Soulless

by Kate Rudolph

  “But there’s a safer path?” Sierra hoped.

  “Not quite,” Mindy quashed those dreams. “But there are a couple less dangerous ones. They’d take fifteen months and three years, respectively.”

  Sierra cursed. It was on the tip of her tongue to apologize for insisting they rescue the women. But she wasn’t actually sorry about doing it, just that it had put their ship in danger. And tempers were simmering between all of them, it would only take one spark of irritation to set them alight. She wasn’t about to do that to assuage her guilt.

  “We need to make a decision soon,” Jo warned. “We’re burning fuel aimlessly right now, and the longer we do, the fewer options we have.”

  “How long?” asked Sierra.

  “We can try to fix in situ for another day.”

  Mindy jerked up and looked at the two of them as if just now noticing they were in the room too, even though she’d been working with Jo for a while. “We should ask the aliens.”

  “What?” Sierra had been doing so well at not thinking about Raze for the last forty-two minutes or so that she nearly jumped out of her skin at the suggestion.

  “Down girl,” Mindy actually laughed. “We’re not trying to steal your boyfriend.”

  A denial of the label didn’t even try to spring to Sierra’s lips and Mindy’s eyes brightened when she didn’t protest.

  “Anyway,” Mindy continued. “We don’t know where they’re from, but they might know something we don’t.”

  “That much is obvious,” Jo muttered.

  Mindy and Sierra ignored her. “Let’s do it,” Sierra agreed.

  The wait between using the speaker to request their presence in the cockpit and when the three men actually showed up felt like an hour, even if it only took a matter of minutes. Sierra kept her eyes glued to Toran, afraid if she wasn’t careful, she’d spend the whole time grinning at Raze, whose presence behind his leader was like a burning sun.

  Jo explained the situation quickly and laid out their possible survival routes. Toran showed no response to the news that they could be stuck on the ship for months, though Sierra realized that the three men could just as easily jump off at the first space port. That thought almost had her jerking her gaze to Raze, and her jaw ached with the force of keeping her eyes trained on Toran.

  “May I see the map?” Toran requested.

  Mindy handed over her tablet and they all watched silently as he manipulated the device, looking for something. After a moment, he stopped playing with it and looked back at his men, but said nothing. No, he wasn’t looking at his men, he was looking at Raze. And if she had to pick an emotion to match to the look in his eyes, she’d say he looked regretful.

  He circled a location with his finger and handed the device back to Mindy. “If you go to those coordinates, I can guarantee that your ship will be fixed and restocked.”

  “That’s close.” Mindy showed the device to Jo. “What is it? It’s not on any of our maps.”

  “It’s the Detyen home base.”

  ***

  A million questions buzzed through Raze’s mind as they closed the final distance to the Detyen base. Why had Toran given away the base’s coordinates? It was a secret held almost as tightly as the existence of the soulless, but he’d told three humans with barely any hesitation. But Toran hadn’t said a word since they walked out of the cockpit, and every time Raze opened his mouth, he was hit with a quelling look that meant no questions would be answered. So he kept quiet. Maybe Toran was acting out of gratitude, or duty. Or just the desire to be home when they were so damn close they could taste it.

  It didn’t matter. But Raze’s other concerns were whirling like mad. He thought he’d have days, if not more, to come up with a solution to his and Sierra’s distance problem. Now they were practically back on the Detyen base, and reality was about to come crashing down on their heads far worse than he could have imagined.

  As they made the edge of the solar system where the home moon lay, Toran made his way to the cockpit at Jo’s request. He could hail their communications towers and hopefully make sure the ship was granted permission to land, or at least that it wasn’t shot out of the sky. That left Raze and Kayde strapped in next to each other, stewing in silence. Well, Raze stewed, Kayde just sat.

  “Our base’s location is not meant to be given to outsiders,” Kayde observed, nearly shocking Raze out of his seat. “Not even when our lives are at stake. Did Toran reveal his motives to you?”

