by Linda Gayle
She thought of that awful moment when the black-clad figure had raised the weapon toward Kels while he fought with the other gangers, and her finger had tightened on the trigger. Her mind as clear as empty space, Sayal had simply pressed her hand against the woman’s head and pushed her life force from her body, easy as pushing closed a door.
“I knew they were coming,” she continued quickly. “I did feel your emotions through our bond, and I put on these clothes, readied the disruptor.”
“You killed the ganger too?” Elion demanded.
“Yes.”
“Same way?”
“Yes. I…I pushed their life forces out of them.” She lifted one shoulder in a helpless shrug. “I can’t explain any more than that.”
“With your bare hands,” Kels said.
She nodded.
Elion snapped, “You said creator. Who created you?”
Now they were wading into deeper territory. She turned to Kels and the formidable weapon he still aimed at her. Their eyes met, hers pleading. She didn’t dare open their bond, for he would sense it, and this moment had to be honest. If he truly believed whatever they’d shared and felt had been manufactured, she was lost.
He clenched his jaw; then he seemed to reach a decision and he slowly set the weapon aside, leaning it against the wall beside Elion.
“Who was it?” Elion barked, hands fisted. Anger flowed off him, anger and hurt. Pain twisted inside her chest. Elion… She’d let herself love him, and it was all coming down around her now. Curse all the Fates that’d brought them to this.
Kels put a hand on his friend’s chest. “Easy, mate.” Then to Sayal: “It’s all right. We’re listening.” He held up his hands. “No one’s going to hurt you. I’m sorry I lost my temper. Now tell us, sweetheart. Tell us the truth so we can help you.”
She forced herself to say the words—the words that would forever destroy the trust she had with these men. “My creator was a Prime. I’m a…I’m a Prime-human hybrid.”
Silence as the blood drained from their faces. Then Elion choked out, “Impossible. Aliens, humans, can’t interbreed.”
“She didn’t say that,” Kels said thoughtfully, studying her. “It’s genetics. The way you said your ship’s owner manipulated flowers and whatnot. Human genes spliced with Prime genes in a laboratory. They’ve been doing it for decades with plants and lower animals. It was only a matter of time before someone went and did it with humans.” A light went off behind his eyes. “The ship’s owner—that was your Prime, wasn’t it?”
She nodded, putting her face in her hands for a moment, then drawing breath.
“Then your mother was human?”
“My mother was a Dawn Goddess, what you call a Prime worshipper. She was human, but also an empath, with much greater powers than mine. At least”—she flexed her hands and stared at them—“until now I thought so.” She looked back at Kels. The heat had left his eyes, and she saw he listened. It gave her courage to continue. “The Primes watch the high games for candidates for their…experiments and for their own pleasure. They’re highly sexual beings. Only humans match them in that regard. When my mother drew my creator’s attention, she went to him willingly. It was an honor. She was little more than a child, only fourteen by your Earth standards, when he impregnated her.” She rubbed her forehead, where a pain was forming. “I know only what she told me. I was raised with her and two Primes, my creator and my tutor. I’m sorry. The truth I’ve been learning, what Elion has told me, I know you must despise me.”
Instead of yelling at her, Elion whirled on Kels. “You knew, you bastard. I remember now, the night of the jarouk game. After the jack, you didn’t give her Dimextrin. You handed me Solactate because you knew the Sol would offset the jack toxicity.”
“Now hold on,” Kels said. “Yeah, it’s true I thought there was more to it. Jack’s poison to ‘hancers as well. I didn’t know she was half fucking Prime.”
“You knew, and you didn’t tell me.” Elion sliced his hand angrily through the air. “I thought we were mates, a team. When were you planning on spilling the news? When she popped the life out of me too? What the fuck, Kels?”
“I wasn’t going to jump to conclusions,” Kels snapped.
Elion jabbed his finger at him. “You knew I was falling for her. For a freak. An illegal, immoral life form.”
