by Loren Rhoads
He wondered how she liked her freedom now. It pained him physically that he hadn’t glimpsed her since she’d left the tomb. The engineer’s description of her had been garbled by pain or fear. He’d said she disabled his whole crew, killing none of them. That was so unlike the girl Thallian had trained that it had to be a lie. Or else Raena was so debilitated by her captivity that she was no longer a threat or much of a challenge. Thallian prayed that wasn’t true.
The man Lim had said that her hair was still black, still long. He remembered her high-heeled boots. In the darkness of the tomb and with the speed of her attack, he claimed not to have gotten a very good look at the rest of her. Still, he swore he recognized her wanted poster. Of course, a man would agree to just about anything as a slow-burn laser removed his fingers.
Thallian ached to have something to do. All he needed was a direction and he’d be off after her. Failing that, he’d be happy to administer a good, well-deserved beating to someone. Unfortunately, all of the family was faithfully occupied with tasks he’d assigned. The servants toiled invisibly behind the family’s ranks, out of Thallian’s reach. In a room full of boys hunched over galactic news feeds, he felt cut off, alone.
Thallian found himself staring at his own reflection in a sleeping screen. What would she see when he found her again? Would she be disappointed by the silver in his beard, the crow’s-feet around his eyes? He was still in fighting trim. He yearned to prove it to her.
* * *
Mykah was amazed by how well the human girl kept up. The lap through the casino to pick up players was the easy part, merely a matter of staying out of the grasp of the casino security goons. The next challenge was to gain some height by scrambling up the outside of the crumbling Templar edifices, then leaping across to the balconies of the newer chromed glass monstrosities that had sprouted like fungi on the corpse of the old city.
Since the new girl didn’t know the game’s destination, she couldn’t pass Mykah up and get ahead. Instead, she shadowed him silently, never even seeming to breathe hard, which her reflective catsuit surely would have betrayed. Every time he glanced over his shoulder, she was there. Grinning.
Mykah wriggled through the open transom window on the thirty-second floor of the Vierdlak Tower. The girl jumped in after him, feet first. She landed in a crouch and glanced efficiently around the office before she stood. He realized that the heels on her boots were so high that she had been effectively doing everything on tiptoe.
“What are we here for?” she asked.
“They’re playing a scavenger hunt out there with the jetpacks. We’re going to collect some of the prizes they’re after.”
“And disrupt the game?”
“And fuck its corporate sponsors,” he answered. “The game itself means nothing.”
Mykah smiled as Coni, his blue-furred Haru girlfriend, crawled through the transom and dropped to the floor.
“What’s your name?” Mykah asked the girl, distracting her as Coni opened the safe.
“Raena,” she said. “What’s yours?”
He told her.
“Are you really an evil genius who poses as a waiter?” Raena asked.
Coni laughed behind him.
Flustered, Mykah said, “What about you? Looked like you were flirting with your mom this morning over breakfast.”
Raena laughed, too. “That’s my girlfriend.”
“Got it,” Coni warbled, handing over a packet wrapped in garish red liquid crystal paper. Mykah tucked it into the rucksack on his back.
“What’s next?” Raena asked.
“Can you fly?” Coni chirped. She led the way through the office door, vaulted across the tops of a warren of cubicles, and leaped into a vacant conference room with a view of the desert beyond the city. She and Mykah pulled down the curtains and quickly attached them to struts leaning in the corner of the room.
“Zel dropped out when we made the last jump between the casinos. There’s a pair of wings for her,” Coni observed, nodding toward Raena, “but she doesn’t have a harness.”
Mykah said, “She’s little enough. We can double up on my wings.”
“That’s okay,” Raena promised, which Mykah thought was sweet. No one used the old-time slang any more. “I can hold the struts myself.”
“That wind is going to rip them right out of your hands.”
She grinned. “Wouldn’t be any fun if it wasn’t any challenge.”
