by Lynn Rae
“Come on, I bet you’re hungry. Let’s go make some dinner.” Mat nodded and in a surprising move gave her an awkward one-armed hug. He’d started to avoid gestures of affection the past few years, and Cara was overwhelmed with a warm tide of contentment as he pulled her close before bouncing off the bed and leaving his room.
Rising and following him with a sigh, Cara went to the kitchen and to inventory their pantry. Tomato, egg, spinach, all would work in something. Briefly she wondered what Ben was going to eat, but the idea of even seeing him, let alone inviting him over for some quiche, was too humiliating to contemplate. She’d done something terribly wrong during that brief kiss. Poor technique was all she could think would have caused him to stop and draw away when all she’d wanted to do was sink deeper into his mouth. The idea that her experience had been so different made her shake with embarrassment. She was a bad kisser.
They cracked and whipped eggs, wilted the spinach, and she set Mat to dicing some fresh goat cheese as the oven preheated. She’d grill the tomatoes last and sprinkle on some chives. Her brother sampled some cubes of cheese and nodded his head. “This is going to be good. Can I invite Ben over?”
“No!” Cara involuntarily shuddered. “No, I’m sure he has plans, his friend is on planet for a visit.” His very pretty and extremely impressive friend.
Mat shrugged. “That’s good. I think he’s lonely.”
Cara stopped chopping the cooked spinach and frowned at her brother. “What makes you say that?”
“It’s just he’s spent a lot of time with us. I like him.”
Cara set down her knife since she’d come close to slicing into her hand. She liked Ben too, and in a way she hadn’t realized until he’d kissed her. A kiss as monumentally different from those stolen pecks of Cameron’s as an igniting supernova was from a feeble hand light. Allowing herself to recall her response to it made her breathing uneven, and heat flushed her cheeks, belly, and tightened between her legs. No chopping until she got some control, otherwise her shakiness would result in a visit to the medical clinic and another struggle to keep her dna-print from being scanned and logged.
She’d stayed silent too long. Mat stopped filling glasses with water and gave her a look. “You like him too, right Cara?”
“Sure.” But he doesn’t like me. “He’s been very helpful to us.”
“Can I invite him to dinner tomorrow?”
Why all the interest in Ben? Cara dropped the spinach into the egg mixture and indicated Mat should add some cheese. He’d think it was strange if she said no again, but the idea of seeing Ben and being flustered the entire time sounded more tortuous than hiding in a smuggler’s hold through several jump rings.
“We’ll see.”
“That means no. Just say no if that’s what you mean.” Mat lowered his eyebrows and gave her a very credible stare. Perhaps his was trying on their late father’s menacing persona.
“I don’t mean no. I mean, his schedule and ours might not be compatible tomorrow.” Or the next day. Or the week after that.
Mat tilted his head back and forth as if he considered it. “I guess we’ll see. I’m really hungry, when will this be done?”
Chapter 7
“There you go, now spin around.” Ben kept his grip loose on Mat’s thin forearms as the boy tried to break free. With a grunt of effort, Mat applied basic physics and anatomy to force Ben’s hands away, and he grinned with delight. They practiced rudimentary self-defense moves in the safety station’s small gymnasium.
He could tell from her message Cara was very reluctant to let her brother out on his own again, but when Ben had emphasized they would be learning useful skills for people on the run from assassins, she’d relented. The fact he’d been too cowardly to ask her face to face irritated him like sand in his shoes, but the less contact he had with her, the better.
She’d sent several messages reminding him it was only for an hour and she’d be there to pick up her brother up promptly. How he was going to face her after his abortive kiss he wasn’t sure. He hoped he’d figure it out soon, because the hour was almost up. So far, Mat had shown almost coordinated aptitude for the self-defense movements, but he kept glancing at the climbing wall at the far end of the space.
