Faultless

by Kate Rudolph

  “There were other girls with me on...” Where had they been? She didn’t know. “After we were rescued.” By who? That was another blank. She was almost sure that Brakley hadn’t been the one to free her from captivity. Almost. “Are they here somewhere?”

  Brakley reached out as if he was going to cover one of her hands and Laurel flinched away. She didn’t mean to, she really didn’t, and when Brakley’s eyes narrowed and his lips pursed for a fraction of a second she felt even worse. But then his expression cleared and Laurel wasn’t sure that she’d actually seen what she thought she’d seen.

  “I’m sorry, Laurel, there were no other women with you when we recovered you. I can’t say for certain what happened to them, but it is very likely that they—”

  She gasped and covered her mouth with her hands when he cut himself off. Were they dead? That couldn’t be possible. Laurel’s pulse pounded and her vision went wonky. If she’d been standing she would have collapsed. The only survivor? How? Why? A dark thought crept up from the recesses of her mind. Had she done something to them? If she’d had a control chip in her head, there was no telling what her captors could have made her do.

  No. No, she was sure that she hadn’t done anything too horrible. There had to be limits on what her mind would endure before breaking.

  “I’m sorry,” Brakley repeated. “I know this must be difficult to hear.”

  “I...” Laurel shook her head, her mouth opening and closing several times with no sound coming out.

  “You’re safe here,” Brakley assured her. “I promise you that if we find out any information, you’ll be the first to know. Now, how do you feel about doing a few tests today?”

  She owed it to him to let him study her. She knew that. She had no other way to pay him for the rescue and promised return to Earth. But everything about her was shaky right now and she was afraid she was about to throw up. She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself, to psych herself up to agree, but that only made the quiver of her jaw more obvious.

  Brakley saw it and his eyes softened, a compassionate smile pulling at his lips. “I think we should skip today,” he said before she could answer. “We have plenty of time to do more tests later, and you need to rest. I’ll leave you to it.” He stood and hesitated for a minute. Laurel was almost certain that he was going to try and hug her or touch her, but after a moment he turned around and left and she was alone in the lab that she called home.

  Laurel lay back on her bed knowing that sleep wouldn’t greet her anytime soon. Her mind was spinning and grasping, trying to find the memories that she knew had to be there. Trying to figure out what had happened before she landed on Brakley Varrow’s ship.

  At first it was just a blank, a big black space that made her feel like she was falling into a dead star. But then a face flashed in her mind—light brown skin, curly black hair, and hard, determined eyes. Who was she? A fellow survivor? A captor? Someone Laurel knew from her life before? She groaned and burrowed her head into her pillow as if she could bury herself in her soft mattress. She tried again, closing her eyes and keeping her breath even, practicing some long forgotten meditation techniques that tickled at the edges of her memory.

  More darkness and a strange blurry cloud, a dense fog she tried to step into but was instead rebuffed by. Laurel furrowed her brow and set her jaw. She was going to figure this out if it killed her. She had to.

  The stab of pain at the base of her skull made her gasp, and her eyes snapped open as she shot up from the bed, her hand gripping the edges of her bandage as tears pooled in her eyes. It flared for a moment and then receded, settling into the dull kind of pain that she could handle for a long time. In its own way, the pain was a blessing, distracting her from the soul deep hurt of being the only survivor recovered by Brakley Varrow. She’d take physical pain any day.

  A strange sound rang in her ears, and for a moment Laurel thought that it was an echo of her pain. But it warbled and faded before rapidly spiking and then cutting off as if there’d never been any sound at all. No, whatever that was, it hadn’t come from her mind.

