Whirlwind
Book Four of Valos of Sonhadra
By Ripley Proserpina
Dedicated to Amanda, Isabel, Marina, Nancey, Naomi, Poppy, Regine, and Tiffany. Here’s to aliens, Trello boards, and last minute freak-outs.
Series Summary:
When an orbital prison is torn through a wormhole and crashes on an unknown planet, it's every woman for herself to escape the wreckage.
As though savage beasts and harsh, alien climates aren't enough, the survivors discover the world isn't uninhabited. Now they must face new challenges—risking not only their lives but their hearts.
Welcome to Sonhadra.
The Valos of Sonhadra series is the shared vision of nine sci-fi and fantasy romance authors. Each book is a standalone, containing its own Happy Ever After, and can be read in any order.
Whirlwind
Valos of Sonhadra
Copyright 2018 by Ripley Proserpina
Copyright 2018, Ripley Proserpina
First electronic publication: February 2018
Ripley Proserpina
www.ripleyproserpina.com
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.
Published in the United States of America
Prologue
Interplanetary Penitentiary System
Prison: Concord
Pod: Regenerative Technologies
Many times in Aveline’s life, she wondered, how did I end up here? But there was no question in her mind about what she’d done to get here: locked up in a prison ship, thousands of miles above Earth.
She knew each and every misstep she’d made, every crime she’d committed to land her strapped to a gurney while a doctor held a scalpel over her face.
All the king’s horses…
When the pain got too bad, when the scalpel sliced into her skin, past fascia and into muscle, Aveline forced her mind back to her past.
It wasn’t a happy time.
She’d been one of many orphans housed in Earth-run facilities after their parents had died in an outbreak of disease. But she’d had her sister, which was more than some children had. Aveline focused on the feel of her sister’s hand in hers. All these years later, she could remember it. The floor had been cold beneath their bare feet as they read the rhyme one of the teachers had projected onto a screen.
The doctor pressed hard, jerking her back to the present. Through her uninjured eye, Aveline watched him. A small smile played at the corner of the man’s lips.
And all the king’s men…
He enjoyed hurting her. Each time she screamed, and she really tried not to scream, his smile grew a little wider. Cutting into her made him happy. The rest of the doctors’ faces often blurred; she couldn’t tell one from another. But she’d never forget this man.
The man who took her sight.
“You’re healing so quickly now, 471. It takes all the fun out of my work.” The scalpel clattered on the floor, and he held a syringe in front of her face. “This will burn a little.”
The metal tip jabbed under her cheekbone, a slow burn tingling through the skin and then racing like wildfire along her veins. She should be used to it. The experiment never changed—cut, then heal, cut, then heal—only the location of her pain. Aveline screamed as the fire became molten. Riotous nerve endings sparked, but there was no way to escape from this.
Not out here.
The doctor stood straight, reached for the glasses that protected his eyes and tucked them into the collar of his shirt. His even, white teeth flashed in a grin as she whimpered and squirmed.
“Oh, Aveline.” He let out a breath. His gloved hand was bloody, and it left streaks on the fabric of his uniform where he touched it. “I shouldn’t have favorites, but I can’t help it. You’re my masterpiece. Look at you.”
Aveline shut her eye even though she knew what was coming. A touch like a kiss, light as a butterfly wing on her damaged eyelid.
“Do you remember when you first arrived here?” he asked.
“Dr. Bates?” a guard interrupted him, and her eyes snapped open. “The next prisoner is prepared.”
“Just a moment.” Bates narrowed his eyes. He hated to be interrupted, but he’d never take out his anger on the guards, who were bigger and stronger. No. He’d take it out on her, while she was held fast, medicines pumping through her veins that kept her awake but slow. “Where were we? Oh, yes. Reminiscing. Do you remember, 471, when you first arrived and you spat and swore at me? Do you remember what I did?”
How could she ever forget?
“Do you remember how you pushed your sister aside and drew my attention to you? You knew you were meant for me, didn’t you? 471. 471. My Aveline. My breath of life out here in space where nothing lives.” Bates lowered his face to hers. She could feel the heat of his skin when she shut her eyes. He wanted her to look at him, and she couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
Gently, his lips touched her eyelid. “I took this, so you’d never forget. And you never glared at me again, did you?”
Couldn’t put Humpty together again…
Chapter One
IPS Concord
Pod: Prisoner Containment
Aveline
“It’s healing,” Marisol said. “Amazing how you say it hurts so bad but you walk yourself back from each experiment, no problem. You’re not even limping.”
Marisol touched Aveline’s chin, forcing her to gaze over her shoulder. Her sister’s cool eyes studied her, assessing the damage.
Aveline bit her tongue. There was a tone in her sister’s voice, like Aveline’s pain annoyed her, or like she was being dramatic.