“Calm down, El.” Kels began to inch between her and his furious friend, while Sayal dissolved into nothingness inside, Elion’s biting words worse than any she’d even imagined.
“I fucked her,” Elion growled, his face blotched and red. “You fucked her. A Prime! They’re the enemy; they ripped apart humanity, and that’s one of them.” He stabbed an accusing finger at her. “And she’s a danger, created to destroy, what? Who?” His hot blue eyes flared at her. “Are there others like you?”
Sayal’s throat had closed up. She’d grabbed the edges of her coat together and pulled them tight beneath her chin. Elion—he loathed her. She couldn’t bear it; her heart was breaking.
Kels turned to her, the same question in his eyes. He held Elion back with a hand on his shoulder. “Why were you created, Sayal? Why this charade? What’s your real purpose? It’s clear now you’re going back to your creator, but why?”
His calm gave her strength. There was no point in denying anything any longer. She’d lost everything already. “I am intended to be the first of many. That’s why I ran away. Sorush, my Prime creator, intends to breed or clone more like me. I was raised and trained to blend into human society, so I could get close to…targets.”
“Of course,” Elion spat. “Who could resist her? The perfect assassin. She’d be able to get next to anyone, then touch them, and pow, into the next world.”
“There’s more,” she said, swallowing hard. “Sorush attempted several more times to create hybrids. My mother carried only one to term. My sister, Omaya. Sorush was trying to enhance the empathic qualities I and my mother shared. Omaya was to be the next generation, a true parapsychic—one who could read minds, who could destroy with a touch or…kill from a distance with just her thoughts.”
“Oh fuck,” Elion moaned.
“Where is she now?” Kels asked. She gazed into his steady eyes, seeing not condemnation but urgency there.
“She died.” The pain rushed back. “When she was only a baby.” Images burned in her mind, an infant crying frantically, tiny fists clamped, a desperate need to help, a desperate feeling of helplessness. “She couldn’t block out the psychic impressions around her. Everything—all the pain in the universe—flooded her. Her mind broke, and then her body failed. And then my mother…” Her voice hitched, and she bit her lower lip and turned her face into the rough collar of the coat.
Kels put his gentle hand on her head. How could he touch her? Yet she turned into his palm, craving the contact, the reassurance. “What happened to her?” he asked.
“She killed herself. She could no longer bear to be part of Sorush’s experiments. I knew I was next, that he would breed…something in me. An empath must be born from a living mother. He needs me. Needs my genes and my body. And so I ran away.”
“And now you’re going back. Why?” Elion asked the question, his arms folded tightly across his chest.
“To destroy him. I must.” She searched their faces. “Primes are like inkmen; they keep their secrets guarded. It’s possible he hasn’t shared his methods with anyone else. Before he does, I must kill him.”
Kels turned to Elion. “This is something the military should know about.”
“No.” Sayal leaned forward, grasping the arm of the chair. “Remember I told you he fucked me in front of others?”
Kels nodded.
“There were humans there too, watching from vids. They wore the uniforms of generals. I think Sorush is working with the Terran military.”
Kels looked at her, aghast, and shook his head. “Sayal…”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you from the beginning, but ho
w could I? I knew you would despise me, as you do now.” Her fingers cramped around the chair; her words poured out in a rush. “I never meant for it to come to this. I never meant to feel for you what I do. I…” A great sob seized her.
His fingers moved over her hair. “Shh. It’s all right.”
“It’s not fucking all right,” Elion cried. “We’ve got a huge problem here. She’s carrying the genes that could end the human race. We’d be as relevant as Cro-Magnons in the computer age. Don’t you see it? The fucking Primes are seeding the next generation.” He shoved his hands over his head.
“What do you propose we do, then?” Kels’s temper rose again, burning in his tone. “Kill her? Destroy the experiment?”
“That’s what we should do,” Elion snapped.
