by K. Gorman
Her jaw tightened. “It’s faster, then.”
“Yes.”
“Just the one?”
“Yes. It’s almost in hailing range for live feed.”
Her insides turned into a stiff, tense board. She took a breath, squared her jaw, and held out a hand. “Help me up?”
The bridge had been tidied. She caught a hint of antiseptic and winced, remembering her episode in the pilot’s seat. It looked clean enough now, though no one was actually sitting in it. Cookie sat in the seat to its left, his three laptops active in front of him. Soo-jin had her regular seat by the sensor station, her legs curled up in front of her with a netlink in her hand, though her stare focused on the screen in front of her. She glanced over when Karin walked in, and sat up in her seat.
“Hey—you’re awake!”
“Yes. Sort of.” Tugging the blanket tighter around her, she wobbled as she completed the turn and then, giving her balance a quick, pessimistic assessment, leaned against the wall. “What’s up?”
Marc paused behind her, and Soo-jin’s gaze lifted to give him a quick, critical look. “I assume you’ve heard about the scout.”
“I have. How long we got?”
“Three minutes, give or take.” Cookie looked up from his laptop, and she noticed the coffee packet next to him. “What’s our strategy?”
She resisted the twitch that threatened to take her mouth. Why’s everyone looking at me?
Maybe because she’d been coming up with the crazy ideas lately.
“What do you think, Marc?” She twisted her head to regard him. “Just one scout?”
“Let’s hear them out. I think we owe them that much, at the very least.”
Yeah, she could live with that.
“Cookie changed the idents again, but I doubt that will fool them.”
“It won’t,” Marc said.
“I’m still gonna play that card. I’ve worked too hard to throw it away now.”
Karin glanced at the clock as they bickered. A minute and a half had passed. Not a lot of time left—and something had been bothering her.
“What did you find out about Nomiki?” she asked. “You ran a search, didn’t you?”
Both men went silent.
Cookie, who had much less of a poker face, shot a guilty look at Marc. “Wasn’t me. I didn’t tell her.”
“I did.” Soo-jin lifted an eyebrow from across the room. “If you guys are going to snoop on her sister, at least tell her.”
“She didn’t tell us about the book!”
“Yes, she did. Besides, that’s private—you were snooping.”
“Yeah, well—”
“I don’t give a shit,” Karin said. “What did you find?”
Cookie paused, mid-sentence. Again, his gaze went to Marc.
“Not much, honestly,” Marc rumbled. “Just an article mentioning her. A couple police scan transcripts.”
“Where?”
“Belenus.”
She frowned. “And they mentioned her specifically?”
“Someone like her, doing a White Lion job.”
The White Lion. A criminal organization from the inner worlds. Their card had been on her desk when they’d gone to her apartment.
“So, we go there next?” she asked.
“We don’t know for sure,” Marc said. “Might be better to pull into a station and let Cookie datamine some more.”
“Yeah. Maybe we can find some White Lion people on the station.”
Marc snorted. “Right. Plan a meeting with organized crime with an Alliance wanted poster on your head. I think you need more sleep.”
“You’re definitely right. Though…” She squinted at the rest of them. “I’m pretty sure we all do.”
“Well, if this scout doesn’t arrest us, I’m sure we can catch up on the way to… where is the next station?” Marc, level with her now, lifted an eyebrow in her direction.
She closed her eyes. “Pickering. Belter bar. A week out, maybe?”
He gave her a smile, then clapped a hand on her shoulder. “Knew I hired you for a reason. I—”
The comms tone cut him off. They all jumped. His hand slid away, leaving a warm impression where it had been.
“Shit.” Cookie pulled himself straight in his seat. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Marc laughed. “You got this, cuz. Stay cool.”
“Right. Stay cool. Stay cool.” He sucked in a breath, held it, and reached a single arm over his laptops and onto the navigation dash, plunking the call button with a single outstretched finger.
