by Kate Rudolph
Penny’s skin drained of color and her eyes widened until they were larger than he’d ever seen before. Her mouth dropped open and she looked from him to Krayter and back again. Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.
Krayter stared at him, an unreadable expression in his blazing red eyes.
He felt like a fool. He couldn’t find the words to say anything that needed to be said, and his feet were rooted in place just as surely as the trees towering over Central Park.
And then Krayter let out a whoop and vaulted over the couch, wrapping his arms around Kayleb and almost tipping both of them onto the floor. “You’re not dead!” he practically yelled into Kayleb’s ear. “Why aren’t you dead?”
“I don’t know.” Kayleb pulled out of the embrace, but he didn’t step away from his brother. His heart beat too fast and he couldn’t quite get a deep breath, but it didn’t feel like he was about to drop dead at any moment.
“I think we need coffee,” Penny said before she retreated to the kitchen, leaving Krayter and Kayleb alone again.
Several minutes later, in possession of both coffee and pastries from the bakery on the corner, Kayleb, Krayter, and Penny sat at the kitchen table and stared at their food. Krayter took a nervous sip of his drink before setting his cup down and idly running his thumb over the lip of the mug. “Have you considered that you might have calculated your birthday wrong?” he asked quietly.
The same thought had occurred to Kayleb. He’d been born on Jaaxis, which was lightyears from Earth and on a completely different calendar. Though his birth had been recorded in Interstellar Common Time as well as on the Jaaxis calendar, he’d still needed to convert it from IC time to the Earth calendar. “I did the calculation three times and had it confirmed by the extraterrestrial immigration agency.” He looked up from his coffee and saw that neither Penny nor Krayter seemed willing to meet his eyes. Kayleb pulled his communicator out of his pocket and brought up his identifying data. “See for yourself if you still have doubt.”
Krayter’s arm twitched but he didn’t reach for the device. Instead, Penny grabbed it. Her eyebrows drew down in concentration, but after a moment she handed the communicator back to him with a nod. “That looks correct to me. What else could it be? Is it because you’re so far from home?”
“If distance were an issue, the destruction of Detya would have been a...” He couldn’t bring himself to call it a gift, but when Penny bit her lip, Kayleb figured that she knew what he meant. “The curse is something that lives inside of us, it can’t be outrun. The only cure is to find a denya.”
“So no one has ever tried to get around it before?” she asked. “Really?”
Krayter sucked in a breath and studied Kayleb with new eyes. After a moment, he shook his head, and Kayleb was confused anew. “What is it?”
“You don’t remember that old story?” Krayter asked with a slight frown. “About that man... I can’t remember his name. The scientist and his daughter.”
“That’s just a legend and I’m clearly not one of the soulless, if they ever existed at all.” Kayleb scowled at the thought.
“Wait, what?” Penny shook her head. “Anyone want to take pity on the human and explain?”
Krayter smiled at his denya and reached over, lacing their fingers together. “It’s an old story, ancient by the time Detya was destroyed. Like one of those grim ones that you told me.”
“The Brothers Grimm? So it’s a fairy tale?”
Kayleb didn’t know what they were talking about; fairies, whatever they were, didn’t exist on any planet he’d been on. His translator didn’t offer a better word.
But Krayter nodded. “Exactly! It is a myth. Hundreds, maybe a thousand years ago, a scientist went mad. His denya died and none of his children could find their mates. He dedicated himself to study, to find what causes us to die at the age of thirty. And he found it. He called it our soul, though I don’t think that means the same thing to humans. It is the heart of our personality, our emotions. Anyway. On the eve of his final daughter’s thirtieth birthday, he performed a procedure to remove her soul and save her life. And it worked. But the next day she awoke and killed her father, destroyed his lab, and then flung herself off a cliff because whatever he’d done to her was too horrifying to let happen to anyone else. Whispers of the soulless have been around forever. They are like...” he paused to think for a moment, “they are like your vampires. Not quite living, dangerous. But imbued with life after they should have died.”