It was part of the irony of being a patient in the Regeneration Pod. Being a doctor who loved to lecture while he worked, Bates had explained it to her. “We are to answer the question, how much damage can a body take before the medicines stop working?”
The doctor had found that her tissue could be regrown, muscles and skin reknit. But he could not restore her sight. Whatever he’d done to her eye was too extensive to be healed by the medicine he tested. A while back, a different doctor had wanted to bring her to another pod where he believed he could fix her, but Bates had refused, and the man hadn’t pushed. Likely, the doctors had their pick of prisoners to experiment on.
But Marisol’s attitude bothered Aveline, as it did each time she returned from the experiments, a little more damaged and soul sick. Did her sister think she made up Dr. Bates and the experiments she suffered through each day?
Marisol paused in braiding Aveline’s hair. The curls were sticky from blood that had run from her wounds and pooled around her head. No. If nothing else, her hair would be evidence of her story.
“And the only thing left from those experiments are these…” Marisol released one braid to trace the thin red scars that branched over Aveline’s face like spider webs. Some, Marisol had told her, faded to the color of her skin, a light brown. But the
newest were bright red. Aveline’s body looked like a topographical map. Her scars were the rivers and her freckles the land.
In comparison, Marisol was perfect. The light to Aveline’s dark. Sisters with different fathers, no one would ever guess the two of them shared blood. The only thing they shared was the raised scar at the base of their necks. But that wasn’t unique to them. Other prisoners had a similar scar from the tracker chip inserted deep under their flesh when they first arrived on the Concord.
Marisol had smooth blonde hair and pale skin so white it was almost lilac in some places. Everything about her was smooth. Smooth voice, smooth manners. Her looks were deceiving, though. Only Aveline knew how rough Marisol could be when crossed.
It was a lesson she learned when Marisol didn’t get what she wanted. And god help her if Aveline was the one who said, “No.”
“Did they take you today?” Aveline asked her sister. Even though she knew her answer, Aveline needed the reassurance. If Marisol suffered as she did, everything would be worse.
Aveline wasn’t sure she could bear both her own and her sister’s pain.
But Marisol shook her head, and Aveline sighed in relief. For as mean as Marisol may have been at times, she was the one person in the world who loved Aveline.
And she would do anything for Marisol, had done anything for her. For some reason, perhaps it was because Dr. Bates’s attention was focused solely on her, Marisol had never been taken to any of the medical pods on The Concord. Her tasks were menial—laundry, cleaning.
For that, Aveline was grateful.
Neither one of them had any right to refuse the experiments, nor did they have anyone to hear their complaints.
Aveline and her sister were prisoners at the mercy of the guards employed by the Interplanetary Penitentiary System. Sentenced for more years than they’d been alive, Marisol and Aveline would spend the rest of their life on this prison station.
Because they were thieves. Piss poor thieves who’d gotten caught.
When they’d aged out of the care system on Earth, it was the way they’d supported themselves.
Marisol always had the ideas that helped them survive.
So while Aveline may have been the one who broke into the facilities, took what they needed, and got out, Marisol had been the one to make the plans. She’d been the genius. Anything they had, from the food in their bellies to the shoes on their feet, was because of Marisol and her ideas.
But getting caught rested solely on Aveline’s shoulders. Marisol had never come right out and said, “We’re here because of you,” but she didn’t need to. Aveline knew it. Marisol didn’t need to blame her, because she blamed herself.
She’d never been as smart as Marisol.
Aveline hissed in a breath when Marisol yanked the braid around the top of her head. “Sorry,” her sister said. “Sit still.”
Now her sister was stuck here because of Aveline’s mess-up. She should have been smarter and kept her sister far away from Global Credit Bank. But no, she’d allowed Marisol to talk her into bringing her along.
The credit heist Marisol’d thought of? She wanted to see it. She’d said she wanted to witness the moment where she and Aveline would be set for life.
Instead, she’d gotten caught along with Aveline.
First, Aveline’s fake ID had set off system alerts when she tried to use it. And then the justices had arrived.
Technically speaking, Marisol and Aveline weren’t even in prison for the heist. Their crime had been disrupting the credit banking system. It had taken the bank hours to resume normal business while the justices tried, and convicted, them. In those hours, the bankers, creditors, lenders, whoever—lost credits—or weren’t making credits. They’d kept the wealthy from becoming wealthier.
And now here they were.
The station rocked, and Marisol set her braids against her shoulder. Aveline followed Marisol’s gaze toward the bars that kept them in this pod. Four other prisoners remained in the room with them. This was their “recreational” time, and for twenty minutes twice a week, Aveline got to see Marisol, and walk more than two paces in a straight line.
“Did you feel that?” Marisol asked.
She had.
