by J. J. Green
“You can’t get a job?”
“I’ve got a job. It doesn’t pay enough for my needs.”
“You can’t get a better one?”
Bryce sighed. “It’s a long story, No Names. Maybe we should go to sleep.”
Complicated, shrouded backgrounds were something Carina could understand. “Okay.” She closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but her alcohol-induced languor had given way to alertness. The kiss had awakened something in her—a need for closeness. She felt a compulsion to share something with this stranger, even if it wasn’t her bed. “I’ll be going offplanet tomorrow, so this really is just one night.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m joining that merc band. I just decided.”
“What?” Bryce sat up on one elbow and gawped at her. “After what happened?”
“That guy was just fooling around. As soon as I put him in his place, he would have left me alone.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I was a merc myself for a couple of years. That’s just what they’re like. They’ll push you, but if you fight back you’ll earn their respect and they won’t bother you.”
“Mercs don’t sound like the best people to have as workmates.”
“They aren’t, but, like you, I don’t have a lot of choice.”
“Well, it’s your life. But if you want to join that band, you’ll have to leave early in the morning. I heard them say they were shipping out tomorrow.”
“Right. Thanks. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Now that she’d made and told Bryce her decision, Carina felt calm. Putting it into words had strengthened her resolve. It was time to give up her efforts to connect with another mage and accept that of her few options in life, the best one open to her was returning to the military.
Chapter Three
It must have been around three in the morning when Bryce made his move. Carina wasn’t sure how long he’d been awake. Perhaps he hadn’t slept at all and had been searching her room for anything valuable, or waiting until she was deep in slumber. She only realized he was a thief when she felt his fingertips at her side.
Disappointment and frustration at her own stupidity were her first reactions. She wasn’t afraid of what Bryce might do. Her dagger was under her pillow and her fingers rested on its handle. It was how she’d slept for months. But she was bitter and disillusioned at his betrayal of her trust and she cursed herself for being so gullible.
Never again, she promised herself. She must learn to never trust others’ better natures.
Bryce’s fingers were slowly inching into her pocket, the one that held her pouch. He was taking his sweet time, understandably wary of waking her. The fact that he’d chosen that pocket meant he knew something valuable was in there. He must have watched her push it in deep before she lay down. He’d been setting her up to steal from her right from the start. Maybe he’d even deliberately punched that merc who hassled her in the tavern, if he punched him at all.
Carina mentally cursed again. Served her right for drowning her sorrows.
She debated whether to kill him. It would be easy enough. She could yank out her knife and draw it across his throat in one move. It had to be death or only kick him out. If she wounded him he might fight back and things would get loud and messy. Then again, killing him would be messy too, and Carina’s landlady would charge her extra to clean up the blood.
Bryce’s fingers worked their way steadily deeper.
Decisions, decisions.
The fingers hooked around the drawstring of the pouch and the bulky shape shifted. Carina deliberately also moved, as if she were about to wake up. Bryce froze.
He was stuck now. Carina felt a modicum of pleasure. If he moved his fingers again, he might wake her up and be caught red-handed. But he had to move his fingers at some point because she would wake up eventually anyway.
After a minute or so, Carina tired of the game. She was still suffering the effects of her drinking and really wanted to sleep. “Yeah,” she said, “I’m awake.”
Bryce snatched his hand away and jumped to his feet.
When Carina sat up and turned on the light, his face was a red beacon.
“How dumb are you?” Carina asked. “After I nearly killed you tonight, you pull a stunt like that? What’s wrong with you?” She rubbed her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Bryce replied, hanging his head. “You were kind to let me stay. I guess I should leave.”
“Yeah,” Carina said, “I guess you should, and be happy you’re leaving with your throat intact.”
Avoiding her gaze, Bryce left without another word. Though she regretted her poor decision-making, Carina couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt as the door closed. It was the middle of the night, Bryce apparently had nowhere to stay, and judging from the thrum of rain against the window, it was pouring outside.
Carina turned off the light, thumped her pillow into shape, and thrust her head into it as she lay down. She couldn’t afford to care about others. Look where that had led just that night. If she hadn’t had her wits about her, she could be dead. If Bryce had seen where she kept her valuables, he’d also known about the knife under her pillow. He could have gone for that first. If he’d been quick she wouldn’t have stood a chance. He might have oh-so-gently slipped her knife from its sheath and inserted it in her back.
He hadn’t, though.
Carina turned over and stared at the ceiling as the rain steadily pounded the window. She couldn’t shake the young man from her mind. She wondered what was wrong with her. She hadn’t done anything to feel guilty about, yet she did. Was it something to do with the fact that, despite what he’d done, Bryce seemed intrinsically good?
She sighed and sat up. It didn’t look like sleep would be returning to her that night. She would meditate, as her grandmother had taught her, to refresh and retain her powers. She closed her eyes. First came the Elements: earth, air, fire, water, metal. Next came the Seasons… Five minutes later, her eyes opened. She couldn’t stop thinking about Bryce.
