by Loren Rhoads
Eilif, without being told, held the second glass up for Raena.
“Decades I have dreamed about you,” Thallian toasted. “In all the galaxy, I knew there was only one woman who was my equal. I knew one day you would find your way home to me.” He lifted his glass and drank deeply.
Eilif mimed holding the glass up for Raena to drink, but even if Raena had felt the desire to join Thallian, the glass remained just beyond her reach. She looked down at the woman who cringed before her. Eilif lifted her green eyes to meet Raena’s. A smile flickered across her lips.
Thallian’s glass dropped from his hand, shattering on the polished stone floor. He followed it to the floor and collapsed amidst the glass and spilled wine, the curse frozen on his lips.
“You can drink the poison if you wish to join him,” Eilif offered.
“Thank you, but no,” Raena said. “Is he dead?”
“Not yet,” Eilif said. “I’d like your help with that.”
“My pleasure,” Raena said. “Can you help me out of your dress?”
* * *
Thallian woke up as the last cuff snapped around his ankle. At least, it felt like he opened his eyes, but the blackness was absolute. Where was the emergency lighting? He strained to hear anything in the darkened sleep chamber. Nothing moved.
He tugged experimentally and felt metal bite his wrists. The bonds had almost no give. His limbs were stretched to their full extensions so that if he struggled, he would break his own skin. He thrashed anyway, until he smelled his blood on the air.
His head felt fuzzy. It was hard to think. How had his assailants gotten through the family’s security? Why, after they had him immobilized, had they abandoned him? In the total darkness, the room echoed as if empty.
Something cold struck his chest. Wetness soaked his clothing until it clung clammily against his skin. The liquid lashed out again, drenching him.
Fear threaded through him. “Eilif?” The hope in his voice embarrassed him.
“Yes, my lord. I’m here.”
“What’s happened?”
“I poisoned you,” Eilif said matter-of-factly, as if it was something she did every day.
That made no sense, so he chose to ignore it. “Where’s Raena?”
“I’m here, too,” an all-too-familiar voice replied. Raena Zacari struck a match. Twin flames sparkled in her black eyes. Despite the ruin of her hair, she hadn’t really changed, hadn’t aged a day. She was still twenty years old, too thin for her tiny frame, and dressed in a black catsuit of his wife’s.
A smile slipped across her face like a knife being eased from its sheath. Thallian felt his body respond to that smile. He shifted his hips to draw her attention.
“Goodbye, Jonan.” Raena flicked the burning match at him. It tumbled through the air, arcing slowly above his sodden clothing. The fumes ignited with a whump that crushed him down against the bed. A rush of intense heat stole the air from his lungs.
His women stood beside him and watched him burn. Raena’s face was impassive, but he barely recognized Eilif. Glee contorted her face.
In the fifteen years she had been his, Thallian watched the lines etch around her eyes, watched her body grow lean as it outlasted its youth. She was no longer the beautiful girl he’d taken for his own. Still, she was his. She was here. He loved her more in this moment than ever before.
Raena turned away to pour the accelerant around the room, leaving them together.
CHAPTER 18
Eilif walked Raena back to the hangar and helped get a hopper ready to fly. “I have the castle rigged to blow up,” Eilif told her calmly. “I’ll wait until I see you’re clear.”
Never in Raena’s life had she ever rescued anyone. Occasionally—occasionally enough to have been a fluke—she’d spared someone. Usually, as in Jain’s case, they found death soon enough without her help. Never, ever had she inconvenienced herself to save someone. This time she saw too much of herself in Eilif to let the woman choose death, even if that’s what Raena would have done in the same position.
“Come with me,” Raena said softly. “You don’t need to die here with him.”
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” Eilif answered, an aching, hollow statement of fact. “I don’t know where I came from. I don’t remember anything before Jonan married me. It’s like I woke up and was already a prisoner.”
Raena suspected Eilif was a clone, but of whom she couldn’t guess. She looked vaguely similar to Raena in build, though taller, and she had those electric green eyes. She was a substitute, a facsimile, but not a duplicate.