Ben had to admit his intentions had been complicated. He’d wanted to give Mat the chance for some freedom and reassure his sister along the way, but he’d also hoped to pick up a bit more information on the stranded siblings. To distract Mat from the decidedly non-self-defense applications of rock-climbing, Ben let the boy over to a small sparring ring, fitted him with some gloves, and then pulled on punch mitts of his own. He’d loved to hit things when he was a youngster and figured Mat would be no different.
“Mat, where have you lived?” Ben held up his protected hands and braced himself when he saw the light of battle flare in Mat’s eyes.
“All over. Lots of places.” Mat smacked his right hand several times into Ben and had to be reminded to switch things up.
“Anywhere for very long?” If he could narrow down a particular planet or system, he could do some checking. In theory, congressional record-keeping and census information were all encompassing, but he’d found local records were still the most detailed and up to date.
“Not really. When I was little, I remember we had a house for a few years, but I don’t remember where.” The boy didn’t meet his eyes for the last part of that sentence, and Ben knew he avoided the truth. Another left punch, this was far from centered, and Ben’s arm swayed out at the impact.
“Nowhere for very long since then?” Ben was saddened when he saw Mat shake his head emphatically. They’d been on the run, off the system, for years and years. What would it be like to grow up so isolated? The answer lay in Cara, so quiet and watchful, ever-vigilant to keep them unnoticed. But she’d also raised a brother who was friendly and polite. Somehow, she’d managed to give Mat as normal a childhood as she could under the circumstances.
He no longer doubted they’d been hiding as long as she’d claimed. Between their carefully superficial records, and both Cara and Mat’s inherent reserve, it was clear keeping secrets was firmly ingrained in them. He was curious about their companion and his demeanor, but so far, the older man still recuperated in a medical coma. Ben congratulated himself on not thinking about Cara’s mouth for several minutes.
“What about friends? Family?”
“There’s no one but me and Cara. And the companions, but they’re almost gone now. Cara hasn’t told me what we’re going to do when Soren dies.” Mat’s matter of fact statement intrigued Ben. There had been respect in his tone when he’d referred to the older man, just as there had been in Cara’s, but no deep affection.
“Does your sister ever talk about what it was like before you were born, when she was little?” Maybe she’d reminisced with her brother about the life and parents they’d lost when Mat was born.
“No, not really. You know, Cara warned me you’d try to get information out of me.” Mat gave him a shrewd glance from under lowered eyebrows.
“Have I gotten anything useful?”
Mat shook his head and grinned, any attempt to seem fierce diminished in the face of athletic efforts. He tried for a fully extended punch but lost his balance and stumbled past. Ben tapped him on the back, and the boy spun around with his hands up, his defensive posture ruined by the delighted look on his face.
“What if instead of asking about your past, I just asked you about your sister? Would you tell me anything?”
Mat grinned and smacked a punch right into the sparring glove. “I suppose. She didn’t say I couldn’t.”
Ben moved his mitts higher and nodded for Mat to hit away. The boy didn’t have much power, but he was pretty accurate for a first-timer. “What does she enjoy? Does she have hobbies?”
“She reads all the time. It’s research. She always wants to know everything about anywhere we are. And she likes to force me to learn about anything she’s interested in.”
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What would a forceful Cara be like? So far he’d seen upset, determined, and shyly amused. “What’s she interested in now?”
“Gamaliel’s plants and animals and cooking them mostly.” Mat’s deadpan answer amused Ben, and he laughed. The boy lowered his gloves and watched cautiously, but then joined in with an answering grin.
“That’s very efficient of her. Anything else?”
“Music, she’s always singing something or making me listen to something.” Mat whapped in a quick flurry of hits, and Ben contemplated this. He never would have guessed she was interested in such things, but how would such a topic have ever come up between them? And why was he so impressed and interested in it?
“Oh, and she hates lessons from the companions. Just Soren now, but before when we still had Los and Ruton, we had etiquette and deportment. How to walk and how to talk, how government works. So boring. Cara always made fun of them whenever she could.”
“What did she do?”
