Snowburn

by Frost, E J

  Before I can rise, four other fluff balls rush me. Kez giggles. “They’ll all want some now.”

  “Escape while you can, Snow,” Gig advises.

  I survey the fuzz balls. A black and white one rises up on its hind legs and looks at me the way Alpha Bunny did. Like a furry periscope. They’re hard to resist when they do that. I give it a piece of bread. That gets all the others standing on their hind legs, too. Only they’re kind of bottom-heavy, and two topple over.

  I can’t control a chuckle.

  A black one that toppled over rights itself with a wriggle and hops away, flicking its furry back feet at me. I may not know lagomorph language, but even I can tell that’s Bunny for don’t you fucking laugh at me.

  “Aww, poor Bobble,” says Chiara, amidst general laughter.

  “Second thing you have to understand about rabbits is that they’re easily offended,” Kez tells me. She’s already started eating, and whatever she’s wolfing down smells better than good. Time to stop playing with the pets.

  I break up the bread, pass it out between the three that are still begging at my feet, and leave the rest on the ground in case the black one comes back. Then I slide onto the bench next to Kez. She passes me a plaz container of food, meat and veg in a glossy red-brown sauce. The smell’s not familiar, but it smells good. Spicy, as I discover when I take a bite. Delicious. Ginger and coconut and spices I don’t have names for. The taste reminds me of something and after a moment I place it. The first time I kissed Kez, her mouth tasted like this. “You have this last night?” I murmur to her.

  “Uh-huh, I always have rendang.” A little frown creases her brow. “How did you know?”

  “You gave me a rendang kiss.”

  Kez giggles into her hand. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It tasted good.” I lean into her so I can whisper into her ear, “You can give me another one later.”

  Behind us, someone makes a gagging noise and says, “Get a room.”

  “Your brother, I presume,” I say to Kez. She turns around on the bench to look at Ape.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asks.

  “Last minute run. Hemos to Nock. I got double for it.”

  “I got double for it,” Gig objects.

  “I did the run,” Ape says.

  “I negotiated the fee.” Gig gets the final word and Ape cuffs him across the back of the head in acknowledgement as he goes to sit between Chiara and Duncan.

  I don’t try to follow the conversation that follows between Ape, Gig, Chiara and Duncan. It seems to go back and forth between the runs they’ve done that day and the high score on the v-game Duncan was playing. Gig takes a lot of ribbing off Duncan, and not all of it is good-natured.

  “How long’s Duncan been parta your crew?” I ask Kez.

  She pauses in the middle of tearing a bite of meat off the chunk she’s holding in her chopsticks. Her lips are red and glossy with sauce. Her white teeth are sunk deep in the meat. The sight makes me hotter than if she’d ripped off all her clothes and spread eagle on the table. Well, maybe not hotter than that, but close. I’m glad we’re sitting down ‘cause no one could fail to see the tent pole the little monster’s just popped in my fatigues.

  Kez drops the meat. Swallows nervously. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she whispers.

  “Later.” If Kincaid hasn’t ruined her for oral sex, I’m going to see those white teeth around other meat later.

  She tilts her head warily. Then she glances down at the piece of meat she’s dropped onto her plate, and back up at me. Her pupils dilate. “What were you—?”

  “I said, later. Answer my question.”

  “Um.” She wipes her mouth. Pokes at her food with her chopsticks. “Six months or so. Around the time Ape hooked up with Chiara. Why?”

  “I’m just wonderin’ how he fits in.”

  “Oh, I hired him to help me handle the volume. We started getting a lot of longer runs and Ape and I couldn’t keep up. I didn’t want to let my clients down. He was already a pretty well-known runner, so it wasn’t hard to sell him to clients. He’s done okay so far.” Her tone suggests he’s still on probation. Six months is a long time for him to still be proving himself. Her trust issues emerging? Or maybe she just doesn’t like the way he treats Gig. I’m not sure I like it, myself.

  “He live here?”

  She shakes her head. “He has his own place.”

  There’s clearly some significance to that. “Why?”

