Merlo blinked and examined the sandwich. “Um, thanks, I guess?”
“Heh, don’t thank me. I didn’t make it.” The woman shrugged dismissively and rolled her shoulder, muscle definition standing out under the bare skin as she did so.
After a moment of watching her chew, Merlo bit into her newly acquired food. It was actually pretty good, standard Destiny sandwich fare. They ate in silence for a couple of minutes before Merlo swallowed and made a further attempt to re-ignite conversation.
“So, what’s your name?” She might as well try that one again.
The other woman grunted around a mouthful of sweet food. “Thought I already told you that.”
“Nope, you just kinda… didn’t answer me before.”
“Huh.” Merlo watched and took another bite as the woman shifted, putting her back to the wall and one foot up on the bed, now facing Merlo. “Prisoner 286.”
Merlo blinked, then snorted. “What kind of name is that? That’s not a real name, is it?”
“Sure it is. It’s mine.”
“You don’t have, like, another one?”
“Nope, I’m clean.” She burped loudly and wiped her sugar-dusted hands off on Merlo’s bedsheets.
Merlo blinked several more times, trying futilely to clear the crazy out of her eyes. She turned and once more looked over the woman resting at the foot of her bed. Prisoner 286, even sitting, even slouching, towered over Merlo. Did everyone she met in this damned cluster have to be so huge? It was weird. She was pretty sure this woman was even taller than Branwen, if not quite as broad. Then again, as she took in the corded, toned muscle, bare arms, and occasional scars, maybe she was stronger than she’d realized.
“So, you were an actual prisoner, or something, then?” The consideration that this woman might have been a felon or something didn’t quite make her nervous, at least no more than 286 normally anyway, but she didn’t know what to make of it, either. 286 looked up and met Merlo’s gaze from where she’d been staring at her. Much as before, 286’s bright hazel eyes practically burned with an inner intensity. Merlo suppressed a mild shiver as it trickled down her spine.
“Hel yeah. Several years now. Urebai, mostly.” Merlo winced slightly at the mention of the small prison world, and 286 seemed to notice the reaction. “Ah, you know it? Ever been there?”
Merlo shook her head. “No, never been there. Just… been through the system, is all.”
“Well, I don’t recommend it. It’s crap.”
Merlo snorted again. Despite her misgivings, she found 286 fairly amusing. “So why were you there?”
Prisoner 286 let out a short laugh. “Cause the Altairans didn’t know where else to put me.”
“No, I mean, what did you do?”
286 leaned forward, capturing Merlo’s gaze again. “Now that,” she said in a low tone, grinning a bit, “depends on who you ask. They say I broke a whole bunch of stuff, caused massive property damage, hurt a lot of people, even killed some. I say that some people got in my way and tried to mess with me, and they regretted the decision.”
Despite herself, Merlo grinned too. She could agree with the sentiment, in a way, if not necessarily the action. Besides, who knew? Maybe 286 was actually kind of in the right. Merlo didn’t know the woman’s circumstances. She directed her attention downward and finished off her sandwich with lethal efficiency.
“What about you? You’re the pilot or something, right?” 286 kicked out a leg, laying it next to Merlo as she also relaxed back on her bed.
“Yeah, I’m a pilot, and a damn good one. And my name is Merlo.” She realized 286 hadn’t even asked in return.
“I know. You told me before, back in the kitchen.” Suddenly, she was leaning forward again, an almost predatory look on her face sharing space with that grin of hers.
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. So why have you been following me around the last couple of days?” Merlo tried to keep meeting the Prisoner’s gaze, but it was surprisingly difficult. Kind of like the rare couple of times she’d seen Captain Branwen get angry.
286 shrugged. “Eh, I was bored.” Merlo raised an eyebrow, unsure if she should be insulted, but 286 continued. “Besides, why not? You look pretty... interesting, Merlo.” She rumbled out the last part of that statement and drawled Merlo’s name in that way that made Merlo feel a little quavery inside. She looked Merlo over with obvious interest, and the expression painted across her face said that “interesting” wasn’t all she meant by her statement. Merlo made an effort to break the direct gaze and returned the favor, looking the Prisoner over in return.