  Laurel rolled off her bed and took an unsteady step towards the door. Her body was still made up of aches and pains and she was spending most of her time lying down or sitting propped up on the pillows that Brakley’s assistants had provided. They’d been nice enough to give her a media tablet filled with fun and easy games to play and a series of Oscavian media shows that she’d never heard of. Until this moment, she hadn’t felt the need to get up other than to go to the bathroom. She hadn’t felt much curiosity about the ship around her, or the crew she hadn’t met. She vaguely wondered if that was another symptom of the damage caused by the control chip, or if it came from the trauma of her months in captivity. It didn’t matter either way. She was standing up now with her curiosity piqued.

  Only after the door opened at Laurel’s touch did she realize how easily she could have been locked in. It wouldn’t take any work at all for Brakley Varrow to make her into a prisoner, and her trust in him grew just a little bit more at the fact that he hadn’t. But why was someone screaming on his ship? As far as she knew, she was the only living person that he was performing any kind of tests on, and those were purely for her health, not to discover anything about her or her species. It wasn’t like she was the only human in this part of space, wherever they were.

  The hallway outside of her room was more industrial than she would have expected. Exposed metal beams in the roof reminded her of the monkey bars she had played on as a child. There was no decoration on the walls, and her footsteps echoed down the corridor around her until she consciously softened her feet, stepping quietly from heel to toe. A chill set in her bones and she realized that she was wearing neither shoes nor socks. She could double back to her room, but Laurel feared that if she turned around she would lose her nerve. Brakley had said that she was free to roam around most of his ship, but in this deserted hallway she felt a bit like a thief sneaking into places she wasn’t supposed to be to take things that weren’t hers to keep.

  No one was there to stop her, so Laurel kept going, cold feet and all. Her ears led her down a second corridor, where she came to an abrupt halt at a heavy looking door with a sign on it that said “crew personnel only” in Interstellar Common. Laurel darted a glance around. She was still alone, and when she looked around she didn’t see any cameras, no obvious surveillance that could catch her breaking Brakley’s rule.

  She bit her lip and tapped her big toe against the cold ground. Brakley had saved her life, he’d cared for her health and was taking her home. There was only the one rule to follow, and it shouldn’t have been a big deal. But someone beyond that door was screaming and they might need help.

  What if one of his crew had gotten into an accident of some kind? Maybe she was the only person who could hear them. Even as she thought it, Laurel knew it wasn’t true. She couldn’t remember much, but she knew what tortured screams sounded like. She couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t heard it. Maybe there was an explanation, maybe Brakley was just as good as he seemed. But with a deep breath of determination, Laurel pushed through the door and into the crew corridor.

  It was a bit anticlimactic. There was no one there, no one waiting to yell at her to get out and go back to her room. It even looked just like the hallway she’d been in. But the sounds of screaming were louder, no longer muffled. Laurel crept down the hallway, even more careful to not make a peep this time. With a final burst of sound, the screaming stopped and the sudden silence was enough to momentarily disorient her. Laurel reached out and placed a hand on the wall to steady herself. She was shaking, trembling, as her body remembered all of the things that had been done to it. Phantom aches and pains teased her, and for now she was happy for her amnesia. Her body remembered, her mind didn’t, and at the moment that was a blessing.

  Voices echoed and grew fainter as someone moved down the hallway in the opposite direction. Had they been torturing the screaming person? Performing e
xperiments? Had Brakley lied to her? There was only one way to find out.

  Laurel moved forward, every step cementing the certainty in her mind that she was still in trouble, and could only rely on herself to find a way home.

  THEY’D DONE SOMETHING to his eyes. Everything around him was a white fog. Dru tried to move his hands to wave them in front of his face, but he was still tied down. Varrow and his minions must have known about the claws Dru had hidden in his knuckles since they’d been sure to fasten his bindings halfway up his forearms.

  He should have been trying to escape. All of his training told him to steal his moments and hoard them; he only needed one second when his captors weren’t paying enough attention. The opportunity would be there, he just needed to be ready for it.

