by Celeste Raye
“It’s all part of cards,” the Habbin said in a genial tone, but there was a lethal current flowing across the table now. “Don’t be a sore loser. It’s not polite.”
The man glared at Clara. She stared right back at him refusing to drop her eyes. Bluffing was what she had done, and it was indeed all part and parcel of the game.
Renall’s voice cut in. “Well-played game, all of you. Dealer, clear your table.”
Clara gathered credit chips with steady fingers. The man, sensing he was outnumbered, began a slow retreat. The Habbin and Borgite wandered to the stage to ogle the goods on display. Renall hit a button and the walls, transparent but solid and strong as steel, that made up her cage, descended and the table began to lower until they came to a rest below the gambling floor and on the Lower.
Renall waited until she gathered her credits to raise the walls and step out. He spoke curtly, “That is all. Table up.”
She stepped out quickly. The table slid upward, ready for a fresh dealer and set of players.
Renall eyed her. He was angry, and it showed in the way his lips had gone flat and his eyes narrow. He said, “That was too risky.”
“I had him. I obviously did, as he folded.”
Renall’s long hand yanked through his hair. “You could have cost me a lot of credits.”
Her chin came up. “But I didn’t.”
His chin came out. His eyes flared darker. His nostrils quivered. “I don’t care that you didn’t. Play a safer bet.”
“Then I’d run the risk of not winning larger pots. You said win well. I just did. I took in ten thousand credits on that game.” And that meant five hundred credits for her. Added to the rest of what she had made that shift, she had a pretty little pot.
Renall didn’t bend at the mention of the sum like she thought he would. “Listen to me; I won’t argue this one with you. If you lose a massive amount of credits because you choose to bluff a hand, then you will have to pay back the losses.”
“No I won’t.” her temper hit nuclear heat. The insufferable jerk! ”I am a dealer. Sometimes we lose. That is the way the game is played. If I bluff a hand and lose, then I lose. It’s the chance you take, and if you try docking my earnings, I’ll lose every game until I bankrupt your entire hall!”
Renall’s square white teeth clenched. “What did you just say to me?”
“You heard me. You keep finding new ways to take my earnings, and so far I haven’t said anything about it, but this is where I draw the line. I am already stuck with three indentures I didn’t ask for and the debt for my mother’s passage, on a body ship no less instead of a much cheaper passage, and now you want to…”
He got closer. He stared into her face. “You find me to be unfair?”
“I find you to be an asshole!”
Her heartbeat sped up. That lust she always felt every single time she got too close to him hit, weakening her knees and resolve. How he could manage to excite her so was anyone’s guess.
Renall hissed in a breath. He muttered, “Of all the impossible…”
He stepped closer. Their bodies collided. Her head jerked up. Their eyes met. Her lips parted and then his mouth was on hers. His lips, hard and warm and soft too, took over her senses, sending them reeling in a thousand different directions at once. Clara sagged against him, feeling the strength of his body and the sure and hard flesh below his suit.
Her breath caught in her throat as the kiss deepened, triggering lust so fiery she wanted to rip his clothes away, and hers as well, and make love to him then and there.
Clara shoved away from Renall’s tall body. Her senses were still in overdrive. Her lips puffed and plumped from his kisses. She stared at him, bemused by both the kiss and his expertise at it. She was equally confused by her willingness to kiss him.
He was an alien. He was a creature that held the keys to her future in his tight grip, and he also held the fate of her family in that same grasp.
She knew, better than anyone, that she could trust nobody. She managed to drag air into her aching lungs. “Don’t think that kissing me will get me to see things your way; it won’t.”
He nodded. “I was just about to tell you that you shouldn’t assume my kissing you meant you and I were in agreement.” His fingers plucked the chips from her hands. He counted them quickly, shifted a five hundred credit to her hand. Then he turned on his heel and walked away!
Frustrated and pissed at herself for kissing Renall, Clara took off down a long hallway. Her chambers were situated at the top of a staircase, but she didn’t take it. Instead, she went to the nearest exit door and stepped out of it. The sky, a dazzling orange-blue that came across the heavens at night, was filled with the cold prickling light of millions of stars. Clara stared up at them as she breathed in long gasps of fresh air. Her fingers clutched the credits. Her heart throbbed painfully. Her emotions tangled and ached. Air rushed into her lungs with so much force and oxygen, she felt dizzy.
Homesickness hit. A sharp cramp of missing everything she had ever known set in and stayed. Old Toronto, with its underground lakes and long blank corridors, its crowded below earth tenements and the illegal gambling and the tension, her family and everyone else she knew was so far from her reach now.
She straightened; her eyes watered but the tears didn’t fall. She’d had to take that chance on that last hand. She had a very expensive passage to pay for. Renall had first put her into a position of having to pay that passage and then he’d condemned her for doing what she had to do. He was impossible and an asshole, so why had she kissed him?
She didn’t have an answer to that. She entered the complex again, using her thumbprint to gain access to the higher levels where her chamber was. She passed a few Gurleys hurrying toward the stairs and their shifts, and a few carders as well. She nodded and kept walking. Despite their shared living and work arrangements, none of them were close. Life was too tenuous and the future too uncertain for friendships. People were always too busy watching their backs to trust anyone else to watch it for them.
