The pirate tilted his head, considering. He had always preferred force to negotiation, believing in physical power—whether in body, weapon, or ship—over cleverness, but he was still smart. And, unfortunately, good at his brutal job.
“No,” Verrick said slowly. “No, I recognize that face.”
As the pirate watched her, Maja knelt beside ’Flix. She ripped off part of his coveralls and pressed the fabric to the wound.
“What are you . . . how can you . . . ?” Even the translator had no words for the sound that followed.
“Just press down on the wound,” she murmured. “You have to stanch the bleeding.”
Verrick watched, a stream of cold calculations running behind his eyes. “What was your name again? You’re Manouya’s wonder child, aren’t you? The poor little orphan, all grown up.” He laughed an ugly laugh.
“What’s he saying?”’Flix panted.
“Doesn’t matter. Just keep quiet.”
“But he said—”
“’Flix,” she snapped. “Keep your stupid beak shut.”
The Tolian’s eyes went wide. Never in all the time they’d worked together had Maja so much as raised her voice to him.
Long overdue.
Still he made to speak—to argue, to complain, she didn’t know. Didn’t, at that point, care. Instead, she pressed harder on the wadded fabric, increasing the pressure on his wound; there was already so much blood. ’Flix’s eyes rolled back and he whistled, his hand scrabbling weakly at her arms.
Ignoring her one-time coworker, Maja looked back to the pirate. “The deal’s a bust,” she repeated. “The First suspected these two all along—and you know how they feel about messing with anything pertaining to the Hoveny Concentrix. Everything was tracked, monitored, and recorded. The vid’s already on its way to the authorities—including Plexis Security.”
’Flix’s low whistle from beneath her hands spoke as much of despair as it did of pain. Hang in there, she thought to him. It’ll all work out.
“Then why,” Verrick asked slowly, “are you talking to me? One scrawny Human alone in a Plexis back hall.” He lifted his cleaned knife, turning it to catch the light. “You don’t look much like security. Not much like an enforcer, either.”
“I have a copy of the recording with me, if you don’t believe.” She lifted her recorder in one bloody hand. “But I intercepted the feed. Put it on a time delay to give us a little moment to talk.”
“About what?”
“I think we could make a deal, you and I. Consider this: if you—”
Suddenly, ’Flix deflated under her hands. His muscles went slack as unconsciousness claimed him.
“’Flix?” Maja made to pat his face, only to realize how heavy the wadded fabric had become, saturated with blood. Verrick must have nicked an artery; ’Flix was bleeding out.
She swore. “Get me a spray bandage. We need to get him to a med unit—”
Verrick guffawed, incredulous. She took a breath, then another, trying to stem her rush of anger and disgust.
She’d been away from this work too long. Her request had been a Maja reaction, nothing more.
She looked back to the Tolian. Saw the color of his skin, the seeming thinness of his closed eyelids, the erratic twitch of the muscle movements beneath her hands. He had moments to live, if that, and there was nothing that she could do to save him. Even so, she pressed down, harder and harder, as if she could stop that end with hands and will alone.
Too late, she thought. Too thin a plan, too long getting here, too distant from her days as a smuggler. She could only watch as ’Flix died under her hands.
Verrick paid no attention as the Tolian breathed his last, that thin whistle of air somehow loud in the empty space. Instead, the pirate said, “What was this about a deal?”
Time to bluff her way out of this situation. But she could not look away from ’Flix’s body. Could not, in that moment, find the strength to rise.
“What, nothing else to say to me? Come on, I want to hear about this plan of yours.”
“Verrick,” she said slowly. “I need you to get Captain Bennefeld now.”
The pirate laughed and crossed his arms across his chest. “You want me to do your laundry, too? Fetch you some slippers?” He swore—using a particularly creative combination of names for her.
Her hands had become stone; her blood, ice. She felt each breath as it entered her, filled her; felt the metronome beat of her heart. She ran her hand down the side of ’Flix’s feathered head once, slowly—a gesture of affection she would not have wanted, nor felt, had the Tolian still lived.
She had not liked ’Flix. He’d been a smart being in some ways, as stupid as rocks in others, and he had not deserved to die. Certainly not like this.
One breath. Another.
“Verrick. If you know who I am, then you know my presence here is a threat.” Each word was a cold stone cast between them; and her eyes, when she looked up from ’Flix’s body to stare down the pirate, were colder still.
“Get your captain,” she said again. “Bring her here.”
This time, Verrick complied.
* * *
• • •
Nearly thirty hours after Bax’s interrogation, Dalton stumbled into Manny’s office. He was alone, bent over his work, humming a low prayer.
“They were yours,” she said in accusation.
Exhaustion should have slurred the words, but anger made everything clearer. Her voice. Her past. The look in Manny’s eyes as he lifted his head from the displays arrayed on the low tabletops that served as his desk. Manny’s office was frigid; it always was, by Human standards. But it was not the cold that made Dalton shiver, or tightened her jaw, or made her restless hands tremble by her sides.
