“Jesus!” Boone shook his head. “That’s fucking horrible, K!”
“It taught you to follow orders.” She tried to keep her voice expressionless. “Those who didn’t do as they were told reaped the consequences of their behavior. It also weeded out the weak. I told you there were twenty-six in my birthgroup, right?”
Boone nodded.
“Only twelve of us became Paladins.” K swallowed. “The others—the ones who were too damaged, who couldn’t obey orders or learn to control their feelings— they were purged.”
“Jesus wept.” Boone jumped up and began to pace, his broad shoulders tensed. “No wonder you were afraid to take a shower. K, that is the worst, most inhumane thing I’ve ever heard. To treat children that way.”
“We weren’t children—not really.” K watched him pace. “We were soldiers in training. Paladins. And only those that deserved to make rank survived.”
Boone stopped pacing and turned to face her. “You can’t tell me you think what was done to you is right. That it didn’t hurt you.”
“It was necessary.” K lifted her chin. “I became a better, more controlled warrior because of it.”
“How can you defend what those Purist bastards did to you? They fucking traumatized you, K.”
“They trained us,” she said stubbornly. “Trained us to endure, to feel nothing. And don’t forget, Boone, I am one of those Purist bastards myself, even if you have taken my suit.” She closed her eyes, trying to drive away the memory but it wouldn’t go.
She could still hear the howls of the other children who had not yet learned to master their emotions as the freezing, burning water peppered their unprotected skin like bullets. Her jaw still ached from keeping it clenched tight, enduring in silence. But though she didn’t cry or beg she still hated it. One of the best things about being fitted for her suit had been never having to visit the shower room again…
“K, honey…” Boone knelt in front of her and took her by the shoulders. “I know it’s how you were raised but it isn’t right. Children aren’t meant to be brought up in a barracks by machines with no one to hold them or love them. They shouldn’t be denied the right to touch, the right to feel or fear or love. And they sure as hell shouldn’t be tortured.”
K opened her eyes and looked at him. “It is the Purist way. It’s the only way I know, Boone.”
“And you think you’re a better person for it?”
“I…I know I am.” She lifted her chin. “I am a Paladin. I fear nothing. I feel nothing.”
“Nothing at all? Then what’s this?” Boone touched her cheek lightly. When he pulled his hand away K saw moisture glistening on his fingertips.
“What…?” She stared at the droplets in confusion.
“You’re crying, K,” Boone said in a low voice. “You have been since you started telling me this little slice of hell from your past.”
“I’m not—I can’t be!” She felt a stab of panic. Feeling emotions was one thing but to actually manifest them outwardly…
“Look in the viewer.” Boone nodded at the silvery reflective screen across the room.
K stood stiffly and walked over to it, looking at her image in the viewer’s surface. Sure enough, there were tear tracks streaking down her cheeks. But as she looked closer, she saw that something else was wrong—very wrong.
“My eyes!” She looked at Boone and then back at the viewer. “What’s happening to my eyes?”
Boone came to stand behind her, looking down at her reflection. “Well, you can see a lot more of the white around the outer edges now.”
“Exactly.” K leaned closer, her gut twisting like a clenched fist. “The black of Purity, it’s fading, leaving me. My eyes haven’t been this white since I was a second level Paladin.” She shoved away from the viewer in a sudden frantic movement. “I’m losing it—losing everything I worked so hard to achieve.”
She wanted to run, wanted to get away from herself and everything else, from this whole frightening situation. But Boone wouldn’t let her. When she tried to leave he caught her and held her tight.
“Let me go! Let me go!” K beat against his broad chest with her fists but it was like beating against a stone wall—he refused to release her. Finally she stopped, too tired to continue, too confused to know what to do next.
“Take it easy, darlin’.” Boone pulled her close and held her. “Let it out. Just let it all out.”
“Let what all out?” K tried to say but she found she couldn’t talk—her throat was too tight. She was crying again—she could feel the wetness on her cheeks—but she didn’t allow herself to sob. She could cry quietly, could retain that much of her dignity, at least.
It was the best she could do but it wasn’t enough. Even as Boone held her, murmuring soothing nothings, K could feel the waves of shame and pain rolling over her. She was losing her hold on the person she had always been—was becoming a stranger, even to herself.
“It’s all right.” Boone stroked her hair which fell like a heavy, damp curtain around her face. “It’s all right, baby.”
K wiped angrily at her eyes. “Don’t call me that—it’s worse than your other nicknames for me. I am not your baby.”
“No, and maybe that’s the problem.” He brushed a strand of hair away from her face and looked at her seriously. “You were never anybody’s baby. Maybe it’s time you had some babying—some tenderness in your life.”
K stiffened. “Why, so I can become softer than I already am? Look at me—having emotions and then expressing them. I’m crying for Purity’s sake.”
“They hurt you, K.” Boone’s voice was quiet and his eyes were bright with unshed tears. “It’s natural to cry when you’re in pain.”
“I’m not in pain,” K protested but there was a feeling in her chest, a tightness like someone was gripping her heart and twisting it until she thought it might burst.
