by Kris Delake
Chapter 49
The man shadowed them all the way to Prospera. But when they got on the transport that would take them to the Guild, he was nowhere in sight.
Rikki almost missed him. She had gotten used to his glowering presence.
But she had more to focus on now that they were getting close to the Guild. Misha was getting nervous. She couldn’t tell if he was having second thoughts.
Misha had taken her to the transport station on Prospera, then told her she would have to follow all of his instructions. There was a special way to the Guild that only members knew or people whom the Guild wanted to arrive.
They had to take a private transport. Misha hired it, and wouldn’t let her near him as he did. So there were other things he had to do, things he didn’t want her to see.
He sat quietly in the ground transport car he’d hired. Rikki sat close to him, hands folded in her lap. Because he wouldn’t talk with her, she stared out the window at the scenery passing at five hundred miles per hour. Which meant, of course, that the scenery was just a blur of colors. She could tell she was going through a city because the colors changed from green and gold and red to dark blue and brown and black.
Otherwise there was no difference. The transport hadn’t even slowed, because it was private. It just sped along the express track, going through every single station.
She had never traveled in a private transport on the planet Kordita. It felt odd. She’d been to the city of Prospera several times, but not outside it. So she didn’t realize that the transport had taken a special turn toward the Guild until Misha told her the turn was unusual. It had been sharp and it made the windows in the transport become opaque.
Apparently, even if someone was cleared to hire a private transport to the Guild, that person wasn’t allowed to see the way there.
The opaque windows gave an eerie light to the car, making the seats look like they were in some kind of shadow. She sat stiffly beside Misha, trying not to show her nerves.
But she was nervous, and she was beginning to think he was as well. He had gotten progressively more tense as the transport got farther away from Prospera. The gentle, sensual man she was coming to know had vanished as well. He was all hard edges and sharp lines now. His posture had become more and more rigid as they got closer to the Guild.
He had warned her that he wasn’t quite certain what would happen when they arrived. He had never brought a guest before, and it had been decades since he was the newcomer. He had seen other newcomers enter the Guild, but he hadn’t even been on security detail when they arrived.
He only knew in theory what would happen, and he only told her bits of that.
The transport took another sharp turn, and then came to an abrupt stop. Misha was braced, clearly ready for it, but he had to grab Rikki’s arm to keep her from falling forward.
“Move with me,” he said softly, keeping a grip on her.
He went to the door, slammed his hand against it, and then, as the door opened, pushed her out first.
She stumbled again, startled, and nearly fell on the three steps that led down to an empty platform.
It took her a moment to get her balance. She stood up, a bit startled at where she was.
She was inside a station, with a small seating area, a bench, and several pillars. The station had no identification and no robotic guards that she could see.
For a moment, she thought she was the only one who had gotten off the transport, which made her stomach twist, as she wondered—fleetingly—what Misha had planned for her.
Then she saw him standing behind her, glancing around as if he was expecting someone. Maybe he was. He had told them he was bringing a friend, and he had sent her identification—her real identification. They both figured there was no reason to use an alias here since whoever hired her would know who she was, and might figure she was using her real identity to get into the Guild.
“Everything all right?” she asked softly.
He wasn’t looking at her. He was scanning the area. “Let’s just see how it goes,” he said just as softly.
He put a hand on her arm, almost as if she was his prisoner. She wanted to shake him off, but that was because she was nervous. Still, she walked with a tension she hadn’t had near Misha since she met him.
They stopped at the first pillar. A small window opened in its face.
“Weapons,” he said.
He had prepared her for this, but she still didn’t like it. She had to surrender her weapons to the Guild. He swore she would get them back when she left.
If she left.
If this wasn’t some kind of elaborate trick.
She made herself take a deep breath. She had to remind herself that she trusted Misha, that he had never lied to her (although he had occasionally left things out), and that he would want no harm to come to her.
Still, she couldn’t get rid of the sense that she was walking naked into a pit of vipers.
She pulled out all of her weapons—her pistol, her backup pistol, and her tiny all-purpose weapon, the one she usually never removed. She had been half tempted to keep it, just to see what would happen, but she didn’t.
She had agreed to this. She needed to go through with every step.
She set them all inside the window, and her heart sank as it closed, making a small sound as it whisked her weapons away.
Then it opened again, and Misha had to place his weapons inside—pistol, second pistol, and the knife he kept in his boot.
He looked as uncomfortable about this as she felt.
They moved to the next pillar. His grip remained tight on her arm. He was holding her so tightly it was almost painful. He was still looking around as if he expected something.
The window on the next pillar opened up slowly. She glanced over at Misha, uncertain what to do.
He glanced back, surprised for a moment, as if he thought she should know. And then he frowned just a little, and nodded toward the pillar.
“All identification,” he said.
“All of it?” she asked.
