That got a squint from the tall kid. Got one from the quiet one standing behind him too.
“We don’t need no one’s approval,” the girl said. She was cold and curvy, with big brown eyes she could turn soft and innocent in an instant.
“Kill them,” Abban ordered.
“He has a gun too,” Ash said to the knife-wielding kid. In other words, the boy was nothing more than a dreg doing Abban’s dirty work.
The girl’s lip curled. She understood the message. She didn’t like it. The quiet kid didn’t either, and when he met Ash’s gaze, his eyes didn’t narrow. They blinked once, decision made.
He shoved the girl hard.
Ash drew and fired the same second Abban did, but she’d accounted for the girl stumbling forward. The dreg hadn’t. His bullet blew through the girl’s cheek while Ash’s exploded into his chest.
Blood splattered across Knife-Boy’s face. He made the mistake of looking toward Abban and the girl. Ash lunged forward, intending to disarm him.
The quiet kid slipped a blade between Knife-Boy’s ribs first. Then he focused behind Ash.
She spun. The kids were distracted by Knife-Boy’s scream and the hole through the girl’s face. When one of them did draw a knife, Ash was close enough to knock it from his hand.
Hauch did the same to two kids near him, but Chace drew his Secca Nine.
“Don’t!” Ash yelled.
Hauch spotted Chace and swung a kick into his wrist.
The Secca fired, its trajectory too high to hit anyone.
Fury flashed over Chace’s face. He aimed the gun at Hauch the same instant Hauch aimed his.
“Stand down,” Ash ordered.
Neither man moved.
“What the hell, Ash?” Chace demanded.
“Stand the fuck down.”
“They’ve seen our faces. They’ll stab us in the back.”
“Lower your gun, Chace.”
“You got the distraction you wanted.”
“They’re kids,” Hauch spit out. He looked ready to pull the trigger. He didn’t because he was a soldier, part of an elite team that had sworn to preserve and protect the Coalition.
Like Ash had sworn to preserve and protect it. She’d wanted Abban dead, not Knife-Boy and the girl. Abban had been the one preventing their entry, and he was the kind of asshole who took advantage of starving kids.
Knife-Boy had dropped to his knees. He was crying and cursing. On the ground beside him, the girl lay unconscious. Her chest still rose and fell. If Ash did nothing, both kids would die.
The old Ash wouldn’t have cared. She wouldn’t have told Chace to stop. She wouldn’t have even thought about helping either kid.
“Hauch,” Ash said. “Grab the boy.”
He trusted her judgment, lowering his weapon before Chace lowered his.
Ash picked the girl up, then turned to the quiet, opportunistic kid who wiped his bloodied knife off on his sleeve.
“Get the others back to the shadows,” Ash said. “Choose sentries and runners. I want to know the second anyone approaches this door.”
“You the mogul now?” he asked, raising his chin in defiance. At least he had the brains not to brandish that knife of his again.
“You’re the new mogul,” Ash said. “Make sure you stay it.”
With the girl slung over her shoulder, she turned toward the freighter’s door.
Chace blocked her path.
“You were taking us to Mira,” she reminded him, her voice hard.
Slowly he holstered his Secca Nine, and that deceptively relaxed expression returned to his face. She saw behind it, though, saw the way his eyes narrowed in a silent observation that said, You’ve changed, then he pushed open the door and swung his arm in an exaggerated After you.
She plastered on a cool, uncaring facade, then stepped onto the slanted freighter floor.
3
The dead freighter was sepris-class, decommissioned over a century ago and delivered to Glory by a drug-hazed pilot who couldn’t program a preprogrammed descent. It slammed into the continent’s shoreline, creating a tsunami that decimated coastal cities and wiped out the slum that predated Salvage. When the waters receded, the freighter had ended up here, either pushed by the catastrophic flooding or dragged by the dregs who took up residence inside.
