conspiracy extends beyond these people that I found?”
“It would have to, wouldn’t it, to have part of the Council try to vote their own candidate in as the Guild’s director.” She rubbed a hand over her face.
She and Jack had spent so much time here, while Liora and her people were planning an active assassination. For all that Skye knew, it could be all over already.
Or about to happen.
It sounded like they had real plans, major plans, with at least two backups.
“We have to get this information to the Guild,” Skye said.
“If you don’t know which people are working together,” Jack said, “how are you going to know who to trust?”
Great question, especially since she’d missed so many cues already. She would ask Jack, who seemed to have a very good sense of other people, who to trust, but he didn’t have decades of experience with them.
“I guess we take this information to the director,” Skye said, “and let her figure out what to do.”
Jack was silent for a moment, as if he were considering what to say next. Finally, he nodded his head just a little.
“And what if we’re too late?” he asked softly.
Her heart twisted. She cared more than she thought she did.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we’ll figure that out when we get there.”
Chapter 48
Th
ere was no quick route from their location in the NetherRealm to Kordita, the planet where the Assassins Guild made its home. Even with their speedy ship, it took four days of solid travel.
Jack got his lovemaking on the cockpit floor, mostly because neither he nor Skye wanted to leave the navigation system unmonitored, particularly after that explosion near Zaeen. The lovemaking wasn’t as exciting as Jack had hoped it would be.
Instead, like all of their interactions these days, it had a touch of sadness. They were still deeply attracted, and the sex was wonderful, and inventive. But it no longer felt new. It felt instead like the kind of sex people had after they had already broken up.
Jack tried to approach the topic a dozen times, but always elliptically. And he had started to learn that Skye wasn’t good with subtlety. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t understood the conspiracy recruitments when they happened.
She didn’t believe that people could think differently than she did, so when she was confronted by someone with a competing (but unarticulated) agenda, she simply ignored it, or failed to comprehend all of the subtext.
It wasn’t that she was dumb, it was that she lacked an interest in others that appeared in situations like that.
They had maybe a half a day to travel to get to Kordita when Jack decided to be as blunt as he possibly could. By then, they had finished all of the research they could do with the records available to them. They had decided to make a risky hack into the Guild’s database when they were still in the NetherRealm. That hack had lasted less than ten seconds and had garnered most of the Guild’s current information.
They had sorted through it on the rest of the trip here, but now they were done. Mostly, all they had gained was more confirmation that the people they suspected were worth their suspicions.
Skye sat in the pilot’s chair. Lately, she’d been doing hands-on flying because she worried about the proximity of some other ships. She said she paid better attention when she actually manipulated the controls herself.
She had done the bulk of the flying on the return trip. One of them had to monitor to make sure they weren’t followed, so when she needed sleep, he spelled her. During those times, he used the autopilot and did research nearby.
This meant that the two of them were on different schedules, so they hadn’t even had a chance to sleep in the same bed.
Jack missed it.
She had the screens open, so that she could see everything around them. He usually didn’t pay much attention to anything outside of a ship, but he did lately. And he was noticing just how much extra traffic there was here. It was as if they had left an unexplored part of the galaxy and arrived in a part that was running out of room for ships and humans.
Jack sat at his research station. The chair had become familiar to him, but it didn’t allow him to see her unless he swiveled toward her, which he did now.
“Skye,” he said. “Can I ask you something?”
She was staring at the navigation board in front of her. From this distance, it looked like a bunch of multicolored dots moving in a variety of directions.
“It’s kind of important,” he said.
Kind of. As in not entirely. He mentally kicked himself for the hedge.
“All right.” She tapped something, then raised her head. Her eyes were a bit glazed. He was surprised to note the shadows under them. Had she been working that hard?
He supposed so. He had too, but he always worked hard. He rarely thought about it.
“It’s about us,” he said. He had never used that word before, us, and it made him nervous.
A small frown creased the spot just above her nose. He wanted to caress the frown away, but he was too far from her. He had initially thought of moving to the copilot’s chair before having this discussion, but was now glad he hadn’t. He needed the distance. He wanted to focus on the words, not on that magical physical pull between them.
“We haven’t talked about the future,” he said.
She shrugged. He didn’t like the reaction, but he pushed forward.
“I initially worried that talking about the future was wrong because there was no guarantee that I’d have one,” he said. “But I think if we present this information to the Guild, and they deal with Heller and by extension, the Rovers, I’ll be fine. I’ll be able to make choices. And so will you.”
