by Lauren Esker
"What are you talking about?"
"Are these doing that?" She touched the curiously warm cuff again. "Skara said I wouldn't be able to use them. I don't have the, what did he call them? The mods?"
"You don't have cuff mods?"
"Will someone please tell me what those are?"
Kite held up her hand and pointed to a silver tracery of lines on her skin around the edges of her gold and silver cuffs. "These. Implants in your wrists to connect your neural system to the cuffs. Do you have that?"
Claudia shook her head.
"Why do you even have cuffs in the first place, then?"
"They're not mine. I took them off that bounty hunter, Kriff. They're only on my wrists because I didn't have a better place to put them."
Kite raised her hand, fingers loosely curled into a fist. "Wait—!" Claudia began, but green light blossomed on Kite's cuff and then flashed off what Claudia was now positive was a shield all around her.
"Well, you're certainly using them now," Kite said. "Are you sure you don't have mods?"
"I don't! I don't have anything! I'd never seen anything like this before I met Skara."
"But you raised a shield."
"I know!" Claudia wailed. "I don't know how to make it go down! What if I suffocate in here?"
"You're not going to suffocate. It automatically exchanges oxygen with the air outside the shield unless it finds toxins or a lack of air around you."
"How do I take it down? No, wait!" Claudia flung her hands up in front of her. Kite flinched, which was somewhat satisfying. "Promise you won't shoot me if I do."
"I promise," Kite said.
"... I don't believe you."
"Then what's the point of having me promise, then?"
"I don't know!" Claudia moaned.
A trace of a smile quirked the corner of Kite's mouth. "Okay, look. I admit the gold cuffs worried me. Those are the colors of a Galatean citizen. If you were wearing silver, it would mean you were a non-citizen or a slave, and that would make it more likely that we could trust you. But you don't know about any of that, do you?"
Claudia shook her head. "I never heard of any of this before I met Skara."
"Okay. Listen. You wanted to know who we are. What we are. Well, I'm going to tell you. What we are, friend, is a village of escaped captives. Most of us were once slaves of the Galateans, like Skara and myself. Others are refugees from their various wars. We've been building a city here, a refuge for others like us. Skara has been helping us by bringing supplies and more refugees from the outside. Does that answer your question?"
It did, but it raised even more. Claudia looked at Skara with new eyes, trying to reconcile the self-centered smuggler she'd thought he was with this man who was risking his life to bring supplies to refugees.
"We trust him. And we're trusting you," Kite added, her voice more gentle now. "Can you lower your shield, please?"
"I don't know how."
"Just think 'off.' The cuffs are mentally controlled. Granted," Kite added, "I still don't know how you can possibly be controlling them without the mods."
Off, Claudia thought. Off. Off. Off.
She concentrated so hard that her head began to ache again, but she felt the moment when the shield went down, like the release of a slight strain she hadn't even realized she was carrying.
"I did it!" she exclaimed, and looked up with a delighted grin, just in time to see the green flash as Kite stunned her.
Thirteen
Skara woke to pain. It was fire beneath his skin, a cold twisting in the pit of his stomach, shivers rippling along his veins.
He'd been through withdrawals from various drugs before. He loathed dependency of any sort, and the instant he'd realized he was hooked on anything, he had made himself stopped taking it, refused to let it claim him. But in a galaxy full of addictive substances, not all of which he'd had a choice about taking, this feeling wasn't entirely unfamiliar.
But it was the worst he'd ever been through, and as far as he knew, it was only going to get worse.
There was a part of him that wondered if it would have been kinder not to wake up at all.
"Skara?" a soft voice said.
Claudia? And with that, memory came crashing back, driving away the fog. He'd passed out after landing on Haven, where he'd brought two bounty hunters and then left Claudia at their mercy. Damn it!
He forced his eyes open. "Claudia?" His voice was a rasp, torn from an achingly dry throat.
"Here. Have some water." The cool rim of a cup was pressed to his chapped lips, and a firm but gentle hand cupped the back of his skull, supporting his head as he sipped.