“Legit and not,” he said, and she could hear an attempt at a jaunty tone in his voice.
The attempt failed miserably.
She emptied out her identification into the window, but it didn’t close.
“Any embedded identification too,” he said.
“I’m not removing it,” she said.
“You don’t have to. We’ll take care of that.” He almost sounded annoyed, which made her feel annoyed. She didn’t like the “we.” It suddenly placed her against them.
Against him.
She extended her right hand and placed it in that little window, cringing as a warm beam of light touched her. Then she pulled back her right hand and extended her left. The same light touched it, making her tremble.
Misha felt that. He gave her his cool stare, but he didn’t even try to reassure her. Maybe he had no reassurance to give.
The window closed. This little pillar didn’t even make a sound as her identification got swept away.
Then the window reopened and Misha dumped all of his identification in it. He let the little scanner run over his left hand, the hand he was not holding her with.
The window closed, and Misha waited, almost as if he expected something else to happen. When it didn’t, he took a deep breath.
“I guess we keep going,” he said, sounding a bit confused.
He led her to the third pillar, which opened completely, revealing a staircase leading into the darkness. His heart rate increased.
She wouldn’t have noticed if she wasn’t standing so close to him, if he didn’t have such a firm grip on her arm that she could feel his heartbeat in his hand.
“Everything all right?” she asked as quietly as she could.
He didn’t even move his lips as he replied, “This is almost too easy.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant: was it too easy to get into the Guild, which would be odd, since he came and went fr
om here all the time.
Or was it too easy for her to enter?
She would ask for clarification when she could.
He started down the steps, but he kept a hand on her, holding her behind him, protecting her with his body. She kept glancing up the steps—or at least she did, until the pillar closed behind them.
Then a breeze started, caressing her face.
She stiffened at first, and finally understood what it was.
This was some kind of decontamination chamber. She hadn’t ever encountered one outside of a ship or a port before. The air had that hot chemical smell that decontamination chambers always had.
Misha reached the bottom step, then looked both ways. The corridors themselves were arched, and wound in various directions. He waited in front of three of them before she reached the bottom step.
Then lights came on in a single corridor.
“Okay,” he said again in an undertone, his lips still not moving. “This is weird.”
He had told her that at some point they would separate. Clearly he had expected it before now.
“What should we do?” she asked, working to stay as quiet as he was.
“Keep going,” he said.
They walked through the lit corridor, and it wasn’t until they were almost through that she realized this was the main part of the decontamination chamber. Then they reached the end of it, and a single door opened, leading into a dressing chamber.
“We have to leave our clothes too?” she asked, this time in her regular voice.
“I warned you,” he said.
“You didn’t warn me about clothes,” she muttered. She stepped behind one of the dressing screens, not because she wanted to hide herself from Misha, but because she knew that some places like this monitored the entries. Someone was probably watching, and there might be laws that protected a newcomer’s privacy.
At least, the privacy of their naked bodies. She was certain her DNA had been scanned, her health monitored. Whoever ran this security system probably knew about the carefully hidden burn scar on her hand, and the mended bones in her body from that horrible night so long ago.
The night she had met Misha.
She sighed and grabbed the only loose weave top that fit her. The drawstring pants seemed to be one size, and fortunately they were long enough for her. She slipped the provided sandals on her feet.
Now there really was no way to hide a weapon, unless she had shoved one in a body cavity. And given the kinds of searches the Guild tech had just given her, someone would have found that weapon too.
Rather than reassuring her, the huge search had made her even more nervous.
She emerged to find Misha waiting for her. He was wearing something similar, but on him, it looked natural. The clothing made him seem more relaxed, even though she could still feel the tension radiating off him.
His hair was tousled, like it often was in bed, and through the weave of the shirt, she could see his beautifully muscled chest. She wanted to run her hand along it, feel the contrast of the weave against the smoothness of his skin.
But then, she always wanted to touch him. It amazed her that this feeling never went away.
He took her hand and gave her a comforting smile.
“Ready for the Guild?” he asked.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” she said. Fortunately he didn’t ask how ready that was. Because she felt like a kid on her first day of school—terrified, out of her depth, and just a little bit trapped.
But she wasn’t a kid. She was an adult, who could handle herself.
Even if, without her weapons, her clothing, and her identification, she felt more like a penitent than a person.
More like a prisoner than one of the best assassins in the sector.
“Then let’s go,” he said and led her out of the tiny room, and into the Guild proper.
Chapter 50
They stepped into a sun-baked courtyard filled with greenery. The air was fresh, and it smelled of a dozen different kinds of flowers. Everywhere that Rikki looked, she could see green plants cascading over carefully manicured dirt paths. Benches were scattered throughout, and the plants themselves were structured so that they would cover an area, and reveal another.
