by Ros Baxter
‘Enough with the socialising,’ she commanded, making a little circle with the index finger of her spare hand. ‘Time to strip.’
Here goes nothing, Reetor thought, leaning down to remove his hutanium boots.
He went slow, thinking about her words: I’ve never seen a naked man of Earth. Was he really going to do some kind of intergalactic strip show with this girl pointing that gun at him?
He aimed a grin at her. ‘Might help if I had a little music?’
She frowned, and lowered her weapon so it was pointing at the place he most did not want to see shot or turned to stone.
Guess she doesn’t like jokes. Or maybe she just doesn’t get them.
‘We’re cool,’ he assured her, sighing. Might as well give her a good show.
If she loved his body, would she be more or less inclined to turn him to stone?
He unlatched one boot then the other, kicking them off cautiously so he didn’t startle her. Her cat-eyed watchfulness was unnerving, but she seemed relaxed, gun held loosely in a grip that suggested she had used it many times. The last thing he wanted was to spook a girl who had grown up among the Temerites and learned her fighting skill from the Posterei.
Why did he never meet nice, friendly girls? Uncomplicated girls. First X, now this.
Next he worked on his jacket, throwing it to the floor between them before dragging the bottom hem of his shirt over his head. He tensed as he did so, not out of some vanity of wanting her to be impressed by his six-pack, but because covering his face when standing across from someone with a laser gun went against every instinct the Avengers had drilled into him. He yanked the thing over his head quickly.
When his head emerged again, she was studying him closely, her mouth half open, her eyes half closed. ‘Your body is well defined and your musculature is impressive,’ she said, her voice coming off a little breathy.
Reetor tried to imagine X giving away flattery so easily.
‘It will be such a shame to hand you over to the Enforcers,’ she continued, voice casual with the tiniest edge of disappointment.
Way to ruin the moment.
Was this the time to start the seed of a different option?
‘Who says you have to?’
She laughed. ‘The people who gave me these.’ She ran her hands over the bumpy ridges under her tattoo, close to her full breast. Her words, combined with the way she touched herself sparked a disconcerting blend of empathy, rage and arousal in Reetor. ‘I know you saw the scars, before. I’d rather not have any more to add to my collection.’
‘Of course,’ he agreed, slowly unzipping his pants. Under them he wore only a light black thong, cool and flexible, designed, like his clothing, for maximum movement. He paused for a moment to let her take him in as he stood there in only his underwear.
‘See?’ He gestured to his body and turned a small circle. ‘No hidden weapons.’
She smirked at him as he turned back. ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ she said, nodding towards his underwear.
Hmmm, maybe she does have a sense of humour after all.
‘I think we should check.’ She motioned again to his underwear with her head. ‘I’d hate to be taken by surprise.’
Reetor couldn’t help but smile. There was something about this girl, a unique strength that impressed and confused him. Impressed him because she appeared to be so self-made, so strong and quick and brave, even though she had grown up all on her own. It confused him because he liked it, which was pretty confusing when she was clearly relaxed about handing him over for torture and death.
He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his underwear and yanked them down his legs, pushing them aside with one foot. ‘There,’ he said, opening his palms. ‘Satisfied?’
The girl walked closer, keeping the gun cocked carefully. She seemed interested, but not distracted. He didn’t like his chances of rushing her right now. Not yet.
When she was close enough, she sheathed her gun, pulled out the petrification blade again, and waved it with infinite control in the air in front of the warm skin of his stomach. It was a disconcertingly gentle gesture, and he had to focus hard on his breath to avoid the proximity of her semi-naked body having a predictable effect on him.
She leaned closer so her breasts brushed his chest, but he could feel that she held the blade very deliberately. She wasn’t taking any chances. The twin sensations of the heat from the blade and the soft fullness of her breasts completely unbalanced Reetor.
Her lips parted, red and full, and his world shrank to focus on them. ‘You do not have an erection?’
