by Elin Wyn
She twined her arms around my neck and leaned into me. “Simple enough.”
Last night, when I’d touched her body, a fire consumed me, inflaming me with the need to devour her, to take her and make her mine.
This time, passion smoldered, compelling me to taste every micron of her skin, memorize her response to every caress, discover what made her pupils dilate, her breath come in pants, her heart beat faster.
When I finally pierced her, drawing every shudder and wave that passed through her body into myself, one truth shone through with simple clarity.
Zayda was my home now.
Whatever else emerged from my past, wherever her future took us, everything else was a detail.
This time, when the dream came, I wasn’t in the gray room.
No Hunters loomed over me, no pain waited.
Only rage.
The controls of a small pod twinkled before me, but one red light caught my eye.
Hull breach.
I was losing oxygen, and the jump drive was out.
A quick scan confirmed what I already knew. Not a single planet within range.
Outside the viewscreen, flashes marked where my brothers jumped, one by one, into warp fields far from here. I’d be gone myself, just a flash of bent space, if the emergency launch from the Daedalus hadn’t thrown me into an asteroid.
I closed my eyes. Even a Wolf would need oxygen eventually. Now there was nothing to do but wait.
With the crunch of metal, I jumped awake, fighting against the harness. The top of the pod peeled back, but, instead of the cold rush of vacuum filling the interior, the pale light of a cargo bay flooded in.
Unstrapping, I rose slowly, my limbs weakened, thoughts sluggish. Had the Doc called us back in? Was the emergency over?
When the Hunters swarmed up the sides to pull me out, I didn’t have a chance. I fought, because that’s the only thing I had left, springing on the Hunter closest to me, pinning it down, and choking the life out of it.
Mack, please…
A Hunter stood behind me. With a snarl, I reached back, grabbed its wrist and threw it away.
It scrambled to its feet, heading towards me again. Before I could react, a steel beam crashed across my back.
Mack, wake up!
Zayda? What was she doing here?
Something soft wrapped around me, holding me tight. I fought against it, gasping for air, then snapped awake.
Our room was in shambles, the tray dinner had arrived on smashed into pieces.
Zayda stood in the far corner, weight rolled to the balls of her feet, eyes wary. “You back with me?”
I slid down the wall, buried my face in my hands. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”
She sat down next to me and I pulled away. “Did I hurt you?”
“No.” But her forearm was reddened. Sickness spread through my gut.
“It’s not safe for you to be around me. I need to leave.”
She pushed herself into my lap until she straddled me, hands bracketing my face. “I thought we had sorted that out. We’re together; the rest of the stuff is complications we deal with. Together.”
“I could have hurt you.” The image of the Hunter lying before me, his throat crushed by my hands, flashed before me. The body morphed into Zayda’s, her bright eyes dull and lifeless. At my hand.
I jerked away, but Zayda, the real Zayda, held me close. “Not happening.” She wrapped around me, soft arms bringing me to her neck. “Just rest for a minute, and we’ll figure it out.”
Her scent, warm and welcoming surrounded me, and I buried my face in her hair. “You sure don’t smell like Hunters, darlin’.”
She laughed, stroking the back of my head. “Just remember that in your dreams. Give them all a quick sniff test before you try to kill them.”
“Void, Zayda. Don’t even joke about it. Not this.” My arms wrapped around her waist, and all I could think about was how fragile she was. “Maybe we should see a doctor, see if they can figure out what’s wrong with me.”
“No!”
The panic in her voice came as a surprise.
“Darlin’, I could really hurt you next time. I can’t,” my hands shook, and I pulled her closer. “If I’m fucked up now, how is it going to be if I wake up and I’ve actually hit you?”
“We’ll have to figure it out on our own.” She pushed away from me, stared at me long and hard, then closed her eyes. “I know I said no more secrets, but this one isn’t mine.”
My heart froze. “Whose is it?”
“Yours.”
“Not exactly sure how you’re keeping my own secrets from me, but I give you permission to tell me.” I pulled my hair in exasperation. “Do you even hear how ridiculous that sounds?”
“Mack, this is serious.” She took a deep breath, then the words spilled out in one long sound. “You’renotcompletelyhuman.”
I blinked. “Try that again? Slower?” But her words started to sink in.
“You know already, don’t you?”
I leaned back against the wall, stared at the ceiling. “I suspected something was wrong. I should have needed more oxygen in the shuttle. In the warehouse, I could see you, but you couldn’t see me. Little things.” I swallowed. “And in my dreams, I know there’s something that makes us different. Something the Hunters want.
“How did you find out?”
“When you were in the clinic, I did your scan. You’ve been altered. Genetically modified more than I’ve ever seen. Way more than is legal, to be honest.”
“And you didn’t think to say anything?”
She gave an uneven grin. “I kinda assumed you already knew.”
I tapped the side of my head. “Memory gone, remember?”
Zayda pulled away to sit next to me. “I saw the marks. But I’ve never seen anyone recover as much from a wipe as you have.”