It was very nice. He could have spent all day in her arms ...
"Not that you deserve water," Claudia went on, her voice tart, though her hands remained gentle, belying the anger in her tone. "Seeing how you lied to me, and got me taken prisoner and locked up. Your sister is a real bitch, by the way."
"Sister?" he asked, dazed, around the rim of the cup. "Which sister?" Please, let it be Selinn. She was the only one who might have a solution for what was happening to him now.
The light was dim; they were somewhere indoors. He could just make out Claudia frowning down at him.
"I meant Kite. How many sisters do you have, anyway?" she asked.
"Three." He pushed himself up on a shaky elbow. His entire body felt appallingly weak, and despite the blankets heaped on him, he was shivering. "Where are we?"
"We are in the secret village you took me to, where no one trusts me because I'm an outsider and they've locked us both up."
"What? They've what?" He shoved off the blankets and forced himself to sit up, fighting through the dizziness and shivers. "What do you mean, they locked us up? What the hell?"
"I mean what I said! Your stupid sister said a bunch of things about trust and then stunned me. I still have a headache, by the way." Her voice was plaintive. "They've been treating us pretty well, bringing us food and stuff. I think they're unloading your ship. Which, incidentally—"
"My ship!" He lurched to his feet and then sank back onto the bed. "Those assholes. I've been busting my ass out there for them. Ingrates. I'm having a word with them. A lot of words, starting with What the fuck."
"Sit down before you fall down," Claudia said, planting a firm hand on his shoulder. He could have shaken her off easily ... or at least, normally he could have; in his present condition he would have lost a wrestling match to a four-year-old child. Rather than find out, he decided to let her hand stay there. It was a pleasant contrast to the cold shivers coursing through the rest of him.
"And there's another thing." Claudia gave him a small shake. "Why didn't you tell me not having the symbiont was hurting you? You stupid ass! I wouldn't have kept it if I'd known!"
"Who told you?" Skara asked. His teeth were chattering. He clenched them until his jaw muscles ached, and wondered how much of this was withdrawals from the symbiont, and how much was withdrawals from the high doses of stimulants and painkillers he'd been shooting himself up with for the past couple of days.
"Kite. She said it could kill you if you don't get it back."
Skara unlocked his jaw enough to say, "It will. That's why I came back to Earth in the first place."
"So why didn't you tell me?" She held up a hand, palm cupped. The gold of a citizen bracelet glinted on her wrist, confusing him briefly until he remembered, dimly, that she'd taken them off Kriff. "Here, I don't know how you get it out, but just take it. I don't even want it. It's been nothing but trouble."
"No, Claudia, you don't understand." He reached up and gripped her by the shoulders, hating the faint spasms that ran through his fingers. He needed more drugs. He hated being weak.
"What don't I understand?" she asked.
And for just a moment, he hesitated.
This was his last and only chance. She didn't know how the symbiont worked, didn't know what she would be agreeing to if he tried to take it out of her. And maybe it wouldn't hurt her
at all. He wasn't sure how long it took the symbiont to bond with a host. She'd only had it for a few days. Maybe she'd be fine ...
And maybe, far more likely, she'd end up like him: shaking, drenched in cold sweat, and facing an inexorable oncoming death that she could do nothing to stop.
"Claudia," he said quietly. "I can't take it out of you because losing it would kill you, too."
Her eyes flew wide open. "What?"
"I know it's a lot to take in—"
"You put a thing in me that can't be taken out without—"
"I didn't put—"
"—Without killing me?"
"Don't panic—"
"This is not panic. This is my earnest desire to introduce you to my fist." She wrenched away from him and strode back and forth across the narrow floor, which was only a few paces from one side to the other. They were being held in one of the village's small wooden houses, which he supposed made sense; the villagers hadn't gotten around to building a proper jail yet. The hulk of their crashed ship beside the village was sometimes used for that purpose, but it would have been much less comfortable. Anyway, no jail could hold someone who could make portals; they were essentially being held on the honor system. And they'd left Claudia the cuffs, even. He still had his too.
