Destiny's Song (The Fixers, book #1: A KarmaCorp Novel)

by Audrey Faye

  My Song started its wild screeching runs again, traumatized by the loss of intention. I told it to go sit quietly in the corner with my bacon-craving stomach, and turned down a hallway at random.

  Three more hallways, and the notes inside me had gotten frantic. Of course he wasn’t here. He’d be at his stream, dangling his toes in the water, or flying Ophelia, or something else that would tend to that huge heart of his.

  I spun around and started to run, heading for the nearest exit—and plowed straight into rock.

  “Oof.” Devan made a sound like a farting elephant as I landed on top of him, brain rattling in my skull and teeth contemplating doing the same. He wrapped one arm around me and touched the back of his head gingerly with the other hand. “Mom used to tell us not to run in the halls. That’s never made sense until today.”

  I winced. “Shit, I’m so sorry. Does it hurt?”

  “That depends.” His eyes watched me. Intent. Careful. “Would you kiss it better?”

  I would want to. So terribly much.

  I met those eyes as best as I could, entirely uncertain what to say. The last time he’d seen me I’d been running too. He had no way of knowing that I’d changed directions.

  He didn’t move. I listened to the sound of his heart, beating under my ribs.

  And knew it wasn’t words I needed to find.

  With what little bits of grace I had left, I levered myself off Devan Lovatt’s chest, slid back enough that I no longer touched him, and sat, legs crossed and spine straight, in the first pose taught to all trainees. I closed my eyes, breathed in the air of the dusky hallway and exhaled again, knowing the winds of this place would carry some molecules of me to the far reaches of this planet.

  And then I let my eyes seek Devan’s face. “I would like to Sing for you.”

  He pushed himself up to sitting and mirrored my pose, watching me with those intense, careful eyes. “Okay.”

  I felt, more than heard, shadows scurrying in the background. And quailed. Last night had been very public. I needed this to be private.

  He held up a palm. “Wait.” He beckoned one of the shadows, and they hurried off. Moments later, I could feel the hallway emptying.

  “Thank you.” My voice sounded husky to my ears, unused. I felt it echoing. We were alone now. I let my head tilt down and whispered a note of gratitude. It wasn’t the majestic grasslands or a burbling stream—but it would do.

  I could feel his eyes on me, watching.

  “Tameka told me what you did for me.” His voice sounded wary. Curious. Determined. “She said that if you came back, it would mean you had done the same thing for yourself.”

  Interfering old woman. “Something like that.” I didn’t really know what I had done just yet. I only knew that I was here—and I had something I needed to do.

  I let my eyes slide shut and grounded, down through my skinsuit and the floor under my butt and the vibrations of this place to the heartbeat of the planet below. I shunted the skittering worry aside. I was here, and right now, here was all that mattered. There would be consequences for this choice, I knew that. I would pay them later.

  I breathed—through my palms, my fingers, my nose, my spine. Let the hairs on my head tingle as I let it all flow upward.

  And gathered my Song.

  I looked into Devan’s eyes, as deep and hard and intensely as I’d ever headed at any rock. And let the first notes rise in my throat.

  There was no leaning in these ones, no influence. I was not a Fixer today.

  The first note was creaking, wispy, and even a little off key. I watched him smile—a man who knew exactly what lived in that poor, misbegotten, utterly beautiful note. And offered him the rest.

  Time folded, the way it always does when I go deepest. The music soared high and ran wild underground, floated on whispers and drilled into bedrock. I could feel my soul shaking. Steadying. Living. Breath, clarity, and utter presence—in the notes, and in the still, quiet spaces between them. With all the Talent and love I possessed, I put Lakisha Drinkwater out into the universe for one man to see.

  And when I came back out again, quivering, feeling the last inaudible harmonics of my Song rippling out into the hallway, Devan’s eyes were the first thing I saw.

  The only thing I saw.

  His fingertips brushed mine, as lightly as stardust. “What—?” He cleared his throat, a man struggling to find enough moisture to speak. “What was that?”