“This is recovering?”
“I think the nightmares are your memories coming back, reforming.” Her words were hesitant, feeling her way through a theory. “I don’t know all of the details, but the wipe fries the neurons of the hippocampus. Usually it erases anything stored in the last few weeks, but nothing stored for longer.”
“It did more than that, I can tell you.”
She got up, moving around the room as she talked, putting it to rights. I watched her, wondering if she just needed something to do with her hands while thinking things through. “I know that. And I know that doesn’t normally happen. We can suppose that the experiences you’re reliving are from during the time that should have been wiped.”
“And that tells us what?”
“Your enhancements may have saved you. Maybe whatever is changed in your physiology means you store memories differently. Maybe the wipe was enough to disrupt everything, but only temporarily.”
I got to my feet in a rush, grabbing her shoulders. “You’re saying that everything will come back, just not in nightmares.”
“In time, yes, I think so.” She turned her face away from mine, the sorrow shadowing her eyes.
“Then what’s the problem?” My hands dropped. “It’s because of the modifications, isn’t it?”
“What?” Zayda shook her head, still refusing to meet my eyes. “I’ve known about that from the beginning. Don’t really care.”
“If you don’t mind the fact that I’m not entirely human, and probably the result of illegal research, then what’s our hiccup, darlin’?”
She spun back, her eyes shone with unfallen tears. “Promise me there’s no one else.”
“That’s easy,” I laughed. “There’s --”
“No. Stop. Think about it.” The force of her words silenced me.
“You didn’t just lose a month or two. You lost everything. You don’t remember your name. How do you know there’s not someone waiting for you out there?”
I folded my arms around her, held her close. Breathed in the sweet smell of her. The smooth touch of her skin that could set me smol
dering at any time.
“If there was someone out there, in my past, that meant half of what you do to me, I wouldn’t have been compelled to go to some random-seeming coordinates.” I cupped her cheek in my hand, willed her to believe me. “I’d have done anything to find her. Since that wasn’t the case, she doesn’t exist.”
Softly, I brushed my lips over hers. “You do. And I’d never forget you, no matter what they did.”
The sharp rap at the door made us both jump.
“Come on down, children. We need to talk.”
Zayda
As we descended the steps to Granny’s parlor, I pushed Mack’s revelations from my mind.
No matter what I wanted to believe, he couldn’t be certain. There couldn’t be anything between us but friendship.
My heart clenched at the thought, but at least we would still have that, right?
People choked the narrow hallway, coming in and out of the hive. I stood on the landing, watching. Mack’s hands rested on my shoulders.
“What do you make of it?”
I watched for another moment, spinning my theory. “People come in, excited and curious. Most of them leave, still curious. A fraction are leaving with a different gait to their walk. Excited, maybe, but determined.”
“The air reeks with adrenaline,” he added. “Probably enough to bottle it.”
“That’s odd,” I mused. “No, not about the adrenaline, I believe you. But everyone who looks like they’re heading out on a mission has a bit of red cloth somewhere on their clothes.”
“Maybe it’s today’s fashion? We can ask Gozer when we find a way to check in ‘upstairs’.”
Maybe. But I would have bet that they didn’t have it on them when they came in.
A half-grown kid came and found us in the crowd. “She wants you now.” I couldn’t help but notice he had a red sash tied around his arm. People fell away from him, making a path for us.
At the door to the treasure lair, he stopped, looked up at a corner of the ceiling.
“Cams,” I muttered as the door clicked open, and then I blushed. If there were cams in our bedroom, I’d have words with Granny, childhood hero or not.
But my words died on my lips when we entered her lair. She flipped through an old holo cube, her sharp face softened by sadness. She paused on one, three generations of a family, I’d guess. An older couple stood next to a younger one, all four peering at the infant in the younger woman’s arms.
“Live long enough, and you start to think it’s time to withdraw from the world. Let the younger folks handle things.”
She snapped off the cube with a decisive wave of her hand. “But I know better, don’t I?” Her crafty smile slid back into place, and I could almost believe she was the legendary pirate queen.
“I need another favor.”
“I’m happy to take The Queen out any time,” Mack answered with a grin.
“I’m sure you would be, son, but not today. Today I need a different type of errand run.”
She slid a small, carved, black token across the table. I picked it up, rolled it over in my hand. Something like a modified rectangular prism, chunks carved out of the top so that the line went up and down, up and down all around it.
“What is this?”
“A message. The person at the location I'll give you will know what it means.”
When she told us where she wanted us to go, who she wanted us to find, I took a step back.
“You're crazy.”
“Probably, but that's not the most polite comment to make.”
“Really,” Mack looked down at me, “how bad can it be?”
“This is the Lowers. She wants us to go to the Under.”
“And that's why I saved this little task for you. I have no doubt that, between the two of you, you can get through to my man.” She tapped her fingers on the table and, with a jolt, I recognized my own little tell.
“And once you're down there, you might find out that he has some talents that you want to use yourself.”
