Alton shook his head at something Haldin said to him, and Rachel forced herself to look away and down at the uninteresting boarding ramp she was sitting on.
Could the rakul really still be holding all the strings?
If so, the raknoth were putting on a good show, pretending to fight back. But that’s what they did, wasn’t it? From planet to planet, species to species, they put on good shows. They snatched a body and slid in. They made themselves unquestionably part of The Team. And then, when the time was right, they called in their masters to come revel in the hunt.
They were intergalactic turncoats for Christ’s sake.
And sure, there was the matter of their recently acquired blood ties with humankind that suggested this time might be different—that the very survival of the raknoth was dependent on this time being different. But was that enough? Enough to trust their scaly allies after everything?
She kneaded her brows with her palms and shook her head, attempting to cast the thoughts away like beading drips of water.
Whether or not she could trust they were all on the same side, none of them were doing anyone any good sitting here atop the quiet mountain, as peaceful as it was.
They needed to get back.
She looked over to the right, where Jarek had trekked a little way off on the pretense of going to enjoy the grassy ledge that overlooked Katashina.
Given the unmissable columns of smoke still rising from the village, though, and the defeated slump of Jarek’s shoulders, Rachel highly doubted there was anything resembling enjoyment going on in his head right now.
She should go to him.
For half a second, she wanted to do more than that. Thoughts and images flicked through her head, the two of them alone atop this mountain, locking themselves in Jarek’s ship and forgetting everything else, losing themselves in pleasures that required no thoughts, no pain and strife and—
As quickly as they sprang up, she quashed those thoughts with cold deliberateness.
None of that was going to happen. Not when they had alien claws at their fronts and their backs. Not when any moment could see Gada or any of the other rakul dropping down on top of them or sending in a raging horde of innocent civilians.
Not when there was every reason to believe he could wind up dead tomorrow—hell, today even.
What she needed to do was go dust him off enough that he could get his shit together, get back to home base, and be ready to move when Gada reared his head again. So with that thought held firmly in mind, Rachel stood, brushed off whatever dirt might have clung to her butt, and stomped down the ramp and toward Jarek’s perch.
Gentle quietness pressed in around her as she left the ships and the sounds of conversation from Michael and the Enochians behind her faded to little more than distant murmurs. With the light breeze on her cheeks and the soft grass underfoot, it would have been utterly peaceful out there if not for the sinister smoke columns ahead and the smells of charred wreckage that wafted in on that easy breeze.
Jarek didn’t turn as she approached, not even when she was reasonably sure he’d heard her coming. She sank to the grass beside him wordlessly, sitting close, but not quite touching.
What’s up? The words hung on her tongue, unneeded. There was no point asking him what he was thinking about, what was bothering him. The blackened remains of Katashina in the distance below shouted all the answer she required. So she sat quietly for a little while, trusting Jarek would speak when he was ready.
“I just wanted to save the crazy old bastard,” he finally said after some time. “And now”—he waved an armored hand helplessly toward Katashina—“all this…”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “I know.”
He turned slowly, his eyes refusing to leave the scene stretched out before them. When they finally did, his gaze flicked first to her hand and then to meet her eyes. “But?”
She relinquished her touch on his shoulder and folded her hands in her lap. Was it really that evident in her tone? Or was Jarek just tuned to her -isms well enough that she couldn’t slide her doubts and hesitations past his scrutiny?
“Well,” she said quietly, “Kole did have every chance to save himself.”
When she paused from pointedly studying her folded hands to shoot a glance his way, Jarek’s gaze was piercing, and she didn’t hold it long.
“What happened between you and Alton?” he asked.
She did her best to keep the ripple of shock from rising from her gut up to her face. “What does that have to do with anything?”
In the edge of her peripheral vision, he shrugged. “You’ve just seemed a bit miffed. Okay, pissed. More than usual, I mean.”
“They killed my family.”
The words poured from her mouth like angry gouts of flame before she’d even thought to say them. She glanced back toward the ships, wondering if Alton had heard the words she hadn’t meant to let out.
“I think it’s safe to say I have good reason to be a little skeptical,” she added quickly, focusing back on Jarek. “And I’d think you would be too after our friend”—she tilted her head in Alton’s direction—“nearly pulped you back at HQ.”
Jarek nodded slowly, looking less than convinced. “Maybe so. And I wholeheartedly agree you have more reason to be pissed than most. But I’m not really sure what that has to do with Kole.”
“I’m just saying we need to be careful. And remember who has and hasn’t tried to kill us in recent past.”
“I’m not sure we have the luxury of keeping our allies at arm’s distance for the rakul apocalypse, Rache. You don’t trust them, I get it. But—”
She jerked her hands up. “But what? You’re seriously going to lecture me about trusting allies after you disobeyed a direct order and ran off to save a raknoth? And what good did that do, by the way?”
The weight of her words caught up to her, and she started to look away, suddenly embarrassed. Jarek beat her to it. The shadow that descended over his face told her she’d crossed a line, but he didn’t snap back at her, didn’t even crack a joke. He just turned back to the embers of Katashina and hung his head.
