by Natalie Grey
“Twenty-nine,” Feik said, calling Tera’s attention back.
Nyx opened her mouth to argue, and Tera cut her off. “Done.” She passed over the money without a thought, retrieved—at her request—from the clothes they’d taken off her when she was first brought to the Ariane.
“Are you sure that’s a fair price?” Nyx asked as Feik left to prep the adjoining room for surgery. The Dragon looked troubled.
Tera studied her for a moment, and wondered if it was only the impending procedure that made her wary. “He’s very good. More, he keeps his mouth shut. Right now, you can’t put a price on that.”
Nyx hesitated. “I see,” she said softly. “I’ll … I’ll go, then.”
Tera nodded curtly. She waited as Nyx went into the room, and then she padded lightly to the door to listen for the sounds of clothes being shed, pre-surgery cleaning taking place. Only when she was certain Nyx would be slipping under the effects of anesthesia did she make her way out of the office and to the main terminal in the station plaza.
There were not many people there, which she disliked. Crowds were her camouflage. She had learned long ago that empty spaces were to be feared. She squared her shoulders, however, and approached one of the terminal clusters. A single coin bought her access to messages, and Aleksandr’s codename appeared immediately.
My contact will be wearing blue and white, the message read. She will arrange the call.
The back of her neck prickling, Tera closed the messages, data-wiped the terminal, and turned slowly. A contact. There should not be a contact. She set off across the plaza to avoid the look of waiting for someone—a sure way to make herself a mark—and was halfway to a café when a woman drew up beside her.
“I hear you need to make a call.” She did not look over.
Tera, however, stopped to look the woman over. It was rude and unwise, but she did not care. A contact meant that Aleksandr might be up to something; Tera wanted to know what.
What the look told her was not good. The woman, upon closer inspection, was a cyborg to rival Tera herself—or at least, the cyborg Aleksandr thought she was. She had honey-colored skin, a hooked nose, and wavy black hair drawn into a ponytail, with a curvy form that Tera suspected went just as easily into evening dresses as her present combat clothing. She was well armed, and the muscle-tone of her arms and legs, easily evident in the scans, was astonishingly good. She was also filled to the gills with implants. If Tera had not secured her own upgrades, this woman would be her superior in nearly every way, and that unsettled her.
“Like what you see?” Her eyes were heavy-lidded, amused, and it was impossible to tell if she knew Tera could scan her.
“Just connect the call.”
“Not here.” The woman led her to a corner, where a stand of sad-looking artificial trees provided equally artificial shade from the lights above. A comm came out of her pocket and she handed it over, smiling when Tera turned away ostentatiously.
Every sense, however, remained locked on this unknown.
“Hello?” She kept her voice steady.
“Thank God. Tera, what’s going on?”
“I told you.” It was a luxury to be able to speak freely, even if she was now lying. “I joined their crew to take them down from the inside.”
“You killed Apollo!”
“The man deserved to die.”
He had no answer for that, as she had known he would not. “Tera, you’re in over your head.”
“That’s why I called you,” she reminded him. She had to go gently now, let him talk her into going back to him. He needed to think it was his idea. “I need your help with Rift.”
“You want my advice? Shoot the man in the head the next time you see him.”
Tera flinched and steadied herself, aware that the contact was looking her over. She had to be calm. She had to lie very, very well. “You don’t understand. Whatever information he got, he believes it. No one fed it to him. Whoever planted it in the Alliance systems still needs to be taken out.”
She could hear the yearning in her own voice, the desperate wish that it was true.
“Tera, you know as well as I do that he has it out for me. He’s wanted to destroy me for years.” His voice was smooth as he lied. “He planted that intelligence himself. I’ll tell you everything when you’re back.”
Tera fought the urge to throw the comm away from her and scream. He was lying to her. She had wanted so badly for this not to be true. All that mattered, she remembered, was getting back to him.
But she could not keep from wanting to make him say it.
“But for him to lie about this…” She shook her head before remembering that he couldn’t see her. “Wouldn’t he know the lie would be unraveled?” Tell me it wasn’t you.
“Talon can be a very persuasive man. No doubt he hoped to launch them on a witch hunt and take me down before anyone asked too many questions.” The voice had lost its honeyed edge. There was desperation there now. “You haven’t spoken to him, have you?”
“I’ve been on a ship with him for three and a half weeks,” Tera said, annoyed. “Of course I’ve spoken to him.”
She had a sudden, vivid memory of her legs wrapped around Talon’s waist and his lips at her throat, and she flushed.
“Tera, remember that he lies.”
It was too much, and she felt herself break. “You were never going to tell me, were you?” Tera asked him. “You were going to hide it for as long as you could. You knew I wasn’t going to accept it.”
There was a stricken silence. She was a professional, she never laid her plans bare until the very last moment, but now…now it was too much.
“Come back and we can talk about this.”
“No.” The word came out guttural. She saw the contact taking note of her tone and primed her implants. She would not go without a fight. “No, here’s what I’m offering you. You let me go. You let them go. And in return, I will not come do what I should.”
The moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew she had made a terrible mistake. Aleksandr had not known until now that she cared at all for the crew of the Ariane. He had never before, she realized, had any leverage on her other than herself.
Now he knew how to hurt her.
“You will come back and hear me out.” It was a command, and she could hear the ring of triumph in his voice.
“I won’t.”
“You don’t have a choice, Tera.”
The contact moved a split-second later, triggered by some command Tera could not see. But Tera had been ready for her. The knife she’d taken from the Ariane sliced up, hitting below the woman’s jaw, where the power source was located. It shorted out and shattered, and Tera wrenched the knife upwards cleanly. She watched as the woman’s body slumped to the floor.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she said into the comm. “I will kill every person you send after me. I shouldn’t even let you go.”
“But you are.”
“I can’t bring myself to kill you,” Tera said quietly. She didn’t even know if it was the truth or not. She cut the call before she could say that she loved him. That she always would.
She was turning when the shots hit her: pinpricks of pain that blossomed into a spreading numbness from a drug her implants couldn’t identify. She was stumbling and falling a second later, blind horror welling up. He’d sent another assassin. He was going to kill her.
But the last thing she saw before the world went black was Nyx, gun still outstretched. Her face was set. She did not like this, Tera knew, but there was no mercy there. She opened her mouth to say that they had it all wrong, and then unconsciousness claimed her and she knew no more.
29
She lay prone, with her head turned to the floor and her arms bound awkwardly. Only now, when she was unconscious, did he realize how small she was—normally she held herself with a hum of energy that people knew to avoid even if they didn’t know why.
They’d stripped her of her
weapons, far too many gleaned from the Ariane itself—they were all going to have a talk about secured weapons lockers when this was over—and with her wrists cuffed again, she was only a tiny figure, pitiable. Helpless.
Except that she was far from that. Talon clenched his jaw as tightly as he could, trying to keep from noticing the lines of her body under the loose worksuit she wore. He’d known for two days that this woman was his enemy, and yet part of him stubbornly refused to believe it. He’d bolted awake in the night more times than he could count from memories of her lips, her hands, the feel of her skin…
She had been perfect.
A perfect lie. He crossed his arms now and resisted the urge to sink his head against the glass of the door.
“Tell me all of it.”
“She met up with another woman at the plaza.” Nyx did not look at him. Her eyes, too, were fixed on the woman as if she could understand the secrets lying there. “There was a call. She was angry. The woman must have been ordered to attack her, and Tera killed her.”
In the brig, Tera stirred slightly. Nyx fell silent and they watched as the assassin rolled onto her side, curling into a little ball. She sat up a moment later, woozy, and then froze. How she knew they were outside the door, Talon could not have said, but he was certain that she did. She sat with her back facing them and her arms around her knees, determinedly not looking in their direction.
“Go on.”
“I’m not sure we should talk here.”
“It’s all right.” His voice was soft enough that even someone with aural implants would not be able to hear him through the door.
He thought Nyx would object, but she sighed and looked back. “She killed the woman. And then she told him to leave her in peace. That she’d let him live if he would just leave her alone, and…”
“And?”
“And leave us alone, too.” Nyx looked over at him at that, and Talon knew the leap of hope in his chest.
He shoved it away ruthlessly. “I see.”
“There’s something else you should know.”
“Oh?”
“She’s had enhancements.”
“That’s obvious.”
“No. I mean….” Nyx shook her head. “I mean she’s a cyborg.”
“Not possible.” Talon looked over at her sharply. Cybernetics were allowed, at least in small amounts, but only for the soldiers of the Alliance. There were black markets, of course, but even there, society had found its own lines of what was allowed and what was not. Those who fell within the lines were ‘enhanced.’ Those who did not, were cyborgs. “Even Soras would never have done that to her.”
“He did some of it. She did the rest. The doctor was extremely forthcoming.” Nyx lifted one eyebrow. “You’d think no one had ever held him at gunpoint before.”
“He told you she upgraded herself?”
“He did, but he wouldn’t have needed to. Talon, the woman was dead before I even saw them move. They were both cyborgs. She was fast, she was standing there one minute and then there was a gun and a knife and I never saw her draw them. And she was already dead.”
“So Tera’s fast.” The assassin, he reminded himself. Not Tera.
“No one is that fast.”
Talon sighed heavily. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“I just said you should know. You need me to do this, remember? I’m having Tersi test her.”
“With what?”
“The room’s sealed.” Her voice was flat. “Oxygen.”
“You’re insane.” His response was automatic. In the brig, he saw Tera push herself up awkwardly and begin to pace. She kept her head turned away from them, her face like a mask. “Call it off. Right now.”
“It won’t hurt her. Just see how long it takes.” Nyx lifted one shoulder. “I know she has at least the standard oxygen cache, but beyond that.”