“She’d practice proper greetings in funny voices, and we’d make hats and sashes from paper and march in formation around the room. She’d salute the chairs and call them General Whats-is or Chancellor Whatever. She’s really funny.”
Mat had grown rather red in the face with his boxing efforts, and Ben decided to call it an afternoon. He shook off his mitts, helped the boy free his hands from the gloves, and then handed him a towel. What sort of fugitives would be spending free time learning protocol?
“Your sister is probably on her way. Why don’t you go over the climbing wall and give it a try? You did well.” Ben dismissed the boy with a firm handshake, and Mat took off to the apparatus, dodging pieces of equipment and the few officers using the facility that afternoon. Soloman Erdem strained over some weights in one corner, and Tyla Warn used a counterpoint ball in the other. Ben stood in the middle of the room and stretched, able to keep an eye on the boy and both his officers as well as the door Cara would probably enter in minutes. His shoulder was tight and a few pulls eased the tension.
As if on cue, the door opened and Cara entered, glancing around after thanking the officer who’d escorted her there. She wore her usual serviceable trousers, but instead of a long sleeved shirt, she had on a thin tank that revealed slim arms and draped over full curves. Well.
She nodded at him and then watched her brother clinging to the wall, stuck between holds as one foot scrabbled to find a perch. Soloman Erdem had noticed her enter and left behind his weights with a clang as he sped to her side. The young officer wore the department’s standard brief workout gear, and Ben made a note to review the dress code as soon as possible. Something more concealing was necessary. Cara responded to his effort at conversation with a few nods, but she looked between Mat and Ben at every opportunity. With a smile and a dip of her head, Cara broke off contact with Soloman.
She approached and raised an eyebrow. Ben reminded himself not to look lower than her nose. He didn’t want to notice her mouth or catch a close-up glimpse of the tops of her breasts.
“What’s Mat doing?”
“Experimenting with Gamaliel’s gravity.”
She nodded as she turned her head to check on her brother. He found himself glancing along the elegant curve of her neck and then venturing lower to take in the bit of shoulder her tank revealed. Stars, he never should have kissed her. He was obsessing about it. Last night he’d wasted nearly an hour trying to recall how she’d tasted.
With a smile, she stopped monitoring Mat who’d fallen on his rear after an unsuccessful reach for a hold, and returned her serious gaze to him, her mouth a tight line. She’d retreated back to her cool demeanor, so he guessed she might be regretting that kiss as much as he was. “How did he do?”
“He was very enthusiastic.” Ben tried to reconcile the woman who had played silly games with her brother to the self-contained person standing next to him. He’d already gotten to know the latter as well as was possible but the former intrigued him. Not in a sexual way of course; that sort of thing was completely out of bounds.
With a groan and a rattle of discarded weights, Soloman rose from the bench and flexed his arms and shoulders extravagantly. Cara turned her back on the younger man and peered at Ben from under lowered brows.
“And exactly how enthusiastically did he answer your questions?”
“He became talkative when I let him punch me.”
Her lips quirked, and she stared at him. “And what did you discover?”
“That you like to make paper hats and march around saluting the furniture.”
Her mouth fell open and pink blushed up her cheeks. “He told you that? I can’t believe it. What else?” She sounded agonized at the idea, and Ben remembered how many embarrassing things his own brother knew about him.
“That’s classified.” He tried to joke with her but she shook her head, crossed her arms over her chest, and turned away from him again. The unhappy tension in her body made him anxious. The longer they went without talking about it, the more uncomfortable he felt. “Cara, I wanted to tell you what happened in my place was—”
She hitched in a breath, and Ben kept trying to meet her gaze, but she obstinately refused to look at him. “It’s nothing I want to talk about. We need to go. Mat!”
His peripheral vision caught Mat flinch when she shouted and miss a foothold. He fell again and twisted on the ground to seek out his sister, his grey-blue eyes wide.