286 wasn’t exactly pretty; her face was hard, if not lined, and she had a rough cut to her jaw that didn’t quite scream “feminine.” By itself, that wouldn’t be too noticeable, but she also had a less than average bust, currently mostly hidden by a black sleeveless shirt with a white skull printed on it, and a subdued curve to her hips. She had a minor scar running through one eyebrow and another small scar at her hairline. Her nose was a little sharp and a little bent, as if it’d once been broken and never completely righted.
Still, while she might not be pretty, Merlo couldn’t say she wasn’t attractive, especially something about her attitude, or maybe it was her confidence. She also liked her hair: partially shaved, partially rising upward, and partially flipped over to one side, a blend of black and deep purple. She even had a tattoo or something, a small, silvery marking on her neck that traced out a complex pattern similar to circuitry.
“How old are you?” Merlo blurted it out. She couldn’t tell, really; she guessed 286 was in her twenties, maybe? She felt living with both Mr. Leonard, who claimed to be older than he looked, and Branwen, who exuded the same, had really stunted her ability to properly judge ages in this cluster. 286 was another one whose eyes said one thing but whose body contradicted it.
“Oh, I dunno. Old enough. How old are you, like twelve, ten, sixteen?”
“What? Why would you even say that?”
“Oh, you just look like you still have some growing to do.” She wore a viciously amused smile when she said it, and Merlo realized she was just being baited. She grabbed a pillow and chucked it at the other woman as hard as she could, but 286 caught it effortlessly.
“You could just answer a damn question, you know—” belatedly, Merlo realized that the other woman wasn’t holding the pillow with her hand. Rather, she held out a hand, but the pillow just floated in the air on its own, suspended and surrounded by a slight distortion of the light, as if the edges of it had gone reverse-negative. “What in the ‘verse!” She half rose from her seat on the side of the bed. “How are you doing that?”
Prisoner 286 made a vague motion and the pillow drifted slowly aside. She peered around it with a sarcastically raised eyebrow. “Um, I think a better question is why you don’t know what the Hel Kinetics are.”
Merlo eyed her, and tried to decide whether to sit back down or continue to get up. She especially eyed the strange glow around the Prisoner’s hand—similar to the pillow, like all the light was refracting, warping, and almost reversing its color and contrast. “Know what what are?”
286 sighed and “dropped” the pillow. Her hand almost immediately stopped semi-glowing. “Okay. Just wow. So, if you don’t know what Kinetics are, you must be really, really oblivious, or you’re not from around here.” She cut her eyes sharply, consideringly, at Merlo.
Merlo sighed as well. “It’s the second one. I’m, well, like you said, I’m not from around here.” She hesitated, considering. In the end, she didn’t really see how it could matter much anymore. “And by around here, I mean these clusters.”
286 kept eyeing her for a long moment, and Merlo figured she was probably deciding whether to believe her or not. “So how’d you end up here, then?” 286 relaxed back, and Merlo relaxed as well, in relief. She didn’t really have any way to prove what she said, and didn’t want the issue of her origins to come between her and other people more than it had to.
“Shor
t version? My people sent a ship through a temporary slipstream trying to contact anyone that might be on the other side. I was the pilot. But I didn’t do well enough, and my ship got torn up when the slip collapsed on top of us.” She sighed again, deeper and more heartfelt this time, trying to push back against the vague sadness that distantly gripped at her. “Then we stumbled into Urebai’s planetary defenses and our IFF failed, so they blew my ship apart, and everybody but me died.” The last half of it just fell awkwardly out of her mouth once she started.
286 leaned back, looking impressed. “Huh, wow. You got blown up over my old house. That’s neat.” Merlo glanced up at her sharply, a bit of incredulity in her eyes. “Or, well, I guess it kind of sucked, too. But you didn’t die, so that’s awesome, right?”
Merlo found her gaze drifting back down toward the bedsheets. “Sure, I guess.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Your turn. So what are Kinetics?”
286 snorted lightly, drawing her other leg up onto the bed and crossing them. “Two things, really. It’s an ability, but it’s also what they call people with that ability.”
“So, it’s a thing you can do? Like what you were doing a second ago? What was that?”
