by Kris Delake
Chapter 33
Their drinks rose out of a side pocket of the table, startling Skye. She glanced around the room, wishing she had a more sophisticated way to check for surveillance equipment. She would have to assume that their conversation was being recorded, but she would also have to assume that no one would care about it, that every conversation was recorded here on Zaeen. With that much information being stored somewhere, only bots could search through it, and if she avoided trigger words, then no one would ever hear this conversation.
Of course, she had no idea what the trigger words were, so she could only hope she would avoid them.
Jack grabbed the cups and handed her hers. He sipped his. He looked a bit nervous, as if something she had said unnerved him.
Although he’d been nervous since they arrived. Even before he loudly stated that he didn’t want to stay here, she had the sense that he hated Zaeen.
She didn’t feel much better about it.
“This morning,” she said, then paused. “I think it was this morning. All of the travel has my time sense confused.”
“Our morning,” he said.
“When I saw one of the most proficient members of the Guild talking to Heller, I started worrying. She had to have a reason to hire someone like him.” She decided to skip the word “assassin,” figuring that might trigger something. She hoped Jack would be as cautious.
“Someone proficient?” he asked, and it took her a moment to understand. He had clearly taken her cue and was also avoiding trigger words. He sipped his beverage again. He seemed to have relaxed since she started into this.
She took a sip of her beverage too. She’d only asked for lemon-flavored water, and that was what she got. She was thirsty, and she hadn’t even realized it until now.
At some point, both of them would have to stop and actually sleep. Not do anything else. Just sleep.
But the idea of being in a bed with Jack made her cheeks warm. She wondered if he could sense what she was thinking about. Probably not, since he seemed preoccupied with what she had just told him.
“She’s one of the best,” Skye said. “And here’s the thing. She said that he was the third in line. She said there was a chance that they wouldn’t need him, but they were reserving his time.”
“For what?” Jack asked.
Skye shrugged. “She was going to send the information to an account, along with payment. She wasn’t just reserving him. She was reserving a team.”
“Oh, God,” Jack said. He seemed to understand what that meant. “This may be tied to something I know, but we can’t discuss it here.”
Then he glanced around, somewhat pointedly. She got the message, even if she hadn’t had it before.
“However, I can ask a few questions,” he said. “Is this woman someone you’re investigating?”
“No,” Skye said. “But there’ve been some unusual things coming out of the Guild, and they don’t entirely make sense. I’m worried, and that’s what I was going to investigate.”
“Worried how?” Jack asked.
“The Guild’s all about rules and regulations. I think there’s a rogue element, not following those regulations.”
“You want to stop that?” Jack asked.
She smiled. She had told him enough to make that question relevant.
Then food popped up from that same part of the table. Her sandwich stood six inches high and had more food stacked around it. It smelled of ham and cheese and fresh bread.
Jack’s was identical, except that it had chicken and different vegetables. Otherwise, there was the same kind of bread and just as much unnecessary food.
“We could have split something,” Skye said.
“And still had enough to feed an army,” Jack said. But he reached over, grabbed his plate, and slid it to him. As he did, silverware and napkins popped up near him.
She grabbed her own food and slid it toward her. After just a few hours, Jack was clearly beginning to figure her out.
That should bother her more than it did.
“Initially, I started tracking this rogue group because I thought maybe I should join them,” she said. “I was looking at a variety of possibilities. I figured that if I could find someone else who broke the rules, I might get permission to break more of them. Then I realized that it was more pervasive than that, so I thought I could use these people as an excuse to get me out of the Guild.”
Jack hadn’t picked up his sandwich yet. He was watching her intently. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been the subject of such regard from someone.
She picked up a baby carrot, which looked fresher than any she’d seen in a while.
“The more I investigated, the more furtive it all seemed,” she said. “And not in a good way. These people were up to something, but what, I couldn’t tell. It bothered me. After all, my job is to investigate things, and I started investigating my own people, and I found things that disturbed me.”
“But things you could use if you wanted to,” Jack said.
She shook her head. “It was more than that,” she said. “It was… scary, on some level. I only got bits and pieces, but what I got didn’t seem right.”
“Right for what?” he asked.
“Right for… decency?” Her voice went up at the end. She wasn’t even sure herself. She had hated the Guild for so long that she knew her feelings about the Guild weren’t always a great guide.
“You found it hard to believe that the Guild broke the rules?” he asked, sounding like he didn’t find it hard at all.
“It wasn’t that the Guild broke the rules,” she said, “although that was part of it. No one trained by the Guild broke the Guild’s rules, not without punishment.”
“Provided they got caught,” Jack said.
She switched the carrot to the other hand. “Yeah. And I haven’t reported them yet, because I want to know what they’re up to. But each time I find something, I discover something else.”
