Possibly Valen. In the hands of the right person.
That thought was black and bitter. She lashed out with her free arm. Vials and metal clamps scattered across the room. A tincture bottle cracked, spilling the smell of antiseptic into the small space.
There was no breathing or counting to ten. Not for this.
Perhaps that was a story Veradin made up too.
Her breath came in angry hitches.
Nothing made sense. There was no goal, nor glory. There was only running and hiding and secrets.
Perhaps it would be better to find a Eugenes colony before they traveled much deeper into the Reaches. She could go there, make up whatever story she wanted.
And what? Wind up like Lineao? Studying to be a priestess to the Fates? The thought of a living in celibate purity on the same little world wedged in the ass crack of nowhere made her want cringe.
“Here. Let me.” Jon was there, kneeling before her.
His hands were warm and firm as he pressed the filament to the tender flesh of her shoulder. She felt the mild stinging of the pharms and binding agents. Their warmth spread down into her arm. With it, her fury began to subside as well.
“Better?” he asked.
Her answer was a terse nod, her gaze trained on a dark corner of the room. She started to insert her arm back into the sleeve of her ruined shirt. Jon stopped her. He made a quieting noise even as she drew in a breath to protest.
“You’ll just…undo everything,” he cautioned. He helped her tug the sleeve back over her arm and closed the shirt’s fasteners for her.
Sela prodded the ruined kit with her toe. A glass vial rolled across the floor to strike the doorframe. A sick feeling seeped in around her edges. Trashing the kit had been a childish thing to do.
“This kit is newly manufactured. Something D Company would never have been issued. There are things in it I don’t even know how to use. But Atilio… he might have. Perhaps even things that could have helped Valen,” she said, head bowed, knowing what a false hope that was.
Jon stepped over the spilled bottles and bandages, purposefully oblivious to the evidence of her rage. He sat on the edge of the bunk across from her and said, “Valen was a good soldier.”
“He was my friend. I could trust him.” She looked at him, unflinching. “With anything. And he trusted me.”
His pained expression was rewarding, in a petty way. But it felt just as wrong as what she had done to the kit. She rested her forehead against the metal frame of the bunk and experimentally stretched her shoulders, flexed her neck. The throb in her shoulder was subsiding.
Things were always so clear when she was angry or in pain. The cooling aftermath was so much more nebulous and difficult to navigate.
The Cass thrummed around them in its uneven, aged timing.
“The refueling wasn’t complete,” Jon said. “But we can stretch what we have for some time, if we’re careful.”
She shut her eyes at the refreshed rage his words provoked. He was talking around everything that had just happened.
“Don’t do that. Don’t confess this enormous truth and then pretend it never happened.” It was a struggle to make her voice even.
“I hurt you. And I’m sorry. Forgive me,” he said.
Sela felt him watching her expectantly. She finally turned to him.
“Hurt. Pain. I know how to deal with those. That’s one of the first things the drillers teach you in the kennels.” She gave a humorless smile. “This hurt is… different. But all wounds heal, Jon. Even this one. And at a moment like this, I can understand why there are rules for interaction, why there is Decca. It would be easier to say that I wish I had never met Jonvenlish Veradin.”
Eyes shut and head bowed, Jon blew out a sigh. “Ty—”
“But then,” Sela leaned across the space to him. Hesitantly, she reached out. Her fingers moved under his chin, tilting his face up. She held his eyes with her own. Her voice was barely above a whisper. “I would have never known all the times with you that aren’t like this. I would not give those moments up for anything.”
---
The bunks were narrow, not meant for two. Afterward, Sela lay in one, Jon lay in another, separated by the slender passage into the room. She watched the quiet, regular rise and fall of his bare chest picked out by the dim light from the corridor and decided he was asleep. She reached into the darkness of the floor between the bunks, seeking her discarded clothes.
His hand seized her forearm.
“What’re you doing?” His voice was drowsy.