She had not slept or showered since the interrogation; she’d barely paused in her research long enough to visit the accommodation and eat a package of crackers she’d found in a drawer. There had only been the work—the truth that she’d managed to dig out, sliver by sliver, from where it had been so carefully hidden.
Hidden, she knew now, only from her.
Manny shifted his bulk, leaning back on his ample haunches as he gave her his full attention.
“Yes,” he said. He did not need to ask who she meant.
Even so, she said their names: “Andreas and Lila, Mikael and Sanders—”
Manny lifted a hand to stop the flow of the names of her parents and brother, her aunts and uncles, and the many people they had hired. With that gesture of ivory-tipped fingers he asked for silence, but that—here, now—she could not give.
“There were forty people aboard the trader ship Dalton, and they all worked for you.”
There came a moment of silence as he looked at her. Dalton knew the real Manny: smiling, jovial, ever the optimist. In almost all of her memories, he was laughing. She’d seen this face before—his blank face, stripped of emotion—but never before had it been turned toward her.
The rare times she saw this expression, someone usually died. Even that thought was not enough to deter her.
“Yes,” Manouya said again.
“There really was a pirate attack. The Dashing Boy attacked and destroyed the Dalton—but not for anything in their holds. Not for information, or hostages, or anything else that they carried. They were attacked because you ordered it. You hired the ’Boy to kill them.”
“You’ve been doing your research, I see.”
“Surprised I’ve discovered your dirty secret?” Dalton all but spat the words.
Manny’s thick lips twisted, a gesture akin to a Human’s lift of an eyebrow. “Surprised, only, that it took you this long to look.”
“I trusted you!”
Manny laughed then, the rumbling sound full of genuine humor. “Grasis’ Glory, child. Why would you ever do that?”
/>
She’d thought, she’d believed—
But no, that couldn’t matter now.
“In your research, did you find records of what the Dalton did? I don’t believe I left many intact.”
Despite her anger, the words came swift and smooth, just as he’d trained her: “It was a trader, clean record. Double holds, concealed compartments along the engine bay, dummy hold alongside the engine. It followed Plexis for six years, then worked the Deneb run for four.”
“And what did they do for their other employers?”
“Their other . . . ?” Dalton swallowed.
“They were freelancing,” Manny said. “Did you not find that part? Up to a third of the goods they transported were off the books they shared with me. They were stockpiling money. Establishing their own network of contacts.”
“For what?”
Manny smiled. “To overthrow me.”
As if that were possible. There had never been any question why Manouya was the mastermind behind every major smuggling ring in Human space—at least, in his opinion. “Smarter than the lot of you,” he often said with an emphatic fist to his own chest. Having watched his operation for as long as she could remember, Dalton couldn’t help but agree.
It was not just his leadership or techniques, his ability to see barriers not for their strengths but for the holes one might slip through. It was that he had a mind for patterns, one that was exemplary even for a Brill. He saw patterns in people and behavior as much as in money; he understood the tangled relationships between businesses and governments, information and power, in a blink of an eye.
She understood, then, what he was not saying. One trading vessel—a mere forty people, no matter how terrible that tally—was no threat to his shadow empire or his place at its head. Still she spoke the words: “One ship?”
“No. The captain and crew of the Dalton were but the ringleaders. They spread dissent like slow poison, drip by drip into an open vein. Into my networks, my contacts, my clients. Into my captains and ships.”
“And you let them?”
A low chuckle. “For a time. What better way to diagnose weakness in the flesh, while honing the knife to cut it out?”
“And the fate of the rest?”
“Of the whole of the Dalton rebellion,” Manny said with a twist of his thick lips, “there was only a single survivor. You.”
He had killed them, every one. Yet all she could think . . .
“Manny, why?” Dalton whispered. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Why keep this from her for so long? Hadn’t she proven herself to him, time and again? Or did he think that she was like her parents and older brother, her aunts and uncles? Did he think that in her chest beat a traitor’s heart?
For a span of a breath she ached with that thought, before she at last understood the import of his last words: that she was the only survivor. What was it Bax had said? That she didn’t know what her own name meant. That she was the only one who had ever known Manouya’s questionable mercy.
Realization felt like a blow to her chest. “My name,” Dalton said. Her words came slow, each one a painful birth. “I wasn’t named for the ship, was I? I was named for the rebellion.”
Manny chuckled; he always liked when she proved herself clever. “The rebellion, and its failure.”
“My name is a warning. A reminder of what happens to those who dare cross you.”
Her parents’ rebellion hadn’t just been stopped. She knew Manny; she knew what he would have done. From root tip to unfurling leaf, he had destroyed them: every ship, every business, every record, every life. Every single drop of traitor’s blood was no more than dust and ruin scattered unceremoniously among the stars.
Every drop, but one. The sole survivor of the Dalton rebellion had been brought back into the fold and raised at the Facilitator’s knee, taught to cleave to him as a plant reaches for the sun.
The words were ash and blood in her mouth: “That’s all I am, isn’t it? I’m proof of your revenge—and the whole of your mercy.”
Deny it, Dalton dared him silently. Tell me I’m wrong.
Then, as the silence grew between them: Please.