The screen shivered as the tone cut off. No video, but they heard the rustle of someone on the other side, and a muttering of voices.
Then a woman’s voice came on. “Is this the Nemina?”
Karin froze as she spoke, a little part of her unwinding.
Don’t you remember what we used to be?
“Er—no.” Cookie cleared his throat. “This is the Neuna. Common mistake. How can we help you?”
Silence came from the other side. By this time, Karin had taken a step forward. The floor seemed to bend under her.
A second later, the screen shivered, switched to black. A crackle of static ran down its middle.
Then, the oversized face of her sister stared down from the holoscreen, under lit so harshly by the light of her dash that her skin appeared almost white.
“Oh, holy shit.” Cookie pushed himself further upright, as if it would get him away from the screen.
Karin stumbled into the back of his chair. The blanket fell in a pile at her feet as she swayed, clutching the headrest. “Miki?”
Her hand shook as she leaned forward. Tears pricked the corners of her eyes, but she forced herself to stare through them.
Nomiki’s eyes switched up to her. A brief smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, then vanished. Her sister’s eyebrow quirked up.
“Little sister,” she said, the smile returning. “After all I’ve taught you—is this what you call hiding?”
BLOOD TIES
BOOK THREE
Prologue
The ruins sat up the hill, stark, weathered, rough sides tinted a dusty gray against the midday sun. Yellow grass flowered in the fields around them, waist-high and dry as a bone, bending in ripples from the soft wind. The air smelled hot to her. Scorched. Already, the skin on her forearms was burning under the sun.
All her dreams were taking place in summer, lately. And they were getting more and more lucid.
A good sign, perhaps, if Nomiki was right and Seirlin had been taking their memories.
Karin looked down at herself, lifting her hands. Twelve years old, she’d guess. Skinny. Stick-thin, really—she and Nomiki had both been that way. Still were, in some ways, but she suspected the constant treatments had done a number on them growing up. Hard to put on weight when one was sick every other week.
Jeans covered her legs all the way down to her ankles, worn and faded from use. The T-shirt had a bright orange base, a navy blue trim, and fit her a bit like a parachute. The compound had bought them in bulk, single-sizes shared between all the kids to save money. She and Nomiki fit the smaller scale of the twelve-to-eighteen-year-old lots, but it felt like her sister wore hers better. As if it, in its bagginess, fit her style.
On Karin, it just looked large and cheap.
The wind rippled the grass again, this time pulling a chunk of her hair to plaster it against the front of her face. She raised her hand to move it back behind her ear, then froze.
Her tattoo stared back at her, ugly and incongruent on her pale skin.
The compound had joined a short-but-proud line of organizations that had tattooed its victims. Later, when she’d had the wherewithal to research it, she would find out just how awful and off-base it had been against the other historical contexts. Hers, a play on both the Ourobouros and Eurynome myths, featured an upside-down egg encircled by a snake that ate its own tail.
A shadow passed overhead, distracting her. She squ
inted, looking up.
Then, in the corner of her eye—she was being watched.
Nomiki, thirteen, stood in the shadows of the nearest copse of trees, staring. With the harsh light of the sun reflected in the yellow grasses only feet from her, the underlighting caught her stiff, half-hostile expression in perfect detail. The orange shirt tilted on her neck, falling halfway down her thigh in its shapelessness. With the jeans underneath, the passiveness of her face, and the way her hair parted evenly on either side of her face, she looked almost like a boy.
A van door slammed shut, the noise carrying up the hill. They both turned to look. Beyond the white-washed brick wall of the compound, the dusty, navy blue roof of a delivery van could be seen. A man walked across the lot, a tablet in his hand. As she watched, Dr. Sasha came out to meet him, her lab coat shining in the sun.
