by Kate Rudolph
On the third day she started pacing, clearing the distance from the cockpit, through the kitchen, to the crew quarters, and back, her long stride eating up the distance way too quickly to burn off the excess energy she found within herself. If anything was going to annoy Kayde, she’d expect it was that. But he said nothing, he didn’t seem to be paying attention. Not that she wanted him to be paying attention. But it was strange to be around him with no one else with them. Back on Earth, they’d never been alone, not even when he went out stalking her. Stalking? Was that fair? Maybe. But if he was a stalker, why was he ignoring her now?
She just made it to the kitchen on her tenth or eleventh lap of the ship when Kayde came out of the cockpit. He spared her half a glance before making his way to the food processor. There wasn’t much to eat, and it was all practically flavorless, but Quinn had had worse. That was her entire philosophy when it came to this trip. She’d had worse, she would survive.
“Why did you follow me back on Earth?” That was the problem with being cooped up, inappropriate questions just sort of popped out the second that she had any sort of intelligent companionship.
Kayde took three agonizing seconds to finish punching in the program on the processor before he swung his gaze around to look at her. How did he stay so blank all the time? There was something not right with him. And the longer she was in his company, or at least in his proximity, since they weren’t exactly chat buddies, the more some things that she’d heard the Detyens and their mates say began to make sense. They didn’t mean for her to hear them, that had been obvious. They only spoken when she’d walked out of the room, but her hearing was good, and they weren’t nearly as quiet as they thought they were. From the little hints, she knew that Raze used to be like Kayde, used to be cold like him. And she knew the Kayde hadn’t always been like this, that he’d been a happy child, joking around their base, and when he was a little older he’d become quite the playboy, just like Dryce. She wondered what tragedy had struck to make him so closed off. She didn’t know how a person could go from being full of life, full of vitality, full of love, to being one step removed from an automaton. But here he was, and she doubted that he would appreciate her asking probing questions about his past. After all, she wouldn’t be too keen to explain all of the things that she had done to survive, and that went well beyond the previous year and what the slavers had done to her.
Another man would’ve lied, or evaded the question, but that wasn’t Kayde. He grabbed his meal, something that looked like a bowl full of protein slush, and stepped back from the processor, never looking away from her. “Something about you called to me. I can’t define it.”
“Called to you?” What the hell did that mean? Though, as her mind twirled the words around inside her head, she thought she might understand. She hadn’t been following him, but every time he’d been near, it was like she could sense him at the outside of her consciousness. Was that a calling? Some kind of almost psychic connection? Not that psychics existed, at least not on Earth. That wasn’t a human thing.
“It isn’t something I can define any better than that. You shine brightly and I... That’s all.” He made it clear the conversation was over by taking his bowl with him back down the hall towards the cockpit.
KAYDE HAD BARELY TAKEN his seat again before Quinn was through the cockpit door, practically jumping around the copilot’s chair and sitting in it sideways, one leg hooked over the armrest. “We weren’t done talking,” she said. “You can’t just drop something like that and walk away.”
She had asked the question, he had answered it. What more was there to say? He kept silent, unsure of what she wanted to hear.
“You followed me around all over the city, I saw you a bunch of times.” It wasn’t an accusation, she was just stating facts as she knew them. Kayde couldn’t contradict her; after all, it was the truth. “You’re really just saying that you followed me all around because you were drawn to something about me? And it never occurred to you to strike up a conversation? I’m not some—I don’t know—thing that you can hunt. I am a person.”
“I know you’re a person. I know you’re not a thing.” Kayde wasn’t sure how he had expected this conversation to go, but it wasn’t like this. He certainly hadn’t been prepared for the rawness in Quinn’s voice, the emotion that he no longer could define. “And you had no reason to speak to me.”
