by Faye, Audrey
This night, she didn’t want anyone or anything underestimating her.
Bean shoved her hands in her pockets and wished momentarily for the blaster that would have once ridden there. And then chided her own silliness.
She had never been that kind of warrior.
Grabbing a water tube and one of the apples that a trio of small Lightbodies had been handing out in the courtyard earlier, Bean slid out her door into the hallway.
Nothing stirred, not even the vague energies she’d learned to recognize as Talent taking an unauthorized nighttime stroll. But the knife edge hadn’t gone away. Bean knew that was greaser sixth sense speaking, not Talent—but there were days when she thought maybe the two weren’t all that far apart. Whatever it was, she’d always been smart enough to work with what she had.
She squared her shoulders and kept walking. If she couldn’t see what tried to touch her in the night, she darn well wanted it to see her.
Because she could feel the tug riding underneath the knife edge. The same tug that had pulled her here eight years ago.
For some reason—one that she might never understand—Lucinda Coffey was needed.
-o0o-
It was wrong, coming here like this, covered in cave dirt and whatever lived in the air of a century long past. But Yesenia knew if she waited a moment longer, she would never do what had to be done. She loved the child in her arms far too much.
Hopefully the dim of night would hide the dirt and the agony in her eyes.
She looked around the nursery pod where infants and young children slept, swathed in the slightly green glow of the floor-level lighting. Most parents on Stardust Prime opted for home supports once their babies were born, but a few preferred to hand their child raising off to the excellent staff hired for exactly that purpose.
She had never expected to be one of them.
Then again, despite the words of Regalis Marsden five rotations ago, she had truly never expected to be a parent. Thanks to her, the powers-that-be now knew that some implants didn’t stand up well to trips through time. Sperm, however, made the voyage just fine.
An irony for another day—one when her heart wasn’t threatening to break in two.
Yesenia looked down at the squashed face cuddled in her arms, knowing the child had her father’s golden eyes. Asleep now.
Good. As foolish as it was, she didn’t want her tiny girl to bear witness to her own abandonment.
She didn’t want the energies of the universe bearing witness either. With fierce, unforgiving discipline, she pushed her feelings under. Away. Let the fog of exhausted stupor leach back into every corner of her soul.
A very tired Fixer wouldn’t shake the vibrations in the galaxy overmuch.
A podcare assistant glided over almost soundlessly. “Hello, Director—may I help you?”
Yesenia turned to face the woman fully and kept her eyes on her child’s sleeping face. “This is my daughter. I expect you to take good care of her.”
The long silence spoke for itself. As did the matronly assistant’s wide, astonished eyes.
It wasn’t every day that someone disappeared out of time for three days and came back holding a baby. Yesenia knew better than to try to control the spin of that information. Gossip flowed fast and furious on Stardust Prime, and in this case, they were highly unlikely to guess the truth unless she willed it.
Instead, she would feed the flame of obfuscation. Anything to protect the child she must now release. “I know you weren’t expecting her arrival. I also know you’re fully staffed to handle an infant.” She’d made it her business to know, along with all the other preparations she’d laid in place since her terrible trip five years ago to Regalis Marsden’s tower.
Just in case.
“We are.” The words were quiet, but managed to convey a world of condemnation under the professional non-judgment. “How long will she be staying with us?”
Some parents used the nursery pod for temporary reasons. She could never be one of them. “She will remain in your care.” Yesenia could feel the anguish trying to blast away her fog and stupor and ruthlessly shoved it down. She held the child up toward the disapproving eyes and the kind hands. “Take her now.”
The nurse reached out and briskly handled the transfer. “You’ll want a visiting schedule. Give me a moment to get her settled, and I’ll set that up for you.”
She could never visit. They mustn’t know she cared. No one must ever know. She would not let herself be that kind of threat to her child’s safety. “I won’t have time for that. I have important work to do elsewhere.”
Disapproval iced over into something far harsher.
Good. Her daughter would need all the protectors she could get. She turned to go. She must not break. Not here.
Not anywhere.
The threads of time must lie undisturbed. She had done yeoman’s work after the birth to steady them all. She could not let a single moment of weakness shatter all that work.
“Wait.” The nurse somehow turned the single word into a command, even as she crooned down at the now-awake baby in her arms. “What is her name?”
Yesenia managed a smile as her daughter waved a sleepy, disgruntled fist. “Her name is Tatiana.” A bold and regal name for a child born under a scratchy blanket in a cave of dirt.
Her mother’s one defiant blast at the universe.