  I smiled and pulled myself up straight. I would offer this to him without remorse, without regret. “I am a Singer, and that is my heart’s Song.” Something offered only rarely, because for the rest of my life, part of me would be walking the galaxy outside my body. It was the most precious thing I had to give.

  His head bowed down, the pads of his fingers resting ever so gently under mine. “It was beautiful.” A deep sigh, and then he looked so deeply into me that I nearly fractured. “You’re beautiful.”

  It wasn’t my face he was seeing now, I knew that. It was my Song. My soul. I let my hands stretch out over his, wanting to hold, knowing I couldn’t.

  I could only ask.

  “Will you come see me?” It was an entirely selfish request—one full of hardship and entanglement and promises I couldn’t keep. I frowned and dropped my hands, but never let my eyes leave his. “You should say no.”

  His smile dawned, twin moons coming up over a dark horizon. “I heard that from you once before.”

  I’d been right that time too. “I’m a Fixer, Devan. My life isn’t my own.” And even if it was, I had no business messing with a man who’d dumped himself onto KarmaCorp’s radar. My job was to sand some of history’s rough edges. I had a sneaking suspicion that Devan’s job was to make it.

  “Mine isn’t entirely my own either.” He drew in a long, full breath. “But enough of it is that I will say yes.”

  I closed my eyes and let my fingers touch his again. He would come, and I would Sing for him again.

  And we would see what destiny would make of that.

  24

  Some things didn’t change just because you’ve traveled a thousand lightyears. I skulked down the walkways of KarmaCorp’s headquarters on Stardust Prime, sticking to shadows as I made my way to the boss lady’s office.

  I’d come on the double from the spaceport, hoping to circumvent some of Yesenia’s wrath by arriving before she expected me. Probably a lost cause—I’d been in transit for a week. Plenty long enough for her to have worked up a galaxy-sized storm, full of lots of space shrapnel.

  All the better to shred me with. Yesenia didn’t tolerate failure.

  “Kish!”

  Tee’s hand reaching out from a dark doorway frayed what few nerves I had left. She yanked me into a storage closet, slammed the door behind us, and grabbed at my shoulders, hands frantic. “What the hell happened out there?”

  Nothing I dared tell her. “I got back from assignment, I need to report in. End of story.”

  “Right.” She scanned me up and down, one Grower in high dudgeon. “Tameka sent me a message. She said your heart would likely need tending.”

  That broke every kind of rule there was. “Gods, Tee—stay out of this, okay?” The last thing on earth I needed right now was the whole Lightbody family trying to come to my aid.

  “Like hell.” My best friend took two steps back and propped herself on the edge of a box, arms folded and eyes fierce. “Talk. Tameka wouldn’t. I tried.”

  I knew just how hard Tee could try when she wanted to. I fingered the old Fixer’s handwritten note, still in my pocket. It was much crumpled now from countless readings en route.

  Trying to remember why I’d done this.

  Because somewhere in the first leg of my flight home, I’d realized what I should have known before I’d ever invited Devan Lovatt to come visit—Yesenia could flick her fingers and keep him from setting foot within lightyears of me ever again. I’d been high on some heady combination of love, insanity, and bacon fumes if
I’d managed to forget that for even an instant.

  I looked over at my roommate, still shooting daggers from her perch on a box of supplies. “I don’t even know where to start. How much do you know?”

  “Nothing.” She pursed her lips grimly. “There’s not even a whisper circulating here, and Tameka wouldn’t tell me shit.”

  Tameka had done plenty just by contacting Tee in the first place—but it was far more astonishing that the rumor mill of Stardust Prime had nothing. “How can there not be whispers?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked even grimmer now. “I don’t like it, Kish.”

  She wasn’t the only one. There were always rumors. Always, and Tee would have her hands in the thick of them. If there weren’t, someone was doing a very thorough job of scrubbing them—and as far as I knew, only one person had that kind of reach.

  Yesenia didn’t want anyone to know I’d failed.

  That scared me enough to get me talking. “I was supposed to make the Inheritor Elect of Bromelain III fall in love with one of his neighbors.” I gulped. “I kind of fell in love with him instead.”

