by Loren Rhoads
Still, bankrupting himself would have been meaningful if he’d solved Raena’s disappearance. He’d tracked her, in the years since the War. The decades-old trail, while intermittent and icy cold, eventually led to the Templar tombs. The most he’d really expected to find was a corpse he could lay to rest somewhere less desolate. Raena deserved that. And Sloane anticipated that seeing her dead would break the chokehold her ghost had on him.
He punched some numbers into the computer and scowled at the calculations. A few more keystrokes and he had readied a series of bank transfers. He’d take a look at this impostor, cut his losses, and dismantle the whole fiasco. If the men had figured out whom he was looking for and had gone so far as to set him up, it was time to dump them. And probably time to realize his obsession couldn’t be trusted to anyone else. He would have to find her alone.
* * *
The muscle never fit the décor, Kavanaugh thought. This time their props were carefully chosen: the thermal blanket draped over a bulging forearm to conceal an automatic, the medical box undoubtedly packed with sleep grenades. Sloane’s bodyguards looked pricey, professional, and out of place in the dusty “archaeological” encampment.
Kavanaugh watched Raena clock them as they entered the bunker. The goons scrutinized her, too. Her face gave nothing away, but between her small stature and the gray in her pallor, she could not have looked less threatening. Kavanaugh remembered the bounty hunter who’d been holding her the last time he’d rescued her, back when they were kids. She hit the man once, hard enough to shatter his skull. Kavanaugh had few illusions about what Raena could do when pushed.
At least the muscle seemed well-trained. They’d wait for her to make the first move, before they took her down. Kavanaugh wondered if they’d heard about her single-handedly disarming his whole team. He hadn’t reported it, but someone else might have.
Raena stood to follow her escort. The bodyguards fell into step, one in front of her and one behind, spacing themselves to present two targets. The economy of their movements said more than the size of their shoulders. Disarmament wouldn’t slow them down. They wouldn’t be bullied into dropping their weapons. These two she would have to kill. Kavanaugh guessed she would kill the one behind them first, then take the sleep grenades from the other. He’d have to be careful not to get caught in the crossfire.
Instead of attacking the bodyguards and stealing the shuttle, as Kavanaugh fully expected, Raena leaned against him as they left the bunker. The incessant wind whipped her tangled hair into Kavanaugh’s face. In apology, she slipped her small hand into his as they crossed a moment of wasteland to Sloane’s sleek yacht. A rush of affection flooded him, followed by pity. Had Raena lived her whole life in the wrong place at the wrong time?
* * *
Every morning, Eilif got up, saw that Jonan’s food was safe for him to eat, got the boys up and dressed, checked their food, and then went down to swim.
Mostly, she went by herself. No one wanted to join her in the gelid water very often. She actually treasured her time alone. It was the best part of her day: when no one shouted at her, no one struck her, and she didn’t have to taste anyone else’s favorite food to check it for poison.
The water flowed in from the ocean outside the city. Its current was fast as it flooded into the city’s circulation system. The concrete basin hadn’t been meant for a swimming pool, but Jonan insisted that Eilif exercise every morning in order to keep herself strong.
She could have done fight training with the boys—or on her own—but Jonan preferred it if she couldn’t fight back. So Eilif swam every day and watched the fight practices, when she thought she’d be unnoticed.
Eilif rounded the catchment basin to the outer wall and dove into the flow. For a second, as always, the cold stole her breath. She felt the current wash her toward the culvert into the city. If she had the luxury of drowning, she might have been tempted. Being shredded through the grill was less appealing.
She gulped in a breath and forced her legs to kick.
* * *
While Sloane daydreamed, time slipped. Before he was prepared, Zilla commed him again. “They’re here.”
“Send them in.”
The new girl followed Kavanaugh through the office door. She wore an old black jumpsuit, practically threadbare with age. The exhaustion in her expression pinched the beauty from her face. Black hair hung in dusty tangles past her knees, echoing the cape she used to wear. The hair looked real, not like extensions, and unloved, as though she endured it rather than cherishing it.