Jack wrapped his long fingers around his sandwich. Skye realized that one of the reasons she hadn’t picked up hers was because it was so thick. She set the carrot down and grabbed her knife and fork instead.
“Heller,” Jack said, “and his people only do one kind of job.”
She so appreciated Jack’s caution. She understood what he meant. Heller and the Rovers were assassins, nothing else.
“I know,” she said.
“So why would someone from the Guild need Heller and what does it mean, as a backup?” Jack took a bite of the sandwich. Parts fell all over the plate. That didn’t seem to bother him.
“I have a theory.” She pressed down on the bread. The interior of the sandwich squished out. He was making a mess. It didn’t matter if she did.
But she wouldn’t be able to talk and eat at the same time.
“One of the Guild’s directors got murdered a while ago,” Skye said. “Someone in-house did it, and everyone said that person was crazy. But what if that’s not true? What if it was supposed to happen? I mean, everyone in the Guild must submit to constant medical testing, both physical and psychological. I can’t imagine how someone’s craziness got through the tests.”
“Yet all this behind-the-scenes suspicious stuff is going on,” Jack said.
“But that’s not crazy,” Skye said. “I’m not sure it would come out in tests.”
Jack nodded. “Have you investigated the director’s death?”
“It happened before I was one of the investigators for the Guild,” Skye said. “There’s some kind of rift, and it’s been around for a while. I just keep thinking that the only reason to hire an outside killer—”
“Is to hide the Guild conspiracy,” Jack said.
She shuddered. She hadn’t really thought about that word until now. Conspiracy. It was such a nasty term.
“But why?” she asked. “I mean, if you don’t like the Guild, leave after your time period is up. Start a new organization or join Heller’s organization. Or start
your own company. There’s no reason to destroy the Guild.”
“Unless you hate it,” Jack said.
He spoke quietly, calmly, as if hating the Guild were the most normal thing in the universe.
She felt cold. She hated the Guild, but she would never destroy it. And maybe hate was too strong a word. She hated parts of the Guild, the parts that trapped her, the parts that assumed she could be a killer. The parts that seemed arbitrary.
But she appreciated parts of it too. She respected a lot of her teachers—not the ones who taught assassination, but the ones who taught history and languages and survival skills. She loved the buildings and the gardens. She liked a lot of the people she had grown up with.
She wouldn’t purposefully harm any of them.
But maybe that was because she wasn’t an assassin. Maybe someone with assassin training and the same hatred for parts of the Guild would try to destroy it.
“I don’t want to be the one to save the Guild,” she said.
“Then ignore all of this,” Jack said.
She shook her head. “That’s the thing,” she said. “I can’t.”
Chapter 34
Skye felt more unsettled than she had when she first touched Jack. Strange how his words unnerved him more than that instant connection had.
Perhaps his words unsettled her because they echoed what she had been thinking. He hit on the same analysis she’d been doing with herself before she saw Liora Olliver talking with Heller.
Skye hadn’t had a lot of time to think about it afterwards. She’d been a bit relieved to focus on Jack.
She took a bite of her squished-down sandwich. The ham was real and so was the cheese. All the ingredients were better than any she’d had off-planet. This place amazed her.
Jack ate too. He seemed to understand her need to reflect.
He finished his sandwich quicker than she did. Then he pushed his plate away, with a lot of food left on it.
“Here’s one piece of information you need to know,” he said. “Heller does the pricier jobs himself. He only deploys a team when he’s convinced that one person can’t do the job.”
“I figured.” Skye didn’t want to sound dismissive, but she understood how jobs worked. Even the Guild deployed a team when the job sounded too hard for one person.
She took another bite of her sandwich. The food was restorative. She felt less tired than she had.
Jack didn’t seem disturbed by her terse response. He said, “Part of what he’s trying to do is become the go-to squad for various governments. He told me once that every government needs an extra-legal organization to do its dirty work. He wants the—um—his people to be that.”
Skye frowned. Everyone believed that the Rovers already did such jobs. Now she was paying attention.
Jack had just told her that the Rovers had once been different. It explained a lot. It explained how he could seem so honorable and yet work for them.
“You mean that’s new?” she asked.
“Since Heller,” Jack said. “And just in the last few years. Despite what everyone thinks, the organization wasn’t bad. Not really. There were always bad guys affiliated with the group, but they didn’t last long.”
“If the group has no rules, how could that happen?” Skye asked.
Jack twirled his glass in his hands. “What I was told is that those guys had an inordinate number of accidents.”
“That didn’t bother you?” she asked. She felt a bit emotionally whiplashed. She thought she understood him, and then he would say something that surprised her, so she understood that, and then he would say something like this about the accidents.
That would bother her. The Guild reprimanded people: it didn’t help them meet with “accidents.”
“It didn’t bother me at the time,” Jack said. As he spoke, her heart sank. Had she read him wrong?