Don’t look down. He couldn’t speak.
‘Why not? I understood this is what happens when men of earth are confronted with female nakedness.’ A slight frown creased the half of her face that looked like a choirgirl. ‘If the nakedness is pleasing to them.’
‘Umm…’ Shit, he really needed to do better than this. He marshalled his intellectual resources. ‘It’s not always considered polite,’ he ventured.
‘Hm,’ she said shortly. ‘Strange.’ She reached out her spare hand and ran it across the flat of his stomach.
‘You have beautiful skin,’ she said. Then she stepped back a little, performing a lightning fast switch between blade and gun that gave Reetor an insight into the precision of her training. ‘Why is it so dark?’
He shrugged. ‘Why is your hair so red? Not magic. Just a biological legacy of some place and people we came from.’ He narrowed his eyes, thinking. ‘Your people were probably Celts, at some time.’ He shrugged. ‘Mine were probably Moors.’
She watched his mouth as he spoke. ‘You know much, don’t you?’
He shrugged again. ‘A little.’ Then he watched her frown in disappointment. ‘More than most,’ he agreed.
‘I should like to know more,’ she said, the command back in her voice. ‘You will talk to me while I transport you.’ She paused. ‘And after I bind you.’
The situation suddenly closed in on him. He was pretty sure she had no intention of dressing him before she trussed him up and interrogated him. A man had his dignity, even if he didn’t have much else right now. ‘And why would I do that?’
She stared at him intently, and this time he thought he did see a trace of sympathy in her eyes. But he may have been imagining it.
‘Because I know what it is like to be tortured,’ she said, her eyes flicking upwards and to the right. ‘And if you please me, I might kill you before I hand you over.’ She gestured to her gun. ‘And with this, not with the petrification blade.’ She looked down at her gun as if noticing it for the first time. ‘You do understand that this would be a kindness? That they will kill you anyway, and it will get very, very bad for you before they do?’
He swallowed hard. ‘You’re a real sweetie,’ he said bitterly. ‘But won’t you get less for me if you kill me first? What’s in it for you?’
‘There’s a lot I need to know,’ she said.
Then, like she had divined them from nowhere, a set of silver chains appeared, a kind Reetor had never seen before. She whistled and they skittered across the floor towards him. She cocked the gun at his head in a not-so-subtle warning as the things reached his feet and clambered up his shins like clacking, metallic snakes, climbing his legs, vine-like, and binding his hands and feet fast.
She closed her eyes as though momentarily relieved, and pointed to the gunner’s chair. ‘You will have enough flex to move and sit slowly,’ she said, beckoning him over. ‘Any fast moves, or any lethal intent, and they will cut your circulation even quicker than I could petrify you.’
She smiled, showing perfect white teeth, and he wondered again at the anomalies. Who the hell had taught her oral hygiene on Temer? For most humans, it had been the first thing to go after the Apocalypse. ‘And I’m a quick shot,’ she assured him.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ he said, mentally lecturing his body about not resisting the snake-like chains as he shuffled carefully to the other chair.<
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Once he was settled he turned to her, watching her familiarise herself with the driver’s seat of the pod. She looked at home there, but not entirely. Watching her, he knew some things. He had no doubt, for example, that she fought better than she drove. He also knew she was eager to set their course and to start to talk to him again. A curiosity pumped bright and vibrant from her.
‘So,’ he said, as she touched the on-board crystalair and flicked through star charts, ‘what shall I call you? While we chat?’
She kept looking at the console in front of her, but her mouth tightened. ‘I told you, I don’t know.’
A realisation settled on him. ‘You don’t have a name?’ He made his breathing long and slow to combat the claustrophobic feeling of the chains attaching themselves to his arteries. He understood that this was some kind of biotech he had never seen before; he just needed to trust that it knew what it was doing and would not accidentally kill him. He had to bank that for now, at least, she wanted him alive.
