Still, the food at the villa was excellent, the wine was plentiful, and Kavanaugh found amusement in the whole circus.
Three of the girls were arguing. Kavanaugh didn’t pay attention until one of them leaned across the table toward him. She dressed like her mother in a button-down blouse without enough buttons.
“Settle a bet?” she asked. Where Ariel was honey blonde and golden, this girl was sloe-eyed and ivory pale.
“Sure,” Kavanaugh said, “if I can.”
“I say you are that guy from Mellix’s show,” she said. “Did you hunt down the Messiah drug?”
“Yeah.” Kavanaugh was pleased to be recognized. He’d held off the Outrider androids, sure, but Raena had been the one who took them apart.
“So you know Raena Zacari,” the girl said.
Kavanaugh laughed. “Your mom knows her, too.”
“She’s amazing,” one of the other girls gushed. “The way she moves! And in heels, too.”
“Who’s that?” Madame Shaad inquired.
“Raena Zacari, Mamaw.”
“Worst slave we ever had,” the old woman proclaimed. “She left your mother alone and unprotected on Nyx …”
“Who are you talking about, Mother?” Ariel asked.
“Raena Zacari,” one of the girls gushed. “You know her?”
“Yes,” Ariel said. “She’s one of the first girls I adopted.”
Conversation fell silent down the length of the table.
“You adopted that damned slave?” her mother quavered.
“No, Mother. You’re thinking of the Raena who died during the War. This is her daughter.”
Kavanaugh watched Ariel lie. He knew Raena wanted to build a new life, separate from the crimes she’d committed before her imprisonment, but it surprised him that Ariel kept the fiction up at home.
Ariel avoided his eyes as she told the kids, “You know, Tarik fought alongside her.”
“We were talking about the newscast from the other night,” another of the girls said. “Raena was brilliant. She could move so fast, and she was so flexible and strong …”
One of the boys cut her off. “I want a coat like that! Do you know where she got that military coat, Mr. Kavanaugh?”
“Army surplus,” Kavanaugh said. “It dates back to the War.” Which was true, if not exactly how Raena had inherited it.
“Did you see that old Stinger she was using?” one of the girls asked. “I’m amazed any of that old Imperial tech still works.”
“Just because Mom updates our sidearms every year doesn’t mean everyone can afford it,” one of the boys pointed out. The argument spun off into a new direction.
Madame Shaad came over to link her arm through Kavanaugh’s. She wore a gown spangled with more gemstones than Kavanaugh’s ship was worth. “When are you going to marry our Ariel?”
“Whenever she’ll have me,” he answered, half joking. He didn’t believe Ariel would ever tie herself down. She’d settled into the villa and working on her humanitarian foundation, but that was likely to be as tame as Ariel ever allowed herself to get. She was still a gunrunner at heart.
To be honest, Kavanaugh would rather see her happy than married. Maybe, now that Sloane was dead, Ariel could finally find happiness.
*
When Raena woke, Haoun lay stretched out at her side, the tip of his tail curled loosely around one of her ankles. His breath whistled across the top of her hair, making it ruffle.
Haoun’s scales were cool and smooth along her back, pulling the warmth from her body. She snuggled against him, breathing his complex scent. It reminded her of some kind of metal. Raena pulled up the blanket and tucked it around her.
She thought back over her life from growing up in the Humans First! collective to her Imperial service to running with Ariel and Gavin. Nothing in her past hinted that she’d end up in bed with a lizard. She was so ignorant she didn’t even know what Haoun’s people called themselves or where they came from or if they commonly took up with warm-blooded girls.
All the same, she felt … like someone else, she decided. Sated. Comfortable. At peace.
She smiled at herself. It was tempting to rush into calling this contentment affection, but she didn’t really know Haoun. She didn’t even know if he wanted a relationship beyond being shipmates. Maybe this was just a fetish for him, a momentary dalliance with someone new. If she tried to make it anything more, she could destroy it.
So, she decided, she’d call what she felt gratitude. For the first time in her life, someone had gone out of his way to make her happy. Even if it never happened again, it was enough to know that it could.
Haoun pulled her closer, burying his snout in the nape of her neck. “Don’t leave,” he muttered. “Back to sleep.”
“Okay.” Raena rolled over to rest her cheek against the scales of his chest, breathing him in.
*
On Kolar, the gang of human kids walked into the meeting with a swagger. An Outrider android sat in the middle of an abandoned warehouse at a folding table. It was the only thing in the room cleared of dust.
“Thank you for meeting us,” Decker said.
“Always a pleasure to help young idealists,” the pusher said. “I’m assuming you saw my ad on Mellix’s newscast.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Decker said. “Can the Messiah drug really do what Mellix promised?”
“Can and already has. But the government of this planet is Shtrell, not human,” Outrider pointed out. “That doesn’t make it impossible to take them down, but it will complicate things.”
“We’re not interested in attacking the government,” Decker snarled. “We want to take down the Doranje Corporation.”
“I am glad to help you out,” Outrider promised. “Did you bring the parts I told you you’d need?”
One of the girls stepped forward to open a case of miscellaneous copper pipes, gaskets, and tubing.