“What more will that tell us?” he asked her desperately. He ran through the facts in his head. A cyborg with the right enhancements was nearly immune to poison, able to tolerate oxygen deprivation with enough training, able to keep going through blood loss and pain that would cripple anyone else. Then there was strength and speed, of course, but oxygen would not test that. Right now, none of that mattered. “So she’s a cyborg. I believe you.”
“We need to know whether we need to airlock her,” Nyx told him flatly. “One way, we can let her out and hope we have a chance in hell of keeping her at bay if she turns on us. The other way, we can’t.”
She was right. Damn the woman, she was right.
“Fine,” Talon said quietly. Tera did not stop her pacing inside the brig. She was shivering, though from what he could not tell. She looked like she was holding herself together with only the faintest thread of will.
But that would be another lie. He thought he had learned so much about her from the turn of her head and the quirk of her smile, and all of it had been designed to draw him in. How she had acted that well, he did not know.
Nyx held out the meter. “Now we wait.”
They stood in silence for a few moments.
“What do you think about her?” Talon asked finally.
“You don’t want to hear it, clearly, but I’d say she was genuinely distressed.”
“You were just talking about airlocking her.”
“Because you won’t trust her.”
“Would you?”
Nyx considered that. In the brig, Tera’s steps might have slowed, or it could be nothing more than Talon’s imagination. He fought the urge to tell Nyx to stop this now; it was what he would do, in any other situation.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “I don’t know if I would trust her. To go kill him on her own? Certainly not. I’m not sure she has it in her. But if you’re asking if she’d kill us … I don’t think so.”
“’Don’t think so’ isn’t good enough.” Talon looked over at the meter and felt a wave of dread. “She should be out.”
“She should be,” Nyx agreed softly.
The pacing continued, and they watched in silence as it slowed. There was nothing to doubt now. The steps were coming heavier, and at last Tera stumbled. She only barely caught herself before sinking to the floor.
“We can stop now, can’t we?”
“She’s not hurt,” Nyx told him gently. “We need to see what will take her out.”
“Turn it off,” Talon said flatly.
“She’s all right.”
But she had realized something was wrong. Oxygen loss was peaceful, generally. A creeping tiredness. It did not occur to the body to think that anything might be wrong. But she was fighting it now. Perhaps the thought had finally penetrated that she could not get up, or perhaps it was her implants trying to jerk sense back into her, but she was panicking. Talon watched her try to crawl for the bench, hardly able to hold herself up.
“She doesn’t know she’s all right. She thinks we’re killing her.”
“But we’re not,” Nyx said soothingly.
And then Tera turned her head and her eyes met Talon’s. He opened his mouth to say that it was all right, that she would not be harmed, but she lost consciousness the next moment, head dropping back to thud heavily against the edge of the bench on her way down. Before her eyes drifted closed, there was one stricken moment of betrayal, and Talon felt the breath leave his lungs in a rush. He was in there with her, in that moment, with the desperate gasp for air that held nothing, with the dread and the helplessness—
“Turn it off.” He wrenched the door open.
“What are you doing?”
“I am going to be with her when she wakes up.”
“Is that wise? We’ve established what she is.”
Talon hardly heard her. He had crossed the brig in long strides and he cradled Tera’s head as he moved her gently. She felt perfect in his arms, her face peaceful, as if she might wake at any moment and smile up at him. It was difficult to release her.
“She’s bound,” he said q
uietly. “And I have my gun.”
Nyx hesitated. “Do you want me to wait with you?”
“No.” He sat back on the ground and waited for her to go. When she hesitated, he looked up at her. “Go.”
“You could end it now,” she said quietly.
“What?” He could not disguise his horror.
“You could end it now. She wouldn’t feel a thing.”
It was not a test, he realized the next moment. It was an offer. It was the offer of a friend who knew he could not trust this woman, and knew what it would cost him to cause her pain. And yet…
“She deserves more from me.”
“Because of what she is to you.” The words were soft.
“Because of what I thought she was. But yes.”
Whatever she saw in his face, she did not argue. She checked the level of oxygen now flooding, heady, into the room, and then she left and closed the door behind her.
Talon fixed his gaze on Tera’s face. And waited.
30
She woke in terror. She was going to die. Her muscles were slowing, the breath in her lungs was giving her nothing and she could feel her mind fading even as her implants kicked into life frantically. Move, move, you have to move. And she could not, there was nothing to work with and he was killing her, he was going to watch her die without feeling a thing, without a single shred of remorse and she never—
“Tera.”
She scrabbled away. The realization that she was alive, that her blood was rich with oxygen, came a second later. He was here with her and she wasn’t safe, he was going to kill her.
“You’re safe,” he said. “It was the oxygen, it wasn’t going to hurt you. Do you need water?”
She did not think, only launched herself at him across the room. There was a gun in his hands and tried to wrestle it away from him, muscles still slow. He got it back with an effort, but managed to slip the magazine out of it and she wrenched the rest away and threw it. He was still looking after it when she smashed her bound hands sideways into his torso.