Kels grabbed up the pulsar and jammed it into his mate’s hands. “Here. Look, I even set it on short range so nothing’ll be vaporized ‘cept the chair and the girl. Go on, El.” He shoved Elion around so he faced her, the weapon gripped in his whitening fingers. “Do the deed. Save the human race.”
Elion jerked up the weapon, his finger on the trigger, his legs braced in a shooter’s stance. Sayal pressed back in the chair and froze.
Everything stopped, suspended in time, every detail crystal clear: the lights touching on the spiky tips of Elion’s blond hair; his blue eyes going blank, seeing not her but through her; his finger tightening on the black half-moon of the trigger; Kels’s impassive gaze sliding down the long, vented barrel of the pulsar to her face. Her own voice, small over her thundering heart, saying, “Do it, Elion. Do it.”
The hot red eye in the center of the pulsar’s bore filled her vision.
Then: “I can’t. I can’t fucking do it.” Elion dropped the weapon to his side. Sayal let out a heavy breath, and Kels put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, then took the weapon from him.
“Of course you can’t,” he said. “Because she’s still our Sayal. It doesn’t matter if she’s half-Prime or half-Quitza; she’s still the girl we love.”
Shifting from one foot to the other, Elion shook his head, his expression tortured. “I don’t know. Is she? Is anything real anymore, or did she just brain fuck us?”
Risking his wrath, Sayal lifted her hands a little and said carefully, “I do not have the power to make people love me.”
Kels set the weapon aside again. “Sayal, precious, I’m going to put you away for now, in my quarters, all right? I’m going to lock you in. I’m sure you understand. You’ll be safe there. El and me have to talk things over, decide what we’re going to do next.” He put out his hand, and she took it, rising shakily to her feet. Her legs had no strength at all. Without another word, Kels put his arm around her and walked her from the com deck, leaving a fractured Elion behind. Sayal glanced at him one last time before they left the deck.
“Elion…” she murmured.
“He’ll come around. Don’t fret.”
She glanced up at Kels’s serious, thoughtful face. “You’re not afraid of me?”
He looked down at her. “No.”
“You believe me?”
They turned a corner and paused in front of the door to his quarters, where he let her go. “Yeah, I do. Your story’s too crazy to be anything but truth. Besides, it fills in a lot of empty gaps I’ve been ruminating on, like who was after us on Aleut.”
“Yes. The Prime. I’ve been trying to think of who it might be.”
“Do you know?”
“Perhaps Asheni, my tutor. Not Sorush. He would never leave his ship.” She stepped closer to him. “I never would have knowingly put you or Elion in danger. My plan seemed so simple, and now it’s gotten so complicated.”
“Plans have a way of doing that.” He leaned a shoulder against the door, hands in his coat pockets. “How long have you been on the run?”
“Approximately four months.”
“Four months in a universe you know little about?”
She gave a small shrug. “I knew from vids and my tutor’s teachings.”
“How’d you get to Aleut?”
“I stowed away on a supply galley leaving Sorush’s liner; then from there, I kept jumping ships. If there were many humans aboard, it wasn’t hard to blend in. Otherwise, I hid. I wanted to get as far from him as possible.”
“And that’s how you landed in the Dregs.”
“Yes. But I do believe Fate led me to you. I don’t believe our meeting came by chance.”
His eyebrows dipped. “Fate? Are you religious?”
“No, but…I do think there’s a force that may guide us, watch over us. My mother taught me it was so.”
“Your mother, the Prime worshipper?”
“She gave that up when she learned the Primes’ true intentions.” She dropped her gaze to his boots, still red dusted from the moon’s surface. “I’ve learned things—felt things I never knew were possible since I escaped. Perhaps there is nothing, no greater meaning to all this.” She met his eyes again. “Even if that’s true, there’s still you and Elion. And for that alone I would complete my mission.”
“To kill this Sorush.”
She nodded.
“What happens after you kill him?”
“I will destroy his ship and all records of what he’s done.”
He seemed skeptical. “And you know how to do this?”
