by Susan Hayes
“Eenie-Meenie-Miney-Mo, catch a comet by the—”
She stopped when she heard Jaeger’s voice coming from Toro’s room. “…No, I’m not imagining it, asshole. I’m telling you I heard Cynder.”
The door opened, and Jaeger leaned up against the jamb, a grin on his face. “Hello, beautiful. I thought we were supposed to be coming by to get you, not the other way around.”
“I was ready early and didn’t feel like waiting. Is there a reason you’re in Toro’s room and not across the hall in your own place?”
“I was early too, so I wandered over. Unlike Toro, I know how to tell time.” He glanced over his shoulder and called out. “Hey, T. Cynder’s here. You’re now the only reason we’re not already on our date, so move your ass.”
“Fraxx! She’s early. Gimme a minute.”
Something crashed to the floor, and she heard Toro cursing in three different languages. “He okay?” she asked.
“He’s fine. Just running a little late.” Jaeger's gaze roamed over her, his eyes gleaming with approval. “You look fantastic.”
“So do you. New shirt?” He was wearing black slacks that fit him to perfection and a dark blue shirt that looked soft enough to stroke. Whatever the fabric was, she hadn’t seen it before, which meant it likely wasn’t cheap.
“I spent some of my winnings and picked up a few things. Staying here has freed up a bit of scrip I would have otherwise needed to spend on rent. Thanks for that.”
“You’re welcome. It’s really no big deal, though. We have space right now; you might as well use it.”
“It is a big deal. You took a chance on us, and I’m not going to forget that. You and your partners are building a good thing here. I’m glad to be part of it.”
“Is that why you agreed to be Corp-Sec’s eyes and ears?” she asked.
“In part, yeah.” Jaeger stood up straight and offered her his hand. “It might also be that I don’t like the idea of anyone threatening you, your family, or your home. I know you can take care of yourself, but I like the idea of being able to help. If what we saw last night is any indication, this new pharma is going to be a problem. I’d rather it wasn’t a problem for the Nova or my friends.”
She took his hand, lacing her fingers with his. “Anyone ever tell you that you have a serious nobility streak, Dice?”
“Nope. This is a recent development.” He raised her hand to his lips and brushed a kiss over her fingers. “It started the second I met you.”
Her brain melted a little around the edges, and her stomach filled with butterflies at his words. She even blushed a little to complete her body’s betrayal. It was impossible to look aloof and in control with pink cheeks and a goofy smile plastered on her face, so she stopped trying. “Do I get to know where we’re going, yet?”
“Down,” was his cryptic reply.
“Down is not a location, it’s a direction. And given that this station doesn’t have gravity, it’s not even an accurate direction at that. Down is whatever way the grav plates say it is.”
“It might not be a location, but it’s all you’re getting. We’ll be there soon. We’d be on our way already if Toro had mastered the art of dressing himself.” He winked at her and turned around. “Do you need a hand, T? Remember, pants on before your shoes.”
“So much for nobility,“ she teased him as he turned to face her once again.
Jaeger shrugged. “He’s my brother, he doesn’t get the noble treatment. I’ve seen you with Luke and Kit, so I know you’re exactly the same way.”
“Yeah, I am. Family are the ones you can abuse, and they love you anyway.”
“Exactly.”
Toro appeared at the door a few seconds later, and it was all Cyn could do not to stare. He barely resembled the shirtless fighter who had taken her to the mat only two days before. His auburn hair was pulled back into a ponytail for one thing, and he had ditched his usual casual outfits for a pair of black leather pants and a crisp white shirt with a V-neck that showed a teasing hint of broad chest and muscle. He had donned a black leather vest to finish the outfit, and as far as she was concerned, he looked incredible.
“Sorry to have kept you waiting, Cyn. It took me longer than I expected to make myself look presentable. I’m out of practice.”
“It’s fine, Toro. You’re not late; I was early. By the way, you don’t look presentable; you look great. Both of you do.” She held out her free hand to Toro and smiled. “I’m a lucky woman.”