“And they don’t exist?” Penny asked. “You’re sure?”
“If they ever did, I’m sure they didn’t survive the destruction of Detya,” Kayleb said before Krayter could talk more of the stories of their youth. They had more pressing issues than so-called fairy tales at the moment. “And I still have my soul, I promise.”
Krayter opened his mouth as if he wanted to argue and Kayleb glared at him, resting his hand lightly on the table. He didn’t let his claws out, but Krayter glanced down and snapped his mouth shut. “Fine, this didn’t happen because you had your birthday wrong, and it’s not going to be solved by the old stories. Maybe we can find other Detyens on this planet. There might be an elder who has an idea. At the very least we should call Ruwen.”
Their cousin was the first Detyen to find a human mate. Right now he and Lis were off on a journey to meet Lis’s friends back where she’d originally come from. Though both Lis and Penny had questioned Ru’s decision to leave before Kayleb’s final night, it was the way of their people to not crowd the dying but to celebrate life while it lasted.
“There’s one possibility, isn’t there?” Penny asked, as if whatever she planned to say was the most obvious solution.
Kayleb had no idea what she might say. “There is?”
“Isn’t it possible that you found your denya somewhere? That you slept with her and... I don’t know, forgot? Isn’t that the simplest solution.” She looked between the two brothers and shrugged.
“No,” said Kayleb, shaking his head and pushing back from the table. He paced the length of the small kitchen, his mind whirling. “That’s something I wouldn’t forget. I’m certain.”
Right?
CHAPTER TWO
PAVEMENT POUNDED BENEATH Tessa Greely’s feet as she sprinted the distance from Conner Street up Contact Row. Dilapidated buildings crumbled around her and the people in this part of the city barely spared her a glance. She didn’t need to worry about any cops calling for her to stop; the police only came here to collect the bodies once the blaster fire subsided and all the dangerous criminals were dead or gone.
It also meant that no one looked twice at the man and the thing chasing her. She’d seen plenty of aliens over the past six years that she’d spent in space, but some of those guys were just gross. What needed that many tentacles? From the half a glimpse she got before taking off at a sprint back at the bus depot, it looked like four squids had plastered themselves to its face and then gathered up an octopus or two to hang down from its arms. If she had time to think more, she might have wondered how it could run so fast, but she was too occupied with getting away from the thing to worry about mechanics.
Fucking pirates. They were supposed to stay in space, leaving her safe on Earth. But no, of course the assholes had to come for her, as if this year hadn’t been bad enough already.
She should have just stayed on the Kella.
Tessa darted down an alleyway, her backpack bouncing against her back and heavy enough to throw her off balance. The honk of a passing car gave her a second’s warning and she ducked behind an old-fashioned dumpster, her foot slipping in something slimy enough to have once been food. She bit her lip to keep from making a noise and tried to breathe shallowly, the air so stinky she could practically see it. Voices floated down the alley, too quiet to make out. Tessa’s heart threatened to beat out of her chest but she held herself as still as a statue.
She’d never meant to come back to Earth, back to New York. She’d thought
that she’d found her place on the Kella, that she’d learn her healer’s craft and travel the stars, seeing sights that most humans would never begin to dream of. It was moments like these when she knew that she should have let Kayleb NaMoren die. That was when everything went sideways.
One of the people chasing her spoke again and Tessa strained her ears, trying to make out their footsteps. But New York City hadn’t slept in centuries, and in the middle of the day there was no hope of making out the small noise over the everyday din of life in this wretched place. The alley she’d run blindly into didn’t dead end, a small miracle that she would have thanked God for if she were the praying sort. The other end of the alley opened onto a footpath with tall buildings shading it on either side. Across from her, a fire escape hung just out of reach. But Tessa feared that if she moved an inch her pursuers would be on her. And even if they only made it halfway down the way they’d see her; she only had cover from one side and the dumpster sat flush against the wall. Only rats could hope to slither behind it.