Chace didn’t offer directions. Ash didn’t need them. Even though the freighter had been stripped down to a metal husk, Mira would be holed up in what had been the infirmary. During her two years of training on Caruth, Ash had memorized the layouts of nearly every ship in Coalition space and most of those outside it as well. She could have found her way through the sepris-class ship even if it was dead in the black of space.
Ash shifted the girl on her shoulder. She was unconscious, her head lolling as Ash carried her through the slanted central corridor. She fought the urge to set her down. The freighter was surprisingly crowded, and the girl’s body kept one of Ash’s hands occupied and blocked a portion of her vision to the right.
Foolish. She could practically hear Chace muttering the word behind her. He wouldn’t be wrong.
She took a left turn, encountered even more people. Abban couldn’t have been blocking access to the freighter for long, not with the number of dregs curled up against the bulkheads or watching from the doorless rooms they passed. Most of them were young, probably no older than the two injured kids she and Hauch carried.
She snorted. Chace might be muttering the word foolish in his head, but it wouldn’t be directed only at Ash. He wouldn’t have considered a location with this many people secure. Mira was responsible for this. She’d probably sent out a communication inviting every sick kid in the precinct to visit the dead freighter.
The infirmary sat near the heart of the ship. A line of dirty, snot-nosed children stood outside it. They turned when Ash approached, and most backed out of the way. The few who stood their ground squared their shoulders.
Ash didn’t slow. She darted forward, grabbed the shirt of a boy who insolently stood in her way, and slung him into the kid behind him. Both went down, taking a third kid with them, and the path to the infirmary cleared, no bloodshed required.
“Mira,” she called out as soon as she stepped into the room.
Mira stood with her back to the doorway and removed an injector from the only clean spot on a little girl’s skinny arm. Then she looked over her shoulder and spotted Ash.
A series of emotions crashed through her gaze: recognition, relief, anger, and something else that didn’t last long enough to identify.
“You’re back—” Her gaze twitched to the girl Ash carried. “What did you do?”
Ash dropped her unconscious load on top of the sleep-slab almost before the little girl hopped off.
“Here.” Mira shoved a ration bar into the girl’s hand. “Come back if you feel any dizziness or stomach pain.”
“Got another one for you to fix too,” Ash said, nodding toward Hauch.
Mira looked away from the unconscious girl’s mangled face.
“Where do you want him?” the soldier asked.
Mira speared Ash with a glare before she ripped open a square pouch and unfolded an emergency blanket.
“Lay him there,” she said, setting the blanket on the ground. Then she turned back to the girl and inspected her face.
“The bullet passed through. Keep her on her side. Put these in her mouth.” She handed Ash clotting cloth. “If she struggles to breathe, let me know.”
Mira grabbed her med-sac, then knelt beside the moaning boy. The girl looked worse off, but with a side wound like his, complications could be sudden and deadly.
“You have medical training?” Mira asked Hauch.
“Combat medicine. What do you need?”
“Clean hands and someone who won’t screw up the tool settings.” She nodded toward a half-full jug of water.
Ash turned her attention back to the girl, placed a hand on her arm to hold her in place while she stu
ffed the clot cloth into her mouth, and pushed it up against her cheeks and broken teeth. The bullet had passed cleanly through the right side of her face, but it shattered her upper left jaw.
“Out,” Chace ordered. A few kids were still in the room. Others were edging in from the corridor to get a view of the action. After a few more barked words from Chace, they scattered.
After the room emptied, he moved to the other side of the med-table.
“More than a dozen people saw what you did.”
They saw her save the kids. Or try to anyway. The girl’s breathing was beginning to sound wet. She needed a functional med-bay or surgery center, not a stripped-out infirmary equipped only with a med-sac and tools hastily scavenged from a UniCorps clinic.
This was a fucking mess.
“At least one will report to Scius,” Chace added.
“I’m not worried about him.”
“You should be. He knows you’re dirtside now. He’ll test you—”
“He’s not a problem.”
“Then why are you avoiding him?”
“He’s not part of my plan.”