“Getting dressed. If we’re done here—”
“Done?” His voice flared with annoyance. “Ty, this isn’t a rec suite. And I’m not some random grunt.”
“I know. And I’ve never been in a rec suite with a random grunt.” Sela shot back. She felt foolish and exposed. This wasn’t how this was supposed to have happened. In fact, it was never supposed to happen.
“That’s not what I meant. Just…” He raked a hand through his hair and blew out an exasperated sigh. Sitting up, he tugged her trousers away from her, tucked them under his pillow and lay back down.
“What’re you doing?”
“Sleeping. So are you. Lay down.”
He pulled her toward his bunk and rolled onto his side, making room.
“But the nav—”
“Can wait. Sleep. Now.”
Stiffly, she climbed in beside him. His hand pulled against her hips, forcing her to lean back into his chest. His breath stirred the hair on the top of her head.
They lay in silence until Jon broke it. “The moment I first saw you, I never thought this would happen. I mean us here… like this. I had just arrived on the Storm King. You were some name on a list until then. There was a briefing to meet all the platoon leaders.”
“Command orientation and reassessment,” Sela corrected. “You were eight minutes late.”
“Of course you remember that,” he returned. She nudged him, realizing he was teasing her.
“Throughout most of it, you made a very specific point of not looking at me. Like I didn’t exist.”
“Protocol dictates…” she began.
“Oh don’t try that, Ty. You were pissed. Admit it.”
She rolled her eyes.
“But that was fine by me because what do you say to a goddess when they look right at you? Especially one that’s pissed that you’re taking their job.”
“I never meant to—“
“Of course you did. Liar.” He laughed softly. “You were talking to Valen and ignoring me. And I remember watching you, just wishing I could stop everything, freeze it right there. Because it was perfect. You looked so… perfect. That cramped briefing room that was always too warm, the chairs designed by a sadist, all of it. Perfect. Because you were there.”
“Perfect?” she laughed. “Hardly.”
His voice seemed to fold slightly, when he added, “I know it sounds silly to you.”
“It doesn’t sound silly.”
She turned, granting him her profile. Sela had never thought an ordinary moment could be filled with beauty or mystery. And she would have certainly never thought anyone would describe her as a goddess.
What do you say to that?
She could tell him of the hot, incense-ridden air of Tasemar and watching the Storm King draw its ponderous arc across the night sky and wishing him there at her side. But then her thoughts drifted to Atilio, who had also rested in that same room, dying.
The words came out before she stop them: “When I saw Atilio, I knew he was my son.”
Veradin drew in a quiet breath. But he said nothing. His hand flexed on her waist. He kissed her shoulder.
“I was a just booter when I had him. Fifteen standard.”
“Fifteen?” he asked. But he had to have known. “That’s young for an assigned breeding.”
“It wasn’t. It was an… error.”
He shifted against her.
“Ty, you don’t ha
ve to talk about—”
“In the kennels, we were given pharms: caps, jectors. I don’t know what all. Vaxes. Meds to combat fatigue. It was just something that was done. We never asked. There was even this thing implanted under the skin. Right here.” She shifted, pointing to an area just below her navel. “Like a tracer, but just the females. Thing made me puke all the time. One day when the drillers weren’t watching our cluster, I dug it out.”
“Cluster?”
“The drillers called us that. It fit, I think. A cluster. Not yet deserving of the term troop or platoon.”
They had been nothing but a mass of gangly limbs and unmolded minds, just starting to reach adult height, which for Sela was tall compared to the others. It made her stand out, as did the light amber of her eyes and the fine symmetry of her features. In a kennel, standing out was not often a good thing. It could bring the wrong sort of attention.
“I was selected as cluster leader for drills and special ops mock-ups. Sometimes I was a fumbling skew, but more often I did well.”
“I could see that,” he offered. “That you did well from the start.”
Sela recalled a driller telling her in a half-mocking tone of her natural talent to lead. Something a booter should never take seriously. The drillers alternated insults and encouragements from rack out until rack in.