“You don’t need a reason to start a conversation. That’s why you start a conversation.” Now she was looking at him, and this was an expression he could easily interpret. Confused. That was the look that all people that were members of the Detyen Legion eventually leveled at him. They didn’t understand his way of thinking, and they couldn’t understand why he was the way he was. It was the biggest kept secret of his people.
And he needed to stop this conversation before it could go much further. Soon Quinn would have questions, questions he couldn’t answer, not without betraying the only things he stood for. “There are things you don’t understand about me, things you don’t know.” That warning ought to do it. With any luck, she would back away. She would go back into the belly of the ship and leave him alone with his thoughts. Kayde felt a pang somewhere in his chest, but he ignored it. There was no use lingering with Quinn, no use making his pseudo-fixation worse.
If anything, though, his warning seemed to have the opposite effect. “Things I don’t know?” she scoffed. “Yeah, I don’t even know your last name. There’s a ton I don’t know about you, just like you don’t know about me. That’s why people have conversations. Are Detyens not like that? Are you... I don’t know... All psychic or something? Do you have like pheromones, or whatever, that take the place of conversation?” He thought she might’ve been laughing at him, that she might have been teasing.
Kayde couldn’t remember the last time anyone had bothered to tease him. It must’ve been before he lost his soul. Something unfurled within him, and for half a moment, his cheek twitched as if he were about to smile. He could almost remember what that was like. Smiles had once been easy, freely given, and taken as his due. He tried pulling his lips back, tried to find the right configuration of his face. His muscles became taut, and when he bared his teeth, Quinn sputtered.
“Um... what are you doing? Are you... Seriously... What are you doing?” She narrowed her eyes at him and leaned in a few centimeters, as if to get a better look.
Kayde wiped the expression from his face. What was he thinking? Smiling? He was soulless, he no longer had the right. But something inside him felt hollow, maybe the hole where his soul used to be. “It’s NaDetya.” He could not give her a real smile, but he could give her this. He wanted to give her this, even as some alarm went off inside his head, warning him of the danger of want.
“What is?” asked Quinn.
“My family name. Kayde NaDetya. What’s yours?”
“Porter.” Quinn scowled. She didn’t like to use her surname, didn’t like the memories of her childhood that it brought up. “Isn’t that basically Kayde of Detya? Like for me it would be Quinn of Earth? I thought you all had clan names. Dryce was telling me about it once.”
An unexpected wave of something curdled inside Kayde at the mention of the young Detyen male. He had no claim on Quinn, she could speak with whoever she wanted, but he knew Dryce’s attitude toward available women. “Have you spent much time with Dryce?” Even he could hear the bite in his voice.
Quinn’s eyebrows skyrocketed, and she stared at him for several seconds before tilting her head to one side and blinking rapidly. “A little, I suppose,” she said. “He actually knows how to carry a conversation.”
Kayde didn’t need to feel emotions to hear the pointed tone in that sentence. “That isn’t the only thing he carries.” Why had he latched on to this? Dryce was an honorable Detyen male, an accomplished soldier, and well respected among their people. Kayde could not fault the young man for doing exactly the same things that Kayde had done when he was his age. He just didn’t like
the thought of Quinn doing those things with him.
Like? No, he had no right to like or dislike anything. Whatever this was, he needed to get rid of it. He would schedule in time for meditation as soon as Quinn grew bored of them. He needed to center himself once more.
“Are you jealous of Dryce?” She sounded truly puzzled. “Why would you care? You said it yourself. We don’t know each other.”
Jealous. No, that couldn’t be it. But his atrophied imagination provided an image of Quinn in Dryce’s arms and the claws that lived beneath Kayde’s knuckles itched to shoot out and attack the absent man. Quinn was his, Dryce couldn’t have her.
No. Kayde shot up from his seat and turned his back on his companion. She wasn’t his, he had no claim to her. This obsession was a danger to them both and he needed to get a hold of himself. He could not risk Quinn getting hurt because he was malfunctioning. He didn’t think he could live with himself if he did anything to harm her. The remnants of his soul rebelled at the thought of causing her harm, but he couldn’t trust himself, not anymore. He was no longer a man, he was simply a beast with a task: defend his people, seek revenge, follow orders. And none of those orders had anything to do with Quinn.