“The galaxy is a big place,” Raena said. “There are lots of holes in which to hide. Come with me and we’ll find you somewhere that’s safe.”
“I want to erase this place,” Eilif argued.
“I support that.” Raena smiled. “We can trip it as we clear the airlock.”
Eilif smiled back. “It would be nice to watch it explode.”
* * *
The hopper’s cockpit would be cramped for the two of them. At least Eilif didn’t bring anything with her, preferring as Raena did to travel with only the clothes on her back.
Raena tried to reach Mykah on her comm bracelet, but the dome, the water, or the distance into space prevented her from getting through. That added a challenge. She would have taken a larger ship, but she’d stressed to the pirates that they should run if anything larger than a hopper came off the planet. If she took the time, she could modify one of the other ships to chase Mykah’s transport, but both she and Eilif were ready to be on their way. Besides, Eilif never had any training that might have given her the skills to escape. She’d be no help as a copilot. Raena wasn’t sure she could fly a larger ship alone and one-handed.
Raena warmed up the hopper’s engines as she and Eilif settled into the pilot’s chair, un-selfconscious about the ways their bodies touched. They’d had so little control over who touched them, and how, for so long that they were able to compartmentalize the contact, lock it away.
Which was good. Raena needed her right hand free to fly, but her left shoulder throbbed where she’d taken the bullet. She rested gingerly back against Eilif and fastened the crash web over both of them. She’d just have to deal with the pain. She’d had worse.
Raena eased the throttle forward and awkwardly pulled in the landing gear. As they were nearing freedom, she mistimed the explosion. It triggered when she opened the airlock instead of after the hopper passed through. The blast thrust them forward, bashing the hopper hard against the half-open hatch. Something gave a sickening crunch.
Both women looked upward. Before they could worry about whether the canopy remained watertight, the current whirled them out of the dome and into the ocean.
The leviathans she’d watched before swooped down on them. Raena flew evasively, slamming the little ship from side to side, accelerating and braking, making the hopper jump.
Eilif’s head had slammed against Raena’s bullet wound. Raena hissed, but kept flying. Sword-blade teeth snapped too close all around them.
One of the monsters bit another by accident. Suddenly the churning water was veiled with blood as the creatures set upon each other. Raena saw her opening and gunned the hopper forward.
“Turn the running lights off,” Eilif advised. “They’ve learned to track the lights.”
Raena did so. The ocean ahead was illuminated by the glow of the castle burning behind them. The eerie blue flicker revealed the underwater topography ahead. Raena turned the hopper enough to clear a submarine mountain. That gave the women a better view of the fall of the house of Thallian.
Eilif’s demolition had split the dome and flooded the castle. The accelerant Raena had chosen continued to burn, even without oxygen. Every stone seemed afire. Wicked sinuous tongues of flame danced as tall as the mountains. The black shadows of the leviathans swooped amongst them, scrounging up meals.
“I’m sorry about your sons,” Raena said quietly.
“They weren
’t mine, of course,” Eilif answered, just as softly. “I mothered them, when they let me, but they were Thallians. Clones of Jonan. They had been created to die for him. They never stood a chance.”
Raena said quickly, “Jimi escaped. I told him how to adapt a hopper and he told me enough about his point of origin that I could bring Jain back home. Jimi’s already on his way to a new life.”
Eilif’s smile was watery, but grateful. Then she turned her face away to watch the castle collapse in on itself.
* * *
Blood trickled into Raena’s armpit, ticklish and annoying, where her stitches had torn open. With her left arm in a sling, she couldn’t do anything about it.
How much blood had she lost already? She wasn’t sure if the medical robot had topped her off with cloned blood or if anything else might be washing around in her system. Either way, her head felt woozy. She rushed to get them to the surface before she blacked out.
“See the bracelet on my wrist?” she asked, keeping her voice level. “It’s keyed to a channel on Jain’s transport. If you press the black button, it will connect you to the transport’s crew. Tell them Fiana needs help.”
“Who’s Fiana?”
“My code name.”