“Except Stelvick, an alpha in my cluster. He saw me as a threat, I think. He had the heart of a killer without the soul of a soldier’s discipline to temper it.”
“Stelvick?” His tone incredulous, damning. “They named one of you after that beast?”
Sela nodded. “Fitting, if you knew him. It’s like they know sometimes what we’ll become when they name us.”
“And, this boy, he…”
“He may have been a boy, but he was already a monster, enormous.”
Stelvick was reluctant to obey a direct order from her when she was appointed team leader. When he did obey, it was with muttering indolence. He brutalized his opponents in the training exercises, needlessly injuring and seldom heedful of reprimands. His wrath would turn easily on the other members of their cluster.
“Perhaps every litter at the kennels has struggles over the balance of power. Always a strong one, perhaps too much so, too content to kill without forethought. Too prone to violence. Maybe the drillers intended it that way, as a means to allow us to sort ourselves out, thin the pool.”
“I don’t know, Ty. They don’t tell us much about the kennels.”
She could not bear the strain of apology in his voice. Did he not understand that this was the only life she’d known? This was just how it was. Awkwardly, she rolled over in the bunk, facing him.
“Shall I stop, sir?” Sir. There. The title came out unbidden. She bit her lip.
His voice was odd, thick sounding. “I hate that you had to live like that… grow up that way.”
“It made me who I am. I don’t know anything else.”
“It still doesn’t make it right.”
“Stelvick was just waiting for an opportunity. The others were at mess. Not a driller in sight. I’d been injured that morning during hand-to-hand, so I was resting in the barracks.”
That was not the whole truth. Sela had been reluctant to go to the medicenter. Sometimes, an injured booter would go there and never return. Recycled, the drillers called it. She had not wanted to risk being recycled. Whatever that meant.
“He knew I would fight and that I was injured so he ambushed me.”
She recalled the staggering explosion of pain at the back of her head. The tiles of the waste rec room cold and solid on her face. Sudden rough hands on her as her stunned brain struggled to catch up with the physical onslaught. The purr of ripping fabric. Cold air meeting exposed skin. And his terrible weight and the invasive pain of him. His sneering voice: Next time you give an order to me, you skew bitch, you think on this. Long and hard.
But Sela had decided to tell no one. Not a driller or a single member of her cluster.
“Certainly he had to be charged? Punished?” Jon asked.
Sela rolled onto her back and looked up into the empty black of the ceiling. It was difficult to look at him when she lied.
“He was dealt with.”
What happened to her was not going to happen to another female. Any leader would make the same decision to protect her team. And so she waited for her chance, her own opportunity to ambush. She wanted to say she relished it. But she did not. There was an inquiry after his body was found, but hardly an energetic one. Perhaps even the drillers had been relieved that Stelvick was gone. No one had seen or heard a thing. Stelvick was an unfortunate casualty.
“Days later, I became sick. Except, it was not illness.”
“Atilio?”
She nodded with a thin humorless smile. “By then, I figured out what the implant had been for.”
As an example to other females that did not conform, the drillers decided the non-reg breeding would not be terminated. Instead, Sela was trained well into the final days of the accelerated pregnancy. Her heart felt like it would explode whenever she took a single step and her stomach bowed out in a great embarrassing arc. The looks, the taunts. Sela bore it all in silence. She had done them all a favor. She had slain the monster living among them. The punishment had been worth it.
“Seventeen years later,” Veradin said. “And the boy ends up assigned under his own mother. The Fates—”
“Coincidence.”
The thought that what had happened with Stelvick or her son was engineered by an unseen entity made her feel hollow.
“My son is gone now. It’s like he never happened. It feels like it did when they first took him from me.”
“Ty, I don’t know what to say.”
Sela sat up, pulling away from him. She felt suddenly clumsy, flushed and very aware of her lack of clothes. This had been so foolish. She could not stand the anguish in his gaze, the pity in his voice.
“Where are you going?” His fingertips traced down her back.
