by Carysa Locke
“You’ll find the drawers are already stocked with clothing,” Reaper said from the doorway. “I’ll wait outside.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask how that was possible, when the door shut. Then Mercy remembered she didn’t need to speak the words aloud. Irritated with herself, she reached out to him mentally. It was going to take time for her to get accustomed to using Talent as a matter of course; she’d spent too much of her life avoiding it.
How are they already stocked with clothes? I just got here.
You were kept in a medically-induced coma for three days while Doc assessed and treated you, Reaper told her. More than enough time to provide you with anything you might need.
Mercy opened a drawer and found it stuffed with multiple shirts, everything from simple cotton undershirts, to fully lined armored clothing. She ran her fingers over the armored clothing. It was the expensive stuff, too, made from nano-graph, like the ship’s walls and hull, but smaller, more flexible honeycombs that produced a supple, cloth-like finish. It wouldn’t stop an armor piercing round, but it would take the impact from a disrupter, or turn aside a knife blade. It was nearly as light and flexible as normal fabric, which is what made it so damn expensive. Mercy had noticed Cannon and others wearing it, but she had to wonder how something that cost so much could be so commonplace to them. The pirates seemed to have a penchant for expensive things.
Physical weapons were perhaps the least dangerous thing Mercy faced on this ship, but she pulled the armored shirt from the drawer anyway, knowing it would make her feel more secure. She found armored pants in the drawer below, as well as a variety of underthings. Everything, she noted, looked and felt new. It also fit her, for the most part. She did have to cinch the waist of the pants tighter, and she wondered if that was intentional. She knew she’d lost weight during her captivity.
Touching one of the panels on the far wall, she selected the option for a flat, mirrored surface. It was the first time she’d really looked at herself closely since before she and Atrea were kidnapped. Taking stock of everything done to her body was one thing. Seeing it reflected starkly back at her in one whole picture had her inhaling sharply in shock.
She hadn’t lost just a little weight. Body shaping and toning had never been an issue for her. She wasn’t someone who needed a body regulator implant to maintain her ideal health. Her life required the ability to pick up and run at a moment’s notice, and she’d kept herself in reasonable shape to accomplish that. But her face had a hollow look now, the cheekbones sharp slashes, the skin around her eyes almost bruised looking. Her arms were too thin, the muscle tone achieved from hauling crates across the galaxy all but gone. Her bronze skin did not have a healthy glow, but an ashen undertone. Her newly-grown hair hung in a messy cap, the dark strands bedraggled and uneven. It hung down to her eyebrows and barely brushed the tops of her ears on the side, looking like she’d chopped it off with a dull blade. The armored clothing she’d chosen was a dark burgundy, with a decorative scroll in gold down each sleeve and at the throat, a color that would normally have showcased her complexion. Now, it only served to look oddly bold and out of place, like a child playing dress up.
She had a sudden, inexplicable urge to cry, and choked it back ruthlessly. She was not a vain person, and normally didn’t care much for her appearance beyond whether or not she looked basically presentable. She’d spent so many years trying to be invisible to everyone, she just didn’t bother with enhancements and cosmetics. But looking at herself now, she didn’t see how Cannon, Vashti, Reaper…how any of them could look at her and think she was something special. She looked nothing like the vibrant, striking woman her mother had been, or the intimidating presence she vaguely recalled of Lilith.
She looked weak.
Mercy?
Reaper’s voice in her head was like a slap in the face. Mercy flinched.
Can I have one damn moment of peace? Is that too much to fucking ask? She thought the words at him viciously, suddenly so tired of it all. She just wanted him, all of them, to stay out of her head and leave her the hell alone. Turning away from the mirror, Mercy swiped a hand to change it back to an unreflective wall. She didn’t want to look at herself anymore. She sank onto the bed, not even bothering to fight the hot rush of angry tears now. Maybe Reaper realized she needed a minute without being pushed, because she couldn’t feel him in her head anymore. She curled up on her new bed and buried her head in her arms, trying to shut out the world. It was a lot harder than it used to be.
