“Me?” Stephanie’s voice squeaked.
“All over the news.”
“What?”
The woman sighed. “I’ll see if I can find the report.”
They followed her into a comfortable sitting room, plush, cream-colored sofas and a huge window that looked out across a mountain range.
They sat down and she cued the vid.
“Three months after the disappearance of Stephanie Dubois -”
Ivan shot Stephanie a sideways glance, mouthing her family name and frowning.
Stephanie shook her head. She wasn’t sure what family name Caroline had been given but she was guessing it wasn’t Dubois.
“Wanted for questioning in relation to the bizarre attack on Princess Ana Walsh, primary heir to the majority voting shareholder of Cetus, and acting ambassador of trade, on Icarus Station in the Hyades. This footage was captured on Sakura Station.”
The vid changed, the quality of the image was lower than it had been. It showed Stephanie coming out of a dress kiosk. The angle shifted so that her face was no longer visible but the two men, one with a stunner and one with an endwave pistol were.
The news reporter spoke over the images. “According to facial recognition, there is a ninety-three percent probability that the woman being captured at endwave point is Stephanie Dubois. The remaining seven percent is attributed to the limited number of facial permutations across the universal population. Anyone who has any knowledge of Stephanie Dubois’s whereabouts, is urged to contact the authorities. As is anyone cognizant of the identities of the men who took her.”
“She didn’t mention the body,” Stephanie said, leaning back.
“What body?” Katia asked. “What are you mixed up in, Ivan?”
“It’s complicated.”
“So, uncomplicate it.”
“Maybe we should go,” Stephanie said, standing up.
“We don’t have anywhere else to go,” Ivan snapped.
“We’re clearly not welcome here.”
“I’m sitting right here.” Katia said, throwing her arms open to indicate the space around them.
“Yeah, I know. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re not too happy about me being here, are you?”
“Stephanie,” Ivan said, voice low, like it was a warning.
“No offense, lady, but I don’t know you. I know Ivan... but I’m not about to have you bringing a world of trouble down on my family because of him.”
Ivan grabbed Stephanie’s arm and yanked her to the seat beside him.
“Katia, we just need to stay here until we can figure some things out. No one even knows about your holiday cabin and we probably could have gone there without you finding out if we’d wanted to. I wouldn’t do that, of course, out of respect to you. I don’t know when you stopped trusting me though.”
“I trust you, it’s her I don’t know.”
“You know me, Katia. Would I have brought her here if she wasn’t worth helping?’
Katia shot Stephanie a look that was hard to interpret. “I don’t know, you were always bringing in strays.”
Ivan didn’t answer that. Stephanie bit her tongue.
They sat for a moment, in silence.
Katia stared out the window. Her eyes scanned from one side of the window to the other, but she looked so lost in thought that Stephanie doubted she saw anything at all.
Katia sighed. “Fine. You can stay in the cabin. But if anyone finds out, I’m saying I never saw you.”
“Thank you, Katia. I owe you one.”
“Yeah, you do.”
Ivan winced. “Could we get some supplies too?”
Chapter Thirty-Six
“Why would anyone want to travel like this?” Stephanie asked, lurching from side to side as the animal shifted its weight. She wrapped her hands tighter around Ivan’s waist, scared for a moment that she was going to fall.
“There aren’t any tracks up here and even if there were, I think taking a car would be a bad idea. Too easy to track.”
“I can’t believe you just disabled the GPS in your coms.” Stephanie shook her head. Her wrist twinged, the realization that she hadn’t needed to hack her old coms out sitting uneasily.
Ivan patted her on the arm. “You can’t change the past. I’m assuming you did the best you could with what you had.”
Stephanie nodded.
“What are we going to do, Ivan?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Find someone to bribe? Wear a disguise?”
“If we can’t think of anything else, it might come to that.”
They rode on in silence for a while longer, the packs digging into her thighs, a cold breeze running its lazy fingers through her hair. Ivan’s warmth at her front.
“At least I have the co-ordinates for Sanctuary now. We have somewhere to go when we get off planet.”
“Do you think Caroline found her way there? Or is she still with the people who took her?” Worry tightened the muscles in his back.
“She might have gotten away.,” Stephanie said, hopefully. "We can look for her on Sanctuary first and if she’s not there, we’ll be able to mount a rescue party from Sanctuary.”
“I hate to say this, but what if Dr. Volkov was wrong? I mean, that was a treatment center back there.”
“They put him there. The people who took Caroline. They made it look like he was paranoid and delusional but he’s not. You’ve seen them. They’re real.”
“You know that old saying? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t anyone out to get you. What if it holds true in reverse? Just because everyone’s out to get you, doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid.”
