Nightchaser

by Amanda Bouchet

  I shrugged. Luckily, I was good at getting into secure locations and decoding locks, especially the fancy ones. Also, the galactic government didn’t seem to be actively hunting and destroying these kinds of relics anymore. They must have figured they’d gotten the bulk of them in the beginning and could let slide the spread-out, occasional, hard-to-find rest. Otherwise, places like this shop and a small wing of the Intergalactic Library would have been goners.

  “If you like that one, I have four more with me today, and I can get you sixty-seven others. Really good stuff.”

  She hummed a little under her breath. “So many. Did you steal them?” she asked.

  First Shade with his bullets, and now this? Do I look like a thief? Apparently, yes.

  I lifted my chin. To hell with it. I was always living on the edge. And from the looks of this place, the utter lack of order, I was pretty sure I was safe. “I heard about their unjust imprisonment and liberated them from an unappreciative source.”

  There was total silence for a moment, and then a laugh cracked out of her. “Anyone who talks that way about books is definitely a kindred spirit.”

  I was beginning to understand what she meant by that. A slow smile spread across my face. “Can you take any of them?” I asked, hope for my new armored door bubbling inside me.

  “I…” She shook her head in what seemed like pretty easy surrender. “If they’re all as beautiful as this one, they’ll be hard to resist.”

  Yes! “I need five thousand in universal currency,” I said in a low voice.

  She sucked in a sharp breath. “That’s…not easy.” The book lover’s gleam in her eyes turned into distress.

  “I know. I’m sorry. I would give them to you if I could, but that’s my best price.”

  She leaned toward me, her soft waist pressing into the counter, her even softer brown eyes pleading with me to drop my price. “Why? Why do you need that much?”

  All the frustration and want and hope and sadness inside me punched out, seeming to blow holes right through the slots between my ribs. “So I can repair a door, fly off this rock, and liberate more things that need freeing.” I didn’t confine my mission to books. As much as I loved and appreciated them, other things ranked higher than novels on the list of what to deliver from tyranny.

  Susan closed her eyes and took a deep, long breath, her hair like a halo of fire around her head. When she opened her eyes again, I could have sworn they were wet. For some reason, that made a hint of tears burn behind my own eyes, when I hadn’t cried in years. This amazing place—and woman—were wreaking havoc on my heart.

  She finally nodded, her look saying it all. How can I? But how can I not? Her skin seemed to scream it from every pore.

  “Bring me the rest in two days,” she said, “and I’ll have what you need.”

  Relief sang through me. That was perfect.

  Her eyes suddenly darted to look at something beyond my shoulder, and she shoved the book under the counter, whispering an urgent “Get behind here.”

  Years of living on the run honed certain instincts in anyone. That tone of voice—low and brittle, with rising panic just underneath—I knew it so well that I didn’t hesitate for one second. In two steps, I was around the counter and diving down faster than a comet about to inflict Armageddon on some poor, unsuspecting planet.

  Chapter 10

  The bell tinkled loudly just as I landed on all fours behind the counter. Susan stayed close to the register and used her foot to nudge me toward the stairs, sending me oozing down the steep, tight spiral. I held the bag of books against my middle, trying not to make a sound. I stepped quietly, hardly even breathing, and ended up in what must have been her living space, although it closely resembled the bookshop.

  My heart racing, I eased backward until I was out of sight entirely but could still hear the conversation above. It sounded as though three, possibly even four people had come in. They were loud—of mouth and step. Military-issue boots always hit the floor with a distinctive thud.

  I glanced around to make sure I was alone. I was—except for cats. Cats were everywhere.

  I darted anxious looks from side to side and up and down. Cats occupied much of the available space, even sitting atop furniture and bookshelves.

  Did they bite? How many colors did they come in? There were some bright-orange ones draped across the back of a tattered couch, parts of the animals almost pink, especially their noses. The rest of the felines mostly came in whites, grays, and blacks.

