Shoot the Messenger

by Pippa Dacosta

  The fae’s right eyebrow twitched. The movement was tiny. Most would have missed it completely. But I knew what I was looking for. The marshal’s words had hurt him. This fae cared.

  Talen leaned outward and peered around the marshal’s shoulder. His intense gaze pierced the shadows, spearing into me. “You have brought me a guest.”

  Kellee turned, surprised to see me rooted to the floor only a few steps inside the room. “Kesh?”

  No, no, don’t tell him any more. Not my name, not any of it. If I had known Kellee’s source was a fae, I wouldn’t have come. The second I stepped into the light, I’d be exposed. Would he know? The marks painting my skin itched. Would he recognize me? I didn’t recall him or his name, but there had been so many fae and my name was notorious among them. Not Kesh’s name. My other name.

  But I wouldn’t run. Not from him. I briefly touched my neck, feeling the ghost of cool metal. He was caged. I was free.

  I willed my feet to move forward and plastered a blank expression on my face.

  “Ah,” the fae said. The smooth sound unwound me. “Marshal Kellee, would you be so kind as to leave us alone?”

  Kellee chuckled. “That’s not happening, Talen.”

  The fae cut him a look so deadly I was surprised it didn’t slice through the cage.

  Unfazed, Kellee rapped his knuckles on the glass. “Remember who put you here.”

  “How could I forget?”

  Had Kellee captured this fae? I swallowed a hard knot in my throat and stopped beside Kellee. The fae’s eyes bored into mine, burrowing deep into my soul and digging up all the gems of my past. Had he once seen me painted with the blood? Had he roared along with the thousands of others who had reveled in their entertainment? He didn’t look the type to lose his mind over bloodlust, but they never did.

  The fae’s smile held secrets. He glanced at Kellee but didn’t seem inclined to speak what was on his mind. He knows. He knows. He knows. My heart beat out the fear.

  Talen dragged his gaze over me, slow and steady. “Thief.”

  “I am no thief.” But I understood why he would think so. He likely sensed the low magical throb I carried with me.

  His eyes narrowed, gaze piercing deeper. “What do you want?” he asked, looking directly at me.

  I was here. It was done. And if there were consequences, I would deal with them. But right now, I needed answers. “What do you know about fae adopting tek?”

  He waited a few beats, his thoughts probably lingering on how I carried fae magic. “We’re averse to using tek,” he said. “It pains us, as you know. But in extreme circumstances, we’ll adopt it, briefly, if we must.”

  “Is it possible for a fae to live in a tek-advanced society?”

  He flicked a hand, dismissing the suggestion. “Unlikely. For a day or two, perhaps. No more.”

  I looked again at his surroundings. His cell—crisscrossed with metal. The tek observing from hidden corners. The array of tek I had seen on the way in. The prison was encased in tek. How was this fae even coherent?

  Intelligence sparkled in his eyes. “You’re wondering how I have survived?” Talen asked. “I have been here a very, very long time. Besides living, my only other option is death, and I am not ready to meet the Hunt just yet.”

  He must be in agony. Every breath, every movement, must hurt. “Then, isn’t it correct that a fae exposed to tek over a long period of time could live in a tek-advanced society? Like you are here.”

  “Live? No. Survive?” He smiled at my question, almost as though it pleased him to have me ask it. “This…” He stepped back from the glass, the movement silent. “Was not voluntary.”

  “But if he or she were exposed to tek slowly, over many years, they might build up a resistance?”

  The fae blinked, possibly for the first time since we had entered. “It is possible but unheard of. It would take many years of voluntary exposure to human tek and a great deal of pain.”

  So, Larsen had slipped under the radar over years. Centuries? “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “It has been three hundred and forty-two years since the marshal detained me.”

  Kellee stiffened. Talen had revealed too much, and the fae’s smile proved it.

  I blinked, careful to school my features. The marshal was how old? I stared ahead, refusing to glance at Kellee despite needing to see his reaction.