The walls around her were tall enough that she couldn’t see over them. They were made up of buildings that hooked together like row houses and they seemed to go on for miles. Some buildings appeared to stand alone. Arches made of stone and covered with ivy separated those buildings from some others, creating new paths off to the side.
She got the impression of a lot of space, a lot of land, and a lot of power.
There was also a timelessness here, as if time had stopped the moment she and Misha emerged in the courtyard.
“Wow.” A voice came from one of the trees. A female voice, rich and throaty. “Did you sell your firstborn, Misha?”
Misha frowned in the direction of the voice. He was looking down, so Rikki did too. A tiny woman stood between three trees, their leaves practically covering her. She came up to the middle of Rikki’s chest, and she was so thin that Rikki could probably lift her with one hand.
“Shut up, Hazel,” Misha said.
“I mean it, Mish. How’d you get a stranger in so deep?” The woman took a step out, her hands clasped behind her back.
Rikki could see the muscles in the woman’s arms. She could also see the fondness that Misha had for her. It softened his features, made him almost smile.
“You know better than I do, Hazel,” he said, “and don’t pretend that you don’t.”
She grinned, then extended her hand to Rikki. “Hazel Sanchez.”
Rikki took her hand. Hazel’s grip was hard, her handshake so firm it nearly hurt. Rikki matched strength for strength.
“Rikki Bastogne,” she said, feeling odd as she gave her real name. But they had to know it anyway.
“I hope you’ll forgive me,” Hazel said, “but I’m supposed to baby-sit while Misha explains why he brought a stranger here.”
“See?” Misha said, more to Rikki than to Hazel. “I told you she knew.”
Hazel’s expression changed. She looked very serious. “I don’t though. You have more upper level mojo than I thought, Mish.”
“You think that’s what it is?”
She shrugged. “I’m on probation, remember? They don’t tell me nothing.”
He laughed, probably because he was supposed to, since his laugh sounded a little odd. Rikki had never heard that laugh before. And she felt uncomfortable because he didn’t explain anything to her.
He wouldn’t tell her what Hazel Sanchez meant to him, nor did he tell her what probation meant. Or why Hazel seemed so calm about that probation.
“Except you know where I’m supposed to go, right?” he asked Hazel.
“You know where you’re going,” she said with a grin.
Rikki watched, feeling separated from them both. She had never seen this side of Misha before. She was beginning to think she hadn’t seen most sides of him, that he was a stranger to her.
“You know what I mean,” Misha said to Hazel.
“You know what I mean,” she said.
He made a face, but it was a pretend-exasperated face. He clearly liked this woman. He was flirting with her.
That jealousy that Rikki had teased Misha about a week or so back flared in her. He had had a relationship with Hazel, one that predated his with Rikki. She had a hunch they had never been lovers, but they had an easy friendship, one that spoke of history together, and she envied that.
Hazel stopped smiling first. Then she tilted her head to the left and said to Misha, “You’re heading to the office. You need to explain yourself, my friend.”
“Yeah, I figured,” Misha said. Then, to Rikki’s surprise, he put a hand on her shoulder and leaned into her, kissing her quickly on the lips.
It was casual, it was comfortable, and it calmed her.
“I’ll be right back,” he said and headed do
wn one of the paths. “Be good.”
Like she could be anything else. She was trapped inside a compound with people who didn’t trust her.
It was pretty here. It smelled of flowers.
And it was about as close to hell as she had ever come.
Chapter 51
The office was Misha’s least favorite place in the Guild. The building itself was about half a mile from the spot where he had left Rikki, which was irritating in and of itself. He walked as fast as he could along the path; he would have jogged, but he thought it might make him look desperate.
He was feeling desperate. He didn’t want to leave Rikki alone here, not even with Hazel. He had worked with Hazel for years, back when they were both apprentices. They had even partnered during their apprenticeship, helping each other on various jobs.
They’d been friends forever.
But he didn’t trust her. She was a screwup. This was her fifth probation in ten years. She managed to work her way out of probation, usually by doing a spectacular job on something hard, but never could maintain that level of competence long.
Right now, he wanted Rikki beside him. He didn’t want her in the hands of a screwup.
The office building was a square, five-story monstrosity. Someone had tried to design it like the other brown stone buildings of the Guild, but whoever that someone was had failed. The office looked exactly like it was—a building for bureaucrats, one that had no beauty and barely had any functionality.
The assassins who failed to survive in the outside world worked here. They’d had the training, but for one reason or another, they couldn’t handle the job itself. They “retired” inside the Guild and got to sit at desks, making life hell for everyone else.
Hazel should really have “retired” here. But she hated the office as much as Misha did, and was struggling to stay out of it as long as she possibly could.
Misha, on the other hand, had never been in danger of working here. He excelled at his job, and had from the moment he was certified.
Misha slipped in the main door, noting how much cooler the interior was than the garden. Some of that was the lack of light. This place had ceiling light so white that it seemed harsh.
