Nightchaser

by Amanda Bouchet

  She still looked as though her thoughts were focused far away, but she knew what she was saying, and it was solid advice.

  Chapter 9

  I handed Shade the mug, hoping the dark liquid inside was still hot enough—and that he didn’t prefer it with sugar. We didn’t have any, although we did still have a little of Mareeka’s valuable honey.

  “Coffee,” I said. “Good stuff. It’ll put hair on your chest.”

  His lips curved up in amusement. The surprised smile faded quickly. “You think I don’t know what coffee is?”

  “I think you’ve never tasted this coffee. It’s the best in the galaxy.”

  He took a sip. “Yeah, it’s good. Thanks.” He drank again.

  I smiled. This already seemed easier than earlier. Maybe he’d just needed coffee to brighten him up.

  “So, what about the damage?” I asked. “Still thinking the same as before?”

  His gaze roamed over the Endeavor, over the holes the Dark Watch had blown in her hull. Shade Ganavan sure did like to stare. At me. At my ship. Maybe it was a Sector 2 thing.

  Had his eyes just snagged on the fresh-looking stickers?

  He obviously didn’t miss a thing, and they did seem a little too new, with none of the slightly raised numbers battered yet by space travel. I’d meant to beat on them with a chain this morning, but then Shade had shown up too soon.

  “I can patch her up for you,” was all he said.

  “Still thinking a week?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Unless you mind seeing a whole lot of me.”

  Actually, I was pretty sure I didn’t.

  The heat of a blush spread across my chest and neck. I willed it not to hit my face. “I probably won’t be around much anyway,” I said.

  His eyes seemed to sharpen on me. “Why’s that?”

  “I need to sell some rare books.” I figured I should just outright ask him what I wanted to know rather than beat around the bush. Or in this case, the Endeavor. “Do you know of anyone who likes the old stuff? You know, bindings and pages and all?”

  His face remained fairly expressionless, although there was no way I could call him bland. “Stamped or not stamped?” he asked.

  He wanted to know if my books had galactic approval. Tamping down the nervous twist in my belly, I shook my head. “No seal, but they’re not seditious or anything. Just novels.”

  “Just novels?” Something wry colored his tone. “What’s more seditious than the imagination, Tess Bailey?”

  A chill swept over me. A little from the way he said my name, a little from the fact that I was putting way too much trust in someone I didn’t know, and a little from Shade’s unexpected and almost daring question. He was right. The free mind was both a wonderful and a dangerous thing. My imagination was betraying me right now. The mutinous little beast was envisioning having all sorts of interesting conversations with Shade Ganavan over the course of the week.

  I lifted my mug and took a sip. The coffee’s enticing aroma curled around my senses while the idea of getting to know Shade better heated my insides, possibly making me reckless.

  My eyes flicked up, meeting his. “Rabble-rousing comes to mind,” I answered.

  He cautiously nodded, as if he hadn’t expected me to come right out with something like that. Maybe I shouldn’t have.

  “That means agitating something in here.” He tapped his chest over his heart with the hand that wasn’t holding his mug. “Why do you think no one writes novels anymore?” Shade asked.

  Was there a hint of regret in his voice? Of nostalgia for a time when people could say what they wanted? Neither of us had been alive then.

  The obvious answer was to avoid harassment or possible imprisonment for something the authorities, even erroneously, might consider subversive or inflammatory, and especially anything they might see as dangerous to their hold on power. But Shade already knew all that.

  “Because novels stir feelings, wishes, and the heart,” I said. “Not all ideas and thoughts need to be proven, or even can be, and the Overseer is only interested in—no, only allows—what can be measured and quantified and put in a neat little box.”

  Shade looked at me hard, and I replayed what I’d just said in my head. It was fact. I hadn’t said anything truly rebellious, nothing that should have earned me such a stern look.

  “Do you talk to just anyone like this?” he asked.

  “I don’t talk to anyone.”

  His brow creased, and I wished I could take that back. Being a total recluse probably wasn’t an attractive quality to a man who lived and worked in the swarming docks. And despite the situation, and Jax’s completely rational cautioning, I wanted Shade to like me. It had been so long since I’d been kissed.

  I swept my bangs behind my ear, adding, “Except for my crew. I talk to them.”

  Shade moved away from me, taking another sip of coffee. “Do you think science is incompatible with creativity?” he asked.

  I relaxed a bit with more distance between us—and because he’d chosen to continue the conversation, despite its slightly dangerous undertone.

  I shook my head. “Some new discoveries are accidents, but most come from a person’s vision, from having enough inspiration to imagine the next step.”

  And yet the Overseer constantly tried to stomp the imagination out of life. He wanted everything to be clinical, uniform, as boring as the brown clothes he always wore. For such a competent, smart, and horrible man, it was surprising he didn’t see that there couldn’t be hypotheses and experiments without imaginative thought.

  Shade looked pensive.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer right away. Then, “I think life would be damn dull without good books in it, and there’s a great little place in Windrow that might want what you’ve got.”

  My heartbeat took off with a sudden burst of speed, and my smile couldn’t help but go along for the ride. “Windrow?” I asked.