Mercy lay there for a long time. It was easier than trying to face everything. The silence of her room, the black emptiness of space, cold and free of all those Talented minds, pressed against the outer wall of her room, just on the other side of the bulkheads that protected her from a hull breach. She’d never found that comforting before, but she did now. She wanted to stay like that forever, but that proved impossible.
It could have been minutes, or hours, before her own thoughts proved too much, crowding her illusion of peace until she had no choice but to deal with them. She would give anything to have Atrea here. Someone who couldn’t read her mind, who would pull her into a hug, and shake her two seconds later, telling her to stop being an idiot. But Atrea was in stasis, maybe dying. Because of me. That was the crux of it. Mercy had been weak, and it was Atrea who would pay the price.
Not that she would blame Mercy for it. Atrea wasn’t like that, had never been like that. Mercy, on the other hand, could blame herself without any help from her best friend.
“I’d trade places with you, if I could,” Mercy said to the empty room. She tried to imagine what Atrea would say in response, and almost laughed, despite everything.
Get over yourself, Kincaid. That’s what Atrea would say. Mercy could practically hear it. It was a bad situation. One we never would have been in, if I hadn’t walked us into that dive on Yuan-Ki. So stop crying and figure out how to fix me.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mercy wiped at her face with a sleeve. The armored clothing was, among other things, self-cleaning and self-mending. It absorbed the moisture instantly. With an effort, she stopped her tears. She didn’t have time for self-pity. She had to figure out everything she possibly could about her Talent, everything she’d never known, if she was going to help Atrea.
When she left her new quarters a few moments later, she was carefully composed, all trace of tears gone. Reaper waited for her, leaning against the wall in the corridor like he had all of the time in the universe. He straightened when she stepped outside the door, but she didn’t meet his eyes.
“You’re still here.”
He considered her carefully. Mercy was pretty sure her efforts to erase the evidence of her tears had not been good enough to escape his notice, but he said nothing.
Where else would I be?
She decided the safest thing was to ignore that. The last thing she wanted to think about was Reaper’s whole day revolving around her for the foreseeable future.
“This Queen thing,” she said. “Is it the reason I was able to…make Atrea Talented?”
From the corner of her eye, she saw him visibly react to her words, going absolutely still. “Is that what you did?” he asked, his voice without inflection. She noticed that he spoke out loud, instead of in her mind. She nodded.
“Yes. What Frain did…it might kill her. But what I did could kill her, too. Her mother was Talented, but Atrea was born a null. Somehow, I found that potential inside of her, and I…I made it real.” Mercy looked down at her hands, realized she was holding them clenched together, so hard it hurt. She forced them to relax, holding them loosely at her sides.
“Yes,” said Reaper. “Lilith used to make certain Talents stronger when she found it useful. It is something unique to being a Queen. The ability to sense Talent in someone, and manipulate it.”
Mercy nodded, almost to herself.
“So, if I learn how to use it, maybe I could change what I did.”
Reaper
didn’t answer right away. Mercy had the impression he was weighing his words. She suddenly wished she could be inside his head, listening to his thoughts. She wanted the truth, however stark or unforgiving it might be.
“Don’t lie to me,” she told him, looking directly at him for the first time. She met his eyes without flinching. “Don’t ever lie to me. Not to make me feel better, or protect me, or for any reason.” She took a breath. “Can I fix Atrea?”
“I don’t know.”
“But maybe.” If he wasn’t sure, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be done.
Reaper watched her carefully. “It’s possible.”
“Okay, then.” Dry eyed, and more determined than she’d ever felt in her life, Mercy lifted her chin. “I want to get started. Show me this arena.”