“I think we’re the lucky ones,” Toro replied, tugging her hand until she moved in closer to him. “You take my breath away.”
“I’ll be right back. I need to grab our dinner, then we can get going.” Jaeger released her hand and squeezed past Toro, back into the room.
“We’re taking dinner with us?” she asked.
“No food dispensers where we’re going,” Toro said.
“You’re not going to give me a hint, either?”
“Not even a little one. You’re just going to have to trust us.”
Jaeger reappeared and handed a backpack to Toro. “You take this, and I’ve got the rest.”
“Got it.” Toro slung the bag over his shoulder while keeping hold of her hand. Jaeger reclaimed her other hand, and the three of them started walking down the corridor. A quick glance told her that Jaeger was carrying another pack the same size as the first. She was more than a little curious to know what was in them.
When they reached the doors to the club’s main floor, Jaeger squeezed her hand. “If you’d like us to let go of you now, we will, but we don’t want to. I want to walk out there and let everyone see the beauty we’re taking to dinner.”
“Same here. You’re with us, and I want everyone to know it, but only if you’re okay with it.”
“Who said I was letting go of either of you? If I didn’t want anyone to know about this, I wouldn’t have said yes in the first place. Besides, if anyone says anything, Toro can deck them and afterward I’ll ban them from my club.”
“Sounds good to me,” Toro said and opened the door.
It was early enough the club was still relatively quiet, but they garnered a few curious looks as they made their exit.
They were only a few feet from the door when Kit’s voice boomed out from the far end of the club. “Have her home by ten, boys, and keep your hands to yourselves!”
Laughter and rowdy applause filled the bar. “I’m going to kill him for that,” Cyn muttered, half tempted to turn back and lay into her brother here and now.
“Revenge is a dish best served cold. C’mon, beautiful. We’ll plot their demise over dinner,” Jaeger said.
“Or I could hurt them now if you’d rather. Your choice,” Toro added, making her laugh.
It was nice to have them both ready to defend her, even if their methods varied. “Dinner and demise, I think. I’d rather be with the two of you than spending any more time on my idiot sibling.”
“Your wish is our command, milady,” Jaeger said. He led them out of the club and across the main concourse to a maintenance door she had never noticed before. He pressed his palm to the scanner, and seconds later, the door opened.
“Do I want to know how you did that?” she asked.
“I told you, I like to explore. I used to build and dismantle bombs for a living, remember? Rewiring a simple scanner was easy, and it gives me access to the more interesting parts of the station.”
“Illegal access,” she pointed out, following him through the doorway. “If our date ends with us getting busted for trespassing, I may never speak to you again.”
“We won’t. No one’s going to disturb us. I have a plan.”
Toro groaned. “Every time you say that, it all goes to hell. What’s the plan, Jaeg?”
“You mean he didn’t tell you, either?” Cynder asked.
“Not everything,” Toro replied. He directed a frown over Cynder’s head toward his brother. He wasn’t sure what Jaeger was up to, but the lack of informat
ion was worrying their date, and that wasn’t okay with him.
“Enough with the secrets, Jaeg. Tell her what we’re doing down here before she gets mad and walks away.” He sent the message via their internal channel.
“On it,” Jaeger sent back and then started speaking out loud. “We have permission to be here tonight. I talked to your friends in Corp-Sec after our meeting yesterday. Since they didn’t come through with a codename for me, I asked them to get me access to the lower levels instead. There’s nothing down there but maintenance corridors and support equipment, so they said yes...eventually.”
“Codename?” Toro asked. He had already heard about the meeting and what Jaeger had agreed to, but there had been no mention of a codename until now.
“He wanted one for being a Corp-Sec spy, and I’ve given him one. He’s Diceman, Dice for short.”
“You asked for a codename? There are times I worry about you, Jaeg. Did they drop you on your head when they pulled you out of your maturation tank? Maybe you should go back to see that doctor again and get your head checked.”
“Did you see Dr. Jefferies today?” Cynder asked.