  Talen’s soft smile had probably lured hundreds of humans to their deaths over the years. Here, he was using it against Kellee. He knew he’d given something away. From my time behind bars, I knew such slights against a jailor—small as they were—amounted to huge victories.

  “You endure pain daily?” I asked, quieter now.

  “I do.” To survive, he had built up an immunity to tek. If he’d done it, others might have as well. Others like Larsen. It would have taken time. Time during which the fae had fallen into myth and legend. Human generations. But the fae were nothing if not patient. Long-lived, what was a few hundred years of pain?

  “Why do you ask, Kesh?”

  A shudder tracked its way down my spine. “There’s—”

  “No reason,” Kellee interrupted.

  The fae studied us. His silvery hair moved beneath the light like liquid mercury. For someone caged for over three hundred years, he looked remarkably well. We studied each other. What family was he from, I wondered. Was he a social fae, a worker, or was he in service to the court? None of the answers mattered, but a fae locked away so far from home was a sight I’d never expected to see. It was like catching a mythical creature in a jar. It shouldn’t have been possible.

  He moved closer to the glass and tilted his head. His violet eyes darted as he studied me. “What are you?”

  I glanced at Kellee and saw the marshal raise an eyebrow. He had asked me the same.

  “A messenger,” I replied.

  “No,” Talen said. “You have the magic of my kind. I sensed it the moment you entered. You’ve spent time with us. A long time.” He touched his neck, and before I could stop myself, I had mirrored the gesture. I dropped my hand, but the flash of recognition in his eyes told me he understood.

  “I see.” His smile grew predatory, and this time, when he looked at Kellee, there was a knowing brightness in his eyes and a smirk tugging at his lips. “Do you trust your companion, Marshal?”

  “We’re done here.” Kellee strode toward the door, leaving me alone, facing the fae.

  “I know you.” Talen pressed a hand against the glass. His flesh bubbled and sizzled, but he leaned in closer, ignoring the burn. “You have the power to free me from this prison. Do it, do it now and I will forever be in your debt.”

  My heart raced too hard, tightening my chest. “I can’t.”

  “You can.” Closer still. His beautiful eyes shone alarmingly with tears. In all the years I had spent with them, I had never once seen a fae cry. A single clear droplet skipped down his pale cheek. “Do this one thing and I will be yours.”

  There was magic in those words. A promise, a curse. And my human heart ached for it.

  “Kesh!” Kellee snapped. “Get away from him.”

  I had loved them once, loved them like I was one of them. And this one, lost to his people, lost to his world, captured for centuries. Like me, he had been caged. I pressed my hand to the glass, over where the metal-infused screen scorched his palm.

  “I know you, saru. Free me and I will be yours.” He dropped to one knee, closed his burnt hand into a fist, pressed it against his heart and bowed his head. “Allow me to serve you.”

  Kellee grabbed my arm and dragged me toward the door. The fae stayed bowed, his words circling inside my head. Allow me to serve you.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Kellee hissed. “Words are the only weapons he has left.”

  Talen’s tear-filled offer haunted me long after the prison door had slammed shut.

  Chapter 10

  Marshal Kellee jabbed at the flight controls, disengaging the s
huttle from the prison dock. If he exerted any more force, he’d push his fingers through the console.

  I gripped the back of the adjacent flight chair. I couldn’t bring myself to sit down and strap in, not with Talen’s offer still ringing in my ears. Allow me to serve you. If I hadn’t dug my fingers into the chair, Kellee would have noticed them trembling. The dangerous kind of anger burned like acid in my veins. It was a trick. No fae would ever serve a saru. They didn’t know how to bow to anyone but their sovereign, and even then, it was begrudgingly.

  “Are you going to demand I take you back to Calicto?” Kellee asked gruffly, his attention on piloting.

  He had said he wasn’t keeping me against my will. But walking back into Calicto without a plan would get me killed. One fae at the head of Arcon and another in prison? A day ago, I would have laughed at the thought. If there were two fae in Halow, there might be more. I couldn’t tackle more alone.