  Tee’s face was a conundrum of empathy, fascination, and horror. “Oh, hell. Oh, no.”

  “It gets worse. He kind of fell in love with me too.” Or he’d been well on his way, anyhow.

  Horror won. Tee yanked me down onto a box beside her, her hands wrapping my face like she could protect me if she just held on tight enough. “What the hell did you do?”

  “I left.” I looked straight into her eyes and wondered if it was the last time I’d get to see them. Fixers in exile didn’t get passes to Stardust Prime. “But first, I Sang for him. And I invited him to come visit me.”

  She turned sheet white. We both knew how bad this was. Three hundred years of history made very clear what happened when we didn’t follow orders. There would be a calm, organized, very convincing cleanup of any nasty ripples—KarmaCorp didn’t leave galactic messes. And I would spend the rest of my life chained to a pile of paperwork somewhere that would make Bromelain III look like the cradle of civilization.

  Death by irrelevance.

  And that’s if I was lucky. The StarReaders would measure the consequences of my actions—they likely already had. And then KarmaCorp would do what it needed to do.

  None of which would change what happened in Yesenia’s office. I hadn’t followed orders. Even if I hadn’t changed the destiny of the universe one hair, she was still going to want my head.

  Because I had taken the risk. Because I had dared to create ripples of my own making.

  Tee was watching me carefully. “Tameka said she tried to stop you.”

  I hoped like hell she hadn’t put that in her report to Yesenia. The choice had been mine, and the head rolling should be mine, too.

  My roommate’s voice had quieted. “She said you let her.”

  I looked down at the scratched floor under my feet. I couldn’t lie to Tee—she knew exactly how much Talent I had and what I could do with it. “I shouldn’t have.”

  “Hmm.” She sounded almost bemused. “Do you know why you did?”

  Because I hadn’t wanted to see a proud legend reduced to gelatin. “Does it matter?”

  “Yes,” she said, so quietly I could barely hear her. “He must be an amazing man.”

  He was. But he wasn’t the only reason my head was about to roll.

  Because on day six in the tin can, I’d finally figured something else out. As much as my instincts for self-preservation wanted to believe otherwise, this assignment had changed me in ways that had nothing to do with Devan Lovatt.

  Diggers do what they’re told or they die. Fixers do what they’re told—or someone else dies. Or at least that’s what I’d convinced myself over the last fifteen years, with the thorough cooperation of the corporation I worked for. I had chosen to become a loyal cog, to imprint KarmaCorp’s mission on my soul.

  I had chosen to rebel in small ways—and bow down in large ones.

  It wasn’t hard to understand why. I’d crashed into the side of a mining asteroid before I was a week old, then been yanked out of that life because of something I could do with the notes of a song. My life was solid evidence that destiny happened to me—I didn’t create it.

  Until one small moment on a backwater planet when a different wind had blown at my back.

  A moment that, no matter how much my boots were shaking now, I couldn’t bring myself to regret. When I’d landed on Bromelain III, I’d believed that what I did mattered. Now I believed that I mattered. I was still flotsam—but I was a different kind of flotsam.

  Or at least I would be until Yesenia was done with me.

  I reached for my roommate’s hands. “Keep your family out of this, okay?” The Lightbodys were a force to be reckoned with on this planet, but they were no match for Yesenia on a tear.

  “Not going to happen,” said Tee softly.

  It damn well was, even if I had to throw myself out of a space chute to make sure of it. “Delay them at least.” That would buy me some time to sacrifice whatever body parts Yesenia might take as compensation for the shit storm I’d landed on her desk.

  “Go.” She pulled open the storage room door and laid a hand on my arm as I moved to leave. “Iggy and Raven will be waiting at our place.”

  Friends at my back. “Circling the wagons, huh?”

  “Yeah.” She slid her hand down my arm and squeezed my fingers again. “Something like that.”

  I kept my face as calm as I could, tossing her the bag I’d been carrying as I stood to go. “Apples and butter. I’ll be there in time for the pie.”