“I’m not paranoid.” She wasn’t delusional either.
She gritted her teeth. Maia was real. The killer was real. Even Dr. Volkov was a real person. So, he hadn’t really been there when she’d been speaking to him... he was still real. Caroline had figured out how to implant the memory of him, that was all.
“I never said I was talking about you.”
“Were you, though?”
He shook his head. She wasn’t sure if it meant he wasn’t talking about her or he didn’t want to talk anymore and she didn’t want to touch him, skin to skin, in order to find out.
“How long do you think it will take us to get there?” she asked.
He glanced around. “Sometime before sunset.”
“That’s specific.”
“That’s the best I can do.”
“I don’t want to ride in silence,” Stephanie turned her head, leaning her cheek against his back.
“Makes you anxious?”
“Something like that.” She hadn’t heard from Maia or the killer for a while and she thought maybe the conversation was keeping them at bay. It would be nice to have some peace and quiet inside her own head for a change, if it wasn’t for the nagging feeling that they were going in the wrong direction.
They should have been moving up and out. Away from the planet, out of the gravity well, as Ivan termed it. They should have been flying through space, hurtling between Garnet Gates on their journey to Sanctuary. She’d already plotted the route in her head. It would only take two jumps, three or four days at most, to get in the vicinity of Sanctuary, once they left the planet.
“Anything in particular you want to talk about?’ Ivan asked.
“I’m not sure. Anything been bothering you lately?”
“Other than being on the run without knowing why or who we’re running from?”
“Other than that.”
“I’ve been thinking recently, about Caroline.”
“Yeah,” Stephanie sighed. It was hard not to think about Caroline.
“Do you think it’s possible... for first loves to last?”
“Was she your first love?”
He shrugged. She would have given anything to see his face.
“I don’t know... How do you even know when you’re in love?”
Ivan chuckled. “You haven’t been.”
>
Stephanie drew back from him, her hands shifting to hold onto the pack behind her.
“Don’t get mad at me,” Ivan said. “I know it sounds cliché, but when you fall in love, trust me, you’re not going to be asking yourself if you’re in love or not. You’ll know.”
“But how?”
“I think it feels different for different people.”
Stephanie rolled her eyes. “That’s such a cop out.”
“Hey, emotions are complicated things. You can’t tell me you think everyone experiences anger or joy in the same way. I know I don’t even experience anger the same way every time.”
“There are different kinds of anger.” She knew that much. There was the anger that gnawed away at her gut, making her feel useless. The one that boiled through her, making her face hot and her muscles tight. There was the cold anger that left her feeling strangely detached from her body, yet mentally sharp, giving her a kind of clarity she rarely felt. And she’d felt every kind of anger, directed at the corporation who’d created her.
“Maybe there are different kinds of love too?”
“Like the difference between love for a family member and love for a sexual partner.”
“I should hope they’re different.”
“Technically, if you’re using gene therapy, the biological problems of in-breeding have been removed. It’s not even illegal between consenting adults, on some planets.”
Ivan shuddered.
“Yeah, it’s still pretty gross. I think it’s like an ingrained evolutionary bias.”
The conversation lulled.
Stephanie fell back on observing the world around her, searching for a new topic of conversation. She’d hoped to hear more about his feelings for Caroline... but they’d ended up talking in fairly abstract terms. Did that mean he was still in love with Caroline? Or that he was in love with her, but thought he might fall in love with someone else in the future?
Her hand itched for answers and she tightened her grip on the pack. Its rough fabric bit into her hands. The trees grew close together at semi-regular intervals, the woods old enough that new trees had spawned between the original rows. Somewhere in the distance, she could hear water trickling. The animal they were riding smelled musky and she couldn’t decide if it was a bad smell, or if it was somehow comforting.
“It’s hard to remember that all of this was created by men,” she said.
“It’s not really. I like to think of us as nature’s midwives, carrying the trees to the stars.”
Stephanie snorted. “Were you a poet in another life?”
“Maybe I should have been.”
“I’m just imagining the three different Ivans, meeting in a bar. Poet, doctor, and... what would we call you? Space thug? Smuggler?”
“Purveyor of difficult to come by goods.”
“Smuggler.”
“What about you? What would you have been in another life?”
She stared off into the distance, trying to see something beyond the trees. She’d never thought about it before.
“I feel like we’ve had this conversation before,” she said, after what felt like the longest pause.
“You’d be a mother.” The back of his head moved, nodding. “You get three choices. What you are now.... a mother.... and....?”
Stephanie shrugged. “It sounds like the set up for a bad joke. Three women walk into a bar. A mother, a psychologist, and a spy.”
