by Kris Delake
She laughed without humor. “I meant to say that we would survive it,” she said.
“I’m going to make sure you survive,” he said. “You can count on that.”
But they both knew that she couldn’t. No one controlled the future. And no one controlled people like the Rovers.
But she pretended to agree with him. And then they got back to work.
Chapter 45
They had found different things on their research, things they hadn’t told each other until they sat at the large gaming table in the entertainment area, the tabletop divided into a dozen screens, each with information flowing across it.
Jack used one main screen in the center to chart all the information. Skye hated to admit that he was better at charting than she was. Faster, better organized, with all kinds of additions that clarified things instead of making them more confusing.
He sat in front of the chart, adding to it as she added information. She wandered around the table, glancing at screens. She also maintained one other screen toward the far end of the table, and that screen scanned for connections that neither Jack nor Skye had seen.
That screen found the thing that nearly made Jack crazy. Apparently Liora Olliver had once been involved with Misha Orlinski.
Jack wanted to let Rikki know right away, but Skye stopped him. Skye normally didn’t pay attention to other people’s relationships, but she remembered that one. Misha and Liora were mismatched from the beginning. Liora had lorded it over all of the other women that she had been involved with him, and Misha apparently hadn’t noticed.
When he did, or when something else happened, something Skye did not know want to know about ever (she believed other people’s relationships should be private—extremely private), then he broke up with Liora.
The breakup had been so ugly that Skye avoided both of them. Misha, because Liora stalked him and made nasty comments to any woman who was near him, and Liora because—well, because she had become so very bitter.
She had been so disruptive that the management of the Guild had disciplined her over her behavior. Skye remembered that too, because she had been stunned to see someone else get disciplined and she had also been stunned that the Guild had actually acted against one of its best assassins.
She explained all of this to Jack, who stared at the connection for the longest time.
“And this Olliver woman is the one who hired Heller,” he said.
Skye nodded.
“Don’t you find that odd?” he asked.
“I find it all odd,” she said.
He stood up and arched his back. It popped. Then he reached upward and touched the ceiling. His arms remained bent. She couldn’t touch the ceiling if her life depended on it. Not without standing on a chair or something.
“This discipline that she got, was it severe?” he asked.
“Based on what?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know that much about the Guild.”
She thought about it. She thought her relationship with the Guild was severe, but she had never been disciplined.
Other people had, though. Some got demoted and were no longer assassins. They got moved to other parts of the Guild. Some were happy to be off the assassin track and probably violated some rule so that they would be demoted and not have to kill for a living.
But people like Liora, they rarely got disciplined, and almost never for something personal.
“She was on an accelerated track,” Skye said, thinking out loud. “She was the best at everything, which always made me feel stupid because I was pretty bad at most of it.”
“What’s everything?” Jack asked.
“You know, shooting, using knives, figuring out how new weapons worked. She could hit targets from a crazy distance, but she preferred to be up close. And if there was a timed test, she often beat the time.”
Jack looked down at Skye. She wanted to tell him to sit. This standing made her uncomfortable.
“I thought you didn’t pay attention to other people,” he said.
“It was hard not to with her. The teachers and judges who weren’t very observant always confused us. We look alike.”
Jack frowned. “I saw her. She shares your body type, but it’s pretty clear that she is nothing like you.”
“Not to most of the folks at the Guild. They wanted me to be her. They usually forgot I even existed—until I wanted out, that is. Then everyone knew me.” Skye sounded bitter, but she was bitter. No, check that. She was angry. Furious.
And she’d been happy to see Liora disciplined.
“What happened after she got disciplined?” Jack asked.
“She had to go through some sensitivity training or something, I don’t know,” Skye said. “She couldn’t leave the Guild for months. I remember that because I ran into her during that time and wow, was she nasty. I remember saying to Hazel Sanchez, who’d also been in class with us, that the discipline didn’t seem to be working.”
“And what did your friend say?” Jack asked.
Skye started. She hadn’t said that Hazel Sanchez was her friend. “Um, she said that the discipline generally didn’t work. It usually pissed people off, and if she were in charge, she’d make sure they revamped the entire program.”
He pointed at Skye as if she had said that. “There’s the link,” he said and got back in his chair.
He leaned toward one of the other screens and started tapping at it.
“Is there any way, besides forcing you to remember, to know who got disciplined and who didn’t?”
“That’s not an easily accessible file,” Skye said. “And I don’t remember most of who got disciplined. It really didn’t matter to me.”
“I figured,” he said, sounding distracted. “Can we hack into the private Guild files?”
“We’ll get found a lot faster if we do,” she said.
“Is there a way to figure it out without getting into the private Guild files?”
She sat down beside him. “There is a pattern. Someone is on a career track, then they get yanked off—”
“For months, right?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “And they get sidelined in the Guild, and then they’re never on the same track.”