  I didn’t meet her eyes. I knew neither of us believed it.

  25

  Bean looked up from her desk as I walked into the outer rings of Yesenia’s sanctum. “Hey, Kish—how was the trip?”

  I squinted at her innocent face. “You haven’t heard?” All gossip on Stardust Prime routed itself through this office before it went anywhere else. Tee hadn’t been kidding.

  Her eyebrows shot up. “No. What am I supposed to have heard?”

  She’d find out soon enough. I nodded at the boss lady’s door. “Has her head started steaming yet?”

  Bean’s eyes slammed shut and then opened again very slowly, as if I might be some kind of hallucination. “No. She just ordered waffles and a fruit bowl for breakfast. What the heck is going on?”

  I stared, suspicious and confused. Yesenia’s eating habits were the stuff of Fixer legend—the woman’s food consumption totally tracked her moods. Waffles and a fruit bowl sure didn’t sound like hurricane-level fury. “Seriously? She’s not in there muttering inventive death threats under her breath?”

  “I don’t think so.” Bean shook her head slowly. “She was here early, chatty when we ran through her morning agenda, and she’s got some pretty Ethulian flute music playing, or she did last time I was in there.”

  Yesenia’s music consumption also tracked her moods. “No Rachmaninoff?” Even a second-year trainee knew what that meant. RUN.

  Bean stopped bouncing on the exercise ball she used as a chair. “If you don’t fill me in right now, I will make sure you get assigned to every trainee introductory tour until the end of time.” She fixed me with one of the stares that had earned her the job as the boss lady’s gatekeeper. “And that will just be for starters.”

  That was a nuclear warhead kind of threat. I opened my mouth, prepared to give up my mother, my secret chocolate stash, and the keys to the vault on Meridian Five—but not the details of my assignment—when Yesenia’s door slid open. “You will learn the outcome of Journeywoman Drinkwater’s trip in due time, Lucinda. In the meantime, do you have the files for the new graduates ready? I’d like to look at them again before we match them with their first assignments.”

  Any other assistant would have taken that as a very pointed message to get back to work. Bean just tilted her head slightly, dreadlocks shaking, and watched the two of us with avid interest.


  Another reason she was the boss lady’s gatekeeper—Lucinda Coffey might be the only person on the planet who wasn’t scared of Yesenia Mayes. No one had any idea why that was the case. Bean had just shown up one day and turned herself into the most essential person on Stardust Prime.

  “Journeywoman?”

  By the tone of Yesenia’s voice, she’d been standing there indicating her door for more than the last nanosecond.

  I gulped and moved my feet with dispatch—unlike Bean, I was plenty scared of the woman who ran all the parts of KarmaCorp I’d ever known.

  I headed straight for my usual spot on the carpet, square in front of her desk. “Ready to report.” I might be nervy as a snake in a volcano, but I damn well didn’t intend to cower.

  Yesenia slowly made her way behind the desk and took a seat in the towering black chair that trainees were occasionally dumb enough to call her throne. “I’ve been awaiting your arrival. I appreciate you coming to me so quickly.”

  Her words carried no hint of whether she was about to rip off my head and feed it to a wormhole, or just put me on dustpan duty for the rest of my natural life. “I failed in my mission. I wanted you to know immediately.” A foolish gesture—transmissions traveled far faster than human bodies in space. She likely already knew every last sordid detail.

  “That’s an interesting characterization.” She tilted her chair back slightly. “Why don’t you tell me your version of events and then we’ll decide whether you’ve tarnished your record, shall we?”

  I tried not to stare and failed utterly. She was toying with me. The woman could be brutal, but I’d never seen her be cruel. I proceeded, stuttering, wondering whether she’d come up with a fate worse than wormholes. “I was sent to Bromelain III to arrange a mutually interested romantic relationship between the Inheritor Elect and a woman from a family of significant local stature. That outcome was not accomplished.”

  She inclined her head slightly. “I hear Devan and Janelle were not overly cooperative.”

  That wasn’t the kind of thing that was supposed to matter. “Local support is not required for successful assignment completion.”