Beyond those superficial differences, the likeness to the girl in his memory was uncanny. Sloane shut down the balance sheet and rubbed his face. This girl’s dark skin looked as hard and opaque as stone, with an underlying silvery tone that was completely unnatural. Her eyes remained as black as he remembered, but the sharpness of her gaze was blunted. He remembered the fierce girl, fast as lightning and twice as lethal, that he had tried to rescue so many years ago. She hadn’t aged a day; yet, looking into her eyes, he saw that the years had passed for her, too. Excruciatingly so.
The half-smile he remembered, the smile that had disturbed his sleep a thousand times, the faint scimitar curve of her sweet soft mouth, warmed her eyes as she acknowledged his scrutiny. “I knew you’d come someday, Gavin.”
He had far too many questions, so many things he wanted to tell her . . . He didn’t know where to start.
She preempted him. “Could I have some water?”
Laughter burst out of Sloane’s chest, loosening the tension of too many hours of work, too many hours of worry. “If you’re really Raena Zacari,” he promised, “you can have a feast.”
“Just a drink of water, for now.”
Sloane got up from behind his desk to open the refrigeration unit in the wall. As soon as his back had turned, doubts overwhelmed him. It couldn’t be Raena. In the unlikely event she had survived the War’s end, she would have aged. Time was inescapable. This girl had to be an impostor.
At least her story might be amusing. He broke the seal on a bottle of water. “Where have you been all this time?”
“In that tomb, waiting for someone to let me out.”
“It’s been, what?” Sloane asked casually as he poured her a tall glass of water. “Twenty years? What’d you do for entertainment?”
“The claustrophobia burned itself out after a while. Thank the Stars for that. After that, I had my memories for company.”
She appeared at his side. Her hand brushed his on the glass. Startled, Gavin sloshed water onto the chrome bar and the fur carpet below. She caught the half-empty glass and drained it, eyes closed, savoring the feel of the water across her tongue.
“You’re first-class,” Sloane snapped, taking the glass away. “Who put you up to this? One of my competitors? One of my ex-wives? Kavanaugh? Ariel?”
The shadow of pain passed over the girl’s face, wrinkling her perfect, unlined forehead. Raena had been twenty when the galaxy swallowed her. This girl, whoever she was, could scarcely be more than that.
She looked up at him. “I relived the memory of our first kiss a million times,” she said. “It helped me to stay sane. You hauled me into your lap in that sleazy bar on Nizarrh. You crushed me in your arms. You kissed me like you’d known me forever, Gavin. You fixed something in me that was broken.”
She dropped her gaze, dismissing him. “Your life has gone on.” She waved at his ludicrously spacious office, implying the entire base around them, the encampment below. “How could I have expected you to recognize me?”
Some nobility kept her shoulders square as she turned back toward Kavanaugh and Zilla. Zilla’s hand was on her gun, just as Sloane would have ordered it to be.
Kavanaugh, though, stared at the waif with the long black hair, his hand half-extended toward her. Something in Kavanaugh’s guileless brown eyes surprised Sloane. Kavanaugh accepted the girl’s impossible story. His certainty was more persuasive than anything the girl might have s
aid.
If you let her go this time, Sloane thought, you won’t find her again.
It’s not her, he told himself. It can’t be. Raena must be dead. And Kavanaugh had always been a credulous kid.
Even so, Sloane pursued her. Years of dust dimmed the black shimmer of her hair. When he reached for her, her arm felt warm and solid beneath his fingers, a young woman’s muscles hard beneath the tattered black jumpsuit.
She turned back toward him. Her face tilted up, lips parted as if she wanted to lean toward him, kiss him once before she vanished forever.
Sloane engulfed her in an embrace.
She smelled like the passage of time, like a body grown cold in the grave. She was real, solid and strong, warm and alive. Sloane wanted desperately to kiss her, but their whole glorious romance had existed in his imagination for so long, he wasn’t sure how to initiate the real thing.
