Heartless

by Kate Rudolph

  He turned fully toward her, the autopilot doing most of the flying at this point. “Could you put your other hand on the chair?” he asked, trying to sound nonthreatening.

  Quinn stiffened and her jaw clenched, further signs that she wanted to keep her other hand out of sight. “Can you take me home?” she asked, unmoving.

  “There’s a tight exit schedule,” Kayde replied. “If I don’t make my time at the gate, it will be more than a week before my mission can be rescheduled.” He had his parameters, had his goal, and he wasn’t designed to deviate. Perhaps Toran, or Dryce, or even Raze would approach this problem differently, but Kayde was none of those men and he could only do this the way he knew how.

  “No,” Quinn insisted, the hint of a quaver in her voice. “Take me back home right now, you can’t keep me here.”

  “It’s my ship, how do you propose to stop me?” He only realized it was the wrong thing to say when Quinn’s mouth dropped open and a helpless little sound escaped her throat.

  The next thing happened very fast. In a blink, Quinn was around the chair, launching herself towards him with one of her hands, the one that had been hidden, holding a small, wickedly sharp knife that could do damage in the hands of someone properly trained. As she came at him swinging, he took in her form and acknowledged that she wasn’t a complete novice. But whatever she knew, he knew far more. If he were a betting man, he would place credits on the fact that she had never sliced someone up before.

  They grappled for a handful of moments, the fight dragging out not because of Quinn’s surprising skill, but because Kayde was unwilling to cause her pain. A simple lock on her wrist could have ended this all in a matter of seconds, but as angry as Quinn was, Kayde was certain he would have to snap the bone before she would stop attacking. He couldn’t do that to her. But before he even had a chance to get winded, he managed to loosen her grip and tossed the knife away, where it slid out of reach. He was straddled on top of her hips, his hands pinning her wrists to the floor, the fabric of her long sleeved shirt sliding under his fingers. Anger, no rage, washed over her face, making her look alive in a way that captivated him.

  A spark of awareness shot through him, something that Kayde could almost define, something just out of reach. His eyes locked with Quinn’s, and both of them were frozen in the moment. This was unlike any battle he had ever fought before. In the heat of combat there was no time to pause for longing glances or loaded looks. But this was no battle.

  “You’ll have to kill me,” Quinn spat. “I won’t submit.”

  From where Kayde was sitting, he didn’t need Quinn to submit. The fight was already over. She tried to struggle against him, and he tightened his grip just enough to make it a warning, but not strong enough to bruise. In doing so, he pressed the rest of his body down against her, and that set Quinn off. She struggled in earnest, almost succeeding in bucking him off as he was surprised by the vehemence of her response. It only took another moment for his brain to catch up to what she meant.

  “I mean you no harm. I would not touch you without your consent.” He managed to press her back down against the floor, and tried to position himself so that he was touching her as little as possible.

  “Your dirty hands are all over me right now, you fucking—” she let out a frustrated scream rather than complete the insult. “Let me go.”

  In other circumstances, if she were someone else, he wouldn’t even consider it. The proper action at this point would be to restrain her and confine her to one of the rooms on the ship. But this was Quinn, and Kayde knew he wasn’t going to do that. “Are you going to attack me again?” He focused on a small freckle just above one of her eyebrows, rather than risk looking her in the eye again. He didn’t want to be caught up a second time, didn’t want to risk that connection again. An impossible suspicion rose from his subconscious, whispering the seductive possibility that he couldn’t afford to hope for. That was, if he were even capable of hope.

  “Let me up and see,” Quinn challenged. Her entire body was still taut, balanced on the knife edge between action and inaction.

  If he let go, she was going to come for him, and they were going to end right back in the same position. And every time he let her fight back, he risked injuring her, and she risked injuring herself. But Kayde found himself loosening his grip and rolling back off his knees until he stood over her. He reached down and offered a hand to help her up, but Quinn scooted back and put space between them rather than take his assistance. At least she didn’t attack him again.

  Kayde’s mind scrambled, trying to come up with the right thing to say to calm the human down. He’d already screwed up once, and he wouldn’t have many chances to fix it. She would be stuck on the ship with him for some time, and at some point he would have to sleep. “There’s a waypoint not far past the jump gate. From there you could book passage back to Earth fairly easily.” Yes, that would work. According to his maps, the waypoint was little more than a fuel stop, but this close to Earth, Quinn wouldn’t be forced to wait long to go home.

  “With what credits?” Quinn scoffed. “You’re not even a creative kidnapper. The guys who nabbed me at first tried to say it was all one big misunderstanding, they told me they booked me passage back home and I walked right onto that slaver ship without a backwards glance. I’m not going to be that stupid again.” She sucked in deep breaths, her chest rising and falling in time.

  “I’m not a slaver.” Was that even in question? How could she think that? He had been one of the people who saved her from the slavers. He would never condone something so barbaric. Even in the cold winter of soullessness, whatever remnants of emotion still lived within him rebelled at the thought of trying to own someone.

  For a moment, Quinn seemed lost for words. She took a final deep breath, and met his eyes. “Yeah, well, convince me.”