  It was the most Kayde had said to him outside of a mission in years. “No.”

  “This will be noted when he applies for the extension,” Kayde said, as if making stray observations were a totally normal thing.

  Had Raze been so wrapped up in his own troubles that he hadn’t noticed anything wrong with Kayde? He wanted to gnash his teeth at the standard euphemism, though. ‘The extension’ was the most bloodless way of describing soullessness, as if sacrificing everything that made a person himself was a matter of paperwork. Not everyone who volunteered for the procedure was accepted, and Kayde had a point. Something as extreme as giving away the coordinates of their base to a team of unknowns could easily disqualify Toran.

  “I’m sure he has his reasons,” was all Raze could come up with to say before they lapsed into silence once more.

  The landing came more quickly than he expected. From the hull of the ship, there was no clue that they’d approached the planet, other than the rocking as they broke through the atmosphere and the popping in his ears as the pressure changed. Chatter from the back of the ship told him that the women were excited to be somewhere, though he was certain that the deviation from the promised path was leading to rumors of more slavers and abduction.

  “Welcome home,” Kayde said.

  Raze didn’t respond. His home was sitting up in the cockpit, and this hunk of snowy rock was only a place that he’d lived, a place that had tried to tear away everything he was and had almost succeeded.

  “Good morning, passengers,” Jo’s tinny voice came over the speakers. “It is not long after sunrise on this stopover moon. Because of security concerns, we will be escorted by armed soldiers to our quarters while the ship is fixed.” A shout of alarm sounded from the back, shot down by frantic whispering. “Please don’t be frightened, no one here wants to hurt you. But you will need to go along with our escort and follow instructions while the ship is under repair, if not, you may be detained. Prepare for boarding. Pilot out.”

  The speaker cut out, but the whispers didn’t. Tension ratcheted up as the sound of a ramp lowering screeched to life, followed by the slow roll of the main door moving to one side. Booted feet pounded up and six masked soldiers, covered from head to toe, stomped into view. One woman screamed, but the rest maintained a terrified silence. This wasn’t going to end well, and there was nothing Raze could do about it right now without making things worse.

  Toran came back from the cockpit and waved at the soldiers. He gestured for Raze and Kayde to follow and they did, leaving the ship and the women behind. Raze locked his gaze forward, his neck straining to turn back and try and catch a glimpse of Sierra, but he had to hope they’d have time for that later. No, he needed to get through his debriefing and survive whatever evaluation Toran had in store for him.

  They’d landed in a hangar with a retractable roof, rather than in the airfield outside. It would make repairing the ship easier, and also make it more difficult for any passenger to get a report of where they were.

  “Kayde, you are scheduled for debrief and evaluation in three hours. Go to your quarters and get cleaned up before then.” The man nodded and trotted off down one of the hallways splitting off from the main corridor. They were far from the central hub of the base, but everything was still close enough to walk to. There weren’t enough Detyens in the legion to need a city-like structure.

  Toran turned to him, his face taking on a gray tinge. “You’ve been scheduled for immediate evaluation. Is there any objection?”


  At least his leader didn’t quite have his hand on his blaster. Objecting now would only see Raze stunned or worse, and would surely lead to a swift execution. “No objection,” Raze said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Raze stared at him for several seconds before shaking his head. “Did you give them the coordinates to expedite my execution or because you wanted them to survive?”

  Toran didn’t answer, and Raze had no idea what he was thinking. They walked down the central hallway to the examination cells, every step taking him further away from the hope of a future and his mate’s arms.

  ***

  Sierra really didn’t like this place. There was something weird about it. Not that she or any of the group of humans they’d ushered here had actually seen anything other than the small suite of rooms they’d been assigned. If Toran hadn’t said anything, she wouldn’t have even known that they were in Detyen territory. All of the guards were covered from head to toe and all of the signs on the walls were written in IC. They could have been anywhere.