“Come get me if any of the alerts sound. I must take my rest.” He escaped the cockpit before Quinn could say anything, and he wasn’t sure if he heard her voice calling after him, or it was just the whistle of the life support system blowing through the ship.
Chapter Five
YEP, THIS WAS A TERRIBLE idea. As Kayde’s footsteps retreated down the hall towards the sleeping quarters, Quinn settled back into her seat and crossed her arms, hugging herself tightly. That whole thing had been unexpected. Not that she expected anything from Kayde, not that she knew anything about him. The jealousy of Dryce? What was that about? Okay, maybe she had had an inkling about that. After all, the guy had practically been stalking her for the last month. Well, not stalking, not exactly, but he’d been paying close attention.
Did he want her? Was he attracted to her? Did she want him to want her? Did she want him? Quinn groaned and let her head fall back against the headrest, rolling it from side to side as if she could ward off some uncomfortable questions. Did she? Could she? She hadn’t had any pleasant thoughts about sex, about being with someone in that way, since she had been home. Relationships had never really been her thing, and even before all of the horrors that the slavers had inflicted upon them, she hadn’t had a spectacular experience. It had never been something to write home about, even if she had a home.
But Kayde was different. For one thing, he obviously wasn’t human. Over the past few months she had been wary of human guys. She could remember the hard press of human fingers gripping her, hurting her, doing things to her best forgotten. But almost all of the slavers that had bothered her had been human. None of them have looked like Kayde, and that seemed to be some sort of blessing. She didn’t feel uncomfortable around him, and those dark memories that swirled around at all hours didn’t rise up and try and drown her when she was next to him.
And, yes, maybe she liked looking at his face. And his muscles. And those dark markings she had caught a glimpse of peeking out of the collar of his shirt. Was that attraction? Would she freak out if he tried to kiss her? If he touched her? She shifted in her seat as an unexpected flash of heat washed over her. No, she didn’t think that she would have a bad reaction to him. Not at all.
What was she thinking? It was just the two of them stuck on the ship, potentially for months, and she was going to complicate that by developing feelings for him? By wanting to sleep with him? No, that way led to trouble. She couldn’t walk down that path. And certainly not alone. The only thing worse than a frustrated attraction was a one-sided one.
Was it one-sided? Her mind circled back to the Dryce issue. For a man who never seemed to give anything away, Kayde’s expression and body language had been practically screaming when she mentioned the younger Detyen male. Maybe that should’ve annoyed her. Kayde had no claim on her, and she had dumped more than one man for being consumed by his petty jealousies. But just as with everything else, Kayde was different. He made her feel different.
It would be really, really stupid to try something with him. He was her only way home, and if things went south she might end up stranded in space. She doubted Kayde would do that to her, no matter what happened. But she hadn’t survived this long by believing the best in people.
Quinn needed to get a hold of her hormones. This probably had nothing to do with Kayde. It was just her body calling out for contact, a sign that maybe she was starting to heal after everything that had been done to her. Kayde was merely convenient, the closest male body that didn’t make her shudder in terror. No, she had a feeling that if she were shuddering around him it would be for a completely different reason.
She locked down those thoughts, stuffing them in to a little box and burying it deep in her psyche. Kayde was the most closed off person she had ever met. He was practically a robot. Whatever she was seeing, she was just projecting it onto him. Even that jealousy thing. Maybe he had just been tired. After all, if he was attracted to her, wouldn’t he have stuck around? Instead, he had stormed off in the middle of the conversation as if she were less interesting to him than the pillows and blankets in his bunk. Not exactly romantic material. Not exactly someone to fantasize about.