“Let’s go. Collect your things,” she called out to her brother and then glanced at him briefly. “Thank you for spending time with him. Good evening.”
Cara turned away.
“Cara, wait, I…” Ben trailed off as he watched her leave with Mat. What was he planning on saying to her anyway? She’d made it clear there was nothing between them and she was right.
With only an hour to spare before Mat returned from school, Cara decided to wash some of their clothing. Most of what they’d recovered from the crash reeked of acrid smoke, and she didn’t want their rooms to take on any of the odor. Chita had shown her the laundry room on their initial tour of the barracks so she made her way to the clean and spacious facility where she’d wasted at least ten minutes deciphering the instructions to the machine. Once she was sure how to proceed, she loaded their soiled garments into a hopper, selected the cycle she wanted, and hit the power key after allowing it to subtract a few marks from her personal account.
She supposed she could leave the machine during the cleaning cycle, but she and Mat had so few clothes, she didn’t want to take the risk of anything happening to them. Dragging a stool from near the door over to the machine, Cara settled herself on it after she checked the clothing again, and opened her datpad to continue her reading. She’d been bouncing back and forth between an epic fictional fantasy novel and a dry instructional guide to the flora and fauna of Gamaliel. At this point in her day, she was spending more time with the novel; the strange symbiotic relationships of the Gamaliel organisms that produced the cortiglow hormone no longer interested her as much as the exploits of a loyal knight desperate to rescue an endangered princess.
The knight had just barely escaped evisceration by an armored dragon with phaseflame breath, when the noise of some people entering the facility broke her away from the fantasy. She recognized Ben’s friend Lia, who was accompanied by a dark-haired and animated woman carrying a tiny baby wrapped in a bright green blanket. Lia lugged two baskets of jumbled clothing, and Cara took an anxious breath when they started her way wearing big smiles.
“Hello Cara! Isn’t it fun to do laundry? I refuse to pack dirty clothes in with clean, which is why I’m here.” Lia dropped the baskets on the floor and held out her hand in greeting. As Cara shook it, she introduced her companion as Moca Blakelock, the magistrate for the entire planet, and her new son, Typho. Cara used the appropriate honorifics, and Magistrate Blakelock pursed her lips.
“Sakes, I haven’t been treated so elegantly since I landed here a year ago. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Citi
zen Belasco.” With a sigh she adjusted her hold on her son, and the baby blinked his black eyes at the ceiling. He moved his hands against his blanket swaddling, and Cara was fascinated by how tiny his fingers were.
Cara wondered why the magistrate of an entire planet was doing her own laundry when there had to be some butlebot available. Soren had done theirs most of the time and had shaken his head with distaste whenever she’d undertaken the work. Cara liked the process of transforming rumpled and stained clothing into something fresh and wearable, and today she’d get to do that with no judgments. Maybe Moca Blakelock felt the same.
“So, Cara, Ben tells me you aren’t long for Gamaliel. Where are you headed next?” Lia placed her soiled clothing in neat rows in her chosen hopper.
“I’m not sure, it depends on when our companion might be well enough and when there’s an available ship.” Cara glanced away from Lia’s friendly gaze and peered at the machine. The steam cycle had just begun, so she was in for a few more questions. Typho gurgled, and she looked over at the baby, remembering all of Mat’s little baby sounds with a touch of melancholy.
The magistrate nodded her head as she used one hand to toss clothing at random into an available hopper. “Considering the fact that you weren’t planning on ever stepping foot on our planet, I hope your time here has been a pleasant as we can make it.”
“Your citizens have been very welcoming.”
“And your brother is attending our school? What does he think?” The magistrate’s sharp brown eyes held her gaze as she propped her baby up on her shoulder. Cara knew the question was a polite one but suspected the woman also wanted an outside opinion on her organization, which according to the congressional colonization bylaws, included overseeing all aspects of public education. This was in addition to sanitation, criminal justice, land grants, and all the other miscellany of turning an unregulated world into a safe and well-functioning part of the galaxy.