The proximity alarm shrieked and Raena slapped it off. A leviathan was on their tail. She leaned forward toward the controls, trying to coax more speed from the hopper’s little engines.
Eilif hissed as she saw the blood slicking the front of her flight suit now that Raena had moved away.
“We’re gonna make it,” Raena promised. “I didn’t survive this whole nightmare to be eaten by a fish.”
She spun the hopper, firing off the charge meant to thrust meteorites out of the way. The leviathan took it in the eye and turned tail, swimming for its life before its brothers scented blood.
* * *
The hopper reached the ocean’s surface without the speed it needed to leap into the air. It crashed back into the water. Eilif had a panicked moment of trying to figure out the releases for the crash web, but she got herself free at last and hit the right buttons to power down.
She could see land a couple hundred meters away. They could make it. She grasped Raena’s wrist, hit the black button on her comm bracelet, and relayed the message she’d been given.
“We’re on our way,” someone told her.
Raena was out completely. Eilif reached around her, gathering the emergency supplies. She took a very deep breath. Then she popped the hopper’s canopy. As water poured into the ship, Eilif pulled Raena free.
The ocean was icy in the planet’s perpetual winter, but Raena didn’t react. Eilif swam strongly for the shore, towing the smaller woman and the gear. For the first time, she was grateful that Jonan had insisted that she learn to swim.
Eilif hoped the gelid water would slow Raena’s blood loss, but hypothermia would soon be a greater concern. She had to get the shelter up before long.
She pushed herself to swim harder.
* * *
Eilif listened as a ship landed nearby. Every cell in her body wanted to run, slip through the back wall of the shelter, and vanish into the ashen drifts outside. But that was suicide. There was no longer anything to eat on the planet’s surface and no water she could drink. She refused to die now, after everything.
Besides, Raena needed her. Eilif curled close around the little woman, trying to keep her warm despite their sodden clothes. Raena had to live. Who else could protect her now?
“Raena?” a man called. His wasn’t a voice Eilif recognized. She shivered. She’d never met a stranger, an off-worlder, before.
“She’s here,” Eilif called back. “She’s been shot.”
The shelter door slammed open. Three figures stood there, training all manner of mismatched weaponry on her. Behind a young man with a crazy bush of beard stood a hulking figure covered in long lavender-blue fur and a slim creature that made Eilif think of a squid. Her head swam at the sight of them—aliens!—but she blinked hard and forced herself to say calmly, “Thank you for coming for us.”
The man stepped forward, sheathing his gun, and peeled back the crinkly thermal blanket to look at the mess of blood saturating Raena’s clothes.
“Who are you?” the blue girl demanded.
“I was a slave,” Eilif said, still clutching Raena. “She rescued me.”
“Looks like you’re returning the favor,” the man said. He was gentle as he pulled her away and handed her toward the tentacled creature. Eilif let herself be directed, watching as he picked Raena up in his arms. “Let’s get her onto the transport.”
“Are they coming after you?” the blue girl wanted to know.
Eilif didn’t have to ask who “they” were. “They’re all dead,” she assured her.
Belatedly, now that escape was so close, triumph surged through her. She felt as if she’d never smiled before in her life.
Eilif followed the man and the aliens onto Revan’s stolen transport. She didn’t even feel the cold of the planet she was leaving behind.
* * *
Mykah had more experience leaking things to the media, so Raena asked him to arrange the rescue of the last survivors of the Arbiter from the surface of the Thallian homeworld.
She watched the news coverage from the darkness of her cabin aboard Mykah’s transport, now renamed Veracity. Overall, the Arbiter’s men seemed grateful to be retrieved from their long exile. Some of them even looked forward to standing trial, so they could spill the details of the Thallians’ responsibility for the Templar genocide.
Mykah was thrilled at being allowed to break the story.
Raena sipped some kind of herbal tea that Haoun had brewed for her, something supposed to aid her body to heal. Her shoulder was still stiff, but Eilif seemed to have done a masterful job of stitching it up. The weakness from the blood loss seemed slower to dissipate. It seemed as if the memory of what had almost happened to her did not want to leave her flesh.