  She glances down the table, then turns a little towards me so the others can’t see her face. Looks at me very steadily. “I don’t want him here,” she mouths, barely making any sound.

  I raise an eyebrow. Wait to see if she elaborates. When she doesn’t, I hazard a guess. “He make a play for you?”

  She nods. I slant him a glance. He’s too clean-cut for her. She needs someone darker, to give her that edge she craves.

  “After he’d already been with Nevie,” she whispers.

  Guess they don’t share everything after all.

  I pick up a small piece of meat with my chopsticks. Offer it to her. I want to see those white teeth in action again.

  She takes the meat delicately between her teeth, reminding me of Alpha Bunny. Both are queens of their hives. And they get to say who and when.

  I waggle a finger at Kez and she leans into me. I put my mouth so close to her ear, my lips brush her skin. “What’re the chances of gettin’ to groom you later, Queen Bunny?”

  She grins, that full, cockstand-inducing, mischievous grin. “Pretty good. But the dominant male doesn’t ask.”

  “No?”

  She shakes her head. “You haven’t met Tigger yet. He’s probably sleeping on my bed.”

  “What’s King Bunny do when he wants some groomin’?”

  “Bites the scruff of her neck.”

  “Mmm, bunny love sounds rough.”

  Kez laughs. “And brief. But they do it a lot.”

  “Works for me.”

  A wadded-up napkin hits Kez in the side of the head. I glance up and meet Ape’s blue glare. “You’re putting me off my food,” he grouses.

  Kez flushes all the way to the pierced tips of her ears. She picks the napkin out of her food. Puts it to one side. Rises. Walks over to her brother and slaps him across the face. Hard.

  Chiara jumps off the bench in her haste to get away. Duncan just leans to the side.

  “You ass!” Kez shoves her face right into her brother’s. “I’ve never said a word about you. Not about the fucking parade you’ve brought through here. Not when you moved her in without even asking me first. Not when you’ve been humping so hard you’ve practically come through my damn wall. I never said a thing. So you keep your fucking opinions to yourself!”

  She turns on her heel and storms away, slamming foliage out of her way. Guess her patience with little brother isn’t infinite after all.

  Ape has gone so red he looks ready to explode. I give him a condescending smile as I pick up our trays of food and chopsticks. “Nice timing, Ace.”

  I follow Kez into the jungle.

  I let her lead the way to wherever she’s going. Make no attempt to catch up with her as she strides through the garden, up a short flight of stairs, then down a hallway. She kicks open a door, slams it shut behind her. I balance both trays of food in one hand, open the door quietly and step through.

  Her bedroom. No doubt about it. Screens patterned with cherry blossoms and birds hide the permacrete walls. Long rack of girl clothes against one wall. Big mirror and dressing table. Oversized futon for a bed, neatly made, with a startled black rabbit sitting in the middle of it.

  Kez spins and begins to snarl, then she sees who has followed her and the fight goes out of her. She sags onto the futon, rests her elbows on her knees and hangs her head. “I’m sorry.”

  I set the trays of food down on the polished wood floor. Join her on the futon. The rabbit gives me a disgruntled glare, hops off the bed and disappe
ars through a membrane in the bottom of the door. That’s why she’s got one of the old manual doors instead of a slider: so the rabbits can come and go. “What was that all about, kitten?”

  “I get so angry at him sometimes,” she whispers.

  I put my arm around her shoulders. Wait for her to lean into me. When she does, I settle my hand in her hair and coax her head onto my shoulder. “That been comin’ for a while?” I ask.

  She nods against my shoulder. “Sorry. It’s not about you.”

  I already figured that. It’s about her being alone when her brother had someone, a string of someones, and rubbed her nose in it. It’s about having to take care of him, put his needs first, when she was just a kid herself. Maybe it would help if she spits all that out. “What’s it about then?”

  “Nothing.”

  Maybe she’s not ready to spit it out. I shrug the shoulder under her head. “You don’t wanna talk, we don’t have to talk. I’m just as happy finishin’ dinner before it goes cold.”

  She fiddles with one of her dreadlocks. “I don’t want to bore you.”