She went over to the window. Her view was obscured by the river of rain running down the glass, but she thought she could make out a figure standing in the scant shelter of a wall. Was it Bryce? She couldn’t tell.
A small Cast was needed. Carina picked up her plain, battered metal canister from the table and swallowed a mouthful of the contents. She closed her eyes and wrote the character, Clear, in her mind. When she opened her eyes, a circle of glass repelled the rain so that it ran around the sides, leaving the center open and transparent.
Carina looked down into the street. The figure was Bryce, looking wet and forlorn. She debated telling him to come inside. She would have to remain awake but it seemed she wasn’t going to sleep again that night anyway. It wouldn’t hurt to give the man shelter for a couple of hours.
Just as she was about to go down to tell him he could come back in, Bryce pulled a metal box from his pocket and opened it. He pushed up his shirt sleeve, took a syringe from the box, and pressed the end of it against the inside of his elbow.
Carina changed her mind. Now everything made sense. There was no reason that a fit, healthy young man couldn’t find a job that would support him. He was an addict. That was why his job didn’t pay enough to meet his “needs.” It also explained why he’d been so desperate to steal from Carina that he’d risked his life.
Carina returned to her bed. She wouldn’t invite an addict into her room. That would be madness. Who knew what lengths he might go to for a dose of whatever local drug was his habit?
This time, meditating came more easily to Carina. She mentally went through the steps. Elements, Seasons, Strokes, and finally the Map. The Map was the most complex item of all to remember, and Carina wondered if she sometimes got it wrong. Perhaps she always did. Since Nai Nai had died eight years previously, Carina had received no feedback on her efforts. She had nothing to check her memory against. Like all things to do with
mages and Casting, no physical record of the Map existed.
Perhaps even Nai Na's Map had been wrong. After all the millennia that mages had been lost, the Map could have changed.
By the time Carina finished her meditation, the rain had stopped, and the sun was rising. Bryce had disappeared from his spot under the streetlight, probably wandering off in a drugged-up haze. Carina looked out over the small town, thinking it was her final view of it.
Her gaze shifted to the side and alighted on the Sherrerr estate. Little Darius, the boy she had rescued, lived there and it was within those walls that another mage also lived—the person who had sent her the pouch and its precious contents.
For three months, Carina had unsuccessfully tried to enter the estate. But the Sherrerrs never hired people without checkable backgrounds and the place had airtight security. No one from there except non-corruptible servants and guards ever came into town, though she had spotted shuttlecraft leaving from within the grounds.
Carina took out her pouch and spread its contents on the table. More tantalizing even than the elixir ingredients was a simple pebble, pretty and shiny but lacking the luster of the gemstones it lay beside. It was the most humble item of all, yet it seemed to mean the most.
Up until her death, when Carina was ten, her grandmother had made a meager living by polishing and selling beautiful stones they found in the wild lands around their slum settlement. Had the mage in the Sherrerr estate also known Nai Nai? And if that person had, why hadn’t they come out to speak to Carina when she’d returned Darius, their child?
All the time Carina had been trying to meet the mage in the Sherrerr mansion, she’d nursed a secret hope that the person would come out and find her. It wouldn’t have been too difficult to track down a strange ex-merc in that small town. The fact that the mage hadn’t seemed to imply that they didn’t want to. Maybe they didn’t think she was important.
Whatever the reason, it was time for Carina to move on. But after her broken night, tiredness assaulted her. She went back to bed and fell asleep. By the time she woke, queasy and her head aching, it was already mid-morning.
Chapter Four
After handing her last few coins to the hostel landlady, Carina swung her bag of few belongings over her shoulder and went out into the street. She squinted against the sun’s eye-piercing blue-white glare. It was something she had never quite gotten used to on Ithyia, and she looked forward to leaving it behind along with her hopeless quest.
Not too long ago, a dear friend and father figure had advised her to give up the soldiering life. He’d told her to get out before she developed a merc’s tough skin, which allowed them to kill impassively and then forget. Well, she’d tried to leave. She’d spent three months searching for another path in life, trying to connect with her own kind, and she hadn’t gotten anywhere.
Carina set her jaw and turned in the direction of the space port. The addict thief she’d had the bad judgment to try to help had said the merc band was shipping out that morning. With some luck, she would catch them before they left.
She began to jog, her bag bouncing on her back, annoyed at herself for going down to the very last of her currency before deciding to leave. If she had only a little cash or some local credit she could take an autocab, but all she had left were the gems. Exchanging them for money would take time she didn’t have.
The route to the spaceport took her through the center of the backwater town. The street was already busy with shoppers. Eating establishments were putting tables out on the narrow sidewalks ready for lunch, forcing pedestrians to step into the street. The narrow electric autocars that were the most popular form of motorized transportation swerved around the walkers and gave out their alarm jangles. Children ran recklessly between the vehicles, which went slowly and braked within a heartbeat. At each interruption to their journey, the cars’ occupants would open their windows and rage at the kids.