He wondered if Claudia had figured out that they were being treated with kid gloves, compared to how things could have been.
Not that she was in any mood to listen right now. She stopped pacing and whirled around. "When were you going to tell me?"
"I was planning on it!" Skara protested, swinging his legs off the bed. He was feeling a little steadier now.
"When? Before or after you dropped dead? Before or after I dropped dead?"
"You're not going to drop dead. You feel fine, don't you?"
"Sure I feel fine! I feel fine because there's an alien parasite in me!"
She dragged her fingers through her hair, then picked up a pillow and screamed into it.
"Are you okay?"
Claudia lowered the pillow and glared at him. "Oh yes, I'm great. I'm peachy. I just found out that we have one alien parasite to share between us and whichever of us doesn't get it is going to die. Why wouldn't I be okay?"
"It's not a parasite, it's a symb—"
"Not really seeing the difference here!"
There was a knock on the door. Claudia spun around and hurled the pillow just as the door opened.
It bounced off the chest of someone so tall that he had to duck to step under the wooden lintel, particularly since his height was increased by a pair of horns curving up from his electric-blue hair. Claudia stopped in mid-rant, her mouth open, as without speaking or changing expression, he caught the pillow and dropped it on a nearby chair.
"Finally," Skara snapped at the humanform dragon. "Care to tell me why we're locked up, Lyr?"
"I just got back to the village from a scouting trip. I didn't know you were back until half a tick ago." Lyr turned his curious silver eyes on Claudia, who was still staring at him. "Hello. Who are you?"
Claudia closed her mouth.
"Stop staring," Skara said, deeply irritated for reasons he couldn't quite put his finger on. "Yes, he goes around bare-chested all the time because he doesn't feel the cold like the rest of us do. That, or he just likes to make his mate jealous. Which he is, you know. Mated. Very much in love, can't keep their hands off each other, very annoying. So quit drooling."
"I'm not drooling!" Claudia snapped indignantly, finding her words at last. She patted the top of her head. "You've got—"
"Horns. I know." Lyr smiled at her. "I'm a dragon. Never seen one before?"
"... what?" Claudia said faintly.
"She's from Birthworld, dude," Skara told him. "Like your mate. So no, she's never seen a dragon. Or an Iustran. Or a Tybor until just recently; I understand she's now met Kite."
"When exactly were you on Birthworld?" Lyr inquired, turning a cool silver gaze on him. "I thought you were going to stop running the blockade. It's not worth it. You're going to get caught."
"Where do you think I've been getting the money to keep your secret slave village in seed tubers and plows? You freeloaders don't exactly pay for yourselves, you know!"
"Skara, I've told you, we don't expect you to—"
"Can we not have this argument now?" He didn't like the way Claudia was looking at both of them—a very thoughtful gaze, as if she was figuring out a few things for the first time. Things he didn't want her to figure out.
He didn't want her looking at him like he was some kind of hero. He wasn't.
On the other hand, being locked up and treated like a criminal by the people he'd been helping was really freaking annoying. Technically he was a criminal, but that didn't mean he enjoyed being treated like one.
"You're right," Lyr said, to Skara's even more intense annoyance.
Skara glowered at him. "Are you reading my mind right now? You better not be."
"You know better than that. Surface thoughts only, and not without permission." Lyr let out a breath. "The village council is going to want to talk to you."
"Village council. You know, less than a year ago there wasn't even a village here, and the only reason why there is a village council or a village to have a council is because of me. Well, partly because of me," he was forced to add, in the interests of honesty. "Somewhat because of me."
"Skara, the point is, you brought a stranger here—"
"We bring strangers here all the time!"
"Escaped slaves. People who have everything to lose and nothing to gain by reporting us to the Galatean authorities. All it'll take is one, Skara, and then we'll have a fleet of Galatean warships in orbit around Haven."