“Perfect,” Outrider said. “We have only to discuss payment and you can begin.”
*
When Raena opened her eyes, Haoun was watching her. “Hungry?” he asked hopefully.
Raena nodded. Generally, she ate to thrive—as Ariel’s dad had drilled into her, back when she served as their slave. Food was a necessary evil. This morning she actually felt ravenous. “Have you got a destination in mind?”
“There’s a commuter market,” Haoun said. “We can pick up something as we walk.”
Haoun stepped into his tunic as Raena slithered into her catsuit. In moments, they were out the door. Only after it closed behind her was Raena tempted to have taken a souvenir, something to symbolize how happy she’d been in the night.
“Have you been here before?” Raena asked. “On Lautan?”
“I stopped off here on my way to Kai, when I was looking for work.”
“Where did you come here from?” Raena asked.
He looked at her as if weighing whether to answer.
“Didn’t mean to pry,” she said quickly. “I just feel like everyone knows everything about my life, but I don’t know any of you very well. I’ve been too wrapped up in my own drama.”
“Well, your drama has been pretty epic in scale,” he teased. “Mine is much more quotidian.”
Raena wondered what he’d really said that his translator would put it that way. “I’m ready for things to be much less epic,” she said.
Before they’d walked far, they found the commuter market he’d promised. Raena followed her nose past the pastries and noodle bowls to a spit skewering blackened meat. “Sorry,” she said to Haoun, “but that is the best thing I’ve ever smelled.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose not.” He waved the stall owner over and ordered two.
“Let me pay this time,” Raena said. “You got the room last night.”
*
They ended up with two large sandwiches of chipped meat wrapped in some savory flatbread. R
aena’s hands looked too small to get around hers, but her eyes lit up with anticipation.
They found a tree whose shade seemed inviting. Raena began at the top of her sandwich and worked her way down, turning it every so often to keep the filling from falling out.
Haoun found everything she did entertaining. Unlike the other human girls he’d been with, Raena was the first who seemed truly unselfconscious. Everything she did—eating, drinking, cavorting with him—she did wholeheartedly.
A smile flashed across her face. “Why are you watching me?”
“Trying to figure you out.”
“Got a question?”
“What are you doing with us?”
“The Veracity, you mean?”
Haoun nodded and took another bite of his sandwich.
“At first, I was just using you to get to Thallian,” Raena admitted. “But then Mykah did such a stellar job breaking the news about him to the galaxy and I didn’t have anywhere else to go … I was kind of just along for the ride, after that. I thought you’d put me out at Capital City and I’d be wandering again, but then Mellix needed my help …” Her voice trailed off. “What are you doing with us?”
“Running away.” That wasn’t the whole truth. “My mate asked me to leave.” Mykah knew this, and by extension, Coni probably did, too. “Serese kept our home, our kids, and I went to Kai.”
“Why did you come with Mykah when we left?”
“It seemed like a grand adventure, becoming a pirate. I had no idea what ugly stuff we would get involved in.”
She gazed at him, waiting for him to finish that thought.
“This has been the best time of my life,” he confessed. “For the first time, I feel like I’m actually doing something important. Something that will change the galaxy for the better.”
Raena grinned at him.
Haoun reached out his hand. She wove her fingers between his.
“The funny thing is,” she said, “I feel the same. I am so lucky to have found all of you.”
She snuggled against him. The smell of her skin was electric, straight to his brain. She looked soft, fragile, but beneath her thin skin, her muscles were surprisingly strong. He’d never known anyone like her.
Things might be complicated once they all got back on the Veracity. Haoun hoped he hadn’t broken anything that he would regret later, but for now, he was glad of her company.
“What do you want to do today?” she asked.
“I need to pick up some souvenirs for my kids,” Haoun said.
“How many kids do you have?”
“Two boys and a girl.”
“What are they like?”
“The boys are just boys. They like sports. We play a ball game on my homeworld that they’re really good at. Jexxie, the youngest, is really smart. She will rule the world some day.”
“Is it hard to be away from them?”
“It would be harder to be there.”
Raena didn’t argue. “What do you want to buy for them?”
“I thought I’d start on the toy street, see what they have to offer.”
“I’ll come with you, if you’ll help me find a swimsuit afterward. I haven’t been swimming since I left Kai.”
“Me, either,” Haoun realized.
She looked down at the remains of her sandwich. “This defeated me,” she admitted.
“Never eat anything bigger than your head,” Haoun advised. “It’s one of the first things we teach our young.”
Raena laughed. “I will keep that in mind.”
Haoun heaved himself to his feet and reached a hand down to her. As they walked, he asked, “Did you ever want kids?”
Raena shook her head. “Can’t have them, at least not the natural way. Thallian had me sterilized.”
“What?” Haoun jerked to a halt, stunned by the casual way she said it.
Raena linked her hands around his arm. “No one knows this, unless they’ve run a medical scan on me. On the Arbiter, before I ran, Thallian had my ovaries removed. He was a clone, you know, and all his family were clones. I’m not sure if he was planning ahead to after the War, when we’d retire to his planet and clone ourselves some offspring, or if he was simply trying to control me. It doesn’t matter now.”