Chapter Eleven
In most spaceports, especially those with a smuggling presence, underground fights were a mainstay. They went hand in hand with the more accepted and legal gambling dens and bordellos. Jump jockeys lined up to spend their credits in places like that, anxious for anything to relieve the monotony of one long jump after another. Mercy could never understand why the Commonwealth lawmakers thought a bunch of bored and isolated men and women could indulge in alcohol, drugs, and sex, but stop short at violence. Losing their pay to dice or cards was just not as viscerally satisfying as betting against one human being’s ability to beat the shit out of another.
Mercy figured the government saw it as wasteful. Spaceships didn’t fly without pilots and navigators. People broken and stuck in a med ward weren’t doing their jobs. No matter how often a spaceport authority found out where a match was taking place and shut it down, another would spring up, almost before the writ of arrest had finished being issued. And people with credits or hard currency to spend could always find them.
Just after Atrea’s sixteenth birthday, the old Wolf had taken them to a match. Atrea’s birthday was a mere nine days after Mercy’s, so both of them had been feeling full of themselves. Old enough to drink in most systems, old enough to take and pass the exams to complete their primary education certificate. Adult.
Wolfgang offering to take them to a fight had seemed like an official acknowledgement of this truth. Looking back, Mercy should have known it was nothing of the sort, but at the time she felt a secret thrill and no small sense of pride, one she knew Atrea shared.
That feeling had only lasted to the end of the first fight. The combatants looked like a good match, both of them being about the same size, with the kind of muscled build that said they probably did more than just flying cargo. Any smuggling crew worth its salt had a few beaters in the ranks. Captain Hades didn’t, but he stuck to soft goods. No drugs, no weapons, no slaves, no illegal tech. He smuggled agriculture past checkpoints to desperate colonists. People left him alone because he didn’t offer competition, and most smugglers had colony ties. Wolfgang Hades helped feed their families.
Plus, Mercy suspected he was a bit of a beater himself. Not that he ever talked about it, but she knew he’d been in the military at some point. He moved like someone who had implants.
So did one of the fighters. The other did not. When the first punch landed, Mercy knew it would be over quickly. But that wasn’t how it played out. Later, Wolfgang explained that the losing fighter had probably owed a lot of money to someone, and the fight had been a set up. The question of whether or not he could win was answered very quickly. The beating went on, and on. Until there was nothing recognizable left.
As a message, it was effective. The crowd knew what happened to people who didn’t pay their debts. So did Mercy and Atrea. It was the last fight either of them ever attended.
Even given that limited experience, however, Mercy knew what the arena was the moment she and Reaper stepped inside the room. Hard to say what the space was originally intended for. A cargo hold, maybe. But the pirates had long ago converted it to something else. One of the things that made nano-graph such a valuable ship material was its fluid nature, without sacrificing strength. It was built to self-repair, but this was only the beginning of what it was capable of. Reprogram the nanobots built into the graphene, and they would restructure the material into a different form or shape. Evidence of this already existed in the way her room had been arranged, or the size of the lifts.
Here, it could be seen in a much more spectacular fashion. The arena was exactly what it sounded like. An eight-meter-square space was marked off in the center of the room, with seating sprawled around it. The seats were structured in rows of benches around the outside edges of the room, and were already half-filled with people when Reaper and Mercy arrived. Two men stood in the center square and faced off against one another, stripped to the waist, skin gleaming beneath the lights. Both were young men, in their twenties, one darker, the other the unnatural pale pallor of someone who spent much more time on ships than walking the dirt of any world. Both were lean with well-defined muscle, holding themselves with a confidence that said each expected to win. A third man, this one fully clothed, stood between them, speaking in a low voice.
Mercy stopped just inside the room, remembering that long ago lesson with Wolfgang. She tried to ignore the way people were turning to stare.
“What is it this is supposed to prove to me, exactly?” she asked Reaper stiffly. She didn’t care to watch two men beat the crap out of each other for fun, especially not while on display to a crowd of people she didn’t know. Then she thought about Max and Kator. “Wait, is this what you’re going to have those boys do?”