“So this Liora Olliver, she lost her entire career because she had relationship issues.”
“They weren’t issues,” Skye said. “She was stalking him and—”
“You know what I mean,” Jack said.
“Yeah, I do,” she said. “Liora never got promoted after that. She got passed over for all kinds of assignments.”
“And you know that…?”
“Because she bitched about it. She came to me and said that we were two of a kind because we were both bound to the Guild. She had to serve some months doing what they wanted. I told her that we were nothing alike and if she ever said that again, I’d figure out a way to hurt her.”
Skye spoke with the same kind of force she’d used when she threatened Liora.
“You said that to an assassin?” Jack asked.
Skye raised her chin. “I could do it if someone made me mad enough. I’d be stealthy and I probably wouldn’t have physically hurt her. I might’ve hurt her identity or something, but yeah, I would—”
“I’m just impressed,” Jack said.
Skye flushed. Someone else’s opinion hadn’t really mattered to her before.
“Thanks,” she said, knowing the word was inadequate.
He nodded, looking down at the screens, as if what had just passed between them hadn’t been important.
Maybe it hadn’t been to him, but to her, it was a revelation. She let out a small breath. He was becoming important to her.
She didn’t want him to be.
Or did she?
“It’s going to take some work to figure out who got yanked off career paths,” Jack said. “These older files are counterintuitive.”
She took another deep breath, glad he wasn’t
looking at her. “Yet, it would all be in the older files.”
She kept her head down, then moved to the other side of the table. She didn’t want to think about Jack right now. She wanted to focus on this search.
But he was very distracting.
“I think we can set up search perimeters,” she said.
“How?” he asked. “It seems to me that being demoted is a personal thing. That whole career track would be something someone would sense, rather than actually experience.”
“You are such a Rover,” she said.
His head came up quickly. He wasn’t smiling.
She held up her hand.
“I didn’t mean that as an insult,” she said. In fact, she’d meant it as banter. But she didn’t say that. “I just meant that you’re from an organization that’s ‘loosely’ affiliated. I come from one with rules. There’s an actual career track. Look.”
She called it up, and showed it to him. The good grades, the high marks on the physical side of things, the internship, the early jobs, and then the successful jobs. Only the most successful assassins got the work that took brains and skill. The rest got pretty routine work, mostly dealing with fairly dumb criminals that couldn’t get prosecuted usually for some silly reason.
Only a handful of assassins from each graduating class got assignments of the kind that the Guild was famous for. And after her relationship with Misha, Liora hadn’t gotten any of those.
Misha had, though. He had never gone out of favor with those in charge of the Guild.
That had driven Liora crazy as well.
Skye explained all of this to Jack. He studied it as if it were a different language.
“Wow,” he said. “It’s like the Guild is some kind of government in its own right.”
“It is,” she said. “Once you’re in its sphere, you don’t leave.”
Or you rarely leave, she thought. She was one of the few who planned to. Even the folks who hadn’t done well in her class planned to stay after their early assignments were over. The Guild gave everyone a home, and protection.
Provided they survived their first few years as an assassin.
“That’ll help,” Jack said. “We might actually have a chance of figuring all of this out.”
“Information is always out there,” Skye said. “It’s just a case of putting it together.”
He grinned at her. “Did I say that to you?”
“No,” she said with a mock frown. “I’ve been saying it for years.”
“So have I,” Jack said, then lowered his head and went back to work.
Compatible. Similar. With the same methods and the same interests. She sighed softly. And he was impressed with her.
His life might be threatened, but she was the one in trouble.
She had succumbed to the ultimate attachment.
She had fallen in love.
Chapter 46
Skye seemed nervous and preoccupied. She paced around the entertainment room, and wouldn’t alight anywhere for long. She’d sat next to Jack a couple of times, then popped back up as if ejected from her seat.
He tried to focus on the information pooling in front of him, but he had trouble doing so. Part of him needed to monitor Skye just because she was acting so strange.
And, if he were honest with himself, he also wanted to monitor her because he had been monitoring her all along. She had become his focus. He loved her changing moods, her soft skin, the way that she laughed. He just wanted to spend more and more time with her—and he knew he had ruined that by contacting Rikki.
Not that Skye was jealous. She hadn’t been.
He’d ruined it because they had agreed that the outside contact would force them back into the populated parts of the universe. Their time together was over, and they hadn’t discussed the future.
He hadn’t discussed the future because there might not be one. Or maybe that was just the excuse he was giving himself, because he worried that Skye would tell him that once this entire adventure was over, he was on his own.
She had been so clear from the beginning that she didn’t want any attachments. The more he learned about her, the more he realized that she had lived her entire life according to that philosophy, and these past few weeks with him had simply been an aberration.
An enjoyable aberration, but an aberration all the same.