  Susan’s odd question suddenly made more sense. Had she been talking about cats?

  A striped one approached me and weaved between my ankles, rubbing against my legs. The sinewy motion reminded me of a snake. Not that I’d ever been around snakes, either. In fact, the only living thing I knew how to deal with besides people was bees. How weird was that?

  I stood there, still and quiet, nervous about what was above and nervous about all these unfamiliar creatures below. I tried not to startle the felines or seem threatening in any way. If they ganged up on me, they would totally win.

  The smallish cat continued using my leg as a head scratcher while I gazed up, listening for clues as to what was happening overhead. Customers wouldn’t have freaked the owner out. But the Dark Watch… And those boots…

  My gut clenched. I’d had my back to the door and a bag of stolen, unstamped books in my hands.

  Bad move, Tess.

  Did Susan get visits like this often? A military patrol banging into her shop?

  “When are you finally going to clean this place up, Susan?” a woman demanded. I heard a chair clatter and scrape across the floor, as if roughly kicked aside.

  My hands fisted at my sides. I was going to have a fit if they touched those wooden tables.

  “Oh… Um… Soon. I’ve been meaning to.” Susan went quiet for a moment. “I got distracted by a book and…forgot.”

  Someone snorted loudly. A male. “And what book had you so interested that you couldn’t clean up this shithole like we told you to last week?”

  Shithole! This was the most amazing place I’d ever seen besides the apiary on Starway 8.

  I swallowed the rage and protest burning up my throat. Now wasn’t the time to shout them out.

  I could tell that Susan was moving out from behind the counter, probably drawing them away from me. She must have walked over to a shelf. “This one. It’s…it’s a bit older. All about the legends that sprang up around Mall Hall after its orbit changed and its moon drifted off.”

  “No seal on it,” a third voice said a moment later.

  “Oh? Yes, well, look at that. I’m not sure anyone minds so much about that anymore,” Susan said.

  “The Overseer minds,” the man grumbled.

  Actually, I was pretty sure the Overseer had bigger fish to fry, like the rebel squad that had just found and destroyed the unmanned probe that had been sneaking around Sector 17. It had probably been gathering information about the possible location of the rebel base.

  Asshole goons. They’d never find what didn’t want to be found.

  Even from downstairs, I heard the Dark Watch soldier scrape the saliva out of his throat with a vulgar grating sound and then spit. I didn’t have to see it to know he’d spat on one of Susan’s beautiful books, and it was all I could do not to tear upstairs and spit on him. If I hadn’t been outnumbered and armed with nothing but four books and a clingy cat, I might have tried it.

  “Well, now it’s got somethin’ on it, doesn’t it?” the man drawled.

  “It does,” Susan agreed without a hint of animosity in her voice.

  Feet stomped, trooping all over the floor above. “Now clean this place up before we come back!” the first man growled. “Or we’ll double the fine from last time.”

  The bell chimed violently, and then they were gone.

  My
pulse continued to roar, at odds with the new quiet in the bookstore. The cat still wove between my legs with long, sinewy caresses. The feline was small. Not a baby, I didn’t think, but slight and lithe. The rumbling vibration coming from its body was curiously soothing and helped to settle my incensed spirit and rattled nerves.

  Susan wound down the spiral staircase and located me in the maze of cats. “Sorry about that. They were just…”

  “Harassing you?” I supplied.

  She nodded, adding a fatalistic shrug that told me this had happened before—and would happen again. Everything about the movement said it is what it is.

  But something in her eyes seemed suddenly forlorn. Not defeated, but unsure and maybe a little scared. I put a hold on the rebellious rhetoric I wanted to spew with angry and justified words. She was already fighting in her own way, bravely, and I had no right to try to persuade her into more. The reason more people didn’t rise up was because it just meant getting beaten down. That kind of life was something a person had to choose.

  Fucking Dark Watch. Damn Overseer, with his tyrannical—no, maniacal—vision of the galactic ideal.