  QUINN WAS BEGINNING to think that she’d made a hasty accusation. Kayde’s expression never changed, but that was nothing new, and there was something in the way he held himself that made her think he was telling the truth. He hadn’t known that she was on the ship, he hadn’t meant to take her. She still didn’t understand his bullshit about not taking her home, but she had been around the Detyens long enough to trust that he wasn’t about to sell her to the nearest convenient scumbag who liked owning people.

  “I can send a message to Toran right now,” Kayde offered, taking up the challenge she had laid down. “We’re getting close to the gate, and there will be interference, so it can’t be a two-way call. But I can tell him where you will be, and I’m certain that he can arrange for you to be transported back home as swiftly as possible.”

  She was already so far in debt to the Detyens and to Sierra Alvarez that she had no hope of ever evening the score. Waiting for Toran to send an interplanetary taxi to take her home would only be a drop in the bucket. Of course, Sierra and all of them would insist that they’d only been doing their duty, that Quinn and her fellow survivors owed them nothing. But Quinn couldn’t work like that. Where she came from, a person paid her debts or had those debts called in. There was no such thing as forgiveness, or a free ride. She volunteered to work with the Detyens in part to discharge some of what she owed, even if they never knew it. She’d had to tell them that she was working for them out of boredom, and even if it was the partial truth, it was only a small sliver of the greater whole.

  “Where are you going? What’s your mission?” An idea began to take root in her mind, something she would’ve never volunteered for, but since she had been thrown into the middle of the action she might as well go along with it. She owed Kayde just as much as she owed all the rest of them. For a moment, she was concerned that he wouldn’t tell her. His always neutral expression seemed to shudder and she realized she was beginning to learn how to read the small tells that he had. He didn’t like to give anything away, but no man, or alien, was made of stone. At least she didn’t think so, how would that work? She gave her head a mental shake to dislodge the erran
t thought. Diving down mental rabbit holes was a nice way to ignore all the terrible shit that was happening to her, but those kind of tangents were practically useless when she needed to stay in the moment.

  “Would you take a seat?” Kayde asked. “We’ll be approaching the gate soon and need to be buckled in for safety.”

  If it were another man, she’d think he was stalling, but if Kayde didn’t want to answer her, she knew he would just tell her no. So she sat and buckled into the copilot seat and waited to see if he would talk.

  “While the rest of the crew is waiting for the ambassador to make his next move, I am following up on another lead,” Kayde said after several moments. He didn’t bother to explain everything that the Detyens and their human mates had been doing back on Earth for the past two months, knowing that Quinn had been involved with it all for some time. If she ever met Ambassador Yormas of Wreet, she didn’t know if she’d be able to stop herself from punching him in the face. He and his men had almost killed Toran and Iris, his accomplice had injured Kayde, and he might be masterminding a plot to destroy Earth. He was definitely not her favorite alien.

  The alien sitting next to her—and it disturbed her to realize that he might be her favorite, current situation notwithstanding—continued to speak. “We need to know what happened back at HQ. Nyden Varrow said Yormas wasn’t working alone. We know there was an Oscavian warship, obviously. But none of our communications have been answered.”

  “Is it a little soon for that? I assume you can’t make a direct call.” The location of Detyen HQ was a tightly guarded secret. Even though Quinn had been there, she couldn’t have directed anyone to the place, no matter what they offered her in exchange for the information, or how much they threatened her. All she knew was that it was an icy planet, one that seemed completely hostile to life, yet where the remnants of the Detyen race cobbled their lives together, in a search for vengeance for a planet that had been destroyed before any of them were born.

  “That’s true,” Kayde conceded. “But by now, we should have heard something.”

  “So you’re going back to HQ to see what happened, right?” What must he be feeling right now? He might be flying directly into a graveyard, might be only days or weeks away from the confirmation that most of his kind had been annihilated. Something knotted deep inside her chest, an emotion strong enough to nearly choke her. “You’re doing this all alone?” The answer was obvious, but she couldn’t stop the question from escaping.

  “It isn’t dangerous, or it shouldn’t be. I am merely a scout. With such a small team, we cannot afford to send anyone else back.” He thought that she was concerned for his safety, perhaps that she was worried that the Oscavians were still lurking. And now that she thought it, that was true too. Concern for Kayde had buried itself deep in her skin, something she was scared to acknowledge, but couldn’t extract without a lot of blood and pain.

  “You shouldn’t have to do this alone.” No one should be forced to reckon with the possible loss that he was flying straight towards.

  Kayde stared at her for several seconds, his stare a heavy weight everywhere his eyes landed. “It needs to be done.”

  If it was so important, why had they waited two months? Why hadn’t they alerted the human authorities to potential threats? She didn’t ask these questions. She didn’t want Kayde to lie to her, and she suspected that he wasn’t willing to tell the truth. “Are you heading back to Earth once this is done?” He would have to, right? How else would he relay his information? Clearly whatever lines of communication had been set up were compromised.

  “Those are my orders,” Kayde confirmed. Again, there was something in his voice that told her it wasn’t the whole truth.

  “And how long do you think this will take?” She couldn’t be about to do what she was about to do. It felt like she was possessed, watching herself from somewhere else as her body volunteered for a task she had no place signing up for.