Mykah nodded, going for the silent, serious type. He could always catch her when she started to fall. Once he had his own wings sorted out, he helped Coni open the window. Coni paused on the ledge, then jumped, and flipped out her wings to slow her descent. Raena watched how she did it and stepped to the edge, looking out rather than down. She raised the wings, braced the ends of the struts crosswise against her chest where the wind would force them back into her rather that bending them out behind her back. She’d have a bruise in the morning for real.
She looked back over her shoulder. “See you in hell.”
Then she was gone. Mykah hopped onto the edge, flung his wings out, and prepared to dive after her. Instead, she’d caught an updraft and soared past him. The wind ripped the laughter from her lips but not from her eyes.
* * *
Raena had left the game flyer behind on the little round bar table. The diffraction-printed flyer didn’t give any details about the game itself, just posed a series of questions: Would you like to fly? Are you able keep up? Who can climb the highest and fall the fastest?
The whole concept sounded utterly terrifying to Ariel. She wondered if the darkness in her tomb had burned Raena’s fears away. Maybe the solitude honed her somehow, too. She seemed fixated on getting herself strong enough and fast enough to take Thallian down.
Ariel had no doubt that Thallian would come after Raena. Ariel had always known men like him, petty aristos who counted their lovers as possessions and couldn’t countenance rejection. Thallian would never, ever admit Raena did not belong to him. He’d keep coming after her until one of them killed the other.
Ariel remembered her only encounter with her sister’s former commander. Ariel had been smuggling for Coalition Supply, delivering guns to Sune as the human population prepared to secede from the Empire. She didn’t know the Coalition base had fallen, brought down by Thallian’s “diplomacy,” until she and the supply convoy arrived there.
Thallian’s warship made short work of the unprepared convoy. The shockwave as the cargo ship exploded pitched Ariel against her controls. Fighting for consciousness, she magnetized her onboard computers as the Arbiter reeled her in. She never had a chance to escape. In the tractor beam, she couldn’t even eject.
After their escape, Raena said Ariel could have popped the fighter’s canopy and sucked vacuum. Race traitors had escaped Thallian that way before. To be honest, suicide hadn’t occurred to Ariel.
Now that she understood what went on in Thallian’s detention, she wouldn’t make that mistake again.
She sipped her drink and remembered every second of her stint in the holding cell on Thallian’s ship. The Arbiter it had been called, the bastard’s sick joke. Thallian’s idea of arbitration was to take everyone hostage, then torture them until they broke and told him what he expected to hear. If they died in custody? Unfortunate collateral damage.
When he strode into her cell, it felt like sand filled her lungs. She couldn’t get any air.
“You are a race traitor and therefore sentenced to death,” Thallian told her. “Since the eradication of the Sune base, you have no one useful left to betray. I am here to discover if you have any other uses.”
Gasping for her life, Ariel toppled off the cell’s bench and fell to the floor, fingers clawing uselessly at her throat.
Thallian kicked her hard in the ribs, knocking her onto her back. Coronas rayed around the too-bright lights as her consciousness flickered.
Thallian knelt beside her to unbutton her blouse. He stabbed a needle as long as his hand into her chest.
The respite was instantaneous. Ariel coughed and sputtered, choking on the air that rushed to fill her shriveled lungs. Thallian caressed her breast as the drug paralyzed her limbs. All the while, his gray eyes locked on Ariel’s. When he smiled, he seemed to have too many teeth.
He lifted back her onto the cell’s utilitarian bench. Ariel was so confused by being rescued from the brink of death that she didn’t immediately register that he had continued to undress her until nothing impeded his pleasure. Ariel couldn’t even close her eyes to the shame.
When he’d finished—and he used every trick he could to prolong her degradation—Ariel realized that Raena had come into her cell at some point. Thallian watched as recognition passed between them.
Expressionless again, Raena took Ariel’s limp arm, turned it over, and gave her a second shot. Despite the hypersensitivity of her abraded flesh, Ariel didn’t feel the needle go in. Then tears flooded Ariel’s eyes, blurring her vision and spilling heedlessly into her hair.
“That will be all,” Thallian said.