“You’re a psychologist?” Ivan twisted to look at her.
“Ah...”
He blinked.
She could almost see the wheels turning behind his eyes. Why would a psychologist have knock-out gas and know how to pilot a ship? Why would she have carved her coms out of her own arm and gone on the run?
She bit her lip, wishing she could take the flippant comment back.
“I guess that explains a lot,” he said, turning back around. She could feel the questions bubbling up, like an aura around him. He held them back and they rode on in silence.
* * *
The cabin was small, cozy.
Stephanie looked around at the single room. One bed with a small lounge at the base of it took up half the room. A fireplace took up one side. The kitchen with its dining table encroached on the space.
Ivan dropped the pack of supplies on the table.
“Can you unpack this while I take care of the horse?” he asked.
Stephanie nodded.
She couldn’t meet his eyes.
He left the room and she breathed a sigh of relief, going to unpack their supplies. She moved food into the cupboards and the cold storage. Checked the water levels and filtration system. Made sure the power was running. She even lay the fire-kits out next to the fireplace.
Ivan came back inside. His hair stuck to his forehead, plastered down with sweat.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he said.
She went cross-eyed, trying to avoid the vision that flashed through her mind. They had a real water shower. He would be naked in the other room, water running over the planes of his body, steam wrapping around him.
“Okay.”
Ivan shot her a funny look as he walked past her, grabbing a change of clothes before he headed to the bathroom.
Stephanie fell back on the bed.
What’s wrong with me? She groaned.
She couldn’t stop imagining him in the shower and the sound of the water running in the next room wasn’t doing much to calm her down.
I have to get out of here.
If she didn’t, who knew how long she would last.
She pushed herself up and rushed outside, gulping the fresh air down like she was drowning.
There was only one bed in there, Maia pointed out. And that couch looked too small to sleep on.
Damn it, Maia. How come everything you say makes me want to tell you to shut up?
Because I’m honest. She could hear the shrug in her voice. People don’t always appreciate honesty.
Sh. Listen. The killer said.
They fell silent, straining to hear what the killer had heard.
A whooshing sound came from far away. It sounded like the ocean.
Aren’t we landlocked? Stephanie asked.
That’s a hover-ship, the killer said, recognizing the sound a moment before it came into view.
Stephanie turned and ran back into the house, screaming Ivan’s name.
They’d found her.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
He came out of the bathroom, dripping wet, a towel slung low around his hips.
“There’s a hover-ship outside,” Stephanie shouted. The whooshing sound was getting closer.
“What?” Ivan crossed to the window and peeked outside. “How did they find us?”
“It must have been Katia. I thought you said we could trust her.”
“I thought we could,” Ivan muttered.
Stephanie stood, wringing her hands. She was out of ideas. So was Maia. The killer was pretty sure he could take whatever came through the door.
“There’s a stunner in my bag,” Ivan said, crossing back to the bathroom.
Stephanie went through his pack, finding the stunner in a compartment on the side. She pulled the stunner out, turning to aim at the door.
She heard Ivan swear in the other room.
The whooshing sound had gone.
Silence wrapped around the cabin so thick she could have sworn she heard the snapping of a twig from a thousand meters. Then her heart rate picked up and all she could hear was the rushing of her pulse. Her throat went dry and she swallowed convulsively. Her breath hitched in her throat.
A knock.
A knocking sound came from the door.
“Stephanie? Are you in there?”
The voice was female, heavily accented with the local dialect.
She frowned.
“Who is it?” she called, without thinking. She bit her lip. She should have pretended there was no one home. But there was a
horse outside and they would have just broken the door down.
“My name is Sofia Wang. I’m a journalist with the Middle Kingdom News.”
There was a long pause, as though she was waiting for Stephanie to answer. Ivan came out of the bathroom, moving on silent feet. He took another stunner from his bag and moved around so that he was standing beside the door. He nodded to Stephanie and it took her a moment to figure out what he meant.
He wanted her to open the door? Was he crazy?
She shook her head, frantically. She couldn’t talk to a reporter. The corporation would kill-
They were probably going to kill her anyway.
“Stephanie?” the woman called from outside. “I just want to talk. We can tell people your story. Trust me. Nothing will leave this house without your consent.”
Stephanie opened the door.
Two people stood outside. The woman, Sofia Wang, was dressed in a dark blue suit, her hair fell in perfectly glossy waves over one shoulder. The man was wearing track pants and a sweater. He had a controller in one hand and was wearing dark glasses. Three orbs floated around him and one of them shot into the house when she opened the door. Stephanie dropped to the ground, firing a shot at the man.
Rogue Memory Page 17