Reaper touched a hand to her shoulder briefly, and she knew it was meant to reassure her.
Be patient, and you will see, he said. Hopefully, you will understand.
“I see we’re back to speaking telepathically,” she muttered.
Reaper arched an eyebrow.
One of us is. The other could use some practice.
The best response to that, Mercy decided, was to ignore it. Not that he was wrong. She just didn’t like having it pointed out. It didn’t escape her that he hadn’t answered her question, either.
Patience, Reaper said. Mercy’s teeth ground together. She was going to get really tired of hearing that.
Looking around at the crowd, she suddenly became aware of a familiar presence hovering just outside her shields. She was starting to be able to differentiate between individual minds, although it would have been difficult with this many people, had this person not made a point of being noticed. Mercy hesitated, and Reaper gave her a look. He didn’t need to say anything for her to interpret it. He clearly thought she was being a poor student if she continued to avoid actually using her gifts. Remembering her vow to learn as much as she could, Mercy sighed and squared her shoulders. She reached out with her mind, feeling horribly vulnerable in this crowded place.
Vashti?
Yes, dear. Please do come and sit with me. Over here.
Mercy felt a tug at her attention, and turned her head to see the older woman lifting a hand and waving in their direction from across the room. She was sitting right in front of the arena, her bench center to the action. Mercy hoped none of the surprise she felt leaked through her shields. From the little she knew, she never would have pictured Vashti as a fight fan.
She and Reaper made their way around the room. Mercy steadfastly kept her gaze pointed straight ahead, ignoring the countless curious eyes on her, and the whispers, both vocal and telepathic, that followed in her wake. It was with a wave of relief that she finally reached Vashti and took the empty seat next to the old woman. Reaper sat on her other side, so that Mercy was between them. That helped, too. She’d been afraid she would end up with a stranger next to her, and right now she was already feeling overwhelmed.
When Reaper sat down, the people on the other side of him got up and moved, giving up their good seats for worse ones, much further away. Mercy quirked a brow at Reaper, but he just smiled. It was the kind of smile that was more sharp than amused. He wasn’t the least bit bothered by the d
iscomfort others experienced around him. In fact, Mercy suspected he rather enjoyed it.
Beside her, Vashti let out a low laugh. Two men were seated on the other side of her, one in his mid-thirties, the other clearly younger. The older of the two gave Vashti a brief, unreadable look, while the younger looked uncomfortable. Both had the same familial stamp to their features that Vashti, Mercy and Cannon shared, with skin a burnished bronze shade, angular cheekbones and jawlines, and the dark hair and green eyes that seemed universal. Mercy found herself going tense.
“Ever the popular one, eh, Nikolos?” Vashti asked easily, seeming to ignore the byplay around her. Reaper shrugged in response, and Mercy wondered if Vashti usually used his given name, or whether she did so now to provoke him. That made her wonder a bit more about Vashti. Intentionally provoking someone like Reaper seemed like a bad idea.
Mercy had to force herself to relax, concentrating on her muscles and keeping her breathing even. She reminded herself that, with Lilith dead, her family no longer wanted to kill her. Or so they said.
Vashti gave her a warm smile. “Griffin and Cage are my nephews. Lilith had four daughters. Pallas, Macha, Nemain and Athena. Your mother, you obviously know. Nemain was Cannon’s mother. Athena was Griffin and Cage’s. They are my great-nephews, and like me, mean you no harm. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“I’m sure I’ll start to believe that eventually,” Mercy said with a stiff smile. She leaned forward slightly, and gave them a nod of greeting, while making sure her shields were still in place, bolstered by Reaper. The older of the two nodded back.
Griffin, Reaper told her, so softly she barely heard it. His younger brother is Cage. Neither will try anything while I am here. They fear me.
Good, she sent back. Maybe it was wrong of her to feel pleased that Reaper inspired such fear in others, but if it helped make her feel safe, she didn’t care.