Sela slid her hand beneath his pillow, freeing her confiscated clothes. “I think we both know this was a mistake.”
“Mistake? That’s not what I think at all.”
“I do.”
Balled-up clothing clutched to her waist, she left.
27
The water in the shallow basin was torturously cold. Sela splashed her face and neck again and again, until her skin felt numb. Finally she sagged against the compact silver sink of the waste rec room. Eyes shut, she rested her forehead against the mirror. She released a long pent-up breath, opened her eyes.
“What are you doing, Tyron?” she muttered at her reflected twin.
Wrong. It had all been wrong. But right, at the same time.
Little wonder there were the rules of Decca to prevent fraternization between subordinates and their superiors. Sela had imagined being with Veradin, but always in a vague sense. The way you crave something in an absent unrealized manner, thoughts buoyed up without a hint of reality for support—a self-indulgent daydream.
Just as she had confessed to Jon, it did not truly matter to her that he was Human. His persona had not changed with this discovery. In fact it showed the consistency of his character: he was willing to carry the burden of this life-rending discovery alone rather than risk losing her.
But it had changed her.
Things were complicated enough. They had become unwitting pieces in some strategy that neither of them was likely to glimpse as a whole until it was too late. And she had permitted this self-absorbed fantasy to play out. She had succumbed to a baser desire to have him.
Now it was done. Out there. Irreversible.
Their vulnerability was complete. If Jonvenlish Veradin was her weakness before, now it was far worse.
“Focus,” she said.
It can never happen again. It will never happen again.
Drawing a deep breath, she toweled the water from her face and neck and got dressed. She had taken
a fresh shirt from Jon’s belongings, doubting he would mind. It was oversized for her, but lacking in bloodstains. She paused. A quiet murmur drifted into the corridor. The sound of a voice.
Sela checked the vox panel just over the sink. Its lights were dark. The vox link was inactive. Jon still occupied the bunkroom. That left one thing: Erelah.
Pulling on the shirt, Sela slipped out into the common passage.
---
The voices grew louder as Sela reached the tiny galley. It was an argument but she could not discern words. One voice plaintive and childlike, the other more direct, commanding.
In the shaft of light cut from the common passage Erelah sat on the floor, leaning against the bulkhead with her back to the doorway.
“Who are you talking to?” Sela asked.
Erelah turned and looked up at her, wide eyed, plainly startled. She did not sound entirely certain when she replied. “I wasn’t talking.”
“I heard voices.”
Sela’s forward motion triggered the internal lights. They revealed dark maroon smears along the sleeves and collar of Erelah’s baggy flight suit. Furtively, the girl turned away, hiding her hands.
“What do you have?”
“Nothing.” Erelah stared straight ahead.
Sela yanked the young woman’s hand from behind her back and wrenched the object from her fingers. It was a shiv, more accurately a piece of sharp metal from the coms array casing. Still in control of Erelah’s arm, Sela rolled the girl’s sleeve up. A crazed pattern of welts seeped blood from the pale skin of the girl’s forearm.
“Why would you do this?”
“I can’t get them off. See? Scales, pushing out of my skin. Like Tristic.” Erelah pulled her arm away and with her other hand, scratched at the injured skin. She looked up at her with those eerie green eyes. She was like a child, pleading. “If I scrape them off, Tristic can’t come in.”
She grabbed the girl’s wrists, trying to keep her from injuring herself further.
“There’s nothing there. No scales. Only skin. You’re damaging yourself.”
Sela had encountered soldiers like this. It always seemed to be the ‘scriptors. They could not hack what they experienced in battle. The fear consumed them from the inside, erasing their pride and reducing them to broken things. It was far worse than a simple case of battle burn. A simple meditech could not fix their pain. No amount of cajoling could bolster them into being whole once again. They were shipped off, if they survived their internal onslaughts. These broken beings became someone else’s problem, not Sela’s.
Allies and Enemies: Fallen Page 22