“Your tears say differently.” Tilting her chin up, he pressed his lips gently to her wet eyelids—a touch so soft K could barely feel it. And yet, her heart skittered in her chest.
“What…what are you doing?” she asked, her voice coming out soft and breathless.
“Comforting you,” Boone murmured.
“You don’t have to do that—I’m fine,” she insisted. “You can…can let me go now.”
He gave her a long, appraising look. “Is that really what you want?”
“Of course it is.” K glared at him.
“All right. If you promise not to hurt yourself.”
“I have already given you my word I won’t purge myself until I get my suit,” K said, sniffing. “I shouldn’t have to swear it again.”
“Fine.” Finally Boone relaxed his grip on her and she was free. But for a moment—only a moment—she didn’t want to move. She wished she could stay there and take the comfort he was offering, could let her tears dissolve the bad memories and make new ones to take their place. The feel of his lips on her cheeks and eyelids had been so soft and yet they made her heart pound…
That was her weakness talking. The growing Impurity that was eating her from the inside out. I must fight it, K told herself fiercely. I must hold out until I can find my suit!
But how much longer could she wait? How much longer did she have before the balance inside her shifted and her emotions ate her ability to reason completely?
How much longer would her eyes remain black?
Chapter Eight
After the shower incident, as Boone began to call it in his mind, things shifted subtly between himself and K and not for the better. Now she was colder and even more withdrawn than she had been to begin with. Boone feared that the emotional break-down she’d suffered after recounting her traumatic past for him might have pushed her too far. Shouldn’t have made her tell you, he told himself. Shouldn’t have pushed. But he couldn’t quite believe that.
Bullshit—she needed to talk. Needed to get it out.
Sure and that’s why she’s back to being as col
d as a cadaver. Not that she ever got that warm in the first place.
He argued with himself back and forth but eventually decided that what was done was done and he would have to let it go. He didn’t push K or try to get her to tell him any more about her life on Athena. She would open up or not when she was ready. And he shouldn’t care anyway. K was the enemy—she’d promised to clean his clock in the near future and he didn’t doubt for a second that she was capable of doing it. So why did it bother him so much that she had withdrawn? Why did he ache for her when he thought of what she’d endured, when he remembered the tears in her strange, lovely half-black eyes?
Forget it, he told himself. Concentrate on getting Shayla back. That’s what matters. And it did—he missed his little sister as much as he ever had and was just as determined to get her back. But almost as often as Shayla, his thoughts turned to K. Who was she really under the cold exterior she tried so hard to project? Would he ever know? Did she even know herself?
They continued to be close physically, at least—there was no way she could avoid that. Despite Loki’s veiled hints that the touch-cravings would lessen in frequency at some point, Boone continued to take “time-outs” with her on a regular basis. And since K didn’t object—or no more than she had before anyway—he assumed that she still needed them.
She was also still reading her way through Shayla’s collection of Old Earth literature. Boone often thought the best parts of his day were when she gave him her “book reports” on the various things she’d read. He found that K tended to have a unique perspective on almost everything from Wuthering Heights to Oliver Twist. Some of the reading seemed to disturb her—she wouldn’t discuss Brave New World or 1984 with him at all—probably because both books hit a little too close to home. The High Sentinel, from what little she’d told Boone of him, sounded like he could be Big Brother’s twin. But it was the children’s books she seemed to find the most absorbing.
Boone suspected she had started reading that particular section in the reader because the books were shorter and she was looking to gain more work-out time as per their bargain. She continued to read them, however, because she liked them—or so it seemed to him. He wondered if maybe they spoke to something inside her, nourished the famished child that had never been allowed to grow. K had never had a childhood of her own, not really—perhaps reading was allowing her to experience what she had lost.
She had been Boone’s prisoner for almost two weeks and they were within hours of a shallow orbit around Minotaur when she gave him her take on The Jungle Book.
“It’s about a boy who is raised by animals—wolves,” she said, while sitting in Boone’s lap during their mid morning time-out.
“Go on,” Boone urged, intrigued as always to hear her views on classic literature. “So he’s raised by wolves—anybody would know that just from reading the synopsis.”
“It’s more than that,” K said thoughtfully. “The boy—Mowgli—he actually thinks of himself as one of the wolves. He knows he’s different but he doesn’t really internalize it until the wolves reject him. That’s when he realizes that he doesn’t belong with the pack anymore.”
“What happens then?” Boone had read the book as a boy but it had been years since he’d picked it up.
“Well, the book is broken up into several different adventures but after he realizes he can’t stay with the wolves, he leaves the pack behind and tries to go back to his own kind.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t work though—he has too much of the jungle in his blood. So he goes back—but on his own terms. He—”
“Boone if you’re not too busy cuddling with Princess Paladin I have a mechanic on the viewscreen for you,” Loki’s nasal voice came over the com, interrupting K’s report.
“Do they have the part we need?” Boone asked.
“The mechanic says they might…for the right price.”
Boone cursed under his breath. “I don’t know how much more credit I can pull this far from Colossus. I guess I can try, but—”
“I don’t think that’s the kind of payment the mechanic has in mind. Look, you’d better come talk about it in person. If you can tear yourself away from the lovely K for a moment that is.” Loki’s voice dripped sarcasm, making Boone grit his teeth.