A grin stretched across Chace’s face, making him look easygoing and innocent. “So you are here to scheme.”
She kept her jaw squeezed shut. Chace wasn’t thinking past his own self-interest and survival. For most of her life, Ash hadn’t either. It was when she started taking gambles—when she started connecting with other people, letting them get close—that she had changed.
Most of those gambles now languished in graves.
Her head pounded. It felt like some trapped version of herself was trying to escape. She almost wanted to set it free. It would be a relief to return to the cold, calculating woman she had been, to lose the images that plagued her dreams and to erase that never-quite-forgotten ache that encircled her heart.
But if she lost the hurt, she’d lose the person she’d become.
And she’d lose the man who made her want to be more than a cutthroat dreg.
Rykus was out there, working to save his home world and the Coalition they’d both taken oaths to preserve and protect. He’d fought for others his entire life. Ash hadn’t fought for anyone for half of hers. She hadn’t even considered it, not until those last few months on Glory.
She changed the girl’s clot cloth. She could fight for this kid.
The girl survived the night. The boy didn’t. The blade had sliced his liver, and Mira didn’t have the drugs or tools needed to fix it. When his heart stopped beating and Mira turned her attention to the girl, the clot cloth had finally done its job. The bleeding slowed. Coupled with the medical vac Ash had found, the girl’s lungs remained mostly liquid-free.
When Mira confirmed she was stabilized, Ash leaned against the wall, staying out of the way while the aid worker tended to Hauch’s arm. It was a straightforward injury but worse than he’d let on. The strap he’d tightened above the wound hadn’t been a good enough tourniquet.
Ash drew in a breath, let it out, and willed away the guilt and exhaustion that had settled on her shoulders. She hadn’t shoved the girl or slid the blade between the boy’s ribs, but she was responsible. She’d known what to say and how to act to trigger the quiet kid to take action. That was one of her talents, reading a person to see exactly how to set them in motion.
After a while, Chace disappeared somewhere. When he returned, he handed her a vorix. She didn’t open it. She held the warm bottle between her hands and watched as Mira finished wrapping Hauch’s arm.
“Hydrate and rest,” Mira said. “Think you can handle that?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Hauch gave her a grin that did not at all make him look like he had a history of ignoring doctors’ orders.
Mira’s narrowed eyes said she didn’t buy it, but she stood from her chair and crossed the room to Ash.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come back,” Mira said.
Ash pushed away from the wall. “You told me not to.”
“So you finally learned how to follow orders.” Mira’s attempt at a smile didn’t brighten her face. Dark circles swooped beneath eyes Ash had once called naive. They weren’t naive anymore. Mira’s usual poise and polish was gone, crushed by Glory’s unending corruption and despair.
Ash lifted a shoulder. “I follow a few. You shouldn’t be here. UniCorps should have reassigned you.” The aid organization never should have sent Mira to Glory to begin with.
“I’m not leaving.” Mira took Ash’s unopened vorix, triggered the top, and drank a third of the bottle.
Chace folded his arms, gave Ash an I-told-you-so look, and waited for her response.
“You’ve made Scius’s kill list,” Ash said.
“Half the planet’s on his list. It’s fine.”
“He razed your clinic.”
“He thinks I’m dead.”
“He thought I was dead too,” Ash said, trying not to raise her voice. “All he has to do is put pressure on the right person or make the right offer, and they’ll tell him where you are. He’ll make you pay for saving my life.”
Mira sipped at the bottle. “Someone should take care of him.”
Ash’s brow furrowed. Was Mira actually telling her to kill Scius? Never mind that he’d solidified his power, Mira was a peacemaker, an agent of UniCorps. She had never before advocated for anything remotely resembling violence.
“You’re getting on the next capsule,” Ash said.
Mira crossed her arms. “I have a shipment arriving on the next capsule.”
“Let the Seekers have it.”
She gave Ash a look that clearly said no, then turned to the sleep-slab and looked down at the girl.