Carina had become familiar with the businesses, shops, and services that crowded the main thoroughfare, and no doubt the owners had gotten used to seeing her. Small towns were like that, as she knew well from having grown up in one herself, though her home planet was an ass-end-of-the-galaxy place. Ithyia, on the other hand, was at the center of a Sherrerr-controlled region of the galactic sector. A bustling capital city of millions was a two-hour shuttle flight away, though Carina had never been there.
Working as a merc, she’d visited many planets. Though climate, location, and population created differences, she found they held some things in common. Humans—and most non-humans, too—had essentially the same requirements: food, drink, clothes, gadgets, entertainment, items for decoration and ornament, and places where they could gather to socialize. Then came the specialisms of the area. In that town it was splicing. The place was apparently known for its splicers, and that was what drew most visitors.
The results of splicing treatments had given Carina some idle interest while she had tried to find a way to contact the mage on the Sherrerr estate. Splicing to fix a medical condition was heartening to see. Someone with a horrible disease could enter a splicing center one day and emerge the next week or month entirely cured.
Yet splicing for body modification was more interesting. The least adventurous went for changes in their skin, hair, and eye colors. Others let their imaginations run riot, resulting in what appeared almost impossible and possibly painful adaptations. In her time in the town, Carina had seen plenty of examples. Some customers emerged from a splicer’s shop with scaly, hairless skin, slit pupils or bifurcated tongues of lizards. Others sprouted soft fur and had their fingernails modified to claws, while yet more had skins with the smooth, metallic sheen of star grubs.
Carina wondered if the splicers could also confer a star grub’s ability to survive in deep space. The creatures were known to float for thousands of years on the mysterious dark matter streams from system to system. If the splicers really could engineer that ability, did the people with those modifications ever attempt an outsystem journey? She’d concluded that, yes, some people really were that crazy.
She was nearly at the spaceport. Passing one of the larger splicing establishments, she gave an involuntary shiver. As a mage, she had a visceral fear of the places. She could never risk having anyone analyze her genes. Whatever it was that gave her her abilities could be discovered, and no splicer would be able to resist the prospect of the riches that would follow if he or she could give others the same talent. Her cells would be priceless, and her freedom forfeit. Splicing presented risks she would never take. She would have to remain a plain human, which was in fact exactly how she liked to be.
A shuttle took off from the spaceport. Carina held up her hand to shield her eyes from the glow of its engines. It was late morning. She began to run faster. If Bryce had been correct about the merc band leaving that day, she didn’t want to miss them. There was no telling when another troop might arrive, and her other options for escaping the planet were few.
A few minutes later, Carina finally arrived. There were only a few spacecraft in the bays and none of them looked like typical merc vessels. One was the domestic carrier that left twice a day for the capital city. Another was a luxury ship, sleek and spotless. There were also a handful of single-seaters for system cruising. Only one shuttle looked promising, but its hold doors were closing. It was about to take off.
Carina ran over to it. “Hey,” she shouted to a figure she could see inside. “What ship are you going to? Are you mercs?”
“What? No, we’re on a cargo run. Mercs left this morning.” The doors closed with a hiss of compressed gas and the thunk of metal bolts slotting into place.
Carina cursed and put down her bag. She was out of breath from running. As she panted, she also cursed Bryce. If she hadn’t helped him out the previous night, she would have woken up early and probably caught the mercs’ shuttle.
An alarm horn sounded. The cargo shuttle was about to take off. Carina walked from the field, wondering what she c
ould do next. She rued the fact that she hadn’t asked about work on the cargo ship while she had the chance. It might not have paid well, but she would have been offplanet, and maybe even outsystem. Now, she didn’t know when her next opportunity might appear.
As she returned through the spaceport building, she took a detour to the booking offices, but inquiring there brought her no solution. Nothing was scheduled to arrive from outsystem for the next week. Carina would have to sell a gemstone to get the funds to eat and sleep while she waited for her passage.
On her way out of the booking office, she stopped. “When does the shuttle to the city leave?” Her chances of finding a working passage to deep space would greatly increase at the capital’s spaceport.
“Fourteen fifty,” the clerk replied.
“And how much is a ticket?” The clerk named a sum that made Carina wince, but she could raise it. She had time. “And are there seats available?”
The man smiled. “There are always seats available. The flight isn’t cheap, and after the visitors spend their hard-earned creds on splicing, a lot of them opt to go home by road.”
“Great. I’ll be back soon.” She went out and through the waiting area before returning to the street and the bright midday glare of the sun. A familiar figure was leaning against a support. It was Bryce, apparently waiting for her. When he saw her, he came over, his expression hopeful. “Did you change your mind about leaving?”
“What are you doing here? Have you been following me?”
“I remembered you said you were going to join the mercs this morning. I was hoping—”
“Forget it.” Carina pushed past him and marched away.
Bryce trotted beside her. “Have the mercs already left?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes, they have. Thanks to you I overslept and missed them.”
“Well your loss is my gain I guess. You need a job, right?”
“No, I don’t. And even if I did, I wouldn’t take one from you. Not after you tried to steal from me. Besides, I don’t have anything to do with addicts.”