  My knuckles had bleached white. I loosened my grip on the chair. “You took me to a fae,” I said, training my voice to hide everything boiling inside me.

  “You wouldn’t have gone had I warned you.”

  Why? Why had he done this? All we had learned from Talen was that a fae may deliberately build up a resistance to tek. I already knew it was possible, and now so did Kellee. But that meeting had been about more than that.

  An ache throbbed through my jaw, radiating from my clenched teeth. “You wanted to see how he would react to me. You didn’t just want answers about Larsen, you wanted answers about me.”

  Kellee maneuvered the shuttle backward, away from the dock. The engines grumbled, vibrating through the floor. The marshal didn’t reply. Heated tension simmered around him. It didn’t matter. He’d shown his true colors and used me.

  “Sit down,” he ordered.

  I ignored him.

  “Sit the fuck down,” he growled. The sound raised the fine hairs on my arms. Warring instincts spiked my veins with adrenaline. He turned his head to finally look at me. Whatever he saw on my face eased some of his fury.

  He sighed and faced ahead, rolling his shoulders to work out the frustration. “Would you please sit while we maneuver away from the dock? It’s safer.”

  I didn’t move. “It wasn’t about getting help at all. It was about you trying to figure me out.”

  “Can you blame me? You’re not fae, but you wield their magic. What am I supposed to think?”

  “You were going to take me in…”

  “I was,” he admitted, still working the shuttle’s controls. “Until those intruders attacked you. They would have killed us both. That’s when things got interesting. Talen’s reaction to you confirmed it.”

  “Confirmed what?”

  “You’re someone important to them.”

  A dry, humorless laugh barked free. “No, that’s definitely not the case.”

  He flinched. “Whatever he told you, don’t listen. It’s misdirection. The first prison they had him in, he turned the entire staff against one another in three weeks. Now he’s isolated—for everyone’s safety. But I guess you know exactly how to handle a fae, right?”

  So do you, Marshal.

  I stared ahead at the blackness we cruised through. “I know you.” Talen couldn’t know me. He had been in prison too long to know me. Maybe he hadn’t meant it literally. He knew I had his people’s magic. He knew I was saru. In his lofty fae mind, that was probably all he needed to know.

  I touched my neck, expecting to find the cool touch of iron, but only found my skin, soft and warm.

  “You have the power to free me from this prison.

  Allow me to serve you.”

  Their word bound them, and Talen’s words had been explicit. He couldn’t know me, he couldn’t know what I’d done, but he could be mine, and that was no small thing. The thought alone set my pulse racing. The times I’d dreamed of being equal among them, being loved for the right reasons, not the wrong ones. Talen couldn’t make me fae, but having him beholden to me… his power as my own, his strength coursing through my veins. To a saru, there was nothing more seductive, not even freedom.

  Better to push it aside for now. Larsen was the priority.

  “Did you get your answers about me, Marshal?”

  He glanced over. I expected to see a triumphant smile on his face but didn’t get that at all. If anything, the lines around his mouth made him appear tired. “Some. And a whole lot more questions.”

  I kept my eyes on the nothingness ahead of us. I had questions too, like how the marshal had captured a fae some three hundred years ago. “You once hunted the fae?”

  “No.” His quiet dragged on for so long after his denial that when he next spoke, his soft words bore the terrible weight of their meaning. “They hunted my kind. To extinction.”

  The ride back to Juno passed in silence. I left Kellee to stew in his apartment on everything he’d learned from my encounter with his prisoner and ventured into Juno proper. Curved glass revealed the station’s spine and the catwalks wrapped around it, each one like ribs around the central cavity. Walking to the edge and pressing my hands against the glass, I peered down into the station’s cavernous middle until a hot wash of vertigo forced me back.

  So much glass and metal. Dots of color streamed along the transparent ribs—corridors. People. Hundreds of them. Like ants in a hill. I looked up, following the central cavity to a black dome pricked by starlight. Not ants, more like goldfish in a bowl. Juno was so vast and beautiful, typical of human tek, but so fragile. Juno was exactly the kind of place the fae despised.