  “Your bookstore isn’t a shithole. Far from it.” I wanted to reassure her, since I hadn’t been able to defend her. If they’d turned physical, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself, but apparently, bullying and verbal threats weren’t enough to make me take a risk with myself anymore, and I wasn’t sure I liked what that said.

  “No,” she agreed. “But it’s untidy—at least for them.”

  Chances were, those goons probably wouldn’t have cared about untidy at some past point in their lives, and maybe they would have even liked it. But anyone who joined the galactic military was eventually brainwashed into believing the Overseer’s jargon and garbage.

  “Untidy isn’t the easiest path these days,” I pointed out. Expressing her desire for more personal freedom through mildly subversive means like a riotously disorderly bookshop made Susan a target for fines and intimidation. That took guts.

  She still looked shaken, but a sense of pride washed through me. For her. For me. For everyone who consciously drew their own line in the sand and refused to cross it.

  “For what it’s worth, I like your form of protest,” I said, finally getting up the nerve to squat down and pat the cat. It immediately turned its small, striped head into my hand and rubbed enthusiastically. Its fur was soft and short, its nose wet, its whiskers wiry. The rumbling sound got louder.

  “And for what it’s worth, I like yours,” Susan replied with a significant look, holding up the book I’d shown her and that she’d hidden behind the counter.

  I nodded my thanks, knowing that the level of defiance the crew and I embraced wasn’t for everyone. We knew the consequences of our actions. We’d already lived them. We still did.

  Susan’s kindred spirits remark came back to me. For some reason, it made me think of a huge web connecting everyone who fought the oppressive regime in whatever way they could, big or small. The image morphed into stars, bright spots of hope and courage winking all over the Dark—one giant constellation, spread out, but strong. Stronger than the Overseer thought.

  I scratched under the cat’s chin, where fluffy white fur led down to a slim chest. It seemed to like that and offered me better access, tilting its little head to one side and closing its eyes into contented slits.

  I smiled. This little beauty had a small body but a big personality, if I had to guess. I wondered if all cats were like that, or if this one was special and different from the rest.

  “What’s that noise?” I asked. “It’s like this cat has an engine inside it. It’s not an android or something, is it?” I’d never heard of robotic cats.

  Susan laughed. “He’s quite alive. It’s called purring. It means he likes you.”

  I straightened, the feel of the cat’s stiff whiskers lingering on my hand. I rubbed the tickling sensation away. “I thought it was a her.” I hadn’t seen any obvious evidence of himness.

  “Oh.” Susan made a snipping motion with her fingers. “Can’t have more cats, you know?”

  Ah. Poor little guy. I think I did know.

  “He’s yours,” Susan said.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “He chose you. That much is clear.” She nodded toward the cat at my feet. “Plus, he’s gray, white, and black. All mixed up—just like you wanted.”

  Anxiety shot through me. I hadn’t had a clue what she’d been talking about. “I’m not equipped for a cat.”

  “Not to worry.” Susan flitted around her living room before coming back to me with a small metallic tray—kind of cat-sized—and a bag of sand.

  “The litter renews itself,” she announced. “Very handy. Only needs refreshing once a year or so.”

  She shoved everything at me, clearly intending for me to take it. I removed the remaining four books from my bag, set them on the nearby table, and then slipped the tray and litter inside my carrier in their place.

  Crap, that was heavy. It seemed I had a cat.

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  Susan glanced around her wonderfully disorderly, cat-strewn home. “I don’t really name them anymore. Too many.” She scooped up one of the big, furry, orange ones. It was four times the size of my new companion. “If I want them to come, I say, Here, kitty, kitty, and if I want them to listen, I say, Hey, you!”

  In a timely demonstration, she called out, “Hey, you! Get off the table!” and a slinky black cat jumped down with a light thud from apparently the one piece of furniture on which they weren’t allowed.