“Okay,” he said, trying to focus on the information, “when people get disciplined, sometimes they get demoted, right?”
“Yeah,” Skye said. “You find anything?”
“Quite a bit.” He already had a list of about twenty names. “Does the Guild do anything to prevent traitors in its midst?”
Skye froze. “That’s a big word. Traitors.”
“It’s what someone would be, right, if they went against a country or a government. Isn’t that what we’re looking for with the Guild?” Or maybe he was just jumping to the wrong conclusions.
Skye still hadn’t moved. She ran a finger along the edges of the screen in front of her. “I guess so, yes. But what would be the goal of these traitors?”
Jack shrugged. “Would they want to overthrow the government of the Guild?”
“We don’t call it a government,” she said. Then she leaned forward, and started tapping on the screen. “Take a look at this.”
She sent more information to him. It was about the death of the former director of the Guild, the man she had mentioned before, a man named Rafiq Zvi. According to the information that Skye just sent Jack, this Zvi had been killed by someone inside the Guild, someone who had gone crazy.
It seemed too easy to Jack.
“Let me check this out,” he said.
He dug for a bit to see what he could find. The Guild records had very little, although they claimed that Zvi had died on Guild property. But the more Jack dug, the more he found references to the nearby city of Prospera.
So he looked in Prospera’s records. Apparently, the city had claimed jurisdiction at first because, contrary to the Guild records, Zvi had died in a restaurant in Prospera. The city had investigated a little. Then the Guild informed the city that the Guild would do the investigation.
The city handed jurisdiction over to the Guild with a speed that surprised Jack. Usually police departments were very protective of their own investigations. They also wanted to make sure that a suspicious death got solved properly.
Most of the research he had done for the Rovers early on had been in jurisdictional matters, in figuring out who or what someone could get away with in a particular location. He was an expert in finding out how to avoid jurisdictional problems and when to invite them.
It looked like someone had done the same for this death in Prospera.
He dug a bit deeper, and found a name that had been on his list of possibly disciplined assassins.
“Do you know a Camalla Taub?” he asked Skye.
“Why?” she asked.
“She’s the one who got the investigation of Zvi’s death moved out of Prospera,” Jack said.
“He died in Prospera?” Skye ran a hand over her face. “Wow. I always thought he’d been surprised in the Guild.”
“Not from the initial reports,” Jack said. It took him some digging to retrieve those reports, but he managed it. “Apparently, he’d been in a restaurant with some old friends. He’d gotten up—to do what seems to be in dispute—and got beaten to death in the back part of the restaurant.”
“That’s weird,” Skye said. “The directors of the Guild come out of the top assassin pool. Do you know how hard it is to kill people like that?”
“Only in theory,” Jack said. He really didn’t want to know.
“This contradicts every story I’ve heard about his death,” Skye said.
“Weren’t you at the Guild at the time?” Jack asked.
“Yeah, and it shook up everyone. But we were awakened the next day, told he was dead, and told that the Council of Governors would elect a new director. It took weeks, a
nd then it got disputed, and finally Kerani Ammons took over. It took her a while to consolidate power since almost half the council had voted against her.”
Jack remained silent. He dug a bit more. He felt oddly disturbed. And he wasn’t quite sure how to communicate that disturbance to Skye.
Finally, he said, “I know you’ve learned to think of the Guild in a particular way, but imagine this if it were a country instead of the Guild. The leader dies, and the information about the death is not clear. Someone gets blamed, but that someone might not even have been near the leader when the death occurred.”
“Is that true?” Skye asked. “I thought some crazy killed him. Isn’t that what happened?”
Her reaction was what Jack had been afraid of as he started this line of thought. He had learned long ago that people brought up in a system had trouble thinking outside of that system, even if they didn’t like the system. Since he’d never had any allegiance to any system, he had the luxury of being a free thinker.
“Just go with me on this for a moment,” Jack said. “Imagine if the someone who got blamed could possibly be a patsy.”
“Damn,” Skye muttered.
“And there’s a cover-up. No one knows, or the people who do know don’t care. To get a new leader, there are a series of hoops that everyone has to jump through, including an election through a limited body.”
Skye swallowed hard. Her gaze remained on Jack’s. He hadn’t moved. He was afraid he would upset the balance between them.
“If you control most of that body, then you get the leader you want,” he said. “But if you only control half, it might be dicey. It might take a bit of finesse. It would definitely take more time.”
“I’m not sure I like this.” Skye clearly understood what he was getting at.
“Ultimately, it doesn’t work. The new leader gets chosen but by the wrong half of the council, and it takes a while for that leader to consolidate power. That leader, who hasn’t been part of the inside group until now, knows nothing about the cover-up on the other death, and so governs according to whatever laws are in place.”
“Laws that include a discipline system that destroys careers,” Skye said. She clearly understood what he meant. She seemed both upset and intrigued by it.