Why had she said that? She’d made her point. Taking the extra shot had been unnecessary. Mean, even.
But how could he be standing up for them after everything? It was irrational. Naïve. Everything Jarek pretended not to be.
Wasn’t it?
“Jarek, I didn’t—”
“No need to apologize, Goldilocks.” He didn’t look up. “You’re right.”
“It’s not your fault, Jarek.” She waved a hand at the village below. “You didn’t do this.”
“No.” He shook his head, looking like he didn’t remotely believe her words or his own. “I didn’t.”
Silence stretched between them as Rachel tried and failed to think of anything to say that wouldn’t be redundant and utterly useless. Anything she said would only make it worse. She silently cursed Kole for his harebrained peace plan.
Minutes stretched by, and she found herself looking back at Alton, unable to help but think she wouldn’t have shed tears if it had been him instead of Kole. Would that really have made anything any better, though? Was it really Alton she was even angry with?
She turned back to face the village.
Sure, Alton had been complicit with the operation, and tangentially involved, but he hadn’t been the one who’d hounded her mom out into the woods, sent men after her family, and pushed her until she’d been desperate enough to do what she’d done to rescue Rachel.
Alton hadn’t been the one. But he was the only one left, if what he told her of his clan was all true.
A subtle rise in the barely audible hum of chatter back by the ships caught her attention. Beside her, Jarek was listening intently, aided by Fela’s enhanced feedback.
“It’s HQ,” he said to her questioning gaze.
She turned and saw Michael come around Jarek’s ship at a jog, headed their way and waving a hand in a we gotta go fas
hion.
“It’s the furor,” Jarek said, rising to his feet. “It’s happening again.”
10
Jarek watched the dark purplish material of the raknoth door hatch wriggle its way closed and suppressed a shudder. He let the tension out as a long sigh instead, looking around the rather spartan room.
He’d have preferred to make the return journey on his ship, but given that time seemed to be of vital essence right now, they’d opted to all pile into the Enochians’ ship and bolt back. Jarek’s ship was following at its own pace, flown by the ghostly remnant of Al they kept on board the ship’s computer for situations like this—the entity he and Al called “Ship Al.”
And so here he was, lurking in the first empty room he’d found.
Aside from the odd assortment of rune-etched knick-knacks and dark staves that suggested this might be Hal and Elise’s quarters, the room consisted of little more than a bed and a few drawers.
That was just fine. It wasn’t like he’d wandered into the quiet room seeking a view.
Why did he feel this terrible?
So they’d let Kole down. It wasn’t as if Jarek had never made major league mistakes or let people down before. Hell, in his bright-eyed teens, he’d accidentally thrown in with a band of veritable psychopaths thinking he was actually going to save the world from itself. Compared to that…
It was only one old raknoth, right?
One old raknoth, his loyal clan, and an entire village of innocent people, actually.
The weight of it all pressed back in, pushing him down to sit on the bed and bury his face in his hands.
He’d been too late. And now god knew how many people were going through the shit back at HQ, and they were going to be far too late to help them too, super-fast raknoth ship or no.
They’d fucked up. He’d fucked up.
It was the truth. He couldn’t fight it. And much as the thought made him want to test the durability of the nearest iridescent purplish wall, there was nothing he could do about it now.
For once, he should have listened to Alaric.
Footsteps approached from the corridor outside, light and hesitant—Rachel’s, he guessed. They paused outside the hatch, and he pictured her raising her hand uncertainly to knock.
No knock came, though, before the hatch disentangled itself from the wall and peeled back to reveal a tight-faced Rachel.
It wasn’t a mystery how she’d known which room to try—his mind might be warded from her senses, but Fela wasn’t, and he could only imagine the exosuit stuck out like a sore thumb once Rachel had learned what to look—or feel—for.
She padded into the room, avoiding his eyes until she stood in front of him and no longer could. She looked tired, and not a little bit like she didn’t want to be there just now.
Jarek watched her, trying to wrangle up some snarky comment—anything to ruffle her feathers and break this odd funk that seemed to have settled its way snuggly between them.
Nothing came.
So, instead, he resorted to sweeping his gaze around the room as if taking it in for the first time.
“A whole year in here, huh? What do you suppose they’ve been doing for fun all this time?”
Rachel looked from the staves in the corner to the bed and finally back to Jarek with the faintest of head shrugs.
A grin tugged at his mouth as he traced her likely conclusion but died as the traces of amusement faded from Rachel’s face.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, spreading her hands in a there, I said it gesture.
“I’m not sure why.” He shrugged. “I mean, I’m sure we could keep it up for a good year or two if we put our backs into it.”
She wasn’t buying the diversion. Not today.
“It wasn’t your fault. None of this was, or is, or…” She sighed and came to plop down beside him.
He met her hazel eyes, so full of pain and frustration and raw emotion that he thought they might simply burst with it at any moment. And there, buried beneath all that negative energy, that tiny, glimmering flicker of want and need that peeked out through everything else and called to its bonfire-sized counterpart somewhere between his head and his free-falling stomach, well outside the bounds of reason and control.