"I trust her," Skara said. He was aware of Claudia turning to him, and tried not to look at her. "I vouch for her, okay? She's not going to turn us in."
"All right. I'll talk to them." Concern flickered in Lyr's silver eyes. "Do you need medical attention?"
"No," Skara said sullenly. "I'm fine."
"I can have Meri—"
"I said no!"
Lyr grimaced and turned to Claudia. "I apologize that our meeting occurred on such an awkward note. I am Lyr."
"Claudia," she said. "He's not actually okay, you know. He's—" She paused, as Skara shook his head vigorously at her.
"Yes?"
"He's not okay, but apparently he and I need to have a talk about it."
"Then I will leave you to have your talk, and I will speak to the council. Do you two need anything?"
"No," Skara said flatly
"You don't speak for me, Skara." She smiled sweetly at Lyr. "No, thank you. Not right now."
Lyr nodded and left.
As soon as the door closed behind him, Claudia whirled on Skara. "What do you mean, he's a dragon? How many different kinds of aliens are there?"
"Never mind about that." He was annoyed to notice that he was barefoot. At least they'd left his pants on. "You need to portal me to my ship. To the medbay, if you can."
"Oh, Skara—"
"Claudia." He reached out, opening and closing a hand. With an exasperated look, she supplied herself as a human crutch and helped him stand. "I cannot let them know how bad it is. It's bad enough you know how bad it is."
"Yes, about that—"
"Claudia. Please."
She closed her eyes briefly in a "give me strength" gesture. "Okay. I'll take you there. And you'll answer my questions about what the symbiont really is and what it does to its host. Deal?"
"Deal."
"I'm still mad at you, by the way."
"I know. I would expect nothing less."
She wrinkled her nose at him and raised a hand in her portaling gesture. She'd gotten much better at it; the portal opened immediately, without the need for prompting or coaching, revealing a slice of his medbay.
Skara took a last look around the hut by pure habit; he was used to memorizing places so he could portal back if needed. Weird to think there was no p
oint now. And if he couldn't get the symbiont back somehow, there would really be no point.
He refused to accept her offered arm and stepped through the portal on his own, only to sway and grab hold of the medbed on the other side.
"Wow, you are in bad shape," Claudia said, banishing the portal with a wave of her hand. She didn't look at all the worse for wear, so she must have had ample time to recover from the strain of the previous portals. The symbiont would also be working more efficiently in her system now.
"It looks worse than it is." He gathered himself, strode to the door, and palmed it shut. There were faint clunks and thumps coming from below: the village unloading their cargo. Another surge of offended indignation rolled through him. Ingrates.
"I very much doubt that." Claudia sat on the medbed and folded her arms while Skara rummaged through his supply of medications. "Okay, it's time for you to tell me the truth. The whole truth, this time, not whatever tiny part of the truth you think I should know. About the Rahadi, or whatever you said they were called, and this thing in me and exactly where you got it and what it's doing to me right now."
"Rhuadhi. You know, in my defense, the entire time I've known you, we've had bounty hunters after us. There hasn't really been time to tell you more than the basics." His stock of stimulants was getting low. He didn't normally use them heavily like this. He touched a tab on that rack, adding a reminder note to the computer to pick up more. "Speaking of Squonxface and whatever you called the other one, where are they?"
"Kriff and Ilyx. They're still locked up, as far as I know, but I've been with you the whole time, so I can't say for sure." She snapped her fingers impatiently at him. "You're stalling. Talk to me."
"Okay. Give me a minute." He slammed the injector home, and closed his eyes briefly as relief spread through his veins, soothing the pain and itching, chasing away the bone-deep fatigue.
It was only a temporary respite. But he'd lived his life in the "now," knowing that tomorrow might be worse. This wasn't so different.
He opened his eyes to find Claudia watching him with open worry on her face. She attempted to cover it with irritation, badly, as soon as he looked at her. "How bad is it?" she asked quietly.