  Confined to stark gray rooms, all of the women had their own beds, and they’d been given plenty of food. After a restless night’s sleep, Jo and Mindy had been escorted back to their ship at the break of dawn to begin the necessary repairs, leaving Sierra to manage the women. Quinn wasn’t speaking to her now that they were under armed guard, and only about half of the women would even meet her eyes. One of them, whose name she still didn’t know, a short blonde, had squeaked and run away when Sierra came within a meter of her.

  They were all on edge and ready to burst with anxiety. And on top of all that, in the depths of Sierra’s heart, she knew something was wrong with Raze.

  She’d seen no sign of him nor his men since they’d exited the ship. And for the first few hours, that hadn’t seemed strange. He was a soldier, he had a mission and orders that had to take precedence. But she’d expected at least a message from him by nightfall. And she’d hoped for an invitation to his quarters, even if her responsibilities to her people would have forced her to turn him down. But an entire day with no contact? That didn’t seem right. Especially when she concentrated on that bond seated right below her heart and felt a churn of anxiety and sorrow.

  She had the anxiety in spades, but nothing about this situation should have been bringing up sorrow. Which made her think that wasn’t her emotion, it was Raze’s. And because of the magic—or whatever—of the denya bond, she could feel him.

  “Hey! Where’d you get that?” Sierra heard one of the women yell and let her head fall to her hand for all of three seconds before pushing herself up from the table she’d claimed as her own and marching over to a cluster of yelling women.

  Yelling was better than crying, she supposed.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded. The petite blonde was clutching something close to her chest while Davy tried to pry her arms open and get at whatever it was. “No fighting, come on.” She felt like a teacher on the schoolyard, but Davy looked ready to use her nails to gouge deep cuts into the blonde if she didn’t let go.

  “Laurel stole something,” one of the women snitched.

  So the blonde was Laurel. Okay. Sierra put a hand on Davy’s shoulder and was almost shocked when the woman actually pulled back. Laurel had curled onto one side and the metallic edges of something peeked out from under her arms. Sierra held out her hand. “Give it here.”

  “I didn’t steal it,” she said in a pathetic whisper of a voice.

  Sierra didn’t even care that she was lying. She was working on too little sleep and the stress of wondering if they were going to get out of this place, and uncertain of whether her mate was in trouble or if she just had indigestion. “You’re not in trouble,” Sierra grit out. “Just give it to me.”

  Laurel cast her eyes down and swiped her palm against the screen as she handed it over. Sierra clicked around and saw an open media game. She noticed that the device had somehow connected into the station wireless network, but it must have been an automatic setting, since the game was in offline mode. She tucked the tablet into her pocket. “Where did you get it?” she asked.

  “I found it,” Laurel mumbled.

  None of the women had come to the ship with tablets, which meant Laurel had ‘found’ it in Sierra’s, Mindy’s, or Jo’s bags. Awesome. “There’s a media station in the central room. If you want entertainment, go there. No more finding shit.” She left it at that; she wasn’t going to punish someone for using a tablet without permission, and they were stuck together long enough that she didn’t need this drama now.

  A few minutes later, Mindy and Jo came back and the tension in the room was thick enough to taste. They each shot Sierra a look, but she shook her head, not wanting to add to their pressure. Her colleagues sat at the table beside her after grabbing drinks and some food from the processor they’d been given access to.

  “How’s it look?” she asked.

  “A few burned out wires and a missing compressor. We’re lucky we didn’t explode when we fell out of FTL,” Mindy said around bites of her stew. “They need to manufacture the compressor in one of their machining printers, and they said they’ll have it for us tomorrow. Then we should be cleared to go.”

  “Armed guard escorted you here?” Sierra asked. She hadn’t left the suite since they’d been put there.

  “Yup,” Jo said, her lips popping on the p.

  None of them mentioned the possibility that the Detyens might not let them leave. Besides, why would they let them repair their ship if they were just going to be stuck here?

  “You said a compressor is missing?” Sierra asked, circling back to the issue at hand. “How the hell did that happen?”