“Yes. I’ve studied the ship’s holomanuals. There are overrides I can set in place.”
“Hm. All right. What if he kills you?”
“Then again the mission is complete. If my body is destroyed, he must begin again, and women like my mother, true empaths, are one in a billion if that.”
He crossed his arms and pulled on his lower lip. “So when we got to the high games, and let’s say this Sorush did see you, he’d politely invite you back to his place. Is that it?”
She tried to decipher his tone. “Perhaps not politely…”
“And me and El? He’d just say, ‘‘Scuse me, fellas. That’s my bird you’ve got there. Mind if I cut in?’”
She rubbed her arms. “I don’t know. It’s not you he’d be after.”
“But we know about you. At least now we do.”
“He wouldn’t know that.”
“Would he take the chance?”
A chill ran through her. “Oh. I hadn’t thought… Oh, Kels…”
He pushed off the door and waved his hand over the panel to open it. “I don’t mean to make you feel guilty, luv, but this is a serious situation for all of us. I’m still going to aim us toward the Zone, but we have a bit of time before we get there, and we all need to put our heads together and puzzle out a solution. Else we’re all goners, most likely. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you how powerful Primes are. The closer we get to the Zone, the more pull they’ve got too.” He put his hand on her back, the familiar pressure like a balm on her guilt-racked soul. “And forget the high games in any case. They have much better scans. They’d pick up your alien DNA same as Canto’s, but they’d filter out the source. You’d be handed over to the military for dissection or back into the same tangle you left.”
Sayal shuddered. “Fates, I’m so stupid.”
“No, you’re not.” He compressed his lips at her dour self-assessment. “Just naive. Let’s concentrate on what we do know for certain, and not beat ourselves up over whatever mistakes we’ve made, eh?”
She thought a moment, shaking her head at her poor planning. What a fool she’d been. “Leave me, Kels. Drop me somewhere, anywhere. Take off. Forget you ever knew me.”
He threaded his fingers through her hair and cupped her cheek. “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen neither, princess. My mate’s in love with you, and I have to say I’ve grown fairly attached as well. We don’t abandon the folks we take into our hearts. There’s a lesson for you.” And he smiled. Tears welled in her eyes. He thumbed them away. “Don’t cry. Nothing undoes me like a woman’s tears, and I need my brain on straight.”
He bent to ki
ss her, and she lifted to the balls of her feet to meet him. She put her arms around his neck and held on tight, and he did as well, holding her to him with strong arms. If only he’d hold her forever, make her feel safe and wanted. Despite his admonition, she sniffled against his chest. “Kels?”
“What is it?”
“I don’t think Elion loves me anymore.”
He pulled back to look at her. “Why? Just because he almost vaporized you?”
She nodded, wiping her tears away on the back of her hand.
“Now, luv, if you let a little thing like that get in your way, you’ll never find your happiness. He didn’t do it, did he?”
“Well, no.”
He found a scrap of tissue somewhere in one of his deep pockets and handed it to her. “And he never would have. Do you honestly think I would’ve handed him that pulsar if I’d thought he’d pull the trigger?”
She had, without a doubt. Blowing her nose, she tipped her head ambiguously.
He smoothed his palm over her hair. “Be strong, Sayal. We’ll muscle our way through this. You’ll see.” He waved her ahead of him into his quarters. “Can I get you anything? Hool? Cigs? More hool?”
She actually found herself smiling a little, though sadly. “No, thank you.”
“All right, then. You sit tight while me and El ponder. Probably best you don’t leave until we come and get you.”
“I understand.”
He gave her another little peck on the lips before the door slid shut between them, and Sayal dropped to the edge of his bed. No matter what he said, there truly seemed to be only one way out, and that was to turn herself over to Sorush. She’d have to escape the ship as soon as they landed.
Fates, how had she gotten herself into this? Sayal stripped out of the canvas gear down to her own clothes and lay back on the cool sheets. Her mind whirling, she tried to make plans that would work this time and save the men she loved.