Ariel’s hopes raised a fraction, but Raena simply left the cell. Her sister had been dismissed. She’d left Ariel on her own with the madman.
“Now,” Thallian purred, “tell me how you know my aide.” And Ariel, scared and aching, ashamed and desperate that he’d leave her alone, furious to have been abandoned by Raena, told him everything. More than Gavin would ever know.
Shaking the memories away, Ariel took a trembling sip of her xyshin. The liqueur was too sweet for her taste, the sort of thing teenaged Raena had adored. So many contradictions in her little sister twenty years later, like the joy she took in the mirrored catsuit, reflecting the world back upon itself and making herself invisible while burning like magnesium. Ariel couldn’t reconcile that with the little teenager who always dressed in black, trying to erase herself, sink into the shadows, and never be seen again. If it hadn’t been for Ariel, twenty years ago, Raena might have succeeded. The Empire would have worked the trick that Raena could not.
That Raena had forgiven her after the depths of Ariel’s betrayal meant more than life itself. That Raena would arrange another prisoner’s death, doctoring the records to make it appear that Ariel died in custody: that would have been harder to stomach if Ariel hadn’t been so relieved to be rescued. Raena stole her a ship, got her the clearance codes, and then refused to come along. She intended to stay behind to cover Ariel’s escape, as if anything could be hidden from Thallian. So Ariel bashed her sister on the head with a scanner case and took her hostage.
As soon as he knew they were gone, Thallian charged Raena with treason and put a bounty on her. He wanted her back, no expense spared.
That such a beast still breathed was blasphemous. Never in a million years would Ariel have asked Raena to face him again. And yet, what choice did she have?
Raena left the flyer behind as a warning. The time was coming. She would leave them soon.
If only, Ariel prayed, I could die before then. I cannot watch this happen. I cannot wait to hear if she survives him a third time. I cannot stand the suspense.
A reptilian figure slipped into the video lounge, his back to her, and quickly transacted some business. Ariel caught a whiff of something familiar. Before he could dodge away, she asked in a low voice, “Can I buy you a drink, friend? You have something there that interests me.”
CHAPTER 9
Revan thought Jain would never settle down and go to sleep. The initial execution had worn him out, but now that its details dominated the galactic news, the boy was too excited to wind down.
Revan remembered back when Jonan had become galactic news. That had been the start of the bad times, before the Thallians lost nearly everything. Once they’d had a beautiful palazzo on the shores of the Shining Lake. The family had filled the rooms with music and science. There had been seventy of them, brothers and cousins and uncles. Then Jonan’s part in the dissemination of the Templar plague came out, followed by the revelation of the family’s part in replicating the disease: in well-rewarded service to the Empire, of course. The family had been reviled.
Disgraced, hunted, and eventually betrayed from within, only Jonan, Revan, Aten, and Merin remained. Four left of seventy, nine boys, and Dr. Poe working alone to make more.
Revan sat on his bunk, listening to Jain working out on the other side of the thin bulkhead.
In another world, Jain might have been Revan’s own son. Or if Revan had been born into another family, on another world . . . which of course never could have happened. Revan was a product of cloning, just as Jain was. On another world, neither of them would ever have been cloned. They never would have been born.
He rubbed his eyes, aching for things that were gone, things he could never have. He wished he could sleep.
Eilif was a blessing, a spot of brightness in their exile. Of all the things he’d never possess, Revan coveted her the most. He knew he would never have the nerve to tell her of his feelings. He knew too well what Jonan would do to both of them—Eilif first—if he found out.
Still, it wasn’t fair that Jonan would cast aside such a wife for this aide of his, crazy and dangerous though she might be. If it ever came within his power, Revan would help Eilif find her way to a better life.
The thought itself was so painful that Revan fastened the alligator clip to his other nipple and flipped the switch to the generator’s timer.
* * *
Kai City turned out to be larger than Sloane realized, full of too many dark nooks that a pair of amorous “sisters” might crawl off into after they’d been expelled from their bed. Sloane forced himself to stay focused and avoid the temptations of this planet’s version of Patpong Road, even though the touts promised shows that would grow hair on his palms or turn him orange.