  “It could be a couple of months.”

  Months. If she took him up on his offer to get off the ship and the way station, she would be home in a day or less. She could find a way to put together tattered pieces of her life, to clean up the mess the slavers made of her psyche, and create bonds with her fellow survivors. She could find a way to move on from the nightmare that she’d been living in for the past year, and let go of the balance sheet that only existed in her mind. But if she got off of the ship and went back to Earth, Kayde would be alone. He wouldn’t be there when she turned her head, wouldn’t be lurking in the shadows when she looked for him. In a strange, creepy way, he’d become a security blanket. A part of her had known for a long time that he wasn’t a threat, and even when he’d wrestled her down to the floor and cast away her knife, he’d done his best to do her no harm. Absently, she wore at the cuff of her sleeve, tracing over the sensitive skin of her wrists. If she pulled back the fabric, she doubted that she would even be bruised.

  Could she really let him do this mission alone? Yes, the sane part of her insisted, let him go. Go home. Live your life away from this madness. But even as the thoughts filtered through her mind she knew what she had to do.

  “Don’t drop me off at the way station. I’m going with you.”

  Kayde continued to stare at her for several long moments, his silence almost loud enough to drown out the distant drone of the engines. He had still said nothing when they came to the jump gate, and as they queued up to travel through it, he remained silent. Quinn gripped the arms of her seat tightly as they prepared for the jump, and once they flew through, her body feeling squished and stretched in the strangest ways, Kayde continued flying. They flew close enough to the way station that Quinn could see the distant sparkle of ships surrounding it, but Kayde never slowed. She leaned back in her seat and pulled her legs up, wrapping an arm around them and telling herself that she had made the right choice. The darkness of the view screen in front of her, the black stretch of space that seemed to reach out and to forever, offered no reassurance. But she was in this now, for better or worse. With Kayde.

  She hoped she hadn’t made a huge mistake.

  Chapter Four

  QUINN WAS BEGINNING to regret her decision to stay on the ship. The only surprising thing about that was that it had nothing to do with Kayde. She hadn’t realized just how boring space travel could be, especially when her only companion was a silent warrior who seemed determined to keep a polite distance between them at all times. Not just physically, but conversationally and emotionally too. If she didn’t know better, Quinn might’ve thought that Kayde was a robot. He wasn’t, right? Surely someone would’ve mentioned that before. Besides, she had seen him eat, and he had ducked into the bathroom on enough occasions to convince her that he had necessary bodily functions not found in mechanical people.

  No, he just acted like a robot. The first day after she decided to stay, she had tried to chat, using the team back home as conversation starters. After all, that was all that she and Kayde really had in common. But when she asked after his fellow Detyens and Sierra and Iris, he had given one-word answers, effectively cutting off that conversational path. She got a little success when she asked him about the ship, letting him instruct her on how to read the navigational maps and how to chart a flight plan. That had taken all of a half hour. Nav systems were designed to be easy to use and she could only ask him to repeat himself so many times. Eventually Quinn had retreated into the heart of the ship, claiming one of the rooms for her own. Since it was just the two of them, she wasn’t about to sleep in the open crew bunks. The room wasn’t much, a small bed attached to the wall, a water station, a small mirror, and a cubby for her luggage. That only served to remind her that she had no luggage, no clothes, no cleaning supplies, and months ahead of her with nothing but what she was wearing.

  The rest of the first day had been dedicated to scavenging any supplies that she could find. She found the room Kayde was going to use for himself, which was bigger than her own, and she thought it m
ust’ve been the captain’s quarters. The bed was huge, and soft, and inviting, but she wasn’t about to lay down in it. She’d screwed herself over once by falling asleep in the wrong place on this ship, and she wasn’t about to do it again. Especially not so soon after that first mistake. She ignored Kayde’s bag and stuck her head into the private shower that was unique to these quarters. She found a small bottle of soap and debated with herself for about three seconds before sticking it in one of her pockets. Kayde’s bag had still been sealed when she walked in, and she doubted he had unpacked his toiletries. There was no toothbrush, no razor, nothing else in the small bathroom to suggest that the soap she’d found was his.

  In the empty room, the quarters not occupied by her or Kayde, Quinn hit pay dirt, finding a small bag which contained three pairs of pants, four shirts, and one extremely fluffy sweater. There was even an unopened package of undergarments. She said a silent prayer of thanks to any god watching, and slung the bag over her shoulder, ferrying it and her soap back to her room. In the large communal bathroom she found a closet well stocked with more soap, towels, and toothpaste. She didn’t have much, but she had enough. As long as she had some way to clean her clothes, she would survive until they made it back to Earth. Hell, she didn’t really need clean clothes. It wasn’t like the slavers had cared that much about cleanliness.

  The second day was spent much like the second half of the first, scavenging through the ship, this time for something to do, some form of entertainment. Kayde didn’t seem to care about that stuff, when she asked, and he told her he hadn’t even brought an entertainment pad with him. The ship did have an entertainment room with some sort of gaming system she didn’t recognize and a holo player stocked with unfamiliar films.