Quinn leaned forward and looked at the control panel, her eyes dancing over the blinking lights. One of her hands hovered over a control screen, but she was careful to keep her distance, careful not to touch. She wasn’t about to screw up their flight by accidentally changing their destination, or expelling all of their fuel into the vacuum of space. That wouldn’t be good. And if she did something like that, that would ensure that she was stuck with Kayde for more than the few months that he had anticipated.
She pulled her hand back quickly and tightly gripped the arms of her chair to resist the temptation to touch anything. She wasn’t about to tempt fate. Quinn spared a glance back down the hallway towards the rest of the ship. It had gone quiet; Kayde must have made it back to his room all right. That left her alone, monitoring equipment she didn’t understand, and questioning what the hell she was doing. Hopefully one day she would figure it out, and hopefully she wasn’t going to go crazy with want for a man who wouldn’t give her the time of day. She wasn’t that desperate, and she was much stronger than that.
Kayde NaDetya could stay in his room for all she cared. She had no claim on him, and that wasn’t about to change. And that was just how she liked it.
WHEN KAYDE RESUMED his post several hours later, Quinn switched off positions without a word. That was good, that was normal. That was what he was supposed to want. Well, not want, but it was difficult to find the right words to describe the way he experienced the world. So many languages were deeply rooted in emotion, and functioning without it could leave him adrift in vocabulary that no longer suited him. So he would have to settle for the word want, even if it wasn’t quite right.
They didn’t speak at all over the next day, and the trend might’ve continued indefinitely if Kayde hadn’t checked the supply levels in their food processor and water containment systems. He’d been aware of the levels when he boarded the ship, of course. But with Quinn on board, they were going through their supplies twice as fast as anticipated. There was enough to survive to get them to Detyen HQ, but if his people’s home had been destroyed, and if they could not scavenge once they got there, their situation would soon grow dire.
And even if everything was completely fine at HQ, Kayde doubted that Quinn wanted to subsist on flavorless protein packs and vitamin powders. Taste was no issue for him; in fact, the blander, the better. It was a survival tactic of the soulless. They avoided strong flavors, strong sensations, strong colors, anything that could trigger the remnants of emotion, of desire. It was a long-held theory that keeping all experiences as neutral as possible would lengthen the useful existence of the soulless. Kayde was will
ing to believe that. On Earth, with all of its noise and sensuality, he’d been strung like a tight wire. Back on the ship where there was much less to distract him he could feel his muscles unwinding. So long as he ignored Quinn.
It was a big ship for two people, and the task was simple when they each seemed determined to ignore one another. But with a supply stop imminently necessary, Kayde knew he would need to find his companion and inform her of the change in plans. She would not want to be kept in the dark.
He thought he would find her in the kitchen, but it was empty. She didn’t answer when he knocked on the door to her room, but he remembered the ship came with an entertainment station and he realized that it was the most likely place for a human to spend her time.
The door was open and he could hear the sounds of the holo player as he got closer. Quinn’s laughter echoed around him and Kayde froze in the doorway when he saw her face lit up with delight at whatever she was looking at. She was transformed, bright with emotion and looking years younger now that the worry she carried with her everywhere was nowhere to be seen. She was just the kind of woman he would’ve pursued before he lost his soul, beautiful with a hint of danger, who could laugh because she knew just how bad the universe could be and didn’t let the darkness destroy her. If he could still wish, he would have wished for her. Would’ve wished that they had met years ago, before he lost his soul, before she had been subjected to terrors that kept her up at night. What would she have meant to him back then? Maybe everything.
She was the kind of woman he would have wanted for a denya. But even if Raze had been lucky enough to find his after losing his soul, Kayde held out no such hope for himself. The universe did not hand out miracles like that, and he certainly didn’t deserve one.
The holo player went silent when Quinn realized he was standing there. Their eyes locked for a moment and a sharp echo of desire stabbed Kayde in the gut. He would’ve wanted this woman so much, would have done anything to claim her back when he could.