  “I’ll tell you when I’m bored.”

  She sighs. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then it probably won’t make any sense to you.”

  “’Cause I don’t have any brothers or sisters? You think that means I’ve never resented anyone I cared about?” My resentment towards Marin alone could fill several galaxies.

  “Sorry.” She hunches her shoulder against my side, then leans more solidly into me. “I’ve tried to make it up to Ape, you know, that he doesn’t have anyone but me. I’ve never said no. Whenever he wanted something . . . I got it. No matter what the cost. I’ve bled for him. Done things I swore I’d never do.” She bites her lip. Takes a deep breath. “He never even says thank you.”

  She’s spoiled him, and now it’s biting her in the ass. Ingrate. “Thank you’s not in little brother vocabulary.”

  “He’s not a baby anymore.” She looks up at me. “It’s time for him to grow up. I shouldn’t have to pull his ass out of the fire again and again. I shouldn’t have to do this . . .”

  She shifts away from me. Just slightly. But I feel it, and I know. This is it. This is what she keeps shying away from. This is what she’s hiding. From me. From her brother. From everyone.

  “What is this, Kez? No bullshit this time.”

  She curls into herself, puts her hands over her face. “I can’t tell you.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “I can’t.” She rocks back and forth, but she’s not leaping up, not running away. “I swore I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  “I’m no one. I don’t even have a name.”

  She turns suddenly and puts her arms around my neck. “You do. You have a name and secrets and I wish to God I hadn’t dragged you into this. It’s just . . . I didn’t know how many chances I’d have after this. I was afraid it might be my last chance with you.”

  I don’t like the sound of that. “S’okay, kitten.” I close my arms around her carefully. One hand in her dreadlocks. The other cupping the curve of her back, away from the bruise, away from the scar. Non-threatening, to help her relax enough to tell me whatever secret she’s been holding so tight. “Let it go.”

  She’s silent for a long moment, then turns her face to rest her cheek on my collar. Rubs her skin against mine. “You know how I followed you into the Delta a couple nights ago?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was upset. I thought you were going to be with a girl, and . . . I didn’t like it. I lost track of where I was. I crossed over into Red territory. I didn’t have any business there. I didn’t have anything to trade. They caught me and they wanted skin and I wouldn’t give it to them without a fight. So they put me up on the K-net. Sold me to the highest bidder.”

  My gut tightens. “What happened?”

  “Someone bid twenty thou hard for me.”

  “Fuck.” That’s a lot of credits for one little runner.

  “I know . . . it’s too much. I knew it as soon as they told me the bid. They were gloating. I knew I was fucked.”

  I draw her a little closer. “What’d they do to you?” None of her scars look recent, but they could have hurt her in other ways.

  “Nothing, really. They took me to a warehouse in Hemos City. Left me there. It was empty. Just a threedy deck. A man spoke to me through it. He was using a distorter. I never saw him.”

  She didn’t need to. She knows who he is, and so do I.

  “It was the way he spoke about Chiara,” she continues. “He used her name and he said it . . .”

  “The way a father would,” I finish for her. Since I found out her brother’s doing Baby Tyng, I figured this was coming.

  She nods against my neck.

  “You had to know, sooner or later, that this particular shit would hit the fan.”

  She shrugs. “Chiara told us a lot of things. She said she was estranged from her family. That her father had disowned her. Ape’s not the first street-rat she’s been with. She was on the Liquid Circuit for a while before they hooked up. But, I don’t know, I guess he’s the first guy she’s been serious about.”

  “What’d Tyng have to say?” I ask.

  “He was angry. He wanted to scare me. He did a good job.” She makes a little snuffling noise. “He wants blood. Flesh. To pay for the loss of his family’s honor. He said nothing I could do would make up for how my family has dishonored his.”

  It’s funny how seriously criminals take honor, when most straight cits think they don’t have any. But when you live outside the law, all you have is your word. And honor becomes everything.