  “The bookstore is about twenty blocks south of the docks—on the corner of Baxton and Lorn. A woman named Susan owns and runs the place. It’s called Flipping Pages and has quotes by Vivica Vot all over the front. You can’t miss it.”

  “I love Vot.” Vivica Vot was a poet and philosopher who’d taken a spot on board Exodus 2, the second mass transport to definitively leave Earth to explore the galaxy and look for safe places for humanity to plant new roots. Her poems were full of the fear, hope, and wonder that accompanied the first irreversible leaps toward new horizons.

  Shade nodded. “Who doesn’t like Vot.”

  It wasn’t really a question and didn’t invite further discussion. That was too bad. I loved talking books.

  I mentally filed away the name and address of the bookstore. “Thanks. That’s a really big help.”

  Shade rubbed the back of his neck again. He took another sip. “How come you’re the captain?” he asked.

  I bristled a little at the question. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He shrugged. “Just asking how it all came about.”

  Most of the truth was off-limits. I chose my words carefully. “When we first got together, I was the only one who knew how to fly.” It was an honest answer. Innocuous, I thought.

  “And the one who knows how to steer the ship ends up steering everything else?”

  I thought about it. Fiona was really only interested in her plants and the possible damage they could do to some—and their potential benefits to others. Miko and Shiori just wanted to survive one more day until the inevitable end. And Jax… Jax didn’t care who was in charge as long as it was someone with a conscience who listened to what other people had to say—which was what he’d been fighting for his entire life.

  “I think we steer together,” I told Shade. The crew only listened to me because they chose to, and that was how it
should be. When I gave an order, they obeyed, but that was because loyalty and trust had been earned, not imposed in any way. If one day I asked them to do something they didn’t want to do, they wouldn’t. And I would respect that choice.

  Shade didn’t say anything.

  I finished my coffee. “Well, I’m going to let you get to work while I go see about those books.”

  He glanced toward his bag, a smallish brown thing he’d brought up along with his heavy equipment. He went over to it and rummaged around. When he came back, he flopped a hat down on my head.

  “You’re so pale,” he said, adjusting the brim to shield my face. “You’re already getting sunburned.”

  My whole chest clenched tight, as though two big fists had grabbed on to my heart and squeezed out an oh! and a my!

  “Thanks,” I said a little hoarsely, resisting the urge to fiddle with the hat myself. It was good having something to shade my eyes. And hiding my face from possibly prying eyes was never a bad thing. My heart still raced.

  He held out a small box to me. “And take one of these today, and one in three months.”

  I took the sealed box from him and read the label. “Liquid vitamin D?” I asked.

  Shade sniffed, his hands falling to his hips again. He looked off into the distance. “You’ve finally got some sunlight. Might as well stick some calcium to your bones.”

  “That’s…” Incredibly nice. I didn’t think he wanted to hear that, though. He was scowling. “Thanks,” I said again, pressure growing beneath my ribs.

  “How many are you?” He looked at me again. “The whole crew?”

  “Five,” I answered. No one but Jax had come to the door, so Shade hadn’t seen any of the others yet.

  Shade nodded. “There’s enough for everyone.”

  He’d thought of the others? That was even better. “Wow. Okay. Great. I’ll pay you back for this.”

  He shook his head.

  “I insist.”

  “No.” He barked the word as if he were angry or something. Again.

  Surprise and gratitude and confusion all jumped inside me like solar flares, heating me up. Shyness had been burned out of me in the first few weeks of incarceration with the help of Hourglass Mile’s communal showers and vermin-killing soap, but Shade Ganavan was one-man proof that I could still get embarrassed.

  I took a step back. Then another. I climbed on board the ship, having let down the stairs for once. It had been more practical for carrying coffee.

  “All right. Thanks,” I said from the doorway.

  I turned and moved deeper into the Endeavor, hoping the shadow of the hat’s brim had hidden the bright flush across my face.

  * * *

  I gathered a small selection of books while Shade got to work filing down the rough edges of the hull where he’d eventually attach the reinforced plates. I said goodbye to the people inside the ship and then to the person outside. Just before I stepped into the elevator tube to head toward Flipping Pages, Shade called out, “Keep your head down, Tess.”

  I nodded, figuring he was serious about that, since he hadn’t called me buttercup or some other crap.

  There wasn’t an inch of me that didn’t think Shade Ganavan knew his way around his city and most of what was going on in it. And he’d seen how I’d reacted to that Dark Watch goon in his shop, since playing it cool hadn’t really cropped up. I doubted I’d hidden a single moment of my panic, fear, and flight from Shade, and if he was telling me to keep my head down, he probably meant that Windrow was a district that soldiers patrolled—maybe more than others. It made me extra glad to have his hat. With it, I could look around but still have a shadow on my face.

  With five of the rare books in my bag, vitamin D in my body for the first time in years, and sunlight on my bare arms at least, I wound my way out of the docks—noticing plenty of spare platforms on towers other than the Squirrel Tree as I went.

  Damn swindlers. Shade had been right.

  Ground level was busy—busier than on the previous day. But it was also earlier. The pedestrian lanes were clean and wide, especially the farther I got from the docking towers, and there were even some small trees and shrubs planted here and there to break up the endless monotony of man-made constructions.

