by Calinda B
She sighed and let her head droop so the water could pour over her without her drowning.
Although considering she was about to walk back out into the desert to face the shriving, maybe drowning wasn’t such a bad idea.
“You can’t leave.”
She jerked her head up with a gasp, inhaling the dark, delicate fragrance of the flowers and a deeper lungful of the very scent she was trying to wash away.
And found herself trapped in Eril’s arms.
He’d come out of nowhere like some wishful dream she’d conjured. And her wayward mind had conjured him already naked. How wicked. Droplets of water beaded over the fern tattoo on his shoulder, glistening like titaniamonds but more lush and lickable.
She strained away from him. This time she didn’t have the excuse of being stuck in a canyon with a storm raging overhead. “Didn’t the shower light say already occupied?”
“Auxo has override. What if I needed to bring you more soap? Or a dose of cold, hard reality.”
She scowled at him. “I don’t need either one.”
“Right. Because you just slough off anything that touches you. Like you’re made of plysteel yourself.”
His jaw was clenched, but not as hard as the rest of him. He was angry and aroused all over. She was tempted to finally challenge him, to see how strong and dangerous he was when he wasn’t pretending to be something he wasn’t. But the floor was wet and slippery, and the flowers were so delicate. Something would get broken.
She’d been built to break things, but for once, she’d resist that urge.
In favor of another urge entirely.
Since he already had his arms around her, it was easy enough to match his hold. She threaded her arms low behind his back and clenched her hands on his bare ass. His hips jerked against hers in surprise, and she caught his jutting erection between her thighs.
She looked up at him between her water-spiked lashes.
His eyes were wide and gleaming silver in the green light of the little jungle. “You can’t stay in Rampakh,” he said roughly. “There’s nothing there.”
“That’s fine because I don’t want anything there. I’m waiting for the shriving.”
“That’s insane.”
“I’ll be insane, just like the others, if I don’t do this.”
“I won’t let you.”
“You don’t command me. No one does. Not anymore.”
“Shaxi—”
She covered his mouth with hers and stopped his breath with a searing kiss.
He stiffened—all over—but rather than pull away, he pulled her closer, his fingers gripping her arms with almost painful intensity. The thick head of his cock probed at her center where she was hotter and wetter than any jungle grotto.
She lifted her leg and anchored her calf behind his crooked knee, giving him access, and he dove into her with a groan that vibrated through her bones.
Desperation spiraled up in her, entwined with desire. She didn’t know what the shriving would scour from her, but she hoped this memory, this feeling at least would remain. If only she could drive him deep enough…
She took him in all the way, until his hips ground into hers and he thrust her into the curtain of flowers. Petals rained around them, sweet and musky and as bruised as their skin as they slipped to the pebbled floor.
He rolled so she was on top and his thick flesh sank even more fully into her. She tipped her head back, uncaring of the water sluicing around them. Breathing didn’t matter, only taking the pleasure as far as it would go, rising and impaling herself on his engorged shaft until they were both gasping.
She braced her hands on his shoulders, swearing she could feel the fine traceries of his tattoo burning under her palm, as if the lines would complete themselves in her flesh. When he turned his head to kiss her wrist, he sucked at her skin, hard enough she knew it would leave a mark, and she reveled in the small ache, something to help her remember. His hands cupped her breasts, thumbs flicking over her peaked nipples, just as he raised his hips into hers, and she forgot everything.
Her climax seized her from out of nowhere, and she bucked against him. His hands slipped down to frame her hips, holding her, guiding her, and then jacking up into her. The hot gush of his release bathed her from the inside as the water poured around her shoulders.
She collapsed on his chest, riding the heaves of his breath since she didn’t think she could be bothered to breathe on her own.
It was a long time before he levered her up. She made a soft noise of protest, but he only set her on her feet under the spray and washed away the remnants of their sex.
“Come with me.” His voice made it an order, but she wasn’t inclined to protest.
Wrapped together in her sheet, they dashed for her quarters.
“Good thing it’s the middle of the night,” he said as they locked the door behind them.
“Not our fault,” she said. “That shower is meant for indulgence.”
“The joys of living with l’auraly.” He brushed her wet hair back as he pressed her down to the bunk. “Why would you want to leave?”
“I don’t,” she said.
“Good.” He kissed her, his tongue circling her lips and tongue, teasing.
She meant to say she didn’t want to, but she still had to, but the distraction was too great.
They came together again and when they finished, they were both too tired to part. They lay with their legs entwined, the sheets damp and scented of the scarlet flowers.
She closed her eyes, her hand where he’d sucked a bruise to the surface of her wrist lying limp over the hard muscles of his chest.
He traced his fingers along the inner curve of her arm, and she shivered at the tantalizing sensation.
“You respond to my every touch as if it was the first time,” he mused.
“It is the first time, as far as I can remember,” she said.
“Hermitaj should have been outlawed long ago. What they did to you, to all the others, was wrong.” His voice was hoarse, angry.