Papers rustled and she thought she heard chittering as if thoughts of rats had summoned them close. A whimper caught in her throat and she kept her lips snapped tightly shut lest it escape and betray her.
She didn’t want to die. God, she’d been so stupid.
The straps of her backpack dug into her shoulders, reminding her of her choice and her mistake. At the time, it had seemed like the only path to take, but looking back at the bodies she’d left behind in the last weeks made her resolve slip. Maybe she was just delaying the inevitable and taking her friends and allies down with her. Maybe if she abandoned her bag here, they’d stop chasing her and let her disappear into the shadows of the city, never to cause trouble again.
But Tessa hadn’t survived in space for years by being stupid. There was only one end to this deadly game.
She chanced popping her eyes up over the dark lid of the dumpster and almost collapsed in relief when she saw neither a man nor a terrifying squid monster waiting for her. But experience told her not to run, that she’d gotten away too easy and the people who chased her knew how to run their quarry down. One little alley wasn’t enough to trick them. So she looked again, taking in every brick in the walls and all of the garbage littered along the ground. At first her eyes passed over it, a small black box that might have been another piece of refuse. But she’d seen something like that before and the damn thing had cut a hole in her favorite pants and seared the skin off of her calf. The cheap healing cream she’d been able to find had sealed the wound but left a nasty scar from ankle to knee.
God, she missed the Kella with its shoddy medbots and almost unending supply of regen gel.
Tessa looked back down at where she squatted, squelching the revulsion at whatever gross shit had mixed together to make the sticky soup that coated the ground. Instead, she picked up a small metal lid to some jar that must have been thrown away in a shoddy bag. She flung the projectile out, hoping it skipped across the ground more like a rat than a piece of trash thrown by a person.
The black box jumped into action, shooting a red burst of blaster fire straight at the lid. She took a deep breath and nodded. Okay, she could handle that. A blaster box like that usually didn’t have a transmitter, and the battery wouldn’t last long. Either the pirates didn’t think she was hiding in the alley or they didn’t particularly care. Her thighs burned and the smell of the alley had faded to her senses enough for her to know that she’d smell of garbage all day, no matter how many times she showered.
She found another piece of fallen trash and threw it in a giant arc, watching as the red beams swiveled and sighted the target. Tessa threw and threw, the stench of burning trash and blaster fire sizzling in her nose, but she couldn’t stop. If she left the blaster box there before it burned itself out, someone might get hurt and she didn’t need another death or injury on her mind. Her heart hurt enough already.
It took several minutes and Tessa cringed at all of the germs that had to be crawling over her hands, sticky as they were with grime and filth. With a final burst of fire, a screech went up, echoing down the alleyway, and the acrid scent of electric smoke tickled her nostrils. Tessa threw one final bit of trash and no laser found it. It landed and rolled to the opposite wall unopposed.
Without another look down the alley, Tessa took off down the footpath and made her way to the hole in the wall motel she’d heard about from her sister, a New York prosecutor who used to handle criminal cases. The half-collapsing stone building that dated to the twentieth century had once been a respectable brownstone and now served as a den of prostitutes and unsavory characters. No guards there would ask questions about her presence and, even better, the android attendant at the door took cash. No trace that Tessa Greely had checked in, no way to track her.
Cheap plaster hung on three of the little walls of the room, the place barely big enough for a bed with a suspiciously stained quilt on top. Tessa grimaced but decided it would have to do for the night. She found the shared bathroom on her floor and nodded mutely to the made up woman who washed herself with a dirty cloth. Neither of them said a word, it wasn’t that kind of place. Tessa scrubbed at her arms and once her brown skin had turned red from heat and friction she splashed water on her face and ran a hand around her neck, trying to get the worst of the stench to go away.
Her clothes needed to be burned, but she only had one other set and couldn’t afford to lose these. She headed back to her room and switched into the cleaner pants and shirt before bringing the stinking pile of cloth back to the bathroom, where she submerged it in the sink and let the steaming water run for several minutes until it drained clear, rather than a dingy grayish brown.