The shadow passed again, this time over the parking lot. Neither the delivery man nor the doctor looked up at it, but Karin did. A hawk, larger than normal for this area, wheeled overhead, riding the currents. A dusty tan color, its feathers flecked with slivers and darts of darker hues, it moved in a lazy pattern. As it passed back over the tree growth beyond the compound’s gate, its wings flapped and its head turned back before it vanished past the branches. A few seconds later, it reappeared, soaring back across the compound.
Nomiki watched it, too, and a frown drew down her eyebrows. She’d shifted, angling her body like some of the deer Karin had seen around the area, as if she were ready to run. Her eyes dropped and met Karin’s stare, holding it.
Then, in a flash of movement, she was gone.
Chapter One
The ship hung in space, a small speck on the horizon magnified into a visible, examinable shape on the bridge’s main holoscreen. A cousin to the Nemina, the approaching Fallon scout shared many of her features—a pointed, angular nose with splayed front windows, a chunky, practical body, flared wings for atmo cruising. Even the propulsion gave off similar readings. In the past half hour of watching it approach, they’d busied themselves with analyzing it.
Its arrival hadn’t been a secret. Their outboard sensors had spotted it more than three thousand kilometers away. In space, with the enormous open distances and current scanning technologies, few things could take them by surprise.
Except, just recently, Fallon had taken them by surprise.
As the system’s older stepchild, and the Alliance’s foil after it had pulled out of its folds some twenty years earlier, the Fallon empire held the best military in both manpower and technology proportional to its population—tech which Karin Makos had been enjoying for the past month and a half. Her current ship, the Nemina, had come out of the empire’s large fleet decommissioning two years ago, and although it had been stripped of its weapons and imperial comms, it still carried an above-average kick in its engine.
Enough to out-accelerate an Alliance cruiser, as they’d recently discovered.
Of course, that in itself wasn’t strange. Cruisers were enormous, and the Nemina…
Well, she was a scout. Fast and light, devoid of major armaments. Just like the approaching Fallon ship.
Her sister was on it. Nomiki, whom she had spent the better part of the last two months searching for. After all this time, and all the struggles she’d gone through since the first Shadow attack, she was going to see her again. It felt too optimistic to be true, as if she were still in one of her dreams.
But then, she wasn’t exactly in top form. Everything felt like a dream right now, from the haloed glare of the monitors to the tingling sensation that kept pricking the underside of her skin. She must have dozed off since the call. The ship was closer on the screen than she remembered from a few minutes ago—but not so close for the difference to be obvious.
“So,” Soo-jin said from across the room, breaking the silence. “Your sister. Is she always homicidal, or is that a part-time gig?”
Karin winced. Though both she and her sister had been birthed as products of a genetic and psychological experimentation program, the design of Nomiki’s program had run a lot deadlier than her own magical light-producing capabilities, and some of the memories they shared had a lot more blood and death in them than she preferred.
The immediate emotions associated with those images had diminished over time, but that didn’t stop the flashes that ran across her mind whenever the topic came up. Oddly, they didn’t portray the first time she’d seen Nomiki kill someone, but the third or fourth time, after they’d been well into their escape. The picture of her sister ahead of her in a darkened hallway—the pale white of her nightgown pulling at her senses like a ghost in the dim, green-tinged shine of an emergency exit sign, one half of a modified and sharpened set of scissors clutched hard in her bloodied grip—seemed to meld and shift together with another time when they’d killed a man by the side of the highway. Different place, different clothes, same tool.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll vouch for you.”
“Thanks. I’d appreciate not dying.”
Marc wandered into the room on the tail end of the sentence, a mug in his right hand and an eyebrow lifting. Streaks of dust crossed the front of his loose T-shirt at odd angles, a result of him moving cargo around the ship. Due to the similarities in ship design, they would need to alternate airlocks to avoid touching the wings together—which meant the Nemina’s little-used aft airlock would see some action. As a scrounger, she really only needed one airlock to dock with space stations and other travel hubs. Last Karin had looked, they’d piled the stores from their second-last visit to Caishen in its hallway nook, complete with cargo netting to keep it in place.