  Mindy glanced at the survivors and then back. “Someone had to remove it. Someone with a bit of skill. Or instruction.” Her voice had dropped low and Sierra could barely make it out.

  “Like, say if one of the girls had a control chip and was instructed to stall the ship so someone could come collect them?” Sierra was equally quiet.

  Mindy nodded.

  “Or the aliens lured us here.” Jo threw that bomb out like it was nothing.

  Sierra had to choke on her denial. Raze wouldn’t. But Toran sure had been quick to give out the coordinates. Still, it didn’t make sense. “Why?” she asked.

  “Fifteen ladies to encourage their recruits? I don’t know, people are fucked up.” Jo shrugged, and even she didn’t seem convinced by her theory.

  “From what I’ve heard, it doesn’t work like that here,” was Sierra’s response.

  “And you trust what you’ve heard?” Jo asked.

  “Maybe we can get their medics to check for control or tracking chips,” Mindy broke in, making peace. “Or they can lend us a scanner. It won’t be perfect, but it will give us some answers.”

  Sierra didn’t want to turn that kind of suspicion on the women, but there were only so many options for who had done the deed. Raze had been with her the entire time, and neither Mindy nor Jo had motive. That left the twelve survivors and two Detyen warriors.

  The door to their quarters opened and for a moment, Sierra’s heart lifted. Though at first glance Toran looked a bit like Raze, he was too green and a little shorter than her mate. His eyes met hers and he jerked his head towards the door. Sierra excused herself from the table and went with the Detyen. Finally she could get some answers about Raze.

  And she didn’t even have to ask.

  “What is Raze to you?” he asked. The guards that had been posted to their door were nowhere to be seen, and the nondescript gray hallway could have belonged in any building on any planet that Sierra had ever been to.

  They were really doing this now? Thoughts of secrecy vanished as the anxiety in her stomach spiked into outright fear. “He’s my mate and if you’ve done anything to hurt him, I will end you. Where the fuck is he?” Something was really wrong, and she needed to fix it. Now.

  “I’m not the one who wants to hurt him,” Toran insisted. He placed a hand o
n her arm and tried to drag her further down the hall.

  Alarm bells went off in Sierra’s head and she jerked her arm away. “Don’t touch me.”

  He raised his hands in peace. “Please, if there’s any hope of saving him, you hold the key.”

  Saving him? “They’re going to kill him?” Her knees threatened to give out, but she locked them and forced herself upright. She wouldn’t show weakness in front of this man. “Tell me what I need to do.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  It wasn’t a cell. Soulless warriors slated for retirement weren’t kept in cells. No, they were confined to locked rooms with a comfortable cot and plenty of food. There was even a window that looked out onto the wintry expanse that was their home moon.

  To say his examination had gone poorly would be an understatement. The moment he’d mentioned a denya, he’d been labeled delusional and fixated. No one even suggested speaking with Sierra, even though he’d practically yelled at them that talking to her would explain everything.

  But no, he was soulless, and therefore he could not have a mate. He could not feel anything. Despite all evidence to the contrary. The decision to execute him had taken less than half an hour. He’d be given his Final Night, as was custom, and removed at dawn the following day. He would not be permitted to say his goodbyes, and Sierra would never hear of what happened.

  Until the door had locked behind him and Raze realized that there was absolutely no way of getting out, he hadn’t known what it meant to feel hopeless. Until this moment, every impossible scenario had ended with him finding a way out. When his thirtieth birthday approached with no mate in sight, he’d applied to become a soulless warrior and cheated death. When his men were captured by pirates and under threat of death, he’d found a way to save them. When their ship was floating dead in space, another had been right there to take them home.

  But there would be no rescue ship tonight. Nothing but darkness and a scalpel taking him from his mate and the galaxy.

  His eyes misted and he blinked hard, holding back tears. He had nothing left but his pride, and he would not give that up, not so soon after he’d found it again.