  “He said . . . horrible things. He said he’d hurt Ape so bad that no woman would ever look at him again. He knew about my back. He said he’d burn Ape, make my back look like a scratch in comparison. He said he was having a virus geneered just for Ape, to eat . . . to eat his dick off. I couldn’t . . .” Her voice catches. “I couldn’t let him hurt my brother.”

  I close my eyes, knowing what must have come next. “You offered yourself in his place.”

  She nods against my neck. “He’s my brother. No matter how much of an ass he can be . . . I’m all he has. If I don’t stand up for him, who will?”

  He doesn’t deserve her. “What’d you offer?”

  “That’s the worst thing. I don’t know. He kept yelling at me. Saying he wanted flesh. Something permanent. I swore I’d never give flesh again . . . I argued with him for a long time. But he wouldn’t listen.” Her voice breaks. “Once I agreed to flesh, he stopped arguing. He just said, ‘I accept.’ But he didn’t tell me what. Didn’t set any terms. He said I’d have to do two runs for him, but he’d pay me for them. He didn’t say anything more than that. Just that I’d understand after the second run. He told me the first run was to New Brunny and the second was to the Cloudlands. Everything else . . . what I’ve told you, I figured out for myself.” She pauses for a long moment then whispers, “I’m scared, Hale.”

  She should be. It’s a test. He’s using the two runs to figure out what matters to her and then he’s going to destroy it. He’s going to break her.

  “What if . . . what if I can’t run after this . . .” she whispers into my skin.

  “You’ll still be you.” But I remember that moment of seeing her run in Eddle. The beauty and freedom of her movement. If he cripples her, she won’t be herself. A little bit of her beauty will be lost.

  She snuffles, wipes her nose. “Do you see why I lost it at him? He sits there and acts like this isn’t his fault.” I feel wetness on my neck. I cradle her close, rock her a little. “He’s never been able to keep it in his pants. The number of times I’ve bled because of his dick . . . and then he brings that ticking time bomb into my house. And he has the nerve to criticize me?

  She takes a deep, harsh breath. “I’ve never asked him for anything. I’ve never had anything for myself. And now, now i
n the middle of this mess that he’s made . . . I could lose the one thing I want . . .” Her voice breaks again.

  “What’s that, kitten?” I ask softly.

  “You.”

  I run my hand up and down her back, carefully above the scar. “Easy, kitten.”

  “He can’t just let it alone. Can’t just be happy for me. And I’m fucking it up by dragging you through this mess . . .”

  “I’ll tell you when it gets too messy for me.” I don’t want it to be, but it’s already there. I’ve been careful to avoid the major players in Kuseros’s underworld. Too much visibility. Too much potential for someone like Mike-the-Merc to recognize me and rat me out up the chain. And she’s dragging me straight into the path of one of the biggest fish in the pond.

  But there’s no way I’m going to let Tyng break her.

  I stroke her cheek with my thumb. “Wanna know what I think?”

  She nods.

  “I think you’re right about Tyng. He is using you to test his top dogs. See which of ‘em barks. And he’s testing you. Looking for your breaking point. Maybe that’s why he sent you to Kincaid. He must know what that fucker’s like.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” Her arms tighten around my neck. “You’re probably right.”

  “You gotta ask yourself where this ends, Kez. Once he gets his pound of flesh, whatever it is, you think that’ll be the end of it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I do. “Men like him never stop. He’ll destroy you, and then go after your brother anyway.” I stroke her fuzzy head. “It’s a matter of honor. And honor’s never satisfied.”

  “I don’t know what else to do. Short of tying up Chiara and dragging her back home, I can’t force her to go back—”

  “That’s not the worst idea.”

  She snuffles. “It goes against everything I believe in.”

  Her and her issues with authority. “Well, there’s always plan B.”

  “What’s plan B?” she asks.

  “Take out Tyng.” And it clicks. Something that’s been nagging at me ever since she showed up at the docks. Ever since she put her hand in mine and looked up at me with those big blue eyes. Ever since I realized it was the danger she wanted. That it’s what she was looking for. And the cold knot that’s gathered while she’s told me about Tyng expands to fill my gut. “But you already thought of that.”