Gross.
She wrung everything out and took the not quite sopping mess back to her room with her, where she hung it on the back of a rickety chair and on a rusted hook on the door. She doubted it would dry by morning, and that was just one more annoyance to add onto the shit sandwich that her life had turned into in the last three weeks.
Tessa collapsed back onto the bed, ignoring the stain, and pulled her bag up and let it rest on her lap. She unzipped the top and glanced inside to make sure that she still saw the glowing blue light from the little device that had given her so much trouble since negotiating her escape. The pirates would kill to get it back, which meant she needed to get it to someone who could use it against them first.
The first person that came to mind was her sister. Tamara had been prosecuting cases for the city of New York since Tessa was a kid, and while the age difference between them meant that they weren’t that close, she knew exactly how smart and resourceful Tam was. But Tessa couldn’t bring this kind of danger down on her with no warning. She had no communicator and she wasn’t sure what the pirates knew about her. They’d done a cursory scan when she’d been taken prisoner, but whether it was diagnostic or identifying she didn’t know.
Inrit would have known what to do.
Tessa remembered the red Detyen woman with a fondness she hadn’t felt when they’d shared space on the Kella, a ship that had seemed like home at the time. Inrit, it turned out, had an unsavory piratical past, but with her mate, the cyborg Max, they’d been able to get the ship out of one hell of a scrape when pirates attacked and boarded it.
If only they hadn’t taken off at the next space station. She and Inrit hadn’t really been friends, but if there was anyone she could walk up to and say hi, I stole some important pirate documents and now they’re pissed and following me and expect concrete suggestions rather than panic, it was her.
What about Kayleb? the traitorous corner of her mind that she’d shoved into darkness and tried to forget asked. Kayleb, who’d said wonderful things with that wicked sense of humor of his. Kayleb, whose eyes glowed red when he looked at her for too long. Kayleb, who’d kissed her like it was more important than breathing.
Kayleb, who’d looked at her after his injury and only seen a stranger.
She hadn’t been bitter at
first. A little hurt, sure, but it wasn’t his fault that he’d been hit in the head and his memories jumbled. The doc on the ship had been certain he’d completely recover. But whenever Tessa tried to get close, his damned brother was there to shoo her off, as if she didn’t have a claim.
Then again, if Kayleb hadn’t told his brother about their... thing, then maybe it had all been a pack of lies from the beginning. Maybe it was all stupid tricks to get her into bed and take his pleasure. You’re my mate, I’d die without you.
Yeah, right.
When she closed her eyes she could still see him over her, one arm cradling her face as if she was a precious gem. She could almost remember his scent, part soap and part something hot and spiced and all hers.
No.
Tessa sucked in a ragged breath and pushed thoughts of Kayleb aside. Something in her chest ached and she absently rubbed her hand against her breastbone. It wasn’t like heartburn or anything she was used to, and she’d been feeling it since she made it to this damned city. Her heart was tugging at her chest, trying to pull her somewhere she needed to go.
She’d started feeling it sometime after she and Kayleb were together and if she had a knife, she’d dig in and cut whatever it was out of her and be done with him forever.
She stuffed the pirate device back into her bag and lay down, slinging the straps over her shoulders and cradling the bag in front of her so that it would be harder for someone to come in and grab. She buried thoughts of Kayleb and the Kella and her sister and closed her eyes. A few hours of rest and she could run again.
If the pirates didn’t find her first.
SIX MONTHS AGO
The Consortium was weird and Tessa didn’t like it. The colony of humans abducted from Earth and abandoned in this system was barely whispered about back home. It wasn’t exactly a secret, but it was so far away that few people saw the point in caring about it. Of course, that was how Earth reacted to so many alien overtures and threats. Their little solar system was out of the way of the major shipping lanes and on the other side of the galaxy from the ever growing Oscavian Empire. No one was a threat to Earth and so they were content to stay in their own safe corner of space.