  Susan shook her head. “The paw prints they leave all over that glass top…” She turned back to me, smiling warmly despite the wry resignation in her voice. “I may not like to conform, but I do like a clean place to eat.”

  I nodded in agreement. I was enthralled, fascinated, and somehow completely at home, even with all the unfamiliar cats.

  “Would you like some tea?” Susan asked.

  I wished I could stay, but I still had clothes to buy, and I didn’t want to be gone so long that the crew started to worry about me. I kept both explanations to myself and politely declined.

  “Maybe next time, then.” Susan made it feel like a real invitation, one she genuinely meant.

  “Thank you.” I’d be back in two days. Maybe I’d take her up on the offer then.

  She glanced at my new cat. “You can name him, though.”

  My eyes widened. What did you name a cat? “Um…”

  She shook her head, making her sunburst hair move. “No, ‘Um’ is too vague. It won’t work.”

  It took a second for understanding to sink in, but once it did, I burst out laughing, startling Not-Um into a low crouch. He looked at me a little warily for the first time, his black-tipped ears flattening back.

  So, no startling noises for my cat. He was going to love a high-speed, shoot-’em-up, jump-around space chase, for sure.

  “I think I’ll name him Bonk,” I finally decided, tilting my head to look at him.

  “Bonk?” she asked.

  “He spent five minutes bonking his head against my ankles.” And now he was doing it again, bumping and rubbing like my legs were the best things around. “What’s that W on his forehead?” I asked.

  “People usually see that as an M. Most tabbies have it.”

  I swiveled to see him from the front instead of from above. “I was looking at him the wrong way, I guess.”

  Susan picked up Bonk and gently slid him into my bag on top of the cat equipment. He immediately sat and poked his head out. She gave him a final pat.

  “Not the wrong way,” she said to me. “I think you just see things from a different angle than most.”

  My heart warmed, understanding that for the compliment it was. I had a feeling Susan saw things from a different angle, t
oo, and maybe in brighter colors.

  * * *

  After leaving Susan with the promise to return in two days’ time with the rest of the books, I went to a couple of the large clothing emporiums I’d seen while walking through Windrow on my way to the bookstore. I didn’t linger, even though personal shopping was a rare treat for me—something I remembered doing with my mother in fancy buildings with beautiful light—and I could hardly feel guilty about using a small part of our dwindling funds to replace some of the essential items I’d lost. The real reason I moved quickly was because I’d had to zip Bonk into my bag to keep him out of sight, and I was scared he’d freak out. Or suffocate.

  As it was, he stayed calm—and fine—but I ended up checking on him every minute or two, panicking when I didn’t feel him moving around.

  Luckily, I didn’t need much. Having been locked in the closet, my flight suits and spare boots had all survived the hole-in-the-hull carnage, and I really only had to pick up some underthings and a few civilian pants and tops. I’d taken the spare bedding off the never-used cot in the brig but left our four-bunk guest bedroom intact in case we needed the extra beds. We mostly moved food and chose our own missions, but sometimes we were needed to transport rebels between operations, with our orders coming directly from the Fold.

  On my way back to the docks, I started to get the prickly sensation of someone watching me. I couldn’t look around too much without being obvious, so I took the most winding, convoluted path I could manage without getting myself lost, trying to shake the feeling—and whoever it was, if there really was someone. I didn’t underestimate the strength of paranoia. It was entirely possible my twitchiness was all coming from my own head. As Shade and I had said earlier, the imagination could be a powerful thing.

  Just before I reached the docking towers, my anxiety finally faded. Maybe that chafing feeling on my nerves had just been because of the multiple Dark Watch patrols I’d seen around the city, some on foot and some in armor-plated hover cruisers. I’d kept my head down, Shade’s hat on, and stuck almost uncomfortably close to groups of other pedestrians, pretending to be a part of them. Guards were more likely to overlook harmless-seeming civilian groups than anyone walking alone.