  The city teemed with people, machines, vehicles of all kinds, some robots, and, weirdly, a whole lot of cats. I’d seen cats before, but only in live-stream videos. The felines were usually stalking birds, running from dogs, or doing what looked like death-defying acrobatics. These cats weren’t doing much of anything, though. They were just walking around or sitting there in the sunshine, watching this world go by.

  Making it to Windrow wasn’t the same thing as finding the bookseller I needed, so I typed Baxton and Lorn into one of the interactive Albion City assistance stands on a busy street corner. A grid pattern instantly popped up on the screen in front of me, mapping out the best route to get there. I turned and walked on, learning the neighborhood as I went.

  Flipping Pages already looked special from the outside with the Vivica Vot quotes decorating the storefront, but once I opened the door, it was pure magic. A window into something else. My heart hung suspended for a moment, waiting for the rest of me to catch up.

  The first thing I noticed was the bell over the door, just like at Shade’s place. Then it was the high shelves lining every single wall, filled to capacity with a jumble of mismatched books. And then it was the comfy chairs and well-used couches toward the back, with wooden tables between them, all of them strewn with magazines and books. Paper. I’d never seen so much of it in my life. And the heavy books and glossy pages weren’t even in neat piles or stacks. They were haphazard. I loved it. I loved the whole place on sight.

  How did Shade Ganavan know about this store? It was obvious he liked it—and books. Was he as drawn to the happy disarray in here as I was? He seemed like the kind of guy who liked to muss things up, and if the heat in my belly when I thought about him was any indication, I wanted him to get a little messy with me, too.

  Disheveled. Tangled. Warm. Just like his shop and this place. I’d bet Shade didn’t give clinical touches or neat, dry kisses. No, he would lick, devour, and suck.

  My pulse surged like that moment when an engine ignites. Thoughts of Shade were distracting me, though, and I blew out a quick breath, trying to get my mind back on track. I was here to sell rare books, not wonder about what that man did in bed.

  “Hello?” I called out. There didn’t appear to be anyone here.

  After a moment, I heard scuffling on stairs, and a woman I assumed was Susan appeared behind the register, having evidently come up from a lower level hidden behind the counter. She was probably in her mid-to-late fifties, a little on the short side, and totally unruly, just like her shop. There wasn’t a piece of clothing on her that matched the rest. And nothing in the galaxy could ever have matched the flame-red hair that stuck out in corkscrews all around her head.

  “Sorry.” Smiling, she made a useless attempt to smooth down her hair. “Just feeding the cats.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I like cats.” In theory, anyway. I’d yet to touch one, in fact.

  I slid my fingers under the strap of my bag, shifting its bulk a little. Now for the fun process of trying to foist off stolen goods.

  I didn’t feel guilty about having taken the books—they’d been completely underappreciated in that billionaire’s sterile basement—but I did feel guilty that the library wouldn’t get them. If they ended up here, though…

  I looked around again. Wow. This place was nice.

  “I know, I know—the shop’s a little untidy.” Susan’s gaze darted around, turning tenser. “I-I’ll straighten up soon.”

  “No! Don’t!”

  Her eyes widened at my sudden outburst.

  I settled my voice back into a normal volume. “I mean, it’s
great. It’s great just the way it is.”

  She smiled again, her grin so big I could see the insides of her cheeks. “Are you a kindred spirit, then?”

  “Uh… Maybe?” I wasn’t quite sure what she meant.

  Her eyes narrowed, dipping up and down to look me over. I couldn’t figure out her look. It wasn’t hostile in any way, but she was still sizing me up—and very obviously, at that.

  “White, gray, or black?” she asked.

  It would have been a lot easier to answer her question if I’d had any idea what she was talking about, but I decided to just go with it. “None of those colors are much fun by themselves,” I said. “Mix them up?”

  She nodded. “Stripes, then. Stripes it is.”

  Huh. Well, weird and wonderful as that was, because anything inexplicable that didn’t kill you was actually pretty damn cool in my opinion—the Black Widow, for instance—I had business to conduct. I pulled out one of the books.

  “Would you be interested in anything like this?” I asked, turning it over in my hands so that she could admire the old-style hardcover binding. The artwork on the cover jumped right off the page, looking like something straight out of a fairy tale. I hated to give it up, especially before I’d read it, and the kids on Starway 8 would have salivated over something like this, all of them impatiently waiting their turn. Mareeka or her partner, Surral, might have borrowed it from the library for them. I knew of at least one eleven-year-old boy whose eyes would have lit up like starbursts. Coltin loved a good adventure story, and I brought him one whenever I could.

  “Hmmm.” Susan took the book from my loose grip and looked it over. “No seal?”

  “I don’t think it ever went through the rounds.” And by that, we both knew I meant not only the stampings of approval, but the burnings as well.

  “That’s unusual.” She looked at me, her fingers still lightly tracing the bold, gold lettering of the embossed title. I noticed her fingernails. They weren’t dirty, but they were definitely a little unkempt, just like the rest of her. “It must have been in a very secure location to go unnoticed,” she said.