Well, her second. Placing Tatiana here would be the other. It walked a very fine line with the instructions Regalis had issued. She would keep the child close so she could keep watch. Make it known she was Tatiana’s mother for the protection that would bestow on her.
And suffer the agonies of watching her beautiful, bold girl grow up believing she had a mother who didn’t care.
The universe must not know that Tatiana mattered.
Yesenia could feel the fog threatening to swallow. To overwhelm. To take what little life force she had left and transmute it into unending despair.
She must go now.
She could hear the nurse asking more questions as she left. She didn’t stop walking. No one would question her—they would only judge, and she could live with that.
Her daughter was alive. Well and feisty and vibrant and safe.
And if her mother was very tough and very smart and very careful, this was only the first step in a long journey to make this right.
Because somewhere in the dirt of a long-ago cave, Yesenia Mayes had made a promise. One day, she would make this right. The energies of the universe did not get to take her daughter away. Not forever. That she simply could not bear.
She turned around and allowed herself one tiny moment of weakness. One last look at a head covered in red fuzz, and golden eyes that were sliding closed.
And then she stared down at the cave dirt on her empty hands and walked away.
-o0o-
Something wasn’t quite right.
Bean tilted her head, eyeing what she could see through Yesenia’s open office door at a slightly different angle. It had been bugging her all morning, that sense that something was missing.
Besides the obvious absence of the woman behind the shiny desk.
Bean picked up her third cup of coffee of the day, took a sip, and set it back down beside the tablet on her desk. She needed to get her mind on something more tangible than strange little niggles. She had work to do, and today it was going to require copious amounts of caffeine and actual focus to get the job done.
She’d walked the halls half the night, trying to find whatever had awakened her. It hadn’t been until breakfast, when she’d walked into the massively stirred-up caf, that she’d actually found it—or the beginnings of it, anyhow.
Yesenia had arrived with a baby in the dead of night.
And then her boss had come to the office and generated enough messages and memos to keep the whole planet hopping for an entire rotation. Including one instructing Bean that Yesenia would be sequestered in her quarters until further notice, and attending to
matters on her desk only at night.
Bean could only imagine the theories that would emerge once that pattern of behavior hit the airwaves. Yesenia Mayes, space vampire.
It told her assistant something quite different. Deep devotion to work, by someone who currently couldn’t bear the light of day—and who couldn’t sleep. The quiet, indisputable signs of someone in the grip of deep emotion or deep cracking. The sort of personal firestorm the Director would never expose to the public eye.
The kind she had left her assistant the quiet clues to see. After more than a decade of working together, they knew each other well enough for that.
Whatever had woken Bean in the night, part of what she was clearly supposed to protect was the vulnerable part of the boss lady’s soul that most people didn’t believe existed.
Bean sighed—that wasn’t fair. People mostly believed what Yesenia wanted them to believe, and even then the smarter ones, who were legion on Stardust Prime, had their doubts. Which was currently driving gossip into a frenzy the likes of which had never been seen, at least not in Bean’s time on the planet.
Scuttlebutt said that the Director had plucked some infant off a colony rock somewhere and decided to adopt her. The theories on how and why that might have happened were just getting more vivid as the day went on. Throw in the ideas of people who had remembered that Yesenia was a Traveler, and the level of crazy had ratcheted up to the point where Bean figured she could sell tickets and retire rich.
Except for the part where there actually was a baby. Bean had ducked into the zealously guarded nursery long enough to see the fuzzy red head and have a word with the tough and exceedingly kind woman who ran the place.
Tatiana would be very well cared for and protected exactly where she was.
Which left Bean sitting behind her desk trying to deal with everything else. She didn’t even know where to start. Probably by getting straight in her own head.
That Yesenia had gone off on some wild assignment wasn’t hard to buy at all. That she’d been gone nine months in some other timeline stretched the head a bit, but it was believable enough too. There was a reason the Traveler mystique existed, and a lot of it had to do with how much truth ran under the mythology.
But that Yesenia Mayes had claimed a child, or borne one of her own—and then handed her over to a podcare assistant?
Not a chance.
Bean knew why scuttlebutt was willing believe it—it fit all too well with the carefully nurtured persona of the stern, unyielding woman who ran KarmaCorp with a fiercely efficient hand and a polymer-coated heart.