“I knew some of those bad guys. The ‘accidents’ were often quick, efficient, and better than they deserved.”
She understood that. She had felt that way about a lot of the people she investigated. Part of her was quite harsh: she believed some people just needed to leave the universe to improve it.
But she also felt really uncomfortable with assassination as the way to do it. She had said so back at the Guild. It played with dangerous things, and she had protested that. She had protested her part of that.
Death by hire, even if it was legal or nearly legal, crossed certain lines, lines she didn’t like, lines she couldn’t participate in.
She felt like a hypocrite sometimes, but she truly didn’t know a better system. So she made sure that her lines remained firm.
By providing information, she made certain that the right people (or the worst people, in truth) got assassinated, while those with indeterminate guilt or no guilt went free.
She never asked what happened to them when the Guild refused the contract, however. Did those who wanted that person dead go to the Rovers? She didn’t know the answer to that question, and she doubted Jack did either.
They would have to research it, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
She had a hunch she might not like the answer.
“So what changed your mind about your group?” she asked, still avoiding the word rovers.
“Too many people who were innocent died,” he said. “I did the research before the jobs, and Heller or someone accepted the job anyway, even if I recommended against it. Then I found out about this extra-legal thing. Here’s the problem: if you work for a government, the government sets the agenda. The government might despise a group of people for their religion or the clothes they wear or the fact that they are peaceful dissidents. Neither group—yours or mine—should be involved in things like that.”
His voice had lowered, yet it sounded even more passionate than it had earlier. He was gripping the glass so tightly that his knuckles had turned white.
This really upset him.
She let out a small breath. She understood that upset. She related to it, and it made Jack a good guy to her. It confirmed the sense she had.
He seemed shocked by the fact that the Rovers had instituted the change. She wasn’t, but mostly because she had always thought the Rovers did things like that.
She had been more surprised that everything she had known about the Rovers in the past wasn’t true.
“Forgive me for asking this,” she said, “but you’re telling me this is a change of policy?”
“Yes,” he said with quiet force.
He moved the glass near the plate. She got the sense he had done that to avoid crushing the glass between his powerful hands. Then he grabbed the rest of the dishes and replaced them on that part of the table that had delivered them.
“I know what people believe,” he said, “and it was never true. When I was part of it all, we let the rumors stand because it made us more unpredictable. It also brought in certain kinds of work that no one would approach the Guild with—not extra-legal work, but dicier jobs, the kind we specialized in. I would investigate, and if I said no, this wasn’t our mission, this didn’t fall into the kind of legal work that the governments in the sector looked away from or never prosecuted or even encouraged, then we didn’t take the job. Back then, my group listened to me.”
“And they don’t now,” she said.
“It’s worse than that,” Jack said. “It’s not about my ego. I could handle it if it were. Now they take the jobs I recommend against, and they ignore the other jobs. They let you guys handle those.”
His fingers tapped on the tabletop. As they did, the food dishes he had placed on the side disappeared.
He looked at the mechanism in shock, then leaned back in his chair, hands off the table.
“All of that changed under Heller,” she said.
“Yes,” Jack said with that quiet forcefulness. “It changed, and then it changed again. Now it’s so bad that it doesn’t matter who the contract goes out on. The death will happen if the contract exists.”
His hands shook. He clasped them together, but the shaking continued.
Finally, he moved them off the table, apparently thinking she couldn’t see how upset he was.
“It sounds like this was gradual,” she said. “Why is he after you now?”
“Because I was stupid.” He started to get up, then looked at the ceiling, and clearly thought the better of it. He obviously needed to fidget.
Skye waited. She had no idea what else she could do.
“I went to the entire group,” Jack said. “Or what passed for the entire group. And I told them what I knew, how wrong it was, how many innocent people would be at risk, and you know what they did?”
She was afraid she did know, but she shook her head anyway.
“They laughed at me. They called me naïve. They said innocents get hurt all the time, and if it concerned me, I was in the wrong profession.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I agreed with them, so I left. I figured that was the end of it. Then you tell me that Heller’s after me.”
She was frowning. She understood his confusion. It made no sense to her either.
“I figured that he thought you knew something he didn’t want out.”
Jack shook his head. He rocked in his chair for a moment, his expression hardening.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I mean, how can I ruin their reputation? I can’t. Everyone already thinks the worst of them.”
“But you have another idea,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t like it.”
She waited again, knowing if she pushed he might not tell her. He rubbed a hand over his mouth.
“I think it’s personal now. I questioned him in front of everyone, I exposed him, and now he wants me gone.”
“He’s that petty?” she asked.
“He’s a little tyrant,” Jack said. “He wants me dead to prove a point, to make an example. He wants to show that he can destroy me or anyone who gets in his way.”
Skye’s stomach twisted. “If that’s the case you don’t have a lot of choices.”
“I know,” Jack said. “Believe me, I know.”