“Yeah, we both did. I got a clean bill of health, and we let her do the tests she wanted,” Jaeger said.
“You were right about her. She’s different than the corporate lab techs. She was gentle and explained everything she was doing. It was nice to be treated like a person and not a lab experiment.” Toro was impressed with the doctor. Not only had she treated them decently, but she seemed committed to finding out more about how they were made and how best to treat them.
“Yeah, she’s one of the good ones,” Cynder agreed.
“Did you go back to see her yet, or have things too busy around the club?” he asked.
“I went yesterday. She’s noticed there were some differences in the bloodwork between the male and female cyborgs on the Drift and wanted to do more tests.”
“How many female cyborgs are there around here? I’ve only ever met one, you.” Jaeger asked.
“According to the doc, there’s three of us. Me, one in Corp-Sec, and the other’s a miner between contracts. It wasn’t until the miner came in that Alyson had enough samples to notice there were differences. She didn’t say what kind; she just said it wasn’t anything life-threatening. Comforting, huh?”
Toro felt a band of iron tighten around his chest at the thought of something being wrong with Cynder. “She’d tell you if it was important, wouldn’t she?”
Cyn nodded. “Of course she would. She’s doing this because she cares. The corporations that created us aren’t too happy about her interest, either. She told me several of them have been in contact, trying to discourage her from continuing her studies. They’re claiming they still have a proprietary interest in the technologies used to make us.”
“That’s bullshit. We’re free citizens. If she has our permission to run tests, that’s none of their fraxxing business,” Jaeger protested.
“That’s pretty much what she told them, too. It makes me wonder what they don’t want her to know. It’s not like she’s going to build a cyborg army of her own. Even if she had the means, it’s a moot point given that the entire practice is illegal everywhere in the known worlds.”
There had been a lot of disagreement, blame sharing, and denial from every government and agency about the cyborg program, but all of them had agreed on two things: the cyborgs were free-willed beings, not property, and the technology to create them should never be used again. The corporations had fought the rulings, but in the end, they had been forced to comply. Instead of terminating the lives of their former soldiers, the companies who had created them were required to not only free them, but they had to pay them for their time in service.
Jaeger led them to an elevator, and the three of them rode in silence as it took them down to the lowest levels of the station. When the doors opened on the bottom floor, Cynder laughed and glanced at Jaeger. “Down, huh?”
“I told you that’s where we were going.”
“You did. I didn’t expect you meant it quite so literally. Where are we, anyway?”
“You’ll see in a few minutes; we’re nearly there.”
Toro looked around with curiosity. He hadn’t been down here before, and this part of the station was laid out differently than the sections he had seen. There were two identical corridors leading to the left and right. There were no obvious signs indicating what lay in either direction, just a pair of arrows with an indecipherable set of letters and numbers beside them. The corridors were more like tubes. The “floor” was only discernable because it was marked by a double set of pale green glow-strips. The air was several degrees warmer, and there was a trace of condensation on the curved metal walls.
They went to the left, and after less than a minute, Toro felt a disturbing disconnect between what he saw and what his other senses were telling him. Cynder slowed, too, and they exchanged a look between them.
“Grav plates?” she asked.
“I think so. Would explain the round hallway.”
Jaeger glanced back. “Sorry, forgot to warn you about that. This part of the station doesn’t maintain a constant gravity field. This tunnel lets us reorient to a different horizon. Compared to where we started, we’re about halfway up what was left-hand wall.”
“You could have just said the grav plates are making us walk on the wall,” Toro grumbled.
“If I’m too queasy to eat dinner, I’m going to be grumpy. This feels weird,” Cynder said.
“You’ve waged battle on countless planets, survived hundreds of high orbit dropship entries, and you’re complaining about a little gravity disruption?” Jaeger teased.
“I guess I’m going soft. Civilian life is making me into a delicate flower.”
Toro scoffed. “Not even a little bit, sugar. You’re still a sexy-as-hell hardass.”
She beamed. “You say the nicest things to me.”