It had been different back home. Alliances were often the only thing that kept someone safe, or out of the rasp of the Capos that prowled the districts, always on the lookout for captives and lawbreakers. Of course, there were people who would trade a person they were close to for their own benefit. It had happened to her, and so she understood, but still, she missed having someone to confide in and to just hang around with as well.
Her life had become a sterile thing made up of tables and sleep, and the occasional walk outside, and it chafed at her being, abraded her soul, and battered her heart. The only thing that kept her going was the hope she could get her family back, and to do that, she had to take risks and make credits—lots of them.
Her chamber door slid open. Clara stepped inside with a new set of worries. What happened after her debts to Renall were paid off and her family’s debts too? They could leave Orbitary and be free, but where would they go? They could never go back to Old Toronto, and she had no idea what else was out there either. She was not even sure she wanted to know.
Her eyes took in her chamber. It was sparse and utilitarian. The bed was a wide thing and raised on a short dais. The drawers of the small dresser held the clothes she had been given upon arrival. There was a narrow window that looked out over a loading dock and a small strip of green belt, and a chair and table. A wall held a panel that had been keyed for her voice and DNA. She opened it and stowed the credits inside the small safe; a smile tried to come up at the sight of those credits but wouldn’t. Not even that could make her feel better just then.
Nothing else.
She took a seat and hit a button on the table. A voice answered, and she ordered her solitary dinner, then clicked the off switch and sat there staring down at her hands.
Loneliness swamped her. She knew, on one level, that that loneliness was probably what had caused her to kiss Renall. She was starving for contact, something deeper than the daily interfaces she had becom
e accustomed to. That had to be it.
She leaned back in the chair, trying to convince herself of that as the minutes clicked by. There was a light tap at her door, and she went to it, thinking it was her dinner.
It wasn’t. It was Renall.
Her body tensed. “Yes?”
His face wore an expression she hadn’t seen before, but he quickly smoothed that expression away. “Clara, I’m sorry that I condemned you.”
She studied his face. Was he sorry he had kissed her too? She wanted, so badly, to be sorry that she had kissed him, but she wasn’t. In fact, she was really considering kissing him again, which just served to puzzle her further. “I understand why you did.”
He asked, “May I come in?”
Say no. Inviting him in is the dumbest thing you could ever do. She cleared her throat. “I suppose.” What? Had she just said that? It seemed like she had, and he took that invite and entered. The door closed and they stood regarding each other. Clara’s defenses slammed home. She wrapped her arms around her middle and asked, “Was there something else?’
Probably a bad question but it was too late to take that back.
Renall’s hands tugged at the tunic of his suit. He looked away then back at her. He finally spoke. “I know we don’t have any reason to trust each other, or even like each other.”
Her heart sped along. “I would have to agree with that statement.”
He smiled. A real smile. It lifted his cheekbones and lit his remarkable eyes. It changed his entire face, and Clara gaped at him, bemused by the sudden lightness she saw in him.
He said, “Me too. Look, I don’t intend to run this place forever. I have other plans.”
“Do you?” Her spirits plummeted. She had no plans, and if he was there to tell her he was selling the hall, where would that leave her? “Are you selling the hall then?”
“Not now.” His hands dropped to his sides. “I will, eventually. I…I intend to have my own world, well, a shared one with my brothers. That takes much in the way of credits and alliances.”
Hell yes it did. Her mouth dropped open. She blinked a few times. “I see. That’s…” Insane. A whole world? That was beyond mind-boggling. It was also a tricky thing to accomplish in a Federation like the one that aligned some planets with others and against more. She managed to ask, “Is that your…is that why you were angry? You thought I risked too much and that loss that could have happened could have undone some part of your plan.”
“Yes.”
At least he was honest. She had to give him that. She did understand suddenly, and she regretted her action too, but at the same time, she felt a slight frisson of resentment. She asked, “Surely you know that the larger the hand, the easier it will be for me to win my mother’s passage and then for us to win the rest of our family from first serio-max and then your debt. Naturally, that is a large incentive to take more risks.”
“I agree.” His lips, those kissable and clever lips, twisted into a grimace. “I just don’t know what to do about it. The other dealers are indentured for a set number of years. You alone are not. I know you know that and that the terms of your service here are private for that reason. I find myself in a situation where I do not quite know what to do.”
Me too. I don’t know what to do about how I feel about you. Because I want you, and I damn sure can’t trust you, and I am pretty sure you don’t want me. I also have no idea of who started that kiss, and if you regret it. If you wish it had never happened. She cleared her mind of those thoughts. “I see.”
Renall said, “I have an alliance. I must stay in it. So I also must apologize for kissing you. You see, I was not thinking properly.”
Her eyes closed and opened. Hurt came in. “You have an alliance?”
He nodded. “I do. I am already promised to the female child of a ruler of one of the planets in the system I shall be private planeting in. Their laws forbid sexual congress between betrothed, no matter whom that congress may be between. Also, they consider kissing sexual congress. So I have broken that agreement in part, and I have to ask you now to say nothing of it. I would rather forget the whole thing.”