“Yeah. Kinetics, when you get down to it, is the manipulation of dark matter and dark energy to manipulate the rest of the universe. It manifests in ways we can easily see by warping or altering other forces, like gravity or potential energy. But, when it first surfaced, people didn’t know all that.” 286 flexed her hand, and an aura surrounded it.
At first, Merlo couldn’t tell what she was doing, but then she saw where 286’s gaze was fixed on a point past her, and turned at the waist enough to see her room’s metal table and chair floating in midair, seemingly free of the constraints of the ship’s simulated gravity. “Hey! Put those down!”
Prisoner 286 grinned broadly and released them, the pair of suspended objects thumping abruptly to the floor. “The most basic disciplines, the things people usually manifest first and master easiest, seemingly manipulate kinetic and potential energy. Therefore, Kinetics.”
Merlo leaned forward, heavily interested. “What can you do with it?”
In response, the rough looking criminal had a good, long laugh. Merlo waited it out. “What can I do with it? I’m probably not the best choice to give you a good perspective.” She started laughing again.
Merlo raised an eyebrow, but the woman kept laughing for at least a solid minute. Again, she just waited it out, too interested to do anything else. “Why not?” She asked when 286 finally calmed down a bit.
“Because I’m not just any Kinetic, I’m the most powerful Kinetic. I can do stuff no one else can.” Prisoner 286 drew herself up to her full height without standing, straightening her back and looking kind of down at Merlo with a toothy, crooked grin and a possibly crazed gleam in her eye. “As for what’s common, there are several different disciplines it’s split into.” She seemed to slowly relax again, sinking back down onto the softness of the bed, taking the pillow Merlo had thrown her way and tucking it behind her back.
“There are ten, in fact.” 286 continued, ticking the numbers off on her fingers as she spoke. “Stasis, gravity, force, enhancement, aegis, instability, dampening, translocation, pyrokinesis, and vibration. Almost nobody can do them all, or even more than a couple, especially without a lot of training.” She grinned even wider.
“Except you, I guess? Is that it, that you can do all of them?” Merlo guessed expectantly.
286 smiled slyly back at her, almost leering as she looked her over and locking eyes intently with her once again. Merlo barely suppressed another shiver. “Nope. Just more than most. Also, I invented an eleventh discipline: neural. It’s mostly internal manipulation, though. But no one else’s been able to mimic it yet.” The Prisoner’s expression was fierce and proud.
“So, that’s what makes you so special and awesome, then?”
“That and the fact that I’m far more powerful.” 286 raised both hands and gripped them in fists. They were outlined in the strange, non-color almost instantly, and an odd, sphere-like thing that light didn’t properly sink into began to form between her and Merlo. In barely a second, Merlo saw where her hair, clothes and loose bits of her cover began to drift toward it.
“Kinetics are generally categorized into classes one to five.” 286 told her over the tiny dark singularity warping the light and space between them. “I’m a class six.” An edge of Merlo’s plain white sheet rose as if on strings toward the little singularity, and 286 released her fists just as the cover reached up and touched it. The singularity popped out of existence and the sheet fell to the bed, the minor pull Merlo had felt on her body suddenly dissipating. She noted with a flat expression that the edge of her bed cover had been eaten away by whatever forces the warped space had contained.
“There many of those?” She didn’t exactly trust the woman, but she did believe her. She was being serious. That or she was just plain crazy. Merlo couldn’t deny the whole Kinetics thing, though, which lent a lot of believability to her story. And, now that she considered it, maybe it explained what Branwen talked about when she said people on her planet had strange powers, too.
“Nope.” 286 grinned that crooked grin at her again. She hadn’t really ever stopped.
“Just you?” Merlo asked as she watched the other woman curiously, but 286 didn’t answer, just kept grinning. “So what kind of things can you do?”
286 shrugged. “There’s a lot of nuance and variety. The basics are pretty easy to nail down though. You can make a kinetic energy-based barrier that keeps stuff from hurting you or insulates you from dangerous conditions. You can lift stuff, throw it, send force through objects, warp space, almost teleport, heat stuff, cool it, run faster, jump higher, break things. Stuff like that. It’s pretty neat, overall. I like it.”