She petted her fingers over his chest, soothing him. “It’s over.” For some of her fellows, over forever. Maybe for herself as well. Only the shriving would tell.
“But there are still others as bad.”
His despairing tone made her tilt her head to look up at him.
He was holding a small device, its screen flashing through some algorithm faster than she could decipher.
“What’s that?” Unease ticked down her spine.
“Never mind. Just go to sleep, and dream of something sweet.” He kissed her forehead and let the device fall on his chest.
It touched her wrist and gave her an almost imperceptible shock.
She started to curl her hand back but her eyes were already falling shut.
***
When she awoke, he was still beside her, with one arm thrown over his head and his face turned toward her so his soft breathing ruffled her hair.
She stared at him, memorizing the severe lines of his face that had relaxed but not disappeared in sleep. She wondered what he must have looked like as a boy, before that other woman had used him for her mission and broken him. Certainly the harsh grooves beside his mouth and the furrow between his brows would not have been there, but she thought his lips would have been as gently parted as they were now, and the dark sweep of his lashes would have been as delicately stubby.
A pang in her chest made her touch her breast. The ache was deeper than her tender nipples, though. Her heart.
He had done something to her. She wasn’t sure what, but he wanted her to stay, and somehow he made her want to stay too.
Love. The l’auralya had implied the emotion had its own power to bind, to bend wills, to rule the mind and body.
No wonder the qva’avaq would make such a potent weapon. And she understood why nothing would stop those who wanted to control it.
But she could not aspire to love—it would have no place for her until she finished
her last mission. The Asphodel would be on its way soon, safe among the stars. Already, the thrum of the engines vibrated through the bulkhead, a restlessness not unlike her own, one machine to another. But not for long. The shriving would strip away what Hermitaj had done to her and give her back what had been taken: her freedom, her belief in her own humanity, her soul.
Only when she was complete in herself could she hope to become part of something or someone else.
Quietly she rose, disentangling herself from Eril’s slack limbs. He mumbled a protest, but when she folded a corner of the sheet over him, he nestled down with a sigh.
She smiled to herself and then realized she was watching him sleep, as he had watched her. She shook her head at her own whimsy.
From the sonic unit, she pulled her worn Hermitaj uniform. She dressed and donned her hazer. That was all she had come with; that was all she would take.
Well, not all.
She paused one last time at the bedside, looking down. Her fingers ached to feather over his hair, his chest, his kiss, just once more.
But if she roused him, he would try to stop her.
So she would take the memory of their time together and let that be the anchor that held her to the world when the winds came for her.
Without glancing back again, she left.
Chapter 16
He woke in slow stages, breathing the perfume of crushed flowers, sex, and Shaxi. He didn’t want to let go of his dreams. Since the night he’d watched his parents tortured to death, he had resigned himself to never sleeping very deeply, coming awake repeatedly through darkest hours in a burst of fear, appalled at his own vulnerability.
Maybe he could learn to sleep through the night if he had his own innocent warrior to watch over him.
He reached out a hand and found only emptiness.
The unexpectedness made him sit up, but he wasn’t worried. She’d probably just gone to the lav.
But the unlit light over the door said no one was there. His prickling senses told him he was alone in the room. Maybe she’d just gone to the galley for some of her favorite dessert. Maybe she’d be returning any moment with cold berries and warm cream.
No, he knew she was gone.
He pushed out of her bunk and jammed himself into his clothes, still damp from where he’d stripped them in the shower, already running for the cargo bay. The chronometer in one of the comm screens he rushed by said it was early morning, ship’s time. He’d only been asleep a couple hours.
More than long enough for her to be out of reach.
Which should have been impossible. The phase tuner had broken through the last layer of Hermitaj encryption. He’d been able to send her to sleep with a word. And yet somehow she’d still negated the compulsion he’d left in her to stay with the Asphodel. What had he done wrong?
Besides trying to program her to his will.
He skidded into the cargo bay, still barefoot, boots in hand.
The runabout was gone.
He slapped his palm over the comm. “Captain.”
There was a pause, then Deynah’s voice, cracked with irritation. “Trying to get my ship off the ground here, auxo, before Moirai realizes we tricked them. What is it?”
“Unauthorized exit. The runabout is gone.”
“Shaxi took it.”
Eril let out a slow, calming breath. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Let me rephrase. I gave it to her. The thing was beat to scrap anyway, thanks to your driving. Couldn’t have her walking to Rampakh with the storm coming.”
“You shouldn’t have let her go.”
“That’s the job I gave you, auxo. If you couldn’t stop her, what makes you think I could?”
“Because you’re the captain?” Eril bit out the words.
“Doesn’t make me a god.”
That was the true root of his fury, Eril knew. He should have been able to command Shaxi.
“I’ll take the other runabout,” he told the captain. “I’ll have her back by—”
“No. She made her choice, and we’ll honor it.”