Raena twisted in his arms until she could look up at him. With a smile, she rose up on tiptoe. Sloane found himself bending down. Their lips met so softly Sloane thought he’d imagined it.
Then she pressed against him. She was shorter than he remembered. He lifted her feet from the floor without really intending to. Her small hands held the back of his neck like a vise. He felt her smile against his lips.
Eventually they separated a fraction, enough to look wonderingly at each other. Raena made a long exhalation that might have been a sigh. She stroked his beard with the palm of her hand, traced the lines that creased his face, pushed a lock of dirty blond hair back toward his bald spot. “I’ve lost so many years.”
Sloane gazed at her. Tears sparkled in her eyes. The crystalline shimmer against the black depths of her eyes was possibly the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, in a lifetime of coveting beautiful things. How could he have ever doubted this was Raena herself? Then he remembered to put his thoughts into words: “I can’t believe I’ve found you again.”
“Let’s go,” Zilla said, herding Kavanaugh out of the room.
“I knew you’d come,” Raena repeated. “I didn’t know it would be so long.” Then she forced a smile and asked, “Could I have a little more water?”
Sloane picked up the bottle, tilted it against her glass. “I am serious about the feast,” he said. “Not on this base, of course. What would you like to eat? Anything in the galaxy . . .”
“You know what I’d like?” Raena asked. Sloane found himself eager to guess, but she surprised him by saying, “A bath. A bubble bath. I don’t suppose your base has a tub.”
Sloane frowned. “A shower won’t do?”
“I can wait ’til we make planetfall.”
The thought that she would have to wait for anything was intolerable. Sloane mentally ran through the base’s stock, trying to think what might be large enough to use as a bathtub. He remembered an old rocket casing. With some spot-welding, it should be watertight. If they cycled the coolant to the reactors and rationed washing up, there should be enough water for a satisfactory soak. He commed Kavanaugh and got him sealing up the tub.
“Tell me everything that happened since I saw the soldiers overwhelm you,” Sloane demanded.
“Ancient history,” Raena said dismissively. “I’m not interested in the past anymore. You can’t imagine how many times I relived it, just to have something to think about.”
Another twinge of doubt stung Sloane. Why would she duck the question? He went at it from a different direction. “Who locked you in the tomb?”
“Marchan. He did it on the Emperor’s orders, to spite Thallian. I think it was a test of Thallian’s loyalty, to see if he’d come rescue me. Of course, I always knew where Thallian’s loyalties lay. He left me to rot.”
She circled the desk and sank into one of the leather chairs facing it. She looked so very tired, as if drawing each breath drained her strength. Sloane wondered why she wasn’t more ecstatic at her release.
“He’ll come after me, you know.”
Sloane shook his head, trying to follow her train of thought. “Who? Marchan is dead.”
“Thallian.”
The name drove a cold shudder up Sloane’s spine. He counted himself lucky that he’d never met Raena’s former boss, but over the years, he’d done enough reading to loathe the man. Sloane forced a jovial tone and said, “Thallian must be dead now, too. You don’t know how it was. After the War was finally over, there were reprisals, tribunals . . . It seemed like the accusations would never end. If anyone deserved to be caught up in all that, it was Thallian.”
“Jonan would have hidden out somewhere. Too many people were loyal to him to let him be captured. He’s out there. He’ll come for me.”
Sloane didn’t have any answer for that. On the face of it, it sounded like paranoia. But Raena sounded so resigned in the face of her certainty that he couldn’t come up with any plausible denials. No wonder she wasn’t thrilled about being out in the galaxy once more, if she thought she’d have to face Thallian again.
If there were any sort of justice in the galaxy—which Sloane seriously doubted—he’d get a clear shot at Thallian’s head before the monster laid another hand on Raena.
Before Sloane could promise that, Kavanaugh commed them to say, “Tub’s ready, boss.”
* * *
Jonan Thallian walked into the center of the gym and closed his eyes, awaiting the familiar sensation as the anti-grav switched on. He felt sudden buoyancy in his chest and jumped lightly. The hop propelled him upward faster than was possible within the constraints of quotidian planet-bound life. Thallian had spent the first half of his life aboard starships, playing assassination politics. He’d fought in Zero G more than once.