She turned to stare at him, and her green eyes were darker than before. He would have thought there were tears hiding in them, but he dismissed it. She wasn’t the type. ‘I’m guessing I had one,’ she said, her eyes daring him to pity her. ‘Once. Like I’m guessing I had parents. And a home. But it was so long ago, and I was so young, I can’t remember.’ She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘And no one else cares.’
He nodded, understanding intuitively that it was the most she would tolerate by way of empathy. She had no reason to trust him and every reason to be suspicious of his motives. No doubt she had been given the full file on him. The Avengers profiled diligently; she would know his IQ, his strengths and weaknesses, in particular his capacity for reason and emotional connection. And she would be waiting for him to use them all against her. So he was surprised she was even going this far.
She must be really desperate for someone to talk to.
‘So what do they call you?’
She raised that eyebrow again. ‘The Temerites?’
He nodded again, sure he could discern the slightest tremor in her voice.
The girl seemed finally satisfied with her business at the console and he felt her turn her full focus on him as the pod began to hum. He would have liked to ask what course she had plotted, but he figured that conversation was way down the trust and sharing hierarchy. Names were a safer place to start. Well, usually. Right now he felt as if he were picking his way through an asteroid belt.
‘Well,’ she mused, playing with one lock of long hair in a way that made her seem more like the nineteen- or twenty-year-old she had to be rather than the seasoned warrior she had seemed to date. ‘Firstly they called me Sha Sha.’ The word came out as a hiss, and Reetor’s eyes were drawn to the snake on her face and at her breastbone. ‘That was my first name, but it’s not a name. Not really. It’s a job. It means…’ She shrugged and frowned a little. ‘Slave, I guess.’ She frowned deeper. ‘Although that doesn’t really convey the full degree of disgust and loathing they’d be wanting to communicate with it.’ She sucked on the lock of hair a little. ‘Filth is better. But useful filth, if you see what I mean.’
‘Not really.’ Reetor’s fists curled as they sometimes did when he was confronted with the evil in the universe. Evil he had always thought he could do so little about, until the Backlash showed him ideas could become action.
‘Anyway,’ she went on, her face impassive bar a small nerve that jumped under one eye, ‘I graduated from that after a while and became Fura.’ She smiled. ‘It was definitely an upgrade.’ She yanked hard on a piece of hair. ‘And I’ve got this to thank for it. As I grew, the colour really started to deepen. And then I was Fura, the magic one. They were a little afraid of me then.’
Reetor considered the tale, his heart pounding against the chains that snaked across his chest. ‘But not enough to let you go?’
She smiled, and he wanted to reach out and…what? Comfort her, while she told the tale? ‘Afraid enough to know they could never let me go, lest my magic fall under someone else’s control.’ She shrugged, and rubbed her breast. ‘But the beatings ended. And they encouraged my tutelage from the Posterei. I think they saw some use in me.’
Reetor swept a hand around the scene in front of him — the girl sitting at his controls. ‘It would seem they were right,’ he offered. ‘You’ve been good to them.’
She nodded. ‘For now. Once I can find a way to be alone, I’ll kill them all.’
Watching her half-angel, half-demon face scrunched in determination, he didn’t doubt it. ‘The question remains,’ he went on. ‘What shall I call you, if we are to converse?’
Her eyes widened. ‘Why do you need to call me anything?’ She glanced meaningfully around the pod. ‘There is no one else here. There is no danger that I shall think you are addressing another.’
He laughed at her unexpected words. ‘Still,’ he insisted, ‘I’d like to call you something.’ Her mouth tightened again and he wondered if he had pushed too far, too soon. ‘Humans like names,’ he ventured quietly.
‘Fine,’ she said, focusing on the controls before her again and causing the little ship to leap forward with a sudden surge. ‘Call me Ragai.’
He sighed. ‘Do I want to know?’
She turned back to him and her face was very hard. ‘Bringer of death,’ she said.