“Captain, she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean she’s wrong.”
He could hijack the runabout—by the thrice-tangled sheerways, he’d take the Asphodel herself—kill whoever tried to stop him, but he wasn’t sure he could take them all, not and get to Shaxi before the next wave of the storm.
The captain’s voice gentled. “You took your shot with her, Morav, but now we’re out of options. We’re tracking another EM pulse—the biggest yet—within the hour. So unless you’re telling me you’re walking after her, I have work to do. And so do you.”
But he hadn’t taken his shot, Eril knew. He’d hesitated, watching and hoping he’d find some other option besides ending the threat embodied in the l’auraly twins.
The captain was right: he had his mission and he’d waited too long. If he’d killed the girls during the attack at the cantina, he would be with Shaxi now…
Except if he’d acted then on the underwriters’ merciless orders, Shaxi would’ve been another of his victims. He would never have tasted her innocence, never have lost himself in the temptation of her body, never have known someone trying so hard to change what she’d been made to be.
“Apologies for the interruption, Captain,” he said. “Auxo out.”
Deynah started to speak, but Eril cut the comm.
There was nothing left to say.
***
Empty Rampakh was even more creepy when she was alone.
After pushing the runabout to top speed, she’d made the ghost town in good time, but the sky had darkened and thickened like old blood as she halted in front of the curtain wall.
“Due to rising levels of electromagnetic interference, the portal is sealed until further notice,” the automated security system informed her. “Thank you for visiting Rampakh.”
Shaxi grimaced. If she’d been trying to outrun the storm and seeking shelter, that message would have been very annoying. Just as well she wanted the storm to get her.
However, she wasn’t stupid enough to stand out in the sand and spit into the wind. She needed to control her exposure, courting the right amount of electrical chaos to affect her coding. Fortunately, Kala had told her about the override for the recalcitrant wall.
Shaxi climbed out of the runabout and approached the comm pad beside the portal. The wind tugged at the hem of her sand-robe, as if urging her to come and play.
“Soon,” she murmured. Already the tingle of electromagnetism was tracing up and down her spine like Eril had…
No. She couldn’t think about that.
She pushed up the sleeve of the sand-robe and her combat jacket, ready to flatten her palm on the comm panel. She’d need direct access to the wall’s systems to issue the override code.
Pausing, she stared at the faint bruise Eril had left when he sucked at the pulse point on her inner wrist while she overrode him on the shower floor.
In the center of the blushed ghost his lips had left was a tiny wound. Just a nick. She wouldn’t have even noticed it.
Except it marked the port to her implants.
Someone had forced access to her programming.
Instantly, she ran an internal review. The analysis had once been part of her daily routine, but with no link to Hermitaj, there’d been no updates to receive and no one to take her messages. So she’d stopped the pointless exercise, hating the reminder that she was alone.
Hating too the reminder that she was only half human.
It took her a long moment to run the analysis, since it hadn’t been done in awhile. Other than the expected decay of unmaintained status parameters and the warning messages of data packets not sent or received, everything appeared to be operating within standard margins.
Until she’d joined the Asphodel. The incursion of unknown code matching itself to her native security encryption was so subtle she hadn’t noticed at t
he time, wouldn’t have noticed it even if she’d been running her daily logs. Only now, suspicious, did she see it.
Her vision darkened as she tracked the accelerated progress of the mal code, comparing it to her chronometer of recent events.
At the canyon pool. In the shower. Both places with water, alien to Khamaseen.
Both places with Eril, an enemy to her.
Fury blasted through her, hot and stinging as the sand that whirled up with the first shriek of the storm. But she made no sound as she punched in the override sequence and returned to the runabout.
She powered the vehicle through the portal, just squeezing between the doors, as the sandstorm slammed into the wall.
The portal creaked and groaned against the weight of wind and electromagnetic dust, but she didn’t look back as she drove toward the hangar. She couldn’t let the shriving scour her now, not when she didn’t know what malicious code had been added to her. What would be left when she blanked her Hermitaj programming? Who would she be?
What had Eril made her?
Half blinded, she almost missed the darkened hangar, and she barely steered between the scrap in the yard without crashing. Had the static dust interfered with her ocular implant? Had finding the mal code triggered some breakdown?
She stopped the runabout in the middle of the hangar and bowed her head to touch her clouded eyes.
They were wet. Her pulse stuttered in alarm. But when she held her hands in front of her, her fingers weren’t bloody. Instead, they glistened with a clear liquid.
Tears. The word came to her, not from her onboard database which had no entry for the term, but from an older memory, from a time she’d hoped would be laid bare by the shriving winds to reveal who she’d been.
Mama had said she couldn’t have pixberries for breakfast.
“But the season is too short, Mama! We should eat them all day, every day, before they’re gone!”
“There will be more, later. I promise.” A sob, as if her mother too knew time was short. “They’ll wait for you, my sweet girl.”