She didn’t say a word. For a moment, he thought she would turn back toward the navigation panel in front of her. He wasn’t even sure she understood him.
“I don’t have friends, Jack,” she said. “Most people would consider that a warning sign.”
A warning sign of what? He almost asked the question, but decided not to get sidetracked.
“I think you do have friends,” he said. “You just haven’t noticed.”
Her lips thinned, but that flat expression remained on her face.
“Besides,” he said, “I’m not talking about friendship here.”
Her frown grew deeper. “We’re loners. We work separately. We come from different cultures.”
“And we’ve had a hell of a run these last few weeks,” he said. “We get along really well.”
“Because of the sex,” she said.
The words stung him. He hadn’t thought that. He wondered how she could.
“No,” he said. “Even without the sex. We’ve talked about a lot of things, examined a lot of things, spent quiet time together—”
“And you think that’ll last past this trip?” she asked.
Now he was feeling defensive. “Don’t you?”
She shrugged again. “I’ve never been in this situation before.”
And it sounded like, from her tone, that she didn’t want to be in the situation now.
Still, he pressed on. “I would like to continue spending time with you.”
That sounded too vague.
“I’d like some kind of relationship,” he said.
Less vague.
“Maybe even something perman—”
“Jack,” she said, her voice cold. “I don’t make attachments. I thought you knew that.”
Then she turned around and went back to the navigation panel as if nothing had happened.
His heart ached. He’d never really felt like this before, as if he’d been gut-punched when no one touched him.
“I’d like you to make an exception,” he said.
She didn’t respond. He thought about repeating himself, but knew that she’d ignore that as well.
Maybe he hadn’t been unclear earlier. Maybe she had just been ignoring him, hoping he wouldn’t continue to bring the topic up.
She had made herself very clear from the beginning. A one-night stand. She had said she liked him, but nothing more. No words of love during lovemaking—or rather, sex. And she didn’t make attachments.
He did. She had known that.
But apparently, being the kind of person she was, she either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t cared.
He turned his chair back toward the research screen, but he couldn’t concentrate. He’d never been in this situation before. No woman had interested him like Skye. He hadn’t ever felt this way about anyone.
He loved her.
And apparently, she did not love him back.
Chapter 49
If this trip had taught her anything, it was that she knew nothing about people. Skye bent over the navigation panel, pretending that nothing had happened. She felt Jack’s gaze on her back and she knew when he had turned away.
She had a gut sense of people, but only as it pertained to her. Were they safe? Were they honest? Were they people she needed to spend time with?
Whether or not they were into something bad or good, it didn’t matter if it didn’t concern her.
She’d been thinking about the conspiracy for days, knowing that she had probably missed a hundred clues, primarily because she hadn’t cared about the future of the Guild. She had only concentrated on leaving it.
And now this, with Jack.
She had been very clear. She didn’t make friends. She wasn’t warm and cuddly. She was brittle and breakable and she wasn’t going to change. Eventually, he wouldn’t find her intriguing. He would find her irritating, and he would leave her one day just like everyone else had.
The best way to avoid that was to avoid the attachment.
No one came back. Everyone left.
How she felt about him didn’t matter because he would never return the emotion. He might think he loved her, but he didn’t. He was only responding to the sexual connection and once that faded, then he would move on somewhere else.
He was talking about a future now, but once they had survived all of this—once they had made it to that future—he would want out.
Everyone did.
Her fingers kept missing the edges of the screen. She finally had to stop trying to work the navigation panel and flatten her hands against her thighs. She needed to get ahold of herself.
I don’t have friends, she had said to him.
And he had said, I think you do have friends. You just haven’t noticed.
Could that be true? How could she have friends if she hadn’t noticed? Weren’t friends like pets or children? Didn’t they require care and feeding and constant attention?
The fact that she didn’t know these things meant that she wasn’t attachment material. She had purposely not learned any of it.
But she did care about some people back at the Guild. The idea of them getting caught in the crossfire of whatever might happen disturbed her more than she could say.
Just like the idea of Jack getting killed disturbed her. That was why she had joined him in the first place, even after that spectacular one-night stand. She wanted to know he was surviving out there, living his life.
Was that friendship? Or was she just being selfish?
And how could she tell the difference?
She wanted to ask him, which was rich in irony. He was the only person she trusted to tell her how friendship worked.
And she was going to walk away from his.
Only he’d been clear: he hadn’t wanted friendship. He wanted “some kind of relationship.” He wanted something “perman—” She had interrupted him, because she hadn’t wanted to hear the word permanent.