“And that right there proves that you are truly the woman for us. If he tried that line on any other woman, she’d be insulted or in tears by now.” Jaeger stopped outside another locked door. “We’re here.”
He passed his hand over another scanner, and the door slid open. Warm air flowed around them, carrying the scent of green, growing things. It had been so long since he stepped foot on a planet, Toro had almost forgotten what it was like to breathe something other than recycled air.
“What in the worlds?” Cynder’s voice was tinged with wonder as she peered past the doorway to the wonderland beyond.
The door opened out onto a landing near the bottom of a sphere more than fifty feet across. The walls were lined with row after row of brackets, all of them full of plants bathed in constant light from the hundreds of lamps shining down on them from a few feet above the tallest leaves. The brackets were divided into sections by marked pathways, and a catwalk spanned the midsection of the sphere, linking to of the main paths.
Jaeger gestured for Cynder to enter the sphere. “Welcome to Astek Station’s atmospheric farm, or as I’ve decided to call it, the atrium.”
“I had no idea this place existed. I’ve seen the outside of the station plenty of times, and I’ve never seen any sign this is here at all. How did I miss it?” Cynder stepped over the threshold, then turned and beckoned them to join her inside, her face wreathed in smiles.
“I wondered about that myself, so I looked up the plans for these stations. It turns out that only half of it is visible from the outside.” He pointed over their heads. “That portion appears as a hemisphere at the bottom of the station. The part we’re standing on is inside, out of sight.”
Toro groaned. “We’re standing upside-down right now? Is that why we were walking on the wall earlier?”
“They do some funky things with the gravity down here. I get it; they can use more of the space this way, but only away from the inhabited areas.”
“I can’t believe they still use organics as part of the oxygenation process.
No one does that anymore, do they?” Cynder wandered over to the edge of the landing and ran a gentle hand along the leaves of one of the plants. “I’d forgotten how pretty greenery could be.”
“This station is older than it looks. The system still works, so I guess no one’s bothered to modernize it.” Jaeger pointed to a section of plants that looked different from the others. “I think that’s a herb garden, and on the other side I found some flowering plants I suspect are what they sell at the florist shops on the station.”
“I always wondered how they managed to get fresh flowers this far out. My brothers will cry when I tell them they’ve been spending a fortune on posies that were grown under their feet instead of on a planet.”
“I doubt it. If flowers make Zura happy, I bet Luke and Kit would pay any price. They clearly love their wife and would do whatever it took to please her,” Toro said.
“You got that right. She could probably ask for a moon of her own, and they’d try to get it for her. Lucky for all of us, Zura’s not that kind of woman. If she was, the club might be bankrupt by now.”
Toro crossed the landing to stand behind her, trapping her between himself and the plants she was caressing. “What would it take to please you, Cyn? What would make you happy?”
She glanced back over her shoulder and smiled at him. “I’m a simple girl. I don’t need flowers, or moons, or presents of any kind. I don’t take time for myself very often. My brothers would say I don’t take it at all. Spending time with the two of you is making me happy. No club. No worries about unlicensed pharma, or security, or balancing the books. More of this would make me very happy.”
“We can do that. All I need for you to make me happy right now is for you to tell me I can kiss you again.”
“Yes.”
He wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her up against him, relishing the way her body melded to his. She leaned into him with a soft, contented sigh, and he gave in to his need to kiss her. He hadn’t been able to steal another kiss since their bout in the gym the day before, and it felt like forever since he tasted her lips.
She tasted like cinnamon tonight, hot and sweet and sinful. Need tore through him, sending his pulse racing as his cock grew instantly hard. Fraxx, all it took was a touch, and he was on fire for her. Whatever was starting between them, Toro already knew it was more than lust and physical attraction. This was something that could alter his life’s orbit forever if he let it. Standing here with Cynder in his arms and his brother at his back, Toro couldn’t think of a single reason to resist what was happening. Out of all the futures he had imagined for himself and Jaeger, none of them compared to the reality that was Cynder Armas.