Ash suppressed a sigh. The Seekers of the One God was one of the most dominant religions in the Known Universe. Its followers searched the star systems for the Holy Planet, a world supposedly touched by God. A group had set up a House on Glory about a decade ago. They provided food and prayer to the poor, which was everyone on the planet except for the corrupt-as-hell oligarchy and the precinct bosses, and that was why Mira didn’t like them—they let the planet’s few rich and powerful leaders dictate who needed their help the most.
“She’ll die if I don’t take care of her,” Mira said.
“Take her with you then.”
“How do you expect me to find the credits to pay off ’port security? I don’t even have enough to bribe them for my own passage.” Mira picked up a tool from the shelf beneath the sleep-slab, then swiped it across the girl’s forehead. “We shouldn’t have to deal with the bosses.”
It couldn’t be helped. The oligarchy formed Glory’s government, but the bosses were the people who truly ran the world. No one set foot inside a spaceport unless one of them approved it. And if a ship tried to land elsewhere without permission? It met the ground in an inconvenient number of pieces.
Mira retrieved an injector from her bag, slipped in a cartridge, then calibrated it to the right mix of chemicals. She looked tired, like the planet had whittled away at her soul. Ash had told her that would happen. She’d told her to take her medicine to a world that would be grateful for it, but Mira wouldn’t listen. She’d chosen to come to Glory, deciding that its people needed the most help out of all the Coalition’s member planets.
“Mira,” Ash said. “You know what Scius will do. He won’t kill you quickly. He won’t just hurt you. He’ll destroy you. Everything you’ve done, every kid you’ve helped… He’ll tear them down like he tore down the clinic.”
“He’s a monster,” Mira said.
“Yes, and you’ll save lives when you leave.” Ash was playing dirty, but she didn’t care. This planet didn’t deserve her.
Mira finished her drink, then wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “How have you been?”
“Surviving.”
Mira’s gaze darted toward Chace, then back. She lowered her voice. “You’ve been trained?” It was a quiet, careful question.
“Yes.” She kept the answer short and shar
p. Chace didn’t know she was an anomaly. Mira did. She’d suspected it enough to test Ash’s DNA on one of her trips to the clinic, and when Ash’s last scheme had gone to hell, Mira had suggested she enlist in the Fighting Corps and join the anomaly program.
“I’m sorry,” Mira said. “I didn’t know.”
She was talking about the loyalty training. No one else had known about it either. The new requirement wasn’t officially announced until Ash was halfway to Caruth. She and the other anomalies who’d signed up for the program were given a choice to proceed or back out. Half had walked away. Most of the rest dropped out during the hell of physical training. The instructors of Caruth cleared very few anomalies for the boosters and brainwashing.
“The Fighting Corps has been good for me,” Ash said. She actually missed those days on Caruth. They’d been hard but straightforward, and she’d spent a good amount of time getting under Rip’s skin. That had been fun. Still was.
“I’m glad.” Some of the tension around Mira’s eyes eased. It returned when she looked past Ash to the sheet-covered body on the floor. “His name was Harrion. Hers is Nyla.”
Of course Mira would learn their names.
“They were blocking access to you.”
Mira’s expression hardened. “So you shot her and killed him?”
“If I’d done it, they’d both be dead.”
“Neither had holes in them before you arrived.”
The words hurt because they were true, but a little of the old, callous Ash resurfaced. “Life spans on Glory are short. I told you that the day you opened the clinic.”
“They don’t have to be,” Mira said.
One person can’t make a difference. She almost voiced those words. They came from the old Ash too, but they’d been erased by months of brutal exercises and by long marathons of studying interstellar history. A soldier could change the outcome of a battle. Mira could change the quality of lives.
“It’s time to make a difference somewhere else,” Ash said.
Mira’s mouth flattened. “You’ve changed.”
“Yes.” Ash gave her a small smile. “Another thing you’re responsible for. Get some sleep. We’ll get you to the capsule first thing in the morning.”
Shades of Allegiance Page 3