It didn’t, however, fit with the woman who sent Bean to check in on newly arrived tadpoles who might be crying in their sleep. Or the one who spent three days pacing her floor while galactic messengers tracked down a missing apprentice. Or the one who quietly put families of Fixers who went down in the line of duty on permanent KarmaCorp payroll, with jobs that met their real needs and bolstered whatever bits of hope and love they could still scrape together. It didn’t fit with the woman who made sure the Seekers went into the dark alleyways and the gritty tunnels and the dusty colony streets looking for children with Talent—and feeding all the rest. In eleven years, Yesenia had doubled the number of trainees who weren’t inner-planet born and done more for starving children than anyone in the quadrant.
In short, she was a fantastic boss, raising the finest crop of Fixers the galaxy had ever seen—and she did it in part by being a woman who deeply cared for the smallest, the weakest, and the most scared amongst them, even if she would have suffered the tortures of hell rather than admit it.
That was the woman Bean knew, the woman she’d worked alongside for eleven years and grown to cherish as a friend. And if that woman had left a baby in the arms of a podcare assistant, there was a deep and abiding reason for it. A reason Bean didn’t even have the tiniest corner of, and that scared her silly.
Something was very badly wrong in the universe if Yesenia Mayes was abandoning her daughter.
Bean looked down at the handwritten note she’d been crumpling half the morning. She’d dug it out of the depths of her personal filing drawer halfway through her first cup of coffee. The note that had asked her to show up in the podcare nursery five years ago.
Bean swallowed hard. Her boss would trust her to have a very long memory—and to understand what had never been said. Today she finally knew what the note had been asking of her. She might not know why, but in the end, that didn’t matter.
Yesenia wanted her to watch out for a tiny, sweet girl with wispy red hair and golden eyes.
Because for some awful, universe-bending reason, her mother couldn’t.
-o0o-
Yesenia slid into the nursery pod, moving on feet that were as silent as they were exhausted.
She’d spent the entire day in her quarters, meditating. Settling her mind. Resolutely pursuing equanimity, detachment, and sleep.
All she had achieved was new stiffness, new soreness to add to the old.
Her body was all too ready to remind her that she had recently given birth.
She clamped down sharply on the keening still burning in the center of her heart. Right now the biggest danger to Tatiana Mayes was her mother’s weakness, and that simply wouldn’t do. She could not allow herself to be the conduit of harm to her child.
Yesenia walked very slowly down the row of bassinets, noting the slow rocking of some, the quiet lights playing in others. Soothing, individualized to the needs of the current inhabitant.
She wished she could tell them that her daughter loved the stirring Russian songs of her great-grandmother.
The ones she must never sing again.
Yesenia’s breathing stuttered.
She shouldn’t have come. She was not strong enough to do this and keep her heart quiet. But if she didn’t, the energies would see. They would sense what lived within her—and they would know.
Regalis Marsden had told her not to care. Not to love. Not to provide any kind of channel that would let the universe know how important Tatiana was, how important she could be.
Five years ago, Yesenia hadn’t known to tell him that was entirely impossible.
But she was a Traveler, the most prodigious Talent that KarmaCorp had ever produced. If she could not stop loving her daughter, then she needed to build an impenetrable wall to hide the thing that simply refused to die.
With a strength born of exhaustion and torment and a love she never would have imagined possible, Yesenia Mayes stood in the nursery, ten steps from where her daughter lay sleeping, and pulled all that she felt into a tiny crevice inside her.
And then she shielded it with every magic and power and Talent she knew.
Only when that felt stable did she step forward again and close the final distance to Tatiana’s bassinet.
She stood for a moment, feeling awkward and empty and bereft, clutching the worn rug in her hands. She stroked her fingers over the frayed edges as she listened to the whispered sounds of her daughter’s breathing.
Knowing that she could not come again.
The fabric under her hands spoke of sturdiness. Of color and flamboyance and family and daring in the face of whatever life might bring. It held the energies of a place that knew of powers outside KarmaCorp’s ken. It had been acquired in a moment that Yesenia hoped, with every cell of her being, connected to keeping her daughter safe.
Carefully, as if it were the most delicate spun glass, Yesenia laid the rug on the floor at the side of the bassinet.
It was only a rug—surely that wouldn’t shift the threads of time overmuch.
Thank You
I appreciate you reading!
The next Fixer book is already out—Fortune’s Dance, which is Iggy’s story. There is dancing. And cookies.
There are more KarmaCorp books on the way. You can find all the books in the series so far here. To hear about the next release, head to audreyfayewrites.com and sign up for my New Releases email list. You can al
so find me on Facebook. And if you’ve been kind enough to write these short stories a review, please read this note :).
Also, if you’re a reader who likes to graze widely, you might enjoy my assassins (box set of the complete series!) or dragons or dandelions while you wait.
Audrey