She handed us two strips of red fabric. “Stick these on somewhere. Those in the know will leave you alone.”
“And those that aren't?” Mack grumbled.
“I'm sure you’ll teach them manners soon enough.”
Once we were on the street, I leaned against the side of the hive.
“What's so bad about the Under?” Mack asked.
I stared at the black abstract form in my hand, musing. “If she sent a code, any sort of message that could be intercepted, someone could break it. Something like this, the meaning could've been decided years ago. It’d be virtually uncrackable.”
“Can I see that?”
I handed it to him and he turned it over in the light and then set it down in the palm of his hand, level. “I think it's a chess piece.”
“A what?”
“Chess, it's an old game. Doc liked old things, figured it was good for us to learn every strategy game out there. Chess, Go, you name it, she had it on board.”
He stopped, and then wrapped his fingers around the piece. “Doc, I remember Doc now.”
I wrapped my hand around his fist. “Is that a good thing?”
“Yeah,” he let out a long breath. “That's a good thing. Anyhow, let’s see where you’re so unhappy to go.”
To get to the Under, we went back through the bazaar towards the hub of the station. I'd heard of how to get down, but it wasn’t the same as firsthand knowledge. I would rather have had a guide. But right now, there were too many games going on, and we didn't know who we could trust. We’d have to figure it out on our own.
Behind a half-torn-down stall at the dingiest part of the bazaar, I stopped by a rusted metal panel. “It should be here.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t, exactly.” I kept looking for a catch, a sign, anything. “Before I took the assignment, I studied the plans for the station, listened to reports of smugglers that had been captured, tried to learn everything I could. I still don't know how I was caught.”
“That can be tomorrow's mystery.” Mack rocked each corner of the panel, loosening it until, with a ‘pop’, it slid free. “We’ve got our hands full for today.”
We started down the narrow stairs, steep enough to almost be classified as a ladder.
“This can’t be the only way to get to this place, not as stiff as that entrance was.”
I shook my head, knowing that he would be able to see me just fine in the dark.
“It's just the one I know about. An old maintenance passage that connects all the levels, or at least did, once upon a time. I'm sure there's more ways to get down, but I’d expect them to be closely guarded.”
“If the Under is as bad as you say, you'd think they'd be more interested in getting out than stopping people from getting in.”
I focused on my footing for the next few steps. “It’s not that it's bad, just that it’s dangerous. But everything I've learned makes me think that they're not that welcoming to strangers. They’ve made their own world down there, with their own rules.”
“Like Jado and Ardelle plan to.”
I shivered. “I hope.”
Legs aching, we emerged from the stairwell. Mack slid the panel shut behind us as I scouted the area.
We’d left the bazaar in full day shift, here, all was kept in twilight. I looked around, got my bearings, and then wrapped my hand around Mack’s and headed off.
The Lower levels mimicked the layout of the Uppers - straight lines, at least the pretense of order, a sense of striving for prosperity, even if you knew you’d fall short.
The Under mirrored all of that. Women dressed in elaborate costumes that called to mind triD dramas, but made of tatters and wiring. Silent children raced out of narrow alleyways, then faded back from us, too quickly for me to make out the strange painted marks on their faces. The streets curled around in maddening spirals, with no addresses, just landmarks to guide us.
As we passed t
hrough the district, people looked at us curiously, then looked away, as if deliberately forgetting our intrusion. There was no way to disguise that we were strangers, but no one seemed eager to challenge us. I wondered if their indifference was due to Granny’s red tokens, Mack’s size, or apathy.
I stopped at the final intersection, reran the directions in my head, and swore under my breath.
“You've got to be kidding me.”
Mack followed my gaze and grinned. “Another nightclub?” He cocked his head. “I’ve some pretty good memories of the last time you took me to one of those.”
His thumb brushed my lower lip and, for a moment, I turned to hot liquid thinking of the kiss in the Down Low that had somehow set us on this path together.
And then I shoved the feeling away. “Let's go deliver a game piece.”
Calling the place a nightclub might be overstating things. A dingy bar with a few people halfheartedly humping on a makeshift dance floor in the corner would be more accurate.
I pushed through to find a place at the bar. A guy with a reddened, blotchy face, dressed in multiple stained and torn layers, turned and grinned at me.
“Hey, sweetie.” His breath was rank. “You look new. You really need to have a guide down here.”
He leered towards me until Mack’s arm landed casually on the bar between us.
“Thanks for saving me a seat, honey.” He dropped a light kiss on the top of my head, then turned his attention to the bartender.
The drunk’s eyes widened and he leaned away. “Just offering to be a guide, just being friendly.”
“Sure.” The approach of the bartender sparked a different thought. “We’ll buy you a drink, if you can tell me where to find Mulligan.”
“That old kook? What you want with him?”
I turned my back to him, trying to figure out what in this place would be safe to drink.
The bartender stood waiting for our order. Mack rubbed his jaw. “Two of whatever won't kill me.” He glanced down at me with one eyebrow raised, as the bartender moved off. “It probably won't, right?”