“Me too.” She would. “I don’t want to cause you any…whatever.” Her pulse lowered and slowed. Renall had just made it very clear that he did not want her and that he could never be with her either. Not unless he wanted to toss away something of the magnitude of a private planet. No way was he going to choose a carder he barely knew over that, and she was not sure she could blame him for that.
Renall nodded. Relief was clear on his face. “Thank you.”
He headed for the door and out of it. Clara stood there, arms still wrapped around her body, thinking hard.
The loneliness came back. Her heart hurt. Her life felt gray and colorless and as stale and flat as the air being pumped through the room by the re-circulators. Another tap at the door sounded, and her heart sprang back into life. Was it him? Had he come back to say… “Oh for pity’s sake,” she muttered. “You really need to have an encounter with someone. Anyone. Release some of the tension so you stop mooning over him like an idiot.”
She pressed the button for the door and took her dinner tray. She settled at the table, staring at the food. Back in Old Toronto, she would have killed for that meal. Fresh fruit. Real bread and not just nutrition-loaf. A wedge of sky cheese, a porous and soft cheese made with the milk of goats found on Orbitary’s outer edges. A thin slice of protein shaped in an appealing way and covered with carb-rich gravy flavored with spices. A glass of wine made from actual roots and hanging fruits.
Everything tasted like dust. Everything around her felt hollow and insubstantial. Clara let tears come, her head bowing as she chewed and sipped and wished with all her heart that she and her family had never been caught and separated, and that she had never met Renall—because it was already very clear that he was doing a number on her emotions and that was one more thing she simply could not afford.
Chapter 6 - Renall
Renall stormed down the hall and into the large office whose wide windows looked down onto the floor of the hall. Instead of seeing a packed house and money, all he could see was Clara.
Kissing her had been foolish. He had just risked everything he had planned. Everything, and not just for himself, but also for his family. Talon, Marik, and Jeval would be furious if they found out.
Then again, they didn’t have the same restrictions upon them that he had on his shoulders. Their betrothals were of massive importance, of course, but their bride families were not of the same mind about purity that his bridal family was. They were free to do whatever they liked while he was bound by a restrictive and archaic belief system that often left his flesh aching.
But until that moment when Clara had stepped into his line of vision, he had not had any true regret over that deal. Now he did, and plenty of it. He was also having trouble recalling exactly why that pact he had made was such a necessary thing. The longing to kiss her again, and far more, was so sharp-edged that he had nearly taken her into his arms there in her chamber.
The only reason he had not was because he was not sure how she had felt about his kissing her. Oh, true, she had responded, but humans could kiss and have sex as they liked, with little thought to lifetime mating. They lived too short of a life to care about those things. They were hasty and rash and driven by impulse.
Much as he was just then.
That he could be so lacking in control of his body irritated him. The erection straining the front of his suit made it very clear that he was, indeed, losing his grip on his emotions and body.
He tensed as an interface call came on. He hit the toggle and barked out a harsh greeting. Talon appeared on the screen. “Renall, bad news.”
Just what he needed. “What is it?”
Talon said, “We’re on the way back. We came too close to getting stripped and then we somehow had to outrun the Gorlites.”
The Gorlites? Renall’s teeth clenched. The Gorlites were w
ithout a homeland; their planet had been imploded centuries before. They wandered; taking over whatever ships they could when the one they were on was failing. That they’d tried to take Talon’s had likely been a fatal mistake on their part, but it was a safe bet that now Talon would have to fly stealth all the way back or risk running afoul of any of the Gorlites who were aware he had taken out one of their pilfered ships. They were a vicious race, forever parasitic and outlawed, and they fiercely protected what they thought of as theirs, and they sought revenge like some sought oxygen. “Be safe.”
Talon said, “I will.” He paused, “Renall we may have a larger problem too.”
“Oh?” How could they have a problem larger than the Gorlites?
Talon said, “I found something on the ship. A crypto file.”
“So?” Renall frowned.
Talon’s face took on a look even grimmer than the one it had worn a second ago. “Renall, it was a file that got caught in one of our sweeps. We were sorting, on the day before the Borgites showed up. This file, it doesn’t match any of the women we found or rescued. In fact, according to the women on this ship, there were only twelve women aboard.’
Uneasiness filtered through him. “Maybe the crew hustled one aboard in secret.”
Talon’s face darkened. “It’s worse than that.”
“How so?”
Confused and on edge, Renall stared at the interface while Talon chewed at his lips. Finally, Talon spoke. “The crypto file is for a high-ranking government official’s daughter. One who had not just a mind wipe, but a complete remake of her memories.”
Renall said, “So where is she?”
Talon said, “I don’t know. She could be any of the women we have or the ones who died. We have to do a spinal match, take fluid. There’s only one way to do that.”
“Remove their chips and use the fluid. So do that.”
Talon hesitated. He glanced around the empty chamber in which he stood. His voice dropped even lower. “Aside from running the risk of having them run away, there’s a larger risk.”