“Yeah, I’m coming,” he growled. “And can the nasty remarks, Loki. I’ve had about enough of your lip.”
“You say the sweetest things.” Loki signed off with a loud, smacking kiss and the com went silent.
Boone sighed. “I guess I’d better get out there and see what’s going on.”
“What will you do if you can’t pay the mechanic’s price?” K asked, getting off his lap and rearranging her clothing. Today she was wearing another one of his dress shirts, this one dark blue with a red tie cinched around her narrow waist. Boone reminded himself that no matter what else they did on Minotaur, they had to get her some more clothes.
“I’ll find a way to pay it,” he said, snagging the red short sleeved shirt he’d been wearing before their time-out and pulling it over his head. “I have to. If it takes a little longer—”
“You’ll have that much more time to convince me to help you,” K finished for him.
Boone gave her a searching look. This was an area of conversation he had strictly avoided, deciding it was better not to push. After all, he couldn’t force K to help him get past the security field at Midas and rescue Shayla. He could only hope she would see it his way by the time they got where they were going. “I suppose so,” he said at last.
“You do still have my suit,” K pointed out. “I suppose it’s your only bargaining chip. That and my life. But since I’m going to purge myself anyway, it’s not much.”
“Do you really still want to kill yourself so badly?” Boone asked quietly.
A look of uncertainty flitted across her face. “I should want to,” she murmured. “It is my duty to die since I have been contaminated. You’ve been touching me so much and so long that nothing but the deep blackness of Purity can cleanse me now.”
“Death before dishonor, huh?” Boone frowned at her. “Well I don’t buy it, darlin’—where there’s life there’s hope. What would killing yourself get you anyway?”
“Nothing.”
“Exactly.” Boone nodded.
“No, you don’t understand. Purity is pure, unadulterated nothingness. When it takes you in, you become nothing too.”
“Sounds lonely.”
She frowned. “How can you be lonely if you are nothing?”
“How can you want to give up everything to become nothing in the first place?”
“It’s what I’ve trained for all my life.” K frowned. “It’s…expected of me.”
Boone gave her a long look. “I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to kill yourself—maybe it’s time you made some expectations of your own. Come on, I have to go talk to this guy before he gets tired of waiting and breaks the connection. Or else doubles his price.”
He led the way to the main viewscreen which was located, unfortunately, in Loki’s domain—flight control. K trailed after him silently and he hoped she was thinking about what he’d said. They would have to revisit this conversation later—if he was ever going to get Shayla back he needed her to be on board one hundred percent.
Loki was lounging in the flight chair wearing a tight fitting green leather vest and some loose harem-style silver trousers. The ship’s controls were arranged on a semi-circular panel in front of him in a complicated array. Even to Boone’s untrained eyes they looked clunky and inefficient—like most of the ship. But Loki flew it with the ease of long practice, though Boone knew he would much rather be aboard his own custom-built ship, still in dry dock on Eros.
“I’m here,” he said when Loki failed to look up from the apparently engrossing task of filing his nails with a mini-sander. “Where’s the mechanic?” he asked, nodding at the darkened viewscreen.
“I put the image on hold while I waited for you.” Lok
i’s gold-ringed eyes flicked over Boone and K standing behind him. “You sure you want Miss Purity to hear what you have to say?”
Boone frowned. “K knows what’s going on. It won’t hurt to let her hear the call.”
Loki shrugged laconically. “Suit yourself.” He flicked a switch and the large rectangular screen buzzed to life showing a most surprising sight.
He’d been expecting the mechanic to be your garden variety grease monkey with black grime under his nails, probably wearing coveralls with his name stitched on the pocket. It was a stereotype, sure, but often a reality as well in Boone’s experience. Instead, the screen showed and image of a stunningly beautiful woman with full breasts and long blonde hair. She was wearing an immaculate crimson blouse that showed a fair amount of cleavage and a thick gold choker around her slender neck. In fact, the only thing that kept her from being perfectly vid-star gorgeous was her whiskers.
Boone tried not to stare at them but he couldn’t help it. The long, silky hairs protruded from either corner of her lush mouth, making her look extremely cat-like. Large, tilted eyes so green they made Loki’s look dull in comparison added to the feline illusion, as did her vertical pupils.
“Doctor Richard Boone I presume?” Her voice had a soft, purring quality that made Boone wonder if she had a tail swishing out of sight of the viewscreen. He cleared his throat, trying not to let his surprise show on his face.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“The Richard Boone? The famous geneticist? Winner of the Double Helix grant and author of What Lies Within, Genetic Manipulation and its Consequences?” she pressed.
“Uh…I suppose.” Her emphasis on his other profession was surprising and a little worrisome. “May I ask why you want to know? I thought you were a mechanic.”
Her whiskers twitched in apparent amusement. “Oh, I am, Doctor Boone. But I’m also a fan. My father talks about you constantly and we follow all your work. Just imagine, actually getting to meet you like this. It’s very exciting.”
“Uh, well, Miss…”
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