  But everything hurt. And he couldn’t see. And even if he escaped this torture chamber, his days were numbered. It was the curse of his race, he’d die on his thirtieth birthday if he didn’t find his mate. That day was drawing close, and a small part of him, an ember at his core that he knew he should do his best to extinguish, was telling him to give up, to give in. What did it matter if he died now, just a little older than twenty-nine? So what if he lost those last few months? He’d be standing at death’s gateway soon enough anyway. Dru couldn’t bring himself to try and become soulless—he’d seen the shadows that became of his former friends. He’d rather die whole than live on as a ghost.

  A whisper of sound pulled him away from the dark thoughts and his whole body tensed, expecting more of the same ministrations he’d been subjected to for hours. Days? Time had lost meaning since he’d been tied up and he’d long ago given up on his vow not to scream. Whatever Varrow and his minions were doing to him, they were experts. They might have called them ‘tests’ but nothing that hurt that much could have purely scientific value.

  “What are they doing to you?” The soft voice soothed him and Dru’s body canted towards her, turning as much as his bindings would allow. “Oh! You’re awake.” He could almost imagine her jumping back and sneaking a glance behind her. She sounded like she didn’t belong, and not just because she wasn’t cackling in glee at his conquered form.

  Dru’s tongue darted out to lick his chapped lips. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d drank anything. His throat was hoarse from screaming and when he tried to talk he couldn’t manage the sounds without wincing.

  “No, no,” his new companion insisted, “save your strength.” She was moving around, opening drawers and cabinets, but Dru couldn’t see a thing. She wasn’t even a darker splotch on the white gauze of his vision. He should have been on edge, ready to fight the threat, even in his weakened state, but something about the voice and her sweet scent tickled his battered senses and set him at ease.

  “Here,” said the woman, her voice suddenly closer as the cool edge of a glass pressed against his lips. “It’s just water.”

  Dru opened his mouth and groaned as the cool elixir slid down his throat. It overflowed his mouth, running down the sides of his lips and down his chin but he didn’t care. He could have laid there drinking for days, but after only a few moments his water angel pulled back. He tried to grab for her, to keep the water there, but his bindings held him in place.

  The glass crashed to the ground and Dru heard her heavy breaths.

  “Is everything all right?” he asked. He wanted to damn the gods, he needed his vision. What was a warrior without sight? He couldn’t defend himself, or his newfound friend, if he couldn’t see any threat coming.

  “Don’t grab for me,” she said with more mettle than he expected.

  Oh. No outside threat then, just him. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  His angel sighed and silence grew thick between them. Several moments passed before she said, “Okay,” with the kind of resignation that made him want to find whatever had hurt her and do it great harm.

  “I mean it.” He wasn’t sure why this was so important. Perhaps it was that this woman was the only person on the ship so far who’d shown him any kindness. He would not repay it with pain and fear.

  “Okay,” she repeated, her voice just as flat.

  Under other circumstances he might have tried to give her comfort, to hug her, or to promise to destroy her enemies one by one until no one would dare lay a hand on her. But he was tied up in this torture chamber and blinded, barely a warrior, hardly a man.

  “Why are they doing this to you?” she asked, as if she could read the thoughts flitting through his mind.

  As if those who enjoyed inflicting pain needed a reason. But he remembered his first encounter with Varrow, even if a part of his mind was convinced that it had happened a century ago. “Experiments,” Dru grumbled, scowling. “I’m a rare specimen, did you know?”

  “Are you?” He could almost imagine her cocking her head to the side and studying him, trying to figure out what was so special.

  Dru didn’t want to think about the tragedy of his species, he didn’t want to remember how they numbered in the thousands now, reduced from the billions that had once flourished. “What’s your name?”

  “Laurel. What about you?”

  “Dru. Druath. Are you Oscavian?” Varrow and his companions were, this was an Oscavian ship, but Laurel was not any kind of Oscavian name that he had heard before.

  A bubble of laughter washed over him and some of the tension and residual pain that had been swimming in Dru’s veins receded. “Do I look Oscavian?” Laurel asked.