The Concord orbited Earth but gave no indication it was in motion. It was a smooth ride, unlike the one on the shuttle that had brought them to the prison. On the Concord, there was no turbulence because there was no air, or such thin air it didn’t jar the station.
“We have to get out of here,” Marisol stated, pushing at her shoulder to let Aveline know she was finished.
“I know,” she replied and stretched. With a sigh, Aveline faced her sister. She was at a loss for how to escape when they were orbiting the earth at seventeen thousand miles an hour.
If only Marisol’s plotting and planning had included a contingency plan for getting caught.
It came again, a shudder. One of the other women fell off her seat she was jostled so hard.
Marisol gripped Aveline’s shoulders, holding tight. “What’s happening?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Aveline replied.
An alarm blared, and the lights dimmed. It was the signal for the prisoners to put their hands on the wall. Guards on their way to their pod would quickly escort them back to their individual cells. Aveline hurried to the wall; she’d learned the hard way what happened if she hadn’t assumed the position before the guards appeared.
Marisol took up a space next to her. “They’re cutting our twenty minutes short,” she complained but winked at Aveline.
“So inconsiderate,” she joked in reply.
The alarm continued to blare, the sound throbbing against her skull. The station rocked again, and Aveline lost her balance, her forehead glancing off the hard wall.
“Aveline!” Marisol yelled, and then there was chaos.
A blast of cold air hit her so hard she flew away from the wall. Her body slammed into a table, knocking the breath from her, but she couldn’t breathe anyway because suddenly, there was no air.
A flash of blue. Was that Earth?
The cold burned, flaying the skin from her bones.
Silver. Blue. Silver. Blue. It was too hard to see. She thought she glimpsed The Concord, and then the earth, but that was impossible. There were no windows in her pod.
Black.
Suffocating.
Wind, but not air.
Blinding white. So white she closed her eyes because it was too bright. Like the air, it burned her, and she shut them tight. Whatever was coming, she didn’t want to see it.
The force of the wind pressing against her tore at her clothes and hair. It pulled her limbs, leaving her with no control, no way to stop the windmill her body made as it tumbled through space.
Through space!
She was airborne, and there would be nothing to catch her. When she stopped falling, everything would end.
A strange calm suffused her body, and her lungs opened up. The air changed from frigid to balmy, and heavy with moisture, like she was falling through one cloud after another. As the temperature changed, so did the light and the air. The next cloud she passed through was denser, and though she couldn’t be sure, it seemed to slow her.
The consistency was definitely changing. The next one felt sticky, like a spider’s web, and the one after that, soupy and somehow liquid-like.
Stacked one on top of each other, the clouds kept her from resuming the speed which earlier sliced her skin. She’d slowed enough she could move, wipe her hand across her face and hold her hands out to the side as she passed through another cloud.
And catch it.
The cloud was thick, but she held a piece of it clutched in her fists until her back hit a surface and the air rushed out of her lungs.
Aveline lay there, like an angel on a cloud pillow, stunned. It puffed around her, as if her body had displaced its mass and now it formed around her, protecting her like a blanket.
Slowly, she sat up, pus
hing her hands into the ground—ground?—beneath her and gasped in wonderment.
She had landed in the middle of a cloud city. Pinkish blue sky and clouds surrounded Aveline where she’d come to rest.
But thrust between the clouds, seemingly suspended on air, were buildings the likes of which she’d never seen.
Their color changed, swirling and mixing. She couldn’t say what material they were made of—metal or glass perhaps, because they reflected and refracted the light. They were gray like a cloud, then pink or blue like the sky.
And they moved. Aveline shook her head and squinted her good eye. Yes. She’d seen a boat once, bobbing among the waves on the ocean. It was like that.
Aveline stood, legs shaking as she fought to find her balance. What the hell had happened?
And where the hell was she?
Chapter Two
Aveline
The air was different here. It lay over Aveline like a film or mist, one she could taste on her tongue. But the breaths she took left her dissatisfied, dizzy and off-balance, and she struggled not to panic.
Aveline kicked at the haze to see if she could move it aside, but it was like… well… like kicking air. Her foot went right through it.
What a waste of energy. Panting, Aveline fell to one knee. How could it be both concentrated and intangible?
The idea suddenly occurred to her—there may be nothing beneath her feet but endless space and sky. A wild sense of vertigo sent her toppling over onto her hands.
Breathe.
It had to be built into something. Buildings didn’t float; they needed a base, a foundation.
Wind rushed by her face, whipping the hair that had been pulled from its braid across her eyes. With a blind spot, she couldn’t help feeling like she was missing something—an important detail that meant the difference between life and death.
Unbidden, a frowning Dr. Bates flashed through her mind. Her sight was his biggest disappointment. Over and over, he’d return to work on the nerves, re-injuring them in hopes the changes he made to the healing medicine would return her sight. But the damage was too great.
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