Not so great for welcoming guests aboard.
Cookie, Marc’s cousin and resident tech head, walked in behind him. The screens reflected in his eyes as he scanned them, his usual grinning, casual expression tightened by the frown on his brow. The engine analysis still took up the corner of the screen, and his eyes narrowed on it for a few seconds. “So, how deadly is she?”
“Extremely,” she said.
“Could she take out Marc?”
“With her pinky. Sorry, Marc.” She tipped her head back to glance up at his face.
He hovered at the flank of her chair, keeping a hand’s breadth of distance between them. “None taken. I’m hardly a badass.”
“You’re a veteran. Don’t sell yourself short. I’ve seen you fight.”
He blew out a huff of air. “As I recall, you took out the last Shadow we faced together.”
“Yeah, well, I’m magic.”
“I was referring to the one you bludgeoned with a flashlight.” He leaned forward, brows knitting together at the ship on the screen. “That could hold over twenty people, you know.”
“It could,” Soo-jin said. “But it doesn’t. We’ve scanned.”
His jaw moved again, the muscles going rigid in his cheek. The tendons in his neck tightened, more prominent in her angle of view. Karin lifted a hand to her dashboard and reopened a window on the screen with her finger. “The Nemina’s given it a name.”
“Hmm?”
“The other scout. System recognizes it. FL-SC-254-S04.”
“Creative.” He transferred his mug to his left hand and pointed to the screen. “First number indicates the home ship, second the individual ship number. She’s the fourth scout of Fallon’s 254th ship.”
“Huh. Wonder where the other three are.”
“Probably picking through the remains of Caishen and Enmerkar just about now.” Soo-jin curled further into her chair. “I hope your sister gives us an update. I’m really curious.”
Last they’d seen, Agni, a cruiser in the Fallon fleet, had been going broadside with the Alliance cruiser Enmerkar. Alliance-run Caishen station had sat nearby with a full range of weaponry, but even the two-to-one odds hadn’t thrown the match in the Alliance’s favor. Fallon’s ships were simply too good.
Since the Alliance had, at the time, been going after and actively trying to capt
ure the Nemina, they hadn’t stuck around to find out what happened.
“So am I.” As a notification appeared on her screen, Karin sat up in her seat and reached for the rest of the dashboard, keying in the right permissions. A low rumble sounded, then a small nudge jerked her seat as the two ships docked together. She swiped away the next notification and stood. “Guess it’s time to find out.”
Marc made to step back, then hesitated as she swayed, his free hand shooting out into the air between them. She steadied before he could reach her. Sudden dizziness rolled through the front of her mind. She dug her fingers into the plastic-leather of the seat’s back as her vision blotted out in a wave of static, sucking in a breath.
When it receded, Marc’s tight, anxious expression had softened into a brow-furrowed worry.
“Stood up too fast. I’m all right.”
His expression changed little, and his wary gaze drove a needle of guilt into her chest that she couldn’t quite stifle. She gave him her best ‘no, really, I’m all right’ smile—hard to do, considering she had spent the previous sixteen hours in medical rest—and went to step past. His hand brushed her arm, but he made no move to stop her.
A tickle of dust came to her nose as she passed the junction in the middle of the ship and that split into the hall that lead to Cargo One. As she went past Med on her right and several engineering access points on her left, the hexagonal corners in the ceiling gave the place a squarish, vintage look as opposed to the straight-cut, inset walls in the bridge and residential sections.
Boxes came into sight around the next corner, stacked waist-high and trailing along the wall toward Cargo One. The netting, formerly holding the stores inside the nook to the locked hatch, had been pulled back and hooked into two anchor points in the ceiling that she hadn’t noticed before. Its black roping looked like a nest of twisted spiders’ legs against the cream-tinged backdrop.
Something bumped on the other side of the airlock. A shock of brown-black hair caught her attention through the port hole—Nomiki, head turned away, talking to someone over her shoulder.