As he searched, he decided not to pass along Kavanaugh’s message. If the girls didn’t know Thallian was looking for them, Sloane would have more room to maneuver. Besides, Ariel’s choice of Kai was inspired. Thallian wanted Raena alive and as unharmed as possible. Without access to energy or projectile weapons, Thallian’s people would have to come after her in person. It would be a whole lot easier for Sloane and the girls to fight off what they could see.
Nearing the end of his patience for the search, he wished they’d all decided to wear communicators when they’d been together in the hotel room. Just before dawn, he finally found Ariel in the video lounge of the Shiapan casino. She was rolling her own herbs, a dish of crushed-out butts before her. Raena was probably off powdering her nose.
Before he slid into the chair opposite, he cornered the waitress and ordered another round. Best to come bearing gifts.
“New dress?” he asked.
Ariel looked up at him blearily as she accepted the drink. “Are we back on civil terms?”
He nodded. “Would another apology do anything but annoy you?”
She sparked the spliff, considered his question, and shrugged, blowing smoke away from him. “I can’t remember ever hearing an apology. So if you want me to leave, I’m just about done with this planet.”
“I don’t want you to go,” Sloane said quickly. He was relieved to discover he couldn’t send her off alone to face the kind of death that took Lim.
His words warmed the Ice Queen façade and won him a smile. “Yeah, it’s a new dress,” Ariel answered finally. “I like the way it feels when I walk. The slit would look better with a P368 on a thigh holster though.”
“What wouldn’t?” Sloane agreed amiably. He looked around the video lounge, trying to calculate the direction of the restroom. How long would Raena be?
Ariel was sobering up now that she had the spliff mostly burned down. “She’s not here,” she said, hurt in a way that choked her. “She took off with a kid about half my age hours ago. I’ve seen them on the video disrupting the jetpack race, but even that’s been a while.”
“She’s what?”
“She’s gone. She’s training. She’s finding the physica
l challenges that we haven’t been giving her and she’s testing her strength.” Ariel crushed out the butt and began rolling another smoke.
“And you just let her go?” Sloane asked, trying to make sense of it.
“Raena’s not going to leave you tonight,” Ariel said, like he was being stupid. “This thing tonight is just a game to her. She wants to see if she’s ready.”
Sloane shook his head, rejecting the idea. It was time to enlist Ariel in the plan he’d formulated as he’d searched for them. “I need your help,” he confided. “I want to hear Raena moan.”
Ariel gazed at him, eyebrows raised.
Sloane decided to clarify. “I want to drive her wild. I want her to lose all control. Apparently, I can’t do it without your help.”
Ariel laughed at him, then laughed harder at his expression. When she finally caught her breath, she pointed out, “Raena could very easily kill us, if she loses control. She’s stronger than both of us put together.”
Sloane crossed his arms on his chest. “Aren’t you willing to dare it?”
“It’s never bothered me,” she said. “Raena’s always been like that.”
The words slipped out before Sloane thought to censor them.“Bet she wasn’t with Thallian.”
Ariel scowled. “You’re an idiot, Gavin. I bet she was exactly as silent with him. I bet it drove him just as crazy as it does you. I’d bet that’s why she’s so badly scarred. I think he couldn’t stand that she could exhaust him and not make a sound, so he beat her bloody hoping to get a response. If you want to go that far, don’t ask for my help.”
“I’m not talking about hurting her!” Sloane snarled.
“No,” Ariel said, her voice low as a threat, “you’re talking about making her do something she doesn’t want to do. If Thallian couldn’t make her lose her self-control . . . But that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? You think if you love her long enough and hard enough, if you break her down, she’ll stay.”
Sloane glared back at her. “How can you possibly be jealous of Raena?”
“How can you possibly be jealous of Thallian?” Ariel shot back. “Raena cannot love you any differently than she does. Isn’t it enough?”