“Weren’t you angry about it?”
“The galaxy was different back then.” She was people-watching now, her head tracking from side to side. She didn’t appear emotionally invested in something that seemed so enormous to Haoun. He tried to remember that it had happened to her a long time ago. Still, it was difficult to believe she had accepted being mutilated by the madman like that.
Raena changed the subject. “Jain Thallian was probably as close to a child as I’ll ever have. And really, he was more like a brother to me than a son.”
Jain was the Thallian clone who had traveled on the Veracity, although he had been a prisoner rather than a guest. Haoun had never spoken to the boy, but—alongside Mykah and Coni—Haoun had watched Raena telling her life story to the kid. Jain had been barely more than a child, but he’d committed at least one vicious murder before Raena caught him.
Not at all sure he wanted to know, Haoun asked, “What happened to Jain after you took him home?”
“He died.” Anger made her voice tight.
“You didn’t—?”
“No, I didn’t kill him. His family put a noose around his neck and left him standing on a parapet. Jain hung himself.”
Raena stared into the distance, seeing it again. “I thought about letting him go,” she confessed, “but I couldn’t figure out how he could survive. Thallian broke Jain—broke all his sons, for that matter—the way he’d broken me. But I got twenty years locked away from him in which to heal. I wasn’t about to subject anyone else to that kind of a sentence. Loose in the galaxy, Jain was going to become a serial killer like his father. He wasn’t old enough or smart enough to restrain himself. At the very least, if I’d let Jain go, he would have spent the rest of his life hunting me down for what I did to his family.”
Haoun didn’t know the details of what had happened on the Thallian homeworld, other than the Thallians died and Raena did not. When they finally turned onto the street of toy shops, he was relieved to change the subject.
*
Jim toed out of his boots and aligned them precisely beside the door. It had been a long day, climbing and crawling inside an expensive new spaceship, replacing its barely used tesseract drive with a secondhand, refurbished drive. Although his muscles ached, Jim was satisfied with the day’s work, happily exhausted.
He switched on the screen to keep him company as he assembled a frugal dinner. When the computer spoke to him, it had a voice similar to Raena Zacari’s, low and musical. It read out the messages his mother had sent today. She’d been easy to find, once he looked for her: staying with the family who had owned Raena when she’d been enslaved before the War. Eilif didn’t seem to be a slave. Instead, she worked for a charity that bought human children out of slavery and found them homes. Eilif seemed content there. Jim was glad.
“News from Drusingyi,” the computer said. Jim dropped the knife in his hand. Luckily, it missed his stockinged foot when it landed point-down in the floor.
“The secondary dome has been cleared of water. Emergency power is restored.”
Trembling, Jim played the message again. Once more the computer said, “The secondary dome has been cleared of water. Emergency power is restored.”
Nothing more.
“Show me.” Jim’s voice squeaked up into a higher register. He swallowed hard and repeated himself.
One of the family’s surveillance cameras came online. This one looked from the barracks where the crew of the Arbiter had lived under the sea. The camera pointed toward the blackened hulk of the castle. Its breached dome yawned open. On the extreme edge of the field of view, an unhealthy greenish glow lit the hospital dome. Inside that dome, the family’s cloning lab once stood.
Jim typed in the
command to swivel the camera as far as it would go. From what he could see, the cloning lab’s dome did seem to have been repaired. Shadows moved inside it, impossible to identify.
“Maybe it’s nothing,” he whispered. Maybe they were thrill seekers, gawkers who’d come to gloat over the relics of the Thallians. Maybe they were looters or salvagers. But if they wanted to steal his family’s belongings, wouldn’t they concentrate on the castle? Why would the cloning facility interest them at all? Why would they trouble to repair the dome?
Despite his attempts at logic, it felt like ice clogged his heart. What if Raena hadn’t destroyed the family’s elderly medical robot? Dr. Poe had cloned generations of Thallians. If he survived, if he could have found any viable DNA, he might have begun the process of bringing the Thallians back from the dead.
It was too soon for clones to have become old enough to cast the shadows Jim could see inside the dome.
Still, someone prowled around his homeworld. Whatever they wanted, it couldn’t be good.
Jim finished making his sandwich. Then he sank onto his bed to choke his dinner down. What was he going to do? He had sworn that he would never, ever go back home. He was out, he was gone, and he didn’t want anyone to ever connect him with the Thallians again.
If he could get a message to Raena Zacari, she would want to investigate. He kept her warning in mind, though. For the first time in his life, Jim loved his situation. He did not want to die.
Someone, he thought. He had to tell someone. Who could he warn without confiding why he monitored the mass murderer’s home? How could he tell anyone without revealing himself as the lunatic’s son?
*
Outfitted with smoked goggles that cast everything into artificial shades of blue, Raena felt much more comfortable. After all the years she’d spent imprisoned in darkness, her eyes were still sensitive to bright light.
She’d changed into the new swimsuit she’d purchased, then left her clothes and gun in a public locker. When she returned to the beachside table where Haoun ate little crabs by the handful, Mykah and Coni had joined him.
No More Heroes: In the Wake of the Templars Book Three Page 3