Still, dead was dead. Raena had stayed until the fire consumed the contents of Jonan’s room. Then, wearing a borrowed fire suit, she’d waded into the inferno and smashed what remained of his skeleton to splinters. She wanted to see for herself that there was nothing left to clone. The last agent of the Empire—the last scion of the Thallians—had been erased.
She hoped that somewhere safe, Jimi—or whatever he had chosen to rename himself—was watching the news that the last of the Thallian murderers had been assassinated and their secret base swallowed by the ocean. She pictured the boy at work in some shipyard, applying his uncle’s elegant solutions to aging spacecraft. She hoped he would find peace.
Raena felt entirely exhausted, but sleep would not come. Whenever she closed her eyes, she kept seeing Thallian’s funeral pyre. She wasn’t sure why Jonan’s death stayed with her more than any of the others. She’d loved him less than Jain. Still, the expression on Jonan’s face, as the flames caught his clothing and started to burn him, made her shiver. She’d expected to see hatred when it finally penetrated his madness that she refused to be his. Or perhaps to see some kind of acknowledgement of the pain, some kind of struggle against his fate.
What she never thought she’d see was the ecstasy he felt. Jonan not only surrendered to the pain, he embraced it. He craved more. He wanted to be devoured.
That level of masochism shocked her as deeply as anything Thallian had ever done in life.
Then, in his final moments, to see him turn to Eilif: knowing she had betrayed him in retaliation for all he’d made her suffer; knowing that in the end, she chose freedom rather than joining him in death. Raena wondered if Jonan had ever loved his wife as much as he did at the end. Only her final act made clear to him what had been true all along. She hated him as thoroughly as Raena had herself.
Raena’s thoughts spiraled to Gavin and Ariel, to the love they proclaimed for her that she could not return. Both of them loved the person she had been before the tomb, not the one she was now or wanted to become. She
could envision no future with either of them that she would call freedom. She didn’t want to be a possession or an adornment, another in a string of wives, or a companion and bodyguard. She didn’t want to be the mother, even the co-mother, of anyone’s children. She wanted the ability to come and go as she liked, something she had never yet experienced in her life.
Even so, she envied the easy camaraderie between Mykah’s crew. Celebration was just beyond the door of her cabin, but Raena could not bring herself to join it. She was just too lonely.
So she poked around the interweb, struggling to find distraction. Eventually she washed up on the Shaad family channel. Ariel’s message to her still waited to be picked up. Her defenses were low, Raena admitted. It was time to see what Ariel had to say.
Lean and full of character from all the years that Raena had not known her, her sister’s face filled the screen. “Hey,” Ariel said by way of greeting. “If you view this, I will take it as confirmation that you killed that bastard, that you survived and escaped him again. You don’t need to respond if you don’t want to. Of course, I’d love to hear from you, but . . . I understand. Or I think I do. You need your own life, not the past you’d be living with me or Gavin. Your body’s only twenty, Raena. You have decades ahead of you. You need to find your own way. And I promise I will not hunt for you again.” Ariel smiled, bitterly amused. “I can’t make the same assurances about Gavin.”
An encrypted string appeared at the bottom of the picture. Ariel explained, “I’ve set aside a fund for you. Use it to start your new life. Take it in a lump, move it somewhere safe, and don’t worry about paying it back. Call it my way of making restitution for the years you spent as my family’s slave.”
Ariel smiled again and Raena almost felt as if their eyes met. “I love you, Raena. I hope you find happiness. The galaxy owes you.”
Raena reached out to touch her sister’s face, but her fingers found only the smooth surface of the computer screen.
Nodding to herself, she leaned toward the computer screen to record her reply. She knew she looked like hell, but that didn’t matter. “Hey, Ari,” she said hoarsely. “Thanks for the money. I’m gonna do what you said and start a new life. But I need one last favor. Thallian’s wife helped me escape. Her name is Eilif. She’s a clone, although I don’t think she knows it. Looks to me like they tried to mature her too fast and something went wrong in the process. I don’t know if she has long to live. She doesn’t remember anything except being Jonan’s slave.”