Merlo smiled, amused. “Sounds pretty awesome. So how do you get it? The ability to do all of that, I mean?”
286 nodded as if she’d expected the query. “You gotta be born with it. Of course, some people are, but don’t know it unless they’re tested. There have been a few scientists that have messed with implants and stuff to try to create the ability or enhance it, but with no real successes.” She paused to rub at the odd metallic tattoo on her neck, and Merlo eyed it suspiciously. “Kinetics are mostly common in space-faring societies, and much more common in systems closer to the galactic rim. Thuruz particles, a type of dark energy particles, get into the body and bind with proteins in the nervous system. They react to the action potential in a person’s individual bioelectromagnetics to enact changes on a macro scale outside the body. In short, a Kinetic’s neural impulses can affect the interactions of physics outside their body.”
286 finally noticed the lack of comprehension evident in Merlo’s expression and sighed, rolling her eyes mildly. “Anyways, a planet’s magnetosphere will tend to deflect the buildup of those particles in the human body in typical cases, which is why planetary cultures that aren’t to the spacefaring stage yet rarely if ever exhibit Kinetics. Though Kinetics can also be hereditary, once introduced into a substantial amount of the population.” Then again, all of that explanation probably nixed Merlo’s “Fade powers” theory.
Merlo nodded anyway, then voiced her suspicions. “If implants don’t work, what’s that thing on your neck?”
286 burst out laughing immediately, and Merlo was once again forced to wait. “This?” She asked, wiping a bit of a tear of mirth from one eye. She tapped the metallic circuit-work patch on her neck, etched into the jugular side. “This is my explosive collar.”
“Your what?”
“Yeah, the Altairans implanted it in me a couple months ago. Trying to keep me from doing stuff they don’t like, you know? Gave its controls to Sirrah. If I do anything too out of bounds, it’s supposed to blow my head off. Via my neck.” She said it all completely casually while scratching at the little metal plating, as if talking about something as commonplace as how gravitat
ional conditions would affect atmospheric reentry.
“What? That’s insane!” Merlo felt her temper lift off. She found herself increasingly infuriated, growing angrier and angrier at an alarming rat. It was wrong to control someone like that.
But Prisoner 286 just shrugged again nonchalantly. “Eh, can’t blame them.”
“What?” Merlo sputtered again.
286 breathed out, speaking as if explaining a simple concept to someone slightly slow. “Someone’s trying to do stuff that hurts you? You try to stop them. Or control them. Someone’s hurting you or messing up your day? You make them stop. Nothing wrong with that. It’s natural. Only fools or the weak try to convince themselves otherwise.” She leaned forward, close to Merlo, and looked intently down at her. “Their only mistake is thinking it’ll work. Nobody rules me but me, and I don’t die that easy.”
Merlo tucked her hair behind one ear, unable to easily look away from the vivid, violent energy inherent in those hazel eyes. Her temper was subsiding, and she felt something in her gut, not nervousness, but something else. As the moments passed, she slowly began to identify what it was.
“So, what else ya wanna know?” 286 was now very close, leaning in and peering down at Merlo.
“Um…” She could feel 286’s hot breath as the Kinetic uncrossed her legs and moved in even closer. She didn’t edge away though, not even as the Prisoner leaned in all the way, opened her mouth slightly, and kissed Merlo intensely, gripping the back of her head securely as the kissing grew more aggressive.
Far from resisting, Merlo let it keep happening, and then suddenly, hungrily, returned it. In a sense, she didn’t really know how things had gotten this far, and she didn’t really care. She wasn’t exactly a stranger to these kinds of feelings, or actions, and something about Prisoner 286 really “interested” her as well, down to a primal level.
286 slammed into her, and, despite everything, wasn’t quite strong enough to knock Merlo over. But Merlo let her anyway. 286 pressed her down into the softness of the bed, raking her fingers roughly through Merlo’s hair and gripping the back of her neck possessively. Merlo ran a leg up 286’s thigh and wrapped it around the small of her back as 286 gripped it, hard enough for her to feel fingertips through the nanoweave of her armor.
Destiny Abounds (Starlight Saga Book 1) Page 20