Because perhaps revenge was why he’d kept and raised her—but as the years passed, hadn’t she become something more to him? If not his daughter or heir, then at least—something. She’d always thought that in his strange, alien way, Manny loved her. After all she’d done, after all she’d become, surely now she was more than a reminder to those who’d consider betrayal.
But Manouya, the Facilitator, the mastermind and uncontested ruler of every criminal smuggling ring in Human space, and the only father she’d ever known, simply looked at her, icy, impassive. A moment passed. A second.
“Was there anything else?” he asked. A quiet, final dismissal.
No denial. No excuse. No explanation. No apology.
He wasn’t going to say anything else, Dalton realized. Not now, not ever. She stared at him, heart thundering, throat thick with unshed tears. She wanted—
She needed—
She didn’t even know. But it was not this.
At last she took a breath, squared her shoulders, and met Manouya’s eyes. Nodded once. Then she turned and walked away without looking back.
She kept walking, leaving everything behind. Her training. Her friends. Her father. Her name.
She walked out of the ship. Out of this life. Forever.
* * *
• • •
Or so she had thought.
Because as she knelt with ’Flix’s blood soaking into her filthy coveralls, she did not feel like Maja Anders anymore. All she felt was a deep, aching silence that roared through her like a scream.
It had been a hard thing, starting again from nothing—but she had done it. She’d known how to navigate the complexities of worlds throughout the Trade Pact, the ins and outs of life on a starship, the immigration laws and legal complexities of some dozen potential homes. She’d crafted Maja Anders piece by careful piece, creating an alternate self so believable that no one would have cause to dig deeper.
She could have made a life for herself in any number of ways. She could have been a trader, an antiques dealer, an evaluator. But no, she’d wanted to do something real. If she dealt in history, let her carve it from rock and soil; if she paid in sweat and blood, let it be her own. She had no deep love of Hoveny artifacts or the secrets they might tell, but she knew enough from her years with the Facilitator to eventually earn a place for herself in a Triad.
And now . . . this. One way or another, she’d known she’d have to start again. But not like this.
Three pairs of footsteps approached. Two sets stayed back; she listened as that single set of sharp, precise steps drew closer. Stopped.
Maja would have been afraid; she knew it. She’d constructed this identity so carefully, and everything about Maja—from her sheltered, onworld upbringing to her years of scholarly study—should have made her crouch and cringe. Maja would have run, terrified.
No, more: Maja wouldn’t have been here in the first place.
Had she ever truly been Maja Anders?
“You seem to have wandered off the beaten path,” said a quiet voice.
She looked up to meet Captain Bennefeld’s eyes. Nodded once in acknowledgment.
“So it seems.” She turned back to ’Flix, limp and unmoving before her. The air smelled of blood and dust. “This has all gone terribly wrong.”
“Verrick told me of the recordings. That you proposed a deal.”
She shook her head. “That doesn’t matter now.”
She’d never imagined seeing Bennefeld for the first time through a ventilation grate; she’d never truly believed that she’d speak to Bennefeld at all. Yet here she was.
“Tell me,” she asked, speaking words she’d nev
er imagined. “Do you know who I am?”
Unspoken beneath: do you know what you did to me?
This person had killed her family in cold blood. Bennefeld had probably never had second thoughts about that job, never wondered about the lives she’d taken—or the life, singular, that had been left behind. The destruction of the Dalton had been just one unsavory task among the many that were Bennefeld’s bread and salt.
She should be angry, she knew. Angry for the deaths of her blood-kin and all that worked for them; angry for the loss of her true name and the life she could have had. And she was angry—but not, she realized, for those deaths. Not anymore. She had no memories to affix to those losses, only a few bare scraps of information that she’d been able to recover after the Facilitator’s purge. Now that the shock of discovery was years past, she could not maintain her blaze of righteous anger.
No, if she felt anger toward Bennefeld and her crew, it was only for what those long-ago actions had meant for Dalton at the very end. The loss of everything she’d ever wanted, the life she’d loved. The loss of Manny and his place in her heart.
And now, Bennefeld had ended Maja Anders.
This pirate had destroyed her life not once or twice, but three times over, all unknowing.
“Yes,” Bennefeld confirmed. “I know who you are.”
Do you? She looked down at her bloody hands and laughed, the sound a pale echo of Manouya’s deep chuckle. That makes one of us.
Because it was all falling apart now, everything she had built for herself, everything she had strived to achieve on her own. The last of Maja Anders was crumbling, patterns of thought and habit flaking like old paint—and as that sense of self fell away, piece by painful piece, she felt so very relieved.
Never had she lived a constructed identity for so long. Never had something she thought she wanted, something she thought she deserved, felt so false or constraining.
Which left . . . what?
Because if she no longer felt rage toward Bennefeld—was that what forgiveness was, a weary end to hate?—she could not say the same for Manouya. She understood why he had destroyed her family and the rebellion they’d nurtured; had something similar happened when she’d worked at Manny’s side, she would have had a hand in the distribution of such justice, too. What she could not comprehend was what he had made her become.
The Clan Chronicles--Tales from Plexis Page 36