  She was still swallowed up by the white fog that was all he could see. “I can’t exactly tell right now.”

  “You’re blind?” Concern laced her words and the air around him moved as she leaned closer.

  “I hope it’s not permanent.” It was the only hope he could cling to.

  “Oh.” It escaped on a breath and Dru had the strangest urge to smile. “I’m human,” she said. “From Earth.”

  What was a human doing on an Oscavian ship? He tried to imagine what Laurel must look like, but Dru was too focused on the warmth of her voice to draw an picture. “How long have you been here? Have they hurt you?” He’d find a way to tear Varrow and his minions limb from limb if they had laid a hand on this woman. The vehemence of his reaction caught him by surprise, but Dru clung to it. He needed to live for something.

  “Just a few days, I think. And Brakley hasn’t hurt me. They’ve been very nice.” It came out quiet and clear that she was comparing the state Dru was in with her own.

  But from the sounds of it, she hadn’t been on the ship any longer than he had. “Were you one of the women from Fenryr 1?” Was it possible they had been collected together?

  “I’m from Earth.” Laurel repeated it like it explained anything. What did it matter what planet she was from when space travel made it possible to traverse the galaxy with little effort?

  Dru tried to shake his head, but that only made the pain worse and he forced himself to lie still. “I don’t think anyone’s from Fenryr 1, not from what I’ve heard. But were you one of the women held there? Why didn’t you escape with the rest of them?” Had there been a Laurel among the survivors? There hadn’t been time for introductions, and even if he could see he couldn’t remember what most of the women looked like. They’d escaped slavers and somehow managed to end up at his people’s home base, but not long after, a warship had arrived and sent everything into chaos.

  “Escape?” He felt a depression as she touched his bed, leaning her weight into it. “They’re alive?”

  “Last I knew.” He’d stayed behind to ensure that their ship could get out of the hangar where it was being held. Things got a little hazy after that; he’d been injured and losing a lot of blood. But as far as he knew the survivors and their Detyen companions had made it off of Detyen HQ on their way to safety.

  “I—” Laurel took a deep breath, suddenly silent. “Did you hear that?” she hissed.

  He’d heard nothing but her, so focused on their conversation that everything else had fallen
away.

  “I have to go.” She scampered off, her movements a whisper across the room before everything fell silent. Dru leaned his head back against his bed and squeezed his eyes shut, as if that would make a difference. A new sense of purpose imbued him and all thoughts of giving up evaporated in the wake of Laurel’s visit. He was going to get her off this ship, get her to safety. And then he was going to destroy Varrow, even if it killed him to do it.

  Chapter Three

  LAUREL HAD EXPECTED to be up half the night fretting about everything she learned from Dru. Well, she hadn’t actually learned that much from him other than the fact that the women Brakley Varrow had told her were dead might actually be alive. Was Brakley lying to her? He had seemed so sincere in every single one of their meetings. He had rescued her and removed the control chip from her head. He promised her that he would return her to Earth once she was better.

  And he was holding a man hostage and torturing him in the name of some kind of scientific experiment.

  It didn’t fit with what she knew, but Laurel didn’t really know anything about Brakley Varrow. She wanted to trust him because he had rescued her, because he was her savior, but those circumstances made it disgustingly easy for him to lie to her.

  Why would he hold a fellow Oscavian captive? At least she thought Dru was Oscavian. His skin was a bluish purple not that different from Brakley’s, but Dru’s chest and one of his arms was covered by dark square and triangular markings, something she hadn’t seen on Brakley. And his eyes were dark, except for one moment when they were talking, when he had reached for her and Laurel flinched back. In that second, his eyes had been red. It should’ve been scary. He practically looked demonic, and though she’d had an issue with him reaching for her so suddenly, nothing else about him scared her. Well, it was kind of hard to be scared of someone tied up in a torture chamber who was sweating from the amount pain he had endured.