He hesitated. It was a crucial moment. She expected compliance from him; she would not risk her safety and she knew too much about him. But on the other hand, she wanted to connect. Her thirst to know about him, about her own kind, was luminous. He felt it; this was the moment to push back.
‘I’d rather go with something simple, but strong,’ he suggested. ‘Something from Old Earth. How do you feel about Klara?’
Chapter Three: Bondage
‘So you don’t remember anything either?’
Reetor was becoming fast fascinated by the way that long throat of hers bobbed when she was trying to ask something casually, but really cared about the answer. They had been through human society, how it worked — or at least, how it worked now; food; procreation; and any number of other topics, and she seemed to have an endless appetite for information.
He shook his head, because he wanted her to have to look at him. When she did, he elaborated. ‘No. They call us the PA babies.’
‘PA?’ That tiny frown creased the space between her dramatic eyebrows again.
‘Post Apocalypse,’ he said, shrugging habitually before sucking in his breath as the chains bit into him, objecting to the sudden jerky movement. ‘Those of us who don’t remember the place we came from; those who only know The Seek.’
‘That’s what they call it?’ Her pretty face puckered into a scowl. ‘Scavenging across the universe, stealing and trading and taking what’s not theirs?’
Reetor resisted the urge to shrug this time. ‘What else do you do? When you’re flat out of other options?’
‘That’s not all that your people do,’ she muttered darkly, touching the crystalair lightly. He knew it was true. Since joining the Backlash he had found out about some of those things, and he was glad that it had not been misplaced fear, the creeping sense he’d had back at Avenger HQ, the sense that things were not right, were not as they should be. Or worse, that the feelings had not been purely cowardice.
‘Our people,’ he reminded her.
‘Not mine,’ she said, turning back to him and staring him down. The snake seemed to flick its forked tongue at Reetor as he considered her cold fury. Take that.
He waited. Clearly she had more to say.
‘I have no people anymore. And I don’t even know what happened to the ones I had. I grew up a slave. I don’t even know what they called me.’
He drew in a breath to talk, that now-familiar mix of fear and pity chewing at his gut, but she put a finger to her lips. ‘Save it,’ she said. ‘I don’t need your pity.’ Then, almost as an afterthought, she added, ‘I’ve read your file. Your life has been no picnic either.
’
‘You sure want to know a lot about them,’ he reminded her. ‘For people who aren’t your own.’
‘Not about them,’ she said as she broke off the stare, her finger slipping off the crystalair as she seemed to become flustered. ‘About me.’
That delicate jaw set hard and she was a picture of determination.
He could only imagine how long she must have waited, how hard it must have been to carve out a private space in which she could find out about her people.
It was the right moment now, following her rambling interrogation of him about all manner of earth matters, to ask her some more about her. It was a good opening, and he knew where he wanted to start. There must have been someone; there had to have been. Someone had taught this girl their language, and the basics of their norms. Who?
But as he licked his lips and mentally arranged the question, it happened. Her finger, which had slipped when she become flustered, must have brought the vidfile to life, the one he had been watching earlier, sent from some unknown enemy.
He closed his eyes as the images leapt to blurry life again. His back, dark and intent between X’s legs, her commands, and then his wild plunging into her.
The girl watched without speaking for the whole excruciating four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
Then she turned to him. ‘Someone hates you,’ she commented drily. But the most delicate of pink flushes coloured her face. ‘Well,’ she went on. ‘Someone else, apart from the Avengers, and their Enforcers.’ She paused. ‘And the Council that command them.’ For Reetor’s part, he was glad his own colouring did not lend itself to blushing, because inside him, the horror of sitting there while she watched that most private moment was eating him up.
She gestured at the screen, frozen in the final image, X’s face ecstatic, his own focused on the building bliss. ‘She belongs to another.’ Her eyes were bright green, and the effect of them against the delicate flush on the non-tattooed parts of her cheek and neck was startling. And beautiful.