  Doesn’t matter. None of this matters.

  Using my coat’s cloaking abilities, I spun myself an illusion to blend in, exploiting the drab colors and altering my facial features enough to fool any surveillance that got lucky and noticed me among the crowds. Arcon may not be watching this far away from Calicto, but their tek was here.

  I entered an elevator and rode it down a few levels alongside fifty or so others. All were well dressed and wealthy. They chatted about nonsense. Family, work, travel. All the mundane things people shared when they came together. I listened, absorbing their accents so that when I needed to speak, I would blend in.

  Kellee had told me where to find the parts I needed. He hadn’t asked what they were for, although I’d seen in his eyes that he’d wanted to. He had wanted to ask about many things. I had no intention of telling him anything he didn’t need to know. Once Larsen was dealt with, I would disappear from the marshal’s life. Better for him to always wonder about the girl with her illusions. If he knew what those illusions covered, his sense of honor would force him to act. So, I would slip away, never to be seen again, and leave the marshal to his crusade against the fae. It was the only way we would both survive.

  The store Kellee had directed me to glittered with electronic components. I dulled my magic and stepped inside. Many items on display cost more than what I earned as a messenger and some also appeared to be illegally modified, but like the marshal had said, there was no law this far outside Halow’s main systems.

  I collected a few items I needed and some I didn’t. Sota would appreciate a few upgrades. It’s always best to keep a drone capable of microwaving your bones to ash inside your own skin happy.

  After purchasing the components, I left the store and spotted the marshal rising from a bench. How had he seen through my illusion? I ignored him and slipped into the crowd. Sure enough, his reflection in the store windows confirmed he had fallen into step behind me. I had planned to return to his place, but now I wanted to know how far the marshal’s tracking abilities went. Playing cat and mouse would have been easier with Sota, but I hadn’t always had the drone. Dusting off old skills, I picked up my pace, weaving faster through the shoppers. Once I had a good distance between us, I veered into a restaurant, asked after the washroom, and slipped inside. In seconds, I’d switched my appearance, this time draping myself in male attire. The illusion would hold as long as nobody touched me. The marsh
al wouldn’t spot the change without biotek.

  I left the restaurant and eased into a swaggering pace—nothing like Kesh Lasota’s purposeful stride. Juno’s smooth, shiny surfaces highlighted the reflections of those around me, and so far, the marshal wasn’t among them. Good. Knowing how to give him the slip may come in useful.

  When I returned to his apartment, he was sprawled on his couch, reading from his personal palm-sized screen as though he’d been there all along.

  “Did you get everything you need?” The little smile he wore held a smug edge.

  I smiled back. “I did.” I set my box of components down on the floor—the easiest place to spread all the tiny circuitry—and set to work.

  I hadn’t been born to tek like most humans outside of Faerie. So, when I first encountered the strange metal devices with little electronic minds of their own, I’d been fascinated by their construction. Fascinated enough to strip down stolen components and rebuild them into something new. I’d been punished time and time again, but the lashings didn’t matter. What was more pain to a creature like me, surrounded by pain and bloodshed? But tek, that was something else. In my cell, my world so small I counted it in steps, the wonder of tek had been the real magic. Not the intangible fae magic. Tek was a whole other world filled with possibility. I’d created new machines, new tek. Those tek trinkets had saved my life a hundred times over—and condemned it.

  “Here.” I held out a black device no larger than a thumbnail. “It’s the best I can do with what I have here.”

  The marshal had joined me on the floor some time ago to watch me dismantle the circuitry from the pieces I’d purchased and solder them into something else entirely.

  He held out his hand. I dropped the comms into his palm and picked up its twin. “What is it?” he asked, studying it closely.

  “Put it behind your ear, under your hair and against your skin.”

  He frowned like I’d told him to eat it, reluctantly picked it up and eyed it between his finger and thumb. “Where’s the power source?”

  “That’s you.”