As he neared the ceiling, he turned a lazy flip and pushed off hard, diving fast back toward the floor.
Eight of his sons entered the room. Most of them quickly reacted to their father’s trajectory, leaping out of his path to handholds on the walls. The last boy should have entered at a run, but the older boys had dawdled and obstructed his view of the playing field.
Thallian barreled into Jimi at full speed, knocking him off his feet and into the doorframe. Something crunched. The boy collapsed without another sound.
Two of his brothers leapt down belatedly to aid him. Thallian pushed off the doorframe at a steep angle that catapulted him beyond the reach of the metal staves they carried.
The point of the game, as always, was teamwork. The game only ended in two ways: Thallian disabled all of the boys and walked alone to the showers, or they devised a group strategy and overcame him. Thallian hadn’t lost yet, but he foresaw a day in which that might be possible. In that eventuality, he trusted that their sense of filial duty would keep them from killing him. Still, if ever he fell to a mob of teenage boys, he deserved whatever they dished out.
All the same, the boys wouldn’t win today, without Jain here to play. He wasn’t the most agile or the most cunning of Thallian’s sons, but he was the most brutal. All the other boys feared the punishment they’d receive each time Thallian declared the game. Jain alone bore his scars with pride.
The eldest twins—Jozz and Jamian—launched themselves toward their father. Each held the end of his brother’s staff so that the metal formed a barrier between the boys. Thallian flashed them a grin as he bounded upward. Two of the other boys—Jaden and Jarad—quickly moved in to block that space by holding their staves between them.
It was too late to change trajectory. Thallian turned his body so that he could land his feet on the staves and bounce away. The change of position showed him that the remaining boys had moved to box him in. “Good!” he cheered.
Before his feet touched Jaden’s staff, the boy spun it upward out of his brother’s hand. If he’d been an instant faster, it would have landed hard on Thallian’s shin. Instead, the older man caught it between his knees and held fast. He hurled himself into a somersault, pulling the boy out of position. Jaden lost his grip and spun into his brothers’ staves.
Now that he had a weapon
, Thallian made short work of the boys. It was tempting to take his anger out on them and show them the sort of damage a quarterstaff could do in determined hands, but Thallian refrained from blows to the head when he could, striking instead at ribs and arms, breaking bones that could be quickly mended.
The children took their punishment stoically. The only sounds to interrupt the silence were labored breathing, the crack of bone, and the squeak of rubber shoes on the gym walls as the battle wound to its foregone conclusion.
Thallian piled the staves on the floor as he collected each one. After he stacked the last one carefully, so the pile wouldn’t shift in Zero G, he turned to regard the wounded children clinging to handholds around the room. He bowed to them, then touched the control clipped to his belt to cut the anti-grav. He was proud when no one groaned as gravity dragged on his wounded limbs.
As always, Thallian walked alone to the showers.
Eilif and Dr. Poe slid into the gym behind him to tend the wounded.
CHAPTER 3
While Sloane fussed over the temperature of the water, Raena peeled out of her jumpsuit. As he turned, she balled up the tattered fabric and pitched it toward the incinerator. It fell short. The black jumpsuit lay on the deck in a spill of ragged shadow.
She’d been nude beneath the garment. Her small breasts probably didn’t need much restraint. At the junction above her thighs, the hair was thick and black. Sloane savored his first glimpse of her body, ending his appraisal when he reached Raena’s eyes. Did he read condescension there?
Raena defused the moment by asking, “Help me with my boots?”
Sloane didn’t question the eagerness with which he knelt at her feet. His knees protested loudly. His mouth unaccountably went dry.
Raena leaned back against the lockers, gripped an edge with her bony fingers, and lifted her foot into his lap.
How long had she been wearing these boots? How long had it been since she’d washed her feet? Sloane had a moment of dread, then had to laugh at himself. Her body didn’t smell, except of dust and darkness.