That fire roared inside him, turning all other thoughts to dull background buzz, imploring him to reach across the single foot of emptiness between them and pull her mouth to his, to brush away all the stupid bullshit and—
Rachel turned away from him and directed her gaze down to her empty hands, and the fire dimmed, choked out by the expulsion of oxygen from his rattled lungs.
“You asked what happened between me and Alton,” she said, still looking down.
Jarek willed his befuddled brain to catch up with the sudden redirection. “Yeah?”
She plucked one of the rune-etched pendants from the nearby drawers and studied it, bobbing her head as if preparing herself to say something distasteful.
“He told me how my mom died.”
“Oh.”
It was probably the least useful syllable he could have uttered, but it fell out all the same.
“I, uh…” He swallowed his search for helpful words at the look she gave him and settled for rubbing at the back of his head. “It wasn’t Alton, was it?” he finally asked, when he couldn’t stand the silence any longer.
She tossed the pendant back on the dresser, her expression darkening. “Does it really matter?”
He opened his mouth and promptly closed it, deciding that maybe was almost certainly not the answer she wanted to hear right now.
“Do you wanna tell me?”
Rachel was staring at the not-quite-corner where wall bent and floor rose to meet one another in a smooth curve, looking like she wasn’t quite sure she knew the answer to that question.
“She saved me,” she finally said after what felt like minutes of silence. “Stopped her own heart so she could reach out far enough to help me. That’s why I don’t remember stopping them, the… men who attacked us.” She shook her head. “It was never me. It was her.”
She looked up then, and the tortured look in her eyes put a dull ache in Jarek’s chest.
“She died to save me. Because of them.”
Shit. What did he say to that?
He took her hand. “I’m sorry, Rache.”
The words sounded horribly inadequate in his ears, but what else was there?
In a way, Jarek’s dad had died to save him too. And sure, the raknoth had been involved, but they hadn’t played any more of a direct role there than they had in any other of the billions of deaths they’d caused in the Catastrophe. Somehow, swapping notes with Rachel didn’t seem like the thing to do right now.
“I thought…” She pulled her hand free, stood, and looked uncertainly toward the room’s closed entry hatch. When she looked back at Jarek, she spoke quietly. “I don’t know. I thought I could live with it. That working with them was the only way. But…”
“It’s hard to forgive something like that.” He searched for something more but came up short.
Rachel nodded her agreement, not seeming to mind.
Suddenly, her recent snappiness, particularly where Alton was concerned, was much less mystifying. Knowing the raknoth had been involved in her mom’s death at all had been bad enough, Jarek was sure, but this… This was just a kick in the nuts that could easily morph to a nail in their collective coffin.
Not that many people on either side gave two shits about what Jarek and Rachel thought, but human-raknoth relations were already bad enough, and they’d just gotten a sneak peek at what a single rakul was capable of. If they went into battle with Rachel riding the fence about their raknoth pals…
“I know this isn’t what you wanna hear right now, but—”
“Don’t say it then.” Rachel’s eyes were half-defiant, half-imploring. “Don’t tell me we need to all suck it up and play nice for the good of the world. They’re monsters, Jarek. And you saw what h
appened back at HQ when their master called.”
“Come on, Rache, that’s not fair. That was like mind control for Christ sake.”
“That’s exactly what it was,” she snapped. “And if it happened once, it’ll happen again. Have you forgotten what your pal Drogan did to Michael? To Pryce? How can you just forget about all that?”
Jarek bit back his immediate retort and forced himself to take a breath as Rachel paced stiffly around the room.
Clearly, this had been ruminating in her mind for a while now. Hot words wouldn’t end up doing either of them any favors.
He held up his hands in a gesture of peace. “I’m not forgetting. No one’s forgetting. Have you missed the Resistance boys walking around with their torches and their death to the raknoth stares? They might as well be printing it on t-shirts over there.”
Rachel paused her pacing to meet his gaze. “Maybe they should be.”
“Jesus, Goldilocks.”
“What? You want me to show sympathy for the devil? They’re not our friends, Jarek. Not Alton, not Drogan. Not even Kole.”
He tensed. Two controlled breaths.
Why did that piss him off so much? It wasn’t like she was being wholly—or even partly—unreasonable. Hell, maybe she was right. Maybe his “pragmatic” attitude in making the best of a bad but necessary situation had in fact been a delusional one. But still…
“You never even met Kole.”
She let out an exasperated huff. “Does it really matter? Do you really think he was any different? That any of them could be? They’ve spent thousands of years snuffing out more sentient species than the two of us could count on our fingers and toes. Does that sound like the kind of creature that could ever be trusted?”
“Look, I get—”
“Don’t.” She jabbed a finger his way. “Don’t pretend like you understand just to cozy up and try to convince me otherwise. They killed my family. And, in case you forgot, they killed yours too, so don’t—”
Something snapped, and Jarek was on his feet before he knew it.
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 64